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Episode 2

The Ageless Man

1.

The Southland is a largely unmapped expanse of desert, pin-marked now and again by one- and two-horse towns, and very rarely the occasional market city, places where the spokes of trade routes converge. But Sand is miles from anywhere else, and I don’t know what lies to the south, if anything.

At first, when Sand became nothing but a speck behind me—never more has its name seemed more fitting—I took to counting my steps. I counted for hours before I realized I was looking at my feet instead of at the bullet catcher. I thought for sure when I looked up he’d be long gone and that I’d be lost in no man’s land, where there is nothing but cacti and lizards that flick out their tongues like they’re telling jokes about you. But he was still there, a skinny black figure on the pan of the desert, shimmering in a way that was both magical and terrifying.

I’ve been tracking the bullet catcher for three days and my water is gone. So is my food. I began by walking in the footsteps of the bullet catcher, matching his long strides, drinking when he drank, eating when he ate, sleeping when he slept. But, somehow, I never manage to gain any ground. Dmitri’s hat is my only shade. My skin is burned and cracked and dirty. I had planned on sneaking up on the bullet catcher the first night, after he’d fallen asleep near his campfire, but how could I when he seemed to sleep for only moments? And when, at the end of so many long, hot miles, my legs were so tired I collapsed as soon as he stopped? And when there was nothing to hide behind anyway? No rocks, no bushes, no hills.

The wind picks up, a hot gust from the devil’s backside. The sand stings my skin like a million horseflies. The wind fills my eyes and nose and mouth with sand. I’ve stopped sweating, and it’s not getting any cooler—a bad sign. Next will be the light-headedness, then the hallucinations. Up ahead, the bullet catcher goes in and out of focus. And then he’s gone. I stop and blink dumbly at the spot on the horizon where he’d just been. But he doesn’t reappear. I look behind me, at my footsteps receding north. If I turn around, I’ll never make it back to town. Then the wind blows away my footsteps, like I’d never been there at all. And I realize, terribly, that I have no choice but to soldier on after the bullet catcher.

By late evening, the bullet catcher has not reappeared, and his tracks are increasingly faint ahead of me. I’m going to die out here. I thought it would be more frightening, dying, but after so many days walking it’s a relief. It would be easy. I could just lie down, right here, and let the sand cover me like a blanket. But my legs, clumsy as they’ve become, keep stumbling forward on their own. I’m not frightened and I’m not sorry. Not even a little bit. Nikko and I share this fate, six years apart. We will both have died out here, under the big, wide-open sky. At this moment, I feel closer to him than I have in years.

The sun finally sets. For about the length of two breaths, everything is perfect. The wind is cool, the sand doesn’t sting, the piercing blue sky turns dark and colorless. Then the temperature drops. Drops through the floor. It locks my knees and brings new pain to my sunburns. The cold splits my lips, and I lick them to get that little bit of moisture. I’m thinking about Nikko, thinking that soon I’ll lie down and fall asleep and when I wake he will be there with me, and then I stumble over something soft but firm and fall face first into the dirt.

I roll over on my back, fairly certain I’m not dead. Everything hurts too much. My skin is fried, my mouth is full of sand, my legs and feet throb. The cold night air has one hand on my heart. Hell has to be less of an ordeal than this. But the view! The view in heaven can’t be any better. From heaven everything below must seem so small, so insignificant. How can that view be as beautiful as looking up at this dark, limitless dome? What is black at first reveals itself as velvet purple and blue, brilliant with the sharp light of a billion stars.

When we were kids, before we went to live with the Brothers and Sisters, Nikko and I would stretch a sheet over our heads and poke it full of pinholes. Above the sheet, we’d hang candles. It was like sleeping under the real desert sky, only better, because it was warm and Nikko was there, and there were no snakes. When a bit of the colored candle wax dripped onto the sheet, it would expand slowly in a small violet or pink or blue circle.

Nikko would point and say, “Look, those are stars exploding.”

Tonight, as I gaze up, all but unable to move from the pain and cold, the sky looks much like those warm, safe nights of my childhood with my brother. It’s a million miles away in every sense, but it doesn’t matter. The feeling of my lips, splitting wide open again, tells me I’m smiling.

I don’t feel the cold anymore, and at first I think it’s the memories warming my skin and bones, but then something clicks in my mind. It’s hypothermia. If I fall asleep now, I won’t wake. And because I know Nikko must have fought until his last breath, I roll onto my side and try to get to my feet. That’s when I see it, the thing I tripped over. A desert fox lies on its side. Its black eyes stare right into mine. Its tongue hangs from its crooked mouth. At first I think it’s dead, but then I see its stomach rising and falling. A large hunting knife sticks out of the ground by the fox. I grab the knife and pull myself up. There’s a word carved into the ground.

Drink.

I’ve heard travelers tell stories about the desert thirst, the horses and dogs whose blood they drank to walk just a few more miles, to make it just one more day. Heaving, I pull the knife free from the ground. I tumble onto my back. When I hold up the blade, the polished steel catches all the light of the moon and stars.

I crawl toward the fox. It doesn’t move. Its breath quickens. The angle of its neck tells me it’s broken. I run my hand through its fur as if it were a dog and its breathing slows. It looks at me with knowing eyes. Then, tracing the line of its neck, I find the artery and make the cut. The blood slashes across my face. When I press my lips to the fox’s neck and drink, the blood is thick and warm and thaws me from the inside out. It’s gamy, like bad meat, but it’s good all the same, and I drink until the nausea is too much and my stomach lurches. When I look again, the fox stares through me, its eyes empty. I’m sorry and grateful.

I sink to the ground. The blood doesn’t quench thirst like water. After drinking it I feel inches closer to death, but resolved to live. I’m the vampire girl. I crawl close to the fox and press myself against it. It’s still warm. That’s how sleep takes me: blood on my face, holding close to the fading warmth.

• • •

I wake to the sight of vultures overhead, flying in tight circles that I think are meant for me. But I’m not ready—I’ll fight them off with my knife, I’ll tear at their feathers, and I’ll keep one to eat. I’ll eat it raw; I don’t need a fire.

The foul black birds with their burned faces land a few feet away. They hop and skulk toward the fox. It has begun to stink. They start to peck and tear at the flesh, oblivious to me.

When I get to my feet, my legs are stronger than I thought they’d be. The desert stretches behind me. Before me, the mountains loom close enough that I can make out trees, basking in the shade of the high peaks, just below a steep snowline. I’m so close to the mountain that promises animals to hunt, wood to make a fire, shelter, and, of course, the bullet catcher. I can’t believe I ever thought of giving him up.

It’s early, but the desert is already blindingly bright. It’s difficult to tell the earth from the sky, and at first I mistake the figure as a shadow, before realizing that there’s nothing there to cast it. It’s a free-floating shadow, a nightshade, a ghost. It’s the bullet catcher. He stands in the distance, watching me. Then he turns and heads off again.

He knows I’m following him, and for whatever reason, he’s helping me. I kick away the vultures and cut a few pieces of drying flesh from the fox. I stuff the raw meat into my pack. The knife I tuck into my belt. And then I follow the bullet catcher to the very end of the desert.

• • •

That afternoon, the sky is sharp blue and piercing. I take a strip of the raw fox meat from my pack. I eat the whole strip and suck the congealing blood from my fingers.

As I eat, I think of Nikko. He was tough and ingenious. He could be mean as hell too, but never to me. That’s why I looked up to him. While I was busy making myself small so I could fit into any shadow or hiding place, Nikko puffed out his chest and made a name for himself: troublemaker, dirt kicker, sinner. That’s what the Brothers and Sisters called him.

Nikko once made me a music box. It played just three notes, but it was the only music I’d heard since before the orphanage. He showed it to me in theology class, cupping his hands around it so the Sister couldn’t see. But before he could give it to me, the Sister came over and rapped his knuckles with a switch. He smiled up at her like nothing she could do could hurt him. She pulled him from the lesson by his hair, dragging his heels along the floorboards of the schoolhouse. I watched through the wavy glass of the windows as they hauled him into the yard, tied him to a post, and whipped him until his shirt hung in ribbons—yellow from dust, red from blood. I think Nikko had smiled at the Sister so she would forget the music box. I hid it in my desk where no one would see it.

That night was the first time he ran away. He didn’t tell me he was going to do it. I don’t think he’d planned it. He just ran. When I discovered he was missing, I told one of the Sisters I couldn’t find him.

“One less mouth to feed,” the Sister said, and gave me the back of her hand for speaking out of turn. I went back to the dormitory, took the music box from where I’d hidden it under my pillow, wound it up, and cried as it played. I was certain he was dead. But the next day he came back, starving, panting from thirst.

When Nikko ran away for good he had a plan: He was going to join the bullet catchers. But the bullet catchers didn’t just agree to train any skinny kid with a sob story. You had to be special. And Nikko was special. The music box was just one thing he made. He was always taking apart anything he could get his hands on. Clocks, small engines, the orphanage’s boiler and water recycler, they all met with the sharp end of Nikko’s screwdriver, and they all revealed their secrets to him. He would make me little clockwork toys out of scrap: little marching soldiers, or a dog that opened and closed its mouth like it was yapping, a bird that would raise and lower its wings. He made his own sun-powered engine. It didn’t do much; it only lit a light bulb. But to see his eyes shine! He was a genius at gizmos and mechanics.

The thing was, no one but the bullet catchers knew the secret to catching bullets. Some said it was to do with the planet’s magnetic poles or black magic. Some of the more snakebitten drunks said that it was all done with mirrors. Others speculated that even the bullet catchers didn’t know how they did it, that each one of them carried a slip of paper with one piece of the secret written on it—maybe no more than a word or letter—that to learn the whole thing you had to find every bullet catcher and put the secret together.

But Nikko didn’t care about the secret.

Instead, he made a glove that he said could catch bullets. He only showed it to me once—he was afraid of the Brothers and Sisters finding it. Late one night, we went out behind the schoolhouse, one of his hands around my wrist, the other clutching a canvas bag. We crouched in the shadow made by the steeple, rising up between the moon and us, and he produced his invention. It was made from an old glove, the kind wranglers use to grip their lassos. Across the back, brass barbs arched like jumping spider legs. Thin coils of brass were molded in tight spirals around the fingertips.

“With this,” he said in a whisper, “I’ll be able to catch bullets as well as any bullet catcher. When I show the bullet catchers this, they’ll have to let me in.”

He flipped a switch and the glove hummed, low and full of power, like the quiet sound the planet makes if you put your ear to the ground in the middle of a desert night with no one around, when there are no animals howling or plants growing spindly roots through the dirt.

• • •

The mountain is not so far now. For whatever reason, the bullet catcher keeps within sight, slowing when I begin to slow, speeding up to pull me along. I think about Nikko, reduced to a set of bleached bones somewhere out in the desert. The bullet-catching glove he invented rusting away in his pack. Or maybe that’s all gone now, his bones carried away by grateful coyotes, his pack stolen away by salvagers. Because now that I’ve nearly done what he only attempted, I know that if he had lived, if he had found the bullet catchers, he would have come back for me. He would never have left me alone.

What will I say to the bullet catcher when I finally catch up to him? If I could only figure out what Nikko would have said, I almost feel I could keep him alive, in some small way. I’d pick up where he left off, and I’d feel close to him all over again, like I did last night, when I was close to death.

2.

Near evening, I follow the bullet catcher into the huge, crooked shadow of the mountain. The shade cuts a dark, jagged scar in the desert and freezes my sunburned skin. At the foot of the mountain, tired-looking shrubs with dull flowers and spiny petals peek out through the shale. Midway up, where the earth turns from sand to stone, pine trees make a dense, green ring around the steep mountainside. Higher up, the trees turn sparse. The sight of snow, whitening the mountain peaks, makes my teeth chatter. If I close my eyes I can hear the wings of small birds fluttering from brush to brush, the sound of a weak stream running through the crags that form paths and switchbacks up the mountain. It’s into one of those switchbacks that the bullet catcher disappears: one moment there, then gone. He’s the disappearing old man and I’m the unnoticeable girl.

The memory of last night, when I drank the blood of the desert fox, fills me with strength, reminds me I can do anything. I grind my teeth to keep them from chattering, and begin my climb up the mountain.

The bullet catcher leaves no footprints. He doesn’t break a single branch. He doesn’t make a sound. There’s no hope in tracking him, so when the path comes to a fork I take my best guess and just keep heading up. Every now and then I come to a dead end of fallen trees or unscalable boulders and I have to double back to the last turning.

Night is falling when the ground flattens out and the trees open into a small clearing. At one end of the clearing stands a tent made from canvas and animal hide, nestled in the shadow of a low cliff face. The canvas walls are propped up with wood poles tall enough so you don’t have to duck through the flap. Away from the tent, a line stretches between two trees, bowed with drying clothes. Iron cookware sits in a neat stack on a washcloth. And there’s the bullet catcher, sitting in an old rocking chair, feeding dry grass and twigs into brightening embers. The fire catches and the bullet catcher sits back in his chair and rocks slowly. He lights a pipe with a hot coal and takes a couple quick puffs.

From where I crouch, behind a wide, stout pine tree at the edge of the clearing, I suddenly think that maybe he isn’t what I thought he was, that maybe he isn’t a bullet catcher, because from here he looks like any other wizened old man, made small and bent by time. His gaze is far-off, that look old people get when they’re gazing into the past.

He gives his pipe a puff and says, “Come out from behind that tree, young lady.”

My heart seizes, but there’s nothing else to do but what he says. I want to appear confident, strong, but I’m so tired. I’m covered in sand, blood, and pine needles. I smell only a little better than the corpse of the desert fox. The bullet catcher studies me as I step into the clearing and approach the fire.

“So you lived,” he says. His voice is soft and slow. It puts me at ease, but when he looks at me with those piercing blue-white eyes, those dead man’s eyes, my spine goes rigid.

I nod my head, and eke out, “I did.”

“I’ll have my knife back, then,” he grunts, reaching out his hand. I take the knife from my belt and hand it to him. He studies it in the light of the fire. It’s dirty, stained with blood. Pouring clear water over it from a skin, he cleans the knife meticulously, wicking away the water and blood with long steady swipes of a cloth.

“You can stay here by the fire till morning,” he says, not looking at me. “Then you’ll leave. There’s another town down the other side of the mountain. It’s closer than Sand, if you prefer.”

I edge toward the fire. As soon as I feel the warmth on my skin, I realize how cold I am, how thin the air is high above the desert. The fire is hungry for the air and there seems precious little left for me. My starved legs buckle. But it’s warm near the fire and I don’t care that my lungs huff and puff and won’t take in the air. I could die right here. I made it.

I want to tell the bullet catcher why I followed him. I want to tell him that it wasn’t just to get away from Sand—although that would have been reason enough. I want to tell him about Nikko, and I want to ask if he knew him. I want to ask if he knows what happened to him. I found a bullet catcher. I made it through the desert. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so crazy to think that, all those years ago, Nikko might have made it, too.

I want to demand he train me, to make me a bullet catcher, like Nikko would have. I want him to tell me the secret to walking forever in the desert. I want to know how to catch bullets. But the fire is so warm, and I’m afraid that if I say anything he’ll chase me away and make me sleep in the woods, with the coyotes and wolves. So I don’t say anything. Lying by the fire, in the dirt, the heat envelops me, and I drift into a dark, dreamless sleep.

• • •

The next morning, the bullet catcher nudges me awake with the toe of his boot.

“Up,” he says, already walking away, a towel over one shoulder and a tin mug with a toothbrush sticking out the top in his hand.

I grumble a few curses as I shrug off a blanket. I didn’t have a blanket when I fell asleep. I watch the bullet catcher disappear down the path. Folding the blanket, I place it on the bullet catcher’s rocking chair and follow him out of the clearing.

The path weaves through the sparse trees, down a small bluff that ends at the edge of a lake. A lake! It’s like discovering that Nikko and my parents are still alive and they’ve just been waiting until I was old enough to tell me. I imagine Nikko and my parents emerging from the water, their smiles so bright they reflect off the surface. I imagine them taking me in their arms and inviting me down below with them. Under the surface is where life really starts. Everything to this point was just to prepare me, to toughen my skin, to make me waterproof. But then I snap out of it and look for the bullet catcher.

He’s sitting in the water, on a rock just below the surface. His back is to me, tanned brown and zigzagged with scars. His skin is a map: scars like roads and rivers that lead to his pelvis and shoulders. Taking a rock covered in little dimples, he rubs his skin in tight circles, scratching away the dirt and sweat.

His thinness is amazing. Under all his clothes, with his broad, scarecrow shoulders, he seemed so much larger, so much stronger. He could be a hundred years old or a thousand. He’s the ageless man.

Then I backtrack through the trees. I want to be waiting, like a good student on the first day of class. When he returns he’s fully clothed, his coat slung over those wide shoulders, making him look broad and strong again. His shadow goes on forever, and all the courage I built up down on the lake’s edge, when he looked so skinny and vulnerable, disappears.

He doesn’t look surprised to see me. Without a word, he drops his bathing gear by his tent, strides across the camp, grabs me by my shirt collar, turns me around, and marches me to the edge of the clearing. With a push, he banishes me to the wilderness. He throws my pack after me. I don’t protest or struggle because there’s no time. It’s over in seconds. One moment I’m staring at him as he walks back into camp, and the next I’m on my butt, watching him walk away.

Sitting in the nest of pine needles, I want so badly to leave. Haven’t I already accomplished something just by escaping Sand? Isn’t it enough that I found the bullet catcher? That I even spoke to him? I could start again in that new town on the other side of the mountain. Maybe it’s better. Maybe it sits by a river, and everyone has water and fresh food and fat cattle. Or maybe it’s just like Sand, and I’ll end up exactly where I started, with nothing but the desert in my lungs and my sunburns for the effort.

I open my pack and take out the hunk of flesh I cut from the desert fox. Its blood has turned to jelly and makes my hands sticky. My fingertips are red with blood. I rake them down my face. War paint. I am the warrior girl. I stand and march back into the bullet catcher’s camp. Warriors don’t run away; they keep fighting until they can’t draw breath. Warriors don’t go to town and wash dishes; warriors fight.

The bullet catcher is at the clothesline, unhanging each item and folding it carefully, setting the folded clothes in a basket by his feet. Even this mundane activity is full of focus. Hearing me, he turns slowly. His look stops me dead. Then he turns back, finishes folding the shirt he has in his hands, and picks up his hat from where it sits by the basket. He turns and puts it on. His face is relaxed and expressionless. He doesn’t move. Does he expect me to act first?

I reach into my breast pocket and wrap my hand around my gun. It’s warm from being nestled close to my body. I draw the gun and point it at the bullet catcher. I hold it loosely, my arm bent. I’m just showing it to him, I’m not really aiming. My legs should still ache from the miles I walked, but they don’t. Even though I haven’t had enough to drink, or enough hours of sleep, my mind feels sharp, my trigger finger quick. The bullet catcher straightens his back, spreads his feet into a ready stance. He relaxes his hands at his sides and shakes them to get the blood flowing.

“I didn’t come here to fight you!” I call across the clearing.

“A gun is not a threat, young lady. It’s a promise.”

Looking down at the gun in my hand, I feel suddenly foolish. Shaking away the feeling, I point it again at the bullet catcher and say, “I’ve come to train as a bullet catcher.”

“There are no bullet catchers.”

“I saw you in Sand. You killed that man with his own bullet.”

“You’ve been too long in the desert. Your mind’s playing tricks on you.”

I’ve come too far to take no for an answer. What would Nikko have done? I thrust the gun forward and say, “I’m not asking, bullet catcher!”

He stares down the barrel of my gun. He doesn’t care that the gun is small, old, mostly broken. He respects the gun. He takes nothing for granted. “There are two paths before you,” he says. “You can either pocket that gun and walk out on your own two feet, or I can come over there and take it from you.” He pauses a moment, then adds, “It will hurt.”

“I’m not dropping it!”

The bullet catcher doesn’t say anything else. He marches toward me, his eyes cold.

“Stop! I’ll shoot!” I scream. I take a step back and my feet tangle.

He reaches out and grabs the gun. I curl my fingers tighter around it and rip it away. My momentum sends me tumbling backward, the gun still clasped in my hand, pointing at the bullet catcher. My left hand hits the ground to break my fall; the impact shoots through my body all the way to my trigger finger. The gun goes off.

The trees, surrounding us on all sides, swallow up the report of the gun. For a moment, there’s only the smoke leaking from the barrel. The smell of exploded gunpowder.

Time seems to slow down. The bullet catcher moves gracefully. He flicks his wrists. He pivots. My back hits the ground with a thud, knocking the air out of me. A sharp pain runs through my body. I try to scramble to my feet, but there’s no strength in my arms, my lungs won’t fill with air, and when I lift my hands in front of my face, they’re covered in blood.

I don’t have to look down to see where I’m shot. I know it’s bad, bad enough to take the feeling out of my hands so that I drop my gun. And the last thing I see, before everything goes black, is the shadow of the bullet catcher crossing over me like the moon in front of the sun, turning day to night.