The Magic Arrow

The wide cargo bay of dirtship rode so high that the trees seemed half as tall on either side of the Old 40. Gathered around EJ, and scattered across the top of the canvas-covered cargo, were three types of faces—the drained, the bored, and the unconscious. He held up a jug of shortwater and deck of cards. “The game’s three jack,” he shouted. “Who’s in?”

As the sun whittled down and the shortwater flowed, it was hard to hear much but Malik Wheeler and the engine of the dirtship. Wheeler said, “They expect us to think an Elvi killed that Helgate boy? You ever seen an Elvi who could shoot for anything?” Whenever the shortwater came by, he drank a share befitting his big belly.

EJ had never seen anyone quite like him. Random braids of his bushy, blond hair and beard jutted in every direction from his head. EJ said, “I thought Muslims couldn’t drink.”

“We drink just fine,” said Wheeler. He claimed to be “pure Nickajack,” a son of the high plateau that ran between what used to be eastern Kentucky and northern Alabama. “Allah is the Lord of All Things in this world. He knew when He made Nickajack, there was gonna be drinking.”

“There’s plenty Elvii can shoot good,” said Aron. He was what they called “Egyptian” because Egypt was the only Middle Eastern country anyone knew, and only because of the Bible. By the cut of the leather pompadour on his head and his black kaftan, EJ recognized Aron as an Elvani, the feared Elvii defenders going back three centuries to Pakistan. Aron presented himself as a simple pilgrim to Graceland and Tupelo, but EJ had him pegged as headed across the Mississippi to West Memphis to join the Elvii war against the jones gangs in Arkansas. EJ wasn’t shooting straight, either. He was an Elvi disguised as Kansas, a son of the Nations, bare-chested, with a tight, black braid on either side of his head.

Wheeler laid down a four of spades. “Elvii can’t shoot nothing. Ninemile Creek was seventy yards wide or nothing.”

Aron laid down a nine of spades. “Seventy yards. Where’d you get that nonsense?”

“You can’t tell me anybody but a Nations could’ve made that shot. There’s two Helgate boys that was killed. One gets picked off, the other runs. No Elvi could have done that, moved like that—” He demonstrated with an imaginary rifle pointed over the sidegate of the dirtship. “Bang!” he said. He cocked the imaginary rifle, moved, aimed: “Bang!” Wheeler might sound crazy, but he was a sincere. He had been a halal butcher in Huntsville until his wife “turned in her bones.” On her deathbed, he promised her he would be the first of their clan to make pilgrimage to Mecca. He had waited until his children had grown, then hired out as a gunboy on the Nickajack dirtships to earn passage. He was finally headed to Memphis and a riverboat, and down the Mississippi to cross the ocean. At one point, he passed the shortwater to EJ without taking a drink. He said, “I guess I got a ways to go.” Wheeler never took the shortwater again, but he had no end of opinions on the assassination of the Helgate princes. “No Elvi could have made that shot. There had to be a second shooter, or it was a Nations.”

“Why would the Nations get involved, Wheeler?” asked Aron’s brother, Vernon. Vernon was a slighter, odder version his brother. He folded every hand after two turns. He passed time by washing in a tin bucket any item of clothing anyone was foolish enough to give him. Hanging a wash to dry in the black exhaust belching over the cargo bed only made it dirtier than when he started. Vernon had also presented the only occasion for the conversation veer from the subject of assassination: he insisted ducks were “waterfowl,” not birds. For a couple of hours they tried to convince him waterfowl were birds.

“Look who benefits…” said Wheeler, weaving a web of conspiracy. Now and again, a torbie cat threaded through the chattering and dozing passengers—travelers, traders, refugees. At least two chickens were clucking around beyond the glow of the oil lamp in the center of the card game. Into a divot pressed into the tarp that covered the trade goods heaped into the cargo bed, the players had surrendered their smokes, beads, copper tokens, a small bag of beans, and a heart-shaped, silver locket.

“But why would the Nations be in on it?” asked Vernon.

Wheeler snapped, “I just told you—”

“What about you, Kansas?” said a girl EJ had not noticed before. The way she said “Kansas” made him wish it was his real name. She had been playing three jack in front of him all along, yet had never before materialized in his consciousness. Her long, brown dress was embroidered with sunflowers at cuffs and collar. He felt like he might disappear if her pale blue gaze wandered from him. He said, “I didn’t hear you say anything, either.” He sounded bold, but he just didn’t want to disappear.

“I don’t care,” she said. “If you don’t care, Kansas, just say so.”

“I don’t care.”

“Liar.”

He laughed, something he had not done for a long time.

“Well..?”

What could he tell her to keep from disappearing? Did it matter? He could drop the truth in a bucket of Wheeler’s lies, and no one would know the difference. “Maybe it starts with an Elvi,” he said. Wheeler shook his head. EJ pressed on: “Maybe his family was killed—all of them murdered—when the Helgates cleared Heaptown of the Elvii. He is a refugee out near Ninemile Creek. He meets this man who knows how to get at the Helgate princes. An eye for an eye.”

As he spoke, he heard singing, and strumming a few paces across the cargo bay from his left shoulder. It was just audible above the roar of the dirtship.

El ave de la vida cae

Como una flecha mágica

En el corazón del guerrero…

EJ knew the song, “La Flecha Mágica.” The Magic Arrow. When he was a boy, his father played it on a three-string box guitar. He taught EJ and his little sister, Wichita Grace, to harmonize to it.

The husky-voiced singer had silver Nations braids, a dark face and wide eyes. No one had caught his name.

El ave de la vida vuela

En la jaula mágica

Del corazón de la mujer...

Up in the hills during Elvis Week, EJ and his family were the Tattersall Family Band. The trick, Daddy said, was to “get yourself stuck in their heads.” He used to have mistakes built in—a wrong chord progression, a false start, little EJ saying something innocently inappropriate—then a joke to “recover.” Add a Spanish song like “La Flecha Mágica,” for unexpected flavor.

Por qué llora la mujer?

Por qué llora la mujer?

Por qué muere el guerrero?

EJ wanted to sing along, but another voice insisted on sighing around his tongue, one that felt disembodied. …the Elvi takes a wild shot, and it hits Hernan…But Hernan doesn’t die so easy…Hernan now knows where the killer is, now…He empties the cylinder of his revolver into the top of the tree across Ninemile…the assassin comes tumbling down through the branches…Hernan is hollering and carrying on…and dying…

At some point, “La Flecha Mágica” had ended, and EJ’s mouth had closed. Vernon and Aron held their cards low, watching him raptly. The girl—he wished he had asked her name—there was something so penetrating in her stare that he had to look away. But only for a moment. A new tune had begun, the Nations song “Tambubambinu Maqta.”

Tambubambinu maqtatas

Yawar mayu apamun

Tambubambinu maqtatas

Yawar unu apamun…

EJ remembered the verse from the Spanish translation, something about a young man being brought down by a river of blood. “Now that first Helgate boy,” he said, “the assassin had dropped him like a bag of turds off a boat. One shot. He fell off the dock into the water. His first kill, and it meant nothing. But Hernan had fight in him. Heart. Corazón. Still, dying always wins in the end. The only thing his fighting did was force that Elvi to know that he was a person, that he was real, that his life was just as good as anyone’s. When the Elvi swam to the other shore to finish him off, just to stop him hollering for his Momma, Hernan was near enough dead. But that Elvi watched life pack up and leave out of his eyes. When he saw that, he cried like a child.

“You never know what it’s like to kill until you kill. Hernan taught him he was no good for killing. He did one thing, though.”

“What?” Tears welled in her eyes, now. EJ wondered if she knew he was making a confession.

“He took the revolver from Hernan. Just took it. He thought about that for a long time afterward, and he decided maybe it was because killing had taken so much from him…. Killing someone takes something out of you that you never get back. I guess he wanted to take something, anything, back.”

As EJ spoke the last words of his tale, the song of the boy from Tambubambinu rolled on filled with the baleful laments of a girl who loved him, who wept on the banks of a river, while the condor in the sky searched for him, his guitar floating away on the waters. For a moment, EJ felt cleansed, at peace. The expression on her face was no longer sad, but a mystery he could not touch. His mother used to say, “Ain’t no knot patience won’t turn out.” How much patience would she need?

Wheeler said, “Boy, you told that like it happened to you. Had me going, there. I almost believed you might be the one killed those boys.”

EJ shrugged. “Maybe I did.”

Everyone laughed but the girl. She refused to look away, refused to let him cease to exist.

Wheeler, ever-eager to share his talent for being superior to others at all things, said, “Now, if you want to tell that story so’s everybody can really believe it, here’s what you do: first of all, you said that assassin was up in a tree bordering Helgate land for three days, and not one militia came by. How can anyone believe that?” He went on at length, adding more men, more shooting and less tears.

When she finally did look away from EJ, it was like setting a hook. Rather than ceasing to exist, EJ felt a shock of arousal.

A raindrop grazed her eyelash, touching off a blink before crying down her cheek. She scattered her cards toward EJ. She picked up her tiny oil lamp, not much larger than a mouse, from the center of the players. Answering puzzled stares, she pointed skyward: “Rain.” They looked up. She though of foolish dogs. Only EJ saw her retrieving her silver locket from the center of the three-jack game. As the dirtship swayed, he was like a raccoon watching the locket swinging from from her fingers, glittering. The clouds opened up with a sprinkle. The “dogs” looked back her as if she were clairvoyant.

She smiled. She knew many things, like how the ancients had once pushed back the night with electrical light. Away toward Memphis, the last splinter of the sun had blinked out of the sky. She knew that when the dirtship climbed the next hill and pulled off onto the grass, it would have nothing to do with the weather. Moon and stars had reclaimed the night for sleep. Swaying with of the dirtship, she stepped away into the darkness.

EJ threw in his cards and followed her.