The Sisters Brothers

  ‘What of the third keg?’ asked Charlie. ‘Would it not be best to dump them all and be done with it?’

  ‘We are already pushing our luck with two,’ answered Warm.

  ‘If we were to finish tonight we could leave in the morning and get Morris to a doctor.’

  ‘We would all of us need doctors. Keep focused, Charlie, please. After you two empty the second barrel we’ll let Morris mix it all. Once you see the glow, take up your buckets and get to work, quickly!’

  Charlie and I squatted before the keg to lift it. My hands were shaking terribly, I was so nervous all of a sudden; my shoulders twitched and quivered and I thought, I have not felt this way since I lay down with a woman for the very first time. And it was just the same type of divine excitability: I was tortured with giddiness in anticipation of that river coming to life. Charlie noticed my shivering and ducking and asked me, ‘All right?’ I said I thought I was. I gripped the bottom lip of the keg with my fingers, digging into the hard-packed sand. We counted three and slowly hefted the heavy barrel into the air and began taking our cautious, crabwise steps, easing into the running river. The shock from the cold made Charlie hiss, and then laugh, which made me laugh, and we ceased moving for a moment that we might both laugh together. The moon and bright stars hung above our heads. The formula swayed and rolled in the barrel. Its surface was black and silver, and the river was black and silver. We tilted the keg and the dense liquid dropped from the lip. I could not remember ever feeling quite so bold.

  From the moment we started pouring we took small backward steps in the direction of the sandy bank. The keg swirled its fumes and vapors and once more I caught the scent in my nose and lungs; I retched and nearly vomited, it was so strong and overpowering. The heat attacked my eyes and they were instantly awash in tears.

  Once we were clear of the water we tossed the barrel and dashed upriver for the second. We hefted and dumped this and I stood back on the sand to wait. On the far shore, Warm instructed Morris to begin his stirring. When the frail man could not keep a sufficiently brisk pace, Warm foraged a branch for himself and agitated the waters by slapping the surface over and over, just as quickly and violently as he was able. I heard a noise at my back and turned to find Charlie cracking open the third barrel with a hatchet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘We will dump them all,’ he said, grunting as he wrenched back the top of the keg.

  Warm took notice and shouted across the river: ‘Leave off with that!’

  ‘We will dump them all and be done with it!’ said Charlie.

  ‘Leave off!’ Warm cried. ‘Eli, stop him!’

  I came closer but Charlie was already lifting the keg on his own. He took several weighted steps before misplacing his balance and stumbling; the thick fluid crested the lip and ran down the front of the barrel, covering and coating his right hand over the knuckles. This began in a matter of seconds to attack his flesh and he dropped the keg at the waterline, where the current pulled the formula out and to the dam.

  Charlie was bent over in pain, his jaw clenched and locked, and I took up his wrist to study his injury. There were blooming blisters across the knuckles and upward to the wrist—I could actually see the blisters rising and falling, as though they were breathing, the way a bullfrog takes air into its throat. He was not frightened, but angry, his nostrils flaring like a bull’s, with spit running down his chin in a long, elastic ribbon. His eyes, I thought, were magnificent; their reflection in the firelight revealed the very embodiment of defiance, of clarified hatred. I took up the heated water from the fire and doused his hand to rinse it, afterward fetching a shirt to wrap him. Warm did not know what we were doing, or that Charlie had had an accident. ‘Hurry, you men!’ he called. ‘Can’t you see? Hurry up over there!’

  ‘Can you hold a bucket with it?’ I asked Charlie.

  He attempted to close his hand and his forehead folded in sheer pain. The tips of his fingers, sticking from the dressing, were already bloating and it occurred to me this was his shooting hand—something I imagine he had thought of the moment the formula had been spilled. ‘I can’t close it,’ he said.

  ‘But can you still work?’

  He said he believed he could and I fetched a bucket, sliding the handle past his hand and onto his forearm. He nodded, and now I took up a bucket for myself, and we turned to face the river.

  In the time we had been distracted with Charlie’s injury the formula had taken hold, its glow so bright I had to shield my eyes. The river bottom was illuminated completely, so that every pebble and mossy rock was visible. The flakes and fragments of gold, which moments earlier were cold and mute, were now points of the purest yellow-and-orange light, and just as distinct as the stars in the sky. Warm was working away, his hand dipping into the river, his head darting up and back in search of the larger pieces. He was methodical about it, working intelligently, efficiently, but his face and eyes, lit from the river glow, revealed the highest, most supreme type of joy. Morris had exhausted himself and could no longer stir; he planted his long stick into the dam and leaned against it, gazing over the waters with an expression of calm, almost narcotic satisfaction. I looked at Charlie. His face had softened, gone slack, his pain and anger removed, forgotten, and I saw his throat drop as he swallowed. My brother was overwhelmed. He looked into my eyes. He smiled at me.

  Chapter 53

  In the static world of hard facts and figures it was approximately twenty-five minutes before the gold ceased glowing, but the moments that passed while we worked the river were neither brief nor long, were in fact somehow removed from the very restriction or notion of time—we were outside of time, is how it felt to me; our experience was so uncommon we were elevated to a place where such concerns as minutes and seconds were not only irrelevant but did not exist. This feeling, speaking personally, was brought on not only by the wealth our ever-growing piles of gold represented, but also from the thought that this experience was born of one man’s unique mind, and though I had never before pondered the notion of humanity, or whether I was happy or unhappy to be human, I now felt a sense of pride at the human mind, its curiosity and perseverance; I was obstinately glad to be alive, and glad to be myself. The gold from our buckets shone in dense shafts of light, and the branches and limbs of the surrounding trees were bathed in the glow of the river. There was a warm wind pushing down through the valley and off the surface of the water; it kissed my face and caused my hair to dance over my eyes. This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long as I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction; certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since. At any rate, and perhaps this is just, it was not something we could hold on to for very long. Everything immediately after this went just as black and wrong as could be imagined. Everything after this was death in one or the other way.

  Chapter 54

  Traveling back across the dam, Morris made a misstep and tumbled into the deepest part of the river. He fell fully under the water and did not come up. The gold had by then ceased glowing and my brother and I were sitting in the sand beside the fire, hurriedly cleaning ourselves with the water and soap Warm had laid out. My discomfort from direct contact, I should say, had been minimal at first; between the coldness of the river, which tingled the flesh, and also my own excitement and fast-moving blood, I was not aware of any untoward sensation. But by the time the gold once again went mute I felt an expanding heat which became my total concern and focus. Now I was moving just as quickly as I could, dousing and scrubbing my hands and legs and feet. Charlie could only work half as fast and I came to his aid once I had washed myself. I had just finished with his legs when I heard Morris shout out. When I looked up he was dropping through the air.

  Charlie and I ran to the shore, by which time Warm had moved to the center of the dam, his heavy bucket pulling at his right side. He stared helples
sly at the river and Charlie called to him that he should use Morris’s stick, still wedged in the dam, to pull him clear, but Warm did not seem to hear this. He set his bucket beside his feet, and his face was grim. He took a broad step and leapt from the dam into the poisoned waters. He resurfaced with Morris under his arm. Morris was limp but breathing, his eyes closed, mouth hung open, water lapping into his mouth over his tongue.

  As they cleared the river, Charlie and I came nearer to help them but Warm shouted that we must not touch them, and we did not. They lay on the sand, panting and spent, and I ran for the water pot, hefting it to the shore. First I doused Morris, who moaned, and then Warm, who thanked me, but with the pot soon empty and the men in need of a more thorough washing, Charlie and I dragged the two upriver, beyond the formula waters, and laid them in the shallows. I fetched the raw soap and we knelt at their sides, scrubbing the men and splashing them and telling them all would soon be well, but their discomfort only grew and they became increasingly vocal about their pain. Now they were writhing and tensing and shuddering as though they were being slowly immolated, and indeed I suppose that is just what they were being.

  We pulled them clear of the water. I took the last of the numbing medicine and covered their faces and scalps with it. Their eyes were coated in a gray-white film, and Morris said he could not see. Then Warm said he could not see. Morris began to weep, and Warm searched out his hand. They lay together holding hands and crying and moaning and drifting away and then suddenly, alertly screaming—both of them at once as though their pains were synchronized. I gave Charlie a secret look that asked: What should we do? His secret response: Nothing. And he was right. Short of killing the men, there was not a thing in the world we might do for them.

  Chapter 55

  Morris died at dawn. Charlie and I left him on the shore and carried Warm into his tent. He was delirious, and as we laid him on his cot he said, ‘What did we pull, Morris? What time is it?’ Charlie and I did not attempt to answer; we let him alone to sleep or to die. The sky was low with clouds and we slept beside the fire through to the afternoon. When it began drizzling rain over us I sat up and noticed two things at once: Morris was no longer newly dead but dead-dead, his body stiff and cruel and bloodless and somehow light or weightless, resembling a piece of driftwood more than a man; and second, the beavers had climbed out of the water and died on the shore just shy of our camp. That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding. They lay on their bellies, their eyes closed, with the leader in the center, slightly ahead of the others. I did not like to think of the group emerging silently from the waters, marching toward me and my brother as we slept. Did they have it in their beaver minds to swarm and attack us? To ruin us just as we had them with our evil man-made concoctions? Thankfully, I would never know the answer to this.

  I felt badly that Morris had died so soon after making the decision to correct his life and abandon the Commodore. I wondered if during his final moments he felt his death was deserved, if he wished he had never left his post, if he passed with compunction and disappointment. I hoped not, but thought he likely had, and I hated the Commodore for his impact then. I hated him as vividly as I have ever hated anyone, and I made a particular decision about him. The decision did not make me feel better but I knew it would eventually, and so it put the matter mostly to rest for the present, despite a lingering bitterness, that our night of shared glory had ended in such a tangle of grotesqueness and failure.

  I stood and inspected my legs. Hours before, as I had dropped away to sleep, I was fearful I would awaken to find them covered in the liquid-filled blisters, but there was nothing of the kind. From the midthigh down the skin looked as though it had been burned by an afternoon in the sun; they were warm to the touch and there was a degree of discomfort but it was not at all like Morris’s legs had been, and I did not believe my condition would worsen with time.

  Charlie was asleep on his back, eyes wide open, and with a full erection pressing against the front of his pants, which despite my not wanting to know about the thing I took as a sign of wellness. I thought, Who knows in what extraordinary form good tidings might arrive in our lives? I pulled back one of his cuffs and saw that his legs looked just as mine did, red and without hair, but healthy. His hand, however, was much for the worse, with his purple fingers threatening to burst they were so plumped up. The sight of this, along with the beavers, and also Morris made me lonesome; I wished to wake up Charlie to speak with him but decided it best to let him rest.

  It occurred to me I had not cleaned my teeth since San Francisco, and I crouched at the waterline upriver, scrubbing my tongue and gums and teeth and spitting out the foam like buckshot across the surface of the water. I heard Warm’s voice and looked back at the tent. ‘Hermann?’ I called, but he said nothing more. I moved to the beavers and hefted them one by one, holding them at their tails and flinging them into the water south of the dam. They were heavier than I expected them to be, and the texture of their tails did not feel like the appendage of a living being, but something crafted by man. Charlie had sat up to watch as I tossed out the final few. In spite of the peculiarity of my work, he said nothing about it, and in fact he looked somewhat bored. Forgetting his injury, he reached up to swat a fly from his face and winced at the pain of his fingers knocking together. I tossed out the last beaver and returned to sit beside him. He attempted to unwrap his dressing but it had stuck and dried to his gummy flesh, and when he peeled the cloth back, along with it came a layer of skin from his knuckles and fingers. It did not look to hurt him, any more than he was already hurting that is, but it frightened and disgusted him, and me, also. I said I thought we should soak the entire thing in what was left of the alcohol before removing the dressing and he answered that he would rather wait until after he ate. I made us a small breakfast of coffee and beans. I took Warm a plate but he was sleeping, and I did not wake him. His entire body was red and purple and the blisters on his legs were doubled in number and all of them had burst, coating his skin in the brown-yellow liquid. His toes were black and a death-smell emanated from him; I thought he would likely pass over before the sun set. When I came away from the tent, Charlie was pouring the alcohol into one of Warm’s pots, and there was another pot of boiling water on the fire with a cotton shirt dancing in its roiling bubbles. He had taken the shirt from Morris’s saddlebag, he said, and looked to me for a reproach, but of course I had none to give him. He submerged his hand in the alcohol and a fat, Y-shaped vein rose up and pulsed on his forehead. He needed to scream but did not; when the pain subsided he held his hand before me and I removed the dressing. The flesh came away as before, and his hand as I saw it was ruined. Charlie looked at it but said nothing. I pulled Morris’s shirt from the water with a stick; once it was cooled I wrapped the hand, covering the fingers this time, that we would not have to see them and think about what they meant.

  I decided to bury Morris, away from the river where the sand and soil met. This took me several hours and was accomplished with a short-handled spade of Warm’s. I did not and still do not understand the reason for this tool’s existence in comparison with its long-handled counterpart. I will say that digging a grave with it was absolutely a self-torture. I did the work alone, except that Charlie helped me drag the body up the beach and drop it into the hole, but mostly my brother sat away by himself, and twice he walked upriver far enough that I lost sight of him. I did not press him, and he remained attendant for the actual filling in of the grave.

  We had Morris’s diary on hand (why did we not return this to him when he was living? It had not occurred to us, is why), and I struggled with the question of whether or not I should bury it with him. I asked Charlie his opinion on the matter but he said he did not have one. In the end I decided to hold on to the book, my thought being that his story was a unique one, and so best to keep his words aboveground where they might be shared and admired. It was a graceless an
d miserable thing to see Morris’s crooked body at the bottom of that pit. He was filthy and purple and obscene to look at. It was no longer Morris but I spoke to the thing as though it was, saying, ‘I am sorry, Morris. I know you would have preferred a more stylish affair. Well, you impressed us with your show of character. For whatever it’s worth, you have my brother’s and my respect.’ Charlie was unmoved by my speech. I was not sure he had been paying attention enough to hear it. I was fearful I had been overly dramatic. Public speaking, it goes without saying, was not something I typically engaged in. Recalling my bomboniere from the Mayfield bookkeeper, I removed this from my coat pocket and dropped it into the pit, with Morris—a measure of grandness, was my idea. It unfurled across his chest, shining and blue and fine. I asked Charlie if we should mark the spot with a cross and he said I might ask Warm. When I entered the tent I found Warm awake and somewhat alert. ‘Hermann,’ I said. He blinked his milky eyes and ‘looked’ in my general area. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Eli. How are you feeling? I am happy to hear your voice.’

  ‘Where is Morris?’

  ‘Morris has died. We have buried him up from the river. Do you think we should mark his grave or leave him be?’