Free Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland

might speak, but his mouth was too dry. The mule tossed its head and brayed.
    The Apache chief trotted around the man and his mule and exchanged glances with the other Indians. Then he came close to the man and looked down on him with a hardened gaze. The Indian smelled like chalk, like stoneground flour, like dust and nothing.
    â€˜I aint even worth killin,’ the man said.
    The Indian chief leaned forward as if he hadnt heard what the man said. The bones of his armor clacked together as he moved. The other Indians inched forward; the one raised his ax.
    â€˜Your people are good,’ the man said. ‘Your kind gave my father and me passage once. We’re friends, your kind and I—we’re amigos.’
    The chief considered the words for some time as if he understood what the man said. He nodded and sat upright again. He motioned to the other Indians and they cut the mule loose from the tree. The man did not protest as they departed and took his mule with them.
    His father had called the natives friends. They had taken them to an island and fed both the boy and his father smoked fish. They drank fresh water flavored with fruits and pollen and flower petals. Still, none of the natives spoke or looked at them. It was as if for a short time they were treated as demigods. Each morning a woman naked from the waist up with teeth pierced through her nostrils left food by the shelter. She set the food on the ground on a bed of palm leaves. Tentatively she opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, but she never did. Instead she backed away with her head bowed.
    The boy saw her come and go, but the father slept through the visitations. A week passed in this fashion: father and son would walk about the island in silence, the natives always present, but never obvious. They would eat and drink their fill and nap in the afternoon. In the evenings they built a small fire from dried driftwood and fell to sleep by it. By then father and son were ready to converse as if they had spent the entirety of their day speculating what the other would say and then finding the correct answer to steer the conversation in his own direction.
    â€˜Where are we?’ the boy asked his father. They sat opposite from one another by the fireside. Waves rolled in from the ocean. It seemed impossible now that those waters were in the same ocean as where they left the ship burning, the rankness of flesh cremating.
    The father said he figured them to be in the Caribbean, in the gulf somewhere. ‘Hundreds of islands round here,’ he said. ‘Dangerous routes for ships too what with the reefs and all.’
    â€˜So you know where we are?’ the boy asked.
    â€˜Close enough,’ his father said. ‘Stars like I never seen before down this way, stars I only seen drawn out—didnt believe they existed.’
    â€˜Are we gonna leave this island?’ the boy asked.
    â€˜Not certain we can,’ his father said. ‘We’d need a boat.’
    â€˜Do you want to?’ the boy asked. He clarified. ‘Leave?’
    His father stared out at the ocean, the endless horizon, the clouds and birds. ‘If we do, I think we should head inland, toward the coast. American mainland.’
    â€˜Whats there?’ the boy asked.
    â€˜Nothing,’ his father said. He dragged a stick through the sand. A minute later he asked if the boy would be all right.
    The boy didnt know what his father meant and he said he was fine.
    â€˜Best to forget what you saw—forget about that place altogether,’ his father said.
    â€˜Sargasso?’
    â€˜Dont even say it.’
    â€˜What am I supposed to say?’
    â€˜Make something up.’ The father snapped the twig once, then twice and a third time. He tossed it into the fire. ‘Just make up a story and that will be what happened. What happened out there’—he pointed to the darkened horizon, out into a slate of black wind—‘that was