Ostern
Notes: This was written for a cowboy themed challenge over on mgs_slash on lj. It was inspired by the film The Wild Bunch, and guest stars Lieutenant Vulich, one of my OCs from Privideniya. But you don't need to know what either of those things are to follow along.
They drove through the desert in a truck with no name, cobbled together from parts so old that some predated the Cold War.
The first rays of the sun crept over the horizon, and the dust made the sky seem colorless and harsh. Ocelot had not thought that he would sleep at all the night before, but he had slept, and soundly. Out here in the wilderness, far from the corona of the city lights, a starry sky was disorienting, and a full moon could seem almost like daylight. He had spent the night stretched out on his back beneath a sky like that, and the sides of the pickup bed he rode in had risen up to obscure the horizon. He had seen only the sky, heard only the roar of the engine, felt only the jostling flight of bad tires over rough ground, until it felt that he was not himself but instead the sum of all those parts.
Ocelot was still for a while, watching the dawn creep across the horizon, returning dimension to the land. It had been cold last night, but with the sun the heat returned. Soon he was compelled to fling off his blankets and sit up. He mopped the sweat from the back of his neck. He felt weak, but he was no longer feverish. When he moved his left leg, it was stiff but it did not ache with infection. It was an ugly wound, he knew that, and it would leave an ugly scar. But he was alive, and he had been more fortunate than most.
Propping himself up on the wheel well, Ocelot reached over to draw the blanket away from the still form beside him. He already knew what he would find, and the blind, glazed eyes that stared back at him did not disgust him.
Ilya had taken a bullet to the gut. Though Ocelot had done what he could to stop the bleeding and fed him all the water he could spare, they had both known it was only a matter of time. Ilya hadn't complained much, only a little towards the end when the delirium set in. Ocelot couldn't remember when he had stopped raving and finally laid still; it must have been after he had fallen asleep.
Ocelot pulled the blanket back over the corpse's face, wrapped it under his stiff body. He slipped his belt out of the loops and pulled it around the package to hold it. Then he wrestled it to the back of the truck bed and shoved it out.
Ilya hit the sand and did not roll. The tires kicked a fan of white dust over him, and then they were leaving him far behind. Ocelot watched for a while, but the corpse dropped quickly out of sight. It was the end of him, and Ocelot felt no worse for knowing that.
Using his good leg for leverage, Ocelot pushed himself back so he was resting against the cab of the truck. The glass was dirty, but he could make out two shapes inside. The larger one, at the wheel, that would be Jack. Ocelot tried to think of the name of the other, but his memories of the last twenty-four hours were tarnished and hazy.
He rapped on the back window, and the truck slowed and pulled off the road. Ocelot wasn't sure he could stand with his leg in the state it was, but he knew already that he would have to manage it somehow. Even here, out of danger, Jack wouldn't tolerate any weakness or anything that would slow them down.
Ocelot didn't think he would leave him out here, but these days it was harder to be sure. This was, after all, the same Jack who had taken one look at the bullet hole in Ocelot's leg, tossed a bundle of gauze to him, and then climbed in the cab of the truck without a word.
The truck came to a stop at the side of the road. The door creaked heavily as Jack pushed it open and climbed out. He came around to the side and looked over the edge of the truck bed. One hand was cocked on his hip so it rested, just barely, against his pistol. It reminded Ocelot a little of two people newly in love, who always found a way to sit with their knees barely touching, their fingertips grazing each other's.
Ocelot saw that all the time, saw it casually, the way he saw everything that happened in a room at a single glance. But it had been a long time since he had lived it.
"Where's Ilya?" Jack said.
"Dead."
"You toss him out?"
Ocelot lifted a hand to rub at his aching thigh, but then thought better of it and put it down. "Yeah. Did you want to go back and bury him?"
"We're not going back," Jack said.
"Then where are we going, exactly?"
He heard again the creak of a car door choked with rust, the smaller creak of ancient seat springs depressing. The man who slipped out of the truck was lithe and dark. He wore a headscarf, tied hastily over his hair so it sagged a little over one eye. Ocelot recognized him at once, and was not surprised to see him alive and unscathed. Lieutenant Vulich was reckless, and more suicidal than brave. He gave his age as twenty-one, though no one took him for older than seventeen. But he had the luck of the devil, and when things turned as messy as they had back at the missile silo, that was what counted the most.
"We're going south," Vulich said. "I know some people there."
"Accepting outside help was what got us in this mess in the first place," Ocelot said.
Vulich only shrugged. "Suit yourself. But you need to hide from the Russians, and my friends excel at that very thing."
"The Mujahideen..." Ocelot surmised.
"Is there a problem?" said Jack.
"It's just that the Lieutenant's friends don't care for members of Spetznaz much."
"You haven't been in Spetznaz in twenty years," Vulich said. He was a shrewd man, which Ocelot knew already, and it seemed he had done some research, which he had only suspected. "So I don't foresee a problem."
He wrestled open the door of the pickup, and boosted himself back inside. Ocelot looked again at Jack, only to see that he, too, had turned away. And so foreign was the feeling of being left behind that at first Ocelot didn't even recognize its sting.
"Wait," he said. "I'll ride up front with you. There's room."
"No," Jack said. "Stay back here a while. It'll be good for your leg if you can stretch it out."
Ocelot knew that he was not genuinely concerned, for that was a luxury that Jack rarely afforded himself even under the best of circumstances. With a dozen loyal men dead on the other side of the Russian border, he could think only in practical terms. As far as Jack was concerned, the only difference between Ocelot and Ilya was that Ocelot's loyalty might merit a shallow grave.
The engine turned over a few times, then coughed to life. Jack pulled the truck back onto the road and they continued south.
All through the morning they rolled through the white desert. They travelled on one of the old Soviet highways, which stretched for almost one thousand kilometers through the wild country that had once been called the Virgin Lands. If you believed the mythology, then Russia had cultivated this country of wild nomads and horsemen and brought out its potential. But Ocelot had only to look out over the scrubland which stretched in every direction, alive without having ever been touched by human hands, logical in a way that was not imposed by mankind, and he knew that this place was not tame. It was only patient, and wise, and it bore their presence not out of respect, but because it had never even noticed them there.
Ocelot dozed a little near the middle of the day, and when he awoke, gray mountains hovered on the horizon. Glad for something to break the monotony, Ocelot shifted in the bed of the pickup so he could watch them approach. As they drew near, he saw that what he had at first taken for a mountain range was in fact a row of low buttes, chiseled and ivory, each thrusting up boldly from the sand and scrub.
Ocelot glanced through the window in the cab of the truck. Jack was still at the wheel, and his eyes were focused on the road. Ocelot could not have said what he was thinking, and that dismayed him. If the stone sentinels stirred him at all, he would never let on. There was no way to know if he even remembered.
Jack had been the one who brought him over to the other side. For Ocelot, leaving the Soviet Union for America had not been a difficult decision; it had not been a change in ideology, only a slight shift in perspective. It was refreshing, like looking at a cherished piece of art from a different angle.
He knew that Jack had wanted to impress him, and so Ocelot had stifled his yawns and smiled through countless trips to American supermarkets, which had been meant to make him see the vastness and majesty of Capitalism.
He bought a pair of Levis and thought they flattered. He drank a Coca-Cola, and thought it tasted like a vile medicine that the pharmacist had tried to sweeten so petulant children would take it.
In the third week, they borrowed a car and took to the road. They left Washington D.C. behind, and crossed the roiling gray Mississippi. In St. Louis they met up with Route 66 and headed toward the coast. They both wore black aviator glasses, and when they stopped at roadside diners, they drank black coffee and ate bacon and eggs.
Ocelot felt for the first time that he was discovering America. They drove through Kansas, where the railroad ran parallel to the highway, and they paced a freight train for almost a full day. Fields of wheat stretched out in every direction, as far as the eye could see, and lone Victorian farmsteads crouched on the hills and took note of their passing.
Then the elevation dropped, and they crossed into the desert. The transition was so gradual that Ocelot did not even notice until it was nearly complete, for it wasn't barren as he had expected, but studded with grama grass and Sacaton and Joshua trees, like the flora of a Martian landscape.
In Flagstaff, they left the safety of the Interstate behind and braved state roads to the Utah border. They passed through pine forests that crowded the road, as mysterious as a dream, and when they began to descend, the drop was so steep that the trees ended abruptly, without warning, as if a scythe had been drawn over the land.
The earth was red. Curtains of loose dust hung along the sides of the highway, and through them the sky was as dark as a bruise. Ocelot recognized this place, though he had not been here before. On the horizon, a row of stone fortresses hovered, obscured by the heat rising from the pavement.
He knew this vista from his younger years, the ones he had spent in the movie theater back home. He hadn't had much interest in space operas or comedies or socialist realism, but every time a western trickled in from the West, he was there to see it. He couldn't say just what it was about those movies that moved him, only that they had given him a place where good men were scarce, but sometimes wicked men could do good. He liked that. Liked knowing that some men mirrored the world in which they all had to live.
It wasn't men that stirred him now, not like the view from the crest of the final hill did, right before the road descended into the red valley and buttes sprang up on all sides. Their walls were vertical and sheer as cliff faces, and they were not quite as big as he had always imagined they would be.
When Jack pulled the car over to the side of the road, Ocelot had a chance to get his bearings. They walked through the red dust and the patches of grass where the Navajo ponies grazed. And Ocelot said of a lookout that jutted from the rock above their heads, "Look, there's where they filmed The Searchers. And that spire that looks just like a needle, that's from Stagecoach. And see that mitten-shaped rock? It was in Rio Grande. And this road we're on, this very road, the wagon rolled down it in Odnazhd' na Dykom Zapade. Oh, but that's not what they called it here. Once Upon a Time in the West, that's more like it, right?"
Jack only shrugged helplessly and said, "I just don't like Sam Peckinpah that much."
And Ocelot's heart sank, but he didn't love him any less for it. That's how happy he was.
They found a place to camp for the night, and while Ocelot built up the fire, Jack sat down with a woolen blanket and his hunting knife, and for a few minutes he didn't say anything at all. When he straightened up again, he held out the blanket and said, "Here. Wear this. It gets cold in the desert at night."
Ocelot took it from him, and shook it out. Jack had cut a neck hole in the blanket, and fashioned it into a brown serape. Though Ocelot watched his face closely, he couldn't tell if Jack had done it on purpose, or not.
That night, as the sun sank behind the rocks and the fire died down, Ocelot wrapped himself up in the serape and made as if to sleep. He only closed his eyes, though, and waited. And soon Jack came around the last embers of their fire and sat down beside him, close enough to touch. And then he didn't need a blanket to keep him warm.
That night they camped in the Central Asian desert, and the yellow buttes that towered above them were like a mirror of the red rocks he had seen on that first trip to America. No matter how many times he went back, that was how he would always remember that land, and he would never stop thinking of it fondly.
In the front seat, Vulich and Jack flipped a coin to see who would sleep in the cab of the truck. The Lieutenant worked his black magic, and it came up heads. He curled up on the seat while Jack climbed out and came around to the bed.
Ocelot slid over to make room for him, and when Jack climbed in he made good use of it. They did not touch because they didn't have to. Ocelot turned to watch his still profile. When they were this close he could see the silver coming in at Jack's temples. He was luckier than some; Ocelot's hair was already almost entirely white.
"You don't really trust Lieutenant Vulich, do you?"
"I do," Jack said. "For now. He's not smart enough to betray us. He's not smart like you are."
Ocelot was not cheered by the compliment. "When have I ever betrayed you?"
"Never. And that's why I have my eye on you." There was a rustling of blankets as he turned over. "It will be soon now."
It took Ocelot a moment to realize they weren't talking about the same thing any more. "Really? Even after what happened last time?"
"It won't happen again. Just one more job, and we'll have enough to get a good start."
"It's crazy," Ocelot sighed. "Outer Heaven is a crazy idea. But it's your idea, and so you'll never let a little thing like that stop you."
"It's not just my dream," Jack said. "It's all I live for now."
"Then I guess that makes two of us," Ocelot replied, and he believed that with all his heart. He had wasted years trying to figure out the trick to this man. In the end, he had realized there was no trick at all. No puzzle to solve or hidden catch to unlatch. The best Ocelot could do was hold on for the ride. If he let go now, there would be no way to escape being trampled.
"Get some sleep," Jack said, and he really meant it. He pulled his blanket up and closed his eyes.
Ocelot didn't feel tired. He looked up at the sky, watching the clouds without really seeing them. "It still gets cold in the desert at night."
"It always does," Jack replied.
"Do you remember Monument Valley?"
"Sure I do," Jack said. "That was when you came over to our side."
"I was always on your side. But I didn't realize it until then."
He knew Jack wouldn't respond to that, and so he pressed on. "I kept the serape you made me. I kept it for a long time, but I don't have it any more. So I guess I lost it somewhere along the way."
"That was just an old blanket."
"It was just something I kept," Ocelot said.
~End