Aaron Tucker

The Horseman

The large ships are anchored out in the deeper water of the inlet. I see them, and I see the smaller boats spreading out from them, coming to shore. The big ships look like buildings turned on their sides, a city comes to me, and I wonder which of the four he’s on.
I have to believe the man on the ship, my boss, when he says he’s 132 years old. I believe him because my family goes back that far in this place, and they all remembered him that many years ago and passed down the stories of him and his family. He says he plans to live another century, that he’s going to live forever. People say he’s unnatural, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe him.
It’s raining. It always rains in Ocean Falls, or near always. The water comes down gently as a mist, not blocking my view, but giving everything a shine and a slight mirage warble. The wet coastal air in my lungs, as I wait on the dock. I’ve been waiting four hours since I got the radio that they had set off from Bella Coola. The trip was only supposed to take three hours.
I don’t wonder much about that extra hour, as the small boats get closer, and I start to see the men and the boxes, crates and objects, they’re set to haul into the town behind me. It’s a ghost town, and nobody but me has been here for the last five years, just waiting for this afternoon. I don’t wave. They see me. On the deck of the farthest ship, I see a figure. If that’s him, he sees me.
I’m small on the dock when he looks, looking back at him, and the dock stretches behind me to the main road, paved now. The harbour is ringed with a mix of the old wooden structures, preserved as if a museum, then more of the modern buildings, mostly windows and built initially for vacationers to stare out of at the ocean; the glass structures are now greenhouses, meant to grow what he needs. The reflection of all that glass and the solar panels scattered throughout may be so bright as to hide the big house on the hill where he’s to live. The town doesn’t reach far behind me, but the forest does, the cedar mixed with the big rainforest trees tower over everything up the hills then mountains and over into the valleys beyond. Thick brush and wilderness filled with stinging nettle and protruding tree roots I’ve left mostly untouched since I got here; let the bears and deer be. The only thing I’ve managed to carve out is a small corral and grazing field, not far from his big home.
If he looks long enough, he might see that forest growing back into the town, there’s nothing I can do about that.
Oceans Falls, when he was born and lived here before the Second World War, would have been very different, wooden boardwalks and no cars, the brothel on the edge of it all, his family home on the opposite side of town. Lots of Japanese and Indian men come in, up the few hundred kilometres from Vancouver. Chinese, too; some brought their families, and worked the mill, despite the isolation of the place. Some eventually spread out to the canneries and the mines, inland down Dean Channel to what would become Stillwater or around Lonesome Lake, closer to Bella Coola. They learned to catch and prepare eulachon, we all did, being that there was so many, everyone did but his family.
They were always apart. His father ran the mill, headed up the Company, which owned everything in town. They might bring one of the hand-painted pots into their home, the vibrant shades drawn from grinding coloured rock and mixing the powder with fish oil. But whoever made those pots, who worked the mill, who built their own smaller homes around them, they never set foot in their place.
My great-great-grandfather worked for his father. My great-grandfather worked for his father. My grandfather left here, my father never set foot here; too haunted, he said. But I’ve returned.
The first boat gets close enough to throw me a rope and I can pull them to the dock, tie it off, start helping. There are three men, and the tallest comes off first, motions for me to step aside. One of the other men follows him and the third stays on the boat, starts passing cargo, which the other man stacks on the carts I have set up on the dock for just that.
“He wanted us to go slower, so we went slower. An hour late isn’t bad then. I’m Manuel, the captain.”
We shake hands. “Neil.”
“We’re going to keep unloading, there’s a lot, as you might guess, and it’s going to take into the night. There’s food, of course, lots, but all this other shit of his. His furniture, his books, I think he packed his whole life. Four boats’ worth.”
“I don’t even try to understand a man like that.”
“No.”
“No.”
“He told me to tell you, don’t bother helping, we’ll take it on. Just point us where.”
I turn with a sweep of my arm and point to the furthest house set back, the one with the large A-frame front, a peak above the rest of the town. “That giant one there. It’s empty.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Half a decade.”
“And it’s been just you?”
“Just me.”
“A bit like working a lighthouse, all alone.”
“I suppose. I’ve been busy. He’s wanted things set up a certain way.”
“He said you don’t need to bother; the most important thing for you is the horses.”
“ Yes.”
Another boat comes ashore, then another, and they fill the dock, the men and the many, many things, so many more than I care to name or count. Abundance: it’s the only word I can think of and I repeat in my head. The fleet of boats come and come, and I watch them scurry over and into everything.
I have been alone, it’s true, and without much contact with anyone, deliberately so. It was just easier, but also, at a certain point last year, I was told he was cutting off the internet, and that he would be monitoring radio and cell use and wanted none. I was to report any air traffic and especially drones, neither of which have passed over in the last two months. He wanted his town dark and me to be cut off with it. So I knew he was coming but am unsure as to the reasons why now.
But I have made it as close to what he wanted it as possible. At first there were lots of people here with me, in that first year or so, mostly engineers and electricians, carpenters and plumbers, an architect and planner, we all descended on the town to reshape it. The first thing done was setting up seawalls, pumping back the Pacific that had crept up, and returning the town to pre-global melting levels. After that, the roads were so bad at that point, the town so eaten and overgrown, they needed me to be in charge of the horses, packhorses mostly, we used to move things around. Imagine us, all our horses at the original century-old hitching posts outside the buildings, hammerings, sawings, drillings, the chatter of us, installing all the bleeding-edge technology wealth could bring. There’s a strange bed in the big house, I don’t even know what it does, all the wires and the insistence that it’s plugged in and active when he arrives. It’s things like that that have been anticipating him.
Once all those people were done, I was left here as caretaker. He regularly sent men to check up on the equipment, on the town, probably me, too; make sure I hadn’t burnt it all down, but I spent a lot of time just me and horses and the wind and the rain blowing through. I got used to the waves and the clouds, the weather, all rhythms that surrounded me. The tides brought objects every now and then, most often trash from somewhere down the lower mainland. The clearest messages I received were the colour of the clouds turning in mid-afternoon from grey to a sharp, glowing white, and the breeze that would stop, and the water coming and leaving against the shoreline being the loudest sounds.
I kept three horses to help: two good sturdy animals, Larry and James, workhorses to pull trees for lumber or anything else heavy. And Isabel, a saddle horse, because she was too pretty to send away, a bright white mare that makes me feel like I’m riding a spirit when I head out into the woods with her.
The boats are still coming, and the clouds have slid over, nothing grey or threatening, but enough cover that when the sun rips through a seam and fills the boats and the men with light, they can’t help but exhale.
The last time I was with the world, five years ago, it was the same things that had occupied my generation and people like me. In a place like this, it’s easy to remember how the water had taken over almost everything, the poorest countries worst, but everywhere that had a shore was turned upon by the water first, then the people fleeing the waters. I think the boss made his money partly building those cities in the middle of all that risen ocean, but he made his money many ways, over all his years. But one main way was putting those blocks of buildings on stilts like massive oil rigs, each an island of sort.
He’s rich, by some accounts the richest man in the world. He’s not the first to build a fortress, a bunker, for when the world went to shit. This paradise, he must have bought all of this land long ago and just hoarded it, protected it, for when he was ready to build. And now he was here, to ride out whatever apocalypse, personal or societal, that had come for him.
There’s no end in sight to the procession of boats, so I go back through the small town, now packed full of people. After so much time alone, it’s startling, all the noise and motion, and I’m worried about the horses.
But when I spend the ten minutes to walk over, and lean on the fence, I see they’re content, cropping in a corner, not bothering to raise their heads to me. I watch them be peaceful and unaware, Isabel unreal in her bright and serene contrast against the world.
I watch the horses and think that I know two parts of the man who came here to live. I know the public stories as much as anyone else. A billionaire prone to messy marriages by his forties, on all the front pages of the grocery store checkout papers. Made money off the earliest internet selling it to the American military in the 1980s. Bankrolled the Human Genome Project. Provided one of the limbs of commercial quantum computing. Somehow mixed the two into some elixir where he won’t die. Alleged mystery surgeries, infusions, and supposed body doubles. His hundredth birthday party, a scandal, he gave a hundred million dollars to the section of the population he thought had the brightest futures, a sort of lottery that turned ugly when it turned out that almost all the money went to white people.
A myth, a set of myths, really, and hearsay and publicity spin and folk tales and boogeyman warnings. That’s the one side.
The other side, how I’ve been told by my generations, is the way he used to walk through this town as a boy so cautiously, like everything was going to jump out at him. My great-grandfather said, it was told to me, that as a boy in class he was wound so tight that he’d yelp when called on. It wasn’t like he was unliked or wasn’t competent. He could fish, everyone said so. But he had a malicious streak, even as a teenager. He would go out when the salmon were spawning, and farm roe, and sell the eggs to the Japanese men in town as a delicacy. A good business, not that he needed the money. When my great-grandfather began to do the same, his buckets would disappear overnight, all the roe gone. Then the Japanese men wouldn’t buy from him, just refused. No reason, just no.
Or when his father ran him out of town about when the boss turned eighteen and no one knows why. This was around Pearl Harbor, and when they were putting all the Japanese families in camps across B.C. and the rumour was, he was trying to buy their displaced land and goods before his own father could.
The roe is not in the papers. Getting chased out of Ocean Falls is not in the papers.
The night is coming down, and I gather my horses up and guide them into the stables, pitching hay in and setting up their water. I’m leaving when Manuel finds me.
“His horses are coming off now, or almost now.”
I follow him back down the slight slope together, toward where the guts of the ships have been pouring out of for the last hours. They’re floating four horse trailers over, centred in the middle of flat barges, and the containers waver on the water as they get near. I smell the animals, same musk and scent as any other horse, it carries on the ocean air.
I know they are among the finest thoroughbreds in the world, horses so pure as to be priceless. I know this in concept, but it’s nothing until I see them myself. They are royal. Majestic, no other word. Each is muscle, obsidian, and glimmering in the late evening. I take the first one’s reins and lead it down a gangplank onto the dock, and its smooth gait is unbothered. I show it my hand, then run it along its neck and the side of its head, scratching by the halter. What would usually be coarse is soft, gorgeous to the touch.
“I will not suffer inferior genetics.”
The voice is at my shoulder, and turning to it, he’s in a thick denim coat and jeans, leather cowboy boots, his grey hair blowing with the light breeze off the water. He looks in his late sixties, his teeth strong and straight, his blue eyes clear. I understand the tabloid handsome, white movie star, and can understand why it’d be hard to turn away from this man, set on living forever. The way the man holds himself though, in this untamed place, there’s more than a touch of costume and silk.
“Pardon?”
“My horses. I’ve traced their lineages back into the sixteenth century. I’ve cut out anything possibly weak or ugly about them, bred them perfectly. It’s impossible to make a better horse.”
“I’ll be happy to take care of them.”
The horses don’t stamp or fuss. They’re statues, even in what has to be the most foreign conditions to them.
“I know who you come from.”
“Pardon?”
“I remember him, your grandfather.”
“Likely my great-grandfather. He was about your age when you were in school together.”
“He was mostly kind to me.”
The horse I’m holding turns as if in response to this, and looks out over the water, snuffing loudly. Then it nuzzles against my hand.
“I’ll get these horses put away.”
“Don’t mix them in with the ones already here.”
He walks on past me, out onto the road and up toward his big, jutting building, sharp as a canine tooth. After a minute, he’s gone into the evening.
His other three horses are docile enough that they follow me leading the one all on their own, in a line toward the stables. I notice that there are new bags of feed piled up, a brand I don’t recognize, likely ingredients I’ve never heard of.
I hear my three horses shuffle as we get close, interested, with no panic. I lead the four past them, and there is some form of animal communication, maybe I share in it for a second, that flashes between them all.
I don’t mix them in. There are separate spots for his horses set off and each one goes in willingly, in almost exactly the same way. I pet each one, whisper a kind word to each, then the same for my own, and leave.
I’m not used to lights on the ocean, but they’re there, steady and not so far off. There are noises and voices that carry over the water, the illusion of people being right beside me, behind me. Past people, future people, people here with me now.
The man aims to be immortal. But I’ll age alongside him, and so will his beautiful horses, and we’ll grey and shrink and turn to skeletal dust and flesh that disintegrates into the ground, all of everyone else. He aims to stand on top of all of us that way.

Aaron tucker

is the author of seven books, including the novels Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (both with Coach House Books). His work on facial recognition technologies and artificial intelligence will be published in a forthcoming book with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2026; his prior scholarship on facial recognition won the Governor General’s Gold Medal. He is currently an assistant professor in the English department of Memorial University, where he teaches Media Studies and is the program director of the Creative Writing Diploma.