A Hidden Place (17 page)

“Nance, what is it? What’s wrong?”

The gun, she thought. The fear, the agony … She touched her ribs, her belly, wanting the reassurance that those wounds she had felt were not really her wounds. “I can’t explain,” she said faintly. “I don’t understand it myself—”

But Anna had stopped shaking, and she sat up now, hollow-eyed, luminous with faint blue fire. Nancy felt Travis recoil; but she gripped his hand and held it tightly, needing him.

Anna blinked. Her grief had filled the room; it was palpable, physically present, a smell like roses … a cloud … an electricity in the skin….

She looked at Nancy. “You felt it?”

“Yes! God, yes!” She pressed against Travis. “That was him, wasn’t it? That was Bone. He’s close—”

Anna said faintly, “They’re killing him.”

I
n a little railtown called Buckton their luck went bad.

The wad of money in the right-hand pocket of Bone’s navy pea coat had grown much larger. Twice in the course of this hot summer, in towns whose names they did not know, they had committed successful robberies. “Nothing big,” Deacon said. “Nothing ambitious. Just a little money out of the till. Just a kind of income tax. A little Relief Program for Archie and Deacon and Bone.” They would locate a gas station or a general store not too far from the railway or too close to town, would approach it at dusk; Deacon, brandishing a handgun he had taken from the Darcy farmhouse, would empty the till. The proprietor or the store clerk might weep, might curse, might silently watch; but it was never Deacon or Archie he looked at, it was Bone; Bone huge and blankly pale, his pallid wrists projecting from the cuffs of his pea coat, his eyes white and unblinking in their cavernous orbits.

This should have been the same. They had hiked away from a hobo jungle to this place, a whitewashed building with a torn screen door and the word Sundries written above it. They stood outside in the gathering dusk, calculating the isolation of the place, the chance that somebody might come by. “It’s wide open here,” Archie said nervously. “Anybody could see us.” But Deacon only favored him with a contemptuous sneer. “Cowardly talk,” he said, and reached under his coat for the big handgun. “For Christ’s sake,” Archie began—but Deacon had already pushed through the rust-hinged door.

Bone hurried after.

The room inside was narrow, plank-floored, tidy. Sacks of flour squatted on pineboard shelves. Bone was engulfed in the heady smell of wood polish and grain, in the merciless yellow light of an overhead bulb. The proprietor was a barrel-shaped man who had not yet noticed Deacon’s gun; his eyes were fixed on Bone. Bone sensed the man’s distrust, not yet coalesced into fear. The proprietor said, frog-throated, “Can I help you gents?”—then paled as Deacon stepped forward, grinning.

Archie watched the door. That was his job, and he performed it flawlessly. Bone stood beside Deacon at the counter, claustrophobic in this enclosed place; Deacon held the pistol. “All we want is what’s in the till,” Deacon said coolly. “Hand it over slow.”

“Car coming,” Archie said from the door.

Deacon did not turn. “Let me know if it stops.” He was relaxed, methodical. Deacon was not afraid of the man behind the counter, not afraid of jail or of committing violence. He had changed, Bone thought, since the Darcy house. Maybe he didn’t
want
to kill the storekeeper, but he would not hesitate to do so should the occasion arise; some part of him might even welcome the violence, the brief wild pleasure of pulling the trigger and proclaiming his potency. Bone perceived all this without words. The immanence of death boiled around Deacon like a thundercloud. He stank of it.

The storekeeper had frozen. He stared at Deacon, at Bone, at Deacon again. Beads of sweat started out on his broad forehead.

“The till,” Deacon said. “Empty the goddamn till!”

“Car gone by,” Archie said.

Bone watched the storekeeper’s fat hands delve into the cash drawer. He wadded the cash as he tugged it out, pushed the soiled green bills across the counter. “It’s not much,” he said, his voice cracking, “but it’s all—see—look—”

“All right, all right.” Deacon used his pistol to sweep the cash toward Bone. Bone took it without counting it and stuffed it into the pea coat.

“Archie?”

“All clear … no, wait, Christ, there’s another car!”

Deacon held the pistol steady. On the wall, a Pepsi-Cola clock ticked out seconds. The breathing of the storekeeper was stertorous and aggrieved.

“Gone by?” Deacon asked tightly.

“It’s—” Archie’s voice lost a beat. “Deacon, it’s slowing down.”

“Be damned,” Deacon said. He turned fractionally.

Bone watched as the storekeeper dived behind the counter. When he came up an instant later he had a shotgun in his hands. Deacon turned back but his comprehension lagged. Bone felt the seismic shift—Deacon’s confusion and fear, the storekeeper’s blossoming triumph.

The shotgun was inches from Deacon’s chest. The storekeeper tightened his finger on the thick steel trigger.

Bone reached out and took the gun in one huge hand. He jerked the barrel upward. The storekeeper’s finger closed convulsively and both barrels discharged into the ceiling.

“Oh my Lord,” the storekeeper said. Bone snatched the weapon away from him and threw it into a corner with the stitched cotton sacks of animal feed. “Oh, my sweet Lord.” And Deacon thrust forward his pistol.

“Deacon,” Bone said gently. “Deacon, don’t.”

But it was too late. Feverish with hatred, Deacon fired.

The storekeeper lurched back gap-chested and bloody into a wall of patent medicines. Brown bottles of iron tonic fell about him like hail.

He was dead. It was that simple.

Death again, Bone thought sadly.

“Fucker tried to kill me,” Deacon said, trembling. “You saw him! Can’t deny it! Tried to
kill
me!”

And Bone looked at Deacon, a small man now, frightened in the aftermath of his own violence, and thought:
I don’t owe him anything.

It was a new idea, startling and absolute.

Deacon was alive now because of Bone. Bone had discharged his debt.

White smoke coiled from the barrel of Deacon’s pistol.

“Tried to kill me! You saw him!”

“Car gone by,” Archie said weakly.

They rode mostly empty boxcars. If they entered a crowded one, it would be empty at the next whistlestop. Bone’s reputation had grown among the hoboes.

“Fuck ‘em all,” Deacon said cheerfully. They sat in a boxcar—empty—with the prairie night rushing past outside. It was no longer summer. The wind was cutting and Bone clutched his jacket around him. The Calling was elusive tonight.

Deacon had acquired a bottle of muscatel. He drank unstintingly and offered none to Archie. After a time, pacified, he talked in fragments about his life in Chicago, about the Great War, about the child he had abandoned. Then, with a violent finality, he passed out.

Bone and Archie sat in the rattling darkness, very nearly invisible. The door was open a crack and Bone watched the landscape pour by. A harvest moon hung on the horizon.

“He’ll do it again,” Archie said.

Talking to himself, maybe, Bone thought.

“I should walk away,” Archie said. “Walk away and be shut of the whole thing. I
should.
…”

Bone gazed at him inquisitively.

“Ah, no,” Archie said, taking up the remainder of Deacon’s muscatel. “No. I guess I’ve been with him too long. Maybe you don’t understand that. It’s not queer. Don’t get that idea. It’s just that I owe him some things.”

Bone nodded.

“I was never good on my own. Too damn dumb. Deacon’s a thinker. Smart. Smart as a whip! But that’s where he gets into trouble. Figuring angles all the time can make a person crazy. I’m not trying to stir up trouble, but listen, Bone, listen to me: to Deacon you’re just one more angle … you know what I mean?”

There was no fear about Archie now, only a sadness, a melancholy, like the scent of the rain in the air. Bone said, “I know.”

“It’s been sweet for him so far. Christ, he could do anything! He was right. He
was
right. It’s not Deacon they see, it’s Bone, the geek—you. Deacon’s sitting pretty.” The chill air made him shiver, and Archie took up the bottle and swallowed convulsively. “You, though, Bone, you’re out in the cold, you know that? Out in the snow and ice. When they hang somebody, it won’t be Deacon. And pretty soon Deacon’s gonna want to lose you. Oh, yes. They know you now. Hoboes know you, cops know you. Everybody. You’re getting to be a liability. Bad to be with. You’re not much good to him anymore.”

It was true enough, Bone thought. But he guessed it didn’t really matter any longer. He had paid out his debt to Deacon. It worked both ways: Deacon was bad for Bone to be with, as well.

But he worried about being alone, about being recognized … especially now that he was so close.

The Calling was faint but very near. In recent days his mind had seemed to race; he was filled with a new lucidity. He understood so much.

“I’ll stick with him,” Archie was saying. “I don’t care what he did. I know he killed those people. By God, didn’t we bury them? But he needs me.” Archie looked at Bone pleadingly. “He needs me … doesn’t he? Doesn’t he?”

“I guess he does,” Bone said.

They spent the next night outside a freightyard, camped by themselves, huddled over a weak fire while the wind came sluicing over the prairie. “Give me the money,” Deacon said, drunk again.

Bone, shivering, pulled the wad of bills out of his pocket.

Deacon counted it twice. It came to almost three hundred dollars.

Deacon gripped the fluttering bills tightly, as if the wind might carry them off. “We could go a long way on this,” he said. “A
long
way. Some warm place. Florida, maybe. What say, Archie? We spend the winter in Florida. Live like goddamn kings. Buy a piece of property maybe.”

“There’s no Florida property for three hundred bucks,” Archie said morosely.

“Then we’ll get more,” Deacon said.

Archie looked at Bone and then back at Deacon. “If you mean—hey, Deacon, I don’t think we should—”

“One more time,” Deacon said. “Maybe someplace a little ritzier. Someplace they keep more cash in the till. Someplace—”

“No!” Astonishingly, Archie had risen to his feet. “Deacon, it’s crazy! They’ll spot him a mile away! We’ll all be killed, all of us!”

Deacon didn’t answer, only sat back against his rucksack and gazed at Archie. In a moment Archie’s rage had faded; he looked foolish, outlined against the stars with the night wind picking at his tattered coat, and he sat back down again.

“Just one more,” Deacon said. His voice was placid, calming. “I know we can’t carry on with it. All I want is a little extra. You understand. A little something to keep us warm. Something to keep the cold away. You understand, Archie.”

But Archie was shivering, Archie was hugging himself, and it looked to Bone as if Archie might not be warm ever again.

He woke up that night after the fire had gone out.

The embers were cold, the ground beneath him was cold. Bone sat up and hugged his pea coat around himself.

Amber light from the freightyard washed out over the prairie. Behind a chain link fence, an acetylene torch dropped showers of sparks. The night air was full of metallic smells and the stars above him were icy and strange.

The Calling sang to him.

Here I am, find me.

Now before the time passes.

Bone, find me, here, now.

He could not mistake the urgency of it. He sensed that some irreversible process had been set in motion, that he needed to play out his part. His body felt huge and strange about him. In this last week the sickness had come back, the convulsions that bowed him heel-to-crown as if he were about to erupt from this clumsy cocoon and burst forth transfigured. It was time to move on.
So close now.
He did not need words to know it.

He moved away from the cold campfire, from the prone bodies of Archie and Deacon, into the darkness. In the shadow of a rust-eaten oil canister he stood to his full height and scanned the eastern horizon.

She was a light there.

He thought it for the first time: “She.”

She was a blue corona that rose and flared like a searchlight against the stars. Bone knew without thinking it that the light would be invisible to Archie or Deacon. It was a sign meant exclusively for Bone, a kind of marker.
Here I am.
He trembled with the closeness of it.

The light transfixed him, consumed all his attention for a timeless moment, and he was startled when Archie tapped his shoulder.

The smaller man was shaking. His knapsack was in his hand. He gazed up at Bone, and there were tears leaking from his eyes.

“We leave him here,” Archie whispered. “Listen to me. Without us he can’t hurt himself. He’ll be okay. We leave him here, right, Bone? Without us they can’t touch him. He’ll be okay—”

And Bone, gazing at Archie, was overcome with another realization.

He was not like Archie or Deacon.
1 am not human.
The thought was dizzying, and for a moment he was afraid a convulsion might overtake him. In the glare of that blue light he had glimpsed himself, had bathed for a moment in the secret illumination of the Jeweled World. Bone’s comprehension failed him, but he understood, at least, that he was not like Archie. The gulf between them was vast, vast …

“Archie, no,” he said. His voice seemed loud in the darkness. “I have to go—“he pointed helplessly—”
there
—”

Archie gazed beyond him, not listening, blind to the Calling light. “He changed since we met you. But that’s not true, either. It was nothing you did. Just something he saw in you. I don’t know. You were like the ghost of all the beatings he took. But not beaten. All his old anger came out.”

There was a motion in the darkness beyond the oil tanks. Bone, distracted, looked away.

“I guess I changed too,” Archie said. “I only ever wanted to help him. I guess you know what I mean. But I can’t do that by staying with him. That’s the hard part.” His eyes focused on Bone. There was anguish there but also a kind of strength. Bone felt a shadow of the smaller man’s pain, of this hard-won peace he had arrived at, somehow, in the deep of the night. “We have to leave him. It’s the only way to help him. Christ, it frightens me to be alone! It’s the only thing I was ever really scared of. But if we don’t leave him, Bone, he’ll kill himself. He’s drugged up on crazy vengeance and there’s no sense in him.”