A Hidden Place (2 page)

Deacon led him to a circle of charred stones under a tree, a blackened frying pan. “We have a little food,” Deacon said. “You’d like that? Yeah? A little food?”

Bone nodded. He had not eaten for some days.

“Food,” Deacon said, gratified.

Archibald sighed unhappily and began heating up a few chary slices of salt pork. There was a can, also, of concentrated soup.

Deacon sat down and Bone, grimacing in pain, crouched beside him. Deacon dug deep into the folds of his faded cotton shirt and brought forth one of his snipes—a “Sunday church snipe,” Deacon called it; he had explained back on the flatcar that the best and longest snipes were the ones the churchgoers butted out just before services Sunday mornings. Bone didn’t smoke; he shook his head, smiling to demonstrate his gratitude. He thought Deacon must be really sorry for trying to steal his coat. Deacon carefully repocketed the snipe and said, “You’re the most ugly man I have ever seen but I like you. Bone, Deacon likes you.”

Bone nodded, smiling industriously.

“Tonight,” Deacon said, “we leave this pissant town. No work here. No use even looking. Ride away is about the best we can do.”

“Bad place to camp,” Archie put in.

“Bad cops,” Deacon said. “That’s the story here. You understand me, Bone?
Tonight.”

“Yes, Deacon,” Bone said out loud. But he perceived that the sun was already on its way down, and the two men showed no signs of packing up. Move on, he thought, yes, that would be good.

Inside him, strange feelings stirred.

That night, for the first time, the feeling grew so strong in him that he thought it might drive him mad.

He woke up after Deacon and Archie and the rest of the hoboes in the meager encampment had fallen asleep. The fires were out and frying pans hung in the dogwood trees like Christmas decorations. It was dark, and the cold had come down again.

Bone sat up, shivering. He wasn’t sure what had brought him awake. He gazed up at the nameless and unfamiliar constellations. This
feeling,
he thought. But maybe it was only hunger. Bone was big and the food he had begged from Deacon and Archie had only aroused his huge appetite.

He stood up, tiptoeing over Deacon where he was curled up in a moth-eaten Hudson’s Bay blanket, and began to move silently and swiftly back along the train tracks. There was a crescent moon and Bone’s night vision was very good. The rows of head lettuce stretched away to converge at the vanishing point, a horizon full of food. He boosted himself up a barbed-wire fence, ravaging the skin on his palms, and fell on the other side. The lettuce was all new growth but it didn’t matter to Bone; he filled his mouth with green matter, swallowed, filled it again, again, until at last his hunger had abated some.

He sat back on his haunches, drooling.

He wasn’t hungry anymore. And yet this other feeling persisted.

It was like his travel-on feeling, but more intense; as if his shuddering sickness had become a part of it and his hunger and his pain. It would not be still inside him.

His eyes twisted under his thick brow ridge.
What is it, what}

He itched with an unfocused sense of urgency.

That was when he heard the dogs.

Their baying broke the stillness like a knife. Bone crouched down instinctively, not breathing. But he was not in immediate danger: the sound was coming from the south, where the hobo jungle was.

A raid.

He had seen raids before. He knew how it was when the people came into a hobo camp with their pipes and shotguns. Once he had almost died in such a raid. His instinct was to run, to find a road or a train and get as far away from the violence as he could. But then he thought of Deacon and Archie sleeping and helpless back there and suddenly he was on his feet, running. His pulse beat in his ears, the air was cruel on his bloody hands, and he thought he might vomit up everything he had eaten. But he had to get back.

The southern end of the encampment had suffered first. The raiders were big men, fanners probably, in red-checked shirts and hunting jackets. A fire had started up in one of the cardboard hovels, embers flying up, the light of it making the violence seem slow and cinematic. The dogs had gone wild with the smoke and the stink of the jungle; they dove like ferrets into hovels to drag out screaming men. The farmers used their iron pipes on anyone who was slow or who resisted. It had happened so suddenly that those on the fringe of the encampment, like Deacon and Archie, were only just beginning to come awake.

Bone pulled on their arms, trying desperately to communicate some sense of urgency through the barrier of their fatigue. He remembered Deacon bragging that a real tramp could sleep anywhere, through anything—but the problem now was waking up. In the excitement Bone had forgotten all his words.

Archie sized up the situation quickly and managed to run a few paces ahead. Deacon stood up at last—the farmers were terribly close now—and his face contorted unhappily, as if he believed he might still be dreaming. Bone tugged him forward, but that was a mistake; Deacon cried out and fell over, his feet tangled in his own Hudson’s Bay blanket.

Bone pulled him up. But it was too late. A farmer in an orange hunting jacket swung his pipe and caught Deacon hard on the arm. Deacon shrieked and fell back. The farmer raised his pipe again, and Bone perceived that the man would kill Deacon if the blow were allowed to fall. To prevent it, Bone grasped the farmer’s right arm at its fullest extension and twisted until it snapped—a thing he had not realized he could do. The farmer gazed at Bone very briefly, his face gone white with shock and confusion; then he stumbled back, screaming.

Deacon was weeping with pain but managed to scuttle forward with his rucksack in his good hand. Archie helped him up, gap-jawed: “Deacon,” he said, “Deacon, you see what that big man
did
? Jesus!”

“Go,” Deacon sobbed, “just for Christ’s sakes go!”

Two more of the farmers came up on the heels of the first, and before Bone could decently run he had to swing out his long arms with their fists like weights so that these two men fell down also, one of them unconscious and one almost certainly dead. A sort of collective moan rose up from the raiders.

This time Bone did not need to be goaded. He ran, keeping abreast of his friends. The fires roared behind him.

“Boxcar!” Deacon shouted. “See!”

A long, ponderous freight was just pulling out of the yards. The yard bulls and the railway cops had all congregated down by the hobo jungle; the open door of the boxcar gaped like a broken tooth. The three of them ran to catch it, Deacon favoring his injured shoulder. Before they reached it, though, a scissorbill stepped up from the shadows in the gully, and he was carrying a shotgun.

Deacon and Archie fell to their knees. Bone didn’t think about it at all. Reflexively, he let his momentum carry him forward as the railroad cop leveled the gun; he was faster than the man’s reaction time and was able to duck under the line of fire before the big muzzles of the gun erupted into the night. Then his broad bony hand was on the cop’s face, twisting it back, snapping vertebrae; the scissorbill fell backward into the scummy slough, dead before the idea of death could enter his mind.

Deacon helped Bone up into the boxcar. There were scraps of straw in the corners and the smell of cattle. They would be cold again tonight, Bone thought bleakly. But that hardly mattered now.

Deacon gazed back at the body of the scissorbill as the train picked up speed.

“He’s meat,” Deacon marveled. “Christ God, Archie, you were right.”

Archie looked at Bone from his recessed eyes and said nothing.

They slid the doors closed as the train accelerated into the night.

Deacon, still favoring his left arm, slapped Bone on the back.

“Stick with us, kid,” he said. “Stick with old Deacon and Archie.”

The next day there were mountains again, and snow in the night. Bone huddled in his pea coat—it was tom now—and listened to Deacon and Archie swap tales about how it had been in Bakersfield and Terre Haute and Klamath Falls and how it felt to be crossing the Hump again. Deacon brought out a bottle of muscatel and the two of them drank until their conversation blurred and Bone could no longer understand them. They gave him little quizzical sidelong glances, called him “Buddy” and “Good Friend Bone,” and were careful to offer him what they had, more profusely when they were reassured that he would not accept. Eventually they fell asleep.

Bone sat in the open door of the boxcar, the cold wind tearing at him. There was a pulsing in him, much stronger than it had been before. He could feel it.

For the first time it made words inside him—the ghosts of words.

Here I am, find me. Find me, here I am.

The train roared down the eastern spine of the Continental Divide, and Bone felt the same unfamiliar strength rising up in him, the strength that had allowed him to kill all those men back at the railyard. He was focused now. Aimed. For the first time in Bone’s memory he knew where he was going.

Here I am. Find me.

The clear, high song of it was unmistakable. At last he understood.

Bone was coming.

T
he municipality of Haute Montagne stood at the junction of the Fresnel River and the railway, its water tower and its huge granaries erupting from the prairie like blocks of basalt from an eroded sea floor. Once, not long ago, the town had aspired to be a city.

It still had a little of city in it. There was the main street, Lawson Spur, or simply The Spur, which was blacktopped and lined with concrete sidewalks dazzlingly white in the noonday sun, which boasted the big Bingham’s Hardware Store and J. C. Penney’s and Times Square Lunch, all fronted in dusty yellow brick; and there was the trolley that ran on embedded rails from the switching yard down The Spur to the granaries farther south. Everyone agreed that those were big-city conveniences. Once they had been accepted as harbingers of greater things.

But Haute Montagne remained a small town in its artful cultivation of box elders and bur oaks, in its side streets on which the pavement gave way quickly to cobbles or pressed dirt, in its gabled clapboard houses with high dormers and big front stoops that looked so invitingly shady when high summer lay on the town like liquid metal. It was a small town by virtue of its silences at noon and midnight, and the distances the big trains traveled before they arrived hissing at the depot. The prairie vastnesses had made of the town an island, isolated, proud in its isolation, set apart from the chaos that had so lately descended on the country at large.

But the town was not in any real way safe, no safer than New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, and perhaps that unacknowledged wisdom made its decline the more galling. Haute Montagne (“where the railroad meets the wheatfield”) might once have wanted to be a city, but that ambition had died—or at least had been set aside, like the hope chest of a young woman destined for spinsterhood—in the Depression that had come like a bad cold and stayed to become something worse, some lingering if not fatal disease. The granaries had laid off much of the town’s male population; the trains stopped less often; dust and drought had withered too much fertile land. The noon silences became profounder. Midnights were interminable. There was a sense, never explicit, of some even darker eventuality hovering like an army of locusts beyond the indefinite horizon—biding its time.

Travis Fisher had some feeling of that when he stepped off the eastbound train and onto the whitewashed boards of the Haute Montagne depot with July like a haze in the air.

He had been tempted to stay on the train all the way to wherever it went, New York, Maine, just sit and watch the miles pass away like unremembered dreams. His ticket was paid up only this far, though, and he had change of a dollar in his pocket for money and no real choice. He climbed off the pullman car into an immense summer silence and _ withdrew from his shirt pocket the hand-drawn map his Aunt Liza had sent him in the mail. South down The Spur to Lambeth, west on Lambeth to DeVille, number 120. In truth he was a little afraid of this new place, but he was nineteen years old and had carried a grown man’s responsibilities since the year he had turned twelve, and so he straightened his shoulders and picked up his bag and began walking. The canvas bag contained a change of clothes and a photograph of his mother. It was not heavy.

There were old men and young men side-by-side on the public benches in front of the train station, and they all looked at Travis with an eloquent incuriosity. His footsteps on the pavement were loud in his ears. At the corner of Lambeth and Spur he should have turned west, but he saw the Times Square Lunch with its wide glass windows and realized at once how hungry he was. He bought a dime western at a newsstand and let himself gratefully into the cool shade of the diner. There were three men at a side ‘table but nobody at the long Formica-topped lunch bar.

He ordered himself a hamburger and a Coke. The hamburger was a slab of broiled beef and the Coke came in a big soda-fountain glass with condensation on it like dew. The waitress was young, dark-haired, small-breasted under her uniform, and she gave him a series of covert glances. When she brought over the side of french fries she said, “You must be Travis Fisher.”

“Trav,” he said automatically, only then realizing how odd it was that she should know his name. “How did you—”

“Relax,” she said. She put her elbows on the counter. “I’m Nancy. Nancy Wilcox. My mom knows your Aunt Liza through the Baptist Women
.”
She rolled her eyes to demonstrate her attitude toward the Baptist Women. “I guess just about everybody knew you were coming in today.”

He was not sure he was pleased to hear that. But she was pretty, so he thanked Nancy Wilcox anyway and said he hoped he’d see her around.

“Probably you will,” she said. “Mom and Liza Burack aren’t exactly close, but they move in all the same circles. High-minded, you know: church committees, temperance league. Translation: busybodies.” She winked and turned away, flipping her long dark hair out of her eyes. Travis gazed at her a moment before directing his attention to the dime western and the hamburger.