A Hidden Place (21 page)

“I don’t understand … tonight? You mean the men who are meeting together?”

“Meeting together? Do you believe that’s what they’re doing? Is that why Creath is cleaning his rifle, Liza?” Faye Wilcox put her plump hands palms downward on the table. Her lips were pursed. “They are a posse. A mob.”

Vigilante,
Liza thought. But— “You can’t know that.”

“How could I not? The rumor is all about town. But you don’t need a rumor to know.”

“But Travis? Surely Travis has left?”

“I believe he has not. Not while Nancy is here.”

Liza said nothing, only gripped the beveled edges of the kitchen counter. Faye stood up suddenly. “Your own sister’s child! How can you be so hard!”

Travis is lost,
she thought dizzily. She had written him out of the book of her heart. But she thought of Creath with his rifle … of the other men with theirs. “Faye—”

“No,” Faye Wilcox said bleakly. “It was stupid to come here.” She went to the kitchen door and opened it. The hinges squealed; a breeze danced inside. There was the smell of woodsmoke. It was what Liza had always loved about autumn, that melancholy perfume on the air, the smell of winter stalking somewhere beyond the horizon. A dry leaf, wind-borne, skirled over the kitchen floor. “Pray for them,” Faye said. “Please do at least that much.”

Liza swallowed hard and nodded. Faye Wilcox closed the door behind her.

When the time came for Creath to leave the house, the fear Liza felt was for him as much as for Travis: it had lodged in her breast like a living thing. Outside, two big sedans pulled up and sounded their horns. Creath rose from his chair with glacial slowness and went to the door. His rifle was in his hand.

Liza took his arm. “Creath, don’t go.” He turned to stare at her and she fixed her eyes willfully on his red-checked shirt. His old hunting shirt. “It doesn’t matter what they want. Stay. Something bad might happen … I don’t want you to get hurt.”

But he pulled his arm free. The oily metallic smell of the gun was chokingly strong. Liza felt her eyes fill with tears.

“This is bought,” Creath said, and she knew at once that he did not mean the gun in his hand but the whole of it, the men waiting outside, the Baptist Women, the tent revival: all this skein of things and people into which she, Liza, had purposefully woven them; and she took a step backward, her breath catching in her throat. “Bought and paid for,” Creath said solemnly. “We can’t take it back now.”

No, Liza thought, it cannot be too late … she thought of Faye Wilcox standing like a funeral stone in the kitchen not an hour ago
(a posse … a mob … pray for them)
and felt fear close about her like a cloak. Creath had opened the door now, had turned his back; a cold gust of autumn air escorted him toward those two black cars idling in the shadows of the box elders; and she thought
he will die he won’t come back again-,
she thought
dear God, forgive me
and held out her hand to him, stupidly, imploringly: “Creath—!”

But the cars were pulling away now, engines growling like animals against the night, and Liza faltered on the old boards of the veranda, alone, clutching her white knit sweater about her throat and thinking: He was right. This is bought.

Bought and paid for.

Nancy brought the porcelain bowl to Anna’s lips. She drank a little, and the aura of blue fire—it was constant now—receded a little. “Travis is bringing Bone here?”

“Travis is attempting to.”

Nancy sat back, considering it. The sun was gone. On cloudless blue days like this, the darkness came down quickly. The sky beyond the open door of the switchman’s shack was giving up the last of its glow, and she used the time to light a candle. She was surprised to find that her hand was trembling.

She turned to Anna. How little there was left of her! She had faded almost to transparency, her humanity a frail vessel for this blue light that threatened to burst out of her … to disperse, Nancy supposed, like a puff of smoke; and she would be lost on the wind then, vanished. “Tell me what it’s like,” Nancy said impulsively.

Anna turned her head. “The Jeweled World?”

“Yes.”

“A place,” Anna said. “I’m sorry … I can’t describe it in terms you would understand.”

“Not like this place,” Nancy said.

“No.”

“And very beautiful?”

“Often.”

“You dream of it?”

“Yes.”

“I dream of it sometimes.”

“I know,” Anna said, her voice far away.

“You must be very powerful … to be able to come here.”

“Perhaps too powerful.”

She means Bone, Nancy thought. Bone might be dangerous. “Powerful enough to come here … powerful enough to go back.”

“I hope so.”

“Did you find what you wanted here?”

And Anna smiled faintly. “I don’t know. I think so, yes. A sojourn in the wilderness. You might ask yourself the same question.”

“Is that where I am? In the wilderness?” But it was a silly question. She gazed around herself This shack, the prairie, the night….

“For a long time, I think,” Anna said.

We
are all exiles.
She said, “I envy you … I wish I had a place to go back to.”

“Here,” Anna said.

She held out her hand. Nancy looked dubiously at her.

“It’s all I have to give,” the alien woman said. “Not much. A little.”

Nancy touched her.

She supposed, afterward, that what Anna had given her was a kind of memory, a glimpse into Anna’s own past: it was inexpressible, evanescent; all that lingered was the impression of a great light and warmth and vibrant color, as if, Nancy thought, she had penetrated into the heart of the sun. And the memory, inadequate as it was, contained a small heat of its own; it warmed and reassured her.

I will keep this, she thought. I will carry this memory like a charm and only bring it out when I need it.

Anna gazed impassively at her.

“Your world,” Nancy said solemnly, “is very strange and beautiful.”

Anna smiled. “So is yours.”

“Is it?” Nancy looked up, surprised. The candle flickered. Outside this shack a sea of prairie grass bent and hissed in the wind. She said slowly, “It could be. I guess it could be.”

But then they heard the first of the gunshots … far away but clear and distinct, pinpricks of sound etched against the vastness of the night.

* * *

When they approached the railway trestle both drivers switched off their lights, and the black cars rolled like tumbrils off the main road and across the stub-bled meadow, wheels grinding, engines laboring. The railway trestle was black in the moonlight, stone and iron, and Creath fancied he could smell it, a stink of wood and grease and soot-blackened brick. It was hateful.

Bob Clawson sat with his belly up against the steering wheel, dressed, for maybe the first time in his life, in clothes that were less than immaculate: old pants, flannel shirt, threadbare jacket
—and he’ll likely burn them in the morning,
Creath thought. Clawson switched off the ignition and the ensuing silence was like a weight. Nobody spoke. There were six men in the car counting himself. Clawson was the leader. Nobody spoke, Creath observed, unless Clawson spoke first, as if they needed his approval. But Greg Morrow sat in the back seat with his daddy’s big shotgun on his lap and his eagerness was palpable, a presence in the car; Creath had been aware of it for the last quarter mile, when the only sounds had been the rumble of the engine and the hiss of his own strained breathing. “Everybody out,” Clawson said, and it was not much more than a whisper.

They stood in the moonlight with their rifles. Creath felt faintly ridiculous: this army, he thought, this two-bit infantry, half of us scared of the dark. The other car had pulled up ahead; Tim Norbloom was in charge of that little battalion. Creath felt the heft of the rifle in his hand. They had all loaded their weapons during the ride over, and the phrase that ran through Creath’s head, idiotically, was
armed and dangerous.
He looked at Greg Morrow, a shadow against the deeper dark … he could not he sure, but he believed the boy was grinning.
Armed and dangerous.

Ahead, Tim Norbloom’s crowd had opened the trunk of the other car. Norbloom drew out the torches: lengths of thick pine doweling or spruce two-by-twos wrapped at one end in oily cloth. Norbloom and Clawson’s group moved together, made a circle to cut the wind. Norbloom handed out four of the torches—Greg took one; Creath did not. Clawson drew a box of safety matches from his jacket pocket. The torches did not want to take the flame at first, the blackened cotton seeming to resist its own incineration, but then Greg’s torch whooshed up all at once, sparking into the night, and he passed on the fire to the others.

There was no hiding now. They had to hurry.

They ran across the meadow toward the railway trestle, Creath lagging behind, his breath laboring. The silence, at first, was eerie; but then Greg Morrow let out a long ululating war whoop that seemed to strike a primitive chord in the other men. The trestle was nearer now, their torches casting a red glow against the black bricks of it, their own shadows huge and manic, and others of them took up Greg’s war cry; someone fired a gun into the sky. Echoes bounded back from the trestle arches, and to the men just coming awake in there, Creath thought, it must seem as if a part of hell itself had come to earth among them. They moved sluggishly at first and then more desperately; a pitifully few men to have inspired this army, but that was irrelevant now; now there was no returning. This was bought and paid for. Two hoboes ran shrieking into the cold river, striking out for the other side. Their heads disappeared beneath the black water and Creath could not tell, then, in the flood and panic, whether they survived or were carried away. The vigilantes were laughing, swirling their torches like kids swinging sparklers on Independence Day, but their laughter was not childish … or rather, Creath thought dizzily, it was the shrill and hysterical laughter of a child torturing a cat. There was nothing of innocence in it.

He stood still, watching. The gun was a dead thing in his hand. My good Christ, he thought, what if she is here? Seducer, temptress, succubus, the source of his sin: but he knew instantly that he could not raise this rifle to her. And Creath felt a lightness in him then, a feverish buoyancy, as if his feet might spontaneously lift him from this cold fallow ground and deliver him up to some thing or place he could not imagine: death, judgment, the stars. He knew that Bob Clawson was gazing at him, had taken stern note of his immobility, but there was no way to respond, and in truth he no longer cared.

He watched Greg Morrow whirling his torch about his head. The firelight seemed to have transformed him: his grin was maniacal and his eyes feverish. Creath guessed that the boy was paying back some old debt, avenging somehow some irretrievable humiliation. The tramps had mostly fled; the guns had been fired but only into the air; the townsmen had begun to huddle together sheepishly now in the stinking darkness. But Greg was oblivious; possessed, he threw the stub of his torch onto the roof of one of these hovels, oily pasteboard sheets that roared at once into flame. Creath felt his heart skip a beat. The heat washed over him and he thought,
She could be in there.

Tim Norbloom stepped forward—playing the policeman now—and put a restraining hand on Greg’s shoulder. Just then a figure broke from the burning hovel, running for the river:
Anna,
Creath thought for one agonizing moment, but it was not; only a hobo, a dark and half-naked man, possibly a Negro. Creath had begun to relax when he saw Greg raise the rifle and sight along it and pull the trigger The explosion in this confined space beneath the trestle was deafening. Creath winced, and when he opened his eyes he saw the tramp, dead or mortally wounded, spreadeagled on the ground. The light of the burning hovel danced on his skin. He might have been bleeding; in this light everything was bloody.

It changes things, Creath thought. They had come here prepared to kill. But, in the event, they had backed away from it. And it was Greg’s fault mainly: he had misled them, there was no threat in this pathetic slum. Creath saw Tim Norbloom eyeing the boy with frank contempt. Some of the men cursed. The enormity of this was too great; they felt too much like murderers. You, too, Tim Norbloom, Creath thought: that guilt is palpable. In this strange hour his mind was quite lucid and Creath imagined he could read other men’s thoughts. There was a kind of skewed victory in it despite the dead man on the ground, because
she
had not been here … Anna was still alive, and a part of him exalted at the’ thought.

The men walked back to the cars. The night had soured on them. Creath, his ears still ringing with the proximity of the gunshots, watched Bob Clawson remonstrating with Greg Morrow, saw the boy’s impassioned response; Clawson went to Norbloom then and the two of them spoke heatedly. Creath heard the sound but could not make sense of it. The trestle was eerily lit by the embers of the Hoovertown and a freight train came highballing out of the east, oblivious.

Clawson and Norbloom were arguing. Norbloom turned away, his fists clenched, and climbed into the second of the two automobiles. The two parties broke up, and Creath watched Norbloom’s sedan bouncing over the rutted soil. Clawson sat at the wheel of his own car stonily; his cheeks were flushed pink. Creath climbed in last. “Thank God it’s at least over,” he said.

Clawson looked back at Greg. Greg stared at him.

“We’re not done yet,” Clawson said grimly. “Norbloom is an idiot. It’s important to finish this. We have begun it and we are obliged to finish it.”

“One more place,” Greg said evenly. “I’ll show you the way.”

Please God, no, Creath thought, and Bob Clawson revved the motor.

Travis saw the trestle fire from a distance and circled to the south, keeping to a line of windbreak trees. White smoke curled up in the moonlight and the cold wind carried the hoarse shouting of the men across the prairie.

Bone was frightened. Travis could tell. He crouched in a drainage ditch and the alien crouched beside him. The alien must be tremendously strong, Travis thought, to have come even this far. His jacket was a mass of blood and there was fresh blood welling up now, a brighter red in the moonlight. An ordinary man would have died. But Bone was not ordinary, not a man. Bone’s eyes were fixed on the trestle and the flicker of fires there.