Beautiful Dreamer (12 page)

It turned out a mistake. The trees got pretty close together and I got turned around a deal, which is how come it was several hours before I found myself at the river below the railroad. There was no way to tell where they was but if they had either one of them got out of that river, this was where I would figure they would make for.

I heard the sound of a train whistle in the distance and got a strange feeling. It seemed the smart place for me wasn't down there toward the river but up above, where I could see the bridge reach out above it like a line someone had drawn in the sky. So I started in to climbing, putting the rifle on safety, there being those who had shot theirselves for not doing such. I got up to the top just as she pulled around the corner.

I seen the men working on the engine and then the wagons were going past, not so fast that I couldn't have stepped aboard if I had a mind. I could see nothing of them, but I squatted down to look and, as I did, it seemed to me I could see someone on the other side, running along, only the passing wheels made it difficult to see. And suddenly I knew how it was them but I couldn't get at them because they was on the other side. I slipped the safety and thought to maybe shoot through but saw how that would just hit the wheels. So I ran along to find a place where the wagons were joined and I could get a clear shot. But I had spotted them too late.

Then it was past and I jumped across the rails and pulled the rifle up, squinting along the bridge where it was going. And I think I saw something further along but then it was gone as soon as I saw it and all I could do was watch the caboose, with its red lights, even though it was day, swinging away around the corner and dropping down the hill.

*   *   *

He was asleep. The rhythmic de-dum de-dum, de-dum de-dum had rocked him into a half-dream. With part of his mind, he knew where he was, the countryside drawn away behind him like dust settling behind a car, but part was putting fragments of time into a new order. His wife was there, young and laughing, running round the house like she did and him after her, hot and eager, but so was a man with a gun, swinging round slowly to look him in the eye, the laughter there still. Then he was in a river, with no time in between, as if the river had been there all along. His mind was shaking itself gently, getting it all into some kind of pattern. He opened his eyes but didn't exactly wake up. The air was warm and washed over him. There was a pain waiting for him, and he slipped away from it again, so tired that the tiredness was almost a barrier. He was drifting somewhere, back in the river and the trees above. The sun was on his face and he was in the middle of a sparkle of light. And everything was fine, everything was just as it should be. And he could hear the wash of water and laughter that had the sound of water rushing over rocks.

Then he was jolted back into wakefulness. The engineer had pulled on the brakes so that a chain of clangs passed the length of the train, like a message, if he could only have understood what it said. Then it was picking up speed again, but the noise had woken him and he opened his eyes, feeling the ache in his shoulder as he did so.

For the first time, as it seemed to him, he had time to think. He was pulling away from danger. Each double clack of the wheels put him further from those who wished him dead. But he knew, too, that he had no idea where he might be going. Get away from the boy. A voice inside told him he must get away from the boy. What good to stick together now, when they were away from those who knew what had happened? The thing was to strike out in different ways. He guessed the boy must have some place to go. Then again, just because he didn't know where he was didn't mean that others wouldn't. He turned to the boy but he was asleep, mouth open, lying like a puppy by the fire. And he was a boy. He could no more fix an age to him now than he had before. But there was more to him than you would think. And he had saved him twice, for he remembered, now, the body that thudded into him, took him forwards and into the river when he had taken one bullet and might have been expected to take another. The train clanged again as the brakes bit hard and this time it was the boy who woke, staring straight up at the roof, looking puzzled, before recalling where he was, it seemed, since he turned towards him now and looked him in the eye.

‘How you doing?'

There was no reply, as how could there be when the boy was dumb? Been with him so long, he had put it out of mind, no longer asking himself how it could be so, accepting now that he would stay as closed in as he was.

‘You take a look at my shoulder?'

The boy sat up. He looked worn out. Doubtless they both looked worn out, considering what had happened to them and where they had been. He got up just the same, making his way toward him while balancing against the movement, black, his clothes torn through and a glisten of red blood against the black where a rock or a branch had opened him up. He sat down beside him, close to where the open door gave them a view of what was passing. And what was passing was mostly trees and fields as it had been since they had climbed on board, however long ago that had been. The boy reached out but he could see there was nothing he could do unless he took his shirt off. So he leaned away and eased himself out of it, though that wasn't as easy as it seemed and he had to let the boy help, pulling one arm out and then swinging it around back before peeling it down the other. He was gentle enough, bracing himself as the train rocked back and forth and lurched, occasionally, as if the wagon were catching up with the one in front and then letting it go again.

He glanced down at his shoulder. It was red around the wound but it was clean enough, dark at the centre where the bullet went in, and puckered some, but clean. He looked down at his chest and though it was the mess he expected it to be, he could see that even so soon the skin was beginning to form, though it was tight and painful where the letter had been burnt. He held his hand out in front, the hand that he'd used to push the car brace away, and he noticed that he could open it further now. The burn was still there, clear enough, white crusted with black, but the time in the water seemed to have softened it some. In fact, it seemed to him that he had emerged from that baptism a great deal better than he had gone in.

There was nothing for the boy to do. They didn't have anything to put on, except he remembered the jar of cream he had slipped in his inside pocket. He put his hand in. He thought it might have broken. It would hardly be surprising if it had, but it was still there. Some of the cream was there, too. Mostly it was a smear around the sides but there was some at the bottom so that he could hook his finger in and bring a clot out. He spread it on his chest, leaving the hand to heal itself. There were bits of fluff in among it but there was just enough to outline the letter, soften the hard-edged scab, lift some of the pain away.

The boy watched him do it, watched as the letter was spelled out in white. Then he shrugged and went back to where he had been sitting before, staring between his legs when he slumped down, staring as if he were trying to figure out where they were going to and why he was here, as why would he not whose life had been turned around as much as it had been, no more having a map to follow than did the man he found himself with.

Outside, the land rose as a series of hills swung into view, hills with still others behind them, green edging to purple. The engine began to labour, the wagons to clang against one another so that the man had to reach out a hand and steady himself. It was strange, this feeling of being drawn along in a direction not of his choice, this sense that he had surrendered his fate not to another man but to this machine, straining against the land, cutting through it as if it could go wherever it wished. Somehow his mind was still back there in the only place he knew. He was unused to floating free, being carried into the future. Where he came from, he knew the past. Every stain on his table, every crevice in the wall, every broken fence post, every rock and gulley had a past, prompted a memory, told him that he belonged. Now he was where hills lifted into the sky and there were places and people as strange to him as he would be to them. And yet the train was his protection. As long as he stayed on the train, that future would never become anything as definite as a place. He had nothing to explain and nobody to explain it to.

The hills were giving way to what could only be called mountains, at least to one who had never seen such, never seen hills that went beyond a certain height, the kind of height that hills were meant to be. They edged up into a sky that went from blue to turquoise to white. There were clouds gathered around the top of them as though it were the mountains themselves that made them. The rest of the sky was that relentless blue that could bear down on you and, though the train made a wind of its own, the air itself was still thick and sweaty, though thinning now, cooling a little. He sat with his back to the edge of the door, knees drawn up, watching as trees came toward him so that he could reach out a hand and take a leaf. He closed his eyes, not content, running as he was, even here on the train, running from, running toward, but at rest for a second as if at last it had relented, the whole thing, one thing after another, until his head had spun and his body had done what it had to do, not knowing why, except what else was there to do? Fifty-one years old, he thought, and shook his head without knowing he did so. Fifty-one years old.

The wagon was empty, except for what looked like a pile of rags in the far corner. None the less, there was a smell that he couldn't quite track down. It wasn't there when he first climbed in, or if it was, it was lost in the rush and the fear. It was a mixture of sweet and sour and it hung on the air like the smell of verbena, though not verbena, something else, something he knew nothing of but that recalled a smell he knew. And even the breeze which spun wisps of straw on the floor of the wagon, and lifted his hair which before had been slicked to his forehead, even that didn't clear it away. And then he began to wonder what it might be, remembering, suddenly, a rat trapped under the stoop that had rotted one summer and filled the air with flies. And as he remembered, so he looked around and where could it come from but from the pile of rags? After a while, he made his way to it and stirred it, standing up, finding his balance, and walking splay-legged so as not to fall. He stirred it with his feet. Then he stopped and crouched down. He lifted a piece of sacking and then stopped, sucking in his cheeks, shaking his head, as the wagon rocked from side to side and the bright countryside slid away behind. There was a touch of doom about him, right enough. No matter how hard he tried to get away, it was chasing right on after him. The boy must have detected something as well, because he came across and crouched down beside him and they both stared into the dead eye of the old man, the other missing, plucked out as if a raven had come in and flown off with it to its nest, dead men's eyes gathered like eggs to be hatched into monsters.

The bitter smell was from where he had pissed and voided himself. The sweet was from where he seemed to be rotting away. The man reached a hand out but then withdrew it.

‘Can't have been dead long, just the same. How far the train come? Can't have been dead that long.'

Even so, there was a smell and strong enough that he wondered why they hadn't noticed it before or, if noticing it, and he realized that he had, why they hadn't tried to find out what it might be.

‘This has maybe come up from the Gulf. Then again, perhaps it just sat in a siding. Wouldn't take much to turn him, not in this heat.'

What he really wanted to know was why he was dead. Had he just given out, riding the rails to God knows where, or was there something else besides? He lifted a torn jacket that might have once been worth something, though a long time ago. And as he lifted it, he saw there was blood down his front, black and red and drying to powder. It didn't make sense, his having blood there, except that he was soaked with it, had bathed in it, as it seemed. And to the right, where his heart was, the man facing him but seeing nothing, with one eye gone and the other dead, was a tear in his shirt and another beside it, and another, too.

‘God,' he said. ‘He been killed. And don't we look like just the folks as would have done it, with nothing to show for ourselves and me all shot to hell? We gotta get out of here, kid. We gotta get off this train before they find us with him. They'd just as soon hang us for this as for anything else they have in mind. We gotta jump.'

As if to frustrate the thought, at that very moment the train began to pick up speed, deciding, finally, it seemed, where it was off to and wanting to get there fast. The land must have levelled out, though he had thought it was no more than a series of hills, mountains, rising up by steps as far as he could see. He peered at the man, but if he had a secret, he didn't offer it up. He could see by the cut in his red shirt that he had been knifed, and since people don't knife themselves, and even if they did, would hardly be likely to take the knife out and throw it away, someone had obliged him before going off. ‘First time it slows, we off. It don't matter how far we come or where we are.'

But how far had they come? He was far from sure how long they had been on board and knew nothing of where the train went, except to the north. But even he knew that the north was an idea and not a place. Then the engineer put his brakes back on and they both fell down, the pain shooting through him, separating himself from himself as a knife would do, as a knife had done for the one who slid to the side now and down on to his face, staring out of the door through his one good, dead eye.

He was on his feet again immediately and edging to the door.

‘Come on, boy. This is as far as we go.'

He put his head out of the doorway and then pulled it back in again. He had seen a depot coming towards them, a water tank looming up like some animal, an elephant, he guessed, with its trunk hanging down.