Beautiful Dreamer (17 page)

He reached into his pocket for the cream, but it had gone, dropped somewhere along the way. His fingers smelt, though, of the perfume. The cream had gone but the perfume remained and still carried him back where nothing but irony awaited him. He slipped the shirt back on again and lay back. After a moment, he raised himself and looked across at the boy, hugging his knees and staring out where the red sky was already shrinking into blackness.

‘You OK?'

The boy nodded.

‘We sure in a mess, boy. But at least we got away.' Then, a pause. ‘I want to thank you, boy,' — another pause — ‘James, or is it Jimmy?' — the boy said nothing — ‘for what you done back there, for what you did in saving me back at my house and for doing it again at the river.' He paused, almost out of breath, certainly his heart beating hard, though he couldn't have said why that should be. ‘Anyway,' he said, and then said no more, falling silent as a first point of light pierced the deepening black of the night. After a moment, the boy nodded, but the man saw nothing of this, lying back on the grass which felt more like moss and looking up as one silver eye after another opened on to the dark world down below. Then, an afterthought, ‘And I'm sorry about your daddy. He shouldn't have gone in that door, but they shouldn't have done what they did.' Then, as though feeling the inadequacy of that, and protected by the darkness, ‘He were a better man than they and if I didn't know that from what he did, I would have known it from what you did.' And that was that, a debt discharged in the only way it was likely he would be able to do it because, even feeling free as he did up there, already high above what had happened and those who were chasing after him, he still knew that they would catch him in the end. He had been born doomed. And if he had ever doubted that, then every now and then he was sent a reminder, as with his wife, as with his son who had looked on the world and seen it for what it was and decided against it, as he should have done if he had had the choice.

There was still warmth in the soil but the air was cooling already. In the morning, they would climb higher and then maybe down the other side. Maybe, he thought, they could cross the state line, a moment later realizing that it wouldn't make much difference, this whole land being the same. It was born into them, he thought, so why not into him? He was a freak of nature, leastways that was what they would think down here. And what do you do with freaks of nature except cut their throats? He had seen a two-headed calf once. The farmer thought to get him some money for it until a preacher had come and stood there until he cut its throat, saying it was a spawn of the devil and he should breed for purity, realizing, as he thought this on a Tennessee hillside with a black boy by his side, that this was a joke, that those who were after him had been breeding with themselves for centuries, as pure as you like, and didn't they have two heads in their way? Something was wrong with them, right enough. And what they did to me and to the boy's daddy, that was a sign of that. The devil's loose, right enough, he thought, and he's right here. Not the kind of thoughts to take into your dreams, but they were the thoughts he carried into his.

*   *   *

He had visited the first two places before the night came on, talked to those who manned the depots, if you could call them that. One served a lumber yard more than passengers, there not being many of those, especially with money hard to come by. The other was for coal and there hadn't been much of that and was still less now. They had seen nothing, of course, swearing they would have seen, were on the lookout indeed, since the company gave them instructions about those riding the rails. Not content with that, he had walked up and down the track, going far beyond the depot to the point where the train would have slowed, though he still didn't think they would have jumped, not the man anyway, though there was no knowing how bad he had been hit, not even if he had been, he supposed, since, as far as witnesses were concerned, the brothers came right at the end of the line. There was nothing there, though not knowing what it was he was looking for, that didn't tell him a lot.

The main thing against these places was that they were too close to where they would have got on, unless they had had the cunning to jump right off and double back. It wouldn't have taken much to fool the boys. Then he remembered the dogs. The dogs were brighter than any of those that owned them and he wouldn't have run the risk himself, if he had been running, and he tried now, as always, to put himself in the position of those he chased. So, being as scared as they doubtless were, they would have stayed on until they were sure they were free and clear. And yet surely they had had the sense to know that word would get through and so were off by the time the train was stopped. Now he was on his way to the third place, eighty miles some away, when the night came on and, though he went on driving and came to it, finally, no more than a water tower and a loading dock, there was no way he could do anything else. And there was no one there either, the last train having gone through. They had called through the timetable, vaguer about freights, which didn't seem to operate to a timetable, ‘not as such', they had told him, and, according to that, it would be seven in the morning before one came through and not long before that when the agent came on duty.

He got out of the car, meaning to walk along the track, but the last flare of red had thinned out and gone. He thought of driving on, turning some cop out to find him a bed, but he had had enough of people for a while and he had no more liking for the cops than he had for anyone else in the state where he was born but was damned if he would end up dying. So he went round to the trunk and got out the blanket he used to wrap his tools. Since the car was new, there was no oil on it. He had always kept his tools in a blanket. The old one he had tossed out. It kept the tools from clanging around, and he had simply transferred them as they were, dropping them in gas for an hour and cleaning them up so they would be suitable for a new car.

He went round to the front. The sky was already frosting with stars but he wouldn't need the blanket for yet awhile and even then not for warmth but only for comfort.

In the north, the nights had been silent. Here, the noise was deafening, with every kind of animal you could name calling out for another of its kind, mating in the dark. Well, none of that for him. He could call as loud as he liked and nothing would come running for him. As if to prove it, he stood by the car and cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘Carrie!' he called, and then again, ‘Carrie!' But he could have called all night and she would never come back from where she had gone, wherever that was.

Then he sat in the car and got to thinking again. Why the dead man on the train? Had he, maybe, threatened to turn them in? Had he attacked them? No weapon, though, had been found, neither the weapon he was killed with nor any he might have defended himself with or threatened with. Well, maybe they tossed it out where he would never find it, or took it with them, or maybe he had never had such. The man was a problem. The rest he thought he could see. The ruction in the store, the spasm of violence against a man who must have known his fate the moment he saw them coming toward him, the white man caught in the middle, the black boy not knowing where to run to and running altogether the wrong way, as if there were a right way, so that he ended up in the middle of something he didn't start but had no choice but to follow to its end. The man came out of another story.

He looked out of the window, where the sky was now white with stars, like the frost that used to rime his windows up north but which they never got to see down here, or hardly ever at least. And it came to him then. The man did come from another story. No telling how long he had been dead, not until they'd cut him open and found out for sure, or as sure as doctors are prepared to say. So, they jump on board, getting away from death, and there is death staring right back at them. But if that was the case, they would have jumped right back off again. He would have done. And what was the chance, after all, that there would be some killer on board? Well, there was a chance. The country was full not just of the poor but the crazy, too. And how did the poor and the crazy travel if not by freight? No one would give a ride to such as them.

He got out of the car and stamped his feet. If he was going to spend the night cramped up in a Ford, albeit a spanking new Ford, he would ease himself a bit. Indeed, he realized suddenly that he hadn't eased himself for some time and went off to the side of the road and pissed, adding his own noise and smell to all those already out there.

And having buttoned himself, he decided to walk down the line, though the only light was the stars and a sliver moon that flattened everything out. Even so, he decided to walk along. He walked on the ties, lengthening his steps, remembering doing this as a child, when each step was like that of a giant, so that you had to jump from one to the next. All he had to do now was loosen his walk a little. The lines shone on the top where the iron wheels had polished them over the years. He bent down and ran his hand along one of them, feeling it smooth, yet with small notches you couldn't see with the eye where a piece of grit, maybe, had scoured a small pit. He walked away from the water tower, figuring that of course the engine would stop there, putting the wagons further back. He figured, too, that whoever jumped aboard wouldn't have gone so close to the engine, with the risk of being seen. So, further back, a good deal further back.

He walked along the line now, balancing like a kid again, one foot flying out at times to stop him falling off, until he forgot what he was doing there and remembered his youth, not in detail, just the feel of it, his leg flying out and him telling himself he was a hundred feet up in the air like an aerialist, with a slip meaning sudden death.

Then he glimpsed something silver-white by the side of the track and stepped off to meet his death, plunging that hundred feet, except that all thoughts of that had flown away. He bent down and picked it up and before he realized what it was, he knew it was what he was looking for. It didn't matter what it was, though it seemed to be some kind of jar. What told him that he had found what he was after was the smell, the perfume. In an instant he was back in that house in the clearing, if you could call it a house. He was on his hands and knees in the dust and sliding out a shoebox that someone else had slid out only a short time before since you could see the marks and there was no dust where it had been pulled out. And he was smelling it and wondering what flower it was it reminded him of, except that that didn't matter any more because this was the place they had got off and he didn't have to drive on to the next and all he had to do was wait for first light, not even for the agent to come on duty but just early enough for him to see if he could pick up their tracks. This was where he could do with a dog, he realized. He envied those he lived among nothing but their dogs. But there was no provision for one in the budget he had been given, and besides, wasn't he supposed to work with his brains and file indexes and the telephone and not the kind of thing that anyone with no brains could achieve just so long as he had a decent dog?

He looked around, but the light was no good for tracking so he walked back to the car, not balancing on the line this time, nor treading from one tie to the next, but thinking, already, where he would have gone if it had been him that had jumped down from a train leaving a dead body and with no one but a nigger boy for company, assuming the dead body to have any connection with the two, as logic told him it ought to have, but knowing that if logic ruled the world, why did such things as music exist, or cigarettes, come to that? And the thought was enough to send him reaching for one, his match flaring in the dark, lighting his face, then dying as he drew the smoke down into his lungs. One thing was for sure. Away from here is where they would have gone.

He must have known he had been seen. Or did he? He had never asked that and wouldn't have been told if he had. Maybe this man did not know he had been seen, thought he had got away with it all and no one would guess. Even so, he could see that it made no difference. He still had the same problems. Indeed, if it were him, he would have been in despair as problem piled on problem, as though he were Job being tested by God who took pleasure in making each day worse than the last, each hour worse than the last. He looked up at the hillside, rising away from him, a black wall. One thing, he told himself, he wouldn't go that way, not burnt and shot as he was. Trouble enough without giving himself something else to tackle.

He was back at his car now, feeling light-headed at what he had found, at figuring out so much even if he couldn't figure out what was in front of him right now. Well, he had learned something through the years. Take a problem to bed and it was often solved by morning light. There was no bed here, but a brand new Ford would doubtless work the magic. He climbed in the passenger seat, away from the steering wheel, and bunched up the blanket to form a pillow. Before he let himself drift off to sleep, he lifted the jar to his nose and breathed in the smell of flowers. They stirred some memory of his own, but before it could carry him back, he was asleep, the jar on his lap, the animals calling to their own.

*   *   *

He wouldn't let us take the dogs, not even the one, and wouldn't tell us why. It were as if he had decided we should take them on without no help at all. We had just gassed the truck up when he told us. I tried to argue but you didn't argue with him. Didn't make no difference if you was family. Being family didn't save you from a kick in the jaw. And if that weren't enough, if not having the dogs weren't making things hard enough, Pa wouldn't let us go right away. Called us into the house where Ma was still putting up a noise, as if that could bring them back.

We'd just as soon be on our way, but he called us on over and said as how we wouldn't be going anywhere until we'd paid our respects. And what respects were these? They were dead. Thing was to get those that done it. That was respecting them. But Pa's word went, even if some on us had begun to feel that the time was maybe coming when it wouldn't.