Beautiful Dreamer (5 page)

His mouth was open so you could see he had no teeth worth mentioning, more gaps than teeth and those he had were pointing every which way but where they should. His eyes were half-open and there was a smile on his face, the smile he had been born with. The man looked at him for a moment, as if making up his mind about something, though the fact that he had gone inside for the shell showed that he had already made his mind up about what mattered most. Then, as if recalling where he was and what he was about, he stepped back half a dozen paces, brought the gun up and squeezed the trigger. The body leaped up and then settled back. He broke the gun open straight away, letting blue smoke drift up in the sunlight. The birds had stopped singing for a second, but now they started up again, not caring who lived and died or what the purpose of it all might be.

He turned around and walked back to the cabin, gathering the boy up under his arm as he walked past, unaware, it seemed, that this was the first time he had ever touched a Negro, let alone held him to him as if he were kin.

He sat the boy down and went out again, returning a few minutes later with a jug under his arm. He took a broken cup from the sink and poured the shine into the cup, placing it in front of the boy, who was shaking as if some engine were idling inside of him.

‘Drink it.'

The boy shook his head, tears welling up into his eyes.

‘Drink it, boy. There weren't nothing else to be done. First it would have been me and then it would have been you. You did what you knew you had to do and that's all there is to it. Now we got to bury them boys and get out of here or we'll both be as dead as them two wanted to make us. There's more of them Steadmans and won't nothing stop them coming for us, if they know they was headed this way. Our hope is they was on their own, thought this whole thing up theirselves. Either way, we got to go and I need you all together.'

He lifted the jug and tilted it into his own mouth, swallowing hungrily. He realized that the pain had left him, that he couldn't feel the burnt chest or the burnt hand. He nodded to the cup and the boy slowly lifted it to his lips, his hand shaking.

‘Drink it up, boy. You saved us both but that won't be worth spit if we ain't away from here within the hour. Goddamn it, why can't you speak?'

The boy lowered the cup, a trail of liquid down his chin glinting in the sunlight from the open door. Then he raised the cup again and drank, his Adam's apple bouncing up and down as he drew the heat into his cold body.

*   *   *

He knew they would have to leave. He thought to bury the bodies, even carried a long-handled spade outside with the idea of dragging them into the wood and digging a grave, two graves in the black soil. But when he stood over them, the handle of the spade already paining him when he tried to grasp it, he knew that he could never manage it. Even dragging them the thirty or forty feet was probably beyond him and certainly, if he did manage that, he could do no more than scrape the surface away. The dogs would find them straight away. The boy was useless, still sitting inside and sobbing. And how old was he anyhow? Twelve maybe? Fourteen? He couldn't tell with them, had never been able to tell, nor cared over much, not needing to.

He thought of the well. If he could get the boy to lift the legs, they could maybe drop them down where they wouldn't be found, not for a while at least. But he doubted he could manage it, and besides, the idea of them rotting down there, poisoning his water, even if it wouldn't be his water any more once he had gone, wherever he was going, for the truth was he was vague about that, was more than he could face. And what did that leave but letting them lie where they fell, shot through with hatred, brought down by their own evil. Nor was he sure what the law could do, whether, if he put enough distance between this place and where he would end up, that would mean he was free and clear, he who had never been free and clear of anything.

Then there was the boy. It came to him then, as it had not before, that the two of them were tied together. He had seen the boy shoot the men and the boy had seen him finish that one off. Besides, the boy had saved his life, even if it was him, or his daddy, who had put that life at risk. Either way, there was no place one could go without the other. So he was tied to a dumb black boy who would have looked through him as he would have done in turn if they had met on the street.

He went back inside, knowing now that they must be on their way, that even now there might be others making tracks to the cabin. It stood to reason they would have told their brothers, unless they had been off on their own and just took it into their heads to have some more fun. Even so, it was a matter of time, especially since he couldn't bury them as he should, since he had left them where they fell. Then there was the law to chase them down.

He looked around the place that had been home and wasn't any more. He felt nothing about it. He tried to figure what he should keep, what he should carry away with him to wherever he was going, but could think of nothing. In the end, he opened the cardboard box and took out the jewel, glinting deep in the sunlight, not knowing why he did it, and tore a piece of paper from the wall. He wrapped it and thrust it down into his pocket. He took his clasp knife and he took the seven dollars he had hidden beneath the floorboard under his bed, where the cockroaches scuttled each night and the dust was thick. He went into the kitchen and opened the box of shells, filling the pockets of the torn green jacket he slipped on, the jacket that would make him sweat in the day but that would be needed at night.

He filled two dishes with the cold rabbit soup and put them on the table.

‘Eat.'

The boy shook his head.

‘Eat. We got a long way to go and no time to stop to find something.'

Again the boy shook his head, so he went ahead and ate his own bowlful, listening as he did so for dogs or shouts or anything that would tell him he was too late and should have gone already.

‘Look, boy, you and me are together. I dare say you don't like it, and neither do I, but if you stay, you are as dead as those out there, the one you shot and the one I shot. They won't ask you nothing if they catch you and they won't shoot you clean as you done. You seen what they can do and there's more they can do when pressed to it. So stop your crying and eat. We going in couple minutes.'

The boy looked at him as if trying to understand what he had been told. Then he reached out a hand, still shaking, his face still streaked with snot, and slid the bowl towards himself. He took up the spoon and ate the stew as if he weren't human, as if he were a robot doing what the machinery said he should do.

Five minutes later, they left the clearing. The sun was clear of the trees and the shadows had shrunk back so that the two dead men lay in a circle of light. The man led, heading for the stream, knowing that they had to kill the scent, but knowing, too, that that would be what those who followed would expect. The boy had nothing on his feet, while he had his old boots, holes everywhere and with newspaper lining the sole. The water was ice cold from where it came down from the hills. It ran fast but was only deep enough to cover their ankles. At the edge, you could see where they had stepped, but the water would soon smooth that out. The man glanced back to see that the boy was following, knowing that he would be since he had no choice and that the stream gave them a direction when that was what both of them needed above all.

The woods were alive with noise and the sunlight flashed on the water and sparkled where it filtered down through the leaves. His body was feeling better. He had hardly felt any pain since he had stepped from the outhouse and seen the men standing there with their guns, deciding whether to kill him or not, or simply when.

Further down, as he knew, the stream would join up with the river and then whoever followed would have to decide which way they had gone. It would be harder to walk in the river. It was deeper and faster, but they would have to stay with it as long as they could because the men would simply run their dogs up and down the banks until they found where they had come out.

The boy had stopped crying and was looking at the water, trying to pick his way among the rocks. He moved easily enough. The man didn't feel anything about the killing, though he had never killed a man before and wouldn't have now if he had had a choice. But he wondered how it was for the boy to do what he had done. He did it for himself, no doubt, figuring that if they killed him, he would be next. Even so, he had picked up the gun and stepped right into the light and where would a nigger have had a chance to fire a gun before? And instead of firing both barrels, as he had done when his own daddy had let him heft it for the first time, the boy had squeezed only one, swivelling round to take the other man. And that man was looking him straight in the eye and pointing a gun of his own. No, this might be a boy, but he was a boy with something inside. And was he born with the dumbness, or had the dumbness come with what he had seen? There were stranger things.

They walked for an hour and then the woods opened up as the stream rushed towards the river.

‘You swim?' asked the man.

The boy nodded.

‘Best way is to pick us a piece of wood and go with the current. Keep ahead of them.'

They would expect him to go downstream, figuring, as had he, that it would take less energy and be faster, too. But the trade was the speed.

There were logs aplenty fringing the river, nudged there by the eddies that swirled along its edge. He made sure that they both had one. For a few hundred yards they waded, but outcrops of rocks soon forced them into the twisted water, flecked white, so that they both let the river carry them, lifted their feet and drifted as fast as they could have walked in the open. The cold was pleasant enough, numbing his pain, washing away the memory of the guns in the clearing and two men lying dead for eternity.

*   *   *

He lost a sense of time, watching out for rocks, being spun around, dragged forwards, sucked down. He lost a sense of distance, there being no way to judge such with the trees swimming by in a blue sky broken into fragments, with the sun sparkling through branches and shining bright off still water where a sandbar left a stretch satin-soft beside the ruffled fold of the moving river. He had lost all sense of feeling down below, lost all sense of feeling almost everywhere except in his face, with the spray smarting and blinding him. He was pulled onwards, where the river decided the direction and the speed, not knowing where it was going except away, swallowing water, coming up for air, looking where the boy might be but seeing nothing, spun again.

He stopped not because he chose to do so but because a patch of land reached out into the river and a branch snagged him and swung him in to where his feet touched the black mud, not that he felt anything but the fact that it was there. And then the boy smashing into him so that he almost lost his grasp. They hung there for a while, gathering themselves, before he edged along toward a place where he could ease himself out of the water. He didn't look at the boy, assuming that he could look after himself, not caring either, just reaching for the land, cold through and done for.

The first few steps, his feet sank into the soil, but then they got a purchase and he forced himself forwards but soon fell to his knees and then over on to his back. And though the sun shone down clear and hot, he still felt cold through, as though the ice at his centre would never melt. He was aware that the boy was beside him but it was the cold that dominated. He began to shake, though he was out of the icy water now and in the sun. It was as if the sun had triggered it, as if only now did his body realize how cold it must have been.

So they lay, side by side, forgetful, or so it seemed, of the reason for them running, the reason for lending their lives to the river in the trust of getting them back. They lay, tired through and cold, while the sun slowly worked to bring them back to life.

At last he sat up and saw that the gun was still in his hand. When he first jumped in, he had held it above his head, but after a bit had forgotten it was there at all. He looked at it in surprise, trying to figure out how he had held on to it all that time when he couldn't feel anything and had had to put his hand out to steady himself time and again. It was there, though, and he had to use his other hand to pry it free. Then he realized something else, something he should have thought about if there had been time to think of anything at all. The shells were in his pockets and his pockets had been under water. He reached in and took them out one by one, his fingers still cold, still difficult to use. There were eight shells and though the cases looked waxed, so that beads of water stood out on them like trembling diamonds, he was not so sure they were any good.

He lined them up side by side on the dark soil, orange-red, like so many bright eggs put there by some creature no more than a moment before. His own clothes were steaming and he figured the same sun that was warming him at last might dry out the shells for when he would have to use them. For with the sun and the warming of his body had come remembrance of why he was running, why they were running. He began to think of the boy who was sitting a few paces off, breaking a twig between his black fingers and staring into the passing river, thinking thoughts of his own, thoughts perhaps of the father he had lost and where they were going.

‘You OK?'

The boy looked around, as if unsure where the sound might have come from. Then he looked across and nodded.

‘We wait here a bit and dry out, then we move on. There's a railroad somewhere up ahead a piece. I thought maybe we could get ourselves a ride, get out of the county.'

The boy showed no signs of being interested, no sign that he would rather be on his way.

They had been going some hours, he knew that. He had lost a sense of the time of day, except you could always tell within an hour or so by watching the shadows. The sun might seem pinned in place and immovable, but if you watched the shadows you knew it was edging across the sky. He flexed his fingers, the feeling now fully returned. But there was no pain in his chest, though he seemed to remember you were supposed to keep burns dry. No chance of that, and the plunge into the river had done him no harm that he could tell. There was a bruised feeling from his ribs but the burn itself seemed to have settled down.