A Hidden Place (11 page)

Bone recoiled from the force of Deacon’s voice.

“Shut up,” Deacon whispered fiercely, “and stay put, and that’s all I want to hear from you.”

Bone sat still.

Deacon moved out into the rain as Archie had, but in a different direction: toward the farmhouse.

Bone was still waiting—gazing at the rain, his knees pulled up, rocking in rhythm with the Calling inside him—when Archie came back, staring at Deacon’s empty bunk. “Son of a
bitch,”
he said, and turned almost tearfully to Bone. “Where is he? Oh, Christ! Did he go out? Did he go
there?”

Bone pointed toward the farmhouse—a dark shape in the rain through the door.

Archie staggered as if from a physical blow. He looked suddenly small, Bone thought. Small and old. His grief was like a dark aura. “Oh, Christ, Bone— come on, come with me, we gotta stop him, stop him before it’s too late!”

The demand was so heartfelt that Bone did not question it. He ran behind Archie into the rain. He was cold and wet instantly, water slicking his stubble hair, running past the collar of his pea coat into his tom checked shirt and down the knobs of his spine. They reached the farmhouse, and Bone pressed up against a kitchen window. Condensation frosted the glass; he could not see inside; but one wet pane gave him back his own reflection, sunken-eyed, pale, and huge. The kitchen was dark. Archie shouted: “Bone! Bone, the door’s locked! Knock it down, for God’s sake, he’s inside there,
Bone
—”

But then a light flashed twice in the darkness, the noise of it ringing painfully in Bone’s eardrums. It was Darcy’s big shotgun, Bone guessed. The one that had hung on the wall. And in the eerie silence that followed there was only the drumming of the rain, the rattle of a fallen copper kettle from the kitchen, and the wail of Archie’s weeping.

Digging the hole, Bone thought about death.

The darkness was absolute, though the rain had tapered to a drizzle. He worked methodically with the Darcys’ broad-bladed shovel, fighting the wet ground and the mulch that littered the wheatfield, turning up the rich dark soil. The night wind on his wet clothes made him tremble, and Bone gritted his teeth and drove the shovel savagely into the resistant earth. He smelled of his work.

Death was not such a bad thing, Bone thought. He had wondered, at times, if it was not in fact death that was Calling him, whether that elusive sweetness might not be the sweetness of release from this misshapen body. In some way it might be … but he had been offered death many times and had never accepted. The body resisted. There was an incompleteness about it.

Too, he had seen death often enough among the railway tramps and it was not attractive. There was a kind of shamefulness about a human body after death, Bone thought, the limpness, like a child’s costly doll too casually discarded. To Bone, the dead always seemed insulted: subject to indignities, and passively sullen.

Bone had made the hole shallow but wide. It looked less like a grave than like some kind of crater, broadly dish-shaped, now filling with black water. Bone guessed it was good enough and when he stood up and turned toward the farmhouse he saw the halo of Archie’s lantern bobbing toward him across the denuded wheatfield. Archie had stopped weeping, but his face was set in a rictus of grief, his eyes heavy-lidded and bruised-looking.

“It’ll do,” Archie said. He looked at Bone. “Come help me.”

They moved back through the darkness to the Darcy farmhouse. A single kitchen lantern was burning, and Bone navigated through a gloom of shadows. “Here,” Archie said tonelessly. He put his hands under Paul Darcy’s shoulders. Bone took the feet, spreading the legs until he was able to grasp the body under the knees. This was death, all right. Always the same, Bone thought, that rag-doll pout, as if the farmer were holding his breath to protest the injustice of it. Bone looked without curiosity at the broad red stain across Darcy’s midsection. They lifted up the body and carried it into the wheatfield, to the hole Bone had gouged there.

The body looked up at them from the hole. Archie, breathing in gasps, poured a spadeful of earth over Darcy’s face, as if he could not bear that silent recrimination. There was something prudish in the gesture, and Archie straightened hastily, shaking his head. “One more,” he said.

This one was more difficult even for Bone. The Darcy woman lay at the opposite end of the kitchen, spreadeagled next to the iron stove (the stove Deacon had called a “puffin’ belly”), and though her wound was similar to her husband’s the expression on her face was even more reproachful. Maybe the indignity was worse for a woman: this nasty business of lifting and burying. By the time they reached the grave Archie was weeping again, a dry weeping that seemed to come from deep inside the cavity of his chest. Mrs. Darcy lay in the shallow hole in her yellow print dress, and Bone saw that the rain had made her expression quizzical, as if she were surprised to be here, staring so fixedly up at the night. Bone suppressed an urge to apologize.

“Bury ‘em,” Archie said. He wiped his hands on his pants. “Bury ‘em fast as you can.”

Bone drove his shovel into the dirt pile:
chuff.
It was easier work than the digging had been.

Now the bunkroom was full of light. Deacon was there, filling up his kitbag and Archie’s with oddments from the Darcy household: forks, spoons, canned food. He did not look cheerful exactly, Bone thought, but there was a feverish redness to his cheeks, a wildness in his eyes.

“A night’s work,” he was saying. “All in a fucking night’s work. Right, Archie? All in a night’s work—right?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Archie pleaded, “shut up about it.”

Bone stood in the doorway, waiting.

“We move out tonight,” Deacon said. “Find us a train. Moving out, Bone! Find us a train out of here.”

Bone nodded. It was all he had really wanted. He gazed at Deacon hefting his kitbag and wondered for the first time whether these men were really his friends, whether the killing of the Darcys had been, as Deacon insisted, “necessary.” Deacon feeding him in California, Deacon offering him a smoke— that Deacon had smelled trustworthy and Bone had invested his trust accordingly.

This
Deacon—literally twitching with nervous energy, his eyes wild with lantern light—smelled very different. There was an air about him of cordite and revenge. He had killed. He had killed with calculation and without mercy. He could do so again.

Deacon motioned to Bone, and the two of them stepped outside for a moment. “This is just between us,” Deacon said, hooking his arm over Bone’s stooped shoulder. “Not that I don’t trust Archie. Don’t get me wrong. He’s my buddy. But he’s a little wild right now—you understand? I got something I want you to hold onto for me, and maybe don’t let Archie know you got it. Understand?”

Bone shrugged.

“Good,” Deacon said hastily, “great,” and he pushed something into the deep pocket of Bone’s blue Navy pea coat.

“Archie!” Deacon yelled. “Time to move out! We want to get down the road before sunup!”

Lingering behind them on the wet road away from the farmhouse, Bone waited until there was a little dawn light and then reached into his pocket and pulled out what Deacon had put there. It was a damp wad of bills, prosaic in his huge calloused hand. Bone slid the money back into his pocket.

The Calling was louder now, and he listened carefully for the sound of a train.

N
ancy located Travis on the first chill day of the autumn.

Seasons in Haute Montagne always followed the calendar. Springs were a haste of melting and blossoming; summers declared themselves boldly; autumns hurried toward winters; and winters came down like guillotine blades. She was accustomed to it. The prairie, incising the sky on all horizons, gave up these clinical seasons. But now for the first time Nancy was seriously worried. The adventure was not an adventure any longer. She had lost Travis, and Anna would not tell her why. The cool air and the shedding of the bur oaks seemed full of portents.

She watched the Burack house for a time; for a time she waited with Anna at the switchman’s hut. Travis did not come to either place.

If he had not left Haute Montagne altogether, she thought, there was only one place he might be.

She put on a heavy cloth coat and took a hunting knife from the attic chest where the relics of her father’s life were stored. She attached the knife to her belt and slipped away from the house. It was an overcast Saturday, and her mother was off at a Baptist Women’s meeting. Fallen leaves pursued her until she was beyond the town, and then there was only the dry prairie grass. She followed the southern bank of the Fresnel toward the railway trestle.

She was frightened, though she tried not to admit it to herself. All her life she had heard stories about railway tramps. That they left encoded marks on people’s doors. That they stole babies. That they would kill you for the money in your pocket. Sometimes, especially these latter years, she had seen such men come into town looking for work. They had seemed less threatening than sad, worn-out, eroded. They wore helplessness about them like a suit of clothes. The church would occasionally feed them, though Nancy’s mother disapproved: “It only encourages them. And the smell!”

Sad. But Nancy did not doubt that they could be dangerous, too. How could such despair not breed anger?

She moved through the empty meadows toward the scabrous iron trestle, burdocks clinging to her skirt. When she saw a faint line of smoke rising up, she reached inside her coat and closed her fingers on the reassuring whalebone handle of the knife.

It was not a big hobo jungle. Haute Montagne was too far from the big cities, too insignificant a stopover, and too chary a society for that. But there were men who lived here, at least briefly. She saw two huts made of tar paper, tin, and old two-by-fours in the darkness under the trestle. A tiny fire burned fitfully. A few men lay strewn on the ground like sacks of trash, asleep, their limbs at random angles. The sound of the river running came back in echoes from the arch of the railway bridge. She moved as far into that shadowy place as she dared.

“Travis?”

Her voice, too, echoed back.

She thought: He is not here.

But then a shadow stirred in the dark pebbly corner where the trestle met the bank, and Travis stepped forth.

She was relieved that he was not like these other men, some of whom had risen up to stare blankly at her; he was, still, better groomed, better dressed. He looked only down on his luck, not broken. It seemed inconceivable that he could have been living like this … for days, Nancy thought; almost a week since she had left him alone at the switchman’s shack.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

He had lost weight. He stood before her like a pillar of stone.

“I need help.” His eyes avoided her, and she added, “You left me.”

“Not you.”

“Anna? You mean Anna?”

“Let’s not talk here.”

She followed him up the grade of the riverbank, up to the place where the trestle leaped across the water. Travis sat on a concrete abutment, gazing wearily off at the horizon.

“Travis,” she said, making herself brave. “I know there’s something wrong. I asked Anna about it. She wouldn’t explain, but she says it was a mistake—you saw something you shouldn’t have seen. You weren’t ready.” She licked her lips. “It was a
mistake.
Travis, please come back.”

He was a long time answering. The wind was brisk, and Nancy hugged her coat around herself.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said slowly, “what Aunt Liza believes about Anna. She’s
not
human.” For the first time he looked at her. “You understand that?”

“No! How could she not be human? She—”

“You’ve been with her. You know.”

Well. Of course there was so much she didn’t understand. Obviously, what was happening was not normal. Normal people didn’t need to be sequestered in ruined buildings for months at a time. But—not human? How could that be?

Travis’s fists were clenched.

“I gave it up for her,” he said. “I had it in my hand. A life. An ordinary life. She seduced me out of it.”

“She’s lost, Travis. I talked to her about it. She’s just lost, is all. I don’t know where she’s lost
from,
or how she plans to get back … but lost is lost. This town won’t help. We have to.”

She reached for his hand. But he drew it away, and the gesture was so quick and so instinctive that it shocked her. “Don’t,” he said.

“My God. It’s me. It’s
me,
isn’t it? It’s something
I
did.”

Travis shook his head no. His eyes, however, were blank.

“I trusted you!”

He turned back toward the bridge.

“Travis! Travis Fisher, you son of a bitch!
I trusted you!”

The wind tore at her.

He watched from the bridge as Nancy stalked away through the prairie grass. Part of him wanted to follow her. To apologize.

But he could not forget what had happened in the switchman’s shack. The thing Anna had become. The experience defied comprehension. He knew only that it was real, and that the Anna-thing was not human, and that she had seduced him into betraying any hope he might have had of a future here in Haute Montagne.

To the west, workmen were erecting a tent for the traveling revival. A clanking and the cry of muted voices came across the prairie. The tent revivals always came to Haute Montagne in the autumn, Nancy had said. It was a signal of impending winter, as unmistakable as the racing of the dark clouds across the sky.

There was nothing left for him but to move on … to move on the way these other men did, riding the boxcars and the flatcars. Racing the snow, looking for work. Travis had resigned himself to it.

But not yet, he thought, though he could not explain even to himself why he felt that way: not
just
yet.

He would stay here a while.

Off west, the fluttering banners of the tent revival rose on their guy wires to the gray sky.

He thought:
There is unfinished business here.