THREE OF SCIENCE FICTION’S FINEST WRITERS HAIL A REMARKABLE NEW TALENT:
“Robert Charles Wilson’s fine first novel is a sweet and subtle probing into the question of what it means to be human. There’s a resonance in this book, an illumination of depths.”
—JACK DANN
“I greatly enjoyed A HIDDEN PLACE. I found it touching and powerful, and I very much look forward to Mr. Wilson’s next book. He’s a talent to watch.”
—LISA GOLDSTEIN
“Lovingly written…Wilson handles character and language as well as Sturgeon at his very best—think More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels—and paces his alternately gritty and gentle Depression-era narrative with the skill of a born storyteller. A HIDDEN PLACE delivers in quiet but bona fide ways that make me believe it will still be finding readers years from now.”
—MICHAEL BISHOP
A HIDDEN PLACE
A Bantam Spectra Book / November 1986
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1986 by Robert Charles Wilson.
Cover artwork copyright © / 986 by lim Bums.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: Bantam Books. Inc.
ISBN 0-553-26103-7
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
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For Janet
Prelude:
Bone in California
Bone was the only one awake on the flatcar as the train labored out of the mountains and into the fog-choked valley, and it was Bone who saw the railroad cop.
He was only dimly aware of the danger. It was deep night, morning not far off, late in spring. The air was bitingly cold and damp. Bone was lucky; he had stolen a thick Navy pea coat the week before. He wore it now, pulled tight in one hand because he could not button it across his wide and bony rib cage. He had a hat, too; a thick woolen watch cap pulled down over his stubble hair so that it warmed is ears. Bone was lucky. But in that shivering predawn hour he was aware only of his acute discomfort, the convulsions that seemed to travel seismically from his feet up to the crown of his head. It was more than the cold; cold had never bothered him much; it was something else—a sickness.
He did not think about it in any detail. Thinking was difficult and unrewarding for him. Bone was notorious in the hobo jungles because he spoke so seldom, and because of his oversized joints and fleshless body. Even his name was not his own. It had been given to him on a similar train a long but (in Bone’s mind) indefinite time ago. Most of the hoboes who rode the boxcars were emaciated. But Bone had gone beyond that: his huge ribs seemed to be fighting their way out of his parchment flesh; his elbows were sharp as flint axes; and when he bent you could watch the articulation of his knees, the patella sliding like some oiled mechanism in a hay baler or a forklift. They called him Bone, and he gave Bone as his name when he was asked.
Fatigue lay on him now like a drug, though he could not sleep. Fatigue and this new shuddering weakness. Electricity seemed to crawl over the surface of his skin. It reminded him of the time he had accepted from another tramp the offer of a swallow of muscatel. The liquor had burned like fire, and a little while later he had spasmed it all up again. Since then he had been careful to take only water.
The train slowed. He guessed they were approaching a railway yard, but a ground fog had risen up from the farm fields all around and had hidden the stars and the horizon. He sat up straighter at the thought of a railyard: in Bone’s mind a railyard was a bright nexus of danger. It was then, abruptly, that he saw the cop, the beam of his flashlight flicking out of the mist to touch on Bone and the other figures asleep on the flatcar, the man’s blue scissorbill cap cocked toward them avidly. The cop yelled something, but the train was still moving pretty fast; Bone was alarmed but figured there would be time to get away.
He woke up the other men one by one. In the difficult journey through the mountains he had learned some of their names. Benny and Joe, Deacon and Archibald, Campbell and Crawford. Some were singles, some moved in pairs or in temporary alliances of threes. They were uniformly dirty and they wore sack pants and rope belts just like Bone did. Bone woke the other hoboes by jostling them with his big knobby hands. Some, waking and seeing his angular Halloween face above them, involuntarily flinched away; but when he told them about the scissorbill they sat up frowning, furtively crouched.
Deacon Kenny and Bill Archibald came and squatted next to him. These two were a pair, and Deacon, a middle-aged man who said he was a meat-packer from Chicago, was the leader. Deacon was short and dense and tattooed and had an immense collection of snipes, unsmoked cigarette butts, which he hoarded and rationed as if they were a private treasure. Archibald, his buddy, was a lanky man who spoke in laconic, brief Southern drawls and carried Deacon’s frying pan for him and would hold up a fragment of mirror so that Deacon could shave his face with a sliver of broken glass each morning. Deacon was an obsessive shaver; Archibald had a wispy tramp’s beard that he would not cut off, though Deacon tugged on it and ragged him for it.
Bone had never shaved but didn’t have a beard: he guessed it wasn’t in him to grow one.
“Train’ll go on through,” Deacon said, nodding to himself. “The cop can’t get on and we can’t get off. It’s safe.”
“Is it?” Archie said. “Look there.”
Bone stared where Archie was pointing. It was the cop’s flashlight bobbing up and down, the cop chasing after them, still yelling, and now the train was slowing, too, was grinding to a stop. Deacon said, “Oh, shit.”
At the sound of the brakes all the tramps leaped off the flatcar at once. It made Bone think of a man burning lice off his clothes with a lit cigarette, the way they jumped. Then Bone jumped, too. He landed crouched in the cindery gravel beside the track. The scissorbill was very close and he was shouting, and now—Bone could see them emerging from the fog— the yard bulls were running to join him. Suety, hostile men in dingy gray overalls.
“Bone!” Deacon was yelling. “This way! Bone! Run, dammit!”
The tramps were all scattering down the grade of the railway, through a scummy slough of water and into the foggy lettuce fields and the night. Bone moved to follow. But the seizure came then and he was down on the cold ground shaking. It was like a shiver that consumed his whole body. His awareness narrowed down to something like a speck, a black dot in a red emptiness. He was only distantly conscious when the railway cop pulled him up by the armpits, when the yard bulls—after a moment of disgusted commentary on his misshapen body—began to punch and kick him.
The blows came down like hard rain. Bone stared incuriously at his assailants. He had distanced himself from the pain. Cheated of a reaction, they hit and kicked him harder. Then—made queasy, perhaps, by the excesses he had inspired in them— they drifted away one by one; and the scissorbill, his cap askew now, muttered something Bone did not understand and pushed him with his foot down the Stony grade and into the cold and stagnant water.
Bone lay in water up to his waist, his head cradled among the cinders and small stones, the steam of his breath rising up into the sky.
He listened for a while to the metallic shrieks as the railcars were coupled and uncoupled in the morning darkness.
He blinked his eyes and closed them, and time ceased.
He might have died. A dozen times before, a dozen di
fferent places, he had come as close. But then, as now, some kernel of intent had hardened within him. Waking, he felt it like a song inside him. It was diffuse and not specific; he could not tack it down with words. But he knew what it meant. It meant he would survive, would heal himself, would move on. He had been moving on, it seemed to him, all his life.
There were fingers, softly, at his neck, his chest, his feet.
He opened his eyes.
Gritty sunlight seared him. His body ached. He focused on the faces of Deacon and Archie above him. Deacon was stroking the stiff lapel of Bone’s good blue pea coat.
Deacon grinned. “Bone is awake. See, Archie? Bone’s gonna be okay.”
Bone sat up.
Archie, who was angular and tall, said: “We would have taken the coat if you were dead, you know. And these shoes. We thought you might be dead.”
“But he’s not dead,” Deacon said peevishly, his voice a throaty flat midwestern rasp. “Bone’s not dead, are you, Bone? Bone, listen, there is a little jungle up the tracks. You want to come—Bone? Can you walk? Walk with old Deacon and Archie?”
Bone knew they had been trying to steal his clothes and that this was Deacon’s way of apologizing for it. He felt no animosity toward them, but he wasn’t sure he could stand up. The yard bulls had kicked him pretty hard. He had to try, though. He pulled himself erect. It was like a gantry standing up. He was six feet five inches tall—a hobo had measured him once, just to get the exact figure of it—and when he stood up he swayed like a tree. The small of his back hurt terribly and he put his hand back there. “Kidneys,” Deacon said knowingly. “Yard bulls go for the kidneys. They always do. You’ll be pissing blood for a day or two, Bone.”
Bone thought he was probably right.
They moved on down the tracks. In daylight he was able to see that this was a tiny agricultural depot, locked in by oceans of lettuce and, far off, ar-bored grapes. The sun had burned off the mist and the day was hot and getting hotter. The heat came up off the cracked dry bed of the railroad right-of-way like a growing thing. He saw the jungle in the dis-lance now as Deacon had said, a small concatenation of box huts and hovels where a river cut through the broad flat valley and a stand of dusty dogwoods had grown up.
Bone had never been here before, though he had been many places like it. He knew he was not smart, but something in him, some instinct, prevented him from riding the same way twice. He wondered sometimes what he would do if he ran out of railroads, but that had never happened; maybe, he thought, it was impossible; maybe there were always more railroads, always more places like this. There certainly seemed no end to it.
He wondered, too, what it was he was looking for, what it was that pulled him with such a dire if dimly sensed imperative. It was more than habit or hunger. It was something he did not share with these other men. Something for which he had not been able to discover a name.
“I saw a man once,” Deacon was saying, his thin-soled shoes slapping against the packed earth, “take a drink of muscatel and walk out the door of a moving boxcar. I swear it, I saw him do that. Did he live? I don’t know. I guess it’s possible. The things people live through would surprise you. Like Bone ere. Beating like that would kill a normal man. Yard bulls leave him in the ditch till somebody finds him. City buries him … or they pitch him into the river so he floats out to sea. There are more dead tramps floating in the ocean than live ones riding the rails: that’s a fact. You go out some places the water would be just thick with tramps. Like fish. The tide brings them all together. That’s what they say.”
“That’s a crock of shit,” Archie said.
“You don’t know anything,” Deacon said calmly.
Bone had seen oceans, mountains, deserts so dry they drew the moisture out of you and left you like a cooked crab, all hard dry chitin and no meat. And cold and hot. He had seen river valleys lush as rain forests, industrial towns black with coal smoke and battered by noise and poverty. It was all the same to him. There was a thing he wanted, and he had not found it. Something sweet, he thought, like music. Privately, he believed Deacon’s story about the dead hoboes and wondered if he would end that way himself: Bone floating anonymously with the others, Bone merged into a vast human sea-wrack.
Deacon led him to a circle of charred stones under a tree, a blackened frying pan. “We have a little food,” Deacon said. “You’d like that? Yeah? A little food?”
Bone nodded. He had not eaten for some days.
“Food,” Deacon said, gratified.
Archibald sighed unhappily and began heating up a few chary slices of salt pork. There was a can, also, of concentrated soup.
Deacon sat down and Bone, grimacing in pain, crouched beside him. Deacon dug deep into the folds of his faded cotton shirt and brought forth one of his snipes—a “Sunday church snipe,” Deacon called it; he had explained back on the flatcar that the best and longest snipes were the ones the churchgoers butted out just before services Sunday mornings. Bone didn’t smoke; he shook his head, smiling to demonstrate his gratitude. He thought Deacon must be really sorry for trying to steal his coat. Deacon carefully repocketed the snipe and said, “You’re the most ugly man I have ever seen but I like you. Bone, Deacon likes you.”
Bone nodded, smiling industriously.
“Tonight,” Deacon said, “we leave this pissant town. No work here. No use even looking. Ride away is about the best we can do.”
“Bad place to camp,” Archie put in.
“Bad cops,” Deacon said. “That’s the story here. You understand me, Bone? Tonight.”
“Yes, Deacon,” Bone said out loud. But he perceived that the sun was already on its way down, and the two men showed no signs of packing up. Move on, he thought, yes, that would be good.
Inside him, strange feelings stirred.
That night, for the first time, the feeling grew so strong in him that he thought it might drive him mad.
He woke up after Deacon and Archie and the rest of the hoboes in the meager encampment had fallen asleep. The fires were out and frying pans hung in the dogwood trees like Christmas decorations. It was dark, and the cold had come down again.
Bone sat up, shivering. He wasn’t sure what had brought him awake. He gazed up at the nameless and unfamiliar constellations. This feeling, he thought. But maybe it was only hunger. Bone was big and the food he had begged from Deacon and Archie had only aroused his huge appetite.
He stood up, tiptoeing over Deacon where he was curled up in a moth-eaten Hudson’s Bay blanket, and began to move silently and swiftly back along the train tracks. There was a crescent moon and Bone’s night vision was very good. The rows of head lettuce stretched away to converge at the vanishing point, a horizon full of food. He boosted himself up a barbed-wire fence, ravaging the skin on his palms, and fell on the other side. The lettuce was all new growth but it didn’t matter to Bone; he filled his mouth with green matter, swallowed, filled it again, again, until at last his hunger had abated some.
He sat back on his haunches, drooling.
He wasn’t hungry anymore. And yet this other feeling persisted.
It was like his travel-on feeling, but more intense; as if his shuddering sickness had become a part of it and his hunger and his pain. It would not be still inside him.
His eyes twisted under his thick brow ridge. What is it, what}
He itched with an unfocused sense of urgency.
That was when he heard the dogs.
Their baying broke the stillness like a knife. Bone crouched down instinctively, not breathing. But he was not in immediate danger: the sound was coming from the south, where the hobo jungle was.
A raid.
He had seen raids before. He knew how it was when the people came into a hobo camp with their pipes and shotguns. Once he had almost died in such a raid. His instinct was to run, to find a road or a train and get as far away from the violence as he could. But then he thought of Deacon and Archie sleeping and helpless back there and suddenly he was on
his feet, running. His pulse beat in his ears, the air was cruel on his bloody hands, and he thought he might vomit up everything he had eaten. But he had to get back.
The southern end of the encampment had suffered first. The raiders were big men, fanners probably, in red-checked shirts and hunting jackets. A fire had started up in one of the cardboard hovels, embers flying up, the light of it making the violence seem slow and cinematic. The dogs had gone wild with the smoke and the stink of the jungle; they dove like ferrets into hovels to drag out screaming men. The farmers used their iron pipes on anyone who was slow or who resisted. It had happened so suddenly that those on the fringe of the encampment, like Deacon and Archie, were only just beginning to come awake.
Bone pulled on their arms, trying desperately to communicate some sense of urgency through the barrier of their fatigue. He remembered Deacon bragging that a real tramp could sleep anywhere, through anything—but the problem now was waking up. In the excitement Bone had forgotten all his words.
Archie sized up the situation quickly and managed to run a few paces ahead. Deacon stood up at last—the farmers were terribly close now—and his face contorted unhappily, as if he believed he might still be dreaming. Bone tugged him forward, but that was a mistake; Deacon cried out and fell over, his feet tangled in his own Hudson’s Bay blanket.
Bone pulled him up. But it was too late. A farmer in an orange hunting jacket swung his pipe and caught Deacon hard on the arm. Deacon shrieked and fell back. The farmer raised his pipe again, and Bone perceived that the man would kill Deacon if the blow were allowed to fall. To prevent it, Bone grasped the farmer’s right arm at its fullest extension and twisted until it snapped—a thing he had not realized he could do. The farmer gazed at Bone very briefly, his face gone white with shock and confusion; then he stumbled back, screaming.
Deacon was weeping with pain but managed to scuttle forward with his rucksack in his good hand. Archie helped him up, gap-jawed: “Deacon,” he said, “Deacon, you see what that big man did? Jesus!”