A Hidden Place

  She felt a small thrill run through her. Of course, their rehabilitation could not be complete so soon; Clawson must have some secondary reason for wanting Creath, some dirty work he wanted done. But it was a stepping stone. She thought, we are at least on probation.

  “I’m sure Creath will be anxious to talk to you,” she said.

  “Well, I appreciate that, Liza.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good talking to you. I’ll call back, then.”

  “Yes.” She thought of asking for his number but decided against it: better not to appear too anxious. “Thank you,” she said.

  She hung up the phone and leaned a moment on the dust mop, waiting for her heart to calm its aggravated beat.

  Everything was happening so quickly!

  The evening was naturally anxious. Creath absorbed the news without visible reaction—only smoked his cigars and played the big Atwater-Kent radio. But Liza could tell by the way he held the paper creased in thirds, not turning the pages, that it was on his mind.

  The phone rang at half past eight. Creath waited for Liza to pick it up. Bob Clawson. She passed the receiver to her husband; he motioned her out of the parlor and pushed shut the door with his foot.

  Liza lingered in the hallway. She was not eavesdropping. Her posture was erect, disdainful. Still, she thought, words have a way of slipping through doors.

  Tonight, however, Creath’s tone was suppressed; the conversation went on a maddeningly long time, but all Liza heard was “yes” and “no” and … if she had made it out correctly … one other word.

  By nine Creath was out of the parlor. He went directly to the kitchen and poured a drink of water from the tap. From the way the veins stood out on his face Liza guessed he would have preferred hard liquor. “What is it,” she said, “what?”

  “Nothing much,” Creath said: but it was the same falsely casual tone in which he had customarily lied to her about Anna Blaise (a memory she quickly suppressed). “Just Bob Clawson getting together some bullshit—pardon me—some two-bit smoker. Bunch of men griping about the Red Menace. Harmless, I guess.” He took a big swallow of water. “Guess I’ll go.”

  Liza nodded dutifully. Secretly, however, she retained her suspicions. She did not think “two bit” would describe any organization Bob Clawson would ever bother to get involved with.

  And as for “smoker”—well, that was possible. Anything was possible. But the word that had drifted through the parlor door had not sounded much like “smoker” or “two bit.”

  The word Liza had heard was “vigilante.”

  Later that evening Liza got a phone call of her own: Helena Baxter calling to let her know that the votes from the last meeting had been counted; that the results were not official, of course, until the announcement the following weekend, but—speaking strictly off the record—it looked like Liza had won a victory.

  Travis watched the switchman’s hut from the reedy bank of the Fresnel River, dusk gathering around him like the cupped palms of two huge black hands. He hadn’t eaten for two days—his money had run out and there had been nothing to scrounge at the hobo jungle—and voices circled like birds inside him.

  He was not sure how he had come to this. He was dead broke, his clothes were tom and stiff with dirt, the only way he had of washing himself was to dip his body in the frigid river water. All this was foreign to him. Mama had always been scrupulously clean; she had kept their small house soaped and dusted and aired. The thought created in him a wave of nostalgia so physical it left him weak-kneed. And his traitorous memory chose that moment to echo back something Creath had said (it seemed like) a long time ago: Well, we all know where that path inclines, I guess.

  Nancy and Anna had brought him to this, he thought. Broke, hungry, cold … and without the simple willpower necessary to hop a freight and put some miles in back of him. He knew what was happening in the town, he had not needed Nancy to tell him that; he had been down The Spur twice, spending the last of his pocket money on food, and on both occasions he had been paced out by the police. The jungle was overdue for a rousting—possibly, given the mood in Haute Montagne, a violent one. He should leave. There was nothing for him here.

  But he gazed at the shack where Nancy was. Nancy and the Anna-thing.

  Suppose, he thought, we do help her (posing the question aloud, though there was no one to hear him here in the tall grass)—suppose we do help her, well, what then? Where does that leave us?

  Alone, he thought bitterly, broke, nowhere to go. No better off. Haute Montagne would never welcome back Travis or Nancy. Too many rules had been broken, too many borders transgressed. He shivered in his inadequate clothing and wondered if Nancy knew the kind of future she had devised for herself.

  Maybe that was what was keeping him here, this remnant of what he had felt for her, this fear… but was it strong enough to draw him back inside that shack?

  He thought of Anna: her moth-wing skin. Her eyes coldly blue in the darkness.

  His love. His fear.

  He might have turned away then, might have been driven back by the terrible intensity of the vision, when he saw, far off, a figure advancing from the stand of elder trees down by the switching yards. The gait was familiar but the memory eluded him: Who could be coming here? Then the name fell into place—Greg Morrow—and with the name a tremor of fear.

  Travis emitted a sort of moan and stood up, running forward without thinking about it. He intercepted Greg halfway to the switchman’s shack.

  Greg looked at him warily but with an obvious contempt. Confronting him, Travis felt suddenly helpless, foolish: what could he say? “You don’t have any business here,” he managed.

  It was inadequate, but Greg Morrow must not be allowed near the switchman’s shack. Obviously he had suspicions: that was bad enough; but if he knew the truth—

  But Greg was smiling. “That where she is?” — nodding toward the shack. “That whore Anna Blaise? Nancy, too, maybe?” The smile became a smirk. “You fuckin’ ‘em both, farmboy, is that it? You know, you smell like shit. You look like shit, you smell like shit. But, hey, maybe they like that, huh? I bet it drives ‘em nuts—that stink—”

  Travis balled his fists. But before he could move Greg had put his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a knife. It was a stupid knife, Travis thought, wood-handled, with a long serrated blade, it looked like a cheap steak knife. But he guessed it could cut. Greg waved it gleefully at him, and Travis felt a wave of fear wash over him. Fear and—something else.

  “Not this time,” Greg said calmly. “I won’t be screwed over this time. Stand still! I’m just gonna go over and knock on the door. No problem. Just want to see who’s home.”

  He stepped forward, and Travis—hardly aware of himself—stepped in front of him. Greg stood still. The knife was motionless in his hand. Travis looked at the knife and then at Greg. Greg’s eyes twinkled, there was a hint of glee there, and his smile was the rictus of a man strapped into a roller coaster coming to the top of the first big hump and enjoying it somehow, somehow thriving on it. Travis realized then that Greg would use the knife, would use it gladly; that if Travis were hurt, if he died, it wouldn’t matter; Travis was a hobo now; found dead, he would be quietly buried.

  “Do it,” he said aloud, and a part of him wondered where the words came from. His voice was guttural, very nearly a growl. “Do it, Greg. I’ll take the knife away from you. I vow I will. And I’ll cut your balls off with it.”

  Travis waited. The knife was only inches from his belly. But he looked at Greg and saw that some of the giddy hysteria had faded from his eyes. The knife wavered; an uncertainty had crept into the equation.

  Then, swiftly, Greg smiled again.

  He let the knife drop. “Well, I guess I know what’s in there already. I guess you just told me.” He took a step backward. “Have fun while you can, farmboy.”

  Travis watched him walk almost lazily back toward the trees, listened for the sound of the car cranking up
. His own heart was beating wildly,- he felt dizzy.

  He thought of Nancy in the shack, of what she had so narrowly avoided. Of what she could not much longer avoid, now that Greg Morrow had come back here. Christ God, he thought, shivering, she’s consorting with demons—they’ll crucify her—

  He turned back and there was the sound of her scream.

  He pulled her away from Anna, and instantly Nancy stopped trembling. She looked up at Travis with a mute, enormous gratitude. “You came. …”

  “Nance, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  The gun, she thought. The fear, the agony … She touched her ribs, her belly, wanting the reassurance that those wounds she had felt were not really her wounds. “I can’t explain,” she said faintly. “I don’t understand it myself—”

  But Anna had stopped shaking, and she sat up now, hollow-eyed, luminous with faint blue fire. Nancy felt Travis recoil; but she gripped his hand and held it tightly, needing him.

  Anna blinked. Her grief had filled the room; it was palpable, physically present, a smell like roses … a cloud … an electricity in the skin….

  She looked at Nancy. “You felt it?”

  “Yes! God, yes!” She pressed against Travis. “That was him, wasn’t it? That was Bone. He’s close—”

  Anna said faintly, “They’re killing him.”

  Interlude:

  Bone Loses Faith

  In a little railtown called Buckton their luck went bad.

  The wad of money in the right-hand pocket of Bone’s navy pea coat had grown much larger. Twice in the course of this hot summer, in towns whose names they did not know, they had committed successful robberies. “Nothing big,” Deacon said. “Nothing ambitious. Just a little money out of the till. Just a kind of income tax. A little Relief Program for Archie and Deacon and Bone.” They would locate a gas station or a general store not too far from the railway or too close to town, would approach it at dusk; Deacon, brandishing a handgun he had taken from the Darcy farmhouse, would empty the till. The proprietor or the store clerk might weep, might curse, might silently watch; but it was never Deacon or Archie he looked at, it was Bone; Bone huge and blankly pale, his pallid wrists projecting from the cuffs of his pea coat, his eyes white and unblinking in their cavernous orbits.

  This should have been the same. They had hiked away from a hobo jungle to this place, a whitewashed building with a torn screen door and the word Sundries written above it. They stood outside in the gathering dusk, calculating the isolation of the place, the chance that somebody might come by. “It’s wide open here,” Archie said nervously. “Anybody could see us.” But Deacon only favored him with a contemptuous sneer. “Cowardly talk,” he said, and reached under his coat for the big handgun. “For Christ’s sake,” Archie began—but Deacon had already pushed through the rust-hinged door.

  Bone hurried after.

  The room inside was narrow, plank-floored, tidy. Sacks of flour squatted on pineboard shelves. Bone was engulfed in the heady smell of wood polish and grain, in the merciless yellow light of an overhead bulb. The proprietor was a barrel-shaped man who had not yet noticed Deacon’s gun; his eyes were fixed on Bone. Bone sensed the man’s distrust, not yet coalesced into fear. The proprietor said, frog-throated, “Can I help you gents?”—then paled as Deacon stepped forward, grinning.

  Archie watched the door. That was his job, and he performed it flawlessly. Bone stood beside Deacon at the counter, claustrophobic in this enclosed place; Deacon held the pistol. “All we want is what’s in the till,” Deacon said coolly. “Hand it over slow.”

  “Car coming,” Archie said from the door.

  Deacon did not turn. “Let me know if it stops.” He was relaxed, methodical. Deacon was not afraid of the man behind the counter, not afraid of jail or of committing violence. He had changed, Bone thought, since the Darcy house. Maybe he didn’t want to kill the storekeeper, but he would not hesitate to do so should the occasion arise; some part of him might even welcome the violence, the brief wild pleasure of pulling the trigger and proclaiming his potency. Bone perceived all this without words. The immanence of death boiled around Deacon like a thundercloud. He stank of it.

  The storekeeper had frozen. He stared at Deacon, at Bone, at Deacon again. Beads of sweat started out on his broad forehead.

  “The till,” Deacon said. “Empty the goddamn till!”

  “Car gone by,” Archie said.

  Bone watched the storekeeper’s fat hands delve into the cash drawer. He wadded the cash as he tugged it out, pushed the soiled green bills across the counter. “It’s not much,” he said, his voice cracking, “but it’s all—see—look—”

  “All right, all right.” Deacon used his pistol to sweep the cash toward Bone. Bone took it without counting it and stuffed it into the pea coat.

  “Archie?”

  “All clear … no, wait, Christ, there’s another car!”

  Deacon held the pistol steady. On the wall, a Pepsi-Cola clock ticked out seconds. The breathing of the storekeeper was stertorous and aggrieved.

  “Gone by?” Deacon asked tightly.

  “It’s—” Archie’s voice lost a beat. “Deacon, it’s slowing down.”

  “Be damned,” Deacon said. He turned fractionally.

  Bone watched as the storekeeper dived behind the counter. When he came up an instant later he had a shotgun in his hands. Deacon turned back but his comprehension lagged. Bone felt the seismic shift—Deacon’s confusion and fear, the storekeeper’s blossoming triumph.

  The shotgun was inches from Deacon’s chest. The storekeeper tightened his finger on the thick steel trigger.

  Bone reached out and took the gun in one huge hand. He jerked the barrel upward. The storekeeper’s finger closed convulsively and both barrels discharged into the ceiling.

  “Oh my Lord,” the storekeeper said. Bone snatched the weapon away from him and threw it into a corner with the stitched cotton sacks of animal feed. “Oh, my sweet Lord.” And Deacon thrust forward his pistol.

  “Deacon,” Bone said gently. “Deacon, don’t.”

  But it was too late. Feverish with hatred, Deacon fired.

  The storekeeper lurched back gap-chested and bloody into a wall of patent medicines. Brown bottles of iron tonic fell about him like hail.

  He was dead. It was that simple.

  Death again, Bone thought sadly.

  “Fucker tried to kill me,” Deacon said, trembling. “You saw him! Can’t deny it! Tried to kill me!”

  And Bone looked at Deacon, a small man now, frightened in the aftermath of his own violence, and thought: I don’t owe him anything.

  It was a new idea, startling and absolute.

  Deacon was alive now because of Bone. Bone had discharged his debt.

  White smoke coiled from the barrel of Deacon’s pistol.

  “Tried to kill me! You saw him!”

  “Car gone by,” Archie said weakly.

  They rode mostly empty boxcars. If they entered a crowded one, it would be empty at the next whistlestop. Bone’s reputation had grown among the hoboes.

  “Fuck ‘em all,” Deacon said cheerfully. They sat in a boxcar—empty—with the prairie night rushing past outside. It was no longer summer. The wind was cutting and Bone clutched his jacket around him. The Calling was elusive tonight.

  Deacon had acquired a bottle of muscatel. He drank unstintingly and offered none to Archie. After a time, pacified, he talked in fragments about his life in Chicago, about the Great War, about the child he had abandoned. Then, with a violent finality, he passed out.

  Bone and Archie sat in the rattling darkness, very nearly invisible. The door was open a crack and Bone watched the landscape pour by. A harvest moon hung on the horizon.

  “He’ll do it again,” Archie said.

  Talking to himself, maybe, Bone thought.

  “I should walk away,” Archie said. “Walk away and be shut of the whole thing. I should. …”

  Bone gazed at him inquisitively.
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  “Ah, no,” Archie said, taking up the remainder of Deacon’s muscatel. “No. I guess I’ve been with him too long. Maybe you don’t understand that. It’s not queer. Don’t get that idea. It’s just that I owe him some things.”

  Bone nodded.

  “I was never good on my own. Too damn dumb. Deacon’s a thinker. Smart. Smart as a whip! But that’s where he gets into trouble. Figuring angles all the time can make a person crazy. I’m not trying to stir up trouble, but listen, Bone, listen to me: to Deacon you’re just one more angle … you know what I mean?”

  There was no fear about Archie now, only a sadness, a melancholy, like the scent of the rain in the air. Bone said, “I know.”

  “It’s been sweet for him so far. Christ, he could do anything! He was right. He was right. It’s not Deacon they see, it’s Bone, the geek—you. Deacon’s sitting pretty.” The chill air made him shiver, and Archie took up the bottle and swallowed convulsively. “You, though, Bone, you’re out in the cold, you know that? Out in the snow and ice. When they hang somebody, it won’t be Deacon. And pretty soon Deacon’s gonna want to lose you. Oh, yes. They know you now. Hoboes know you, cops know you. Everybody. You’re getting to be a liability. Bad to be with. You’re not much good to him anymore.”

  It was true enough, Bone thought. But he guessed it didn’t really matter any longer. He had paid out his debt to Deacon. It worked both ways: Deacon was bad for Bone to be with, as well.

  But he worried about being alone, about being recognized … especially now that he was so close.

  The Calling was faint but very near. In recent days his mind had seemed to race; he was filled with a new lucidity. He understood so much.

  “I’ll stick with him,” Archie was saying. “I don’t care what he did. I know he killed those people. By God, didn’t we bury them? But he needs me.” Archie looked at Bone pleadingly. “He needs me … doesn’t he? Doesn’t he?”

  “I guess he does,” Bone said.

  They spent the next night outside a freightyard, camped by themselves, huddled over a weak fire while the wind came sluicing over the prairie. “Give me the money,” Deacon said, drunk again.