Beautiful Dreamer (10 page)

There was a flatbed beside him but no place to put his hand. He had thought, maybe, to try for where the wagons were coupled, but the coupling was set back, its parts clanging together so that anyone who tried would maybe be crushed to death. He ran beside it just the same, watched as it rocked and swung, metal buffer kissing metal buffer, pipes and cables hanging down. There was no more than a hundred feet now and he could feel his legs begin to go, that and an ache in his chest and shoulder both. A box car came level and he could see how the doors were open slightly, though there was no hand hold that he could detect. He had expected, maybe, a metal ladder, something to reach for, but there was nothing but this gap, swinging away and toward. The boy leaped ahead of him, turning so that he hooked a hand round the edge of the door, blocking him from jumping himself. Then, with a half-turn, he swung his legs up, supple with youth, like a fish flicking itself off into the gloom. Fifty feet and a pain in his chest. Fighting for air. No way to make it, as it seemed, no way to follow the boy whose legs disappeared as the wagon pulled away.

He glanced down at his feet, scared he would trip, looked ahead for the man with the gun he expected to step out in his path. Thirty feet, and the girders like so many arms reaching to embrace him. He jumped at last, risking everything on this, who had no choice to do otherwise, his feet slipping as he took off so that he grabbed lower than he wanted and grabbed with the arm that was shot through and burnt. He caught hold not with his hand but his elbow, bent round the door, his left hand, so that he was facing backwards, away from the direction it was going, his legs flying. Twenty feet.

The bridge was latticed with rusting girders, criss-crossed, a cat's cradle of iron, with space for a walking man but not for legs flying out as the train pulled free of the hill and on to the flat. He twisted himself, throwing his other hand back over his head, gripping the door with his one good hand, pulling as hard as he could, easing himself forwards. It was too late. The bridge was on him. He kicked his legs inward, seeking some purchase and found it where one of the planks of the wagon was broken. His toe jammed into it and the thrum of the girders pulsed in his ears as the shadows flickered and the note of the train changed. Down below, the river sparkled, but all he could see was the flaking brown paint of the slid-back door and the shadow of the girders blinking on and off, on and off. Then they were free and the train hit another gradient, slowing for a moment so that he could ease his foot out and pull on his one good hand. He felt another hand take hold of his jacket and ease him forwards. It was the boy, pulling against the motion of the train and making little difference but just enough to help him lever against the edge of the door and wriggle his chest around it, his burnt chest. It was the pain in the end that helped him do it, urged him on to one last effort.

It was round his waist now and he knew he was safe. He rolled over and in and lay on his back, done, exhausted and destroyed, but in just the same. For a while, he thought of nothing, fighting for breath, one pain contending with another so that he seemed to glow with it, throb as the girders of the bridge had throbbed in his ears. He closed his eyes and everything glowed red, as though his blood were afire. The whistle of the train sounded as it gathered for its descent, proud it had made it, announcing itself to the world. It was some time before he gave any thought to the man with the gun, or the men, since he had no way of knowing how many there were. He wondered whether they had seen him jump aboard, he and the boy who was somewhere behind him in the gloom, thinking his own thoughts and fighting for air, too, if there was any justice in this world, as heaven knows there wasn't as far as he knew, travelling, now, from one place to another without knowing where that might be and him already changing, changed, indeed, so that he no more knew himself than the place he was headed. Both a mystery, like it was a mystery he had opened his mouth when he knew he should keep it shut, like it was a mystery he was travelling with a boy the colour of tar quite as if they were father and son, as God knows they might be kin in a place where no blood was pure, no matter what they said and how they acted, lynching their own, maybe, without knowing, without caring either.

*   *   *

I see the man who fired the shot. I looked across and see him in among the trees. I guess it was a flash of light or something, because he caught my eye. But no sooner I saw him than he fires and the white man takes it in the shoulder. We were by the river and the bullet pushed him to the edge. I looked back to the man and saw him lift the gun again and I knew we were both dead, so I jump for the river, taking the man along with me. The water ran fast and he clawed at me so that I had to kick free. Even so, I couldn't reach up to the air, though I see it above me, silver and blue. I hit my head on a rock which sprang me up to the top where I could take a breath, then I was spinning down again. After that, it was rocks and a spill of bubbles in my ears like bells and trying to keep clear and stay in the pull of the current. Then nothing, nothing until I looked up to see the white man bending over me and me lying on the river bank and choking water. I guess he got me out, but here he was already tugging at me and saying we got to climb a hill. They was after us still and we got to climb to the railroad track. And I knew it was true. I wanted to go off on my own, but I knew they would get me for sure, so I stayed with him and climbed the hillside, slipping where it was still slick from the rain.

I felt all bruised inside and on my back, and my face was rough like someone had rubbed it with dirt. Nothing stopped. Ever since the men came to the house, nothing had stopped. Things had happened one after another and there seemed no way I could hold them off. All we did was run and it didn't seem to make much difference whether we was in the water or on the land. There was people after us and no way I could see that they wouldn't get us. And I could see he were in a bad way and not likely to be much good. I could see where his gun had gone that I thought might be the saving of us like it was before, except that now it was gone and if they could shoot him once, they could shoot him again and me alongside him.

We reached the top and I could see how he was almost done. He was breathing heavy and favouring one side. He was shot up and knocked about so much, I was surprised he was moving at all. We lay down under the trees and looked down the track. I don't know how he knew anything would be along. I had heard the whistle before, right enough, but not so often I could be sure when anything would be along. Then, there it was, coming toward us. And he said how we should jump on board but not how we should do it. And he said that if I should make it I should keep on going, as if I would have thought to do anything else, though where I should go to he didn't say. Maybe he had somewhere to go, but I didn't. I did if I done what my daddy had said, but I didn't and had killed a man instead and so couldn't go there any more, as it seemed to me. So now I was travelling without knowing where.

I ran for the train, looking for where I could jump, and a car came along. I got in easy enough, though whatever happened to me in the river was making me feel bad. I turned around and there was the white man running beside the train, red in the face and panting like a bull. I looked and saw how the bridge was coming and thought he could never make it and how I would be alone after all, except he made this leap, old though he was, and I saw where his arm looped round the door, his hand reaching out as if there was something there he could take a hold of. And I could see it were the burnt hand and that the shoulder was the one he just got shot in so that I felt sure he would let go. His legs were flying and the bridge was pretty much on us. Then he must have managed it because the bridge was flicking by and he didn't get knocked off, so that as we cleared the bridge I reached out for his collar and managed to get him in.

I guess I did it for me and not for him. We were together now and there didn't seem anything I could do about it. I wouldn't have chosen to be with him, but there didn't seem anything else I could do. He could have left me by the river, given me up to them men, but he stuck there till I come to. And besides, he must know what to do. He a white man, after all.

He lay there and so did I. We were both tired through. We had got away. I just lay back on the floor among the straw and the dirt. There was nothing in the wagon but a heap of rags over in the corner. We were picking up speed now and easing down the hill. I could see the trees flickering by, so that after a bit I couldn't watch. The flickering made my head ache and I could feel that feeling that told me the shakes were coming. When I got that feeling, I had to make sure I were safe, so I pulled back from the doorway. I wanted to tell him, so he would know what to do, but I couldn't speak and couldn't think how to show him. And besides, maybe the feeling would go away. It sometimes did, especially if I could just lie still. Except that the wagon was rocking from side to side and the flashes of light from the doorway seemed to set my head to throbbing. I thought maybe to shut the door, but didn't trust myself to stand or get close to it. So there was nothing for it but to lie back and try to stop it from happening, though, if it wanted to, there wasn't nothing I could do, not a thing in the world. And the train was the same. It was going north, that much I knew, but where it was going I didn't know and anyway wasn't nothing to be done about that neither. It would just take me wherever it wanted to. And then the shakes came and the dark rose up, and I'm falling down into it like there is nothing but dark and I feel the shakes before it swallows me up. And then I am gone and not there no more, just somewhere where nobody is but a picture broken all to pieces. And then it was dark again and there was no me at all.

*   *   *

Something was over. A line had been drawn. He was tireder than he had ever been. There was no one pain, no one ache, his body simply hummed with pain and ache. Until now, he had thought of nothing but the train, as if the train were a destination in itself, except that he knew it wasn't. For the moment, though, it would do. It was putting distance between him and those who wanted him dead and who, if they knew he was on the train, as doubtless they would, could not possibly know where he would get off, since he didn't himself. For the first time, he felt if not at peace then relaxed, not tensed to fight or to run. Outside the door, the land was pulling away behind him, cutting by, each passing tree a second further off in time and space. Most of his life, nothing much happened each day that was any different from any other. He would work if there was work and not if there wasn't. Every now and then, he would go to the store or hunt in the wood, but nothing much marked off one time from another. Now things came at him one after another. It seemed to him that there was no rest. It was as though everything had been stored up and was now pouring out so fast that he could do nothing more than watch, as if it wasn't his life at all. Now here he was, heading north or thereabouts with his body all broken up and a bullet through his shoulder. He held out his hands as though he could catch the water that was his life, but it spilled right on through, sparkling but lost.

Thinking of it brought back the pain, or maybe it was the other way about. He reached up his finger to touch the wound but stopped short. It had gone clean through. Chances were, it would heal on its own. He had been shot before, when he was six and someone had fired a rifle across a field. It went through his hand, almost plumb in the middle. There was a scar there still. His mother had looked at him strange when he showed her the wound, punched through in the middle of his hand. It had healed right up with doctoring, though. Things happen. In the season especially, things could get real dangerous. He remembered a neighbour, walking with a boy on his shoulder. Someone way off took a shot at a squirrel and took the boy right between the eyes. His father had gone on walking, not realizing at first, except that the boy had slumped forward, playing, as he thought, until the blood come down on his face. He remembered how the man had run along, holding the boy out in front of him, not running anywhere since there was nowhere to run to, just like a chicken will run when its head is off, looking for the head, maybe, or figuring it can outrun its own death. A clean shot through the shoulder maybe wasn't so bad, not when you thought what it might have been.

He heard a sudden sound behind him, not a sound he had heard before. It was the boy. He was lying on the floor of the car, kicking his heels, shaking all over like a badly tuned car. Everything was shaking. For a second, the man sat there, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, the boy lost in some other world. He swung up and went across to him. His face was screwed up and his body had begun to arch. Not knowing what to do, he did nothing, thinking maybe that the boy was mad or had got hit and they hadn't known it, a hit in the head maybe. There was spittle around his lips so that he thought maybe he had got bit by something with the madness, a dog perhaps. That he had seen, or heard rather, the scream in the wood, and, finally, a shot that nobody asked about, knowing it was all a father could do for a boy got bit by a dog should have been put down itself, was put down but too late to save the one it bit.

Then it was gone and the boy relaxed, sank back down, his eyes closed, his head on one side. Something had gone out of him. Whatever devil had been inside had come out. He put his ear to the boy's chest. He was breathing. He was breathing fast but, even as he listened, that breathing became regular as though he were asleep, as perhaps he was. Then he realized it was just a fit, would have realized earlier, he guessed, but for everything else that had happened, but for his own pain and confusion. He had seen it once before in a woman who fell down at the church. People had thought she had seen a vision, but it was just a fit. But seeing it before didn't mean he knew what to do. He guessed, indeed, that there was nothing to do except let it take its course, like it had done. It was a good thing, he thought, that the boy had taken sick away from the doorway and that thought got him to thinking. What if he had had a fit plunging down the river or climbing the hill or when two men had been pointing guns at him and it was the boy who rescued him, whatever his reason for doing it? And what must it be like never to know when you would be taken? How you might be leaning over the fire or riding a horse or just about anywhere when suddenly God reaches down a finger and pushes you off so that you woke up burnt or broken or didn't wake at all. Wasn't it bad enough he had been born black? Now, along with that, he was cursed with the fits. He turned away, content to leave him where he lay, and went back to the doorway where the woods had given way to open country and he could see the odd cow or two, stationary in flying fields.