Beautiful Dreamer (16 page)

‘If you don't git off my land, you're going to hell.'

The sheriff stepped aside so that the sun was behind him and, as the man raised a hand to shade his eyes, took hold of the rifle and twisted it away from him.

‘Sit yourself down, old man,' he said, indicating a cane chair whose cane was unwrapping itself so that it looked as if it were tied to the porch. ‘Sit down.'

The man did so at last, and stared ahead of himself as though there were no one there, no one he was prepared to acknowledge at least.

‘How did it happen? You'll have to tell me and if you won't tell me here, then you can tell me somewhere else.'

There was a pause, so long that he wasn't sure whether the man was listening at all. Then at last he began to talk.

‘Told 'em not to go. It were enough what they did. What they did were right but it were enough. Leastways it's a fool that goes in the day when anybody could be waiting. More'n one of them, you see. Waiting for them, no doubt. Nigger lover and others. Jumped them. Shot them down. Don't worry none, don't need no law to settle this. They were ourn and we deal with ourn. The boys'll be back, you see, and then it'll all be over.'

‘I'll need the bodies.'

The man stood up, looking up at him, hatred in his eyes. ‘You touch they two and you'll touch nothing else. They'll be buried regular. They be buried in the church when them others is dead. Until then, they won't rest.'

‘It's hot, man, and besides, it's a murder case. I got to get a doctor look at them.'

‘A doctor. What kind of fool you? They dead. Ain't no doctor going a bring they back.'

‘Not to bring them back. They've got to be looked at. For the trial.'

‘The trial?' said the old man with incredulity. ‘There ain't going a be no trial. What for should we need such? You git. You ain't needed here and you ain't wanted neither.'

The two men stared at each other across more than a few feet of dust and might have stood there for centuries without understanding how the other could inhabit this world. But the stand-off was interrupted by the baying of dogs. Both looked across toward the woods and three hounds bounded out, heads down, not searching for a scent now but heading straight back. Behind them, a group of men emerged, seeing him right away since one of them pointed at him and then at his car. He stood and waited for them, scanning their faces, faces that looked much the same. There was something wrong, though it was difficult to put your finger on it. Some disproportion. Some distortion. They each carried a gun and one of them carried two. They trailed them or held them on their shoulders.

‘Get 'em, boys?' asked the old man when once they were near.

‘What he doing here?' said the one with two guns.

‘He seen 'em,' he replied, not saying who that might be, but referring, as was obvious to all, to the bodies lying behind him in the house, stretched out on the trestle table, having lived their lives and laid themselves down for eternity.

‘So?'

‘What happened?'

‘What's that you say?'

‘What happened? What happened back there that brought them to this and what happened where you've just been?'

‘They got theirselves shot.'

‘Who did it?'

‘That's right, sheriff, that's the question right enough. Who could of done it?'

‘If you want to be smart, you can be smart in jail.'

‘What have I done? Seems to me it's somebody else you should be looking for.'

‘Who killed your brothers?'

‘A nigger lover. Leroy winged him, though,' blurted one of the others, spitting a gob of black juice into the dust.

‘You shut up,' said his brother.

‘What “nigger lover”?' He used the words as if they were a piece of rotten meat he'd found and wanted to pick up with a stick. These people lived in another century, as it seemed to him. But, then, he'd been away from the state long enough to breathe some different air. Should never have come back, neither, wouldn't have done but for a wife that couldn't settle elsewhere and then chose to take off when he did come back.

‘We don't know nothing.'

‘I can believe that, only I can't believe you don't know who did this. What “nigger lover”? The same one you come near to killing? That one? And what have you done to him now?'

‘Listen up, sheriff. This is family business. You ain't from here.'

‘I've been away but I've come back.'

‘You ain't from round here.'

‘Tennessee.'

‘Hell, this ain't Tennessee. What do I know about Tennessee? You ain't from round here or you'd know. They our kin and we gonna fix it.'

‘Besides, they jumped the train.'

The oldest brother, and he knew none of their names and wouldn't have been able to keep them straight if he had, stepped up to the one who spoke and put his face right in the face of the other.

‘I told you to shut it.'

You could see the spittle hit his face. He gave a jerk to his neck as though readjusting his head, and then pursed his lips.

So, they had got away and the ‘they' meant there were two of them and that meant he could see how the crime had happened.

‘One of them black?' he asked.

There was no reply.

‘Time you was going, ain't it? Got things to do, I reckon. An' so have we.'

It was time to be going, all right. There was nothing more to be done here, not for the moment at least. And if they were on the train, he had to get it stopped.

‘How long ago was this?'

They stood staring at him with blank faces. Then one of them said, ‘I'm gonna get cleaned up, Pa,' and spun on his heel.

The sheriff went back to his car, filmed now with dust so that he could trail his finger along it and see a shiny black line as he had on the piano. He looked around again, not seeing how any family could have been raised in this place but understanding how, if they had been, they would have been as strange as these. These people never looked beyond themselves for anything. They were one animal, growing on its own, dying on its own.

The car started instantly. He liked that. His last he had had to coax as if it were a woman he wanted to persuade to a dance, not that he'd done that in a while, not in a long while. He spun the wheel. The men watched. The dogs watched. Nothing seemed to move, except him. Then he was in the shade of the woods, lurching from side to side in the hard-baked ruts that shook him around as though he were somebody's child that had been caught in the mud, that had done something wrong and was being shaken by its father. And somehow he had the feeling that perhaps he had. Now they had given him enough to be going on, they would be back out of there and on their way. There was a race, except he was sure he was bound to win it. If they were on the train, the man and, he supposed, the boy, since it could hardly be a black man, at least none that he knew, then they could be a long way off. Assuming the boys had come straight back from seeing them jump the train, that would mean two, three hours. It would take him fifteen minutes to get back into town and maybe a half-hour on the telephone. That was a long way for a train to travel, except that no train he had ever seen pass through had been in that much of a hurry, certainly not the freight. And this must be a freight because there was no way they could jump a passenger train. None the less, three or four hours could be a hundred miles.

It took him more than half an hour to get it stopped, but the news that came back when he did surprised him more than he would admit. Those he was searching for weren't aboard, but somebody else was. They found a dead body. They found someone who'd been knifed and had his eye cut out and that took him way beyond anything he had been thinking. You get a picture, he said to himself, even as he was getting into his car to start on after the train, and everything seems in place and then something goes wrong and you can't hold the pieces together any more. Like two jigsaws mixed in the same box.

He swung away from the office, wheels spinning, dust rising up like a sign from God. The problem was now, he said to himself, where the hell did they get off? And within a few minutes, even as he wound the windows right down to get a breeze moving through, his mind was getting to work again. He had been given four places the train had stopped: two stations, a watering place and one where a deer ran right at the engine as if it had had enough of life. Later, they found it in the cab where the engineer had put it for later. But that was later, when nobody cared much what an engineer might have done. The question was, which place would they have chosen to get off? And he was sure they wouldn't have jumped, not if one of them was winged. And that meant that the man they had busted up and burnt a little, as he'd heard it, had now maybe got a bullet in him and wouldn't be about to jump, not if he wanted to live. But what foxed him was the dead man. That didn't fit at all. Well, time enough for that when he got to see him, but meanwhile he was going to stop off along the line, see if he could pick up any trail, even though that meant pulling off the road from time to time. The railroad ran parallel but some way back at places. He wasn't sure he should have brought his Ford. He didn't want to go busting up the chassis or ripping out the differential.

*   *   *

As soon as the train had pulled away, they started climbing. It was clear to both of them that they were no longer going anywhere, in the sense of a place that had been in their minds, maybe, when they started out. They were getting away, putting distance between themselves and whoever might be following them. They were doing something that made no sense and that therefore might fool those who tried to figure what they would do. Climbing upwards seemed to take them literally above everything. It was true that the man could not shake off the pain, that his shoulder was worse than it had been, even if his chest was better, just smarting from the sweat but healing along with that. His hand, too, seemed better. The shoulder was bad, though, even if he would not stop and look at it, would not stop at all, driving on toward who knew what, like a bird will circle on a thermal, rise up when it makes no sense anyone can fathom since its food is far below, along with the water. It was as if up there it was free so that, even if it died on the wing, it would go on flying as it fluttered down, not finally being dead until it hit the ground, bounced and lay still. That way, it lived beyond its time, still flew even though the life had floated out of it.

Already the railroad was no more than two silver threads laid on the ground, while to the north they could have made out a smudge of smoke from the engine if they had chosen to look, as they did not, staring no more than a few feet in front of them, focusing on the rocks and bushes, watching out, perhaps, for a snake, though not admitting such, simply aware, as any from there would be, that there are things that do you harm. Well, what a thought. As if more harm could come to them than had, as if creatures that kept to themselves and slithered through the grass could ever do what men had taken it into their minds to do for no better reason than that they were men.

The day was ending. By climbing they seemed to still the fall of the sun, the land opening up ever further as they rose. Even so, at last its tip touched the far horizon and seemed to spread out, its colours bleeding along the lid of the sky. And now, at last, they stopped, stopped and turned to watch a shadow begin to creep toward them across the land, itself a hazy blue. It crept toward the lakes that sparkled, their brilliant blue mixed in with a shimmering silver. Neither one of them had ever seen such lakes, set down like a kind of grace among the brown and green, a promise for those in need of hope. The man said nothing, amazed at his own capacity for wonder. The boy, voice gone in the night, snuffed out like a candle, stared as if he had landed on another world, not knowing what to do except stare, letting it all spill into his soul so that he and the man could maybe know, now, why the birds rose up, drawing great circles in the sky, drifting high where they could see the blue and the silver, now being eclipsed by the moving shadow.

‘Best stop here,' he said, looking across at the boy, who was no longer behind him as at the start, being younger and unwounded, except where the ache of his dislocated arm had made him stop once or twice and wonder at how the man kept on, being as wounded as he was.

They looked around for somewhere they could get some cover. It was still warm but it was fresher here, as if the night might bring something it never did lower down, so that it would no longer be like breathing warm milk. There was a freshness that made the man, at least, feel light-headed, though maybe it was the shoulder, too. He wanted to look at the shoulder.

There was a small dip in the rising land, a pocket handkerchief of close-cropped grass, as if goats or some other creature had been grazing it close. He pointed to it and they walked across, edging round a crop of rocks still warm from the sun whose tip was balanced on the purple line of the horizon so that they could make out the fretted edge of what had looked so smooth before. Then, even as they watched, it disappeared, for a second a single bright orange spot, like a minor sun, hanging there and then turning off as if someone had thrown a switch.

He got out his knife and cut a few branches. In all his years, he had never slept in the open, except on his own porch on the worst summer nights. He had never been far enough from home to need to do it, so he was unsure what to do. None the less, he cut the branches, figuring them as cover of some kind, trying to rest them on him as if they were blankets. But after trying this for a while, he pushed them aside.

Then he remembered his shoulder. There was still enough light to take a look, for the sky was a sheet of red where the hidden sun was spreading its light over the western sky. He eased the shirt off his shoulder and took a look. But the red light made it all look inflamed. He could see a darker area around the wound and saw that it had spread beyond where it had been before, but that was to be expected. Cut your finger and it was the same. Even so, it felt bad.