Beautiful Dreamer (20 page)

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He was climbing now for no other reason than that he could think of nothing else to be doing. At first it had been to get away, put as much distance as he could between himself and the boy and that thing they had found in the wagon, abandoned and left to rot and be carried off where no one would know who did it. He had been running from whoever was following them, and he realized he had yet to see the face of any of them, being shot down out of nowhere, nearly died in the river, risen out of it and come to this place which he had come to think of as Indian land, though the only reason for that was because of an arrowhead and a doll and a memory, somewhere, of a story he had been told, though when and by whom was as lost to him as most of his life that was so much the same from day to day that there was no way to mark one off from another.

The arm was hurting him now. He told himself that it would ease off, but he had seen the line where the poison was and had begun to think how it would slowly move over him until it stopped his heart. Still he went on, the boy behind him, silent, thinking on something he could never know since the boy couldn't talk, even scratching his name in the dust rather than speak it out loud.

Yet for all that, there was something made him feel settled, no, not settled, he thought, talking to himself inside his head, just at peace. He had travelled further than ever before, there being no reason before to travel except when he and his wife had planned where they might go, knowing they would never make it but imagining it all just the same. And he had never been so high. He knew there was land stretching every which way but had never seen it all of a piece like he did now, turning now and then to see the boy was still there, to see the earth stretching out brown and green with splashes of blue, flashing gold. Strange thoughts had started coming to him as he climbed higher. It seemed to him that he breathed less easily, took less air in, feeling light and faint even. He thought how it might be to be a bird, free to go anywhere, float on the air, dive down, fly off to somewhere where there was snow and ice. He thought how it would be to be free of the land that held him down, had always held him down, rooting him like some tree that had nothing to do but live and die and never leave the place the seed entered the ground. At last he stopped, tired, not having slept more than an hour as it seemed to him, though knowing that often he dreamed of sleeplessness. He did not look for soft grass this time, but settled in a rocky dip whose flat stones reflected the heat. He lay back on one of them, like a sacrifice laid out for the kill.

And how many days was it since he was home and thinking no more than that he would have to go to the store? Who would have thought so much could have been poured into that time, whatever it was, like rain filling a dry barrel and keeping on flowing so that you couldn't say just how much water there'd been. The boy sat at his feet, rooting in his pocket, taking out the arrow and doll and turning them in his hand. Then he started sobbing, the boy, shoulders heaving, strange noises coming out of him, not like crying but desperate. He wanted to reach out a hand to him, did, finally, sliding down the stone and reaching out an arm so that the boy just turned to him and buried his face in his chest, the chest that had pained him but didn't no more, that pain lost in another, sobbing as if all his life were pouring out. Who would have thought he'd be doing this? Taking a nigger in his arms. But that wasn't what was on his mind. What he was thinking was that here was the boy he was supposed to have but had died. That was what climbing so high had done to him, the air thinning out so that he thought strange thoughts. Here was how it might have been if God had not reached out his hand and stilled two lives, if it were God that did such things. Not flesh of his own but someone whose pain he understood, having suffered pain himself. And not the pain he felt now, even as the boy pressed back into his wounded chest and shoulder, bringing that pain back, reminding him that pain could switch around the body when it chose. The pain of losing someone you cared for, someone who made sense of it all as if there was a pattern, after all, a story you were living through. And what were children for except to keep that story going when you were gone, so that even dying had some sense about it? If you didn't have them, then this was all there was and this was not enough. You had to make sense of what you had, and there was nothing there to make sense of, as it seemed to him. Except, looking out over the land below, perhaps there was if you could only read what was written there. But how to do that? Like a blind man, maybe, press your fingers down on it. Maybe the land was like that. And maybe it was only when you were pressed down into it you could read the message that it spoke, understand what it had all been about. After a bit, the boy stopped crying, but he didn't let go and they both drifted off to sleep, needing the sleep they hadn't had, needing to mend themselves by dreaming they were whole.

*   *   *

I lost the sense of it. Running off from the train was all we could do and we had to run somewhere. Going up seemed a place to go. I didn't have no other place. And there were something in the climbing after sitting in the wagon being taken somewhere you didn't know. And the white man seemed to have some place in mind. I looked in his eyes and could see he weren't going to give me up, though I killed a man. And after a bit, I felt calmer, seeing the railroad tracks far below and figuring they would never guess where we had gone. We had come aways and I didn't know where we were, no more than him, as I guessed. But being lost made me feel better in a way, because if we was lost, how could they find us?

And when I felt all calm inside, I got to looking around at what I could see. The world, it seemed to stretch for ever. My daddy brought me a book one time with pictures of the world and all the places in it. On the front was a picture of the whole world as if you could hold it in your hand, but inside he puts his finger on Tennessee and it just a tiny part of it all. He shows me the country we live in and though that big enough, it still just a part of it all. Now I got to look out over it and I could see that it were true enough. It goes on right to the edge and then over it for sure.

When we stopped the first time, I found the arrowhead and the doll as if they had been laying there just for me to find them. I never seen an Indian, but they was here before we was. They gone now. The white man done them, too. But here I was, standing just where they had done and looking out where they had looked. And I didn't feel so scared.

And at night I got the same feeling, staring up at the stars. The whole sky was full of them, so that no one could ever count them. And they were further than you could reach. It got cold after a while and I couldn't sleep, and a whole jumble of thoughts came to me that I couldn't sort out one from the other, until I saw the sky start to lighten in the distance and the stars started to fade away like they had never been there at all.

His shoulder looked bad. He stopped and undid his shirt and I could see it were all red. He didn't say anything, but was quiet and serious. We climbed up higher then, until even he gave up on it and settled himself on a rock. And then it all came down on me. I weren't thinking of anything when all at once I wanted to die and I couldn't stop from crying and rocking myself. My daddy was gone. What they had done to him. I couldn't bear it. And him talking to me and me watching and doing nothing. And suddenly he puts his arm around me and I hold on and hold on, shaking my head as if I could stop it happening. And he held me tight and I could smell him but I was used to that smell by now and he were there and where could we go and would they catch us? After a bit, I stopped. It swept away like the cloud that cleared the sun just then and I looked out where you could see the lakes, far away and bright. And then I guess I drifted off to sleep, the sun warm on me, feeling safe for the first time, feeling how we might make it after all, him and me. And when I woke, I saw a light flash golden in the sky. For a second, I couldn't make it out. It was maybe God's eye, I thought, opening on the world. Then it was gone and I could see how it had been the sun on a plane that was now no more than a speck of black. And a while later I heard it, far off and distant, like a memory.

His arms were still around me but he was asleep hisself, lying there with his mouth open and a soft sound coming out of him. And I could see how he could just have left me, given me up to them, said it were me that done it and they would have believed him, him being white. That were the first time it came to me. He didn't have to do it and he had. I suppose it was because of what they did to him. Even so, he could maybe have bought himself out of that and wouldn't no one have believed me. He stirred and after a bit let go on me and I stood up. He didn't look so good to me, though I wasn't used to judging how a white man might look. I could see that his arm pained him. When he shifted a bit, his mouth pulled back and a frown came on his face. Then I heard the plane again and looked across to where I had seen it before, only it was closer this time, circling round like the birds did, using the air, maybe, to keep up.

‘They're looking for us.'

I turned around as he sat up. He pulled the face again and half-reached his hand across his front, but stopped.

‘I think, maybe, they're looking for us.' Then to himself, quiet, he says, ‘How they know we're here?'

Then he says, ‘We best get under cover a while.'

There wasn't much in the way of cover except for some bushes, so we wriggled under there. We could still see up through the leaves, but I guess whoever was up in the plane wouldn't see us. It got closer, though, the sun catching its wings when it turned. It didn't seem much up there. No more than the birds.

‘It'll go after a bit,' he said. ‘Don't worry. And maybe it's not for us.' I could hear in his voice that he didn't mean this or wasn't sure. ‘It's maybe someone learning. Doing turns up there. Just the day for it.'

I think, maybe, he was saying it for me, but it went just the same. One moment it was up there and the next floating down in the distance, dropping down like it was looking for where it belonged.

‘Just out on a practice,' he said, ‘that's what it will be.'

We wriggled out from under the bushes and I could see him looking up above to see if there was somewhere better we could go. Then he says, ‘There's a cave or something up there, where the water's falling. Reckon that might be a good place to be. Come on, James, Jimmy.' He remembered my name but had forgot what I'm called, but I could hear in his voice how he was trying to say he was a friend. He didn't need to do that. If he hadn't been a friend, we wouldn't have been here, up on this old mountain, watching a plane flashing gold the way it done.

*   *   *

He had to be two hours at least behind the brothers. But since none of them knew where they were going, that might mean nothing at all. He knew that he was maybe chasing nothing, that the two he was after were perhaps miles away in the other direction. The smeared footprint was doubtless left by one of the brothers following nothing more than his own inclination. And after he had been climbing for no more than a quarter of an hour, he saw the pointlessness of it. Why would anyone trying to get away climb up here, except, perhaps, to sit it out?

Nor was it easy to see where they might have gone. For the first part there was a path of sorts, where people went for walks. There was dog shit, the usual paper trail of sacks and Kleenex and newspapers. Higher up, there were rubbers, trodden into the mud as if people had just laid right on down where they were. Higher up, though, the paths diverged, trailing off in different directions before giving out altogether. Hill or mountain, this was big and there were a dozen ways they might have gone if they had gone at all. He began to realize that he should have waited, that there was no point in doing what he had done. And besides, maybe they had simply walked around and off the other side and were already five miles, ten miles away in just about any direction. He had got sucked up in this thing just like the family of morons. His job was to be cool, be a policeman. Instead, here he was on the side of some hill he had never seen before, chasing people who maybe weren't there and with a homicidal family wandering round with guns.

He shifted his own gun, fixing the strap so he could sling it over his shoulder. At first he had tried to climb with it in his hand. God knows why. Did he expect them to spring out on him? Well, two of them had already killed two people, three if the one on the train was their handiwork too, though he couldn't see how it could be. That was a mystery. They killed the other two, as it seemed to him, because if they hadn't, they would have been dead themselves. They? No, the white man. He was forgetting that one was a nigger kid. He'd got to thinking of them as desperados. Desperate, yes. Desperados, not likely, not likely at all.

After an hour, he stopped, breathing heavily. This was definitely not what he was used to at all. Already there was a view. In fact, off in the distance, no more than a mile, he guessed, he could see two figures. Neither one was a boy. If that was the brothers, they had taken their time. Then he saw a glint of light, a tracery of silver. Boggy, then, the run-off from the mountain turning it all to mud. So, not likely they had gone that way, though they wouldn't have known it, not at first. And if they had, would they have turned back? Suddenly the mountain seemed more likely, assuming he was right about the smell. All this because he thought he recognized a smell. Then again, even suppose he did, they probably made this stuff by the ton. Why hadn't that occurred to him before? Because it was in the middle of the night, because he had already despaired of finding anything, because he liked to think he was the great detective. Well, it occurred to him now. Or maybe it was theirs and just rolled off when the train stopped.

He took a deep breath. It seemed fresher here. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Might as well go on up, he thought. At least he could see more from up there. But which way to go? Up was up, but this thing stretched out in all directions. It would help if they'd snagged a piece of cotton, dropped a cigarette pack, left him a note. Down below, he saw a boil of dust off to the north and another over to the east. Reinforcements. Soon, Tennessee's finest would be strung out over a mountainside looking for what was maybe fifty miles away. At least they'd be searching the trains, though, in case they had thought to step off one and on to another. Checking the roads, too. And what had they done, these two running away, running in fear and desperation? There would be those who thought they had done no more than purge the land of two people had no business being there in the first place, if you obeyed the Bible. There were lists of people you couldn't sleep with and that family had slept with just about all of them, even unto the tenth generation. It was maybe families like this one that kept everyone back from progressing wherever they were supposed to be progressing to. Half the crimes in the county were down to them, but people were scared because they knew they would be happy to blow anyone away who so much as mentioned them, having no more feeling than if they were stepping on a roach. Now they were up there somewhere with guns, feeling they were God's avenging angels.