Beautiful Dreamer (21 page)

He looked back out toward the two he had seen in the fields and worked out that there were maybe two or three of them on the mountain unless any of them had tracked off in some other direction. But where were their dogs? As he understood it, such as them never went anywhere without their dogs.

He started climbing again, pushing the rifle behind his back, glad that he had shucked his jacket, though it had been cool when he started out. He heard the call of a bird behind him and turned to see some kind of a hawk hovering in the still air, watching out for something to kill.

*   *   *

The other boys are bogged down. I can see them over there, hardly moving at all. Well, they got it wrong, that's all. And so did them others they went that way. Made tracking easy, moving hard. But I can't see them out there unless they hid in they trees out beyond. More likely they up ahead somewhere. Ain't got no gun, neither. I got that shotgun along with me. This were the gun that shot the boys; this the gun going to wish them goodbye. Can't see nothing, though. Too steep round here to get a view. Could have done with the four'n us. I said we should try this place first. Now just the two and plenty places they could go. They could maybe swing round the back, cut on down to the road again, except why would they do that, they don't know we coming? That the problem, though. They up there, they got a view on us. See us from way off. Cover here, but up thereaways I don't see none at all, excepting the rocks. Maybe there's cover in they rocks.

Travis tracked round to the west a way, keep a look-see that side. Can't tell how they'd go. Got a boy along, though. That slow him down, that and a bullet in him. I got him, no doubt about that. Only surprised me he got out of the river. But he took a bullet and got it in him still, I bet. This is better than hunting squirrel.

*   *   *

The cave was dry, but it had a curtain of water falling softly outside it so that they had to edge their way in. It smelt musty and dank and he looked around for the bats but could see nothing where it disappeared around an outcrop of rock. Though the water seemed crystal clear, a lens through which he could see the blue of the sky shimmering like a mirage, it gave the light a green tint so that the cave could have been at the bottom of an ocean. It was cooler in here, the water and the green-washed rock protecting from the glare of the sun. It was a place to rest, a place to hide.

The floor was sandy, except where it was seared by fire. They were not the first, then, to seek it out, and if he had thought it an ancient place there were Coke bottles to prove it otherwise, that and several rubbers like snake foetuses, shrivelled and stiff.

None the less, this was the kind of place he had been looking for, not knowing that he was, but pressing on, sure that he had a reason for doing so. And now here it was, cool, secluded, away from the eyes of circling planes. Not that he thought they were really for them, out there in the still air, flashing some message in the sun.

‘This is the place,' he said, sitting down on the sand, his back to a brown rock.

The boy looked at him, surprised, thinking, maybe, that there had been a point to the climb, that he had known at the start where he was going and had found it now. He put his hand into the falling water, the ice cold seeming to slice through him, his hand disappearing and yet just visible on the other side, a shadow, not black, somehow, but a kind of silver. He pulled it back and it was shining black, though the green light made it seem something else, something he could not describe.

‘Indian land,' said the man, waving his arm in a half-circle.

The boy looked at the Coke bottles and the condoms.

‘Not that stuff. This would be where they would come.' He spoke not from knowledge but from feeling. It was partly the light, partly the smell, partly the feeling of a destination, of a place he and others had headed for.

He felt tired suddenly, and not from the climb. He had found a rhythm, swung his legs and even his bad arm so that it no longer seemed the struggle it had when they were lower down. The railroad lines below had looked like fishing line, so fine, he could hardly see them at all. He felt tired, as if arriving at this place meant he could give in a little, let it go.

Then the boy threw another fit. He had gone round the corner to have a piss, as he supposed, and now there came this noise. And sure enough, there he was, spinning round in a circle, his heels digging down and turning him about a centre. He knelt beside him, unlooping his belt as he did so, pressing it between his teeth, holding him firm with his one good arm. It was like landing a pike. All that life thrashing around, all that energy going for nothing more than the shakes. He thought that maybe he would cry out, unlock his silence, bring language winging back from wherever it had gone, always supposing it had been there before.

Then he was limp and sweating. Even in the dim light, he saw his eyes open and something come swimming back into them, some life, some meaning. The boy shook his head and the man released his grasp, took back the saliva-streaked belt, teeth marks cut neatly into it, maybe a smear of blood. Impossible to tell there, at the bottom of the sea.

Then he felt a sharp pain in his knee. He had knelt on a stone, thrown up by the boy's thrashing feet, or so he thought, but when he picked it up and went back to the cave mouth, he saw that it was another arrowhead. He held it against the silver fall of water and turned it slowly, seeing where it had been fashioned, shaped for the kill. They must have been arrow rich, he thought, to toss them away as they did. And then he realized that he had been right. This was Indian land and they trespassers, except that Indians didn't go in for curses as he remembered it, didn't even feel you could own the land. It was everybody's, just like the air, just like the sea he had never seen. And that was why it was taken from them, because they didn't understand the need for ownership.

He sat down again and after a while the boy came to join him. He handed him the arrow.

‘Came from back there. You turned it up when you were fitting. Now you got two.'

The boy placed the arrowhead in his hand and then reached into his pocket for the other one. Side by side, they seemed different. The man leaned across.

‘Different tribes maybe. I don't know nothing about Indians, except that they're dead. Most of them. This the place they came to die,' he said, forgetting that he had told him this before, or, if remembering, figuring that if you have only a little knowledge it is best to use it as often as you can.

The shoulder began to pain him again and he had an idea. He stood up and removed his shirt, unbuttoning it slowly. Then he walked across to the falling water and thrust his whole shoulder in as he had seen the boy put his arm in before. The cold was a shock but he kept it there.

‘Water's clean,' he said, as much to himself as to the boy, who was lying back, tired, as it seemed, from what had happened to him. He kept it in the water for a full minute more and then stepped back, holding his arm out. The pain had gone. All feeling had gone. He looked at it again, but in the green light could see no more than a darkness the size of a fist reaching down to where his collarbone stood out. It seemed better to him. ‘The body heals itself,' he said, nodding, as if agreeing with himself.

Then he sat down beside the boy and closed his eyes. His head sank back against the sandstone, shaped like a pillow, and he drifted away, as he had so many times in these last days, drifted away into some other place without knowing where it was, except safety.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, two hundred feet below, one brother signalled to another, pointing up where he could see a curtain of water falling from the mountainside, catching the light so that it looked like a sheet of silver. He had seen something in it, like a white fish swimming up, a fish waving around and then suddenly withdrawn. He watched to see it reappear but there was nothing to be seen except the falling water and he stared at it, trying to figure out what he had seen. He couldn't put it together with who they were after, but there was something strange and hunting has always been a matter of watching for signs, not the signs you expect always, simply signs.

*   *   *

Three hundred feet below was another figure. This one shaded his eyes and looked up. He could not see the waterfall or the cave, though water did flow close to him, discoloured, like tobacco juice. But he saw a movement ahead of him, ahead and above. It was one of the brothers. Couldn't be any other on this mountainside. He felt for his rifle, not to swing it round, not to ease a bullet into the breach, but just to reassure himself it was there. From behind him there was the buzz of a plane. He turned around and looked to see if it was close enough to wave, but it was out over the valley, looking where there was nothing to see, except the other brothers, stuck, as it had seemed to him, in the middle of a bog. He turned back to the hill. The figure had disappeared.

We missed them, he thought. Can't see them coming this far. The higher they went, the fewer options they'd got. Simple matter of geometry. Back there, it would have taken a hundred men maybe, spread out wide, to have had a chance of spotting them. Up here, maybe twenty would do it. He was half-tempted to turn around, wait them out at the bottom, try going back along the tracks. Why wouldn't they have gone that way, after all? Go back aways and then cut across in another direction. He had forgotten why he had been so certain they would have chosen to go up. But he couldn't turn around. Not with the boys up there. First, he had a thing or two to settle with them. Second, if he had been right after all, he had to catch them before they blew the man and the boy away. He kicked his boot into the hillside to get a grip and set himself to catch up with the figure he had seen.

*   *   *

They appeared through the curtain of water like beings from another planet. One second, they were silver shadows on the other side and then they were stepping through, not edging round like the man and the boy had done, but walking through as if it were a store-front window they had been dared to run themselves against. They stood there for a second, uncertain in the light, staring ahead, trying to pick out who or what was there. The water dripped off them, their clothes dark and sleek. Maybe if the man and the boy had taken themselves further in, where the smell of bats was stronger and the light poorer, they might have escaped after all. Or maybe not. These were hunters and not likely to give up when once they had set themselves to follow. It took no more than a second or two for them to see the two of them, slumped together, dead already, as it seemed at first, but only asleep as it turned out. And, seeing them, it took no more than a second for two rifles to swing horizontal to the ground and for one of them to make a sound in his throat that was more animal than human, a sound of triumph.

‘Well, look here,' he said, the water dripping off him as if he were dissolving, melting with pure hate. ‘A nigger lover and his boy.'

The man and the boy were awake and looking up at these two figures against the liquid glass of the waterfall, dark against the light background so that they could make out nothing of their features, but hearing the voice, sharp-edged, and seeing and hearing the rifles as they were readied. He was shouting above the sound of the water washing down outside and running, stained rust-red where it took up the soil with its trace of iron, down the hillside toward a man struggling in the heat of the day, upwards and toward where he had seen two figures dissolve in a cascade of silver.

‘We got you ‘bout right, I'd say. Had you down for what you was.' He took half a step forward, still dark to those on the sandy floor, backs pressed against the rock, tensed for what was to come, not knowing how but knowing what. ‘Nothing to say?'

‘I,' began the man, not knowing what he could say that would deflect the fate confronting him, recognizing, as he did, the two figures dripping water black as ink against the bright of the cave entrance.

‘Shut the fuck up. We ain't interested what you got to say. You thought you so smart jumping that train. Well, we a whole lot smarter. An' you got a slug in you somewhere already, ain't you. It were me put it there, an' it's me that's gonna put some more. You, boy, who the fuck are you?'

He tried again to speak, to summon back the voice he had lost. Nothing came but a strangled sound, somewhere at the back of his throat.

‘I said, who the fuck are you? You Johnson's boy?'

‘He can't speak.'

‘Can't speak? Dumb, is he, dumb like the rest of them?' He took half a pace forward, shifting sideways to let the green-white light fall on the face of the two he was after, moving so that his shadow no longer fell across them.

‘See your daddy die? Should've been there, kid. We strung him high. Should've been there. Now we get you.'

The man looked around, knowing there was no place to go but looking just the same, as if the wall might open up and they could run, except he knew that they couldn't, knew that his body was past it anyway.

‘An' you, nigger lover. Running off with a nigger. You like nigger boys? You a faggot? Got a taste for it, have we?'

He was working himself to what he was going to do. If they had stayed in the open, instead of burrowing down in here like some animal, they would maybe have had a chance. He smelt the bats, felt the pressure of the falling water, felt the sound itself. All his senses had come alive when he himself was going to die.

‘You killed my brothers. Shot 'em down.' He stopped and a choking sound came from him, a sound that was a shock to the man, who had thought that whatever faced him had no feelings of his own. He stopped the sobs by crashing his fist into the rock wall so that a silt of sand filtered down.

The rising sun sent a sudden beam of light slanting up through the water on to the ceiling of the cave, splaying a rainbow across it. Both brothers swung around as if it were something more than the sun and, as they did so, the rainbow washed across their faces until they turned back quickly, ready, no doubt, for the man and the boy to fight for their lives. But there was no fight there. They both sat still, staring up at the men whose faces had been plunged back into darkness.