Beautiful Dreamer (22 page)

‘You,' he said, ‘nigger lover.' He stepped forward and kicked the man's feet. ‘You done the shooting, right. You the one done it. In the back, too. Crept up on 'em. Didn't give them no chance at all. Nigger lover. Where'd I get you? Where'd you get the slug?'

His hand began involuntarily to reach across his chest before he stopped it.

‘There, is it?' he said, twisting his hands round so that the rifle butt was pointing forwards, smashing it into the shoulder so that a scream echoed round the cave and he rolled down on to the floor. There was a fluttering sound and the air was full of movement, an exploding whoosh, a sudden thunderclap and a stream of blackness flowing through the air and round the edge of the silver curtain, both sides, through the narrow gaps.

‘The fuck?'

The boy made a sound in his throat, and even as he lay rolling in pain, a pain that swirled around, flowing out from his shoulder, even then, the man thought of the boy, thought that he would maybe have another fit, there in front of the killers, though how he could think this, sinking into the pain, was more than he could understand or could have explained.

‘Fucken bats,' said the other brother, speaking for the first time, though he sounded the same, as though he were just another part of the one thing. ‘Fucken bats. Get it over.'

They both turned back again. ‘Sit up, nigger lover. Time's come.'

The man fought against the pain, seeing its irrelevance, readying himself for what was to come. He sat up slowly, staring up at the two figures who had stepped out of nowhere.

‘I brung something with me. Look see.'

He shifted his rifle to the other hand and swung the shotgun off his shoulder. ‘Recognize it? It yourn. Let it go when I plugged you. Didn't think no one would find it, still less bring it along, right, still less carry it this way. You don't know shit. We got things for you. We got things planned. That other time were easy. Should've shot you down then, had our fun, then shot you down. But for them car. Well, don't make no difference anyhow, 'ceptin' it does, don't it, because you shot my brothers. That make the difference. Nigger lovers is one thing. Killing my kin is another. This were how you killed my brothers, this gun, and this is how you going to get yours. Brought it along special. So's you could die with the gun you used. Only I take you a piece at a time. What you say? You like that? Let the nigger watch till it's his turn. What you say? Got nothing to say? Dumb like the nigger? Or maybe we light us a fire, have some more fun first. You like that? You like that the last time?'

‘Get on with it,' said his brother.

‘I take whatever fuckin' time I like,' he said, swinging round, the shotgun pointing at his brother now, as if he weren't particular who he took. Then he swung back, shifting the gun in his hand.

‘You ready for it? Said yourn prayers? Won't do you no good. You going direct to hell, after I shot you up some, arms, legs, belly. What you say?'

‘Take 'em now.'

‘Take 'em now, sure, take 'em now. My brother think I should take you now, like you'd put an animal down in pain. That the way he is. Ain't the way I am. Why you kill them? Think they was trash? Think we all trash? Why ain't you talking?'

‘Take 'em. The sheriff.'

‘I don't give a shit about no fuckin' sheriff.' Even so, it seemed as though he might have forgotten the man they had left below, and who would have been released long since and was coming, surely, as sure as anything else. He held out his hand toward his brother.

‘The shells.'

‘What shells?'

‘The fuckin' shotgun shells.'

‘I don't have no shells.'

‘What? I tell you to bring shells.'

‘I thought for the rifles.'

‘Shells, shells!' He was screaming now. ‘Not bullets. I got slugs. We both got 'em. Shells for the gun so we could give it to him with his own.'

‘I ain't got no shells.'

‘The fuck…'

‘You didn't say nothing.'

‘Shut the fuck up!' he screamed and threw the shotgun down in the sandy earth, kicking it so that it slid across and hit a rock.

‘We got the rifles,' said his brother.

‘I know we got the fuckin' rifles. I wanted the shotgun.' Then, to the man on the floor, and calming now, ‘Well, don't make much difference to you, I say. You gettin' it just the same. You getting it like I said. Knees, elbows, belly.'

The boy made a sound, a strangled sound as if he were trying to be sick, force something up.

‘What the fuck you…'

But they waited and watched as the boy struggled with himself until a sound came out that was not a moan or a gasp or a cry but a word. ‘Me.'

‘The coon talks.'

‘Shutup. What he say?'

The boy struggled again and the word came, clearer this time, as if he had shifted something out of the way. ‘Me.'

‘Me what?'

Again the boy struggled, getting half to his feet, and again a word came out like a constipated man producing a bullet-hard turd. ‘Shot.'

‘“Shot”? “Me shot”?'

And then again, the man, knowing now what he was going to say and wanting to stop him, but mesmerized by the effort that was producing the words, mesmerized that there should be words at all from one who had stayed dumb in the face of so much, unable to stop him, though he raised a hand to the boy that he should stop, go back to being dumb again, though he knew it would make no difference in the end.

‘Them,' said the boy, sinking back again with the effort.

‘“Me shot them”? You some Indian? Pigeon talk?' Then the meaning of the words got through to him and he shifted the rifle so that it slanted down, pointed in the middle of the black boy who was trying to save a white man when white men had killed his father, the same white men who were going to kill him now.

‘Don't listen to the kid. You can hear he's crazy.'

‘Crazy, yes. Sure. He's crazy. I can hear how he's crazy. Crazy to fess up. Thinks he's savin' his white daddy.'

‘I shot them.'

‘Sure. I can see how you would. Yes. It were the boy. Seen his own daddy go. Watched it all, didn't you, boy? How'd you get the gun, though? That ain't your gun. That his gun. No white man going to give a gun to a nigger, not to a nigger boy, not to a nigger at all, he ain't. Even so. I see it. I see it. He give you the gun and tell you to keep behind them. They never think to find a nigger there. If it had just been you, they'd have taken you. There had to be two 'n you. And it had to be the boy. They would have watched you, 'spected you. They never would have thought there might be a nigger there, 'n if they did, never thought him to have a gun.'

‘Get on with it. They'll be here.'

‘Right. They'll be here. That's right. Well, nigger, I guess you gets to go first. You the one that did it, you gets to go first.'

‘No,' said the man, half-rising, only to meet the butt of the gun on his jaw, breaking it and sending him back into the rock.

‘Outside, boy. You getting it out there like my brothers did. An' you, you just wait yer turn.'

He reached down and grabbed the boy by the neck, pulling him forwards. Then, like a sheriff backing out of a bar, he walked backwards through the water so that the two of them seemed to dissolve. The other one looked down at the man, helpless now, as it seemed, blood spilling from his mouth. Then he, too, walked through the wavering cascade and was gone.

In a panic now, knowing that there were seconds left, feeling the shakes coming on and with pain running through him deep and true, he fell forwards, reaching for the gun, reaching out his hand, with blood in his eyes as well as down his chin. It was no more than ten feet but it seemed a mile, with the pain shooting through him and a wave of blackness rolling over him. He closed his hand around it and pulled it toward him, unable to move further, pulling it in like a rope in the sea. Then he was fumbling in his jacket, where the hand cream had been and where a purple stone nestled in paper, and found the shells, the shells that had survived the river and everything else.

The pain made him shake, the urgency made him shake. He tried to focus his mind, control his hands. He broke open the gun, dropping one of the shells as he did so. He slid the other one in and then groped for the one he had dropped, not seeing, with the blood, feeling in the dirt and finding it at last, smeared with grit so that he had to take another few seconds wiping it on his jacket. Then he slid that in, hearing the pop as it went in. He snapped it closed and tried to stand. His head swam. Though there was a bright light now where the sun had cut through in a beam like a searchlight, he could feel a darkness begin to welcome him.

He banged his hand, the one holding the shotgun, against his shoulder so that his body lit up with pain. Then he took a step forwards as two shots rang out, sharp and clear, not a shot and an echo but two shots so crisp, separated by no more than a second, that he knew what had happened without needing to see. They had stood side by side and shot the boy together so they could both say they did it. They had shot the boy who had saved him not once but twice and no matter what happened now, there was no getting him back. And this was the boy that had told them what was only partly true, that had spoken for him as he hadn't spoken for himself. And he didn't think black and white, though that was why this had started. He thought how they had killed his son, knowing it wasn't his son but knowing no other word that could describe his feeling.

He stepped back now, knowing there was no point in going through the water, knowing that it was better to wait for them when they came back through, but knowing that it made no difference in the end whether he got them or they got him because what was important was what had already happened. For a second, he thought that maybe they had been shooting to scare and that he might still save him. But he knew that such as them, riled as they were, wouldn't see the point to that. Besides, those shots were as final as anything he had heard. It was an execution without benefit of judge or jury. It was the end of time.

He saw them on the other side of the water, saw their outlines, dark and wavering. And he saw their shadows cast on the back of the cave by the searching sun, as if some record of such as they would be imprinted for ever there. Then they stepped on through, silver for a moment, as though they had turned to molten glass, except that a second later they were dark and dripping water and with no faces he could see, the light coming from behind, so that he never saw their faces as he fired, not noticing which was which as they flew back through the water again, one, then the other, the second not moving, as if he couldn't understand what was happening, couldn't think what to do. They went back as if they were on their way to the planet they had come from, stepping into another time.

He stood with the gun in his hand, frozen, all pain suddenly swept away as though someone had been pressing a rock on him and had suddenly relented. Then the gun was on the floor quite as if he had meant to drop it there, except that he hadn't, was unaware it had gone. Then he was on the floor, too, sitting down with no recollection of meaning to.

After a minute or two, he edged himself backwards until he came up against the rock where he had been sitting before. He eased himself up against it and settled himself. There was no running any more. Just a blankness where everything had been. Just the sound of the water falling down. Minutes passed and he began to wonder whether he should step outside, see to the boy maybe. He didn't doubt he was dead, no more than he doubted the other two were, having taken buckshot from no more than six feet and straight in the chest. But he had seen enough of death and wanted to see no more, and since all death was of a piece, it reminded him of others and took him off to another time.

He reached in his pocket and found the package he had felt when he was reaching for the shells, the shells he had forgotten and they had known nothing of. He took it out and shifted himself along to where the sun had slid down the wall as it rose in the sky somewhere beyond the silver curtain of water. He slid along to where it shone warm on his face, bent and changed by the water, softened so that it was more green than gold. He opened the paper, which was no more than a newspaper with long-ago news, and there was the brooch and the purple stone at its heart. He held it up where the sun could reach it, watching as a light seemed to pulse at its very heart, as if it were alive and had been all these years, though the woman who'd worn it had been dead in her grave, her and the one she died in bringing into the world. And as the light flickered and moved, bending and twisting like a candle in a breeze, so he remembered what he had tried so hard to forget, tried to bury deep where he could never hope to reach it. And he sat there, staring at the stone, remembering not only her but what he had been before the world had pressed down so hard on him that he had forgotten what had once lifted him up so high. And somehow, along with that memory was another now, not a memory, perhaps, since it came to him from but a moment ago, but a face, a face staring up at him as if he might turn aside what must come. And if one was white and one was black, what was that to him? The stone he held in his hand had a colour, too. It was not the colour that mattered but the flame that flickered at its very heart.

He was scarcely aware of reaching into his pocket again, feeling the shells there, so reassuring to the touch. Scarcely aware, either, perhaps, of taking two out and laying them in his lap while he wrapped the stone up in its fading newspaper nest. He reached forward for the gun and broke it open, running his hand along the barrels before lifting it so that he could look along those barrels, pointing it at where the sun came through, where the blue of the sky spread out as though you looked at it through the thinnest gauze. Two perfect circles of light. Two circles of blue like eyes staring down at him. Then he closed it up and smiled to himself. He had come up high, higher than he had ever been before. Outside, he knew, the world stretched away in every direction. Things lived and died and it made no difference. There was no time and regret was no more than a drop of rain in spring. Living in a room, in a cabin, on the edge of a wood, with nowhere to go but the outhouse or to a town where people lived in themselves, he had never understood all of this. It was coming up high that had taught him, and how could he be sorry, then, to have come so far or to have risen up like the birds he knew were no more than fifty feet away, beyond the clear lens of the water, floating ever higher and seeing ever further? His lips began to move, lips cracked and flecked with blood, and though his broken jaw made it difficult to open his mouth, began to sing to himself a long-ago song. ‘Beautiful dreamer,' he sang, and then again, ‘Beautiful dreamer,' not remembering any other words, but hearing, even in this cave on the top of the world, where water fell like a silver shroud, the broken sounds of a broken piano which none the less brought forth beauty and harmony.