Beautiful Dreamer (23 page)

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He heard the two shots, spaced by no more than a second and sharp. Rifle shots. Two shots, two people. These weren't signal shots. They were the sound of people dying.

‘Fuck them,' he said aloud, ‘fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.' And though he knew now that it could hardly make a difference, that he was too late, had delayed too long, even so scrambled forwards, tearing his hands on the rocks, slipping where the hillside was slick with water.

He was alert. Now it was murder, murder virtually before his eyes. And maybe those who could do what they had done would think nothing of taking him out. It wouldn't save them in the long run, but if he was dead, that wouldn't help him at all.

Then, two more shots, a shotgun this time. So, they had finished one with the rifle and the other with a shotgun. Maybe that was their style. They even shot black people with different guns. Nothing would surprise him about them.

He slowed down, taking it more carefully this time, pretty sure what he would find. Then, no more than five minutes after the first shots, there came another. The shotgun this time, though sounding odd, echoing hollow as if someone had fired it at the bottom of a mine shaft. And what was he to make of that? He had thought he had got it clear in his head. Two inbred killers hunting down their prey. But that couldn't be. Where did the shotgun fit in, a shotgun fired five minutes after he had thought it was all over? Was it the boys having their private fight? No sense at all. Not until he came to the cave, and then a sense of sorts began to appear. But not really. He still couldn't account for what he'd heard.

Down below, he could see other men climbing up toward him. Off to the side, a plane was banking in his direction. But in front of him was a dead black boy, his face gone, twenty feet from the waterfall, and, closer to the waterfall, the brothers, each blasted from up close and both wet through. There was no point in checking them. They had been dead the moment they were hit. That left the man and that left the final shot.

As he stood there, a sudden swirl of black swept past his head and he crouched instinctively, bringing his rifle up. But they were past him, the bats, returning to their cave, pointing the way meanwhile to a man who was feeling the world slip away from him.

He edged in, not stepping through the water but keeping his back to the green-slimed rocks. Despite the sun, filtered through the waterfall, he did not see the man at first, though he already knew that was where he must be. It was strange, being inside with the water falling down, the sound of the water setting up a constant note. Then he saw him, one sock off, shot in the chest. Not many went for the head. Didn't like to think of themselves going to eternity like that. Indians, he remembered reading once, thought that if your eyes were taken out, you couldn't see to find your way to eternity. There was nothing else to see. Just a dead person putting an end to a story he had tried to figure out, always too late to play a part in it. But that was the nature of his job. Other people wrote the story. Your job was to make sense of it.

It was a crime scene and by rights he should just have left everything as it was, but he didn't like that bare foot. There was nothing dignified about almost any of the deaths he had seen, people pulled from lakes, all puffed up, faces wrong, pieces chopped off by machinery. But the bare foot bothered him, so that, without thinking really, he bent down and picked the sock up. He'd had to do it, of course, to get his toe on the triggers, both triggers, not just one. Even so, what did it matter if he slipped the sock back on? So he knelt down in front of the man and lifted up his foot, not looking higher than his waist, not thinking anything about what had killed him. But as he knelt, he felt a sudden pain shoot through his knee.

‘Jesus,' he said, the sound echoing round a cave now washed with a flickering rainbow. He lifted his knee and slipped his hand down to shift the stone. Only it wasn't a stone. It was an arrowhead. He lifted it up to the light. He had seen plenty of these in his time. He could see where the stone edge had been chipped away to shape it. He shook his head, tossed it down, and then turned back to the foot resting on his thigh, and slid the sock on carefully, not knowing why he was doing it except that it looked wrong for him to be sitting there with one bare foot as though it were some kind of a joke.

When he had finished, he wiped his hands on his pants and looked down at the man, his face tilted back and the light flooding over it from red to violet. Then he bent down and picked up the arrowhead. He took it to where the stream was falling, a waft of cool air raised by the passing water. He ran his finger over the sharpened point and then, looking back at the man you could almost believe had fallen asleep if you didn't look at where he had blown his heart away, he shrugged, turned back to the shimmering crystal of the waterfall, and, for no reason he could have explained, drew back his arm and threw the arrowhead with all the force he could summon. It flew through the trembling sheet of water and disappeared into another time as if it had been fired from a bow and not thrown by a hand, as if then and now were the same. It rose, a shiver of gold against the sun, and then, as a distant bird turned slowly around an invisible centre, curved down toward the waiting land. It is falling yet, as in a dream without ending.

 

Also by Christopher Bigsby

Hester: A Romance

Pearl

Still lives

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
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An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

BEAUTIFUL DREAMER
. Copyright © 2002 by Christopher Bigsby. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bigsby, C. W. E.

    Beautiful dreamer : a novel / Christopher Bigsby.

      p. cm.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35583-8

    ISBN-10: 0-312-35583-1

    1. Men, White—Fiction. 2. African American boys—Fiction. 3. Male friendship—Fiction. 4. Racism—Fiction. 5. Hate crimes—Fiction. 6. Tennessee—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6052.I35 B43 2006

823'.914—dc22

2005046745

First published in Great Britain by Methuen

First U.S. Edition: August 2006

eISBN 9781466851597

First eBook edition: July 2013