The Sound of the Trees (21 page)

I reckon I got to try.

Try what?

Get myself in there. Locks are made to be broken, ain't they?

John Frank started up from his chair like he meant to unleash some prophecy upon the boy. He pressed the palms of his hands together. Then he sat again and began to speak rapidly through his teeth.

You can't do that, goddamn it. It's crazy. You can't.

I got to.

No. No you don't. You ain't goin to be stupid. I won't let you.

You won't let me what? You goin to arrest me yourself?

Well shit. No. But goddamn it, listen to me. They throw you in jail yourself if you get caught. Or worse even.

Jail ain't far off from where I stand now, the boy said, and walkin away ain't goin to help it. Seems to me all I've ever been around to see is endings. And I know that it ain't supposed to be that way. Not for nobody. I ain't sayin I deserve better but I'll be damned if I don't try for it. This girl. He raised his hands briefly, then let them fall. I'd just like to see the beginning of it, he said. That's all. I'd like to know how it is that something begins. That it could.

The boy leaned back in his chair. The movie was reaching its climax and a brooding anthem of heroics rumbled up the aisles. The boy put his head on the wooden chair back in front of him and held it there a moment before he sat up again and faced John Frank. They're goin to kill her, he said.

What the hell? Now how do you get to thinkin something like that? They ain't never killed no one here. That's downright ridiculous is what it is. And I can tell you as sure as we sit here now, if you try and break into that place in a week's time you'll be sitting in that jailhouse yourself.

I don't care about any of that. Didn't you hear what I said? They're goin to kill her.

Alright. They're goin to kill her. Which they ain't. But what you goin to do about it?

I don't know. But somethin. I'll do somethin.

The lights began to come up and the girl called out to John Frank. He put up a finger pleadingly and then turned back to the boy. In the white light the boy's face appeared suddenly very old and featureless and even his eyes seemed to have no fix about them but only a curious glass sheen.

John Frank put his hand upon the boy's shoulder, then took it down and looked at him. He raised both hands in apology.

I can't be a part of it, bud. I just can't.

I know it. I ain't askin you to. What I wanted to know you told me, and I thank you for it. I don't need nothin else.

They looked at each other in the bright and ugly light and at last the boy rose and tipped his hat. You best go on now, he said. Don't want to leave that peach all alone.

*   *   *

IN THE GENERAL
store the boy bought a bag of oats for the horse and the mule and he bought a new razor and a blue cotton washcloth. He bought bread and a pound of cheese and five tins of sardines the old man had asked for. He bought a new pair of cufflinks fashioned from stones and displayed in a cracked fishbowl to replace the pair he had lost by his riverside camp and he bought a soda with his remaining dime. The old woman behind the counter carefully placed all of his purchases in a paper bag. She looked up at him each time she pushed an item into the bag and she offered him a soft smile from the leather jowls of her thin face. She took a very long time and seemed to be trying to place the boy in her memory.

Finally she tilted the bag upright and folded it over twice and held it out to him.

Aren't you the nice boy who came in and bought those sheets? she called out to him.

The boy, who had taken up the bag and was halfway out the door, stopped and turned back to her. Yes ma'am, he said. I think I am.

The cotton ones, right?

Yes ma'am. That's right.

Oh, how nice that is.

Ma'am?

I just find that to be sweet. Goin out to do the shoppin chores.

She wagged a long bony finger at him.

Your mother must be very proud.

T
HIRTEEN

IN THE NIGHT it grew very cold and he woke from a dream of the bears disbanding along a purple ridge and lumbering soundlessly into the knifing snow and after that he could sleep no more. He pushed off the bedroll that had gathered a light dusting of dew and pulled on his boots and rode out upon the foothills in the last hours before dawn. The moon was sickly and disfigured behind the clouds and the light it cast upon the earth was without substance.

Out on the mesa it was profoundly dark and the boy's horse lost her footing and went down on her front legs and pitched the boy into a gravel ditch from which he emerged bleeding above his left eye. The mare swung her head around and staggered up and stepped backward, panicking with her nose high in the gusts of wind and her eyes drained white and spooked on the boy.

The cut was deep and long across his eyebrow and he wiped the blood away from his face and ran a glove along the back of his trousers. He collected the reins and crawled out of the ditch and soothed the mare down and stroked her mane with his gloved hands and told her it wasn't her fault.

From where they stood the boy could see off to where the railroad tracks were forming out of the bleak horizon. Below them on the foothills the singed brown conifers were beginning to forest green. Just as he knew there would soon be skeins of dark weather and whorls of blue rain, he knew his own chance for setting out to Colorado would soon pass him by for another season if he did not hurry.

He went on riding long into the remaining night, up along the mesa above the edge of town and down into the mud slicks and crabgrass. Such sparse trees rose before him he took them to be corpses of trees, and soon he found himself galloping the road that stretched out to the lawyer's lone and silent home.

Though he had figured how to pop the lock on the docket with his knife, all he ever found was news about such things as the water table and a new car for the mayor. He had read fragments of a letter addressing the portioning and zoning of the lands and a bill being drafted that would tax the Indian women for using the space around the willow tree to sell their goods. He read about a number of business transactions and the purchase of pressing machines for a new metal company. He read countless figures that calculated earnings and percentages but never in his search did he find even a single word about the girl.

He slowed the horse at the gate and came down and drew up the latch quietly and stepped into the yard to find the house as he had found it every day. No hand seen through the window nor foot upon the floor. No voice left trailing in the wind, and no words that he could give to beseech it.

He went up to the window and wiped his sleeve across the hoary frost that had formed upon it and peered into the room. A chair and a standing lamp. A pale brown loveseat. An empty mantle. In the corner of the room a coatrack stood unadorned but for a single white shirt that hung from one of the wooden pegs. Below the collar was a golden chevron. There was an inscription upon it but the boy could not make it out. He ran his hand over his hair and walked around the house to where a cobblestone water well stood with its bucket creaking forlornly on the hook. There were no windows in the rear of the house and after a while he went back to his horse and swung his leg over her and swiped at the fresh blood on his cheekbone and walked out onto the cold hard road.

*   *   *

Traveling back into the foothills he downstepped the backside of the mesa wall and trotted the horse into a gravel pass. In the distance a fire burned fiercely behind the timberline and crudely shaped tents worked themselves out of the firelight like broken fragments of some failed greater contraption.

He slowed the mare when he came upon the tents. Through the fire he could see to where a great many men sat crosslegged or stood crouching in gray-and-black overalls with gray blankets upon their shoulders. They were about twelve in number and all were talking at intervals and over one another though none raised their heads to any of the voices, as if speech were as trifling as scrubbing their hands.

The shadow of the mare fell long and dark upon the congregation and some of the men turned to the boy. He was wearing only his ranch jacket and undershirt and on his legs he wore his burlap-sack pants one leg of which was twisted inside the top of his boot and he wore no hat at all. His hair fell thick and stiff across his face from where he momentarily pushed it aside to better see them with his good eye.

Howdy.

The man who spoke out was of mild build and middle age and his own face was cut along the jawline.

Where you headed to at this hour? he called out.

He held a bottle of cutthroat whiskey in his hands which were cradled between his crouched haunches. On his left eye he wore a black leather patch and he nodded slightly at the boy as if to make kinship over the common ruination of their eyes.

The boy looked around at the tents and then at the fire and then at the man who spoke to him. He put his hand up to where his hat should have been, then put both hands down into his trouser pockets. I seen your fire, he said. I wasn't headed nowhere.

You look rightly bad off.

I'm alright.

None of the other men seemed to pay the boy any mind. The firelight danced upon their faces and spent itself, with the wind guiding it one dumbstruck face to the next. The man drew on his bottle and handed it to a bald man sitting beside him without ever looking at him. That so, he said.

He motioned the boy to a place across from him where another man had pushed back away from the fire and laid his head down and was now snoring indelicately with his legs curled into his chest.

I was about to commit myself to story. Set on down.

The boy did not agree but only let down the horse's lead rope and came and sat by.

My ears is too tired to listen to your jawin tonight. We was talkin about Roosevelt.

The bald man was small and wiry and the hand he held raised in protest had only a thumb and a pinky finger.

Ain't no more to say about Roosevelt, the first man said. The man hunts in his Sundays.

We ain't talkin about his Sundays.

Well, what I'm talkin about is if we goin to waste the last hours before we head back to the tracks, we ain't goin to waste em on somebody who wears his Sundays to sight a buck.

Let him go on, someone rasped from outside the firelight. Ain't a gun in Texas that'll stop him anyhow.

It just so happens I got myself such a gun.

Shut up Franklin, someone else said. You ain't got no gun.

Looking around the boy saw a deck of playing cards by one man's side and he saw the many bottles clenched in their hands. He saw that the fire was girded by spike irons that were toed out and rusted and he saw the sledge handles leaned against the tent posts and he knew the men to be railroaders come to bear witness to the mayor's new city.

No one asked him his name nor did they give theirs but only looked at him briefly, then looked back at the fire and drew on the bottles with hands as black as the liquor they drank. His eyes dark and low upon them, the boy himself seemed to be pondering why he had come to sit there and now what to do. He snapped off his gloves and felt around in his jacket pocket and brought forth a crumpled pack of cigarettes. One of the men offered a swig of his bottle in trade. The boy declined the bottle but gave the man a cigarette. He asked the man why they hadn't put up at the inn. The man only shook his head and said they weren't never allowed to stay the night but he did not say why.

Now what was I talkin about?

The man went down from his haunches and sat with his legs drawn out before the fire and his hands cupping the bottle on his belt buckle.

Diggin tracks, someone said.

That's right. Diggin tracks.

He turned the bottle down from his belt and tipped the nose of it across the fire at the boy. You ever seen a fire in the desert? he said.

Not this one again, someone called out. You don't never tell nothin but this.

The storyteller looked as though he'd been wounded and he balled his lips up at the man who had called out.

I ain't talkin to you no more.

Go to hell, someone else called.

I ain't talkin to you neither. I'm talkin to the boy.

I'm sure even he's heard it before.

For a moment he kept his working eye on the place from where the last slur had come, then turned back and looked across the fire to the boy. He had to tilt his head to ballast his sight which made it seem it was not only his eye he had lost but his equilibrium too.

You ever seen a fire in the desert, son?

No sir.

No. Not likely. Not likely any of you all have.

He looked around the fire defiantly. None of the men answered except one who was very drunk and all he said was, She ain't nothin but a two-dollar whore.

Exceptin William over there. He was with me.

The man he named William sat with his tattered blue hat pulled over his eyes and he raised his bottle gravely at the sound of his name, though he did not seem to know for what purpose it had been called.

We was with a crew down on California, the man went on. This was before the Chinamen come and brought the wage down. We'd meant to replace some track line been run thin by the heat but we ended up spendin most days that summer diggin tracks. I'll tell you that line didn't run but a fingernail into the desert. And I'll tell you another thing.

He stopped and took the bottle to his lips. He looked at the boy across the fire.

You get yourself a fire goin in the desert, you best send a telegram quick as you can to your next of kin. They talk about these steep-grade trains run up through the mountains bein most dangerous, but let me tell you son, you don't clear them tracks of sand and the train come on over them, step back. Even if the bumps would ride there's the hot coals from the furnace can bust open, and that's what this here story tells.