Robert Wilson: A Hidden Place

Bone thought he was probably right.

They moved on down the tracks. In daylight he was able to see that this was a tiny agricultural depot, locked in by oceans of lettuce and, far off, arbored grapes. The sun had burned off the mist and the day was hot and getting hotter. The heat came up off the cracked dry bed of the railroad right-of-way like a growing thing. He saw the jungle in the distance now as Deacon had said, a small concatenation of box huts and hovels where a river cut through the broad flat valley and a stand of dusty dogwoods had grown up.

Bone had never been here before, though he had been many places like it. He knew he was not smart, but something in him, some instinct, prevented him from riding the same way twice. He wondered sometimes what he would do if he ran out of railroads, but that had never happened; maybe, he thought, it was impossible; maybe there were always more railroads, always more places like this. There certainly seemed no end to it.

He wondered, too, what it was he was looking for, what it was that pulled him with such a dire if dimly sensed imperative. It was more than habit or hunger. It was something he did not share with these other men. Something for which he had not been able to discover a name.

“I saw a man once,” Deacon was saying, his thin-soled shoes slapping against the packed earth, “take a drink of muscatel and walk out the door of a moving boxcar. I swear it, I saw him do that. Did he live? I don’t know. I guess it’s possible. The things people live through would surprise you. Like Bone here. Beating like that would kill a normal man. Yard bulls leave him in the ditch till somebody finds him. City buries him … or they pitch him into the river so he floats out to sea. There are more dead tramps floating in the ocean than live ones riding the rails: that’s a fact. You go out some places the water would be just thick with tramps. Like fish. The tide brings them all together. That’s what they say.”

“That’s a crock of shit,” Archie said. “You don’t know anything,” Deacon said calmly.

Bone had seen oceans, mountains, deserts so dry they drew the moisture out of you and left you like a cooked crab, all hard dry chitin and no meat. And cold and hot. He had seen river valleys lush as rain forests, industrial towns black with coal smoke and battered by noise and poverty. It was all the same to him. There was a thing he wanted, and he had not found it. Something sweet, he thought, like music. Privately, he believed Deacon’s story about the dead hoboes and wondered if he would end that way himself: Bone floating anonymously with the others, Bone merged into a vast human sea-wrack.

Deacon led him to a circle of charred stones under a tree, a blackened frying pan. “We have a little i food,” Deacon said. “You’d like that? Yeah? A little food?”

Bone nodded. He had not eaten for some days.

“Food,” Deacon said, gratified.

Archibald sighed unhappily and began heating up a few chary slices of salt pork. There was a can, also, of concentrated soup.

Deacon sat down and Bone, grimacing in pain, crouched beside him. Deacon dug deep into the folds of his faded cotton shirt and brought forth one of his snipes—a “Sunday church snipe,” Deacon called it; he had explained back on the flatcar that the best and longest snipes were the ones the churchgoers butted out just before services Sunday mornings. Bone didn’t smoke; he shook his head, smiling to demonstrate his gratitude. He thought Deacon must be really sorry for trying to steal his coat. Deacon carefully repocketed the snipe and said, “You’re the most ugly man I have ever seen but I like you. Bone, Deacon likes you.”

Bone nodded, smiling industriously. “Tonight,” Deacon said, “we leave this pissant town. No work here. No use even looking. Ride away is about the best we can do.”

“Bad place to camp,” Archie put in. “Bad cops,” Deacon said. “That’s the story here. You understand me, Bone? Tonight.”

“Yes, Deacon,” Bone said out loud. But he perceived that the sun was already on its way down, and the two men showed no signs of packing up. Move on, he thought, yes, that would be good. Inside him, strange feelings stirred.

That night, for the first time, the feeling grew so strong in him that he thought it might drive him mad.

He woke up after Deacon and Archie and the rest of the hoboes in the meager encampment had fallen asleep. The fires were out and frying pans hung in the dogwood trees like Christmas decorations. It was dark, and the cold had come down again.

Bone sat up, shivering. He wasn’t sure what had brought him awake. He gazed up at the nameless and unfamiliar constellations. This feeling, he thought. But maybe it was only hunger. Bone was big and the food he had begged from Deacon and Archie had only aroused his huge appetite.

He stood up, tiptoeing over Deacon where he was curled up in a moth-eaten Hudson’s Bay blanket, and began to move silently and swiftly back along the train tracks. There was a crescent moon and Bone’s night vision was very good. The rows of head lettuce stretched away to converge at the vanishing point, a horizon full of food. He boosted himself up a barbed-wire fence, ravaging the skin on his palms, and fell on the other side. The lettuce was all new growth but it didn’t matter to Bone,- he filled his mouth with green matter, swallowed, filled it again, again, until at last his hunger had abated some.

He sat back on his haunches, drooling.

He wasn’t hungry anymore. And yet this other feeling persisted.

It was like his travel-on feeling, but more intense; as if his shuddering sickness had become a part of it and his hunger and his pain. It would not be still inside him.

His eyes twisted under his thick brow ridge. What is it, what?

He itched with an unfocused sense of urgency.

That was when he heard the dogs.

Their baying broke the stillness like a knife. Bone crouched down instinctively not breathing. But he was not in immediate danger: the sound was corning from the south, where the hobo jungle was.

A raid.

He had seen raids before. He knew how it was when the people came into a hobo camp with their pipes and shotguns. Once he had almost died in such a raid. His instinct was to run, to find a road or a train and get as far away from the violence as he could. But then he thought of Deacon and Archie sleeping and helpless back there and suddenly he was on his feet, running. His pulse beat in his ears, the air was cruel on his bloody hands, and he thought he might vomit up everything he had eaten. But he had to get back.

The southern end of the encampment had suffered first. The raiders were big men, farmers probably in red-checked shirts and hunting jackets. A fire had started up in one of the cardboard hovels, embers flying up, the light of it making the violence seem slow and cinematic. The dogs had gone wild with the smoke and the stink of the jungle; they dove like ferrets into hovels to drag out screaming men. The farmers used their iron pipes on anyone who was slow or who resisted. It had happened so suddenly that those on the fringe of the encampment, like Deacon and Archie, were only just beginning to come awake.

Bone pulled on their arms, trying desperately to communicate some sense of urgency through the barrier of their fatigue. He remembered Deacon bragging that a real tramp could sleep anywhere, through anything—but the problem now was waking up. In the excitement Bone had forgotten all his words.

Archie sized up the situation quickly and managed to run a few paces ahead. Deacon stood up at last—the farmers were terribly close now—and his face contorted unhappily as if he believed he might still be dreaming. Bone tugged him forward, but that was a mistake; Deacon cried out and fell over, his feet tangled in his own Hudson’s Bay blanket.