Robert Wilson: A Hidden Place

Bone pulled him up. But it was too late. A farmer in an orange hunting jacket swung his pipe and caught Deacon hard on the arm. Deacon shrieked and fell back. The farmer raised his pipe again, and Bone perceived that the man would kill Deacon if the blow were allowed to fall. To prevent it, Bone grasped the farmer’s right arm at its fullest extension and twisted until it snapped—a thing he had not realized he could do. The farmer gazed at Bone very briefly, his face gone white with shock and confusion; then he stumbled back, screaming.

Deacon was weeping with pain but managed to scuttle forward with his rucksack in his good hand. Archie helped him up, gap-jawed: “Deacon,” he said, “Deacon, you see what that big man did? . Jesus!”

“Go,” Deacon sobbed, “just for Christ’s sakes go!”

Two more of the farmers came up on the heels of the first, and before Bone could decently run he had to swing out his long arms with their fists like weights so that these two men fell down also, one of them unconscious and one almost certainly dead. A sort of collective moan rose up from the raiders.

This time Bone did not need to be goaded. He ran, keeping abreast of his friends. The fires roared behind him.

“Boxcar!” Deacon shouted. “See!”

A long, ponderous freight was just pulling out of the yards. The yard bulls and the railway cops had all congregated down by the hobo jungle; the open door of the boxcar gaped like a broken tooth. The three of them ran to catch it, Deacon favoring his injured shoulder. Before they reached it, though, a scissorbill stepped up from the shadows in the gully, and he was carrying a shotgun.

Deacon and Archie fell to their knees. Bone didn’t think about it at all. Reflexively, he let his momentum carry him forward as the railroad cop leveled the gun; he was faster than the man’s reaction time and was able to duck under the line of fire before the big muzzles of the gun erupted into the night. Then his broad bony hand was on the cop’s face, twisting it back, snapping vertebrae; the scissorbill fell backward into the scummy slough, dead before the idea of death could enter his mind.

Deacon helped Bone up into the boxcar. There were scraps of straw in the corners and the smell of cattle. They would be cold again tonight, Bone thought bleakly. But that hardly mattered now.

Deacon gazed back at the body of the scissorbill as the train picked up speed.

“He’s meat,” Deacon marveled. “Christ God, Archie, you were right.”

Archie looked at Bone from his recessed eyes and said nothing.

They slid the doors closed as the train accelerated into the night.

Deacon, still favoring his left arm, slapped Bone on the back.

“Stick with us, kid,” he said. “Stick with old Deacon and Archie.”

The next day there were mountains again, and snow in the night. Bone huddled in his pea coat—it was torn now—and listened to Deacon and Archie swap tales about how it had been in Bakersfield and Terre Haute and Klamath Falls and how it felt to be crossing the Hump again. Deacon brought out a bottle of muscatel and the two of them drank until their conversation blurred and Bone could no longer understand them. They gave him little quizzical sidelong glances, called him “Buddy” and “Good Friend Bone” and were careful to offer him what they had, more profusely when they were reassured that he would not accept. Eventually they fell asleep.

Bone sat in the open door of the boxcar, the cold wind tearing at him. There was a pulsing in him, much stronger than it had been before. He could feel it.

For the first time it made words inside him—the ghosts of words.

Here I am, find me. Find me, here I am.

The train roared down the eastern spine of the Continental Divide, and Bone felt the same unfamiliar strength rising up in him, the strength that had allowed him to kill all those men back at the railyard. He was focused now. Aimed. For the first time in Bone’s memory he knew where he was going.

Here I am. Find me.

The clear, high song of it was unmistakable. At last he understood. Bone was coming.

The municipality of Haute Montagne stood at the junction of the Fresnel River and the railway, its water tower and its huge granaries erupting from the prairie like blocks of basalt from an eroded sea floor. Once, not long ago, the town had aspired to be a city.

It still had a little of city in it. There was the main street, Lawson Spur, or simply The Spur, which was blacktopped and lined with concrete sidewalks dazzlingly white in the noonday sun, which boasted the big Bingham’s Hardware Store and J. C. Penney’s and Times Square Lunch, all fronted in dusty yellow brick; and there was the trolley that ran on embedded rails from the switching yard down The Spur to the granaries farther south. Everyone agreed that those were big-city conveniences. Once they had been accepted as harbingers of greater things.

But Haute Montagne remained a small town in its artful cultivation of box elders and bur oaks, in its side streets on which the pavement gave way quickly to cobbles or pressed dirt, in its gabled clapboard houses with high dormers and big front stoops that looked so invitingly shady when high summer lay on the town like liquid metal. It was a small town by virtue of its silences at noon and midnight, and the distances the big trains traveled before they arrived hissing at the depot. The prairie vastnesses had made of the town an island, isolated, proud in its isolation, set apart from the chaos that had so lately descended on the country at large.

But the town was not in any real way safe, no safer than New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, and perhaps that unacknowledged wisdom made its decline the more galling. Haute Montagne (“where the railroad meets the wheatfield”) might once have wanted to be a city, but that ambition had died—or at least had been set aside, like the hope chest of a young woman destined for spinsterhood—in the Depression that had come like a bad cold and stayed to become something worse, some lingering if not fatal disease. The granaries had laid off much of the town’s male population; the trains stopped less often; dust and drought had withered too much fertile land. The noon silences became profounder. Midnights were interminable. There was a sense, never explicit, of some even darker eventuality hovering like an army of locusts beyond the indefinite horizon—biding its time.

Travis Fisher had some feeling of that when he stepped off the eastbound train and onto the whitewashed boards of the Haute Montagne depot with July like a haze in the air.

He had been tempted to stay on the train all the way to wherever it went, New York, Maine, just sit and watch the miles pass away like unremembered dreams. His ticket was paid up only this far, though, and he had change of a dollar in his pocket for money and no real choice. He climbed off the pullman car into an immense summer silence and withdrew from his shirt pocket the hand-drawn map his Aunt Liza had sent him in the mail. South down The Spur to Lambeth, west on Lambeth to DeVille, number 120. In truth he was a little afraid of this new place, but he was nineteen years old and had carried a grown man’s responsibilities since the year he had turned twelve, and so he straightened his shoulders and picked up his bag and began walking. The canvas bag contained a change of clothes and a photograph of his mother. It was not heavy.

There were old men and young men side-by-side on the public benches in front of the train station, and they all looked at Travis with an eloquent incuriosity. His footsteps on the pavement were loud in his ears. At the corner of Lambeth and Spur he should have turned west, but he saw the Times Square Lunch with its wide glass windows and realized at once how hungry he was. He bought a dime western at a newsstand and let himself gratefully into the cool shade of the diner. There were three men at a side table but nobody at the long Formica-topped lunch bar.