Neal Barrett - Through Darkest America

“I just wanted to, I guess,” said Howie.

The man shook his head. “Not good enough.”

“It’ll have to be, mister.” Howie looked right at him. “’Cause there ain’t no more to it than that.”

The man seemed amused. “You’re not much afraid of this axe, are you? Don’t you figure I can use it?”

“I figure you can. But I ain’t goin’ to stand here shaking, if that’s what you’re waitin’ for.”

“How’d you lose the eye?”

“A feller cut it out with a knife.”

“You fight him back?”

“There wasn’t much way I could.”

The man nodded. He dropped the axe down to his side. “You can come and have some breakfast if you like. I don’t have no cactus buds, but I reckon you’d eat somethin’ else if you had to…”

There was a big flat pot of beans in the fire and loaves of hard bread that looked like they’d been baked in ashes. There seemed to be plenty. Howie dipped his cup gratefully. The taste of real food almost made him cry.

The man watched him, eating just a little himself. He motioned for Howie to take more, if he liked, but Howie nodded his thanks. His stomach had been empty too long.

He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask the man. Mostly, he wanted to know about niggers. There weren’t supposed to be any since the War. But he guessed there were, all right. Did they live out here, in the desert? Was that where the man was going?

He kept the questions to himself. The man probably had plenty of questions about him, too, but he hadn’t asked much, considering.

When he was finished, the black man took his own cup and Howie’s and set them aside. Then he took the rest of the beans and the ash-colored bread and carried everything away from the fire and out of the camp into the brush.

Howie watched, more than a little puzzled. The man sure didn’t strike him as the wasteful sort—throwing a whole good meal away when food was hard to come by. He walked on, making his way over the flat, and when he finally stopped he just set the beans and bread on the ground. Right down on the ground where his stock was bedded!

Howie was horrified. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The meat jumped right in and fell hungrily on the food, dipping it out of the pot with their hands. Howie’s stomach turned over. He could taste everything he’d eaten in his throat and he could have gotten up and killed the black man on the spot. There was no use hoping it hadn’t happened before. This was clearly the man’s regular habit, which meant he’d been scooping up beans, big as you please, right where stock grubbed their filthy hands the meal before!

“Something wrong?” The man stood watching him across the fire.

Howie was too angry to hold back. “Maybe I got no business saying it, mister… but I sure never seen a man feed good beans and bread to his stock. An’ off of pots meant for people, at that!”

The black man’s face didn’t change. He squatted by the fire and squinted far off like he was chewing something over in his mind. “They ain’t exactly stock,” he said finally. “They just kinda ’pear to be.”

Howie didn’t look at him. He just sat real still where he was. If he’d learned anything at all about people there was one thing certain as night: You couldn’t ever really figure a man inside, even a man you knew some. And he sure didn’t know this one. He wondered if he could get up and out of there on his bad leg before the man could grab the big axe again.

The black man read him easy. “I’m just telling you.” He eyed Howie squarely. “You was the one asking.” He poked a stick in the fire. “They was wandering ’round half starved when I come on ’em. Picking up leaves and bugs and whatever. Looked more like a bunch of bones than anything. Got all this far, though. Halfway ’cross the damn country.”

Howie considered. “Just how you figure-that?”

“Figure what?”

“Where they come from.”

The man stopped his poking and looked up. “One of ’em told me, is how. Rest of them got their tongues cut but this one talks so you can understand him some. You don’t believe none of this, do you?”

“About meat talking?” Howie studied his hands. “Mister, I ain’t arguing with a man that’s feeding me breakfast. But I’m saying if one of them… if something talked to you, it sure ain’t meat.”

The man gave him a humorless grin. “Well, that’s what I’m saying too, ain’t it?”

While the black man gathered up his things Howie kicked dirt over the fire, though there was nothing on the land to burn away. Neither spoke about it, but when the sun blazed up and turned the land hard as brass they started out together. Howie didn’t ask any more about the others. They trailed along behind, always keeping a distance. The black man didn’t seem to notice they were there.

They walked the long day, together and not together, neither pressing the other, taking their company for what it was. When they did talk, Howie found the black man knew surprisingly little about the world beyond the desert. Was there a war? He hadn’t heard about it. The name Lathan meant nothing to him. He did know men came down_to the desert more than they used to, moving to the south and then coming back with horses. He knew what the horses were for, but wanted nothing to do with them himself. A man’d be a fool to get on the back of such a thing.

When the night came and they stopped for the evening meal, Howie ate sparingly. He told the black man he was much obliged but didn’t want to deplete another man’s rations, when there was nothing he could contribute himself. The man said nothing, but understood it was mostly because of the stock.

They’d stopped for noon under the sparse shade of a mesquite. It was the highest point on the flatlands as far as the eye could see, no other object being more than a foot off the ground from one horizon to the other.

“If I’m askin’ something I maybe shouldn’t, just say so,” Howie said. “What I’m wondering is where all this goes, and what’s after it.” He caught the black man’s eye, and the little touch of caution there. “I wasn’t askin’ where you was headed,” he added quickly. “That’s sure no business of mine.”

“Didn’t figure you was,” the man nodded. He snapped a dry twig and worked it around in his mouth. “North you know better’n I do. And east too, I reckon. I never seen either and don’t want to. South is nothing at all. Just more of this. You start calling it Mexico somewhere down the line. Only it don’t change the land none to call it something different.”

“What’s down there?”

“I said nothing. Or nothing I know of.”

“There’s horses.”

“There’s horses. Nothin’ more than that.”

“And west?”

“West is California. There’s plenty there… none of it much better’n where you come from, I don’t reckon. There’s cities. And people.” His eyes brightened some. “And ships. There’s an ocean there, blue as it can be. And once in a while a ship comes in to port. Long and, dark, with big bright-colored sails. And people that don’t look nothing like me…”

He grinned, “…or like you, either.”

Howie was curious about that. “They ain’t from here, you mean?”

“No. They sure ain’t from here.”

“Where, then? There isn’t anyplace else.”

“Well, I guess maybe there is .”

Howie thought about that the whole day and part of the next. He tried to picture what one of the big ships with colored sails would look like. And people that weren’t the same as either him or the black man. What kind of people would they be? And where did they come from? There were other places in the world before the War. Everybody knew that. But there weren’t supposed to be any now.