Behold

by Barker, Clive

  “So here you sit,” another fella said. “Afraid to move anywhere but the wrong direction.”

  The Zanzibar-man cackled. “Pretty much.”

  The longer the evening went on, the sorrier Owen got to feeling for the colored fellas. He knew their names now, Leo and Micah, and that they were from Louisiana, but nothing else. They sat farther back from the fire than the others, heads down over their cans of stew even though they’d added to it as good as or better than most.

  “What about you?” Owen said.

  The pair of them looked at each other, then Micah, the one who’d brought the squirrel, said, like it was just another day, “Spent near two weeks lost in a swamp this summer. There was more of me when I went in, but the skeeters got the rest.”

  Now this was a story Owen wanted to hear.

  “Got inside this boxcar back home. Couple hours later, old man in there with me wakes up, he’s looking at me real keen-eyed. He’s already been where we’re going, just got turned around the day before. So he already knows that in the next town up ahead they’re hunting for someone looks too much like me. Same old thing, say he been messing with a white woman. Well, the old man and me both know how that goes. One black neck stretches as good as the next, and they ain’t too particular long as they get to string somebody up. If I ain’t the one that done it, I done something.”

  Around the fire, it wasn’t hard to tell apart the fellas who were already looking at Micah with fresh suspicions, like squirrel or not, maybe he wasn’t one of the good ones after all.

  “Old man waits for the train to slow down as it goes around a bend, then he hustles me to the door to jump me off that car. Ain’t nothing but swamp out there, I tell him. Old man just laughs, says I can take my chances with the snakes or with the rope. So I picked the snakes.”

  He looked down at his can of stew like it had something to tell him.

  “And the skeeters. And the gators,” Micah laughed, then turned somber. “That old man saved my life. If I’d got in another boxcar, or if he’d kept on sleeping, or if he hadn’t got hisself turned around in the first place . . . ”

  “You’d be four inches taller with a wobbly head,” Leo said. “And I wouldn’t have to listen to you telling this every night.”

  “I tell it to figure it out for myself. Ain’t never had a turn of luck like that before in my life. Makes me scared I might’ve done used up all the good luck I got.”

  “I think luck is more like love,” Carole piped up with. “It may come and go, but you don’t use it up if it’s real, and on the worst days of your life, it’s what’s there for you when nothing else is.”

  Micah puzzled on that, then broke into a smile. “Well, if you can still say that out here, then maybe there’s something to it.”

  It came soon after that, curiosity getting the better of someone, the way it always did. “The two of you married, is that what you are?”

  “Brother and sister,” Owen said, like always. It was easier that way, apt to keep Carole safer from someone sniffing too close while not setting up expectations to act in a way they couldn’t if he’d said yup, been married most of a year now.

  The answer was good enough for some but he knew what the rest were thinking, as long as they had decent eyes. Owen, he was a Riley, and rawboned Wisconsin hayseed. He looked every inch of it, too, from his big clomping feet to the unruly shock of blond hair piling up from his head. Carole, though, was a Delaporte from Joliet, with a heart-shaped face and kewpie doll eyes and that thick black hair pinned up under her cap most of the time, but when she let it loose, lord have mercy, that was a sight to behold.

  Every time he saw it, he wondered what it would be like to touch. But Carole wouldn’t have him, and he wasn’t asking, not yet anyway, because if a fella expected to pursue an arrangement like that, he had to have prospects, something better than one more day of dust and wind and picking fruit.

  So here they sat, pretending and waiting, because somebody always had to bring it up: “For brother and sister, you two don’t look anything alike.”

  “Neither did our mothers,” Carole said, which wasn’t even a lie, but shut them up just the same.

  Later, once it was pure dark out, and the owls hooted and the bats chased the bugs drawn to the flames, Carole asked if anyone had been to Salinas recently. Or if they might have heard of what was supposed to be there. Nobody had. When she told them what she’d heard last week, around a fire just like this, in Georgia, they seemed uncertain what to make of it.

  Yes, it would be grand if such a thing existed, but it surely didn’t, because why should it, and even if it did, what would it be doing at a hobo jungle in Salinas, California?

  A stringy fella with a smirk for a face waved it off. “Sounds like nigger talk to me.”

  Leo straightened with a scowl. “Then you won’t fall off your seat from me saying it sounds like something I heard about when I was a bitty boy. Place I grew up, there was a hoodoo woman they said had a smoky-looking mirror that showed her things. Only difference is, she was the only one it showed anything to. Didn’t nobody else know how to look, I suppose. Or could be she was the only one the mirror liked.”

  “What’d I tell you? Nigger talk.”

  “Maybe so, peckerwood. You look more like a chicken guts man yourself, so I can see how you might have a problem telling fortunes with a mirror.”

  For a minute it looked like there was going to be a fight, but nobody really wanted one, and soon enough everybody simmered down and moved along. No reason to do the bulls’ work for them.

  Carole seemed to take heart in it, somebody believing her, but she hadn’t been out here long enough. Owen figured he knew the real trouble. Whatever there was or wasn’t in Salinas, it was foolish to hope on such things, because hope was what broke hearts the quickest.

  ***

  Owen was up with the dawn and whistling with the songbirds. At one end of the encampment was the nearest thing to a bathroom—not for relieving yourself, you did that farther along, but for spiffing up. An oval mirror with a busted handle hung by a string from a scrawny cottonwood, head height. On the ground below, a crate served as a table for a scummy cake of shaving soap and a razor. No blade, but if you had your own, you were good, and he did. He carried it in his wallet, kept it sharp by whetting it on stones along the rails and stropping it on the leather of his belt. He splashed water from a bottle and lathered up and started with his neck.

  “Never saw a man take that much pleasure in a shave out where birds could shit on him.” It was Micah.

  “Keeps me civilized. You stop caring about a good shave, you let go of pride.” Owen tilted his head for another view in the mirror and cruised along the edge of his jaw. “I may be dressed like a bum, might smell like one too, but that don’t mean I got to think like a bum.”

  Micah scruffed at the wool on his own face, maybe a week since he’d scraped it off. “I can take it or leave it. What I miss out here, talk about civilizing, I miss a piano.”

  Owen locked eyes with Micah’s reflection and cocked a brow. “You play?”

  “If I know one Scott Joplin tune, I bet I know fifty, and that’s just getting warmed up.”

  Now his cheeks. “I’ll have to hear you play sometime, then.”

  “You point out the ivories, I’ll do the rest.” Micah scuffed at the dirt like he had something else to say but had to dig it up first. “I’m hoping you might even get a chance, too. Wondering if you’d much mind if me and Leo was to keep company with you to Salinas. What Miss Carole was talking about last night, Leo, he sets store by it. Not sure if I do, but Leo’s stuck on it now, and if it’s true, if that place shows you what she say it does, that could make things some easier on us, too.”

  Owen flicked away a foamy wad of lather and whiskers, then started under his nose. “If Carole’s okay with it, then I am too.”

  “We don’t gotta ride on the same cars or nothing, just didn’t want you thinking you’s being followed, that’
s all.”

  “No, ride where you want, it don’t matter.” He nicked himself at the corner of his nose and hissed. “What’s so important about it to Leo?”

  “Just trying to make finding work easier if we can. Leo, he heard there used to be black cowboys out west, maybe still is, thought we could give that a try. Cows don’t care about no color but the red of the branding iron. Might help knowing ahead if we got a future in it, though.”

  Owen caught his reflection again. “Have you ever even rid a horse?”

  “Not so much legal, but yeah, I done it. Didn’t fall off drunk, figure I’ll do even better sober.”

  “Okay, then.” Owen had to laugh, but it didn’t come out as happy-sounding as he thought it might. “There’s gotta be a ranch foreman somewhere who appreciates that kind of attitude. Maybe Salinas can help you find him. Yep. Who knows?”

  Micah eyed him a moment, turning squinty. “You do wanna go, don’t you? I thought last night you did, but you don’t much sound like it.”

  Owen started mopping the suds from his face with a rag. “It means the world to Carole, so I want to get her there. But me . . . if all I’m doing is riding, I ain’t working, and if I ain’t working, I ain’t sending money home. I’m a fruit tramp ‘cause I choose to be. There’s nothing for me back in Wisconsin. My ma, she’s got the consumption. They got her bedded up in the sanatorium in Waukesha County. My pop, he used to have a job putting sheet steel in a press. The machine’d come down and stamp it into a cookpot. Until it took his right hand halfway to his elbow. That was it for him. He always said he was only ever any good for picking things up and putting them down again, but nobody wants a hired hand who’s just got the one. So it’s all on me, wherever I can find it.”

  Micah made a groan of sympathy. “Should’ve told that story last night, you’d’ve maybe won that last bit of squirrel.”

  “But Carole, she’s—”

  Owen stopped himself before he could go further. Cripes, he nearly let it slip. It was too early, and he needed coffee to get him going, and nobody had any. He just had yesterday’s boiled egg to look forward to. Better than an empty belly, but there was no kick to it.

  “She not really your sister, is she,” Micah said.

  “You got no call to say that. You don’t know nothing about us, neither one.”

  “Well, I know a man don’t look at his sister the way you do her unless he got a sickness in the soul, and you don’t seem the type.”

  Owen shook his head, furious as a wet dog. “I don’t look at her. Like hell I do.” Then he shot a glance back to make sure Carole wasn’t hearing any of this, and nobody else, either. “Do I?”

  Micah juggled his hands up and down. “Maybe not so’s most would notice.”

  “Then what in hell are you doing noticing?”

  “Ain’t nothing but seeing what most folks overlook. Just used to reading white faces, is all. Can’t help it. Where I come from, that makes a big difference in how your day goes.”

  Owen had to laugh again, even less happy-sounding than before. Found out by a colored piano player cowboy with no cows and no piano. Didn’t that beat all.

  “It’s your business. Ain’t gonna say nothing to nobody. Just thought I could save you the trouble of pretending. That can be hard to keep up.” Micah took a step away, then turned back. “Sounded like you was gonna tell me something about Miss Carole before you bit it off. You still wanna get that off your chest?”

  He did. And didn’t. But might as well. “Like I told you, I got a purpose out here. I got reasons for putting up with this. It ain’t like that for Carole. Her pop threw her out for no more cause than he said she made one too many mouths to feed. Kept both her brothers cause they’d be pulling their own weight soon enough, the way he saw it, but Carole, he told her to scram and never come back.”

  Micah shook his head at the evil of it, looking at the ground.

  “So this Salinas business, it’s all she’s got. She just wants to know there’s a path forward that don’t end up with her on her back all day, if you get my drift. Just one look at it, to know it’s there . . . that’d do her a world of good.”

  Micah nodded. “Amen. A thing like that, you can hang onto it for a long time. Take it from somebody who knows hanging.”

  ***

  The world was always changing around them, but some parts stayed the same no matter where they were. There was always another train and a need to catch it. Always another hateful man trying to keep you from jumping on, and another one wherever it stopped, itching to punish you for jumping off.

  There was always another town with another shopkeeper ready to put you to work for a few hours, claiming an empty till at the end of the day with an apology that wouldn’t fool a deaf man. Sorry, buddy. Wish I could do better. But here’s a couple brown apples for you. You look like you’d be glad to have them.

  There was always another cop ready to beat you into the dirt for being down already. Always another house with a chalk mark on the curb, and somebody inside willing to share something worth keeping, and send you off with the wonder of it all renewed—that just when you thought it was the devil’s world through and through, you caught a little glimpse of God.

  The four of them sweated across the plains of western Kansas with the taste of grit in their mouths. They shivered in the snowy passes through the Rocky Mountains, sweltered down the western slopes and over the high desert on the other side. Mile by mile, they ate the smoke and the dust; they huddled together for warmth; they coughed and spat and heaved. Past Utah, past Nevada, through the parched inhospitable lowlands of eastern California, they began to despair of ever seeing anything green again, until the fertile valleys down the middle restored hope that it wasn’t all shades of brown.

  When they got to Salinas, Owen was farther west than he had ever been. He’d worked the valley, but never been to the town. His nose found a new smell in the air, clean and crisp—the scent of the ocean blowing in from a few miles away on a kiss of cool breezes. Even Micah and Leo, no strangers to damp air, said it was nothing like the heavy, dank smell of Louisiana wetlands.

  After they jumped off the train past the west side of town, it didn’t take much asking to get pointed the right way. A mile’s walk to the north at most. Now that they were here, Carole was as scared as he’d seen her that they were too late. That while the site may still have been there, their destination would be gone, smashed the day before by men with clubs who couldn’t abide its presence, despising the very idea of it, something that gave without taking and asked for nothing in return.

  The camp was tucked alongside a shallow creek and a friendly grove of spindly trees—the most populous hobo jungle he’d come across, enough folks milling around that it needed three cookfires. They had tents made of tarps, and even did laundry here, clothes scrubbed in the creek, then draped on ropes stretched between trees to dry. A few of the older men looked thoroughly at home, jungle buzzards who’d found their way here and lost their reasons to move along.

  “You come for the mirror tree?” one of them asked. Bald and browned by the sun, bony within overalls, he took stock of them—Owen and Carole, Micah and Leo, dirty-faced and rumpled and weary.

  “What makes you ask that?” Owen said. “We just got here.”

  He shifted on a rickety cot like his joints ached. “You’ve got a look I’ve seen before. All four of you.”

  “What kind of look is that?”

  “Like you’re hungry and don’t know if you’re getting fed or not.”

  Carole took a step forward, one hand wrapped in the other. “But we can? We still can?”

  “That’s up to the tree.” He swiveled with a grimace to point further to the north. “That way. Give it time, though. Don’t rush it. Treat it like a horse you don’t want to spook. Let the place get used to you first.”

  It was the finest moment of Owen’s life, the feeling sinking deep—no, they were not too late. He rejoiced in the relief on Carole’s face,
and her smile, dear sweet Jesus, the brilliant giddy smile on her, just this side of tears, like she’d dropped a weight she’d been dragging since Georgia. He could’ve danced. Could’ve asked her to join him and twirled her until they fell down dizzy, then jumped up and done it all over again.

  But he never danced.

  “Seems to work best early and late, too,” the jungle buzzard said. “Mornings and evenings, when the sun sits low. Couldn’t tell you why.”

  “I could,” Leo whispered from behind. “When the worlds is in-between. Yeah.”

  Right now the sun was high but it wasn’t cruel. With plenty daylight left to burn, it seemed a sin to sit around when there was a town nearby and work to hunt for. His pockets weren’t going to fill up by sitting on his ass. But this place wasn’t going to get to know him if he wasn’t here, either. It made for a long afternoon . . .

  Then next thing he knew Carole was shaking him awake and the sun was in a whole new place in the sky, and the clouds blazed with pink and orange underbellies.

  “It’s time, sleepyhead,” Carole said.

  He could only blink as the setting sun made a halo of her hair. He had no idea when he’d curled up on his bedroll and sleep had taken him. He hadn’t even dreamed.

  “I don’t know how you could grab yourself a siesta.” She sounded envious. “All I could do was pace up and down and look out for the bulls.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

  Nothing would do but that Carole go first. Micah and Leo agreed. They hung back while she went ahead, losing sight of her as she moved away through the trees. How long was it supposed to take? He didn’t know. As long as it took.

  And why, even though this was supposed to be a good thing, did it feel like waiting for someone to die?