by Neal Barrett
One morning, about a week after he’d first seen the man, Howie woke up with a start, knowing something was wrong. The man stood right above him, big boots spread wide and a heavy, long-handled axe in his hands.
Howie didn’t move.
“That’s right,” said the man. “Just stay quiet like.” He nodded toward Howie’s belt. “Slide that knife out slow and toss it aside.”
Howie did as he was told.
“You got anything else on you?”
“No.”
“What’s in your pockets?”
“Some nuts. And a couple of them, green fruits.” The man looked at him. “What kind of fruits?” “The kind that grows on the end of sticker plants.”
The man almost grinned. “You eatin’ cactus buds, are you?”
“I eat whatever I can get.” Howie couldn’t hold back any longer. Ever since he’d opened his good eye he hadn’t been able to take his gaze off the man. Strong, wide chin, dark eyes, a broad nose, and—he was black! Just as black and shiny as pitch!
“Something bothern’ you?” asked the man.
“You, I reckon,” said Howie. “Damn… you ain’t a nigger, are you?”
The dark face didn’t change. He motioned with the axe. “Get on up.”
Howie did. “What you goin’ to do with me?”
The man slung the axe over his shoulder and scratched his belly. “First I’m goin’ to ask you why you been sniffin’ my heels for ’bout a week. Sittin’ behind bushes and watching a man eat his supper.” The man made a face. “You got to have some reason for doin’ somethin’ like that.”
“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 do
wn 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.
The business of the black man’s stock was on his mind, but it wasn’t a subject Howie felt like bringing up again. Where the man was taking them—whatever they might be— sounded too much like asking about the man himself. And that was clearly something the man didn’t want to get into. Howie couldn’t much blame him. If there weren’t supposed to be any black people, and no one figured there were, there might be a good reason to keep quiet about where there were some more.
Once, he’d let the man know real plain about that. “I can take off some other way. Whenever it pleases you. I figure you got places to go that ain’t the same as mhie.”
The black man looked at him a long moment, then said he’d sure let Howie know.
Howie didn’t have to bring up the stock again. The man did that on his own, coming back to the fire one evening after staying a long time in the brush. “One of ’em is pretty sick,” he announced. “Don’t figure he’ll make it for long.” His dark eyes got hard and thoughtful. “Reckon he’s been through enough for anyone, without crossing a place like this. Don’t know as I done ’em a favor taking them on.”
The man’s face, which always seemed to hide a great and silent strength, was suddenly drained and weary. He squatted by the fire, big hands on his knees, and watched the popping coals.
Howie felt he ought to say something, but didn’t know what. Maybe the man didn’t want to hear anything just then.
“Is he the… one that done the talking?” he finally asked. The man shook his head without looking up. “No. ’nother one from that.”
“He still talk to you some?”
The black man raised his eyes. “He don’t like to do a lot of talking. If he talks, he got to think ’bout where he’s been.”
Howie thought about that. “He ever say where that was? Where they came from?”
“Said he didn’t talk a lot, now didn’t I?” The man tossed a stick in the fire. Howie got the message, but couldn’t bring himself to stop.
“Look,” Howie said, “I’m not saying it isn’t so, or that this feller don’t talk, just like you say. But it don’t make sense. If he talks, he ain’t meat. And if he’s people, then someone treated him and the others like they wasn’t. Why’d anyone do that?”
The black man looked pained. Like nothing people did surprised him much. “Why’nt you just get up and go ask him?” he told Howie. “Reckon he’d be the one to answer that.” He stood and gave Howie a brooding look, then walked off out of the light until Howie couldn’t see him anymore.
It doesn’t make sense, Howie thought, and decided he was tired of thinking and saying it all the time.
The black man didn’t talk to him in the morning. Howie followed him across the flat hot land that didn’t seem to end or begin. Then, when they stopped to share sparse swallows of water, the man stoppered his clay jug and looked right at Howie. “Look. My name’s Earl. You can tell me yours if you want.” Howie did, and the man said it once to himself. “I can’t take you where I’m going, Howie, but you can go along some, then I’ll show you how to bear north and west. It’s where the ships come in I was tellin’ you about. You might want to see ’em.”
It was a fine thing for Earl to do, and it made Howie feel better than he had in a long time. “Why, I might just do that,” he said.
It was peculiar how it started, because he was thinking about ships, and the funny-looking fish Earl told him he might see. It came to him slowly, like he was watching the dark surface of a lake for something rising up quietly from its depths. He couldn’t say what it was, but he didn’t feel good about it at all.
When the night came again and supper was done, he made himself walk back to where the others always stayed, a little away from the camp. They looked at him cautiously, but didn’t run. He knew at once that Earl was right. They were dirty and looked like stock, but their eyes told him better. He wanted to turn and go. Until now he could tell himself that Earl was maybe crazy, or making it all up. He couldn’t do that anymore.
“Which one of you is it that talks?” Howie said. They all looked at him. One of the girls was tending the boy who was sick. They were all younger than Howie. “I don’t mean any harm. Earl’ll tell you that.”
“What do you want, mister?” The boy who spoke had pale blue eyes and a nose that had been broken and had healed bad. His voice was thick, but Howie could understand him.
“Who treated you like this?” Howie said. “I want to know that, I want to know who did it.”
“Who are you?” the boy said.
“I’m not anybody at all. My name’s Howie Ryder.”
The boy looked down at his hands. He didn’t face Howie again for a long time. “You’re not one of them, I don’t guess,” he said finally.
“One of who?”
“The guv’munt. One of them.”
“It was the gover’ment give me this,” Howie said flatly. He pointed at the scarred flesh covering his bad eye, then squatted beside the boy. “Is that who it was? Why the hell for?”
“They can do whatever they want,” the boy said simply, as if that explained it all. “Whatever they want to do.”
Howie waited. The boy looked at the others and something seemed to pass between them.
“I want an answer,” Howie said. “That’s all.”
“I don’t have any of those,” the boy said. He stood, walked back to the others, sat with his back to Howie, and pretended to be doing something else. Howie couldn’t do anything but leave.
Earl was asleep, or didn’t want to talk. The sky seemed alive with stars. The boy hadn’t told him a thing. The government, which likely meant troopers, had treated him like meat. Or so he said. It wasn’t something Howie wanted to believe, but he couldn’t put it aside. They were there and he could see them.
The desert night was chill and he rolled up in his blanket. He wished there was a way you could turn off your head when you liked. When you didn’t want to think anymore. Something like that’d be a blessing.
He wondered about Kari. Where she was; what she was doing now. He guessed the war would go on until it quit. Until one side or the other got tired of dying and gave up. Maybe that’s what had happened in the War way back when. Maybe there was no one left who wanted to fight, nothing left to burn.
He turned over with a start, suddenly aware that he had slept, that the night was nearly gone, that something had brought him abruptly out of sleep. He reached for his knife, then recognized the shadow. The boy was just sitting there, watching, not moving at all.
“Whatever you was thinking, it ain’t that,” the boy said. “You couldn’t know it. Not ’less you been there, you couldn’t. Hadn’t anyone ever got out
of that ’cept us. What they do there is use you like they want. You ain’t meat, but you’re by God close enough to it.”
Howie’s throat seemed constricted. “Use you how? What is it you’re talking about?”
The boy worked his mouth funny. “They do it ’cause stock gets weak and don’t breed good anymore. Meat don’t care if it’s humpin’ its sister or its ma, and that makes the blood go bad. You can’t stop ’em doing it, so they put good blood back in the herds. Only it ain’t meat blood. It’s people’s. The boys got to serve the best mares. The girls are put in with healthy bucks an’…”
“Godamn, you’re lying!” Howie exploded. He sat up and stared at the boy. “No one’d do a thing like that! No one!”
“They can do whatever they want,” the boy said.
Howie was shaken. Supper starting to crawl up his throat. “Someone… someone’d find out. They couldn’t do it without someone finding out.”
“Isn’t anyone going to do that,” the boy said. There was no feeling at all in his voice. “It’s down in the old Keys and you don’t get close unless you belong. It’s a lie, the whole damn thing, and they can’t take a chance on anyone finding out.”
The boy looked away from Howie, north, or nowhere at all. He seemed to be somewhere else. Howie thought he was simply turning away, like he did when he didn’t want to talk.
“Look,” the boy said finally, “Earl said it was up to me, but that I probably hadn’t ought to say anything at all. Only I got to do it. Maybe it ain’t right, but I got to do it. See, the thing is, I knew her. They don’t always cut your tongue right, and she could talk as good as me. She talked a lot about you. I knew who you was right off when you said your name. I tried to act like I didn’t but I did. You was the…
”Huuuuuuh…!”
Something tore at Howie’s heart. Food came up and he couldn’t stop it. “You’re talkin’ crazy stuff,” he said harshly, his voice as thick as the boy’s. “D’wanta… hear g’damn crazy stuff!”