Hammond anxiously toyed with a little knife and pursed his lips. “They were old. Couldn’t fight back. Not much, at least. I don’t know why. I don’t. I don’t know why. He was just there, then… then he broke in, robbed them, and… and then he was gone. The police couldn’t find anything, and then we heard a rumor that he had gotten a ride south, down to Pennsylvania. The police followed and they tried to find something but couldn’t, so I did. I went out looking. I don’t know why I did that, either. It didn’t make sense to try and do anything else. That house and that town and that whole life was something gone to me. But I tracked him there, then heard whispers, rumors of a man like that headed further south, so I came south. That was nearly six months ago. He has taken me across the nation. I’ve seen more than I have in my life before and more than I ever wanted to see, but I’ve never seen him. I’ve just been hearing things. The man with the scarred face. Mr. Shivers, as the hobos call him.”
Connelly snapped his head up.
“You recognize the name?” said Hammond.
“Yes.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“They talk about him like he’s not real,” said Connelly. “Like he’s a myth. Or the devil.”
“I think they’re getting him mixed up,” said Pike. “There may have once been a story of a Mr. Shivers, of the midnight man, but there’s this man out there and they’ve heard of him too and they get the two mixed up. They give him a name. It makes him easier for us to find, that’s for sure.”
“He’s a man,” said Hammond. “A man like you or I. He moves like one and he eats like one and he sleeps and shits like one. He’s not a ghost story and he’s not a ghost, no matter what the hobos say. We’ve all seen him. He looks man enough for me.”
“He travels on the rails and hitches rides where he can, like you,” said Roosevelt. “Like us. That’s how he gets away, city to city and county to county. I was in Chicago when he found me. There were bad times and he came. Made them worse, I guess.”
“How did it happen?” asked Connelly.
Roosevelt shifted in his seat. “Quickly. Work had been getting scarce at a factory I was at, this bumshit canning factory, and there was talk of a riot or a union and the entire place was just waiting for something to happen. Something bad. There had been beatings, union busters coming in and finding who said what and just beating the hell out of those fellas. And then he came. A ragged man in a ragged coat, with a great, ruined mouth and black eyes, ugly eyes. Like puddles of oil sitting in the road.” Roosevelt began to roll a cigarette. “Don’t know what he did. Maybe he said something. Maybe he hit someone. He was hanging around for a while and then one day the brawl just broke out and every man who could get a weapon was running into it, and the cops got into it and it seemed like the whole precinct was up in arms, fighting in an alley behind the goddamn factory. I don’t know what he did, but I know he done something.
“My friend Tommy died. Someone took a wrench and busted his head open. His eyes filled with blood and one came out and his jaw was like it had no bone. And my brother-in-law died there, too. Someone busted up his ribs and he bled to death, in his heart and lungs. My sister… My sister went… She wasn’t right,” Roosevelt said finally. “She never got over it. Cried all the time, always crying, and she never got out of bed. They put her in an institution. One day I come in to see her and she… she didn’t know my name. She kept asking me if I had any gum, just a stick of gum, it’d taste so good.
“So I just ran. I ran south. I was in the back of some truck, full of illegals and migrants, and someone said they had heard about a barfight in a town outside of Cincinnati and some fella had been cut up good. And the man who done it, well, he was some man with a cut-up face, they thought. Scarred as hell, they said. So I came south. And I met Pike. And we met Hammond. As you’ve met us. That was long ago. Almost a year. Almost a year before I met Hammond.”
“And I ran into him in Atlanta,” said Pike. “Where he killed my friend. Cut his throat. But that was longer than any of you. For I tell you now that I have been looking for this man for four years of my life. And still he has eluded me. Not until just recently did I know that I was not alone. There are others. This man is far worse than even you can imagine, Mr. Connelly. If we are here, then there are many others.”
“And what has he done to you?” asked Roosevelt.
Connelly just bowed his head.
“Sometimes there are no words,” said Pike. “There are no words.”
“What the hell is he?” Connelly said.
“We don’t know,” said Hammond. “We don’t, for sure. He’s motivated to kill and he’s smart enough to keep moving, and it’s getting a lot easier now because the whole goddamn country is moving with him. Migrant workers are everywhere. Everyone is looking for something better. And among them, there’s him. Something drives him to do this, I don’t know what.”
“Some madness, maybe,” said Pike. “Some disease of the brain that urges him to butchery. I’ve heard of such men, like Jack the Ripper in London, years and years ago. Perhaps he’s one of them. He goes from town to town, stalks someone for a few days, then strikes and moves on.”
“But now he’s doing something strange,” Roosevelt said. “He’s not moving with people anymore, but against them. He’s going west, into the plains, while everyone else is trying to leave them.”
“Lot of people going west from them, though,” said Connelly. “People from Oklahoma and Kansas and the Dakotas. They’re going west.”
“That is true,” said Pike. “We’ve considered he’s trying to join with them. It’d be far easier to hide there. A whole country has been unsettled. These are dark times, and they are getting darker, I think. But we’re close. Closer than we’ve ever been before.”
Connelly said, “And if you find him, you’ll kill him.”
They did not react at first. Then Pike said, “Yes. We will. Would we not be justified in doing so? Would not God and this nation look approvingly on us if we were to kill him, Mr. Connelly?”
“I don’t know about God,” said Connelly. “I know less about God than I do the nation. I don’t think about that. I don’t need to. Some things don’t need to be thought about. You just do them. And I aim to.”
“I can understand that,” said Hammond.
Pike stirred the fire again. “Will you come with us, then? Will you join with us?”
“You know I will.”
“I don’t. What I want may be different from you. Because there’s no going back, and no turning aside here. I said at the start of this that I would die finding him if it came to it and kill if I had to. Would you be willing to do that?”
Connelly shrugged.
“You can’t say. But listen, friend. Listen to me, now, Mr. Connelly, you must listen—should a man raise his hand to us and come between us and our quarry, it is in our righteous duty under God to strike that man down if need be. Nothing matters but the road and the man, and where the two meet.” His greasy fingers crisscrossed over the fire. “Nothing matters but where this ends. And it will end, regardless of the cost, and it will end in blood. For everyone he’s taken from us and for those he’s taken from others, it will end in blood. Will it not, Mr. Connelly? Will it not?”
Connelly stared into the fire, hunched over his lap, his eyes aglow and his hands clenched. He said, “I suppose so.”
“Then that is settled,” said Pike, and spat into the fire. They watched it sizzle among the embers.
“But he ain’t here,” said Connelly. “No one saw him.”
“He’s not here any longer, no,” said Hammond.
“We heard from some people in the camp,” said Roosevelt. “Some folk in there said they seen a man with a cut-up face in Oklahoma, just across the border. He’s headed south. They saw him in Shireden, not much more of a town than Rennah. But that’s where he’s at. That’s where he’ll be. That’s what’s next.”
“Amen,” said Pike.
&nbs
p; And to that they had nothing more to say, and turned to sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
Connelly listened to the men sleep restlessly around him. Stones dug through his bedding and the whisky did not sit right with him and so he chose to watch the clouds roll in above and think.
The hobos said that when Father Time woke up Mr. Shivers was there waiting, just sitting on the ground beside him and smiling. They said he took his blade and cut Father Time across the hand and ran away laughing, and from then on Father Time was bitter and cruel and gave every man hardship and ate every dream.
They said Mr. Shivers had been in every jail in the country. The bulls would lock him up and he would sit there waiting for nightfall and when the moon shone through the bars he’d climb up the beam like a man on a staircase and be out just as fast as you could think. The next day the cops would come on by and just sit scratching their heads at the empty jail cell.
They said that when bums and all the runaway boys and girls die they get their last chance to ride freight with Mr. Shivers, that he has a train made of night that rides straight to hell and the furnace don’t run on coal or wood, the furnace runs on you. Mr. Shivers comes back and takes a foot or a hand or an eye or an ear and feeds it to his train, spurring it on, sending it down to the depths of the earth and to eternity as it eats you alive.
Mr. Shivers, the moonlight man, the black rider. Mr. Shivers, the bum’s devil. The vagrant’s boogey man.
There were a lot of stories about Mr. Shivers. Connelly had heard most of them. In the dark when he could not sleep they often came back.
It had been a hard time getting here. In the days in Memphis when it had just been him and his grief and his empty home he had not known what to do. But he remembered. He remembered that ruined face.
How could he not.
Months ago. Years ago. Lives ago. When he had still been himself and was not this wreck, this empty hulk that was half a man, functional only in terms of endurance and rage. Seas of time lay between himself and that man.
And Molly. Between him and Molly. His little girl.
“I’m close now,” he mouthed silently. “I’m closer than ever before.”
Someone has to put the world right, he said to himself. Someone has to make things right. And he shut his eyes.
Somewhere a train whistle moaned like a man dreaming under a fever. None of the other men stirred. Connelly rolled over and tried to sleep.
* * *
They spent the next three days waiting for a train that would take them into Oklahoma and close to Shireden. Roosevelt spoke to a man who was in at the freightyards and learned of the schedule and Pike told them to rest while they could, and so they caught small game and did their best not to drink or spend money. Each day they watched the camp outside of Rennah ebb and flow, grow and swell with the people who had abandoned their homes, and each of them would go among the people and ask if they had seen the scarred man. From two they heard the same—south, and to the west. If there’s anything left of Shireden, they said, he’ll be there.
“What do they mean, left of?” asked Connelly.
“Beats me,” said Roosevelt. “But that’s what they said.”
And with each day the land to the west became a deeper red, like the horizon was a gash in the sky and it was bleeding out.
“Don’t know what’s coming,” said Pike as they watched it at evening. “But it’s not good.”
On the third day Roosevelt came back from camp with a smile on his face and a small heavy bag in hand. He sat and produced a revolver and a box of bullets and began playing with the weapon.
“What in the hell is that?” said Hammond.
“It’s a gun.”
“What the hell are you going to do with a gun?”
“Shoot stuff.”
“And what do you know about shooting?”
“I know where the bullets come out.”
“Huh. Anything particular you going to shoot?”
“Whatever needs it, I suppose,” he said, and he spun the cylinder and snapped it back.
“Damn, Rosie. Take care of that thing, will you?”
“I’ll try,” he said, and stowed it in his bag.
Finally their day came. They went down to the tracks and crouched in the soggy ditch next to the woods and waited for the train to pass. As it lumbered by they sprinted out and seized hold of the back railing. They lifted themselves aboard where they stowed away in a car carrying lumber. It was already occupied by two old men, both in denim and rawhide, and they watched the new arrivals with faint interest.
“Where you boys going?” asked one as Connelly and the others settled.
“South,” said Hammond.
“To Shireden?”
“Yes,” said Hammond, surprised.
They looked at each other and nodded. “You going to go see the gypsy girl?” one asked.
“The what?”
“The gypsy girl.”
“No. What do you mean?”
“They got a gypsy girl down there, at this carnival. She’s famous. She can tell fortunes, tell you your whole future. It’s why we’re going. I knew a fella who went and talked to her and she told him exactly where he’d be when fortune did him good, and the next week all she done said came true and he was in a gambling hall and he won close to a hundred dollars.”
“And you’re going to hear your fortunes?” said Pike.
“Sure are.”
“Boy, I’d like to get a listen to what she had to say,” said Roosevelt. “It’d be nice to know when the next windfall was coming my way.”
“You don’t really believe in that stuff, do you?” said Hammond.
“Sure I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it’s a bunch of baloney, of course. They’re just scamming a bunch of yokels out there in the sticks. No offense to present company, of course,” he said, and smiled at the two other hobos, who scowled.
“Come on, Pike,” said Hammond. “Back me up on this.”
Pike nodded thoughtfully. “I tend not to trust such things. Don’t know much of devilry,” he mused, “but if it can be used for our aim then I suppose in that sense it’s all right.”
“What? You aren’t serious about going to see a goddamn gypsy, are you?” said Hammond.
“I am. And I’m also serious about the tongue in your head, Mr. Hammond.”
“Seems like a waste of time.”
“Why not? It won’t be out of our way any. And as we grow close we need all the guidance we can get.”
“Besides, it’s a carnival, Hammond!” said Roosevelt. “A carnival! Maybe they got a Ferris wheel and… and beer!”
Hammond sighed. “Well, you can depend on beer to work,” he said, “but I don’t know about the gypsy girl.”
They rode through Missouri and then Arkansas, sharing cigarettes and what meat they had, and so passed into Oklahoma. They jumped off at a set of fields close to Shireden and walked the next ten miles into town. When they arrived it was nearly midnight. They found a traveling carnival was arranged in one of the fields. The night was full of torches and reedy music and laughter and the scent of old ale. Aged booths and carts sat squatting in the grass, covered in peeling red and purple paint. Misshapen tents glowed beyond like jellyfish suspended in the ocean deeps. Men and women smeared in paint juggled or sang or danced. Some ushered the drunken townsfolk into games and shrugged indifferently when they lost.
They asked for directions, then wound their way to a dilapidated cart in the far back. It smelled of horse and something sickly sweet, like bile or rot. On the side was a sloppy painting of a young girl’s face with stars around her head, her lips thick and her forehead large. As they approached a man in shirtsleeves came out and squinted at them.
“What you want? Game’s over,” he said sourly.
“We come to see the gypsy girl.”
“The what? She ain’t no gypsy. She’s from Akron. Get out of here, it’s late as hell.”
“We brought money.”
“Lots of people bring money lots of places. It’s a popular thing to bring. Get lost.”
“We come all the way from Missouri to see her.”
“Really?” he said, thinking. “Well. We’re getting popular. Huh. That’s good news. You know what, sure, you can see her. Let me see the money.” They pulled it out and he inspected the coins in their hands. “Fair enough. Hey, Sibyl!” he shouted into the cart. He pounded on the side. “We ain’t done yet! Just few more!”
Nothing came. Then there was a voice but it could have been just the breeze and Connelly did not hear a word in it. But the carnie said in answer, “We got paying customers here. Come on, get your stuff together.”
“It’s late,” whined a girl’s voice. “I don’t want to see them.”
“People don’t want a lot of stuff. It happens.” He turned to the men and winked. “Takes a while, magicking and seering the heavens. Takes some work.” He took out a flask and took a belt from it, then shouted, “Come on, you’re holding up the show!”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“See who?”
She didn’t say anything.
“See who?”
“The big one,” said the girl’s voice, and it was quiet and shook with fear.
All of them looked at Connelly. He raised his hands and shrugged.
“Goddamn it, girl,” said the carnie, and went into the cart. He was there for some time and when he came out he marched up to Connelly. “Let me see your money,” he said.
“Why? You seen it.”
Mr. Shivers Page 3