Beck

by Mal Peet

  Giggs was adjusting the horse’s harness. He was wearing a careworn black suit and tie. His wife and daughter were sitting on the seat of the buggy. They were dressed up, too: Annie Giggs in a black bonnet and skirt, Elsie in her best frock with a black ribbon pinned onto its front.

  “We got ter go ter a funeral,” Giggs said. “Over ter Singleton. We’ll be back ‘round two or therebouts. Here’s what yer do while we’re gone. Yer listn’in’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. First off, fetch water from the yard pump over ter the cattle troughs. It’s gonna be another hot un. Then go up the meadow we cut yesterday and rake that grass over in lines like I showed yer. Yer finish that afore we’re back, yer can rest up.”

  Mrs. Giggs harrumphed skeptically. Her husband took a step toward Beck and softened his voice a little. “I’m leavin’ yer in charge, boy. I don’t like havin’ ter, but I got no other choice. I’m trustin’ yer. Don’t yer let me down, hear? Or else.”

  “Aw right.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Aw right.”

  When the buggy was out of sight, Beck let go of the pump handle and stood motionless for quite some time, watching the crows resettle. Then he walked around to the front of the house and pulled open the screen door. As he’d expected, the wooden door was locked, as were the windows. The back door wouldn’t open either but when he squinted down through the glass pane set in it, he saw that the key had been left in the lock. He picked up the chock of wood used for a doorstop and smashed the glass.

  In the kitchen, Beck went straight to the larder, where on a slate shelf he found half a cooked chicken under a muslin cover like a lampshade. He tore the leg off and ate it in almost a trance of hunger, stuffing his mouth with the unfamiliar sensation of meat and chewing the ends off all the bones. Digging his fingers into the breast, he ripped off the rest of the meat and swallowed almost without tasting it in a futile attempt to fill his belly. When his shrunken stomach protested at the quantity it held, he roamed the house.

  The Giggses’ bedroom smelled of feet and sour flesh. He went to the girl’s bedroom and sat on the bed, the softness of it entirely novel and seductive. He wiped his greasy fingers on its patchwork coverlet and continued to explore, discovering a door that opened onto a narrow stairway. He climbed up into a low, hot attic room containing a narrow iron bedstead and a chest of drawers. The bare wooden floor was carpeted with dead flies. Light burned in through a small dormer window.

  This room, Beck realized, was where he would have slept if he’d been a white boy. He went to the window. Its sill was thick with crisp and black little corpses. He forced the window open and looked out. For the first time, he peered out from on high at the mean little world he had been living in. It seemed to go on forever and had nothing in it that looked like help.

  He completed his survey of the farmhouse then returned to the larder, intending to polish off the remainder of the food but, standing in the doorway, changed his mind. He left the house, and went to Giggs’s lean-to workshop, hoisted the tool bag, and clattered its contents onto the bench. The bag was large, made of heavy canvas with two leather handles. He found that by putting his arms through these handles he might wear the bag like a rucksack. He carried it back to the house.

  The wardrobe in the Giggses’ bedroom was taller than a man. It had two drawers set into its base. The upper one contained gray and frayed underthings which Beck examined with passing curiosity. The lower drawer held things he reckoned he would need. He put into the tool bag a thick pair of knitted socks, a set of long johns, a shirt, and a pair of trousers made of some stiff heavy material.

  It was beneath them that he found the metal box. It had a lock but no key. Beck shook it: a heavy rattle and a whispery shifting. He put it in the bag, looked again around the room, and his eye fell upon a pair of newish-looking brown boots. Too big for him, but he figured that with the extra socks on they’d do. He put them in the bag, then returned to the workshop. He used the heavy ball-peen hammer to break the box open. The coins he put straight into his pocket. There were eleven banknotes: five- and ten-dollar bills. He took two of the tens and put them into his pocket. He thought for moment, then took two of the fives also. The remainder he put back into the box.

  He returned to the house and dumped the bag on the kitchen table. Then he went upstairs and put the shattered box back where he’d found it.

  Now Beck undertook a more thoughtful stock check of the larder. Two cloth packages held a round of new cheese and a slab of smoked bacon. He took both. On an eye-level shelf were ranged canned and bottled foodstuffs. Some of the cans had pictures on them which, Beck assumed, denoted their contents. Beans. Some kind of meat. Carrots. He took a meat one and weighed it in his hand. He took all the loot he reckoned he could carry and put it in the bag.

  In one of the drawers in the Welsh dresser he found the can opener he’d watched the woman use and the fat-bladed knife he’d watched the man sharpen. He put them in the bag. From the hook on the back of the larder door he took one of the two ex-army water flasks Giggs carried with him when they worked the more distant fields. He filled it from the well, screwed its cap on, and slung its strap over his shoulder. He looked around the kitchen for the last time. His eye fell upon a white jug on a shelf. He took it down, stood it on a chair, urinated into it, and set it on the table.

  It would be pleasing to believe that by heading west Beck was obeying that huge instinct that has made our world what it is. But not so. It was just that when he came to the road the buggy’s tracks in the dust suggested it had turned left, as did a fresh and fly-thronged dollop of horse manure thirty yards in that direction. So he turned right, and right happened to be west. Even if he had known how to orient himself by the sun, it would have been of little help. The sun sat at the top of the sky and watched the boy with pitiless interest, then followed him on his slow journey toward the horizon.

  ON HIS THIRD day, Beck came down the flank of a low hill and saw glitter beyond a file of trees. He mistook it for water, and because his flask was now empty and he was very thirsty, he descended toward it. He slid down a sudden bank on his arse through thorny bushes and a haze of flying insects and found himself on a railroad track.

  He stood between two tar-weeping sleepers and thought things through. There was back and there was ahead. Trains went to places. It was easier to walk on the level. He felt a bit sick because the bacon he’d just finished off had gone as sweaty as he was. He walked on between the rails, sleeper after sleeper, each one a measurement of the distance to nowhere.

  Much later, when heat shimmered the air above the metal tracks and Beck had run out of spit to moisten his lips, a curious shape materialized ahead of him. It loomed out from the birches on the right of the track. Beck approached it cautiously, keeping close to the scrub alongside the track. From fifty yards, he got a good view of it. An enormous metal tank tattooed with rivets. Standing on legs of braced timber uprights. Protruding from the tank, suspended from a metal arm, a thick, slack hose made of what looked like leather. Someone had built an elephant out here in the middle of nowhere and made a poor job of it. But maybe, Beck thought, that same someone might still be around. He stood, listening intently: nothing but the incessant throb and chirrup of insects, a sound already so familiar as to be indistinguishable from silence. He moved ahead, careful where he put his feet, scanning the shifting gaps between the trees. He ran out of cover just a few yards short of the elephant. The ground around it had been cleared, leaving only stumps and new growth. There was no sign or sound of anyone.

  He saw now that the elephant had a tail, a steel tube that descended from its body and disappeared into the ground. And that from where its trunk joined its body there was a long streak of wet rust running down the tank, and that from the bottom of that streak there was water dripping and falling onto a wet patch of dirt. So he went and stood beneath the elephant’s rusty belly and let the drips fall into his mouth and run over his tongue and do
wn his throat. They were warm and tasted none too good but felt delicious. After a while he unshouldered his water bottle and held it to catch the droplets. They came at a rate of about one a second. He reckoned it would take at least the rest of the day to fill the bottle. His legs couldn’t deal with the thought of it, so he heaved the tool bag off and sat with his legs on either side of the patch of wet dirt with the bottle held in front of him. It didn’t work; he missed two drops out of every three.

  The goddamn tank must’ve held more water, Beck reckoned, than he could drink in a lifetime. He cursed his frustration away and stood up, then heard it: a faint continuous noise like a whispered chuckle. It grew, very slowly, into a sound he remembered. A train. He crossed the rails and stared back down the track’s long slow curve and through the heat-warped air above it and saw, where it disappeared into the farthest trees, yes, a rising drift of gray smoke.

  He grabbed up the bag and worked his way back through the birches until he came to a patch of scrub tall enough to conceal him, where he hunkered down and waited. And waited. Waited much longer than seemed right. The shloof and clank and squeal approached, swelled, until, Beck thought, the train had to be alongside his hiding place. Why had it stopped? He was clutched by panic. He had been seen. A posse of passengers was creeping up on him right now. He got to his knees and eased leaves aside and peered out.

  The train hadn’t stopped. It was passing him slower than a man might walk. And it was the same train that had delivered him to Ashvale. He was sure of it. Windows of the passenger cars opened and people stuck their heads out to look ahead. A plump woman fanning herself with a newspaper. A bald man glossed with sweat. A child with red hair. Elsie! No. Older. Now the guard hopped down from his cabin at the front of the freight car and marched smartly toward the locomotive. The perspiring man called a question, testily.

  “Waterin’ stop,” the guard said, not looking up. “Long incline ahead, and the ole girl needs a drink.”

  “I could use one myself,” Sweaty said.

  The guard overtook the train and stood on the same spot beneath the tank that Beck had occupied long minutes earlier. He made easy “come on” gestures to the driver, who was leaning out of his cab, then raised a hand. The train came to a halt in a great slumping sighing of brakes. The driver backed down the steps from his cab, then climbed a metal ladder up onto the top of the engine. The guard untethered a rope that Beck had failed to notice and swung the leather trunk on its metal arm out toward where the driver was perched. When the trunk was in position, the guard tugged on the rope and unimaginable amounts of water gouted into the thirsty machine. When it had drunk its fill, the guard swung the hose back to its original position and the driver climbed down. He and the guard set about filling and lighting their pipes. They seemed to be in no particular hurry.

  Now Beck noticed that at the rear of the freight car, above its coupling, there was a small balustraded platform. It was, he figured, at about the height of his chest. Or maybe a bit higher.

  The guard pulled a fob watch out of his waistcoat, studied it, patted the driver on the shoulder, and strolled back to his cabin. The locomotive snorted steam from its brakes, whuffed a great gout of smoke, sounded its whistle, and began to move. Beck waited until the freight car had passed him then broke cover and ran onto the track. The train was moving at walking pace, and Beck didn’t have much trouble heaving the bag onto the platform then grabbing hold of two of its uprights. But hauling himself aboard was a different matter. He didn’t have the strength, and couldn’t work out how to do it.

  By now the train had gathered speed and he was being dragged at a stumbling trot and the muscles of his arms felt as if they might tear apart if he didn’t let go. He let loose a cry of rage and desperation and the release empowered him. Hoisting his right foot then the left onto the platform, he clung, bent double, for several yards then forced his legs to straighten and propel him headfirst over the rail.

  The tool bag wasn’t much of a pillow, but within ten minutes Beck’s sobbing breath had found a slower rhythm and he was asleep.

  HE HOBBLED OVER the frozen ruts of a side street and came to a stop when he saw the lights and darknesses of the waterfront separated from more distant lights and darknesses by the pallid moon-glow of a frozen river or sea. It seemed to him an impossible and unfair obstacle. He was wearing all his clothes and those he’d stolen; nevertheless, he was agonizingly cold. For a while now he had nurtured the last heat in his core like hands shielding a candle.

  A covered truck passed the junction ahead of him, slowly, its lights lurching. Beck made himself walk on, passing through the mist of his breath. He crossed the road and became one of the shadows of the skeletal waterside trees. Ahead of him and to his right, sound and spilled light and the ice-silvered roofs of parked cars. He worked his way cautiously in that direction, limping quick as he could across the gaps in the trees. It looked as if there were three places where people might be eating and drinking, but there were no signs up like he’d gotten used to seeing. There was an alley that looked like it ran behind, so he recrossed the road and snuck into it. It was all iron-hard ripples of mud and snow, but when he got to the back of the first place things got slushy underfoot and there was a smell of piss. There were two garbage barrels alongside the back door and he eased the lid off the first one and was feeling around inside it when a door opened and lit him up.

  The girl said, “Jesus Christ!” She was carrying a pail which she now raised up in front of her as if to protect herself.

  Beck said, “Don’ shout for no one. Yer all right.”

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “Lookin for somethin’ ter eat. I’m starvin’.”

  “You from over the river?”

  “What?”

  “You a Yankee?”

  “No.”

  “You sound like one.”

  A gale of laughter from the open door.

  She looked hard at him. “If you ain’t from Detroit, what’s a nigger boy like you doing skulking ’round the back a place like this?”

  “Like I said, I’m real hungry.”

  A male voice bellowed, “Daisy! Daisy, where in hell are ya?”

  “Coming,” she yelled back. She emptied the bucket into the garbage barrel. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll try ’n’ bring you something.”

  “All right,” Beck said.

  “Don’t let no one see you.”

  So he shrank into the deeper darkness beyond the barrels and waited, shuddering, exhaling into the ragged collar of his coat. After a very long ten minutes, he heard the door open and close and her voice.

  “Boy?”

  “Here,” he whispered.

  She came close to him. “Here.”

  The bowl was hot. His cold claws almost recoiled from it, but managed to lift it to his mouth. Broth with bits of meat and potatoes in it. He slurped, swallowed without chewing, felt a knotted rope of heat lower itself into his chest and belly. Almost choked on it.

  “Slow up,” the girl said. “Here, put this in your pocket. Keep your hands warm.” She set a hot baked potato on the lid of the barrel along with a flat brown bottle. “Milk’s got a shot of whiskey in, like the soup. Everything we sell here got whiskey in. Say thanks.”

  Beck thought if he looked at her he might cry with gratitude. “Thanks. Sorry.”

  From the front of the building came the sounds of car doors slamming and voices.

  “I gotta go,” she said.

  “Wait,” Beck called after her. “Yer know anywhere I can sleep?”

  She paused in the doorway only to shake her head. Then she was gone.

  He had a sort of rule, although he’d never expressed it to himself or anyone else. Go on the way you’re facing until you can’t go no farther. So he headed up the lane behind the speakeasies and across an open space where unguessable objects humped under the snow until he came to a dark broken wall of sheds and warehouses. He passed through the blackness between two of them and
emerged onto the flagstones of a small dock. The moon was high now and full faced, surprised looking. A slipway to his left ramped down into the ice, which was scarred by tire tracks curving away toward the river. Everything was gray-blue or silver or black. Black ribs of a boat’s ruins jutting from the crust. Slate-colored buildings on the other side of the dock, thirty yards away, wearing fringed shawls of ice. He felt for the potato in his pocket through hands wrapped in rags. Still warm, but not for long. The silver wind that bladed down from Lake St. Clair would kill him in the night if he let it.

  The doors he tried were all padlocked or bolted from inside. He returned to the backs of the buildings. In the lee of the wind the desire to give up, to curl into himself and decline the endless succession of tomorrows, was very strong. The fourth place he came to was made of vertical boards of wood on top of three courses of bricks. Two of the boards threw a shadow. They’d sprung their nails. He reached into his coat and found the knife.

  It took him half an hour to ease his way inside. It wasn’t entirely dark. There were two panes of moonlight in the roof, and after a few minutes his eyes adapted. The absence of wind was almost like warmth. Much of the shed was occupied by a truck with a tarpaulin stretched over its load. Its nose, swathed in blankets, pointed at the double doors. The truck’s tarp was tied tight to cleats down its sides, but at the back was unfastened. Beck lifted it and reached in. His hands found stacked boxes and explored a space just about big enough. He went to the truck’s hood and lifted a blanket off it. It was cold and stiff and he put it on the floor and trod on it to loosen it up before climbing into the back of the truck and making his nest. He felt for and unstoppered the bottle the girl had given him and drank some of the milk. It still had a memory of warmth, and the smoky sweet taste of the whiskey burned pleasantly on the way down. He thought about the potato, but there was always tomorrow’s hunger so he saved it. He might have blessed his luck if he hadn’t long since stopped thinking in those terms.