Neal Barrett Jr.

by Dawn's Uncertain Light

  Howie moved swiftly across the street, keeping to the shadow as best he could. When the man reached his door, Howie’s arm went tight across his throat. The man jerked violently and tried to cry out, clawing at Howie’s hand. Howie let the man see his knife.

  “You do that again,” Howie whispered, “and you’re dead right here. You got that straight?”

  The man nodded eagerly, gasping for breath. Howie slid his free hand past the man’s waist and pushed the door aside. The house smelled of whiskey and sweat.

  “Anyone else live here beside you?”

  “No, just me,” the man said hoarsely. “God, don’t kill me, just don’t do that. All right? I—I got money. It’s in my coat. Take it, take anything you want!”

  Howie loosed his grip slightly, turned the man around and hit him squarely in the jaw. The man’s face went slack. Howie lowered him roughly to the floor. He moved quickly through the house, There were only three rooms—a parlor, a small bedroom, and a kitchen. Howie pulled the shades and dragged the man into the bedroom. He pulled a shirt off a chair and made a gag, stuffing the cloth into the man’s mouth. In the kitchen, he found a coil of wire, brought it back, and wound it tightly about the man’s wrists and his ankles. The man wasn’t lying; he had quite a few coins in his coat, more silvers than coppers, and Howie hadn’t seen a lot of those. He searched the house and found a rifle in a closet. He couldn’t find shells anywhere and left the rifle where it was.

  Howie lit a lamp and turned the wick down low and placed the lamp on the floor. Then he sat down, and waited for the man to come around.

  Howie decided that he’d dozed. He knew he’d been gone a long time, and that Papa would wonder where he was. He heard the voices then, and worked his way down past the big oak tree through the grass. There were three men, not many yards away, stock tenders who worked for his father. Three men, and a girl was with them, too, a girl with a— Oh, Lord God, it wasn’t a girl at all—it was a mare! A young mare with yellow hair, and the men were—

  Howie couldn’t breathe. He thought his head would split open. The mare lay in the soft high grass. Her legs were spread wide and she grinned up vacantly at the men. One of the men touched himself and laughed. His big shaft was stiffly erect between his legs. In a moment he was down on the mare, his hands clutching at her breasts. The mare groaned and engulfed him, thrusting her belly up to meet him. Her eyes were closed and her head arched back until the veins stood out in her throat. The man breathed hard, pumping himself into her. His companions watched, laughing and calling out advice.

  Howie couldn’t hear what they said. He couldn’t hear anything at all. His head throbbed as if there were a million angry bees caught up inside.

  Help me! he cried out to no one at all. Help me, help me, help me!

  The man’s face began to move, and Howie jabbed him once in the ribs. The man’s eyes went wide; a frightened cry was muffled in the gag.

  Howie leaned down close. “You’re Anson Slade.” It wasn’t a question at all.

  Slade nodded frantically.

  “I’m taking off this gag,” Howie said. “You want to yell, why that’s up to you. I ain’t against bringin’ blood.” Howie stripped the gag away. Slade drew in a breath. “Who the—hell are you?” Slade said angrily. “Damn it, I’ll have your—”

  Howie touched Slade’s cheek with his knife. Slade went silent at once.

  “What happened at Silver Island?” Howie said. “I want to know about that. I don’t want to hear nothing else.”

  Slade looked surprised. “Everybody knows about that.”

  “Well, you pretend I ain’t heard.”

  Slade let out a breath. “Them Rebels landed guerrillas somehow. At—at night. It all happened real fast. They killed all the younguns they could catch, and lined up the troopers and shot ’em dead. Wasn’t many of us got away. The Rebels took off in the ’glades.”

  “ ’Glades. What’s that?”

  “Everglades. A big swamp down south. We know they got that far, but there ain’t no way to smoke ’em out. Listen, what you want to know all this stuff for? Take whatever you want, I don’t care. You want more money I can get it.”

  “—How do I get to Silver Island?”

  “Now why would you want to go there? There ain’t a damn thing to see, just—” Slade stopped. He stared at the scarred, hollow socket of Howie’s eyes. “It’s—hell, it’s four hundred miles down there or maybe more. Bad country all the way, even if you stay to the coast. You pass right through the ’glades—only Silver Island’s farther down than that. There’s a whole string of keys and Silver Island’s way down on the tip.”

  Howie frowned. “What’s that mean? The tip of what?”

  “The keys. They’re a bunch of little islands.” Slade wet his lips. “Used to be a kinda bridge road, but that’s a long time ago. Storms maybe took it all out. You got to have a boat.”

  Howie thought about that. He stood and went back to the kitchen. recalling where he’d seen a scrap of paper, a pen, and some ink. He came back and loosened the wires from Slade’s wrists and laid the paper and the pen on his lap.

  “I need a map,” Howie said. “You draw me a map.” Slade rubbed his wrists and tried to grin. “I’m not any good at drawin’ maps.”

  “Mister, I’d sure try if I was you.”

  Slade muttered under his breath, then picked up the pen and began to draw. Howie asked questions: Where did this path go, and where did the swamps begin and end. Slade could be making the whole thing up, Howie knew, but he couldn’t do much about that. When Slade said that was all there was, Howie wired him up again and stuffed the gag back in his mouth.

  Slade looked relieved. The lines relaxed around his eyes. Howie grabbed the front of Slade’s shirt and slammed him hard against the floor. Slade groaned and tried to fight. He seemed to sense that he was wrong, that the man with one eye wasn’t through. When Howie sat down on his chest, all the color drained from Slade’s face.

  “I want you to hear all this,” Howie said calmly. “I want you to know. And I want you to think about it, too. There isn’t no Rebels down there, or even anywhere near. The gov’ment itself done the killing. You know that the same as me. I don’t know why, and it doesn’t much matter anymore. ’Cept you was right there, and now you’re right here.”

  Howie looked at Slade a long time. —Mister, I know what Silver Island was for. I know what you was doin’ down there, Now this is what I want you to hear, One of those girls was my sister. Her name was Carolee. You think about her. Carolee Ryder. You just keep thinkin’ on her.”

  Howie leaned down and picked up Slade and carried him over his shoulder. The kitchen had a small back door, and a path outside led directly into deep stands of oak. Even with the gag thrust deeply in Anson Slade’s mouth, Howie could hear him screaming inside all the way into the woods….

  The three men hung from a high branch, their faces nearly black and their tongues thick and swollen. “We had to butcher the mare,” Papa said. “Sir?”

  Papa nodded to himself, and scratched at a stone with his boot. “Howie,” he said carefully, “she might have had seed.”

  Howie was startled at that. A man was a man, but his seed in an animal …

  “You’re wrong,” Papa said, guessing Howie’s thoughts. “The thing is, boy, that’s something where people and stock is alike. Seed don’t know whether it’s gain’ into man or beast. What you got to see, Howie, is there’s no sin greater than the one you seen them men do. A man’s got a soul, and when he puts his seed into stock, it the same as giving part of his soul to a beast. Do you see that, Howie?

  “Papa, I—” Howie’s voice choked in his throat. “Papa, the mare didn’t look like a mare. Not then. When—when they were doing what they did. She looked like a—girl. Oh, God, Papa, I wanted to do that to her too!”

  “Howie …” Papa’s big hand covered his shoulder. “Howie, men are weak, and they’ll get such thoughts in their heads. Things can kinda look the sa
me when they ain’t, and you got to understand that’s so. She wasn’t the same, boy. You remember that. She was meat, and meat hasn’t got any soul….”

  When Howie was through, he found a shallow depression in the woods where a creek had come by sometime in the past, then dried up and gone another way. He rolled Slade in and spent a good long hour kicking at the bank with his heels, loosing chunks of dirt, then tossing in leaves and dead wood after that. It was too dark to do the job right, but he figured it was good enough to pass, even in the full light of day, unless someone started looking close. He brushed more leaves around the place where he’d worked and dropped the knife in a hollow tree and started back, taking the long way back to town. In his room he lit a lamp and stripped down, carefully going over all his clothes to make sure they weren’t soiled. He went to sleep at once. In the morning he ate a loaf of fresh-baked bread and thick porridge with honey on the top, and paid his bill for the room. The day was sullen hot and the sky was bright as lead, but there was nothing real new about that. Howie left town and started walking south.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There were few settlements along the way, and none of them overly friendly. Howie quickly learned to pass them by. When he could, he followed the Gulf, keeping to the beach, where it was easiest to walk. Half the time, this wasn’t possible to do; sometimes the beach disappeared under the dense tropical growth that pushed right up to the sea. Then he was forced to move inland, following the ruins of ancient roads that had all but vanished under a choking carpet of green.

  Slade’s map was true as far as it went, but Howie found it wasn’t much help. On paper, the western Florida coast curved gently southeast in an unbroken line.. In fact, that line was notched by countless small inlets and several enormous bays. More than once, Howie found himself at the end of some long finger of land, with nothing but water ahead. Then he would have to backtrack, following the long miles he had already covered.

  Ruins of old cities clustered about the larger bays, awesome, crumbled towers of stone and rusted steel, strangled under greenery that softened the horror of what had happened to the world long ago.

  There were plenty of animals about—snicks and rabuts everywhere, and birds of every kind, and now and then creatures with things like branches on their heads. In the swamp, he saw terrible animals that looked like rotten logs, monsters with great jaws and sharp teeth. Howie decided animal life had never really disappeared down here, as it had in the rest of the country. It had simply retreated to a place where no one cared to go. Plenty of bugs had decided to live here too, he thought dismally. There was certainly no lack of mosquitoes, and every other insect he saw had a sting.

  The ’glades were the worst. There was simply no way to get through. Howie finally walked back to a settlement he had bypassed three days before. When night came he stole a small boat. The boat had oars and a sail. He tried the sail the first day and gave it up, after nearly capsizing in the sea. After that, he simply kept to the edge of the swamp, and followed the coast south.

  Finally, his southeastern path gave way, and Howie knew he had reached the tip of this long stretch of land. Now the sea was due east, peppered with dozens of small islands. The fourth day he followed this course, he found the narrow strip of rock and sand curling back southwest and out of sight, and knew this had to be the “keys” Slade had drawn on his map. He turned and rowed in this direction at once. Now and then he saw traces of the bridge-road Slade had talked about. There was not enough left of it to count, and Howie kept to his boat. Sometimes there were places where he could go ashore for the night. The keys were an empty place to be, nothing but the water and the sand. Howie didn’t care about that. He scarcely noticed anything at all.

  Six days after he reached the keys, Howie found Silver Island. He had tried to keep count in his head. As near as he could tell, it was forty-nine days since he’d killed Anson Slade and left the place called Tallahassee.

  The Bluevale Fair was a wondrous thing to see. The town square was lit bright as day, more lanterns than you could count, all strung out on wires across the street. Blues and reds and yellows and greens, every color you could name.

  “Couldn’t we stop? Just a minute? Just one minute, Papa?” Howie begged.

  Papa grinned and winked at Howie’s mother. Carolee was asleep in her arms. “You’ll get plenty of fair come morning,” Papa said. “Does sound like they’re having fun, now don’t it?”

  Howie scarcely slept. And Papa was right. The fair was even finer than he’d dreamed. There were booths and stands everywhere. They sold metal knives and bright clay dishes, glass buttons and bolts of patterned cloth. And the smells! There were things

  Howie had never smelled before. Pepper and cinnamon, tarragon and sage. There were fruit pies and red candied apples and cakes with white sugar on top. There were the Gardens, where you ate without cooking yourself. People just brought things to you, whatever you wanted to have. And at the end of the day there was the parade, with government soldiers and real horses, the first horses Howie had ever seen. Papa promised later on they’d see the pictures of Silver Island pasted up by the courthouse. You might even recognize someone who’d gone there, a boy or a girl you knew. Kids from everywhere were Chosen all the time, and it might be someone from Bluevale, or a farm right next to your own.

  Everyone said Silver Island was a lot like heaven. Nobody knew what heaven looked like unless he’d died, but Howie couldn’t see how God could come up with anything much better. Papa had seen the pictures before, and said they were something fine to see. There were big white houses under great broad trees. Every window had glass and fine curtains, and the grass came right down to bright blue water. Sails colored bright cherry red dotted the bay. And the best thing of all was you didn’t have to worry about a thing. There was plenty to eat and you never got cold. Children who got picked for Silver Island were the luckiest children in the country, Papa said, because they were the start of a brand-new America, the way the whole country would be someday.

  “Everybody can’t go,” Papa said, “and that’s a shame. But that’s what Silver Island’s for, to make a start. To get things going right again….”

  The fire had burned everything right to the ground. Still, Howie could tell where things had been and imagine how it was. He followed the squares of rubble and saw how they had laid the buildings out. It wasn’t hard to figure. Anywhere you put it, a stock operation was the same, on the banks of a river or here on a white spit of land. And that’s what it was, Howie knew. It was the government’s big lie, and hadn’t ever been anything else. He saw where the breeding pens had been and where the mares raised their young. Burned stubs in the ground, in a place set off from the rest, told Howie there had been a high fence. They’d likely kept the young bucks there. There was a dock, still pretty much intact, a landing big enough for barges where stock could be loaded and taken back to the mainland. On the far end of the island he found the remains of the buildings where the government troopers and officials had stayed. Anson Slade had lived here, and come back a hero of Silver Island.

  There were bones everywhere, picked clean by the birds. Bits of crockery and tools. A rusted pistol and a lantern on a pole. Broken glass. Howie bent down and picked up a piece of faded calico. He looked at it, held it in his hand a long time, then gently put it down, as if it might still harbor some shadow of the life it had touched. He looked at the flat desolation, at the white coral ground so bright it hurt his eye. He tried to feel something inside. Sorrow, or hatred or regret. But there was nothing there at all, and he turned and walked back to the beach to find his boat.

  When Howie reached the mainland again, he dragged the boat onto dry land and slept for two days. A strong wind came in from offshore and kept the mosquitoes away. The old road that had linked the keys to the land was still partially visible ashore. A road sign, nearly rusted through and fragile as a leaf, said “1.” He followed the road a few miles until it disappeared again, then set up a camp. There were
hammocks of dry land in the swamp. He walked as far as he could through tangled growth, then tore a piece of cloth from his shirt and stuck it on a tree. He pinned the shoulder patch he’d taken from Anson Slade on the cloth. Then he gathered all the dry wood he could find and walked back to the old road. When night came he built a large fire, and kept it going till the dawn. He caught fish during the day and found some eggs in a nest and ate those. He kept the fire going every night. Four days later they came, creeping up on the camp just before first light.

  Howie knew they were there. He was certain that they’d watched him since at least the second night. They stepped out from cover, five of them, four young men and a girl. Howie didn’t move.

  “You ain’t asleep, I know that,” the boy said. “Just sit up slow and keep your hands up high.”

  Howie did as he was told. The tallest boy there had the rifle. The others had longbows, aimed at Howie’s heart. The girl came in from behind and pressed her hands quickly down his chest and his sides and down the legs of his trousers.

  “Glory be, Jack,” she called out, “he’s got a pistol. Looks to work good, too. Couple of blades and some money. That’s it.”

  The girl stepped away. She knew what to do, and never let herself get close enough to grab. Howie thought she was pretty.

  The tall boy’s eyes never wavered. The rifle was steady in his hands.

  “What you want here?” he asked Howie. “Who are you?”

  “I’m alone. You already know that,” Howie said. “You’ve had time to look around and see there isn’t anyone else. You found the patch. It came off a man named Anson Slade. He worked at Silver Island. I killed him up north. A place called Tallahassee.”