by Alden Bell
They belong, Temple thinks. They have the stink of belonging wherever they go. This world is their world, and they take possession of every yard they cover, and they run the sun to its grave every night.
POINT COMFORT? Wilson says. He takes off his cap and scratches his head. I think I heard of it. An hour south of Houston, maybe. What you want to go there for?
Maury’s got relatives there.
You sure about that?
No I ain’t.
That boy is sure lucky he ran across you.
I’m just droppin him off. He can’t stay with me.
Uh-huh. He looks at her a good long time, nodding and contemplating as if there were a news ticker going across the surface of her eyes.
Well, he says finally, what you do, you ride with us to Longview, and maybe from there you can hitch a ride south. I know some people.
It would be a kindness of you, she says. My feet were gettin tired of covering ground.
That boy of yours, he like lemonade?
I guess, she shrugs. He’ll drink it, leastways. He don’t like bingberries.
Then she looks at Wilson and feels like she’s been caught somehow but she’s not sure how. He smiles and gazes through the glass at the tracks that roll on before them in parallel lines that converge in the distance.
Like I said, she clarifies, he ain’t no kin of mine.
SHE AND Maury ride in the third boxcar along with some refugees. They are huddled and helpless and look at her through eyes that seem to predict death. They are already gone, these women with their infants clutched to their breasts, these men nursing their open wounds and wondering what contagion is already spreading through their bloodstream, these sons and daughters of the earth whose spirits have already leaked out through the rips in their flesh and the cankers in their brains.
Temple hates them instinctively. Wilson, like an inadvertent grim ferryman, does not know that what he brings home is a boxcar full of death. And these dead are worse than the meatskins, because they lack even hunger.
She sits in the open doorway of the boxcar and watches the world scroll by. Maury, next to her, turns the die-cast jet over and over in his hands.
Here, look, she says.
She takes it from him and shows him how to hold it from underneath and look at it from the side so that it looks like it’s flying through the air as they move.
You try it, she says. See? See it flying? It looks like it’s going fast, right? But real jet fighters go even faster. They go faster than the sound barrier.
Maury looks at the toy between his fingers, and everything about him goes quiet and peaceful.
You like that, don’t you? Old as you are, I guess you saw a lot of planes when you were a kid, huh? I guess you remember them pretty good. I seen some, but not a lot.
She looks at him, his eyes.
You look like you’re flyin away in your head, Maury. Like you’re movin speedy between the clouds. Me too. Me too.
And she turns her back on the lost and the dead and the trampled down, she leaves them to their airy graves, and she and the big man next to her look upward at heaven and find there not just gates and angels but other wonders too, like airplanes that go faster than sound and statues taller than any man and waterfalls taller than any statue and buildings taller than any waterfall and stories taller still that reach up and hook you by the britches on the cusp of the moon, where you can look and see the earth whole, and you can see how silly and precious a little marble it really is after all.
THE NEXT time the train stops, she takes Maury and climbs into the next boxcar. There are fewer people there because it is less well appointed. In the last boxcar there were mattresses and bottles of water and a worn-out old couch and some chairs. This car is mostly bare. A few of Wilson’s men scale the outside of the cars to come here and sleep when their own car is too noisy. And there are some others here too, men sitting on the boards and leaning against the walls of the car, smoking, their eyes lit up briefly by the cinder between their fingers. And another man asleep in the corner with a Stetson resting on his chest.
She takes Maury by the hand to the dark corner where she might be able to sleep some. She tells Maury to lay down, and he obeys, and she settles next to him and folds her hands under her head and waits for the rocking of the train to put her to sleep.
In her dreams, there is a man. At first she thinks it’s Uncle Jackson, because he comes and puts his arms around her and behind him is Malcolm. But the way Malcolm is looking at her, she knows something is wrong. He looks fearful, and she wants to tell him that there’s nothing to be scared of. But he points to her forearm that’s still wrapped in an embrace around Uncle Jackson’s back, and she looks and she sees that boils have surfaced all over her skin, and she thinks, That’s funny, I must be dead already and I didn’t even know it. And then she tries to apologize to Malcolm, because he is right to be afraid of her, because she realizes that she would eat him given the chance, that she would eat him all up starting with his cheeks—and that the hunger to consume, she would like to tell him if she could, is not so different from the hunger to protect and keep, or maybe it’s just her own perverse mind at work. But then Uncle Jackson’s arms get tighter around her, and she realizes that this man has a beard whose scratchy hairs are tickling her face, and that Uncle Jackson was always clean-shaven, and that the man holding her isn’t Uncle Jackson at all. And she starts to say, Wait Mose, wait Mose, but she can’t say anything because Moses Todd is squeezing all her breath away because she’s a meatskin and the only things Moses Todd hates more than Temple herself are meatskins, and so it stands to reason that he should want to squeeze the life out of her and that Malcolm should be fearful of her—it all stands to reason—
And when she opens her eyes, it’s true, there he is, Moses Todd, bending above her in the boxcar, saying, Well, look who it is!
And with an instinctual violence, she strikes out, landing a quick punch on his jaw, then rolls out from under him and stands.
Whoa, he says.
But she’s already on top of him, grabbing him by the neck and poised with her other hand quickly unsheathing the gurkha and raising it for a kill strike.
Whoa there, he says, shrinking from her, holding up his hands in submission. Easy, darlin. It’s me. I ain’t gonna hurt you. It’s me, Lee.
Lee.
Her eyes clear in the dim light of the boxcar, and her mind clears of the phantasms of sleep, and she notices that all around her other men have risen to point guns and other weapons at her.
It’s okay, says the man who she has by the throat. He says it to everyone else in the boxcar. I just startled her is all. That’s what I get for wakin a dreamer.
Lee. Not Moses Todd at all. Lee. The hunter. Lee, the man who gave her a taste of slug flesh spiced with aromatic rosemary. The man who spoke to her of Niagara Falls. He was the man sleeping in the corner of the car with the Stetson hat.
Lee, she says aloud.
That’s right, darlin. It looks like we’ve been miracled together once more.
I’M SORRY I punched you, she says.
He moves his jaw back and forth, feeling it with his fingers.
I’ve had it worse, he says. But one thing’s for sure—I won’t be wakin you up from any naps anytime soon.
The train has stopped at an intersection in a small town where Wilson and his men are looking for survivors and supplies. One of Wilson’s men, a big Mexican they call Popo, strolls casually about, approaching the slugs as though he would ask them for directions but at the last minute raising the nail gun to their heads. Temple and Lee, sitting on a wood-slatted bench under the awning of a store, watch from a distance. They can hear the hissing pop of the nail gun, and they can see the slugs stand still for a moment, as if surprised, wavering a little in the breeze, then collapsing to the ground as if they were balloon animals deflated by a sudden leak.
What happened to your friends? she asks.
Well, Horace, he got too clo
se to a slug. Took a bite out of his arm. He wasn’t right after that. Kept waitin to die or to turn or something. He lasted it out for a while, longer than any of us expected him to.
What happened to him?
I don’t exactly know for sure. See, Clive and I woke up one morning, and he just wasn’t there anymore. All his stuff was there, but the man himself was gone. We waited for him till sunset, but he never showed up. Maybe you feel the change coming. I don’t know. Maybe death is a shameful thing. Maybe he went off to be by himself when it happened.
Lee lights a cigarette and leans back on the bench and stretches out his legs and crosses his ankles.
And Clive, well, he wanted to keep on going just the two of us. But I was gettin kinda tired of the plainsman routine, if you want to know the truth. I told him I reckoned I would light out for the west, see what kind of society I been hearin they got in California. We parted right, and we put up a marker for Horace under a pepper tree where no one’s gonna bother it. It’s nothin to nature, but it did us some good.
He flicks his ash to the sidewalk and slides the back of his hand under his nose.
How about you? he asks. He nods in the direction of Maury, who sits on the curb with a bunch of wildflowers clasped in one thick hand. Looks like you picked yourself up a travelin companion.
She tells him about Maury, about how she found him not long after she saw Lee last. About how he was carrying his granny down the road followed by a whole parade of meatskins looking for a feast. She tells how she found a slip of paper in his pocket with his name and the address of his relations in Texas and how she’s been trying to tote him there but that every time she turns around there’s something else that delays her and gets in the way of her undertook mission.
She has seen some things, she says, but she doesn’t feel like going into detail. Suffice to say, she’s been in the mix.
Well, he says, leaning back and studying her like the poorest doctor in the world, you got some scrapes and bruises, but it looks like you got a handle on surviving.
Yeah, she says. Stayin alive ain’t the hard part. The problem is stayin right.
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is I done some things I don’t care to talk about.
Little sister, anyone alive’s got a collection of those things.
Maybe so, but it’s one thing to feel like there’s a few rotten things knocking around inside you like some beans in a can. But it’s another thing to feel like those things are what your heart and stomach and brain are built out of.
She shakes it off and sits up straighter and crosses her arms across her chest.
It don’t matter, she says. It just comes from thinkin too much. That’s why you can’t slow down for long. You gotta keep your brain tired out so it don’t start searching for things to dwell on.
He nods and takes a drag of his cigarette.
Can I ask you one thing, though? he says.
We’ll see.
When you clocked me earlier. Who did you think I was?
That’s one of the things I don’t like to think about.
Who?
Just a man I left to die.
WILSON RUNS the train slow enough for anybody needing a ride to flag it down, but just fast enough to keep the slugs from climbing aboard. Sometimes they try, reaching out and catching hold of the metal flange. Sometimes they hold fast and find themselves dragged for the better part of a mile before their grip loosens and they fall to the wayside like clods of dirt shed by the machine.
Sometimes they are on the rails and are crushed under the train, leaving twisted and undistinguishable masses of biology behind.
When night comes, the land is tar dark. The running lights on the train penetrate just barely into the scrub as they pass by it, a scrim of weeds and thorns from which, every so often, she can see the pale faces of the dead watching her progress, as though these rails lead directly to a grim Asphodel Meadow where the host of the haunted give guidance and pay meet respect to these pilgrims from another place.
In the distance there is sometimes the faint glimmer of firelight, dim and implacable. Wilson claims these are mirages, nocturnal illusions that would recede forever if you tried to pursue them. Like the shimmering sylphs of old that led travelers over precipices or into mazy, unending caverns. Not all the magic of the earth is benevolent. She watches them intently, and at times they seem close, these misty, glowing lights, sometimes just out of reach, and she finds herself leaning forward, reaching her arm out toward them into the dark beyond the door of the boxcar.
That’s a good strategy for a quick amputation, girl, one of Wilson’s men says, and she draws her arm back into the car.
The following day, which is Sunday, some of Wilson’s men climb into the refugee car for a Christian service. Popo the Mexican reads passages from the Bible in a low monotone.
The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;
The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.
As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.
They pray, some silent, some mumbling their lips, some blowing their cigarette smoke upward to God in heaven. Temple watches. The god she knows is too big to need the supplication of the puny wanderers of the earth. God is a slick character, with magics beyond compare—like lights that tempt you into the belly of the beast, or sometimes other lights, like the moon and the glowing fish, that lead you back out again.
The night comes, and when the sun rises again it rises over a motionless desert, over streets full of rusty, broken-down automobiles, over tumbleweed towns filled with derelict buildings, signposts twisted and bent so that their arrows become nonsensical, pointing into the dirt or up into the sky, billboards whose sunny images and colorful words flap unglued in the breeze, shop windows caked with the grime of decades, bicycles with flat tires abandoned in the middle of intersections, their wheels turning slowly like impotent tin windmills, some buildings charred and burnt out, others half fallen down, multistory tenements split down the middle, standing like shoebox dioramas, pictures still hanging on the upright walls, televisions still in place on their stands teetering over the gaping edge of the floor where the rest of the living room has collapsed to the ground in great mountains of concrete and dust and girder like the abandoned toys of a giant child.
Indeed, to look at the landscape you might think not that the world has undergone a devastation but rather that it has been put on hold in the middle of a construction, that, in fact, the Builder’s holy hand has been halted temporarily, that the skeletal structures speak of promise and hope and ingenuity rather than of wreck and ruin.
But there are other places too, what used to be travelers’ oases, clusters of gas stations, fast-food restaurants, motels. The windows are intact, the electricity still flowing, the sliding glass doors still operational, the recorded music still playing on tinny, distorted speakers. Ghost towns. Lost to the world entirely, these places are so dead that even the dead don’t inhabit there.
These towns Wilson and his men treat with quiet respect, as though tiptoeing through a graveyard. There is something ominous and lonesome in this kind of wholesale abandonment. Ghostly, the way the rot and decay have not found their way here through the wide desert. Being left behind by devastation is still being left behind.
12.
They reach Longview, Texas, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. The burn is dry and purgative, and it feels like her skin is being sanded smooth by the weather.
The center of town is barricaded, and there are men stationed with guns, but when they see the train they wave, and someone moves the city bus they use to block the tracks. When the train is within the barricade, the bus closes off the tracks once more.
Three by three, Wilson says. Nine city blocks they got secured here. Biggest str
onghold east of Dallas. This is your stop if you’re still plannin on heading south.
There are children playing in the street, and when they see the train, they drop their bicycles to the ground and run toward it, their mothers admonishing them not to get too close. But it’s not just children. People of all ages and sorts emerge from the doorways and storefronts to gather around the train as it grinds to a slow halt.
Wilson’s men know the women here, and they find one another in the crowd and move off together in pairs, some of the women slung cackling over the shoulders of the men, their behinds stuck in the air and slapped like you would slap a sack of grain.
Other townspeople help the refugees down from the boxcars, and Wilson himself consults with a man and a woman, the elders of the town, to decide which of the refugees should stay and which should be taken on to Dallas.
Once the train is emptied of its passengers, the children begin playing Cowboys and Indians, using it as a massive prop.
I’m huntin a nice cool drink, Lee tells her. You want one?
I reckon Maury and me’ll just look around a bit.
Suit yourself. But try not to beat up on anyone while we’re here, what do you say?
She stands in the middle of the street for a while, not sure what to do with herself. Her place, it’s been proven over and over, is out there with the meatskins and the brutishness, not here within the confines of a pretty little peppertown. She tried that before, and it didn’t work out. What she really wants is to feel that gurkha knife solid in her hand—her palm is sweating for it—but she keeps it sheathed so as not to frighten the children.
She tries folding her arms over her chest and then she tries clasping her wrists behind her back, and then she tries stuffing her hands in her pockets, but nothing seems quite right, and she wishes it were just her and Maury outside where she would know there was something to be done, like building a fire or hiding from pursuers or slaughtering a meatskin.