Beautiful Dreamer (8 page)

The boy shook his head violently and with the stick underlined the name he had written.

‘James, your name's James.'

He nodded.

‘All right. If it's James, that's what I'll call you. A person's got a right to a name. Only thing he has got a right to. Well, James, I guess we wait till sun-up. Get yourself some sleep because I doubt you'll get any for a while. I don't know if they behind us or not. If they ain't now, they will be soon enough. I don't hear no dogs and I wasn't expecting to hear none yet, but it don't pay to be surprised. You understand what I'm saying?'

The boy understood, or so it seemed, for he stood off a pace or two and then settled down right where he was, scraping together some leaves and using a root with a fallen branch laid on it for a pillow.

For all he had told the boy to sleep, the man himself lay staring up at the sky, trying to get his mind to understand how it could go on for ever, with no beginning and no end and what the connection might be between such a spread of time and his own life, how he was in mortal danger and nothing out there gave a damn whether he lived or died. He had heard how what he was seeing was from the past, how the light that flowed over his hand had left wherever it came from thousands of years before. It was a link to a world gone by, and not a world like the one he knew because it came from some other place stranger than any he could imagine. Unless there was a God out there. His folks had gone to church when he was young, had gone regular, and were against sin, which seemed to be everywhere, so that he was forever being hollered out or clipped round the head for committing it. But it had gone from his life, that God, and not only when his wife and son died, neither. It had gone somewhere along the way without him even noticing it. Church dropped away, then prayers, then everything that was left except this sense of wondering what it was all about when the sky was a smear of stars and every now and then you saw one shoot across like a fallen angel.

A cloud scudded across the thin moon, enfolding him for a moment in darkness, though he could still make things out in the starlight, as though that would be enough if the moon should ever fail. Then it was gone again and he shivered as a milky light washed over his hands and made him look as if he was already dead. It was the colour his wife had looked when she gave up at last and breathed out that breath that she had stored for so long. The boy was there somewhere, but who was he? No, he was alone; the boy meaning nothing. He was all alone and with everything taken from him he had ever owned. He drifted into sleep at last, floating on a white lake which rippled slowly in a breeze, and where the ripple creased the silk water, it was dark as if the depths beneath were eternal night, a spill of black ink where God dipped his pen to write the names of the doomed.

He jolted into consciousness with the sun on his face. The boy was holding out a root to him.

‘What time is it?' he asked, forgetting that neither one of them had a watch and that one of them lacked a voice. ‘What's that?'

The boy held it out. He took it and held it to his nose. It smelt bitter. He tasted it. It was sweet. He saw that the boy was eating it and bit a piece of it off. It was fibrous but it reminded him that he was hungry and, with no food to hand, he swallowed.

‘We gotta go. Come on.'

He got up, in doing so standing on the name the boy had scratched the night before. The light soil had darkened during the night and he could not have made out the name if he had tried, but his mind was on other matters.

‘Let's go.' He threw the root in the bushes, not trusting anything he did not know.

Again he led the way. From the angle of the sun, he realized that it was later than he would have liked. Up ahead there was the makings of a path and on an impulse he followed it. It was narrow and he could not think who would have made it. He thought that maybe it was some animal but there were no tracks that he could see. So it was just a path for no reason, but in taking it maybe he gave it one. After half an hour or so, it brought him back to the river, but he was confident he had not come in a circle. The river itself meandered back and forth, bending back on itself as if reluctant to go anywhere at all, as if looking for a way to slow itself down.

‘Perhaps we should have stayed with it,' he said, half to himself, knowing that he would not have survived the cold but remembering its power to kill his pain. The trees fell back some, forming a kind of clearing. There were rocks, which was why no trees had rooted themselves, but the rocks were surrounded by river moss, almost olive green and springy to the foot. He looked around, not welcoming open ground, but everything seemed still and there were no sounds of the dogs that were to be his warning.

They were halfway across when the bullet took him clean through the shoulder. He was no more than half a dozen paces from the river and it knocked him toward it. He knew he had been hit, but felt nothing. He recovered himself, not thinking, at first, what had hit him, looking for the boy as if he might have punched him for no reason at all, his brain trying to make sense of the messages coming in. As a result, he stood waiting for the next shot, not thinking to do anything, not thinking to run or surrender, not knowing, even, that it was a shot. And there was another, but as it rang out he was already falling into the river, the boy's arms around his waist, his weight knocking him backwards into the rush of water. Then he was under that water. It closed about him. The shock of the cold brought him back to full consciousness, as he turned to shake the boy's arms from him, afraid he would drown who should instead have been worried about the bullet the boy had saved him from. Except that his brain would still not register the bullet, only the boy who seemed intent to wrestle him to death, who sought his life as perhaps he had a right to believe he should. And everything moved slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, time to figure it out, all that had happened from the very beginning, time to free himself from the boy who took him down to his death.

They did break surface, the boy and he, but the speed of the river had carried them free of the clearing and out into the centre. He caught sight of something, someone, a dark movement back there on the bank, but was under water again, pulled down this time not by the boy but by a current that seemed to wrap itself around him and tug at him as if it was time for him to die, and not by a bullet either.

And he was cursing himself for not pushing on the way that he knew that he should, figuring, at last, what had happened and understanding, in that instant, that they had looped around him and cut back from the bridge as he knew that they must, all this while turning and tumbling, calm inside, knowing that this was death and that all he could do was submit. No thought for the boy, who was flown out of his life, the life that was ending. And so he tumbled, aware that he was turning and hitting rocks and being drawn forwards and down and around in all directions at ever greater speed. He saw flashes of silver light edged with blue and then the clean dark of the river bottom, end over end, and no time to breathe, no need to breathe, either.

And indeed the river did run faster as it narrowed and cut through a gorge so that it was a froth of white with furrowed water like a tongue folded on itself to hawk a spit and parts where it spun off in separate whirlpools, the whirlpools themselves rushing on and down, finding their own way, with wills of their own.

But he didn't die, being simply rushed forwards and along like any other piece of flotsam fallen into the river and spun and dipped and sashayed. The river swept under the bridge, the bridge where he had meant to jump a train and take himself away from this place toward somewhere else where he could be free. It swept underneath and out round a bend that slowed it some, then back on itself like a snake edging ahead using the curves of its body, going ahead by going sideways.

He didn't die but instead kept hitting the surface and drawing in air with a rasping sound he couldn't hear, what with the rush of the river and the tumble of thoughts going through his mind. He was using lives faster than a cat. First the burning, when he thought they would string him up for sure, and then the two outside his home, seeking him out, then getting hit when he thought they were hours behind, and now drowning. Well, someone was trying to tell him something right enough. And he smiled to himself, even in the midst of all this, and the smile told him that he wasn't going to die and indeed he realized that the river was losing some of its force or that he was being pulled off to where it was quieter and his face was clear of the water and he was breathing almost easy now.

When he came to land, he was drifting slowly. He could see where the main body of the water was still sweeping by, with branches and debris from the storm like so many creatures bobbing up and down. Then there was ground beneath his feet and he was pulling himself forwards where a fan of bushes came down almost to the water's edge. There was no pain from his shoulder. Indeed, he had almost forgotten where he had been hit, but he was used by now to what the cold could do to ease pain until the thaw set in. He thought about the boy, as he hadn't from the moment he first hit the water, and remembered being hit by him just after he was hit by something else, thinking for a split second that it was the boy that had done it and was trying to finish him off, but recalling, too, as it seemed to him now, the sound of the shot, the first and a second just before the two of them went in together. But he was nowhere now. Not that he could see. He looked out at the river, but he must have been swept on past. If they had gone in together, they would have sailed along together, died together, lived together. There was no sign of him, though, and he figured he must be dead as he was convinced he should be himself, seeing he had taken so much punishment and hadn't swum a stroke, just been drawn along as if his life wasn't his to live any more, just like a twig in a torrent taken wherever the torrent had it in mind to go. So the boy was gone. He thought no more than that, lying gasping, a fish on the river bank, waiting for death.

Then he thought of the men. He had no sense of how far he had come or how long it had taken, this ride of his on an ice-water train. And train was the word in his head, though it took him a moment to remember why. How far away was that now, and how far the men? He turned on his back and looked around. Behind him, and through the trees, he could see the end of the bridge, up where the land rose above the river. Having no clear idea how close he had been when they caught him, he could still not figure where they might be, though he knew that the bends must have folded space, bringing him back toward them in sweeping him away.

He eased himself up and felt a sharp pain, clean and clear, in his shoulder. He looked down and could see a neat hole in his shirt. He pulled it back and there it was, punched through flaccid white skin, with no trace of blood. He reached his other hand over his shoulder and down and found another hole, not as neat and small but reassuringly there. It was through and out and with luck time would deal with that. He needed the boy, though, recalled the moment in the wood, with the silver of moonlight, when he wrote his name in the dirt.

He shook his head, alarmed that his mind was wandering. He was about to make the same mistake again, lie around when they were coming toward him. There had been no dogs, that's what had fooled him, or if there were, they had been well-enough trained to keep quiet. And if he didn't hear them the first time, he wouldn't the second. They might be crazy, those men, breeding up in the family so that they went bad as animals will go bad if you breed them up the same way, but they were cunning and sly and trained their dogs well so that though there were those wouldn't give them the time of day, those same people would pay them for one of their dogs that would do what they were told but had the instincts to go on their own and find whatever it was they had to find.

And it wasn't the law. The law didn't just shoot you down. It might do just about anything else, but it wouldn't do that, so he knew what he was up against and that made him feel better in some way he could not explain to himself, still less to others if he had been put to it.

He thumped his balled fist on his leg. His mind was wandering again when his body should have been on the move. He looked around for the boy, scanned the far bank in case he had been dropped there, as though the river were a crow dropping carrion from the sky. There was nothing there, nothing you could call a boy. Not that he acted like a boy. Not that he acted like a nigger. Well, you took people as they were. Most he didn't take at all, preferring to live on his own without the complication. He punched himself again, bringing himself back to what he must do.

Luckily the shoulder wound was on the same side as his burnt hand, so he could lever himself up with the other, crouching low in case they were out there waiting to put a round clear through his head. He listened, but it was useless so close to the river. All he could hear was the drawing rush of water and the squawk of a bird or two close by.

The bushes gave cover. So close to the water, they were deep green and tall so he could almost stand, though not quite, so that he had to move forwards like an old man might, bent a little, shuffling through the undergrowth. But which way to go? The bridge was where they were coming from, maybe where they would stake themselves out, waiting for him to come to them. Then he realized that the gun had gone. He had known it all along, except that it had never surfaced in his mind. He had a picture of himself falling into the river, pushed there by the boy, with his gun flying off out of his hand, his arm flung out as if the water were the ground and he had to protect himself from hitting it. It was not the side that took the round. Even so, he had let it go so that the shells in his pocket were useless now and he had nothing to go against them with. He thought to throw them away in disgust, disgust at himself for letting go, but there seemed no point. Besides, maybe there was a chance he might get it back or even another. That was how his mind was working and he smiled again at his own foolishness in thinking such.