Mr. Shivers

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Connelly awoke to a sharp, stabbing pain in his forehead and a rumbling ache everywhere else. He opened his eyes and saw Lottie was daubing his forehead.

“Mmm? What?” he said, still slurred.

“Just trying to clean you up,” she said. “You need stitches. Probably. Hell, I don’t know. Your forehead is a mess. Half your face is unrecognizable.”

He felt his cheek. It was stiff and swollen and felt like rubber. Speaking was difficult. He lay back down and saw Pike standing on the ridge of the stream, leaning into his staff and staring out at the woods.

“He hasn’t slept yet,” said Lottie. “It’s been almost a day. Everyone’s slept but him. He hasn’t even moved. You saved his life, you know.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Didn’t know or didn’t save his life?”

Connelly waved his hand, sick of conversation that wasn’t yes or no.

Lottie gave him a brittle smile. “Sleep more,” she said. “You got to.”

“Fine,” said Connelly, and then again, a whisper: “Fine.”

They used cool mud and dry moss to stop their bleeding. In the wan starlight they looked medieval, wandering partisans wearing some diseased warpaint. Lottie bound Roonie’s arm in a piece of Hammond’s coat lining and he whimpered as she drew it tight. Connelly allowed her to do the same to him, bandaging the gash on his face. His arm was still useless and they made a sling of his coat but it pained him when they walked.

When they came under the cover of a passing cloud Pike judged they were ready and they ventured downstream in the inky night with hands held out like blind men. They stopped to rest in a nest formed of fallen trees and Pike and Hammond peered out through the cage of boughs around them. They saw nothing and went from one person to the next, silently touching them to tell them they were ready to continue on.

In this fashion they walked for nearly three miles, injured and starving in the blind night. Connelly wondered if it was possible to fall asleep in one world and wake up in another. He had slept on the train so perhaps this was some feverish nightmare, a dream-place where men killed and died for no reason he could see and each minute was spent in a starved, sightless silence, like animals far under the earth. Perhaps the moment of change had happened before then. Some other occasion when he fell asleep. Waking to the crimson sky of the drought. Waking to his new, hellish Memphis, ruined and gutted by a grief caused in the space of a day, an hour, a second. It seemed then that the world was a terrible, wounded place whose revolutions were driven by panic and madness more than love or reason. A directionless freefall toward something, maybe toward nothing. He no longer knew.

That night as Connelly lay on the damp ground he wondered for the first time if there could ever be any return from this. He had considered the futility of it. Had considered wandering out and searching and never finding. And he had considered the law, the chance that his future might be confined to cement walls and damp stone floors and colorless monotony, should his quest succeed. Neither of those seemed very different than any alternative. To live with such a violation was the same in many ways.

But there was always a chance he could succeed, and go back. That things might return to what they were before, at least a little. Before his daughter was taken. He could go home, and though it would be a home without Molly it would be one he could live with. One that made sense.

Now a sliver of doubt worked its way into his mind. That life seemed very far away now. The farther he traveled the less he could recall what he hoped to return to.

He remembered what his wife had said before he left. Remembered sitting on the front porch, looking through the fog of the screen windows and watching tree limbs dance in the night wind, the streetlamps turning them into wicked fingers on the grass below. The warmth of a cup of coffee clutched to his belly. The gentle sigh of a placid evening in a city that was content. His mind was already slowed with whisky, his thoughts turgid and wordless. He did not know how long he had been sitting there.

He heard her walk down behind him but did not turn. Neither of them did anything for a long while.

Then, “I’m going to my mother’s.”

He turned to her. She was dressed nice. A yellow dress with white trim, full of springtime. Hair brushed and neat. But in her eyes there was a place where a fire had long gone out, and when she looked at him he felt the emptiness behind them. The empty place where yesterday had been.

“All right,” he said.

“I’ll be staying for a while.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Long enough. Maybe longer.”

He nodded and turned back to the street.

“Don’t you want to know why?” she asked

“Why what?”

“Why I’m leaving.”

“All right. Why are you leaving?”

“Jesus, Marcus,” she said, and leaned her head up against the glass of the front door.

“What?”

She shook her head. Grinding the veins of her forehead up against the door. “Do you know this is the first time we’ve talked in four days?”

“Four days?”

“Yes.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It is.”

“I’ve said things. I’ve said good night.”

“No. You’re always asleep before me. You’ve slept in the chair downstairs. Or out here. After drinking. I’ve slept in our bed, sometimes. But not usually. I sleep in the tub mostly.”

“Why?”

“The smell. Of the bed. I can’t stand it. I don’t know why.” She turned to face him, her back now up against the jamb. Her eyes trailed up to look into the ceiling. “It’s all right.”

“What is?”

“This. Mrs. Echols said they usually don’t last.”

“What don’t last?”

“Marriages that lose a child.”

Connelly stood up. He put down the coffee and walked to the screen door and crossed his arms and stood there.

“She didn’t say it to me,” she said. “I overheard. Overheard her at church.”

“She’s full of shit.”

“Marcus.”

“We’ll be all right.”

“Marcus. Marcus, we’re not all right now. I don’t see why we would get better anytime soon.”

They were both quiet then. A truck came up the road and puttered by, its one-eyed headlight roving through the brush. They watched it leave and as the mutter of its tires died away the silence became more unbearable.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she asked. “I can tell. You want to go out. To go after that man.”

Connelly nodded.

“I know. I can see it. I can see it in you. It’s eating you alive. That part. That part he took away from you, that part that was her. That empty part is just getting bigger. Eating you up.”

“It isn’t right,” he said.

She shook her head. She moved to wipe away her tears but there were none.

“I can make it right,” he said.

“How? By going out and killing him?”

“Yes.”

“How will that make it right?”

“It’ll make things make sense. I have to make them make sense. That shouldn’t happen. If I fix that then I can come home again.”

“You’re home right now.”

“No. I’m not. You know that.” He turned to look at her. “Would you take me back?”

“What?”

“If I went out there and killed that man and came back, would you take me back?”

“Marcus…”

“I have to do it. I have to. I just want to know if there’ll be anything left for me once it’s done. If it ever gets done.”

“I don’t know. You can’t make things right. This will never be right. Not really.”

“It’ll make things quiet. Make them bearable, then. Would you take me back then?”

“I don’t know. I might. But, Marcus, if you go out there, if you leave your home and this place and me and take to the road like God knows many others have done now, I don’t know who’ll come back.”

“I will.”

“No. The man who goes out there and the man who comes back won’t be the same. I don’t think so. It depends on who comes back, Marcus.”

“I will. The way I was before.”

“You won’t ever be the man from before. And I won’t ever be the same, either. But I do know that there isn’t anything here for us anymore, either. Every day we’re here we bleed a little more. On the inside, in places we can’t see. If you think that will stop that for you, stop whatever it is from dying inside you, then… then I can’t hold it against you. I don’t know if I can take you back after, but I can’t hold it against you.”

He bowed his head. “But there is a chance.”

“Yes. There’s a chance. There’s always a chance.”

“I hope things will be better,” he said softly. “I hope I can love you again.”

She looked away. “I hope so, too.”

He shut his eyes. He heard her walking away and he began to say something after her but could not think of anything. Then he sat and thought.

Hours later he realized she was gone. He had not even seen her head toward the street. Had not even heard the car start. He imagined her fading into the night like some ghost, her dress a warm honey flame swallowed by the dusky shadows, traveling forward into the darkness with a hat on her head and her suitcase in her hand. Movements slow and dignified and normal. Like she was expecting something. Waiting for something to appear before her on the road.

Then he had walked back into the house. Every inch of it had been soaked in silence. He had stood there in the living room and known he stood in the belly of something once pregnant and full of promise. A future and a life violently aborted without even a cry to mark its passing from the world.

* * *

Dawn climbed in the distance and gave the gray land texture. They stopped again to scout. Hammond saw no pursuers but then he did not see much of anything; whatever forest they were in was a deep one. Roosevelt and Lottie foraged for food but Pike whispered an order not to use the gun. He would also not bother to set traps for they would not be staying long.

They returned later with mushrooms and roots they figured were good enough to eat. Pike inspected them, having some rudimentary knowledge of this, and they muddled a thin, watery broth of the ones he approved and sipped it gratefully, trying to ignore its gritty texture. They continued on until the trees came to an end and the stream turned into a river. They bathed and washed their wounds and their clothing, Lottie going downstream for decency’s sake but not all that far as decency didn’t have much to do with anything right now, she said. Connelly and Hammond watched her walk away, undoing her shawl and letting her hair spill out. They shared a look but said nothing.

Roosevelt had woven fishhooks into his coat lapel, each sharp prong carefully wrapped in paper to protect him. They made makeshift poles out of string and reeds and Monk managed to catch three of some kind of small trout. They gutted them and cooked them over an open fire and they had stew once more, but this time their bellies awoke to the fat and meat and for a while they were sated.

Lottie undid Roonie’s bandage. It was ugly but she said it was healthy enough. Pike agreed. They both undid Connelly’s and winced at the gash running down his eyebrow and temple.

“It’ll scar,” said Lottie.

“He still has the eye,” said Pike. “You do, don’t you?”

Connelly turned to look at the glimmering surface of the river, and though the specks of light came through somewhat smeary he said he could still see fine.

“Good,” said Pike. “Now we’ll risk a fire. A real one, for warmth. And we’ll talk.”

“Back there,” said Monk softly, “back there in the woods… You said that was a trap.”

Pike nodded. “I did indeed.”

“What’d you mean by that?”

He hesitated, idly drawing in the mud with a finger. “Well, you heard them back there, didn’t you? Just a snatch of conversation, but it was enough. They had been sent. Sent by someone who we were following and didn’t want us following anymore. Someone who knew we had to be on that train and that we’d be traveling illegally.”

There was no sound but the running water. No one looked at one another.

“He’s covering his trail,” said Pike finally.

“Who?” asked Roonie.

“The shiver-man. The gray man, of course. They were helping him.”

“Why would anyone agree to that?” asked Monk. “I-I can’t imagine him… imagine him…”

“What?” Pike said. “Buying thugs?”

“No. I can’t.”

“It’s a challenging thought, that I admit. We think of him as a monster. But others may just see a scarred man. We know what he is, they do not. They would just listen to the money in his pocket.”

“Could be more to him,” said Connelly, looking keenly at Pike. “Could be he’s used to being chased. Used to tricking the folks who chase him.”

Pike returned his gaze, his face fierce and furious. “Yes. It could be. But there also could be countless stories he’s told himself. It’d be wise to think before giving them credence. I hardly think clumsy men with shotguns are in league with all the terrors of the supernatural.”

“So what does this mean?” said Lottie. “What does this have to do with us?”

“It means we can no longer use the rails,” he said.

“That will cripple us,” said Monk.

“Yes. Yes, it will,” said Pike. “But it’s better to be crippled than dead. We’ve killed two men on the railroad—”

“But they were trying to kill us!” Lottie said.

“That’s true. We know that. We know that well and good. But will a lawman? Will the railroad man? For all we know the railroad man was in on it. And besides, who are we to trust? Who are we to be believed?”

“Americans,” said Roonie defiantly. “American citizens.”

“We are hobos,” Pike said harshly. “Beggars. Vagrants. We have no town or state and we barely have a country. We operate outside of the law and the law knows that.”

“I don’t,” said Hammond.

“Yes you do,” Pike said. “You travel illegally on trains. You have intimidated men for help. And don’t forget why all of us started this journey in the first place. Murder is usually illegal no matter where you go.” He surveyed their faces in the firelight. “That’s what we wish to do, isn’t it? To murder?”

There was no sound but the crackling of flames. Connelly said, “Yes.”

“Yes. You all’ve just tasted violence. You’ll taste more, certainly. If you continue, that is.”

Lottie covered her mouth with one hand.

“So what do we do?” said Roonie quietly.

“We keep going. We can find out where that train stopped and search for the gray man there.”

“But he’ll be miles away by then!” said Hammond.

“I’ve never let distance deter me,” said Pike, and his voice was like ice. “It didn’t at the start. It won’t now. I’ll walk until my legs are stiff and broken, that I’ll do, amen.”

He fixed his gaze on them, and, feeling its force, they nodded, one by one.

Connelly’s thoughts strayed back to the few words they’d heard their attackers share. He couldn’t help think that they were somehow familiar with the scarred man, which made him wonder if more than miles lay between them and their quarry.

“How many more rounds do you have, Roosevelt?” asked Connelly.

“Dozen or so,” he said softly.

“I hope that’ll be enough, if we need them,” said Hammond.

“I hope so, too,” said Pike. “Buying bullets gets a lot of attention. Attention we don’t need.”

Lottie shivered and wiped at her eyes. Roonie was rocking back and forth like a clockwork toy. The only ones who did not move were Pike, Hammond, and Connelly, who sat like they were made of stone.

“Well, then,” said Hammond. “Well, then.”

They then turned in for sleep, and, exhausted, slept soundly.