Mr. Shivers

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

They spent the next day working more on the cars and preparing to leave. They shifted loads and strapped down everything they could. As night fell they ate what was left of the salted pork and huddled around the fire. The day had been warm but the night was freezing out in those dry reaches.

“How many folks have you all seen so far?” asked Clark.

“Seen?” said Pike.

“Yeah. I just… I just want to know how many are headed where we’re headed. I think a fella should know what he’s up against.”

“Clark,” said Missy, “don’t talk about such things in front of the children.”

“They should know, too,” said Clark. “I don’t want anyone walking into this with just dreams in their heads. I want to know. How many?”

“I don’t know,” Pike said. “I don’t know where you’re headed.”

“South and west. Away from all this dead land.”

“People have moved in a great wave, Mr. Hopkins. Did you not know that?”

“I did,” he said, “but… but I haven’t done as much traveling as you all. How many?”

Pike shrugged. “Like the ocean.”

Clark looked down at the fire and crossed his arms.

“Those who hold steadfast will always survive,” Pike said. “You and your family are strong. Stronger than most. I’m not exactly a holy man anymore, if I ever was, but I do see a future for you, Mr. Hopkins. For people as strong as all of you, how could it be otherwise?”

“That’s awful nice of you to say.”

“It’s not nice,” said Pike. “It’s the truth. No compliment, but fact.”

“You people are all right. I was sort of scared of you at first, that I admit, but you’re all right.”

Roosevelt took out his harmonica and began to play. They listened as they lay around the fire. Connelly was rubbing his hands slowly when someone touched his arm. He looked up into the face of Clark’s oldest daughter.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“A little.”

“There’s a little whisky, if you want it.”

“Thank you, uh…”

She smiled. “Deliah.”

“Thank you, Deliah.”

She brought him a tin cup full of bourbon and he sipped at it.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“A ways back,” he said.

“Yeah, but where?”

“Memphis.”

“I never been outside of Oklahoma. I never been anywhere but my hometown.”

“You should be thankful,” said Connelly. “Country’s a wide, mad place.”

“I guess,” she said. “I always wanted to travel. I never wanted to do it this way.”

“I believe that.”

“Deliah,” said Missy. “You leave him alone. He’s tired.”

“I’m all right,” said Connelly.

“Come over here,” Missy scolded.

Deliah scowled and went over to her mother, but smiled at Connelly over her shoulder. He frowned and drank more. Clark took the bottle out and began passing it around. It lit little fires in their stomachs and made the night bearable and soon they were chattering and talking just as though they had been at home.

“These are nice people,” said Lottie to Connelly.

“They are.”

“It’s a sad thing to see them out on the road. I’d like to see them right. It’d be nice to just stay with them and keep moving.”

“It would be,” said Connelly.

“Do you know what I think, sometimes?”

“What?”

“I think sometimes that… that every step I take I seem to lose a little bit more of myself. Every step I take chasing that man, I forget what I’m doing. No… That’s not so. Not what I’m doing, but why. Do you know what I mean?”

Connelly shrugged.

“Like, back in the jungle,” she said. “When Pike beat that man so he’d tell us where Shivers had gone, I just stood there like it was nothing. It seemed okay to me. And it had, after… after what had happened to the twins. But that night I lay sleeping and I thought it wasn’t more than a year ago that I hadn’t never seen a man get beaten in my life. Not like that. Not like that.”

Lottie bit her lip and toyed with her hair. She seemed eager to say something, but stopped, smiled, and said, “Pardon. I’ll just be a bit,” and she walked away.

She was gone a long time. Connelly drank more with the other men. It was the first time any of them had tasted liquor in a while. His head began to swim and the fire became a yellow smear in the night. He wondered where Lottie went, and as he wondered the voices of the other travelers mixed in his head and in the circle of cars he felt trapped, like he had fallen into a hole and was unable to crawl out. He tried to convince himself it was only the drink, but soon it was too much. He stood up and staggered off through the ring of cars and out of the light. Someone called to him but he paid it no mind.

Soon he was out among the scrub. At night the countryside had become a gray and violet inversion of itself, the pasture stubbled like man’s cheek, the creek a narrow braid of shimmering light. Far up above the sky was filled with an impossible number of stars, some large and shining, some the barest suggestion of light at all. The moon seemed closer than it did in any other place Connelly had ever been. It was so close he felt he could almost touch it, its pockmarked skin the color of honey and wheat. He wanted to touch it and then smell his fingers and see what scent it carried across the sky.

He looked back. The campsite was more than a hundred yards away. He could not make out their faces. A strange fear came over him as he listened to them sing, their voices carried to him on the wind. He went and sat beneath a lone cedar, gnarled as an old man’s hand, and he watched them. He remembered the gray man turning and speaking his name as the sky was eaten by shadow. Remembered the look of dull surprise on the face of the man he had dragged off the train car, how the man twisted when struck by the next car and the way he seemed to dissolve beneath the wheels. And he remembered Molly. How small and fragile his memory of her was now. It felt dangerous just to caress it in his mind.

He watched the distant fire and people laughing and sharing one another’s company, and inside of him a voice quietly said: This is not for you. These things are not yours, will not be yours, could never be yours. Not now. Not ever. Not ever again.

And Connelly listened, and he agreed. The cars fenced him out. He could not go back.

He fumbled in his coat and took out a cigarette. He lit it and its coarse red ember burned bright in his hands. When he looked up a figure was walking to him across the field, white and fragile in the starlight. He thought it was Lottie but instead it was the girl, Deliah.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked, smiling. She was wearing a white dress that was so beaten by now it was almost sheer. She came close and he tried not to notice how it gripped her body in the wind. She was barefoot. Pale white feet smeared with dark earth. Each inch of her skin’s texture visible to the naked eye.

“Having a smoke,” he said.

“You could have smoked with us. We wouldn’t have minded none.”

“Just felt like quiet, I suppose,” he said.

She laughed. “Would you like another drink?”

He shook his head.

“Anything?”

He shook his head again.

“Come on back by the fire,” she said.

“No, that’s… that’s all right. I’ve got some thinking to do.”

“You can think with us if you want.”

He did not answer.

“Come on back,” she said. “Please. For me.”

He shook his head. “That’s… that’s kind of you, but…”

“But you just want to sit out in a field, huh?” she said, now pouting. She looked him over and sniffed. “Well, fine, then. Sit under this damn tree. I don’t care. Sit here all you want.”

She turned and strode across the fields. In the faint light she seemed a ghost, each line of her body an ivory curve, each motion agonizingly clear. Her hair glistened and bounced and toyed with the nape of her neck, her delicate hands bunched into fists at her sides. Connelly felt the urge to cry no, no, come back, come back and I will come with you. I will come wherever you ask.

But he did not. He was silent. He looked down between his feet and when he looked up again she was gone.

Connelly rubbed his arms, fighting the chilly night. An animal voice cried in the darkness. Somewhere in hills another cried back, answering.

He looked up at the stars again and considered this spot on the land, this tree he sat under. These empty square feet of land had always been here, would always be here. To this place he was no more than a dream. And he wondered about those who had come before, wandering over the plains, treading this spot. People that came before names. Animals that came before sunlight. Perhaps it had been so.

He touched the coarse earth. Once something had died here. It was a fact of chance. Some animal had dragged itself to this spot or maybe had fallen, limbs askew, its lifeblood leaking onto the earth. And then perhaps it had lifted its thoughtless eyes to the infinity above, looked at the endless, bejeweled dark, just as Connelly was now, and made some sound, some mewling cry. Asking a question. Begging for a few seconds more. And then expired, maybe leaving its question behind.

One death, at least. Perhaps hundreds of things had died here. Thousands. Millions. And maybe all had spent their last moments watching the stars swim by.

Connelly looked at the sky for a long time. He wondered if the stars knew what lived in their depths. If they knew anything at all.