you're so upfront movement? Is that your little dream? A big bad black man?'
I turned away from him completely.
He said, in a very cold still voice. 'Do you get off on corpses, too?'
'This was a mistake,' I said. 'Let's go back. '
'I thought you wanted to talk. '
'Why are you doing this?'
'Because,' he said, 'you are someone who takes off dead men's watches, and you look like you could have been a nice person. '
'I am,' I said, and nearly wept, 'a nice person. '
'That's what scares the shit out of me. '
'You think I want this? You think I don't hate this?' I think that's when I threw down the soup. I grabbed him by the shirt sleeves and held him. I remember being worried about the cameras, so I kept my voice low and rapid, like it was scuttling.
'Look, I was on the train, I was going to die, and Lou said, you can live. You can help here and live. So I did it. And I'm here. And so are you. '
'I know,' he said, softly.
'So OK, you don't like me, I can live with that, fine, no problem, you're under no obligation, so let's just go back. '
'You come up here because of the forest,' he said.
'Yes! Brilliant!'
'Even mass murderers need love too, right?'
'Yes! Brilliant!'
'And you want me to love you? When you bear the same relation to me, as Lou does to you?'
'I don't know. I don't care. ' I was sitting down now, hugging myself. The bowl of soup was on the ground by my foot, tomato sludge creeping out of it. I kicked it. 'Sorry I hassled you. '
'You didn't hassle me. '
'All I want is one little part of my life to have a tiny corner of goodness in it. Just one little place. I probably won't, but I feel like if I don't find it soon, I will bust up into a million pieces. Not love. Not necessarily. Just someone nice to talk to, who I really like. Otherwise I think one day I will climb back into one of those trains. ' When I said it, I realized it was true. I hadn't known I was that far gone. I thought I had been making a play for sympathy.
Royce was leaning in front of me, looking me in the face. 'Listen, I love you. '
'Bullshit. ' What kind of mind-fuck now?
He grabbed my chin, and turned my head back round. 'No. True. Not maybe in the way you want, but true. You really do look, right now, like one of those people on the train. Like someone I just unloaded. '
I didn't know quite what he was saying, and I wasn't sure I trusted him, but I did know one thing. 'I don't want to go back to that bunkhouse, not this afternoon. '
'OK. We'll stay up here and talk. '
I felt like I was stepping out onto ice. 'But can we talk nicely? A little bit less heavy duty?'
'Nicely. Sounds sweet, doesn't mean anything. Like the birds?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Like the birds. '
I reckon that, altogether, we had two weeks. A Lullaby in Birdland. Hum along if you want to. You don't need to know the words.
Every afternoon after the work, Royce and I went up the mound and talked. I think he liked talking to me, I'll go as far as that. I remember one afternoon he showed me photographs from his wallet. He still had a wallet, full of people.
He showed me his mother. She was extremely thin, with dark limp flesh under her eyes. She was trying to smile. Her arms were folded across her stomach. She looked extremely kind, but tired.
There was a photograph of a large red brick house. It had white window sills and a huge white front door, and it sagged in the way that only very old houses do.
'Whose is that?' I asked.
'Ours. Well, my family's. Not my mother's. My uncle lives there now. '
'It's got a Confederate flag over it!'
Royce grinned and folded up quietly; his laughter was almost always silent. 'Well, my great-grandfather didn't want to lose all his slaves, did he?'
One half of Royce's family were black, one half were white. There were terrible wedding receptions divided in half where no one spoke. 'the white people are all so embarrassed, particularly the ones who want to be friendly. There's only one way a black family gets a house like that: Grandfather messed around a whole bunch. He hated his white family, so he left the house to us. My uncle and aunt want to open it up as a Civil War museum and put their picture on the leaflet. 'Royce folded up again. 'I mean, this is in Georgia. Can you imagine all those rednecks showing up and finding a nice black couple owning it, and all this history about black regiments?'
'Who's that?'
'My cousin. She came to live with us for a while. '
'She's from the white half. '
'Nope. She's black. ' Royce was enjoying himself. The photograph showed a rather plump, very determined teenage girl with orange hair, slightly wavy, and freckles.
'Oh. ' I was getting uncomfortable, all this talk of black and white.
'It's really terrible. Everything Cyndi likes, I mean everything, is black, but her father married a white woman, and she ended up like that. She wanted to be black so bad. Every time she met anyone, she'd start explaining how she was black, really. She'd go up to black kids and start explaining, and you could see them thinking ‘Who is this white girl and is she out of her mind?' We were both on this program, so we ended up in a white high school and that was worse because no one knew they'd been integrated when she was around. The first day this white girl asked her if she'd seen any of the new black kids. Then her sister went and became a top black fashion model, you know, features in Ebony, and that was it. It got so bad, that whenever Cyndi meant white, she'd say ‘the half of me I hate. ''
'What happened to her?'
'I think she gave up and became white. She wanted to be a lawyer. I don't know what happened to her. She got caught in LA. '
I flipped over the plastic. There was a photograph of a mother and a small child. 'Who's that?'
'My son,' said Royce. 'that's his mother. Now she thinks she's a witch. ' An ordinary looking girl stared sullenly out at the camera. She had long frizzy hair and some sort of ethnic dress. 'She'll go up to waiters she doesn't like in restaurants and whisper spells at them in their ears. '
'How long ago was this?' I felt an ache, as if I'd lost him, as if I had ever had him.
'Oh ten years ago, before I knew anything. I mean, I wouldn't do it now. I'd like any kid of mine to have me around, but his mother and I don't get on. She told my aunt that she'd turned me gay by magic to get revenge. '
'Were they in LA too?'
Royce went very still, and nodded yes.
'I'm sorry,' I said.
He passed me back the wallet. 'Here. That's all of them. Last time we got together. '
There was a tiny photograph, full of people. The black half. On the far right was a very tall, gangling fifteen- year-old, looking bristly and unformed, shy and sweet. Three of the four people around him were looking at him, bursting with suppressed smiles. I wish I'd known him then, as well. I wanted to know him all his life.
'I got a crazy, crazy family,' he said, shaking his head with affection. 'I hope they're all still OK. ' It was best not to think about what was happening outside. Or inside, here.
It was autumn, and the sun would come slanting through the leaves of the woods. It would make a kind of corona around them, especially if the Boys were burning garbage and there was smoke in the air. The light would come in shafts, like God was hiding behind the leaves. The leaves were dropping one by one.
There was nothing in the Station that was anything to do with Royce. Everything that made him Royce, that
