if he wanted to go much farther. And he would have to go farther. The man had a week’s head start on him at least. It was unlikely that he’d even be in Rennah. But he had been there once and that was all Connelly needed.
Closer, he said to himself. I’m close. I’m very close now.
“Town’s up that way,” said one of the men, pointing to a few lines of smoke on the horizon.
The old man eyed the spindle-like lines twisting across the sunset. “That ain’t the town,” he said.
“No?”
“No. Those are campfires.”
The men looked at each other again, this time worried. Connelly was not surprised. He knew they had expected it, whether they said so or not. For many it was the same as the town they had just left.
Connelly caught its scent before he saw it. He smelled rotten kindling and greasy fires and cigarette smoke, excrement and foul water. It was a plague-stink, a battlefield-reek. Then he heard the cacophony of dogs barking and children crying, a junkyard song of pots and pans and old engine parts and drunken melodies. Then finally it came into view. They shaded their eyes and looked at the encampment before them, saw jalopies lurching between canyons of shuddering tents, people small as dots milling beside them. A wide smear of gray and black among the white-gold of the fields. There had to be at least a hundred people there. At least.
“Jesus,” said one of the men.
“Yeah,” said another.
“Can’t see there being much work here.”
“I reckon not, no.”
“Told you so,” said the grayhair softly. “Told you so.”
Connelly and the men parted ways as they approached. The men walked on and came to the camp’s ragged border. Some of the people had tents and some had cars and some had nothing at all but still mingled around these tattered constructs like refuse caught washing downstream. They watched the new strangers approach, too tired to hold any real resentment. The men split up and wandered in and were caught among the webs of the encampment, filtering through the grubby people to find some spot to sit in or a fire to stand by. They sat and made talk and waited for night and the following dawn. By now it was routine.
Connelly did not join them. He walked around the camp and into town.
CHAPTER TWO
The town couldn’t have been more than five hundred people, at most. Yet the essentials were there: a main street, a post office, a general store, and finally a saloon at the end of the street.
Connelly peered through the yellowed windows of the bar. Dusty bottles were lined up behind an old wooden countertop. Men sat in sweat-soaked shirts with their hats pulled low, staring into their drinks with eyes like muddy ice.
He walked in carefully, stepping like the floor could collapse at any moment. All the men looked at him, for his size caught the eye. He removed his cap and stuffed it in his pocket and sat down at the bar. The others relaxed as he did, seeing that underneath all the miles of travel he was still a man, though no doubt one who had been roughing it for the past months. His hair had grown long and a beard crawled at the edges of his jaw. He could have been thirty, or forty, or even fifty, as his skin was tanned and dark and bore deep lines from the sun.
“What can I get you?” asked the bartender.
“Whisky,” Connelly said.
“Ten cents.”
“All right.”
Neither one moved.
“You don’t have whisky?” asked Connelly.
“We have whisky. You have ten cents?”
Connelly reached into his satchel and took out a thin wallet and a dime and slid it over.
“Sorry,” said the bartender, taking it. “Got to do that. Lots of folks come in here, order, then run out.”
“Wasn’t anything.”
The bartender poured and placed the glass in front of him. Connelly took the glass and drank it in a single swallow.
“Long time getting here?” asked the bartender.
“Here is just another stop on the road,” he said.
An ancient old man stood up and came and sat beside Connelly. He ordered as well, hands trembling. Then he turned to Connelly and studied him, his face fixed in a terrible awe.
“What you doing there, grampa?” asked the bartender cautiously.
The old man did not answer. Instead he said, “West.”
“What?” said Connelly.
“West. You’re going west, ain’t you?”
“If that’s where I’m going, yeah,” said Connelly.
“You are,” he said. “You are. I can tell. I seen enough people heading west to know when one’s going that way. And you are.”
“Okay.”
“You shouldn’t, you know. You shouldn’t.”
“I could go back south or north right after you get done talking to me.”
“No. You won’t. Certain men, the way they look at things and the way they walk, they’re drawn to the west, to the far countries. Even if they turn aside and walk for days on end, soon enough they’ll find themselves facing sunset again.”
“A lot of people are moving west right now.”
“True. That’s true. But they should not go.”
Connelly fiddled with his glass, ignoring him.
The old man said, “They say the sun kisses the land out there, like a lover. That may be so. I been out there. For years, I been out there. And if that’s so then the sun’s love is a terrible, harsh thing. Where it’s placed its kiss nothing grows, all is burned away, everything is scorched and nothing lives and your heart is the only one of its kind that beats for miles and miles. And all is red. Where the sun and the horizon and the sands meet, all is red.”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” said the old man. “You should not go. You should turn around. Stop looking. And go.”
“You leave me the hell alone,” Connelly said.
“Listen,” the old man pleaded. “Listen to me. I been out there. I seen the great, red hunger, and where it walks everything aches. From the stones to the skies, everything aches. It’s broken land, there. It is broken and lost, like those who live there, and they cannot go back. You should not go out there. You should not.”
The bartender scowled. “Get out of here, you damn crazy fool. Stop worrying my customers and get the hell out of here.”
“Go back to your home,” said the old man.
“I don’t have a home,” said Connelly. “Not anymore.”
“But you still could have another,” said the old man. “In the west there is no hope of that. Such things are forfeit there.”
“Get out. Now,” said the bartender. “I won’t ask you again. If you stay here for one more second I’m going to whale you, I don’t care how old you are.”
The old man stepped down from the seat and staggered out onto the sidewalk. He mumbled to himself, played with the buttons on his overalls, and shambled away.
“I apologize for that,” said the bartender. “Damn old coot. He’s always causing trouble. I don’t think he even
