“I don’t know,” said Pike. “How should I know?”
They found an old man who reeked of whisky who told them, “We caught this here nigger rutting about with a white lady. I never heard of such a thing before in my life, not ever. I figured it was rape, but that nigger’d have to be dumber than hell to think he’d get away with such a thing here. She must’ve gone in for it. You ever hear of that?”
“No,” said Connelly.
“Damn it all, it’s astounding. It’s astounding what’s happening to this nation, ain’t it?”
“You can say that again,” said Hammond.
“You being smart with me, young man?”
“No.”
He eyed Hammond carefully. “I can’t abide nigger-lovers. That wouldn’t be you fellas, now would it?”
“Just passing through,” said Pike evenly.
“Lord almighty,” said the old man, and he shook his head. “End of the world come, end of the world go. All souls did burn. No one noticed. Not a one. Not a one but me.”
They stared at the thing hanging from the tree. The noose had pulled its head strangely, giving it the look not of a dead man but of a man poorly made from inanimate parts. Connelly gazed into its eyes and tried to see what spark was there, what motivation or animation had once dwelt there to give it life, or perhaps a vacancy where it had been. Just a sign that it had once been a man and had walked and talked and perhaps loved somewhere on this fading earth.
He found nothing. It was a dead thing. It had no history and it had no future. It was just a dead thing, murdered and hanging from a tree. He could no more find a man in it than he could find reason in its dying.
He wondered where Lottie was.
“Think… think he had something to do with it?” said Monk as they walked away.
“Who? The scarred man?” said Pike.
“Yeah, think… think he caused this?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“It would be easy to blame all the evils of humanity on one madman, wouldn’t it? It’d be simpler. And comforting. But that doesn’t make it so.”
“Let’s go,” said Hammond. “I don’t want to talk to these people.”
“We need to. We need to know if he’s come by.”
“He hasn’t.”
“But how do you know?”
“I’ll do it,” said Connelly. “I will.” He left them to reenter the crowd.
None of them knew the scarred man. No one had heard of him. But Connelly noticed a strange excitement in them, a queer sort of awful joy that made them restless and jittery. It was in how they touched each other and looked at each other and in how they spoke. There was fury and self-satisfaction, a kind of relief. It was as though an enormous celebration was about to begin, but they did not know what they were celebrating nor when the celebration would take place.
Connelly returned to the others with no news. Pike looked back at the people in the field. The lights from the torches caught in his eyes, making them flicker in the depths of his sockets like lanterns in caves, burning low. “I have heard before that certain truths are written on men’s bones,” he said. “That may be so. If it is true then I believe they are written in a language not known to men, and even if they were translated I doubt they would be of much comfort.” Then he snorted, spat, rubbed dirt over the spittle with his shoe, and walked down the hill to the road.
They walked all day, stopping only briefly for lunch at noon. There were no trees to shelter them from the sun so they sat on the edge of a ditch, sweat dripping down their necks as they tore at the salted pork the Hopkinses had given them. Then they rose and continued on.
Everything looked the same. They seemed not to travel at all. Always the thread of brown road stretched ahead, cutting through the fields. Always the same spindly fence, leaning awkwardly by the road. The same fragile yellow grass, so dry it seemed to crumble merely by breathing on it. And the sun never moved, content to sit upon their backs.
When they came to a small stream Pike decided they should stop, more to break the monotony than anything. Hammond and Connelly kept a lookout as the others lowered themselves down to the waters to fill their canteens. The two of them stayed by the road, then crossed and leaned on the fence, watching all the nothing.
“Sometimes I wonder if we’re going anywhere,” said Hammond.
“Think someone mentioned something like that a while back,” Connelly said.
“Yeah. I hate that feeling, though. The feeling of not moving. I always have.” He looked out at the fields, watched the wind tousle the brittle grass. “I remember this place back home,” he said. “It was this bar. This underground bar that was below a fabric store. You know what I mean, a bar in the basement?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“It was one of those. I loved that place when I was a kid. I thought it was like some kind of secret. I’d walk by it in the evening and see all these little windows just poking up above the sidewalk. All lit up. People talking and laughing and playing music. You’d feel the music in your feet when you’d walk by. I wanted to get in there so bad, to see what they were doing. To be part of the fun. But I was just a kid, so they wouldn’t let me know.
“It was the girls that did it. Me and the other boys, we’d climb a fire escape and look down on them as they walked into the bar. We’d never seen girls dress like that. Not our moms, not our sisters. Wearing dresses that shone, shining in that nice light coming up from the ground from those little windows. And there were girls with blonde hair, real bright blonde hair, which I never seemed to see. What’s the word? Tawny? Is it tawny?”
“I don’t know,” said Connelly.
“Well. I think it is,” said Hammond. “Still. Those girls. They were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I couldn’t wait to get older so I could get in there and see what they were doing.
“Then one day I dressed up real nice so I looked older and I put on a good suit so I’d blend in and I went down there and knocked on the door. A man looked out at me, from this little peephole. And he looked at me a while and then he let me in. And you know what?”
“What?”
“It was just a bar. Just a little room that stank of beer, full of drunks, with real loud music. Everyone was drunk out of their minds, sad and sloppy and ugly. And the women. They were tired old things. Tired old things wearing dresses they had no business wearing. Too much makeup, everywhere,” he said, and gestured to his face. “They were different. Different from what I’d seen. Maybe it was the way I’d been looking at them.” He shook his head. “There’s never… There never is anything. You go somewhere so hard and so fast and then when you get there you’re in the same place. Feels like there’s no reward. Nothing to go for. I hate that feeling. That feeling that you’re not getting anywhere. That you’re not getting anywhere good. I wonder if it’s that way for everyone.”
“Not everyone. Some people are getting places.”
“Well. I haven’t met any of those people in the past few years.”
“Someone has to be going somewhere good,” said Connelly. “Someone has to be doing okay.”
“Just not us right now.”
“No. Just not us.”
“Do you think we ever will?”
Connelly thought about it. “I don’t know.”
Hammond nodded. “I don’t,” he said.
Then Pike and the others climbed back up from the stream. They handed out the canteens and rubbed their feet and then continued on.
The better part of the day passed before their walking was compensated. They were carefully making their way down into a valley when they heard a train far to the west. They stopped and Roosevelt judged the sound.
