meeting, one of no importance, and yet later… Later, you found this man to have taken everything you cherished, all at once. I cannot and will not guess at what he took from you, Mr. Connelly, that is a private matter to you and should not be given to conjecture. But whatever it was, you cannot go home. You cannot. And neither can we.”
Connelly stared into his lap, listening but refusing to believe.
“We all run into him,” said Roosevelt. “All of us. We all come to find him. By road and rail, we come.”
“Yes,” said Pike.
“And we’ll go further,” said Hammond. “All the way across the country, if need be. Which we nearly already have done.”
Pike said, “Hammond?”
“Yes?” said Hammond.
“Tell him how you came here. Tell him what started you here.”
Hammond looked at him. Pike nodded. “Go on,” he said.
There was a moment of silence and Hammond said, “It was in Massachusetts. That was my home. My town, Winthrop. I was born there. I still remember it, like it was yesterday. I-I saw him outside my home, a man in a coat that may have been black but had been worn and patched so many times it was gray. His face was scarred, here and here,” he said, indicating the cheeks, “and here around the temple, mottling his eyes. He was watching my home. I didn’t know why. He was watching when I left for work one day. When I came home the front door had been broken in and I… I went to the kitchen and found my parents there.”
Hammond anxiously toyed with a little knife and pursed his lips. “They were old. Couldn’t fight back. Not much, at least. I don’t know why. I don’t. I don’t know why. He was just there, then… then he broke in, robbed them, and… and then he was gone. The police couldn’t find anything, and then we heard a rumor that he had gotten a ride south, down to Pennsylvania. The police followed and they tried to find something but couldn’t, so I did. I went out looking. I don’t know why I did that, either. It didn’t make sense to try and do anything else. That house and that town and that whole life was something gone to me. But I tracked him there, then heard whispers, rumors of a man like that headed further south, so I came south. That was nearly six months ago. He has taken me across the nation. I’ve seen more than I have in my life before and more than I ever wanted to see, but I’ve never seen him. I’ve just been hearing things. The man with the scarred face. Mr. Shivers, as the hobos call him.”
Connelly snapped his head up.
“You recognize the name?” said Hammond.
“Yes.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“They talk about him like he’s not real,” said Connelly. “Like he’s a myth. Or the devil.”
“I think they’re getting him mixed up,” said Pike. “There may have once been a story of a Mr. Shivers, of the midnight man, but there’s this man out there and they’ve heard of him too and they get the two mixed up. They give him a name. It makes him easier for us to find, that’s for sure.”
“He’s a man,” said Hammond. “A man like you or I. He moves like one and he eats like one and he sleeps and shits like one. He’s not a ghost story and he’s not a ghost, no matter what the hobos say. We’ve all seen him. He looks man enough for me.”
“He travels on the rails and hitches rides where he can, like you,” said Roosevelt. “Like us. That’s how he gets away, city to city and county to county. I was in Chicago when he found me. There were bad times and he came. Made them worse, I guess.”
“How did it happen?” asked Connelly.
Roosevelt shifted in his seat. “Quickly. Work had been getting scarce at a factory I was at, this bumshit canning factory, and there was talk of a riot or a union and the entire place was just waiting for something to happen. Something bad. There had been beatings, union busters coming in and finding who said what and just beating the hell out of those fellas. And then he came. A ragged man in a ragged coat, with a great, ruined mouth and black eyes, ugly eyes. Like puddles of oil sitting in the road.” Roosevelt began to roll a cigarette. “Don’t know what he did. Maybe he said something. Maybe he hit someone. He was hanging around for a while and then one day the brawl just broke out and every man who could get a weapon was running into it, and the cops got into it and it seemed like the whole precinct was up in arms, fighting in an alley behind the goddamn factory. I don’t know what he did, but I know he done something.
“My friend Tommy died. Someone took a wrench and busted his head open. His eyes filled with blood and one came out and his jaw was like it had no bone. And my brother-in-law died there, too. Someone busted up his ribs and he bled to death, in his heart and lungs. My sister… My sister went… She wasn’t right,” Roosevelt said finally. “She never got over it. Cried all the time, always crying, and she never got out of bed. They put her in an institution. One day I come in to see her and she… she didn’t know my name. She kept asking me if I had any gum, just a stick of gum, it’d taste so good.
“So I just ran. I ran south. I was in the back of some truck, full of illegals and migrants, and someone said they had heard about a barfight in a town outside of Cincinnati and some fella had been cut up good. And the man who done it, well, he was some man with a cut-up face, they thought. Scarred as hell, they said. So I came south. And I met Pike. And we met Hammond. As you’ve met us. That was long ago. Almost a year. Almost a year before I met Hammond.”
“And I ran into him in Atlanta,” said Pike. “Where he killed my friend. Cut his throat. But that was longer than any of you. For I tell you now that I have been looking for this man for
“And what has he done to you?” asked Roosevelt.
Connelly just bowed his head.
“Sometimes there are no words,” said Pike. “There are no words.”
“What the hell is he?” Connelly said.
“We don’t know,” said Hammond. “We don’t, for sure. He’s motivated to kill and he’s smart enough to keep moving, and it’s getting a lot easier now because the whole goddamn country is moving with him. Migrant workers are everywhere. Everyone is looking for something better. And among them, there’s him. Something drives him to do this, I don’t know what.”
“Some madness, maybe,” said Pike. “Some disease of the brain that urges him to butchery. I’ve heard of such men, like Jack the Ripper in London, years and years ago. Perhaps he’s one of them. He goes from town to town, stalks someone for a few days, then strikes and moves on.”
“But now he’s doing something strange,” Roosevelt said. “He’s not moving with people anymore, but against them. He’s going west, into the plains, while everyone else is trying to leave them.”
“Lot of people going west from them, though,” said Connelly. “People from Oklahoma and Kansas and the Dakotas. They’re going west.”
“That is true,” said Pike. “We’ve considered he’s trying to join with them. It’d be far easier to hide there. A whole country has been unsettled. These are dark times, and they are getting darker, I think. But we’re close. Closer than we’ve ever been before.”
Connelly said, “And if you find him, you’ll kill him.”
They did not react at first. Then Pike said, “Yes. We will. Would we not be justified in doing so? Would not God and this nation look approvingly on us if we were to kill him, Mr. Connelly?”
“I don’t know about God,” said Connelly. “I know less about God than I do the nation. I don’t think about that. I don’t need to. Some things don’t need to be thought about. You just do them. And I aim to.”
“I can understand that,” said Hammond.
Pike stirred the fire again. “Will you come with us, then? Will you join with us?”
“You know I will.”
“I don’t. What I want may be different from you. Because there’s no going back, and no turning aside here. I said at the start of this that I would die finding him if it came to it and kill if I had to. Would you be willing to do that?”
Connelly shrugged.
“You can’t say. But listen, friend. Listen to me, now, Mr. Connelly, you must listen—should a man raise his
