and wild energy that she'd hoped she would never experience again. But now she would stay and search its streets until she found that tower and wait for whoever was coming to her.
As Walks Alone left the station, she caught the eye of a man loitering by the carriage stand. Dante Scruggs shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth and narrowed his one good eye; as the dark-haired woman passed by, the evil thoughts that ran through his head more regularly than the nearby trains picked up their frantic roaming. A month had gone by since his last work; it was coming around to the time when the Voices returned, and that same phrase skipped along the surface of his mind like a stone, over and over again.
He watched her with fanatical concentration; Dante liked the way her haunches rolled when she walked, the way her strong brown hand gripped the handle of the suitcase. He might be half-blind, but he could still spot an Indian a mile away.
When would these women learn they just shouldn't travel alone? Chicago was a rough town; a lady's luck could turn bad any moment, thought Dante, and here she was tempting fate, walking around near the station after dark. As if she ain't asking for trouble, strutting her stuff so shameless, trying to pass for white. Immoral is what it was.
What this squaw needed was to be taught a lesson, and
Dante Scruggs was her man. The thought of their future intimacy made him shiver: He would make himself known to every inch of that brown body before they were through. Then he would take her down to the Green River.
But first he waited for a sign; there, the horse by the hitching post. Its tail twitched to the left, then again: twice in a row.
The woman turned a corner and he followed her.
Against the concrete, brick, and cast iron of the new Chicago that had sprung up since the fire in '71, Dante Scruggs's native coloring provided remarkable camouflage. He wasn't handsome, but you wouldn't call him ugly. Average height, blond and boyish, features plump and mild, like his middle-class shopkeeper folks back in Madison, Wisconsin. He looked ten years younger than his thirty-nine and there was no way to pick him out of a crowd. He wasn't big; most of his remarkable strength was in his outsize farmer's hands: He could crack walnuts with 'em. Smart enough to stay one step ahead of the police and two away from jail, Dante showed the world a bland, kindly face. A person would never notice his glass eye unless they were up close and looking right at it; the iris, as blue as a robin's egg, had no pupil painted on it.
Dante was a breed of man the mechanized world had only just begun to produce. He moved through life casting no shadow while inside he was all hooks, darkness, and ripping pain. He had long ago given up resisting the Voices he heard in his head, and he believed with a servant's humility that once he read their signs it was simply his job to obey.
He pictured the city as a jungle and himself a predator at the top of its food chain; that gave a dignity to what he perceived as his life's work. The U.S. Army had thought enough of his appetite for handing out discipline to make him a platoon sergeant. He put fifteen years in before the massacre at Wounded Knee revealed to his superiors the extent of Dante's enthusiasm for expressing his true nature.
Soldiers in his unit who had been near him dining the engagement testified that Dante had lost all human restraint after that Dakota arrow took out his eye. But then again, they argued, with his sight so badly damaged, how could he be expected to distinguish women and children? The Army had grudgingly bought that argument, buried his excesses in the cover-up. A quiet discharge with honors soon followed, fully pensioned.
Dante interpreted his misfortune differently; the wound opened up a whole new world. He imagined that his lost eye had simply been turned around to look inside and clarified the Voices. And ever since he'd been so grievously wounded, the Voices granted him permission to exact the sort of retribution he'd only been able to dream about: nine murders in three years that nobody would ever connect him to.
With his pension coming in, he didn't need money so Dante devoted himself to what he had heard gentlemen shooters on the range call 'the thrill of the hunt': He'd hired out as a buffalo scout before enlisting in the Army and had nothing but contempt for these rich, idle easterners taking their shots at stationary bulls a hundred yards away. They had it all wrong; the thrill was in the close work, hands on, that's what he discovered. Careful, thorough, calculating. He liked to show his ladies the Green River and then take 'em there, slow and easy, devouring their fear along the way.
And this one was an Indian. That was just gravy on his meat.
This squaw didn't know where she was going, that much was clear, and she didn't know Chicago: looking for street signs, wandering without direction. He didn't care what she was doing here alone; thoughts like that turned them into people and made the magic go away. Her family would be back on the reservation where they belonged; this one was a skipper so Dante felt no impulse to hurry. With prime meat, he liked biding his time. He had followed a woman halfway to Springfield once, hanging back, waiting for the right moment to make his move. That was what made courtship so suspenseful; it might take days or weeks before an opportunity presented itself. But once he'd locked on to one, he never let go until the work was finished.
She took the stairs to a boarding house he knew on Division Street—ladies only, lodging by the week; good, she was planning to stay awhile. Dante had seen this pattern so many times; woman comes into town, finds a low-end job, waitressing, maybe seamstress in a sweatshop. Time passes and the work grinds her down to one of those nameless, faceless bodies no one notices passing by them on the street. Trudging back to her room alone every night. Bone weary, looks wearing out fast. Taking meals with the other thin-faced women in the boarding house; he could see 'em sitting prim and proper through the Irish lace on the dining room windows. Maybe she finds a friend among them and they talk without much hope about meeting a man some day, a fellow who won't treat them too bad, provide some kind of a life. Smoking cigarettes on the back porch, breath steaming in the cool evening air. Washing up in the shared bathroom down the hall, never all her clothes off at the same time. Sleeping with her meager dreams.
Women like empty cups. Drifting through life waiting for something to happen. Now he was here and the waiting was over. Her Me would have meaning.
She would see the Green River.
There she was in a window. Second floor, near the back. That's fine; settling in. The Voices told him it was safe to leave now. He knew where to find her.
But for all his focus on the Indian, Dante Scruggs remained unaware that someone was following and watching him. A dark, quiet man, with a distinctive round tattoo—a circle pierced by lightning—on the inside crook of his left arm. He waited for Dante to pass, then walked slowly after him, blending into the crowd.
YUMA, ARIZONA TERRITORY
Nobody in the hobo camp could remember seeing a Chinaman on the bum before, and in the philosophizing way common to these kings of the road, they viewed it as a true signifier of hard times. Their aversion to capitalism's twin addictions— work and money—did not erase from their minds an abiding curiosity in the larger workings of the world: Their indolence actually gave them more time for sizing up the human condition. Bums kept their ears to the rails of social change; at every stop on their circuit, there were men who made a point of studying discarded newspapers and discussing the evident faults of man like disapproving archaeologists. These hobos were more aware than most good citizens that six hundred banks had failed in the last year, that two hundred railroads had gone bankrupt and over two and a half million people were out of work in America; those kinds of numbers put respectable folk out on the road, crowding up their camps, and made life thornier for the professional vagabonds. Sad-faced men pissing and jabbering about their marital problems or how much they missed their jobs. That line of self-pitying blather turned a real bum's stomach.
The tramps knew, too, that Chinese were family people who took in their own and kept to themselves when things went sour, so when a Chinaman showed up riding the lines, that qualified as news. Slocum Haney said he'd hopped a freight in Sacramento and this chink was already in the boxcar. Never said a word between there and Yuma, not even when spoken to. Never saw him sleep or eat; he just sat in the corner watchful as a cat. Haney didn't even know if he understood English or not. Something crawly about the man, even now, sitting out there
