“Jeff?”
“Jeff’s my dog,” he said proudly.
“You named your dog Jeff?”
“ ’Course I did. Jeff’s a good name. There was a man named Jeff who lived a county over who could toss a ten-pound stone farther
than anyone.”
“Was there?”
“Yes. So I named my dog Jeff because, well, that seemed like a pretty good thing to be named after. When we moved I told him
we’d be in New Mexico. Pa says I should have said goodbye, but I know Jeff. Jeff’ll know what to do. He’s probably just a
few turns of the road away.” He contemplated something very seriously. “Jeff is my friend,” he said. “I told him we’d have
a house, a house just like the one we used to have. I’ll see him again.”
“I’m sure you will.”
The boy looked into the sun and shaded his eyes. “I hope he’s happy.”
“I hope so, too,” said Connelly.
Then the boy looked at Connelly, suddenly embarrassed, and he jumped to his feet and ran away. Connelly watched him go.
“He’ll be back soon,” said Missy.
“What did I do?” asked Connelly.
“You? Nothing. But you can’t just up and move a boy away from his home and expect him to be all right.”
“He’s a good boy.”
“He bears it better than most,” she said. “Some of the others… Well, they ain’t as hopeful as Frankie. You know, you’re good
with children.”
“I’m not that good.”
“Sure you are,” she said. “You know how boys work. You know not to treat them like boys, for instance. Do you have any of
your own?”
Connelly did not move. Then he said, “No.”
“No? Never wanted to settle down or nothing?”
Connelly shook his head.
“Well, it’s not for everyone, I suppose,” she said, and smiled kindly. “Just seems like a waste, is all.” Her smile faded
from her face. “Have I said something wrong?”
“No,” said Connelly, and he stood up.
“I… I didn’t mean to overstep or anything…”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m just going to get some more water from the creek.”
He turned around and walked away, down toward the bend in the land where the silver string of water ran through the pasture.
The wind picked up, sending fingers of dust twirling into the air. He heard shouting and saw the boy running out in the fields,
a stick in hand, crying at some unknown attacker or maybe urging on invisible comrades. Thrust and parry, feint and dodge.
Then a gruff battlecry, dust rising in clouds around his feet as he fought the very air.
Connelly walked down to the creek and filled his canteen. He dipped his hands in the water, felt the eddies form around his
fingers and wrists. Then he took them out and went and sat on a stone by the creek and did his best not to cry.
Mr. Shivers
They spent the next day working more on the cars and preparing to leave. They shifted loads and strapped down everything they
could. As night fell they ate what was left of the salted pork and huddled around the fire. The day had been warm but the
night was freezing out in those dry reaches.
“How many folks have you all seen so far?” asked Clark.
“Seen?” said Pike.
“Yeah. I just… I just want to know how many are headed where we’re headed. I think a fella should know what he’s up against.”
“Clark,” said Missy, “don’t talk about such things in front of the children.”
“They should know, too,” said Clark. “I don’t want anyone walking into this with just dreams in their heads. I want to know.
How many?”
“I don’t know,” Pike said. “I don’t know where you’re headed.”
“South and west. Away from all this dead land.”
“People have moved in a great wave, Mr. Hopkins. Did you not know that?”
“I did,” he said, “but… but I haven’t done as much traveling as you all. How many?”
Pike shrugged. “Like the ocean.”
Clark looked down at the fire and crossed his arms.
“Those who hold steadfast will always survive,” Pike said. “You and your family are strong. Stronger than most. I’m not exactly
a holy man anymore, if I ever was, but I do see a future for you, Mr. Hopkins. For people as strong as all of you, how could
it be otherwise?”
“That’s awful nice of you to say.”
“It’s not nice,” said Pike. “It’s the truth. No compliment, but fact.”
“You people are all right. I was sort of scared of you at first, that I admit, but you’re all right.”
Roosevelt took out his harmonica and began to play. They listened as they lay around the fire. Connelly was rubbing his hands
slowly when someone touched his arm. He looked up into the face of Clark’s oldest daughter.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“A little.”
“There’s a little whisky, if you want it.”
“Thank you, uh…”
She smiled. “Deliah.”
“Thank you, Deliah.”
She brought him a tin cup full of bourbon and he sipped at it.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“A ways back,” he said.
“Yeah, but where?”
“Memphis.”
“I never been outside of Oklahoma. I never been anywhere but my hometown.”
“You should be thankful,” said Connelly. “Country’s a wide, mad place.”
“I guess,” she said. “I always wanted to travel. I never wanted to do it this way.”
“I believe that.”
“Deliah,” said Missy. “You leave him alone. He’s tired.”
“I’m all right,” said Connelly.
“Come over here,” Missy scolded.
Deliah scowled and went over to her mother, but smiled at Connelly over her shoulder. He frowned and drank more. Clark took
the bottle out and began passing it around. It lit little fires in their stomachs and made the night bearable and soon they
were chattering and talking just as though they had been at home.
“These are nice people,” said Lottie to Connelly.
“They are.”
“It’s a sad thing to see them out on the road. I’d like to see them right. It’d be nice to just stay with them and keep moving.”
“It would be,” said Connelly.
“Do you know what I think, sometimes?”
“What?”
“I think sometimes that… that every step I take I seem to lose a little bit more of myself. Every step I take chasing that
man, I forget what I’m doing. No… That’s not so. Not what I’m doing, but why. Do you know what I mean?”
Connelly shrugged.
“Like, back in the jungle,” she said. “When Pike beat that man so he’d tell us where Shivers had gone, I just stood there
like it was nothing. It seemed okay to me. And it had, after… after what had happened to the twins. But that night I lay sleeping
and I thought it wasn’t more than a year ago that I hadn’t never seen a man get beaten in my life. Not like that. Not like
that.”
Lottie bit her lip and toyed with her hair. She seemed eager to say something, but stopped, smiled, and said, “Pardon. I’ll
just be a bit,” and she walked away.
She was gone a long time. Connelly drank more with the other men. It was the first time any of them had tasted liquor in a
while. His head began to swim and the fire became a yellow smear in the night. He wondered where Lottie went, and as he wondered
the voices of the other travelers mixed in his head and in the circle of cars he felt trapped, like he had fallen into a hole
and was unable to crawl out. He tried to convince himself it was only the drink, but soon it was too much. He stood up and
staggered off through the ring of cars and out of the light. Someone called to him but he paid it no mind.
Soon he was out among the scrub. At night the countryside had become a gray and violet inversion of itself, the pasture stubbled
like man’s cheek, the creek a narrow braid of shimmering light. Far up above the sky was filled with an impossible number
of stars, some large and shining, some the barest suggestion of light at all. The moon seemed closer than it did in any other
place Connelly had ever been. It was so close he felt he could almost touch it, its pockmarked skin the color of honey and
wheat. He wanted to touch it and then smell his fingers and see what scent it carried across the sky.
He looked back. The campsite was more than a hundred yards away. He could not make out their faces. A strange fear came over
him as he listened to them sing, their voices carried to him on the wind. He went and sat beneath a lone cedar, gnarled as
an old man’s hand, and he watched them. He remembered the gray man turning and speaking his name as the sky was eaten by shadow.
Remembered the look of dull surprise on the face of the man he had dragged off the train car, how the man twisted when struck
by the next car and the way he seemed to dissolve beneath the wheels. And he remembered Molly. How small and fragile his memory
of her was now. It felt dangerous just to caress it in his mind.
He watched the distant fire and people laughing and sharing one another’s company, and inside of him a voice quietly said:
This is not for you. These things are not yours, will not be yours, could never be yours. Not now. Not ever. Not ever again.
And Connelly listened, and he agreed. The cars fenced him out. He could not go back.
He fumbled in his coat and took out a cigarette. He lit it and its coarse red ember burned bright in his hands. When he looked
up a figure was walking to him across the field, white and fragile in the starlight. He thought it was Lottie but instead
it was the girl, Deliah.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked, smiling. She was wearing a white dress that was so beaten by now it was almost sheer.
She came close and he tried not to notice how it gripped her body in the wind. She was barefoot. Pale white feet smeared with
dark earth. Each inch of her skin’s texture visible to the naked eye.
“Having a smoke,” he said.
“You could have smoked with us. We wouldn’t have minded none.”
“Just felt like quiet, I suppose,” he said.
She laughed. “Would you like another drink?”
He shook his head.
“Anything?”
He shook his head again.
“Come on back by the fire,” she said.
“No, that’s… that’s all right. I’ve got some thinking to do.”
“You can think with us if you want.”
He did not answer.
“Come on back,” she said. “Please. For me.”
He shook his head. “That’s… that’s kind of you, but…”
“But you just want to sit out in a field, huh?” she said, now pouting. She looked him over and sniffed. “Well, fine, then.
Sit under this damn tree. I don’t care. Sit here all you want.”
She turned and strode across the fields. In the faint light she seemed a ghost, each line of her body an ivory curve, each
motion agonizingly clear. Her hair glistened and bounced and toyed with the nape of her neck, her delicate hands bunched into
fists at her sides. Connelly felt the urge to cry no, no, come back, come back and I will come with you. I will come wherever
you ask.
But he did not. He was silent. He looked down between his feet and when he looked up again she was gone.
Connelly rubbed his arms, fighting the chilly night. An animal voice cried in the darkness. Somewhere in hills another cried
back, answering.
He looked up at the stars again and considered this spot on the land, this tree he sat under. These empty square feet of land
had always been here, would always be here. To this place he was no more than a dream. And he wondered about those who had
come before, wandering over the plains, treading this spot. People that came before names. Animals that came before sunlight.
Perhaps it had been so.
He touched the coarse earth. Once something had died here. It was a fact of chance. Some animal had dragged itself to this
spot or maybe had fallen, limbs askew, its lifeblood leaking onto the earth. And then perhaps it had lifted its thoughtless
eyes to the infinity above, looked at the endless, bejeweled dark, just as Connelly was now, and made some sound, some mewling
cry. Asking a question. Begging for a few seconds more. And then expired, maybe leaving its question behind.
One death, at least. Perhaps hundreds of things had died here. Thousands. Millions. And maybe all had spent their last moments
watching the stars swim by.
Connelly looked at the sky for a long time. He wondered if the stars knew what lived in their depths. If they knew anything
at all.
Mr. Shivers
In the morning they readied to leave. Pike accepted the food the Hopkinses could spare, though he denied it first out of politeness.
Connelly was looking over the cars and their packs once more when Lottie came to him.
“We need to talk,” she said.
They walked away from the ring of cars. She led him down to the creek and said, “I’m not going.”
“I know,” he said.
“You do?”
“Figured as much.”
“Are… are you mad?”
He shook his head.
“I thought you would be,” she said.
“No. I’m not.”
She shut her eyes. “I thought you would be. I said I was in this, I said I wanted to see this man dead.”
“I know,” he said again.
“Yes, but do you know why?”
“No. I don’t need to.”
“But I want you to. Let me speak my peace.” She rubbed her temple. “Back there on the train, did you see?” she said.
“See what?”
“When I… When I shot that man, you could see him… Did you see what I… What I…”
“I saw.”
“Did I… Did I kill him?”
Connelly thought. He looked at the ground and said, “No.”
She let out a breath. “No? I didn’t?”
“No. You missed. It scared him. He moved away and while he was trying to reload he lost his balance and fell.”
“I could have sworn I-I…”
“You didn’t,” said Connelly flatly.
She touched her cheek, fingers caressing where the drops of blood had fallen. She shook herself. “I’m sorry. I don’t want
to kill a man. I don’t ever want to have that on me. If the man we’re chasing was dead and gone it would be all right but
I think there’s more killing between all of you and him. Do you know that?”
Connelly nodded.
“I was thinking… Connelly,” she said. “You… you shouldn’t go, either. I don’t think I can convince any of the others but,
well… I don’t think this is worth it anymore. I mean, you met this family. They’d let us come with them. They’re nice and
there’s good things waiting for them. I know. I know it in my bones.”
Connelly stood for a long time. Then he shook his head.
“For God’s sake, Connelly, men are dead—”
“There were dead before this,” said Connelly. “Long before.”
“But—”
“We speak for them. We speak for the dead. To do right by them.”
“And this is the way you’d do it?”
“Doesn’t seem to be another.”
“Connelly, nothing good will come of this. There are people looking for you. And if you all keep on like this, more people are going to be after
you. More bloodshed. More tears. More dead to speak for. We got a chance at something good here. Don’t pass it by. Don’t.”
She smiled. “There are people who like you here, Connelly. That family. They like you. That girl, I think she likes you. And she… she isn’t the only one,” she said
softly, and touched his arm.
Connelly breathed deep, then bowed and shook his head again. “It isn’t good to me.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“That’s the way it is. I look at these people and I just know. I look at you and know these things aren’t for me. Not yet.
I-I can’t go back. It’d be wrong to do that, to abandon this and let him go on. To let my little girl’s death go unanswered.
But… this family. You. Maybe one day I can have things like that. But it isn’t for me. Not now.” He took a breath. “This is
all I got now. This is all I got. All I am. Just chasing him.”
Lottie closed her eyes, wiped them. “You have a choice…”
“I know I do. I’m choosing to make this right. And I can.”
“You don’t want to come with me? At all?”
“I-I do. You know I have a wife?”
“I remember.”
“I’d like to go back to that. One day, to the way things were in the beginning. But I can’t yet. And, Lottie, once this was
done, if it was so that I could never find her again or if she wouldn’t welcome me home, then I would come to you. I would.
But I have to do this. I have to.”
She looked at him for a moment longer, then walked back to the camp without saying anything. He waited for a second and then
followed.
It went much as Connelly had expected. Lottie spoke to them a few paces away from the camp so the Hopkinses would not hear.
Connelly did not come close, so he could not hear everything that was said, nor did he want to.
Pike became angry right away. He shouted at her, pounding his fist into his hand, pointing off into the west and throwing
biblical language at her alongside curses about the weaknesses of bitchery. This she took without the slightest reaction.
Then Roonie wept and she comforted him, holding him in her arms, his crooked fingers playing with her hair. Monk tried to
reason with her, blustering and confused, but she simply shook her head. And Roosevelt and Hammond stayed quiet, Roosevelt
looking nervous and Hammond standing ramrod-straight, his narrow, handsome features pulled taut, his mouth in a hard grimace.
Then the words finished. Lottie nodded, then walked back to the Hopkinses with a queenly, steady stride, though as she walked
by Connelly he could see her fingers trembling. She spoke to Missy and the other woman listened and embraced her hard, and
Lottie hugged her back. The children came down and began bombarding her with questions, spinning around her feet. Connelly
watched them. Watched their passion for one another. Their happiness in being one.
Clark came and spoke to him. “You sure you boys are going to be all right?”
“I suppose,” said Connelly.
“We’re happy to have her aboard, you know.”
“I’m sure she’s happy to be with you.”
“We could use you, sir. We could use all of you. It’s more mouths, sure, but it’s more hands working.”
“We have business in the west,” said Connelly.
“Who doesn’t,” said Clark. He looked at Connelly sadly. “If times were different, I-I…”
Connelly nodded. “If things were different,” he said.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for. Whatever’s in all of you is burning you up. I can see it.”
“Maybe so. I think it’s best we all get going. We’re wasting daylight.”
They shook hands.
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” said Clark.
“Sometimes I think I’ll see everyone again,” Connelly answered.
Clark walked back to the cars and they started up, a small armada of crumbling machinery shuddering in the field. One by one
they lurched forward, gravel crunching under the tires, and they made their way to the road. Everyone waved, each car a heap
of junk and waving white arms. The children cheered and the men called good luck and the women waved as well. With a great
belch of dust the jalopies picked up speed and soon were moving down the road, speeding away, south and west.
Connelly and the others went north. It was not until nightfall that he realized Lottie had not looked at him once after their
discussion, nor had she said goodbye.
Mr. Shivers