The Road to Wellville (73 page)

The fire bell was ringing in the distance and he knew it would be a
matter of minutes before Farrington and his deputies climbed out of the wreckage, brushed off their clothes, counted their teeth, toes, fingers, limbs and ears, and recollected that something was missing. The fire company would turn the wagon over, and Charlie wouldn’t be there. Then all hell would break loose. They’d start knocking on doors, deputizing hayseeds and amateur marksmen, calling out the bloodhounds. He had an hour, maybe less. He needed money, a change of clothes, a place to hide. He couldn’t go back to his room—Mrs. Hookstratten would have alerted them to that—and he didn’t dare go anywhere near the rail yard. The smart thing to do—and from now on he was going to do nothing that wasn’t smart, he vowed it—would be to lie low someplace in town for a day or two, in a cellar, a barn, a carriage house, and find some way to spring the cuffs and free his hands. It was the handcuffs that made the criminal, the handcuffs those farmers and their dried-up wives wouldn’t look at, and if he couldn’t get rid of them, he might just as well give it up and turn himself in.

The fire bell was closer now, shrill and urgent, and he could hear voices raised over the tumult—he had to move. They’d start with these streets, this neighborhood, this lot. Distance, that’s what he needed, and quick. He stood, hurried off across the lot and turned up the sidewalk, fighting to keep himself from breaking into a trot. Just then, a blur of movement froze him in place, and two boys emerged from nowhere to dash past him in the direction of the fire alarm. It was a bad moment—he thought he’d been taken—and he had to hold himself there, hugging his shoulders, until he fought the panic down. When he felt his legs moving beneath him again, he risked a quick reconnoiter of the wide brilliant tree-hung street and found himself locking eyes with an old woman on the porch opposite him. She was leaning on a broom, her pinned-up hair like a helmet, and she gave him a long steady look that ate through to his bones. He kept walking, studying his feet now, his fists wedged up into his armpits to conceal the cuffs, but he could feel her eyes on him all the way to the end of the block.

It was no good. The frenzy began to creep up on him—he wanted to run, had to run, there was no reason or purpose to existence that didn’t involve legs and feet, the sure swift arrow of flight, escape, freedom, safety. He couldn’t just stroll the public streets as if he were
invisible—they’d have him in ten minutes. What was he thinking? Had he gone mad? For all he knew, the old lady was on the telephone now. He looked suspicious, he knew it, sweat coursing down his face, bits of grass and lint clinging to his suit, coat sleeves dangling, his hat gone—and that was a giveaway right there, a dead giveaway. Who but an escaped criminal would walk the streets without a hat? He was practically cantering now, craning his neck left and right to look over his shoulder like a mad heifer in the midst of a stampede, doomed, all but doomed.

It was then, at the very brink of disintegration, that the architecture of his salvation appeared to him. Just as he was about to lose all control and fling himself howling down the street, he spotted something familiar—looming, tall, laminated in sunlight, a great stepped stairway cut out of the sky like a pyramid in profile. And what was it? He knew this place, didn’t he? Stumbling, hurrying, no one in sight, he turned a corner and there it was: the ruin of the Malta-Vita plant.

A tumble of brick, walls without roofs, careening timbers, the great rusted three-story relics of the traveling ovens that had beckoned to him over the treetops: nothing had changed since that bitter November afternoon when he’d stood here and hammered the first nail into the coffin of his hopes. Or had it? As he crossed the deserted street, heart racing, holding himself back, inconspicuous, a decent citizen out for a holiday stroll, he saw that the place looked different somehow, softer, almost inviting. And then he understood: spring had come. Where the fire-blackened walls had stood stark against the barren ground, a testament to futility, now they were buffered by leaf, bud, stalk and creeper. A splash of wildflowers decorated the stripped doorway, saplings six feet high sprang up through the cracks in what had once been the packing-room floor. Six months ago the place had depressed him, shaken him to the core; now it was his sanctuary. There was no reason to get philosophical about it: he ducked behind the wall, and he was safe.

For a long while he lay there on his back in a clump of sumac, watching the swallows flit in and out of their nests in the ovens, his heartbeat winding down, the afternoon softening into evening. They wouldn’t look for him here. They’d look on the roads, in the ditches, they’d prowl the Grand Trunk depot and the Michigan Central, poke through the refuse out back of the Red Onion and post a man outside the shabby
building where he had his room. Here he was safe. Who’d even notice the place? Who even knew it was here? It was an eyesore, a monument to failure, the sort of place the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A. would just as soon forget.

He was safe for the moment, but where did that leave him? His hands were shackled, he was a thousand miles from New York, he had no wallet, no money, no watch, no food. And he was hungry, the first hot hard tug of necessity clutching at his insides even now. He’d had an egg and some toast at a tavern that morning, too excited about his prospects to hold much down, and he hadn’t done anything more than rearrange the mattress stuffing they’d served up at the luncheon.
The luncheon
. The thought of it started up his breathing again, made his scalp twitch uncontrollably and sent something fluttering up his throat—but how the world had changed since the morning, how everything golden and shining had turned to shit. And was it only this morning? It seemed like ten years ago.

The sun held him in its grip, cupped him and held him, and despite himself, he dozed off. When he woke, it was as if no time had passed at all—the sun seemed to hang steady on the wall above him, and he guessed it must have been about five-thirty or six. Birds were pouring syrup into the air, crickets conspired, there was no sound of deputies or hounds or anything else, and nothing had changed. He was still shackled, still hungry, still at large. If he moved, it would be under cover of darkness, and it would be for one purpose only: to steal into a garage somewhere and make off with a hammer and chisel. He saw himself coming back here—leaving to scrounge food, maybe, from a smokehouse, an open kitchen, the trash, even—but always coming back here to sit within these blackened walls and wait on and on until they forgot he’d ever existed….

But what was that?

He shrank into the ground. Held his breath.

A voice, a human voice, rasping and whispery, talking to itself—or, no, singing:

Cracked, drunken, obscene, the voice rose up over the lyrics as if it were raping them, eviscerating them, turning them inside out, and then there was a pause and it repeated the same verse again, once, twice, a third time. Charlie lay there, wrapped in a cocoon of fear, afraid to breathe, and it wasn’t until the fourth repetition that he began to appreciate how his luck had changed. This was no ordinary concert he was enjoying, no usual drunk—
George
, it was
George
. Of course it was. With no one to pay his rent, Mrs. Eyvindsdottir had put him back out on the street, and he’d come home to his hovel under the flight oven. Sure he had. Where else would he go?

The knowledge invigorated Charlie; gave him new life—George would help him. If there was one person in the whole godforsaken dollar-crazed right-living town who would be able to straighten him out, it was George. Charlie rose up tentatively from his hiding place and tiptoed through the rubble in the direction of the sound. He found George slouched atop an outcropping of ruined machinery, a bottle between his legs, his face raised to the sun. “And life is one beautiful rhyme!” he howled, yelping at the words like a bitch in heat, and then he dissolved in laughter.

“George,” Charlie whispered. “George Kellogg.”

George barely reacted. At first Charlie thought he hadn’t heard him, but then the slope-shouldered figure in the ragged coat swung slowly round on his perch—it was an old retort, rusted like an anchor—and let his black eyes and sullen mouth arrange themselves into an expression of mild amusement. “Charlie Ossining,” he said, and it was almost as if he’d been expecting him.

Charlie took a step forward and raised his hands, the chain stretched tight between them. The sun held steady, just over the treetops. “I’m in trouble, George,” he said.

“Who isn’t?” George bawled, and then he laughed, a short whiskey-inflected bark of a laugh that made Charlie nervous all over again. He
was pinning his hopes on a madman, a souse, a boozehound. George would no more help him than he’d help his own father.

“Your father did it to me,” Charlie said, suddenly inspired. He hadn’t moved his hands. He stood there in mute appeal, the chain catching the sun in separate hammered beads of light.

George’s face changed suddenly. There was no trace of amusement in the eyes now and his mouth had fallen in on itself. He swung down from the big cylindrical retort, brandishing the bottle in one hand. “What are you saying? My father? Not that good-hearted man, not the Saint on the Hill himself?” Unsteady on his feet, he threw back his head to take a drink, and Charlie was impatient suddenly, angry—he wanted the cuffs off and he wanted them off now. “Here,” George said, thrusting the bottle at him, “you need a drink.”

What could he do—refuse? George was leering at him, teeth rotted to stubs, breath stinking like a dead thing, the miasma of his catastrophic odor enveloping him, the bottle waving in the air. Humor him, he told himself, humor him. Charlie fixed his hands on the bottle—it was pint-size, a label he didn’t recognize—and drank. He felt the instantaneous heat of it in him, the charge of the alcohol, but there was something else there, too, something bitter and earthy, muddying the flavor. He took another drink above the gleam of George’s eyes, the nod of the approving head, and he realized how much he’d needed it. “Jesus,” he said.

George was grinning like a cadaver. “I’ve got a whole case of it tucked away under the oven over there—we’re going to drink ourselves into oblivion tonight, Charlie, just you and me.” He took the bottle back, pointed his chin to the sky and let his throat ripple. “I’m celebrating,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a dirt-encrusted hand. “This is my last night in Battle Creek.”

Charlie stood there beneath the fat mellow sinking sun, his hands chained together, his dreams obliterated, and conversed with a drunk. For lack of anything better to do, he reached for the bottle. “You know, I really do need to get out of these cuffs, George,” he said, and took a hard swallow. And then, unaccountably, he began to laugh. It was all too ridiculous.

“Sure,” George said, but he seemed distracted. “Aren’t you going to ask me where I’m going?”

“Where you going?”

The yellow teeth, the stinking breath, the high sharp dog’s bark of a laugh: “I don’t know. But I’m damned if I spend another night in this pisshole.” He lurched forward, caught himself. “One little visit to pay before I go,” he muttered, and his look had gone cold again. “You say my father did that to you?” he slurred, tapping the cuffs and relieving Charlie of the bottle in one fluid gesture.

It took a while to explain, and they were well into the second bottle before George seemed to fully grasp his adoptive father’s role in complicating Charlie’s life, though Charlie had tried to fight down his own bowel-tightening terror and outrage and narrate as plainly as he was able. Charlie had been doing all the talking for some time, while George, silent save for the occasional epithet thrown in as a sort of punctuation, stared off into the distance as shadows seeped in to knock down the walls, and the last of the sunlight illuminated the forest growing up through the packing-room floor. They were lying side by side, stretched out in the weeds. A long suspended moment hung over them after Charlie had finished his recitation; he filled it by helping himself to another drink. Finally George drew himself up, coughed into his fist and observed, “He’s a study, isn’t he, the Saint on the Hill? A real study.” Then he rose from the grass with a sigh and went off into the bushes to relieve himself.

Charlie listened to the birds and the crickets and the fierce rattling torrent of George’s micturition, one more sound of nature, a nature he was going to know a lot more intimately now, at least for a while, and pressed the bottle to his chest. He’d begun to forget himself, drifting off for minutes at a time on the sheen of the alcohol, the handcuffs barely there, nothing at all, a minor inconvenience—didn’t everyone wear them?—when George returned with a spike of rusted metal in his hand. It was a foot and a half long, blood-dark in its coat of rust—it might have been a lever once, or a connecting rod from some vital moving piece of machinery, a thresher, a sifter, one of the great standing ovens itself.

“Come over here,” George commanded, and he led Charlie through the wreckage to the base of the nearer of the two big baking and sifting machines. And then, while Charlie strained against the chain that bound his hands, pulling it taut over the projecting edge of the bottommost tray, George lifted the rusted spike and beat the chain with an intense implacable rhythmic fury, beat and beat at it till the place rang with the echoing din and the chain recoiled, jumped, shrank in on itself and finally gave way. They had a drink to celebrate.

“You’re a free man, Charlie,” George said, tipping back the bottle, and the exercise seemed to have sobered him. “But listen, I’ve got something to do—for both of us. You wait here—and feel welcome to drink as much of this sheep dip as you want, didn’t cost me a nickel, I just found it, you might say, on the back end of a car in the Grand Trunk yard. I’ll be back late, after the fireworks, and they’ll be looking for me by then, too—” He paused, and he seemed to relish the thought. “You can bet they’ll be looking for me.”