The Winter Family (28 page)

“Fucking kill you,” Mickey Burns snarled, “you double-dealing kraut!”

Burns sat on Jan’s chest, straddling him, trying to choke the life out of him.

“You did this!” Burns screamed.

Jan saw that Burns was crying.

“Look how many people are dead!” Burns said. “It was you! It was you!”

Jan’s vision was turning pink.

Okay, he thought. Okay.

It felt natural and inevitable, like something he didn’t need to worry about.

And then Burns was struck on the head, very hard, so hard in fact that his head cracked geometrically like an unripe melon. His grip loosened and Jan gasped for air while a strong arm jerked him back to his feet.

“Come on, Müller,” Winter said. “Fucking move!”

Winter swung the rifle in his hands back and forth to clear a space and Jan followed. It felt as if he were climbing over a crowd of people. His fingers were scratching, pulling hair, digging into eye sockets. Eventually they got free and staggered up to the porch of the saloon, where they saw that Bill Bread alone was leaning over the rail to provide them with covering fire, ignoring the bullets smacking into the wood all around him.

They barged into the house and ducked under the windows and then Bill got down as well. Bullets were smashing into the house and glass was shattering.

“God damn,” Dusty said.

He was staring at Winter.

“I’ve never seen nothing like that,” Dusty said. “That was true grit, Auggie.”

Winter gave Dusty a casual look and put his hand to his bleeding neck.

“All right, boys,” he said. “We can’t stay here. We ain’t got much ammunition and there’s plenty more of ’em out there. We need to bust out and split up. We’ll all meet up back in Morris, Illinois. We’ll let Quentin take care of our wages. I know we done all we could and we’ve earned them.”

“Fucking right,” Charlie said.

Jan was coughing.

Winter stood up. When he smiled there was blood on his teeth.

“What you all waiting for?” he said.

The enormous grain elevators stood silhouetted against the sky and pressed up against the river. They were the tallest buildings in Chicago, visible for miles. Each one was over a hundred feet high and could store over half a million bushels of wheat. In the Fire they had collapsed one by one, falling in on themselves in showers of sparks and smoke. But they had been built back faster than any other buildings in the city, in a matter of months, reconstructed by the nameless, decentralized force that had compelled their construction in the first place. They were the temples of a new natural order that would remake the world in its image.

The train lumbered westward and crawled up to them, coming to a shrieking halt in front of a massive steam-powered conveyor that stretched up into the dim and smoky rafters.

Two men came up from the riverbank. They jogged past the massive gray walls of the grain house and skipped over the railway lines to the waiting train. A few of the workers glanced at them but went back to their work, thinking they were only the usual beggars, come to pick handfuls of spilled wheat out of the dirt.

Jan Müller and Bill Bread crouched up against the train. They were bruised and bleeding, tired and very hungry. They had no ammunition for their weapons. Separated in the tumult after they burst out of the saloon, they had reunited in the middle of the night on the muddy banks of the river.

The train crawled forward for an hour, so that each car came to the elevator, tipped to the side, and dumped its silky golden cargo into the pit where the screaming elevator scooped it up and carried it aloft. Then the whistle shrieked, and the train backed out. Jan and Bill climbed onto the roof of one of the cars as it left.

“Lie down,” Jan said.

And so they did, right on the spine of the serpent winding its way through the heart of the city, but even if they were invisible to the men on the street they still felt dreadfully exposed to the windows of the buildings and to the eye of God above.

It was worst when the train came to a stop, at it often did, at crossings and in rail yards. They would have to wait, knowing that if
anyone recognized them they would be as helpless as if they were in a cage. But it was at one of those stops, in a crowded rail yard where half a dozen trains were resting next to one another, that Bill saw Fred Johnson sitting on a train car less than a hundred yards from them.

“Look!” Bill said.

Jan turned and looked. His heart froze, but he quickly came to a decision.

“We have to let him know where to meet,” Jan said.

They stood up and leapt across the gap to the next train and ran along the cars for a while. Then leapt to Johnson’s train and made their way over to where he was waiting, and watching, with his wise and dangerous brown eyes.

“Are you all right?” Jan asked.

“How do I look?” Johnson said.

Jan heard a strange noise. He realized that the railroad car they were standing on was full of pigs, grunting and rooting around beneath him.

“What about the others?” Jan asked.

“Don’t know about Reggie,” Johnson said. “Quentin’s all right. He went with Winter.”

The train shuddered to life and began to roll slowly forward.

“So you know we’re meeting in Morris?” Jan said.

“Yeah,” Johnson replied. “That’s what Winter said.”

“We’ll go with you,” Jan replied, settling back down against the train.

Johnson looked at Jan with what he perceived as hostility.

“What?” Jan said. “You’d rather be by yourself? I know you don’t like me, but I came all the way over here to—”

“I ain’t going to Morris,” Johnson said.

Jan realized that what he had mistaken for hostility was frustration. And it was not directed at him.

“Where are you going?” Jan asked.

“I’m going to the stockyards,” Johnson said.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause that’s where Winter is.”

“I don’t understand,” Jan said.

Johnson hesitated, then spoke. “I went with Quentin to go see
Noah. This was midnight, nearabouts. We climbed up a drainpipe and broke a window and we found his office. Noah came in real early the next morning. When he saw us he was mad. Him and Quentin went into another room. I could hear them screaming. Quentin came out. Smiled at me. Said it would be all right. I said, Where are we going? He said we’d be fine.”

The train was picking up speed, rocking back and forth on the tracks. The pigs squealed louder, as if they were engaged in a heated debate and had to talk over the noise of the moving vehicle.

“Well, it was fucking morning. We went out in the streets and I didn’t know what we were going to do. Everyone was looking for a big colored man. There wasn’t no place to hide. We went back to the restaurant and Winter saw us. He was in an alley, hat pulled down over his eyes. Real still, like some animal waiting for dinner to walk up. He said he’d sent everyone to Morris and we should go there. Then he asked about our pardons. Quentin started to give him the runaround. You know how he does. Well, I don’t think it’s so easy to give the runaround to Winter no more.”

Now the pigs sounded as if they were struggling to burst free.

“Quentin admitted that Noah backed out of the deal. Winter said Noah told you the gloves were off. Quentin said yes. Winter said well, we took ’em off. Quentin says it’s his brother, he can work it out. Winter said he’s sick of Quentin working things out. He’s sick of these Republicans turning their backs on us. He said he’ll sort it out himself. He said where’s your brother? Quentin kind of gives him the runaround again. Then he said he’s at the Stock Yards. They went off together. They told me to go to Morris.”

The train passed from the city core into that endless field of houses, small and plain and wooden, all alike, all new, the new growth after the cleansing fire. They were picking up speed. One of the pigs began to scream.

“Maybe we should just go to Morris,” Bill said.

Johnson and Bill exchanged a look that Jan did not understand. Johnson’s eyes were wide and furious. Bill’s were weak and blinking. But it was Johnson who turned away.

“I checked a newspaper,” Johnson said, through clenched teeth. “There was more in there about me than any of us but Winter. Big
black man. How the fuck were we supposed to get a pardon after this anyway? It was in the fucking papers.”

Jan could hear Bill’s voice:
You know there is never going to be a pardon
.

“Dandy Killer. That’s what they called Winter. How are we supposed to get a pardon after this? I need to talk to Noah my own self. This is my life. My life! He fucking dangled that pardon in front of me and I laid it on the line for him. He must have known he couldn’t give it to me.”

Jan sat up. It seemed safe; they must have been moving at thirty miles an hour. More and more of the pigs were starting to scream.

“I know,” Jan said.

“Well,” Johnson said, “him and me are going to have a little talk.”

“You and Noah?” Jan said.

“That’s right.”

Jan looked at Bill, only to find that he too could not meet the Indian’s sad, blinking gaze.

“What if it was Quentin who lied?” Jan blurted.

“Why would he lie?” Johnson said. “He’s in as much trouble as any of us.”

“What if he was lying all along?” Jan said. “What if he was always lying, all the time, from the beginning?”

Johnson frowned. “You’re crazy,” he said.

“What if it was always Quentin?”

“Quentin saved my life when you wanted to give me up,” Johnson said.

“Yes,” Jan shouted. “I wanted to give you up. Why? Why? Because I didn’t want to be a fugitive! Ha! Like I am right now!”

And now the stench. Chicago was not a sweet-smelling city in the fairest of seasons. As they approached the Stock Yards the smell reached the limits of human endurance.

“It didn’t bother Quentin, though, did it?” Jan said. “Do you ever wonder why he wouldn’t turn you over to the Union troops? Eh? Well do you? The kindness of his heart? You think Quentin is a kind man?”

Johnson hesitated, and then said, “The first time I met Noah he told Quentin we would have to be careful. And we weren’t careful yesterday. But Quentin don’t have no reason to lie.”

Jan started to laugh like a lunatic. “No reason at all!” Jan screamed. “No reason at all!”

When they reached the Stock Yards the train rolled through a side gate of the complex. The swineherds were waiting, leaning on their wooden poles. Almost before the train had stopped rolling the swineherds undid the gates of the railway car and the pigs spilled out, squealing. You couldn’t tell Jan that they didn’t know what was going to happen to them.

The men jumped down and landed amid the pigs.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” a burly swineherd shouted above the din.

“Mind your own business,” Jan said.

The herd of pigs surged forward through the black mixture of mud and pig shit that covered the ground. The only way to go was forward; the universe was constructed to send them in one direction.

Bill, Jan, and Johnson staggered through the muck that sucked at their boots and entered an enormous pen. Far above them were raised platforms where men in suits looked down on them in astonishment.

“Look!” Bill cried.

He was pointing up at the top floor of a building on the other end of the pen. A long ramp led up to a square door cut into the concrete wall. And framed in this door, for just an instant, appeared to be a man in a neat gray suit with a walking stick.

“Was that Winter?” Johnson said.

The three of them moved through the pigs, who grunted and occasionally took little exploring nips, as if they wanted to check how these intruders tasted in case they stopped moving long enough to eat. Eventually they reached the base of the Bridge of Sighs and saw that the pigs were eagerly gathered in a tight circle, rooting at something in the mud. Johnson savagely kicked them and they scattered, honking and chirping indignantly, to reveal a human corpse, which they did not recognize as Dennis Addy, the plant manager.

Johnson was the first to charge up the ramp, but Jan was close behind him.

As they went up the ramp they heard, more and more clearly, the grinding sounds of the machine within, drowning out the terrified cries of the pigs.

And they dropped down into yet another filthy pen filled to bursting with pigs. It was too dark, so for a moment they could only hear Noah’s screaming.

“Quentin! You have to tell them! Quentin!”

Their eyes adjusted to the gloom and they saw that Johnny Empire held Noah next to an enormous steam-powered metal wheel that was turning slowly, round and round. The chains attached to the wheel clanked and clattered on top of one another. Winter had Noah’s watch in his hand. Just as they came inside, he put it in his pocket. Quentin hovered nearby, hopping from foot to foot, looking like a man who enjoyed being in control and who now decidedly was not.

“Augustus, Augustus,” Quentin said. “Please. Please.”

“Last chance,” Winter said.

“Quentin!” Noah cried. “You have to tell them! I told him, I swear, I told him that if there was trouble you couldn’t have a pardon! How could I arrange a pardon after what happened?”

Jan felt his stomach turn over.

“Augustus, please, this is my brother,” Quentin cried. “It won’t solve anything now.”

Winter swung his head around to look at Quentin, and that was when he noticed the new arrivals. His gaze sharpened on them, as if he were trying to read small lettering on a sign far away, and then he relaxed, right into the present moment, as if he had just figured out how the universe had managed to bring exactly the right people together, at exactly the right time, once again.

Quentin followed Winter’s gaze and saw them, and then looked back at Winter.

“Augustus …,” he began.

“Is it true, Quentin?” Winter said.

“What?”

“Did he tell you what he said he told you?”

“Well, I don’t know how to answer that.”

“Tell me the fucking truth.”

“Quentin!” Noah screamed. Then he looked at Jan. “Müller! Get help! Call the police!”