“Pleasant day,” Norbloom said, his big Nordic horseface framed in the darkness of the patrol car.
Clawson suppressed the instinctive distaste he felt for the man. “Very nice. Indian summer.”
“Everything on for tonight?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Bingham came through?” “Yes, indeed.”
“Then I’ll be seeing you later.”
“We’re gathering at eight,” Clawson said.
“Yessir.” Norbloom shot him a mock salute. “I’ll be there.”
Clawson smiled perfunctorily and paused to savor the excitement growing inside him.
Liza watched with great trepidation as Creath brought up his hunting rifle—disused these many years—from the basement, and began to clean and oil it. He bent to the task like a man possessed, his eyes intently focused, and when she spoke to him he did not respond.
Surely there was nothing dangerous in this? Liza felt as if events had somehow gone beyond her… but surely Bob Clawson would not be party to do an enterprise that was physically dangerous?
“Creath,” she said tentatively. “Creath, if this is something … if you don’t feel you should be involved. …”
But he lifted his head to gaze at her, and the expression on his face was a combination of implacability and silent horror so intense that she could not bear the weight of his attention. She looked down, and when she looked up again he had gone back to his work, polishing the rifle barrel so intently that it seemed he might grind it to dust. Please God preserve him, Liza thought, and drew the curtains against the impending night.
Chapter Seventeen
Travis did not locate Bone until the sun was nearly down.
The meadow beyond the railway trestle was wide and overgrown with burdocks, nettles, and prairie grass. He had followed twice along the tracks and ranged much deeper before he saw the blue pea coat, like a discarded thing, in a depression where the land sloped to the river.
He moved close enough to get a better look—no closer.
This was Bone. And Bone is dead, Travis thought, or very close. He parted the dried weeds carefully. The alien man lay curled on himself, his long white wrists projecting from the cuffs of the jacket, his shoes so eroded as to be functionless, his watchcap clinging to the bony slope of his scalp. The body was immense, Travis thought, even curled and helpless like this. He was able to see the chest wound, or the evidence of it: a long rust-colored patch running up the pea coat, angry swatches of blood and skin peeking through.
Your own deepest, hidden face. But not this, surely? Surely this was just a broken thing? Pathetic, he thought, but impersonal, like the crushed body of some unfortunate animal.
“Bone,” he whispered. “Bone.”
There was no response. An eyelid fluttered… unless he had imagined it.
Travis moved closer through the brittle weeds. The sunshine was oblique now and did not warm him. “Bone,” he said, bending over. “Wake up. Anna sent me. Anna said—”
And Bone’s huge fist lashed out.
Travis felt it thump into him, lift him off his feet; felt the astonishing momentum carry him backward.
He sat up slowly.
The fist had struck him squarely on the chest. It might have broken a rib … he felt a constriction as he gasped for his breath.
“Bone,” he said faintly.
The creature stood up. It loomed, a yard away from him, huge as a gantry tower. The eyes, Travis thought. They were like Anna’s—the pupils swollen to fill the sockets—but different, too; colder, somehow,- hostile, wary. Bone took one gasping breath and seemed to wince with pain.
Your own deepest, hidden face… the words mocked him. Not this, he thought. Not this thing. Wounded, betrayed, hardly human for its wounding and betrayal…
Carefully, Travis stood up.
They faced each other.
“Bone,” Travis said.
The creature looked at him.
“Bone, Anna sent me. I’ll take you to Anna. I—”
And he stepped forward.
Bone raised his hand. Blue fire licked from his fingertips.
“They hurt you,” Travis said. A part of him had long since panicked; he was not sure where the words came from. Somewhere deep inside him. “They hurt you. I know. You trusted them and they hurt you. I know. Let me help.” He took a step forward and thought involuntarily of his mother, his mother who had shamed him, dying and looking at him with an expression he could only interpret as reproach. He had hated her then. Her ravaged body had cried out for his pity and he had withheld it: she was dying, of course she was dying, dying for her sins, for the hideous sins she had committed behind his back. An old, old bargain, Travis thought, and felt a surge of guilt like electricity in him: Christ God, could he truly have been so cruel?—hating her when she was dying, hating her because she was dying?
He looked at Bone. Maybe Anna was right. Maybe this was what he had been then: this disfigured thing, suffused with pain so entirely that there was no room for kindness, trust, thought. Bone stood, shivering, regarding him from the depths of his dilated eyes. His fists were clenched and white.
Trembling, Travis reached out toward the monster.
Shortly before dusk Liza Burack answered the timid knock at the front door and found Faye Wilcox shivering on the veranda. “Why, Faye,” she said, and was suddenly and obscurely afraid: Faye had lost the Baptist Women’s election, Faye was here to exact some strange kind of revenge…
But Faye said, “May I come in?” and it was so much like a plea, a prayer, that Liza could only nod.
Creath was still in the parlor, the lights off, dusk thickening about him like a viscous fluid. Liza steered Faye Wilcox past him and into the kitchen. Faye sat at the small Formica table, haphazardly dressed, her hair in loops and tangles down her broad back, and it was a moment before Liza remembered to say, “Coffee?”
“No. Thank you.”
Liza stood uneasily with her spine against the kitchen counter. She was conscious of the ticking of the clock. “Faye … if it’s about the election. …”
“Election?” The Wilcox woman seemed not to understand. “Election—no. It’s much more serious than that.” She adjusted her smudged bifocals. “Nancy’s gone. Did you know that?”
“Nancy? Gone where?”
“Where he is, I think. Where Travis is. You know, I pray they both get away safely. Truly, I pray for that. Is it un-Christian, Liza, that I should want them both to leave? But if they stay here they will be hurt. Worse.” She looked at Liza directly. “It’s tonight, you know.”
“I don’t understand… tonight? You mean the men who are meeting together?”
“Meeting together? Do you believe that’s what they’re doing? Is that why Creath is cleaning his rifle, Liza?” Faye Wilcox put her plump hands palms downward on the table. Her lips were pursed. “They are a posse. A mob.”
Vigilante, Liza thought. But— “You can’t know that.”
“How could I not? The rumor is all about town. But you don’t need a rumor to know.”
“But Travis? Surely Travis has left?”
“I believe he has not. Not while Nancy is here.”
Liza said nothing, only gripped the beveled edges of the kitchen counter. Faye stood up suddenly. “Your own sister’s child! How can you be so hard!”
Travis is lost, she thought dizzily. She had written him out of the book of her heart. But she thought of Creath with his rifle … of the other men with theirs. “Faye—”