It didn’t slip away. It shone steady, and grew till the trees stood out against it, a broad beacon of normality – street lights, maybe. All I could hear was my blood and breath, labouring both; steel bands squeezed at my chest and head. But the tombstones were thinning, opening out; there was a wall here, and beyond it more fence, less dilapidated than the rest. Without breaking stride I sprang up onto one of the stones ranged against the wall, from that to the wall and clutched at the wires. Fortunately they weren’t electrified or barbed, and with my last burning breath I swung myself up, over, crashed down among rough weeds some twelve feet below and ran, ran until I tripped over something hard and fell sobbing to my knees at the margins of the light.
Then I cowered down, shrank back, as the ground quivered. With a rushing, hissing rumble and clack and a lonely, hooting cry something vast went flicking across my sight, an endless phalanx of speeding shadows, blotting out the light, the world.
When the thunder passed and the light was clear again, some fragment of my wits came slinking back. I looked up, gasping, and began to pick myself up, rather shamefaced. Pure luck that freight train hadn’t come up this track instead of the other; next time it might. I’d blundered into some kind of marshalling yard, well lit but no safe place to wander. Miles better than that damn cemetery, though. Part of my mind was threshing furiously, fighting to rationalize what I’d just seen, to explain it away – an earth tremor, overheated imagination, anything. I ignored it. I was just too glad to be out of it. Then I froze; I heard a voice, not close, not far, clear and vehement in the still night.
‘I tell you, you go fuck around in that theah boneyard all you like, but you doan’ get me –’ There, a few hundreds yards away down the track by the fence, sat a squad car with its lights flashing. And I realized the sickening inevitability of it, that they wouldn’t have given up at all, just called up other cars to cover the likely exits. And this one, of all the luck, was mine; I knew that voice, and I sympathized. Staying on all fours, I began to inch forward.
‘Scared? Just you lissen a’me one damn minute, peckerhead – Hey!’
I knew what that meant; I was off even before the doors slammed, the lights swung around towards me, the siren came on. I heard the tyres crunch across the gravel, and it was time to bolt again before I’d even got my breath.
I couldn’t run much longer, but nothing would get me back into that graveyard. Somewhere in the yard another train was coming. I limped across the tracks, into the shadow of some standing freight cars; I thought of getting into one, if only to grab a few minutes’ rest, but they were very securely chained up, and the shadow seemed like no shelter at all. I ducked over the coupling and through, landed right in the path of the oncoming train and found a new turn of speed; behind me I heard gravel spray as the squad car swerved aside. Across more tracks I ran, between stolid lines of silent cars, until suddenly I was at another fence – and not more than a hundred yards up, an open gate. Wouldn’t the cops head for it? I took the chance, there weren’t any others. I made it, and suddenly I was free of all fences, running like a madman through an empty street; but behind me the siren was getting louder. And was that another ahead, around the corner of this tall building? I could turn this way – or that. Towards the sound – or away. That was no siren. I made my choice, and turned the corner.
I could have laughed, if my aching lungs had let me. The street was wide, glistening in the night-haze as if from recent rains; tall buildings, featureless in the night, loomed over it like chasm walls. In one narrow side doorway an old man stood, the only living soul in all that great gorge of a place, a black man in a shabby overcoat, playing a mournful trumpet; and that was the sound. I ran down towards him, and saw the heavy dark glasses he wore, the placard in front of him, the tin cup. He stopped playing suddenly, lowered his trumpet, and I swerved wide so as not to frighten him, wishing I could call out to him. But he called out to me instead.
‘Son! Hey, sonny! Which way de fi-ah?’
Almost instinctively I came to a halt; it was a startling voice, deep and commanding, to come from that stooped old frame. He had an odd sing-song accent, too, not at all American. I gasped, tried to answer and couldn’t; he didn’t wait for one. ‘You run ’way from de man? De poleece? Uh-huh, that’s what I hear, those ’larums.’ The wrinkled old face creased up in a wide grin, over chipped teeth. ‘We fix dat. You just hunkah down behin’ me heah, boy – in de doorway, okay? Oh-kay! You all snug now?’ And without waiting for another answer he lifted his trumpet and began to play again. I knew the tune – ‘Saint James Infirmary’, mournful as hell and too horribly appropriate. I squatted down in the doorway, shivering and wheezing, struggling to get my breath back. I peering up at the old man’s back, shabby and bent but surprisingly broad, and the square of sky framed in the door arch above.
My mind filled in the words, and I wished it wouldn’t. One of the old original blues, so old you could trace its roots back to ancient folksongs –
A siren wailed discords along the high walls, then cut them short in a screech of brakes; blue light pulsed through the door arch. ‘Hey, pops!’ yelled a voice, not the same one now. ‘You see a big guy come runnin’ this way? White boy, wavin’ a machete or sumpn’ – a real crazy –’
‘Son,’ chuckled the old trumpet player. ‘It’s maybe twenny yeahs gone since I saw anythin’ wuth a good goddam! Or I wouldn’t be standin’ roun’ on dis heah chilly stoop, believe me-ee!’
‘Oh,’ said the cop, sounding slightly abashed. ‘Right, yah. Uh, you hear anyone, then? A couple of minutes back?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Someone runnin’, five minutes back. ‘Long Decatur Street way, maybe. I wuz playin’ mah horn –’
‘Okay, pops!’ A coin jingled into the cup. ‘Better get out of the wet, hear? Somebody might take a shine to your cup, this hour o’ the morning!’ The siren came on again, and the light slid away from the doorway; I sagged with relief. The old man took up where he’d left off, till the siren had died away completely, then rounded out the tune with a cheeky little flourish and began to shake the spit out of his trumpet.
‘Nice ’nuff boys – but dey’re not makin’em any bright-ah!’ He turned and grinned at me, and I had the odd feeling he could see me very well. But he fumbled about just the same for the card at his feet, and I picked it up and handed it to him. It carried an incredibly ancient-looking religious print, showing a ‘Black Heaven’ like something out of Green Pastures, and beneath it in crude lettering The Opener of the Ways. He tucked it carefully away in the doorway, and sat carefully down beside me.