Most of the group decided to camp beside the road, but the man with the suit coat and the boy kept walking toward Camp Rapture.
The trees held the day’s heat like an armpit in a seersucker suit. With the now limited moonlight it was difficult to see far ahead. They walked where the trees didn’t stop them, and this kept them on the road. Crickets chirped all around them, and down where the creek cut through the trees they could hear a bullfrog making a noise that made the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.
“Sounds like he’s got a busted horn,” the boy said.
“Them big ones always sound like that,” the man said. “You’d think after hearing that, you seen the one done it, he’d be ten feet tall. What’s your name?”
“Everybody calls me Goose, but that ain’t my real name.”
“Do you mind being called Goose?”
“It’s better than my real name and what they call my brother.”
“What’s he called?”
“Dump.”
“Dump? Why’s that?”
“I don’t rightly know. Well, I think it was because he was always messing his pants. He was doing that until he was eleven years old. He was older than me by a year.”
“Was?”
“He got something and died. Polio, I think. My mama and daddy had nine kids, and I decided I could do all right on my own. Give them others, my sisters, a better chance.”
“Some of them sisters had to be older than you.”
“Yeah. But they ain’t got the adventure in them like me.”
“You never did tell me why they call you Goose.”
“Cause I run like one.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Draighton.”
“I don’t know that’s so bad.”
“I like Goose better.”
“All right, Goose.”
“What’s your name?”
“Lee.”
“Ain’t that coat hot?”
“It is. I hang on to it because I got to have something when winter comes. I can take it off when I work, put it over me at night. It ain’t so bad to wear just walking, not if you’re used to it.”
“All I got is these here clothes and this cap. My shoes got holes in the bottom. I had to stuff them with cardboard.”
“I got mine fixed the same way, son.”
“I got a stick of peppermint I stole from a store. It’s kind of busted up on account of it’s in my front pocket, but I could split it up with you, you want.”
“All right.”
The boy dug the peppermint out of his pocket. It was busted up good, but he collected the pieces and split them up, poured part of them into the man’s hand.
The man put the pieces in his mouth all at once. They had bits of lint and dirt on them, but he was so hungry he thought of the lint and dirt as spice. The last meal he had eaten was two days ago and it was a boiled shoe that he and some bo’s fixed alongside the tracks. There was a tater cut up in the mix, but he didn’t get any of it, and the shoe, though cut up and boiled soft enough to eat, still had the taste of shoe dye about it, and it made him throw up later.
Right now, he was so hungry his stomach felt like his throat was cut.
“What you gonna do in Camp Rapture?” he asked the boy.
“Try and get a job just like you.”
“Boy your age shouldn’t have to work. Chores maybe, but not a man’s work.”
“That’s what I keep saying, but it don’t seem to matter none. I’ve done every kind of work there is, except one that makes big money. I can plow, I can tote, I can paint and I can pick. I worked in a carnival some until the boss bent me over a wagon wheel and stuck his thing up my butt.”
“Sorry.”
“It hurt some, but least he got shit on his dick. Later on I set fire to the little wagon he was in, and he got caught on fire, but the carnies put him out. I run off then, before he got to feeling better and figured out I done it. He had this one pinhead worked there that was real mean when he wanted her to be. She’d jump on you and just whale with both hands fast as she could go, and she could go fast all right. I figured he’d sic her on me. He’d done it to others.”
“You have been around.”
“You name it, if it’s hard to do and hurts the back, I can do it.”
“Wait till you’re my age.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m in my fifties. We’ll leave it at that. Clouds are parting. Moon’s coming out.”
They walked on for a ways, then Lee reached out and stopped the boy. “Look there.”
A huge black snake crawled across the road with a whipping motion, its head held up.
“Goddamn,” the boy said. “That one’s longer than Satan’s dick.”
“You really ought not talk like that.”
“I like you, but you ain’t my daddy.”
“You’re right.”
“Was that a water moccasin?”
“I think it was just a big old chicken snake. They don’t hurt nothing. Less it’s chickens, eggs, or rats. I don’t mind the rats, but you can sure get put out with them if they get in your chicken house and you was wanting eggs for breakfast.”
When they were certain the snake was deep in the woods, they continued walking.
“Chicken snake poisonous?” Goose asked.
“Naw. But they still give me the creeps. I reckon they’re God’s creatures just like us, but I see one, and there’s a hoe handy, I’ll take to it and chop off its head, poisonous or not.”
“Reckon old snake was lucky you didn’t have a hoe tonight.”
“That’s right. One time when I was a kid a coachwhip snake chased me around my house a bunch of times, and when I went inside to hide, it rose up and looked in the window.”
“Naw.”
“It did. Window wasn’t high off the ground, but it scared me bad. Mama got the hoe and chopped off its head. Later, I learned a coachwhip will chase you, but if you stop, it’ll stop, and you can chase it. You stop chasing, it’ll turn and come after you. They’re kind of playing. I think it was looking through that window for me to come out and play some more. Wanted me to take a turn chasing it. And my mama went out there and chopped off its head. Always made me feel kind of guilty.”
“You look kind of like a preacher.”
“Don’t confuse me with one. Though I have done some preaching in my time.”
“Just to make money, work the rubes? Do some of that healing stuff?”
“No, son. I meant it and I didn’t heal nothing, cause ain’t nobody can heal but the Lord God hisself.”
“Why ain’t you still preaching?”
“Sort of fell off the wagon. I could still hear the call but I couldn’t tell no more what the Lord was calling. I felt like a man going deaf. Still good enough ears to hear the sound, but not enough hearing to understand it.”
“What was it knocked you off the wagon? Booze? Gambling? Pussy?”
“I know I’m not your daddy, but you really are too young to talk like that.”
“I don’t know no other way to talk. As for booze, gambling and pussy, I’ve had me some of all three, so I guess I can talk about it, and I can tell you straight out that I like pussy the best. Which was it with you?”
“All of them. Including some you didn’t name. Fact is, I ain’t just here for a job. I’ve come here to set some things I done here right as they can be set. Gonna try and give a lady an apology, if she’s here and willing to take it.”
“And if she ain’t willing to take it?”
“I wouldn’t blame her.”
“What if she isn’t in Camp Rapture?”
“I try not to think about that. It makes me feel bad to think that, so I don’t think about it, and won’t, unless she ain’t here. Then I got to start up with a new set of worries.”
“It happen a long time ago?”
“Yeah.”
“So let it go. My pappy always said, you already done something, ain’t no use noodling on it. It ain’t gonna get better if you do.”
“He may be right. But I’m not doing it just for her. Doing it for me.”