“Are you looking for the man in the hat and the old clothes?” the girl asked.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“He didn’t go that way,” she said, pointing toward Peter. “He went straight ahead.” And she gestured toward the river.
I stopped and wondered whether the girl was lying, or knew something.
“He was limping,” she said.
“All right,” I said and I resumed jogging toward the river, wondering what I would do or say if I found Francis when Peter was not around. At least I could say Peter was looking for him, and Molly too.
We ran past an old hospital, empty now, with posters pasted haphazardly on its walls advertising the O. C. Tucker Shows, a carnival with high divers, games, rides, a fortuneteller, a freak show, dancers galore. On another wall I saw a minstrel-show poster of a man in blackface, and yet another of Fredric March in Death Takes a Holiday.
“That’s where I live,” the dark-eyed girl said.
“In that empty building?”
“No, in the carnival.”
“Where is it now, around here?”
“Down that street,” the girl said, but she did not change her direction to go toward the carnival, if it was there, which I doubted, for this wasn’t the right weather for carnivals or circuses. It was too cold for outdoor shows, and it was probably going to snow. I was not cold, because I was running. But I knew when I stopped I would feel chilled beneath my sweat.
“I think he went down there,” the girl said, and she ran ahead of me and down a dead-end street, beyond which lay the river flats at the edge of the old Lumber District. To this day I cannot give a cogent reason why I followed this girl, trusted her to lead me to a stranger she had seen only once, if that. But I felt that the child should not be resisted if I wanted to find Francis.
“How do you know he came this way?” I asked.
“I saw him,” the girl said.
“You couldn’t have seen him down here.”
“That’s what you say,” the girl said.
“I think you’re a little crazy,” I said, to which the girl did not reply.
We left the paved streets of the city and ran on a dirt path toward the railroad tracks, across fields of weeds and trash, and I saw in the distance half a dozen shacks that hoboes had built, saw people moving near them. Then I saw eight freight cars on a siding, with more people sitting by fires, cooking something.
“That’s where I live,” the girl said, and Orson saw the lettering painted on the cars: O. C. Tucker Shows.
“You live on the tracks?”
“We’re waiting for a steam engine to take us south,” the girl said. “We have to bribe the railroad men.”
I understood nothing about this girl. We ran in silence and then I saw Francis, walking on the flats with his limp. And how he had gotten this far walking at that speed was a mystery. Perhaps the girl and I had run in a roundabout circle to get here, though I doubted it.
“There he is,” I said, and I stopped running.
“You see?” the girl said.
We were uphill from Francis, fifty feet from him, on a slope covered with trees and high weeds, and I then chose to hide myself and watch Francis as he walked north along the tracks, his limp worse than when I last observed him. I felt myself in the presence of hidden meaning (was that what the dark-eyed girl was looking for?) both in my decision to hide, and in the vision that lay before me; and I shivered with the chill of comprehension that something woeful could happen that would mark me. In the presence of malevolence I understood that this is what you feel like before the woeful thing happens. I turned to the girl and saw her petting a kitten, stroking its head with her long, dirty fingernails. Her dog was nowhere to be seen. From the pocket of her jacket a naked doll with only one leg protruded.
“Where did the cat come from?” I asked, and I realized I was whispering.
“He found me,” the girl said.
“And the doll?”
“It was in the car that’s up on blocks.”
“Then it doesn’t belong to you.”
“No, it’s yours,” she said.
“I don’t own any dolls,” I said.
“It’s yours because I give it to you,” the girl said, and she handed me the one-legged doll, which I assumed had belonged to Molly, or Sarah, or maybe the long-gone Julia. I put the doll on the ground and looked at Francis, who had stopped walking and was staring up the empty track, nothing to be seen. I felt the chill I knew would come. I heard noise to my right, someone walking, and turned to see Peter not thirty feet away, standing still and mostly concealed by bushes, looking toward Francis, who was standing beside the tracks. Peter, the dark-eyed child, and I now formed Francis’s silent audience in the weeds.
Francis is a peasant, Peter thought. He is a polar bear. He can live in the snow. He is a walker, look at him walk with that game leg. What did you do to your leg, Francis? Francis is a buzzard, feeding on the dead. Francis is a man who never lost his looks, though he is in terrible condition. You cannot lose the shape of your face unless you lose all your flesh, or stretch it with fat, like Chick. Look at the way Francis wears his hat. In destitution he exudes style. He walks along the gray gravel of the track bed. He casts his shadow on the silverbrown tracks. He walks past a track signal light whose color I cannot see. The weeds where he walks are dun, are fawn, are raw umber, khaki, walnut, bronze, and copper. The sky is the color of lead, soon to be the color of mice. Bosch, The Landloper. Look, he sits on the switch box. He raises the leg of his trousers that are the color of lampblack gone to smoke, and he studies the wound that makes him limp. Not in my line of sight. He nods and decides that his leg has improved, though it pains him. He wipes sweat from his forehead, or is it an itch? He puts his hat on again, stands and walks, stops. Why walk? He will have to run when the train comes. I can see him running with his gimp gait, clever enough to grab the step-iron of the ladder and hoist himself aloft with arm strength alone, perhaps help from a push with the good leg, and up he goes, off he goes to the future in the noplace village of his nowhere world. Away we go, Francis, away we go, swinging from the rope on the hill, flying down into the mud pond. Do not miss the water or you will break your bones. I never missed. Francis taught me how not to miss. Can he see me now? He cannot, yet he can teach me still. The tracks converge in a distant fusion I cannot see from here, but I see them narrowing, darkening as they go, see the yellow lights of a lumber yard still busy, lights of a house so solitary, lights of a burnt-ocher fire (other fires toward the city, carny fire probably fake like everything about carnies), and I see you, Francis, in your termination, the end of family tie, the beginning of nothing. You will carry on, Francis. You will find a way not to die in the midst of your nothingness. You will feel the triumph of the spirit as you leave us in the dust of your memory, obliterating us as you go toward oblivion and the bottom of the jug. Be of good cheer, Francis. Wondrous drunkenness lurks in your future. You will recover from the awfulness of your finality and you will go on to the heights of the degraded imagination, always conjuring yet another rung on which to hoist yourself to new depths. Francis, in your suite of mice and dun, in the majority of your umberness, in the psychotic melancholy of your spirit, I salute you as my brother in the death of our history. You more than I knew how to murder it. You more than I knew how to arrive at the future. In solitude you are victorious, you son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, will you never give me peace? Son-of-a-bitch brother, why is it you do not die?
Francis put his foot on the track and felt the train before he could see it, or hear it. You goddamn leg, you rotted on me. Let them rot. Why’d it have to be me? Why not? Not a time to go for the religion. Sin and punishment, all that shit. Don’t clutter your head, Francis. This is tricky. You don’t want to miss. One time and we’re on the way. Hey, boys, I’m goin’ for a ride. You’d think a guy’d get an invite to at least sleep over after how the fuck many years. Too many to count. Don’t bother. But they give you a chicken leg, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Woulda seen Annie if this’d worked, if there was a place to stay and go slow, do a visit and get the lay of the land, don’t push it too fast, but you can’t goddamn go home lookin’ like this, goddamn bum and filthy, got a chicken leg in his belly and that’s all he’s got. And lookin’ out the window at Katrina. Jesus, lady, you don’t go away easy, do you? Like a life you lived afore you was alive. A way of lookin’ at women that keeps you on the edge of the goddamn furnace, dangerous, them women, God bless all of ’em, and I don’t leave out none, all welcome here. Welcome, ladies, welcome. Anything I can do for you while you wait? Spurt up a couple of kids? How’d ya like that, Helen? You can’t have no kids. And Bessie, you were some bundle, I’ll tell the world, wouldn’t of been the same world without that month, or was it a week? Who gives a barrel of shit? Not Francis. Francis knows there’s no. . I see it. I got a minute. A minute? Less? Step lively, Mr. Francis, ’cause the time is now. Chicken leg here you go wherever the hell you’re goin’, chicken leg step lively step.