A Hidden Place

It was a new idea, startling and absolute.

Deacon was alive now because of Bone. Bone had discharged his debt.

White smoke coiled from the barrel of Deacon’s pistol.

“Tried to kill me! You saw him!” “Car gone by,” Archie said weakly.

They rode mostly empty boxcars. If they entered a crowded one, it would be empty at the next whistlestop. Bone’s reputation had grown among the hoboes.

“Fuck ’em all,” Deacon said cheerfully. They sat in a boxcar—empty—with the prairie night rushing past outside. It was no longer summer. The wind was cutting and Bone clutched his jacket around him. The Calling was elusive tonight.

Deacon had acquired a bottle of muscatel. He drank unstintingly and offered none to Archie. After a time, pacified, he talked in fragments about his life in Chicago, about the Great War, about the child he had abandoned. Then, with a violent finality, he passed out.

Bone and Archie sat in the rattling darkness, very nearly invisible. The door was open a crack and Bone watched the landscape pour by. A harvest moon hung on the horizon.

“He’ll do it again,” Archie said.

Talking to himself, maybe, Bone thought.

“I should walk away,” Archie said. “Walk away and be shut of the whole thing. I should. …”

Bone gazed at him inquisitively.

“Ah, no,” Archie said, taking up the remainder of Deacon’s muscatel. “No. I guess I’ve been with him too long. Maybe you don’t understand that. It’s not queer. Don’t get that idea. It’s just that I owe him some things.”

Bone nodded.

“I was never good on my own. Too damn dumb. Deacon’s a thinker. Smart. Smart as a whip! But that’s where he gets into trouble. Figuring angles all the time can make a person crazy. I’m not trying to stir up trouble, but listen, Bone, listen to me: to Deacon you’re just one more angle… you know what I mean?”

There was no fear about Archie now, only a sadness, a melancholy, like the scent of the rain in the air. Bone said, “I know.”

“It’s been sweet for him so far. Christ, he could do anything! He was right. He was right. It’s not Deacon they see, it’s Bone, the geek—you. Deacon’s sitting pretty.” The chill air made him shiver, and Archie took up the bottle and swallowed convulsively. “You, though, Bone, you’re out in the cold, you know that? Out in the snow and ice. When they hang somebody, it won’t be Deacon. And pretty soon Deacon’s go

It was true enough, Bone thought. But he guessed it didn’t really matter any longer. He had paid out his debt to Deacon. It worked both ways: Deacon was bad for Bone to be with, as well.

But he worried about being alone, about being recognized… especially now that he was so close.

The Calling was faint but very near. In recent days his mind had seemed to race,- he was filled with a new lucidity. He understood so much.

“I’ll stick with him,” Archie was saying. “I don’t care what he did. I know he killed those people. By God, didn’t we bury them? But he needs me.” Archie looked at Bone pleadingly. “He needs me… doesn’t he? Doesn’t he?”

“I guess he does,” Bone said.

They spent the next night outside a freightyard, camped by themselves, huddled over a weak fire while the wind came sluicing over the prairie. “Give me the money,” Deacon said, drunk again.

Bone, shivering, pulled the wad of bills out of his pocket.

Deacon counted it twice. It came to almost three hundred dollars.

Deacon gripped the fluttering bills tightly, as if the wind might carry them off. “We could go a long way on this,” he said. “A long way. Some warm place. Florida, maybe. What say, Archie? We spend the winter in Florida. Live like goddamn kings. Buy a piece of property maybe.”

“There’s no Florida property for three hundred bucks,” Archie said morosely.

“Then we’ll get more,” Deacon said.

Archie looked at Bone and then back at Deacon. “If you mean—hey, Deacon, I don’t think we should—”

“One more time,” Deacon said. “Maybe someplace a little ritzier. Someplace they keep more cash in the till. Someplace—”

“No!” Astonishingly, Archie had risen to his feet. “Deacon, it’s crazy! They’ll spot him a mile away! We’ll all be killed, all of us!”

Deacon didn’t answer, only sat back against his rucksack and gazed at Archie. In a moment Archie’s rage had faded; he looked foolish, outlined against the stars with the night wind picking at his tattered coat, and he sat back down again.

“Just one more,” Deacon said. His voice was placid, calming. “I know we can’t carry on with it. All I want is a little extra. You understand. A little something to keep us warm. Something to keep the cold away. You understand, Archie.”

But Archie was shivering, Archie was hugging himself, and it looked to Bone as if Archie might not be warm ever again.

He woke up that night after the fire had gone out.

The embers were cold, the ground beneath him was cold. Bone sat up and hugged his pea coat around himself.

Amber light from the freightyard washed out over the prairie. Behind a chain link fence, an acetylene torch dropped showers of sparks. The night air was full of metallic smells and the stars above him were icy and strange.

The Calling sang to him.

Here I am, find me.

Now before the time passes.

Bone, find me, here, now.

He could not mistake the urgency of it. He sensed that some irreversible process had been set in motion, that he needed to play out his part. His body felt huge and strange about him. In this last week the sickness had come back, the convulsions that bowed him heel-to-crown as if he were about to erupt from this clumsy cocoon and burst forth transfigured. It was time to move on. So close now. He did not need words to know it.

He moved away from the cold campfire, from the prone bodies of Archie and Deacon, into the darkness. In the shadow of a rust-eaten oil canister he stood to his full height and sca

She was a light there.

He thought it for the first time: “She.”

She was a blue corona that rose and flared like a searchlight against the stars. Bone knew without thinking it that the light would be invisible to Archie or Deacon. It was a sign meant exclusively for Bone, a kind of marker. Here I am. He trembled with the closeness of it.

The light transfixed him, consumed all his attention for a timeless moment, and he was startled when Archie tapped his shoulder.

The smaller man was shaking. His knapsack was in his hand. He gazed up at Bone, and there were tears leaking from his eyes.

“We leave him here,” Archie whispered. “Listen to me. Without us he can’t hurt himself. He’ll be okay. We leave him here, right, Bone? Without us they can’t touch him. He’ll be okay—”

And Bone, gazing at Archie, was overcome with another realization.

He was not like Archie or Deacon. I am not human. The thought was dizzying, and for a moment he was afraid a convulsion might overtake him. In the glare of that blue light he had glimpsed himself, had bathed for a moment in the secret illumination of the Jeweled World. Bone’s comprehension failed him, but he understood, at least, that he was not like Archie. The gulf between them was vast, vast…

“Archie, no,” he said. His voice seemed loud in the darkness. “I have to go—“he pointed helplessly—“there—”

Archie gazed beyond him, not listening, blind to the Calling light. “He changed since we met you. But that’s not true, either. It was nothing you did. Just something he saw in you. I don’t know. You were like the ghost of all the beatings he took. But not beaten. All his old anger came out.”