CHAPTER 40 Nick Andros lay sleeping but not quiet on the bunk in Sheriff Baker's office. He was naked except

CHAPTER 40

Nick Andros lay sleeping but not quiet on the bunk in Sheriff Baker's office. He was naked except for his shorts and his body was lightly oiled with sweat. His last thought before sleep had taken him the night before was that he would be dead by morning; the dark man that had consistently haunted his feverish dreams would somehow break through that last thin barrier of sleep and take him away. It was strange. The eye which Ray Booth had gouged into darkness had hurt for two days. Then, on the third, the feeling that giant calipers had been screwed into his head had faded down to a dull ache. There was nothing but a gray blur when he looked through that eye now, a gray blur in which shapes sometimes moved, or seemed to move. But it wasn't the eye injury which was killing him; it was the bullet-graze down his leg. He had gone without disinfecting it. The pain in his eye had been so great that he had barely been aware of it. The graze ran shallowly along his right thigh and ended at the knee; the next day he had examined the bullet hole in his pants where the slug had exited with some wonder. And on that next day, June 30, the wound had been red along the edges and all the muscles of that leg seemed to ache. He had limped down to Dr. Soames's office and had gotten a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He had poured the whole bottle of peroxide over the bullet wound, which was about ten inches long. It had been a case of locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. By that evening his entire right leg was throbbing like a rotten tooth, and under the skin he could see the telltale red lines of blood poisoning radiating out from the wound, which had only begun to scab over. On July 1 he had gone down to Soames's office again and had rummaged through his drug closet, looking for penicillin. He found some, and after a moment's hesitation, he swallowed both of the pills in one of the sample packets. He was well aware that he would die if his body reacted strongly against the penicillin, but he thought the alternative might be an even nastier death. The infection was racing, racing. The penicillin did not kill him, but there was no noticeable improvement, either. By yesterday noon he had been running a high fever, and he suspected he had been delirious a great deal of the time. He had plenty of food but didn't want to eat it; all he seemed to want to do was drink cup after cup of the distilled water in the cooler which stood in Baker's office. That water had been almost gone when he fell asleep (or passed out) last night, and Nick had no idea how he might get more. In his feverish state, he didn't care much. He would die soon, and there would be nothing to worry about anymore. He was not crazy about the idea of dying, but the thought of having no more pain or worry was a great relief. His leg throbbed and itched and burned.

174 His sleep those days and nights after the killing of Ray Booth had not seemed like sleep at all. His dreams were a flood. It seemed that everyone he had ever known was coming back for a curtain call. Rudy Sparkman, pointing at the white sheet of paper: You are this blank page. His mother, tapping lines and circles she had helped him make on another white page, marring its purity: It says Nick Andros, honey. That's you. Jane Baker, her face turned aside on the pillow, saying, Johnny, my poor Johnny. In his dreams Dr. Soames asked John Baker again and again to take off his shirt, and again and again Ray Booth said, Hold im... I'm gonna mess im up... sucker hit me... hold im .. Unlike all the other dreams he had had in his life, Nick did not have to lipread these. He could actually hear what people were saying. The dreams were incredibly vivid. They would fade as the pain in his leg brought him close to waking. Then a new scene would appear as he sank down into sleep again. There were people he had never seen in two of the dreams, and these were the dreams he remembered the most clearly when he woke up. He was on a high place. The land was spread out below him like a relief map. It was desert land, and the stars above had the mad clarity of altitude. There was a man beside him... no, not a man but the shape of a man. As if the figure had been cut from the fabric of reality and what really stood beside him was a negative man, a black hole in the shape of a man. And the voice of this shape whispered: Everything you see will be yours if you fall down on your knees and worship me. Nick shook his head, wanting to step away from that awful drop, afraid the shape would stretch out its black arms and push him over the edge. Why don't you speak? Why do you just shake your head? In the dream Nick made the gesture he had made so many times in the waking world: a laying of his finger over his lips, then the flat of his hand against his throat... and then he heard himself say in a perfectly clear, rather beautiful voice: "I can't talk. I am mute." But you can. If you want to, you can. Nick reached out to . touch the shape then, his fear momentarily swept away in a flood of amazement and burning joy. But as his hand neared that figure's shoulder it turned ice cold, so cold it seemed that he had burned it. He jerked it away with ice crystals forming on the knuckles. And it came to him. He could hear. The dark shape's voice; the far-off cry of a hunting night-bird; the endless whine of the wind. He was struck mute all over again by the wonder of it. There was a new dimension to the world he had never missed because he had never experienced it, and now it had fallen into place. He was hearing sounds. He seemed to know what each was without being told. They were pretty. Pretty sounds. He ran his fingers back and forth across his shirt and marveled at the swift whisper of his nails on the cotton. Then the dark man was turning toward him, and Nick was terribly afraid. This creature, whatever it was, performed no free miracles. —if you fall down on your knees and worship me. And Nick put his hands over his face because he wanted all the things the black manshape had shown him from this high desert place: cities, women, treasure, power. But most of all he wanted to hear the entrancing sound his fingernails made on his shirt, the tick of a clock in an empty house after midnight, and the secret sound of rain. But the word he said was No and then that freezing cold was on him again and he had been pushed, he was falling end over end, screaming soundlessly as he tumbled through these cloudy depths, tumbled into the smell of —corn? Yes, corn. This was the other dream, they blended together like this, with hardly a seam to show the difference. He was in the corn, the green corn, and the smell was summer earth and cow manure and growing things. He got to his feet and began to walk up the row he had found himself in, stopping momentarily as he realized he could hear the soft whicker of the wind flowing between the July corn's green, swordlike blades... and something else. Music? Yes—some sort of music. And in the dream he thought, "So that's what they mean." It was coming from straight ahead and he walked toward it, wanting to see if this particular succession of pretty sounds came from what was called "piano" or "horn" or "cello" or what. The hot smell of summer in his nostrils, the overarching blue sky above, that lovely sound. In this dream, Nick had never been happier. And as he neared the source, a voice joined the music, an old voice like dark leather, slurring the words a little as if the song was a stew, often reheated, that never lost its old savor. Mesmerized, Nick walked toward it.

175 And he walks with me and he talks with me Tells me I am his own And the joy we share as we tarry there None other... has ever... known."

As the verse ended, Nick pushed through to the head of the row and there in the clearing was a shack, not much more than a shanty, with a rusty trash barrel to the left and an old tire swing to the right. It hung from an apple tree that was gnarled but still green with lovely life. A porch slanted out from the house, a splintery old thing held up with old, oil-clotted jacklifters. The windows were open, and the kind summer breeze blew ragged white curtains in and out of them. From the roof a peaked chimney of galvanized tin, dented and smoky, jutted at its own old, odd angle. This house sat in its clearing and the corn stretched away in all four directions as far as the eye could see; it was broken only on the north by a dirt road that dwindled away to a point on the flat horizon. It was always then that Nick knew where he was: Polk County, Nebraska, west of Omaha and a little north of Osceola. Far up that dirt road was US 30 and Columbus sitting on the north bank of the Platte. Sitting on the porch is the oldest woman in America, a black woman with fluffy white thin hair- she is thin herself, wearing a housedress and specs. She looks thin enough for the high afternoon wind to just blow her away, tumble her into the high blue sky and carry her perhaps all the way to Julesburg, Colorado. And the instrument she is playing (perhaps that's what is holding her down, keeping her on the earth) is a "guitar," and Nick thinks in the dream: That's what a "guitar" sounds like. Nice. He feels he could just stand where he is for the rest of the day, watching the old black woman sitting on her porch held up by jacklifters in the middle of all this Nebraska corn, stand here west of Omaha and a little north of Osceola in the county of Polk, listening. Her face is seamed with a million wrinkles like the map of a state where the geography hasn't settled downrivers and canyons along her brown leather cheeks, ridges below the knob of her chin, the sinuous raised drumlin of bone at the base of her forehead, the caves of her eyes. She has begun to sing again, accompanying herself on the old guitar.

Say, boy, who nailed you to that spot? She puts the guitar across her lap like a baby and gestures him forward. Nick comes. He says he just wanted to listen to her sing, the singing was beautiful. Well, singing's God's foolishness, I do it most the day now... how you making out with that black man? He scares me. I'm afraid Boy, you got to be afraid. Even a tree at dusk, if you see it the right way, you got to be afraid. We're all mortal, praise God. But how do I tell him no? How do I How do you breathe? How do you dream? No one knows. But you come see me. Anytime. Mother Abagail is what they call me. I'm the oldest woman in these parts, I guess, and I still make m'own biscuit. You come see me anytime, boy, and bring your friends. But how do I get out of this? God bless you, boy, no one ever does. You just look up to the best and come see Mother Abagail anytime you take a mind to. I be right here, I guess; don't move around much anymore. So you come see me. I be right

—here, right here— He came awake bit by bit until Nebraska was gone, and the smell of the corn, and Mother Abagail's seamed, dark face. The real world filtered in, not so much replacing that dream world as overlaying it until it was out of sight. He was in Shoyo, Arkansas, his name was Nick Andros, he had never spoken nor heard the sound of a "guitar"... but he was still alive. He sat up on the cot, swung his legs over, and looked at the scrape. The swelling had gone down some. The ache was only a throb. I'm healing, he thought with great relief. I think I'm going to be okay. He got up from the cot and limped over to the window in his shorts. The leg was stiff, but it was the kind of stiffness you know will work out with a little exercise. He looked out at the silent town,

176 not Shoyo anymore but the corpse of Shoyo, and knew he would have to leave today. He wouldn't be able to get far, but he would make a start. Where to go? Well, he supposed he knew that. Dreams were just dreams, but for a start he supposed he could go northwest. Toward Nebraska.

Nick pedaled out of town at about quarter past one on the afternoon of July 3. He packed a knapsack in the morning, putting in some more of the penicillin pills in case he needed them, and some canned goods. He went heavy on the Campbell's tomato soup and the Chef Boyardee ravioli, two of his favorites. He put in several boxes of bullets for the pistol and took a canteen. He walked up the street, looking in garages until he found what he wanted: a ten-speed bike that was just about right for his height. He pedaled carefully down Main Street, in a low gear, his hurt leg slowly warming to the work. He was moving west and his shadow followed him, riding its own black bike. He went past the gracious, cool-looking houses on the outskirts of town, standing in the shade with their curtains drawn for all time. He camped that night in a farmhouse ten miles west of Shoyo. By nightfall on July 4 he was nearly to Oklahoma. That evening before he went to sleep he stood in another farmyard, his face turned up to the sky, watching a meteor shower scratch the night with cold white fire. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. Whatever lay ahead, he was glad to be alive.