Reapers Are the Angels (27 page)

P
OINT
C
OMFORT?
Wilson says. He takes off his cap and scratches his head. I think I heard of it. An hour south of Houston, maybe. What you want to go there for?

Maury’s got relatives there.

You sure about that?

No I ain’t.

That boy is sure lucky he ran across you.

I’m just droppin him off. He can’t stay with me.

Uh-huh. He looks at her a good long time, nodding and contemplating as if there were a news ticker going across the surface of her eyes.

Well, he says finally, what you do, you ride with us to Longview, and maybe from there you can hitch a ride south. I know some people.

It would be a kindness of you, she says. My feet were gettin tired of covering ground.

That boy of yours, he like lemonade?

I guess, she shrugs. He’ll drink it, leastways. He don’t like bingberries.

Then she looks at Wilson and feels like she’s been caught somehow but she’s not sure how. He smiles and gazes through the glass at the tracks that roll on before them in parallel lines that converge in the distance.

Like I said, she clarifies, he ain’t no kin of mine.

S
HE AND
Maury ride in the third boxcar along with some refugees. They are huddled and helpless and look at her through eyes that seem to predict death. They are already gone, these women with their infants clutched to their breasts, these men nursing their open wounds and wondering what contagion is already spreading through their bloodstream, these sons and daughters of the earth whose spirits have already leaked out through the rips in their flesh and the cankers in their brains.

Temple hates them instinctively. Wilson, like an inadvertent grim ferryman, does not know that what he brings home is a boxcar full of death. And these dead are worse than the meatskins, because they lack even hunger.

She sits in the open doorway of the boxcar and watches the
world scroll by. Maury, next to her, turns the die-cast jet over and over in his hands.

Here, look, she says.

She takes it from him and shows him how to hold it from underneath and look at it from the side so that it looks like it’s flying through the air as they move.

You try it, she says. See? See it flying? It looks like it’s going fast, right? But real jet fighters go even faster. They go faster than the sound barrier.

Maury looks at the toy between his fingers, and everything about him goes quiet and peaceful.

You like that, don’t you? Old as you are, I guess you saw a lot of planes when you were a kid, huh? I guess you remember them pretty good. I seen some, but not a lot.

She looks at him, his eyes.

You look like you’re flyin away in your head, Maury. Like you’re movin speedy between the clouds. Me too. Me too.

And she turns her back on the lost and the dead and the trampled down, she leaves them to their airy graves, and she and the big man next to her look upward at heaven and find there not just gates and angels but other wonders too, like airplanes that go faster than sound and statues taller than any man and waterfalls taller than any statue and buildings taller than any waterfall and stories taller still that reach up and hook you by the britches on the cusp of the moon, where you can look and see the earth whole, and you can see how silly and precious a little marble it really is after all.

T
HE NEXT
time the train stops, she takes Maury and climbs into the next boxcar. There are fewer people there because it is less well appointed. In the last boxcar there were mattresses and bottles of water and a worn-out old couch and some chairs. This car is mostly bare. A few of Wilson’s men scale the outside of the cars to come here and sleep when their own car is too noisy. And there are some others here too, men sitting on the boards
and leaning against the walls of the car, smoking, their eyes lit up briefly by the cinder between their fingers. And another man asleep in the corner with a Stetson resting on his chest.

She takes Maury by the hand to the dark corner where she might be able to sleep some. She tells Maury to lay down, and he obeys, and she settles next to him and folds her hands under her head and waits for the rocking of the train to put her to sleep.

In her dreams, there is a man. At first she thinks it’s Uncle Jackson, because he comes and puts his arms around her and behind him is Malcolm. But the way Malcolm is looking at her, she knows something is wrong. He looks fearful, and she wants to tell him that there’s nothing to be scared of. But he points to her forearm that’s still wrapped in an embrace around Uncle Jackson’s back, and she looks and she sees that boils have surfaced all over her skin, and she thinks, That’s funny, I must be dead already and I didn’t even know it. And then she tries to apologize to Malcolm, because he is right to be afraid of her, because she realizes that she would eat him given the chance, that she would eat him all up starting with his cheeks—and that the hunger to consume, she would like to tell him if she could, is not so different from the hunger to protect and keep, or maybe it’s just her own perverse mind at work. But then Uncle Jackson’s arms get tighter around her, and she realizes that this man has a beard whose scratchy hairs are tickling her face, and that Uncle Jackson was always clean-shaven, and that the man holding her isn’t Uncle Jackson at all. And she starts to say, Wait Mose, wait Mose, but she can’t say anything because Moses Todd is squeezing all her breath away because she’s a meatskin and the only things Moses Todd hates more than Temple herself are meatskins, and so it stands to reason that he should want to squeeze the life out of her and that Malcolm should be fearful of her—it all stands to reason—

And when she opens her eyes, it’s true, there he is, Moses Todd, bending above her in the boxcar, saying, Well, look who it is!

And with an instinctual violence, she strikes out, landing a
quick punch on his jaw, then rolls out from under him and stands.

Whoa, he says.

But she’s already on top of him, grabbing him by the neck and poised with her other hand quickly unsheathing the gurkha and raising it for a kill strike.

Whoa there, he says, shrinking from her, holding up his hands in submission. Easy, darlin. It’s me. I ain’t gonna hurt you. It’s me, Lee.

Lee.

Her eyes clear in the dim light of the boxcar, and her mind clears of the phantasms of sleep, and she notices that all around her other men have risen to point guns and other weapons at her.

It’s okay, says the man who she has by the throat. He says it to everyone else in the boxcar. I just startled her is all. That’s what I get for wakin a dreamer.

Lee. Not Moses Todd at all. Lee. The hunter. Lee, the man who gave her a taste of slug flesh spiced with aromatic rosemary. The man who spoke to her of Niagara Falls. He was the man sleeping in the corner of the car with the Stetson hat.

Lee, she says aloud.

That’s right, darlin. It looks like we’ve been miracled together once more.

I’
M SORRY
I punched you, she says.

He moves his jaw back and forth, feeling it with his fingers.

I’ve had it worse, he says. But one thing’s for sure—I won’t be wakin you up from any naps anytime soon.

The train has stopped at an intersection in a small town where Wilson and his men are looking for survivors and supplies. One of Wilson’s men, a big Mexican they call Popo, strolls casually about, approaching the slugs as though he would ask them for directions but at the last minute raising the nail gun to their heads. Temple and Lee, sitting on a wood-slatted bench
under the awning of a store, watch from a distance. They can hear the hissing pop of the nail gun, and they can see the slugs stand still for a moment, as if surprised, wavering a little in the breeze, then collapsing to the ground as if they were balloon animals deflated by a sudden leak.

What happened to your friends? she asks.

Well, Horace, he got too close to a slug. Took a bite out of his arm. He wasn’t right after that. Kept waitin to die or to turn or something. He lasted it out for a while, longer than any of us expected him to.

What happened to him?

I don’t exactly know for sure. See, Clive and I woke up one morning, and he just wasn’t there anymore. All his stuff was there, but the man himself was gone. We waited for him till sunset, but he never showed up. Maybe you feel the change coming. I don’t know. Maybe death is a shameful thing. Maybe he went off to be by himself when it happened.

Lee lights a cigarette and leans back on the bench and stretches out his legs and crosses his ankles.

And Clive, well, he wanted to keep on going just the two of us. But I was gettin kinda tired of the plainsman routine, if you want to know the truth. I told him I reckoned I would light out for the west, see what kind of society I been hearin they got in California. We parted right, and we put up a marker for Horace under a pepper tree where no one’s gonna bother it. It’s nothin to nature, but it did us some good.

He flicks his ash to the sidewalk and slides the back of his hand under his nose.

How about you? he asks. He nods in the direction of Maury, who sits on the curb with a bunch of wildflowers clasped in one thick hand. Looks like you picked yourself up a travelin companion.

She tells him about Maury, about how she found him not long after she saw Lee last. About how he was carrying his granny down the road followed by a whole parade of meatskins looking for a feast. She tells how she found a slip of paper in his pocket
with his name and the address of his relations in Texas and how she’s been trying to tote him there but that every time she turns around there’s something else that delays her and gets in the way of her undertook mission.

She has seen some things, she says, but she doesn’t feel like going into detail. Suffice to say, she’s been in the mix.

Well, he says, leaning back and studying her like the poorest doctor in the world, you got some scrapes and bruises, but it looks like you got a handle on surviving.

Yeah, she says. Stayin alive ain’t the hard part. The problem is stayin right.

What do you mean by that?

What I mean is I done some things I don’t care to talk about.

Little sister, anyone alive’s got a collection of those things.

Maybe so, but it’s one thing to feel like there’s a few rotten things knocking around inside you like some beans in a can. But it’s another thing to feel like those things are what your heart and stomach and brain are built out of.