Two days later the police had two black men in custody—both named Willie Bullock. Neither, however, turned out to be the right man.
—
DOUGLAS STAYED ON WITH THE CADONS AT HARRISBURG FOR TWO weeks before they continued on together—following the river south until they reached the railway line. It being too risky to ride, they followed the track on foot. Though the going was slow, they had plenty of company, and the closer they came to the city, and fell into step alongside more and more Bonus men, the more Douglas felt certain that—just as Cecil had promised—he would soon be reunited with his father there.
But when they arrived in mid-November, there was no sign of either Chet or his father. Together, Cecil and Douglas traveled the length of the city, inquiring at every Bonus camp they found—but no one ever had any news to share. And as the days passed and still they came no closer to learning anything of his father at all, Douglas began to find his mind occupied less and less with thoughts of finding him. Instead— more often that not; for a reason he could not entirely explain—it was toward Sutton his thoughts began to turn. Wasn’t he (he thought), after all, just as likely to run into her on those streets as he was his father—or anyone else? The more he thought of it, the more likely it seemed, and the more likely it seemed, the more he thought of it. The more he remembered (and so acutely that, when the memory came—always as though from nowhere—he had to stop in his tracks, nearly, in order to catch his breath) the way she had spoken to him that first afternoon they’d walked together to the edge of the camp. Her voice soft—almost shy.
Do you miss it very much?
Something about the way she had said it; the way she had looked at him then.
But it was foolish to think of such things. And anyway (he reminded himself) it was Alden, not Sutton, who might be of some help to him now. Alden—who had been there. Who knew for a fact that his father was (except for a single, wayward blow) an innocent man; that somewhere along the line a terrible mistake had been made—which, once perceived, might easily be corrected.
This was, at any rate, what he believed most of the time. Other times—a creeping doubt entered his mind. What if the Indian had finally been caught? If his father’s association with him had been discovered? What if his own bag, found that night at the scene of the crime—his father’s name stitched in red letters on its side—had been used as evidence against him? He shuddered with shame at the thought of it. But why, then—he considered—if this was the case, would he himself, or Chet, or any of the others not also be detained? And how could a man be held for long, or indeed any time at all, for a crime he had merely witnessed—in which he himself had no part? (This, though, would always send his thoughts directly to the boots on his feet—the mystery of their acquisition ablaze, suddenly, like a hot flame inside him. What if the barman back in Kansas City—? If Jim—?)
But no. He stopped himself. This couldn’t all—he reasoned—be about a single pair of boots. Inevitably, then, the thought would briefly flash into his mind: so, what if his father really was a Red—as the cousins had suggested? But no. It was impossible. He did his best to push the thought—and any other—from his mind. His father was innocent. A thing to which Alden—like himself, and anyone who knew him—could easily attest.
But he found as little trace of Alden as he found of Sutton or of his father on the streets of Washington that fall. And when, in early December, he and Cecil approached the courthouse, having at last exhausted every corner of the city—along with the memories of all the veterans, shopkeepers, layabouts, and even schoolchildren who crossed their path—they had even less luck there. No record existed—Douglas was told—of his father or himself having ever been detained there at all.
After that, they stopped looking. But still … All through the rest of that fall, and into the winter, Douglas continued to expect his father, and (until they left Washington; he couldn’t help it) Sutton, to arrive. It could be at any moment, he told himself, over and over again. He—or she— might, suddenly, just … be there. Arriving, unannounced; in the same way that all things, and every moment (even as they are anticipated) always come.
—
DECEMBER PASSED SLOWLY, AND MORE OR LESS WITHOUT EVENT. JUST after Christmas—his every effort having met with overwhelming defeat—Waters shifted his attention to the spring. Then he moved his troops north, near Albany; Douglas and the Cadons followed.
The Bonus Army could only grow! he promised them. After a winter of training, it would rival any of the world’s armies in size and skill— and when it came to sheer determination, it would surpass them all! There would be no way, come spring, for Congress to refuse them: by June 1933, Waters vowed, the Bonus Army would march again down Pennsylvania Avenue, one million strong.
BUT DESPITE THESE PROMISES, a cold apathy crept into the Albany camp. Even Cecil became quiet as the winter wore on. He no longer hooted like an owl, interrupting the fights of other men to start one of his own. He grew thin. First just like the rest of them—like a man who has had too little to eat for too long—but then it was different from that. By February, when it came time to divide what little they had managed to procure for a meal at the end of the day, he politely refused his portion. More for you men, he’d say. Then, when they continued to look at him, their food suddenly unswallowable in their throats: I’ll come round.
But he did not, and, in the middle of February, he died—sitting upright against a tree at the edge of the camp. It was Curly who found him. He stood out at the edge of the lot one day and howled like a dog— from pure instinct, everyone supposed. Because, like a dog, he failed to understand the great distance that had been introduced between himself and the dead man, and kept tugging at Cecil by the hand as if he could wake him. But one thing he did know as well as everyone else: something was terribly wrong that could not be set right. Poor Curly could not be comforted and continued to moan all night long, and it helped the rest some to have their sorrow spoken out loud like that, in the wild and impenitent tongue of a half-wit. It made it easier to say nothing themselves, and they buried Cecil like that, almost silently, and never said among them any but the most necessary words.
—
BY THE BEGINNING OF MAY, EVERY NEWS REPORT IN THE COUNTRY was already announcing that (just as Waters had promised them) ten thousand veterans were, once again, on their way to Washington. Maybe more.
Even when this did not prove true—when it became clear that the Bonus Army had in fact, over the winter, dramatically dwindled in size; that they did not, nor would not now, stand ten thousand, let alone one million strong, the newspapers, Waters, and even the government itself continued—out of either fear or desire—to say that they would.
In a way, then, it continued to be true. In the way that any promise is true. There were always more troops coming—hovering just beyond, and therefore blurring the edges of what was, within each moment, certain and known. So that, in Douglas’s mind, ever afterward—even when the Bonus Bill had been passed for many years and every dime of it spent and forgotten, and all of it had been turned under the wheels of time so finally as to seem as though it had never occurred at all—the Bonus Army was still approaching. Barely visible—an indistinct glow on the horizon: that point at which (as just beyond the last known curve in the road) everything drops away, finally, into darkness; becomes the limit of all things knowable and known.
It was from this direction that Douglas’s father, all that winter, also arrived. Transformed: a winged thing in Douglas’s heart. Indeed, over the course of that winter, for Douglas and the rest, the entire Bonus Army was transformed in this way, to become something more than it was. Hardly—or, at any rate, purely—real anymore, it took root in the most fragile and remote corners of their minds. After a while, it hardly seemed to have to do with them anymore at all. It was as though (thought Douglas, as he climbed aboard a Washington-bound train one early May morning with—except for Cecil—the rest of the Cadons; as the train lurched and continue
d unconsciously along its known route, ignorant of the weight he and the rest of the men—their expectations, both personal and shared—added to its load) he had dreamed it all up. That he had dreamed the promise itself: the emptiness upon which it was based—and upon which, consequently, they rode. Yes, everything was still to come, he thought. There was nothing certain at all, and the future—at that moment—was just as distant as it had been or would be at any other. He felt that quite certainly, as he climbed aboard. Felt—as the air began to stir against the conflicting forward motion of the train and then to howl through the open door—how the promise—the desire at its root, which was desperate and primordial; as instinctive as a fish or a bird, which steers itself by some internal compass ever northward in the spring, or southward in the fall—and the emptiness were one; how they could not be separated, and that their union was in fact the only union. The very substance—or lack thereof—upon which all dreams, waking or not, are founded, and therefore the single source of all things certain and uncertain in this world: past, present, and yet to come.
—
THERE WERE ALREADY NINE MEN IN THE CAR BY THE TIME THE FOUR of them—Mick, Smoke, Douglas, and Curly—clambered aboard. That made, as one old man pointed out to them then, the unlucky number, thirteen. He had one blind eye, the lid swollen shut, and his good eye blinked and blazed as they came on board. It almost seemed to glow in the dark as he counted them. Then it flashed: One of you all’s got to go.
Aw, said another man. He had his hat pulled down low, to cover his eyes. There’s fourteen, he said. You just can’t see the one hid behind your busted eye.
This made some of the men laugh. Then another man cut in, saying how it was he knew for a fact that the number thirteen was lucky to some, and that luck and most things like it were all in the way that you looked at the thing. This was discussed for some time until the blind man, his one eye still blazing, raised himself to his feet and began to shout.
This train is going to start moving, he said, and if one or more of you is not off it I am going to have to throw you off myself.
Finally, a man who looked too old to have fought in France—perhaps he was a veteran of the Civil War, or of the War of Independence, or of the Indian Wars; perhaps he was a thousand years old, and had seen every battle the country had ever fought from the time the first man encountered its shores, and stood dumbstruck and wondering— mumbled, Well, hell, that’s all right, I can understand how you feel, and exited the train.
That made everyone shut up fast, and no one said anything for a while. Douglas didn’t know for sure, but he thought it likely that every one of them, including the blind man, was thinking the same thing he was then. Wishing suddenly, like he was, that it had been him to say, Well, hell, and find another car to board somewhere, and all the way up the line he kept a lookout for the man who had given up his place; who had reminded him, he realized (too late, only after he was gone) of his father—if his father had grown, in less than a single year, into an old man. And also of Cecil. At least the way Cecil had looked in that last month when all of a sudden the flesh fell off his bones and he was hardly recognizable anymore. He got scared thinking about that. About the way that the old man had looked like his father in some ways and like Cecil in others: about how he had recognized him right away, but only realized it too late. So that it was certain (so surely had he recognized him when at last he did) that the images in your mind don’t just disappear, but stay with you, always—no matter how much it seems that you come to forget. Also, it got him thinking about the way his father would have changed in all the time that had passed since he had last seen him, which seemed now like such a long time. Not quite so much as he might, briefly, have imagined—but changed nonetheless. Just as he, Douglas, had also changed—because he felt very certain he had.
It worried him to think of it; of how, should he ever see his father again, there would be some things recognizable about him, and some things that would not be—but that he would never be so unrecognizable to Douglas, nor he—Douglas—so unrecognizable to his father, that they’d fail to know each other. He would never be able to simply turn away, even if that was what he wanted. No, he would never be able to pretend he didn’t see his father, if his father appeared; to pretend there was another man he was looking for instead—a man who hadn’t changed at all. No, his father would be recognizable to him in an instant—but that instant, as with the old man on the train, might come too late. He might just as easily be the thirteenth man on some train car some night as any other man—which Douglas might realize only after he was gone. He might allow him to disembark. Might not cry out after him, or offer to accompany him into the night, or say, You’re all right in here, let me be the thirteenth man, and substitute himself, until it was too late. It seemed (Douglas thought then, sadly, to himself) that time moved at such a pace—always at odds with the mind—that you might never come to recognize anything for what it was, or at least not at the precise moment in time when it was, indeed, that thing.
—
ROOSEVELT WAS NOT A BONUS MAN, AND NEVER HAD BEEN. DESPITE this, Waters was confident the bill would pass that spring. And, indeed, things looked very good for the army at first. Arriving veterans were directed to camps set up just outside the city, where—at the government’s expense—they were provided with a roof over their heads, an army-issue cot, and three square meals a day.
Even those who, from the start, opposed the “safe distance” the camps proposed between themselves and the Hill did not complain as they drifted to sleep in their beds at night, or lined up for a meal. Douglas regretted the distance for a different reason. It was hardly likely, he reasoned—so far away from the city—that his path might cross with Sutton’s now. But it wasn’t otherwise all that bad a deal. And besides, as many of the men happily maintained, if the President was willing to feed and house the army, he would surely be willing, sooner or later, to give in to their other demands. A scattered few, however, believed that just the opposite was true. The onetime bandit—Arizona—whom Douglas met around that time was one of those.
You never get anything free, the bandit would say, and he should’ve known. He was wanted in three states—and it wasn’t (he told them) for standing in line. If the BEF veterans were willing to stand in line now, they all might just as well give up and go home, he said. He himself might just as well go back to Arizona (which was the closest thing to home he had, and how he got his name) and get himself hanged. But still, as he said all this, he didn’t get out of line, and neither did the rest of them, and very slowly it inched forward, and the closer he got, the more Douglas could feel the emptiness in his belly. It got hotter and hotter, until he thought he was going to burn up from the inside, and when he got to the front and held out his cup and it got filled up, he thought he might bust before he got a chance to sit down and eat, and it wasn’t until he had taken a bite or two that he remembered enough to be embarrassed at how hungrily he ate. He slowed down a bit then, or tried to; tried to pretend that each bite was going to be the last, but it didn’t change the fact—whether he ate fast or slow—that after only a few bites more all the food was gone, and the bandit—he seemed to read his mind—said, We’ve been fooled again. You can see that now, can’t ye?
But later that same day they were visited by the President’s wife, who led them in singing “There’s a Long, Long, Trail a-Winding,” and sure enough nearly all of them, the bandit included, sang along. It made the bandit sick to think of it later—to recall how all those men had waggled their heads and said, Why, yes, ma’am, when the President’s wife had asked if they were all just as happy as could be—and Douglas always wondered if that was because the bandit had waggled his head right along with them: Douglas had seen it with his own eyes. If it was because he suspected that, on account of it, he really wasn’t any different from the rest.
Much later, just to irritate him, Douglas would whistle that same tune under his breath, and it would without fail cause the ban
dit to curse and that for some reason always gave Douglas some satisfaction. And there never was any consequence to it, his riling the bandit like that, because a moment later, as it always was with the bandit, the whole thing would be forgotten. You see, the bandit, he would fire off at the least provocation, but the next moment it was like nothing had ever even happened at all. One time, when Douglas mentioned this, the bandit got to thinking seriously on it and told Douglas that he hadn’t always been like that but he figured that he had been at least since Verdun. That after that, whenever his blood rose to a certain temperature, it stopped up the circuits of his brain and there’d be a short fuse and he’d go a bit blank, and that was why he did try his best to keep calm, and, the way he said it, it was obvious he thought he had made a success of it. And why not? He couldn’t ever recollect any different, and Douglas didn’t tell him.
—
IT WAS NOT JUST FOOD THAT WAS ON OFFER THAT SPRING—THERE were jobs, too. At first they went just to the young, unmarried men, but after a while these restrictions were waived and anyone could apply. And plenty did—despite the unflattering rumors that began to circulate soon enough about the conditions in the field.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 23
