Mr. Shivers

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Connelly looked at him and followed the others away.

  That night Connelly could not sleep. Each time he shut his eyes he would see the shape of Ernie’s shrouded body lying not far away from him, spots of red and brown seeping through and soaking into the patchwork of the sheet. Sometimes beyond it another person was sitting on the ground, leaning madly and painted red, arms clutched at their sides.

  Finally Connelly gave in and sat up. He looked at the others lying around him, their chests gently rising and falling in sleep. Then he saw one figure standing far away, a small fire held in its fingers. It looked at him and held a finger to its lips and he blinked and realized it was Pike.

  Connelly stood as quietly as he could and walked over to the old man. He was standing far out in the brush, watching the sleeping party, a glowing ember from the fire in his hand. He blew on it until it turned into a hellish spark and then he held it to the end of a damp cigarette and took a drag.

  “Can’t sleep?” Pike asked.

  “No.”

  “Hm. I can’t either.” He sighed. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s damp tobacco,” he said out of the side of his mouth. Each time he puffed his gray-black teeth would flash between his lips before being lost behind a fog of foul smoke.

  “How’d it get wet?” asked Connelly.

  “Roonie stored it next to his canteen. The man’s an idiot.”

  “He’s a bit off, yeah.”

  “He’s an idiot,” Pike said again. When he was satisfied with his dogend he lowered the ember and studied their party again. “Tell me, Mr. Connelly. What do you think of these new additions?”

  “Think of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think they’re all right.”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, they been roughed up a fair amount last few days. So have we, though. But then we never had anyone die on us.”

  “No,” said Pike. “I suppose that’s the true test of man, isn’t it. If his beliefs quake in the face of death. If they do, does he really believe in them?”

  “We’ve all seen killing,” said Connelly. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Yes. But there’s a difference between seeing killing and taking part in it.” He shook his head, eyes not moving, face still faintly lit by the glow in his hand.

  “You don’t like them,” said Connelly.

  “I don’t trust them.”

  “Why not?”

  Pike turned the ember over in his hands thoughtfully, his skin never touching the glowing point. “Men,” he said, disgusted. “They are such weak things. Do you know when I first saw death? Do you?”

  “No.”

  “When I was nine. I saw my brother, kicked by a mule. He was two years older than me. Fooling about in the pen. My mother insisted on an open casket, saying we had to see his face. He had little of it left, though. I remember that.” Pike turned to look at Connelly. “Do you know why he died?”

  Connelly shrugged.

  “Because he was weak,” said Pike. “Because he was a fool. I know what you think now, though. I do. You think, surely the boy was twelve, and so cannot be blamed for his death? But I was twelve once as well. And I lived. What difference is there between me and him? Either a degree of stupidity, or perhaps those that live on are touched with the blessing of God. I think it may be both. We are all His soldiers, you see. I believe He can save us at any time. If we falter and fall it is of our own doing, none other’s.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.” Pike shook his head again. “Mankind. Mankind is feeble. It is given to lust and hunger and greed. To cowardice. I have seen it in my years of traveling among them. Even when I preached to my flock, I hated them also. For they would weep or tremble, or most often simply forget my preachings mere moments later. Sometimes I sought them out, to see if they had listened. And I found them, then. In their moments of weakness. In their desires of flesh. Soft and senseless. When I found these things I did not let them forget me. No sir. No, I did not.”

  He spat on the ground. “I know now that my years of preaching were wasted on them. They were not worthy of the wisdom I had to give. But with the arrival of these new people… I worry. I worry that I have forgotten how weak men can be. That they may falter when we need them most. I say this to you, Mr. Connelly, because I know we are somewhat alike. You are strong. And I do not mean you are strong in arm, though I can clearly see you are. But in spirit. You are stronger than this new band. Stronger, perhaps, than Hammond or Roosevelt. Maybe stronger than me.”

  “I don’t know that,” said Connelly.

  “No. But I worry for you. We are doing the Lord’s work here. I know this. You and I are great tools in His plan. Do not weaken. We must stay forever sharp. Forever hard. Remember.” Then Pike dropped the ember and crushed it into the dirt with the toe of his shoe. It smoked and sputtered and there was the scent of burning leather. Then he strode back to the fire and lay down.

  Connelly watched him for a while longer. Within moments the old man was asleep and slumbering gently. Connelly waited and then returned to his bedding, but sleep still did not come.

  They spent the next days in the hobo jungle outside the freightyard, waiting. They were joined by migrants from all over the country, men young and old, desperate and excited. Some were mere children, others young families. Some clung to the idea of travel as their only salvation. The young ones smiled through their hunger and dreamed only of biting the horizon, of the great iron machines eating up earth beneath their wheels, and of freedom.

  Some in the camp said this was a tough yard, and Connelly listened. The line he and the rest were going to flip was rumored to be hot, hard bulls with no tolerance for hobos. They spoke of men dragged off and beaten in the woods, whispered of being pushed beneath the cars and being bitten in half by the wheels. Others dismissed it as rumor. All agreed they would rob you, though. It was common for the bulls to herd men off and line them up and take every penny they had. Everyone who was a passenger on the line paid, the bulls would say. Sometimes they paid regular fare. Sometimes they paid more.

  “I remember one time when a railroad man dragged us all off the train,” said one old man. “Had a gun and a stick. Told us the fare to ride was half of whatever we had on us. Me, I didn’t care, I barely had a buck, but this one poor bastard had been working day in and day out and had near to fifty. Damn railroad man was lucky that day. Took the money smiling, told us to clear out or he’d toss us in the clink. Laughed as we ran away. I wanted to kill him. Still do.”

  “One time there was too many,” said a grinning man. “We was all over the train like crows on a telegraph line. The conductor took one look at us and sighed and waved the train on ahead. We cheered him as we sped by and I think he got a kick out of it.”

  Still, you gambled each time you stepped on the rail, they all knew. It was dangerous enough without railroad men kicking you off. The churning machinery would be happy enough to eat an arm or a leg or all of you, should you foul up your mount. Greasing the rails, they called it.

  Connelly had been lucky and knew it. He had sewn a few dollars into the cuffs of his pants in case he ever needed to bribe his way out, but he had never been hurt and had been caught only once, when he was hiding in a car carrying piping. He had managed to stuff himself inside one and ride in something like peace, arms and legs crushed into the tube. Then everything had lit up and a man had been crouching at the front of the pipe, flashlight in hand. He had looked at Connelly for a great while, face invisible behind the light, and Connelly had frozen in fear. Then the light had clicked off and in the dark Connelly could make out a sad and sympathetic eye at the end of the tunnel. The man had thoughtfully tapped the flashlight against his leg, then stood and walked away. When the train had slowed, Connelly had crawled out and jumped off and had not looked back.

  He never knew why the man had spared him, or even who he was. He told this story to Roosevelt.

>   “He was soft, that’s what he was,” said Roosevelt. “Men like that are few and far between, and getting fewer. You want to see something?”

  “Sure.”

  Roosevelt led him out to the woods where the track was clear. A solid line of trees had been chopped down and uprooted, carving a path thirty yards across or so. It was clean and even like a man-made hallway and the rails slid through them like a ship through a canal.

  “We’re not going to hop one, are we?” asked Connelly.

  Roosevelt laughed. “What are you, nuts? I just want you to come here and see.” He knelt by the tracks and reached out and touched them. Parts of them were rusty red and other parts shone bright from where the train wheels had rubbed them clean.

  “See this?” he asked.

  Connelly nodded.

  “You sure? I mean, you ever really looked?”

  He shrugged.

  “These here are the bones of this country. Know how many folks died doing this?”

  “No.”

  “More than a hundred thousand. Maybe two hundred thousand. From when the first spike punctured the dirt to now, men died for this. To lay the bones of this country. Men are still dying. Right now. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “They are. In the freightyards someone’s had an accident. Someone’s getting dragged, something’s not loading right. A hobo like us is messing up his mount and getting chewed up like a doll in a cat’s mouth. Greasing the rails. But, see, you got to sacrifice something. This is the first time in the history of anything that you been able to go from one ocean to another. One big… big architecture,” finished Roosevelt. “And we’re just a part, if that. You know, I had a bunch of different preacher-folk yell at me when I was a kid but I never had much of a head for religion or gods. But if it came right to it, why, I’d say train’d be something like a god. It’s a god to plenty of us. Brings work, brings travel. Brings the future and it brings our loved ones. And it brings death. A lot of it, too. Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe you got to feed it. Feed it a little more than coal.”

  Roosevelt stood up and brushed his hands off. His eyes followed the track, carving its wide alley through the woods. “That’s how you know you believe something,” he said. “If you wound up dying for it and thought, well, that’s okay.”

  A thought wormed its way into Connelly’s head. He tried to understand what it was asking but at first he didn’t have the means. He hammered it out as best he could and said, “Roosevelt?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you kill for the trains?”

  “What?”

  “Let’s say if a certain someone didn’t die then one whole line would wind up breaking down or never getting built. So you had to be the guy to do him in. Would you do that?”

  Roosevelt sucked his lip into his mouth and leaned on one foot. His brows drew close together and then he licked his teeth and blew a streamer of snot from one nostril. “Goddamn, that’s a crazy question,” he said. “It’s getting dark. Let’s head back to the others.”

  Roosevelt led the way, following the path of the rails, but he did not look at them again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On the night before their train left they resolved to get as much rest as they could. As sunset faded into evening the temperature began to drop. Fires were started here and there, people walking from campsite to campsite carrying envoys of burning brush. The air filled with the acidic haze of woodsmoke and people clapped rags and blankets around their shoulders until they resembled wandering mounds of offal, passing one another in the smoky night.

  Connelly left Pike and the others and ventured out until the air was clear. He turned and looked back and saw the valley’s face dotted with dancing sparks, a small sea of lonely light clutching the curve of the land. He listened to the coughs and the shouts, watched vague shadows toil around the shacks. It was a city of refugees, but refuge from what? He could think of no answer except the world itself.

  He took his canteen from his pocket and sipped it to cool his burning throat. As he did a voice below croaked, “What you drinking?”

  He started and looked around for the speaker. A man was lying on the ground not more than ten feet from him, hands behind his head.

  “Just water,” said Connelly.

  The man scoffed. “Ain’t worth it. I can’t sleep a wink in a Hoover if I don’t have some liquor in my guts. I need to marinade my head for a whiles before I can shut my eyes. You come to get away from the smoke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cold nights does that. Nothing but green wood around.” He sat up and grinned at Connelly. His eyes were red as plums and fine blossoms of burst veins circled his nose and cheeks. Connelly saw he had lost a hand and one of his feet was mangled beyond recognition. The cripple stuck out his good hand and said, “Name’s Korsher. I’d shake with the other but I don’t know where it is.”

  Connelly shook his hand.

  “Where you headed?” the man asked.

  “New Mexico,” said Connelly.

  “Hell. Who isn’t? That or California, it seems.”

  “You going anywhere?”

  “Son, I do my best to go nowhere at all at top speed. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”

  Connelly took a step closer. “How did you…”

  “Lose my hand?”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “Got et up by a train. Broked my foot too. It was something else.”

  “I bet.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “How do you get around?” Connelly asked.

  “Slowly. But this helps,” he said, and tapped a length of ash tree he had fashioned into a crutch. “I don’t mind it so much. What’s your name?”

  “Connelly.”

  “Hm. Here. Sit you on down next to me.”

  Connelly did. Korsher absentmindedly reached into his pocket and took out a small ceramic flask, then offered it to Connelly.

  “Take you a sip of that,” he said.

  Connelly opened it and smelled it first. It reeked enough to make his eyes water. Wood alcohol, perhaps. He pretended to take a sip and coughed.

  “That’ll put a lot more kick in you than water,” said Korsher, and he laughed drunkenly. “Makes the ground a lot softer. Makes the night quieter and thinking easier.”

  “I’ll say,” Connelly said, and handed it back.

  Korsher lay back down and looked at the sky. He unstoppered his flask, sipped and sighed, breath whistling between his teeth. “Oh, well. It’s nice to get out from the Hoover. This is all right, ain’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? That all?”

  Connelly shrugged.

  “No. No, I think I’m doing just fine now,” said Korsher. “You got to say that every once in a while. I mean, sure, I’m hungry and I don’t know where the hell I am, but I mean, just look,” he said, and waved above.

  Connelly looked. The moon sat high in the sky, a luminescent and muddy yellow. Webs of stars stretched out behind it, falling in a veil to the faint line of the earth.

  “That’s free right there,” said Korsher. “I couldn’t see any such thing in the city. Too much light.”

  “Yeah.”

  They sat in silence listening to the cicadas and crickets singing somewhere in the brush. Korsher smacked his lips and said, “My daddy once said the moon was a bone.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Looks kind of like a bone, don’t it?”

  “I suppose. I don’t know what kind of bone, though.”

  “Hell, I don’t either, I’m no kind of doctor. My pa said it was the bone of whoever made this here earth. Said he chopped and beat stone all day, just working away, and when he was done he just plumb dropped dead.”

  “How’d it get out there, then?”

  “Devil,” said Korsher simply.

  “The devil?”

  “Yeah. Devil came on by, picked it up, all laughing, and gave it a toss
. Now it’s stuck out there for all to see.” He took a drink from his flask again and made a face, then drank again. “Like a kid throwing rocks at an empty house, yes sir. You believe in the devil?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I do. I certainly do. My daddy talked about him all the time. You couldn’t tangle with such a thing, not by a long shot. He said the world was littered with bones of men who’d try and get the devil. Try and sneak up on him and kill him, you know? But the devil was too smart for them. He’d act all innocent and lead them into a trap. Wind up getting them instead. Said it’d been going on since forever.”

  “Oh. That’s something.”

  “He said when God was asleep the devil come down here and rearranged things,” slurred Korsher. “Then God went on back and breathed a spirit into man and set us loose, not knowing any better. Meant to give us the world but gave us hardship instead, devil just cackling away. You believe that?”

  “I could.”

  Korsher was quiet for a while. Then he said, “You know what?”

  “No. What?”

  “I believe I may have saw him the other night.”

  “Seen who?”

  “The devil.”

  Connelly waited. Then he said, “You did?”

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I think I did.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “ ’Cause he looked just like my daddy said he would.”

  “What did your daddy say?”

  “Said he was a great, tall man in a great black cloak. So tall he could walk through a cornfield and his knuckles wouldn’t scrape a single ear. Said he had eyes like stars, and that every inch of him was scarred from where the angels whipped him raw.”

  Connelly sat forward. “What?”

  “Hm?”

  “What did you say? Just now? About the scars?”

  “Oh. I said the devil was scarred from where the angels had whupped him.”

  “Wh-what was he doing?”

  “When? Last night?”