A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Travis felt the day’s warmth seeping into him from the dry earth under his belly. Crickets chirruped in the gully all around him. He gazed at Anna and thought: Why, she reminds me of somebody.

  She reminded him of, of—

  —he closed his eyes, fumbling for the memory—

  —of his mother.

  Deep currents stirred in the prairie grass.

  The night obscures her features, he thought. It was that profile that did it: the head held high, a gesture both defiant and somehow hopeless. It made Travis think of his mother in a way he had not thought of her for years. He remembered—so vividly now he could taste it—a night like this, that first chill of autumn cutting through the air, when he was no more than six years old.

  He had been in bed, awake when he should not have been. The farmhouse was quiet. The effect however was not of peace but of foreboding, of imminent danger: because Daddy was out late, which meant Daddy was drinking, which meant he could come home any minute full of a sour and implacable hostility.

  Travis could not sleep with this turmoil of emotions in him: the relief of his father’s absence, the threat of his return. He lay in bed listening to the trees talk outside his window and attempted to recreate in his mind the plot of Treasure Island, which Mama had been reading to him that night. He had almost achieved sleep when he heard the front door slam.

  That other, quiet, sound might have been Mama’s indrawn breath in the bedroom across the hall.

  He covered his ears when the shouting began. At the first thump and stifled cry, he buried his head under the pillow.

  Mama, he thought, oh, Mama….

  And when it was over she came to him.

  She did it always. It was her way of saying It’s okay, Mama’s okay, not needing the words or the ugly admissions they might contain.

  She sat in the wooden chair by the window with the paper blinds pulled up and out of her way. “How that wind does torment that old tree,” she said, not even checking to see if he was asleep; knowing, maybe, that he was not. Her voice was choked with recent weeping, but beneath it there was still that quality Travis associated indelibly with Mama, silk and sighing, a good sound.

  Then, just when her voice had begun to comfort him back to sleep: “Oh, Trav, look!”

  He sat up, squint-eyed, and went to the window.

  She held him on the lap of her old print dress, her bony knees under him. The sky beyond the window was vast, clear, wild with stars. The limbs of the willow moved as if in semaphore.

  “See, Travis?” Mama said. “Shooting stars!”

  He thought at first they were fireflies. But they moved too quickly and too purposefully and they did not flicker. Shooting stars, he thought, sleepy now. Falling stars. Pieces out of the autumn night.

  He had fallen asleep thinking of Mama: of the starlight playing on the bruise that lay like a veined map on her cheek; thinking of how when he grew up he would protect her, would not let any harm come to her,- and thinking of those two shooting stars, how they had moved across the dark sky, east and west, as if twinned from a common source.

  He felt as if her eyes were on him now.

  Anna, Travis thought.

  He shook his head to clear it and crawled forward a yard or so.

  She was gazing directly toward the patch of prairie grass where he lay. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. The westbound freight streamed by behind her, a clangorous black banner.

  Weariness came over him again, suddenly. He felt a stirring of alarm, but it was muted.

  There’s something about her, Travis thought. Something had changed in her. He could see it in the arch of her back, in the way her fists were clenched.

  She had shaken off some of that passive helplessness. In her eyes, Travis thought, there was something he had not seen there before: an expectation, possibly a hope.

  But the weight of his body was immense. The night air seemed to press him down.

  Anna, he thought sleepily. Anna….

  Her gaze bore into him.

  He closed his eyes.

  When he woke the sun was standing over the eastern horizon. There were dust motes in the raking light and his bones ached with chill. And he was alone.

  Chapter Six

  He brushed off his shirt and pants and walked back toward town until he could hail a ride. He knew he was late for work. By the position of the sun he was at least an hour overdue. But that didn’t matter. Something important had happened the night before. It was mysterious, not altogether clear even in his own mind. He was sure, however, of one thing: that Anna Blaise did in fact need help, and that in some way she had chosen Travis to help her.

  The feel of it burned inside him.

  He hitched with a jut-boned farmer as far as the south end of town and then walked the remaining quarter mile to the ice plant. His reflection in the dusty windshield of the truck had been wild, his hair askew and blazened with hayseeds, his beard grown out in stubble, his fingernails ringed with black crescents. At the plant he clocked in, threw a little water on his face at the chipped porcelain basin out back, and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he took up his broom and began sweeping the raucous machine shed.

  She must not stay at the Buracks’, he thought. That much was clear. For whatever reason, she had been tolerating Creath’s abuses of her. But that would stop. He could not say he knew these things, but he knew that something had changed in her last night. Maybe Creath would see it, too.

  He worked steadily and alone. When the noon whistle blew he realized he didn’t have a lunch with him, that he had missed breakfast, too, and that the heat of the day was pouring down like molten glass. He wandered through the gravel lot, back of the loading dock, to the grassy bank of the Fresnel and sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, watching the brown water flow and curl. So, he thought, what about Nancy? Did he love her or didn’t he? And what did that imply in this skewed and mysterious new world he had entered?

  Love was unfathomable. He did not understand it. Nancy was a concentration of good and bad things, wild impulses and dangerous urges. He had loved her, he thought; had loved her, at least, in that reasonless moment when he slaked himself in her body. If you could call that love.

  He knew only that there was this different thing he felt with Anna Blaise, an undifferentiated longing that seemed to rise up in him like summer, heat, not passion so much as a kind of ache, as if her perfect body were that garden from which the first man had been cast out and to which all men longed to return. It was as powerful as that. “Love” was inadequate, a merely human word.

  He stood up and turned back when the whistle blew again. When he reached the plant his uncle was waiting for him.

  Creath wore an undershirt that stretched taut over the skin of his belly and he was sweating, the sweat glinting in the long hairs of his arms, his chest. His face was ruddy and there was slow anger in his eyes. He pulled a checked handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his face with it.

  “You were late,” he said.

  Travis nodded.

  “You were out,” Creath said ponderously, “all last night. Your Aunt Liza was worried sick this morning. You appreciate what you’ve done?”

  “It was a mistake,” Travis said.

  “Come on in here,” Creath said, hooking a thumb at his office, a wooden cubicle behind the machine shed. “You come in here, we’ll talk about mistakes.”

  The room inside possessed a single crude window propped open with a yellow-handled gimlet. The heat was intense enough to smell, a stink like the hot-metal stink of a misaligned gear in the refrigeration machinery. Creath had decorated the walls with calendars: bank calendars, hardware store calendars, feed store calendars, none of them current. The ice plant keys hung on a big ring hooked over a nail next to the door; under them was the truck’s ignition key. Creath sank into the wooden office-chair behind the cheap desk, easing back against its protesting springs, fixing a long stare on Travis. Travis felt a wave of dizzy cl
austrophobia sweep through him. Because he hadn’t eaten, he supposed … but he felt like he’d walked into a hot sealed box.

  “We brought you to this town,” Creath said.

  Travis nodded, squinting.

  “We paid your way. It that not correct? Answer me.”

  “Yessir.”

  “We took you in.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Fed you.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I employ you at this ice plant. Is that not right, Travis?”

  “Sir.”

  “And now? What have you done?”

  Travis closed his eyes. “Come in late.”

  “Come in late! More than that, I believe.”

  “Sir?”

  The older man sighed. “Travis, don’t bullshit me. I will not be bullshitted. We took you in, and we fed you, and I employed you … and you were out last night, correct me if I’m wrong, chasing after our other roomer.”

  Travis said nothing.

  “How do you think that makes me feel, Travis? That you would do a thing like that? Act filthy like that while you’re living under my roof?”

  Hypocrite, Travis thought. You goddamned hypocrite.

  Creath waved his hands placatingly. “Now, I understand how it must have been for you. You did not have a normal home. Your mother—”

  “My mother doesn’t come into this.”

  It was a mistake, he realized immediately. But he could not make himself be quiet. Not in this box.

  Creath performed a patient smile. “Don’t take that tone with me. I knew your mother, you little peckerwood.”

  Keep still, Travis thought desperately. He focused his eyes on a 1929 calendar, picture of a little girl, gingham dress, field of daisies. The sky in the picture was a deep and impossible Kodak blue, almost turquoise.

  “Travis?” Creath grinned broadly. “She was a whore, Travis.”

  So many daisies.

  “You understand what I’m saying? She fucked for money, Travis.”

  You could get lost in that blue.

  “She fucked strangers for money, Travis, and I know about it, and Liza knows about it, and the Baptist Women know about it, and I guess by this time just about every dumb shit in town knows about it. You hear me, Travis? She—”

  “Shut your mouth.” He couldn’t help it. His head was spinning.

  Creath stood up, and his grin widened into something truly awful, a jack-o’-lantern smirk of triumph. “No, you poor ignorant whoreson, you shut your mouth, how about that?”

  Travis raised his foot and kicked the old pine-board desk so that it racked backward across the floor.

  Creath fell forward, flailing into a stack of yellow invoices. Travis watched a moment as his uncle struggled up, cursing; then he turned, restraining a rage that ran in him like blood; he yanked open the door. His hand rested momentarily on the lower of the two keyrings, the one on which Creath carried the key to the truck.

  Well, why not? He had lost his job, had probably lost his room at the Buracks’—had lost all there was to lose in this town.

  His fist curled around the keyring.

  He left his uncle grunting in the heat.

  Nancy Wilcox knew as soon as Travis came through the door that something was terribly wrong. It was the afternoon, for one thing, that lull between lunch and dinner when the grill was allowed to cool and at least a little breath of wind stirred the tepid air of the diner. Travis should have been at work. He should not have been driving his uncle’s black Ford pickup, parked now on a crazy diagonal outside. And if that were not enough, she could tell there’d been trouble just from the look of him: his hair ratty and tangled, his eyes squeezed shut as if against some unbearable vision.

  She surprised herself by thinking, Now it begins. She had sensed in Travis even that first day in July a tremor of wild energy, pent up, volatile as a blasting cap. And maybe that was what had drawn her to him, that wildness. He was like a freight train carrying her down some dangerous track and away from her childhood. Now it begins.

  She untied her apron—her fingers trembled— and said, “Travis?”

  “Come and talk,” he said. “I need to talk to somebody.”

  She nodded and put the apron on a stool. The only customer, an unemployed bank clerk spooning mechanically at a bowl of Campbell’s soup, gazed at her in mute incomprehension.

  “Back by dinner, Mr. O’Neill!” she called out, and moved to leave before O’Neill, the owner, could stir himself from the kitchen. Maybe she would lose her job. Probably she would. But that was part of it. She would shed all that: job, town, her mother, respectability. Become some new thing. The bell tinkled behind her as she eased the door closed.

  They drove down The Spur toward the railway tracks.

  “I followed her last night,” Travis said. Far out this old dirt road he pulled over. The tracks lay baking in the Indian-summer heat, oily and bright. His voice was hoarse. “Followed her up here.”

  Nancy nodded. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” He frowned and shook his head as if there were some dream there he could not dislodge. “She watched a train go by. I fell asleep. I guess that’s all that really happened. But it seemed like—” He looked pleadingly at her. “Like she talked to me. Said that something big was on the way, and she was at the center of it, and she needed my help. And in a way it was like I said yes, gave her my promise. Ah, Jesus. I don’t know how to say it—”

  “I understand.” Hadn’t she had the same feeling herself? Sensed it, perhaps, the first time she saw Anna Blaise standing huge-eyed in the doorway of the Buracks’ shuttered house? Nothing specific; nothing as intense as what Travis had experienced; but that feeling of the woman’s helplessness, unmistakably, of coiled mysteries waiting to be unsprung. “I said so all along.”

  “I lost my job at the plant. Had a fight with Creath. Likely be kicked out of the house, too.” He looked at her. “I should go to her while I still can.”

  She could not mistake the implication in that.

  “You love her?”

  “Nancy … I can’t say.”

  “You love me?”

  He gazed at the bright slash of the railway tracks cutting the horizon.

  Even this was not as painful as she might have expected. She believed in free love, yes, love given freely and perhaps as freely taken away. But it was not that: the thing was, curiously, she did understand it … understood, at least, that what had drawn Travis to Anna Blaise was not sex or love in any ordinary sense, was not something she could hope to compete with.

  She loved Travis. She had admitted that to herself weeks ago. But he was more than that: he was her freight train, she thought grimly, the vehicle of her destiny. There was little enough in him of pleasure or of happiness; she had learned that. But for better or worse she was bound to him. She had to hang on.

  “So how do we help her?”

  He looked giddy with gratitude.

  “Talk to her,” he said. “We talk to her.”

  Now, Nancy thought. Now it begins.

  He started the engine.

  “Travis!” Aunt Liza exclaimed. “Thank God you’re safe!”

  She stood in the dim light of the parlor, dusting, wearing an old housecoat, her hair pinned up. Travis regarded her with a mixture of wariness and compassion.

  “We’re going up to see Anna, Aunt Liza.” He felt Nancy clutch his hand.

  “Travis?” She frowned. “Why aren’t you at work? Are you ill?”

  “We can talk later, Aunt Liza.”

  Her expression hardened. “It’s that thing upstairs, isn’t it? That female thing.” She blinked. “You stay away from her.”

  “Later, Aunt Liza.” They moved past her and up the stairs, and Travis wondered briefly whether he might not be insane—whether he had allowed an hallucination to drive him to this extremity. He squeezed Nancy’s hand and pushed through the door to the attic room.

  He thought at first it was empty. The
single brass bed was carefully made-up, the rose-patterned bedspread folded at the foot of it. The window shades were down; the yellow light swam with dust motes. Anna, he saw then, was sitting primly in one corner, in a straight-backed cane chair, her hands folded in her lap. She looked up at Travis and then at Nancy. Her face was expressionless,- when she spoke the words were precise and clipped. “Close the door.”

  Mute, Travis obeyed.

  Anna drew in a deep breath, sighed.

  “Help me,” she said. “I need your help.” Gazing at Nancy: “Both of you.”

  Nancy stepped forward—bravely, Travis thought; though surely there was nothing here to be frightened of?

  “You’re sick,” Nancy said, “is that it?”

  “That’s one way of thinking of it. Though not exactly correct.” Anna tilted her head. “I can’t explain everything at once. I’m sorry.”

  Travis nodded. He was transfixed once more by the perfection of her. Her skin was terribly pale but seemed almost luminous—smooth as jade, alabaster-white. Even her smallest motions were fluid and deliberate. She stood in wild contrast to the barren room, the black Singer sewing machine hunched over the floorboards like an insect.

  He hated himself for the thought, but next to her Nancy was gross, plain, thickly ordinary.

  “All I need,” Anna Blaise went on, “is time. I’m not certain how much. A few weeks … a month, maybe. I need time and I need privacy. It’s not precisely an illness, but I’ll be helpless. And I’ll change. I apologize for not being more exact.” She stood up. “If I stay here I could be in danger. You understand? That’s why I need your help. The Buracks—”

  “I know,” Travis said.

  He told her about his fight with Creath, about losing his job.

  “Then we have very little time,” Anna said. “Is there somewhere I can go?”

  “The shack,” Nancy said. “The old switchman’s shack out by the railroad. Travis? We could fix it up for her. If it’s only for a couple of weeks, I mean, while the weather’s warm.”

  “It’s private?” Anna asked.

  “It’s that, yes.”

  “Then it will do. Travis, can you take me there?”