A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

Prelude: Bone in California

Bone was the only one awake on the flatcar as the train labored out of the mountains and into the fog-choked valley, and it was Bone who saw the railroad cop.

He was only dimly aware of the danger. It was deep night, morning not far off, late in spring. The air was bitingly cold and damp. Bone was lucky; he had stolen a thick Navy pea coat the week before. He wore it now, pulled tight in one hand because he could not button it across his wide and bony rib cage. He had a hat, too; a thick woolen watch cap pulled down over his stubble hair so that it warmed his ears. Bone was lucky. But in that shivering predawn hour he was aware only of his acute discomfort, the convulsions that seemed to travel seismically from his feet up to the crown of his head. It was more than the cold; cold had never bothered him much; it was something else—a sickness.

He did not think about it in any detail. Thinking was difficult and unrewarding for him. Bone was notorious in the hobo jungles because he spoke so seldom, and because of his oversized joints and fleshless body. Even his name was not his own. It had been given to him on a similar train a long but (in Bone’s mind) indefinite time ago. Most of the hoboes who rode the boxcars were emaciated. But Bone had gone beyond that: his huge ribs seemed to be fighting their way out of his parchment flesh; his elbows were sharp as flint axes; and when he bent you could watch the articulation of his knees, the patella sliding like some oiled mechanism in a hay baler or a forklift. They called him Bone, and he gave Bone as his name when he was asked.

Fatigue lay on him now like a drug, though he could not sleep. Fatigue and this new shuddering weakness. Electricity seemed to crawl over the surface of his skin. It reminded him of the time he had accepted from another tramp the offer of a swallow of muscatel. The liquor had burned like fire, and a little while later he had spasmed it all up again. Since then he had been careful to take only water.

The train slowed. He guessed they were approaching a railway yard, but a ground fog had risen up from the farm fields all around and had hidden the stars and the horizon. He sat up straighter at the thought of a railyard: in Bone’s mind a railyard was a bright nexus of danger. It was then, abruptly, that he saw the cop, the beam of his flashlight flicking out of the mist to touch on Bone and the other figures asleep on the flatcar, the man’s blue scissorbill cap cocked toward them avidly. The cop yelled something, but the train was still moving pretty fast^ Bone was alarmed but figured there would be time to get away.

He woke up the other men one by one. In the difficult journey through the mountains he had learned some of their names. Benny and Joe, Deacon and Archibald, Campbell and Crawford. Some were singles, some moved in pairs or in temporary alliances of threes. They were uniformly dirty and they wore sack pants and rope belts just like Bone did. Bone woke the other hoboes by jostling them with his big knobby hands. Some, waking and seeing his angular Halloween face above them, involuntarily flinched away_; but when he told them about the scissorbill they sat up frowning, furtively crouched.

Deacon Kenny and Bill Archibald came and squatted next to him. These two were a pair, and Deacon, a middle-aged man who said he was a meat-packer from Chicago, was the leader. Deacon was short and dense and tattooed and had an immense collection of snipes, unsmoked cigarette butts, which he hoarded and rationed as if they were a private treasure. Archibald, his buddy, was a lanky man who spoke in laconic, brief Southern drawls and carried Deacon’s frying pan for him and would hold up a fragment of mirror so that Deacon could shave his face with a sliver of broken glass each morning. Deacon was an obsessive shaver; Archibald had a wispy tramp’s beard that he would not cut off, though Deacon tugged on it and ragged him for it.

Bone had never shaved but didn’t have a beard: he guessed it wasn’t in him to grow one.

“Train’ll go on through,” Deacon said, nodding to himself. “The cop can’t get on and we can’t get off. It’s safe.”

“Is it?” Archie said. “Look there.”

Bone stared where Archie was pointing. It was the cop’s flashlight bobbing up and down, the cop chasing after them, still yelling, and now the train was slowing, too, was grinding to a stop. Deacon said, “Oh, shit.”

At the sound of the brakes all the tramps leaped off the flatcar at once. It made Bone think of a man burning lice off his clothes with a lit cigarette, the way they jumped. Then Bone jumped, too. He landed crouched in the cindery gravel beside the track. The scissorbill was very close and he was shouting, and now—Bone could see them emerging from the fog— the yard bulls were running to join him. Suety, hostile men in dingy gray overalls.

“Bone!” Deacon was yelling. “This way! Bone! Run, dammit!”

The tramps were all scattering down the grade of the railway, through a scummy slough of water and into the foggy lettuce fields and the night. Bone moved to follow. But the seizure came then and he was down on the cold ground shaking. It was like a shiver that consumed his whole body. His awareness narrowed down to something like a speck, a black dot in a red emptiness. He was only distantly conscious when the railway cop pulled him up by the armpits, when the yard bulls—after a moment of disgusted commentary on his misshapen body—began to punch and kick him.

The blows came down like hard rain. Bone stared incuriously at his assailants. He had distanced himself from the pain. Cheated of a reaction, they hit and kicked him harder. Then—made queasy, perhaps, by the excesses he had inspired in them— they drifted away one by one_; and the scissorbill, his cap askew now, muttered something Bone did not understand and pushed him with his foot down the stony grade and into the cold and stagnant water.

Bone lay in water up to his waist, his head cradled among the cinders and small stones, the steam of his breath rising up into the sky.

He listened for a while to the metallic shrieks as the railcars were coupled and uncoupled in the morning darkness.

He blinked his eyes and closed them, and time ceased.

He might have died. A dozen times before, a dozen different places, he had come as close. But then, as now, some kernel of intent had hardened within him. Waking, he felt it like a song inside him. It was diffuse and not specific; he could not tack it down with words. But he knew what it meant. It meant he would survive, would heal himself, would move on. He had been moving on, it seemed to him, all his life.

There were fingers, softly, at his neck, his chest, his feet.

He opened his eyes.

Gritty sunlight seared him. His body ached. He focused on the faces of Deacon and Archie above him. Deacon was stroking the stiff lapel of Bone’s good blue pea coat.

Deacon grinned. “Bone is awake. See, Archie? Bone’s gonna be okay.”

Bone sat up.

Archie, who was angular and tall, said: “We would have taken the coat if you were dead, you know. And these shoes. We thought you might be dead.”

“But he’s not dead,” Deacon said peevishly, his voice a throaty flat midwestern rasp. “Bone’s not dead, are you, Bone? Bone, listen, there is a little jungle up the tracks. You want to come—Bone? Can you walk? Walk with old Deacon and Archie?”

Bone knew they had been trying to steal his clothes and that this was Deacon’s way of apologizing for it. He felt no animosity toward them, but he wasn’t sure he could stand up. The yard bulls had kicked him pretty hard. He had to try, though. He pulled himself erect. It was like a gantry standing up. He was six feet five inches tall—a hobo had measured him once, just to get the exact figure of it—and when he stood up he swayed like a tree. The small of his back hurt terribly and he put his hand back there. “Kidneys,” Deacon said knowingly. “Yard bulls go for the kidneys. They always do. You’ll be pissing blood for a day or two, Bone.”