A Hidden Place

Chapter Eight

Nancy located Travis on the first chill day of the autumn.

Seasons in Haute Montagne always followed the calendar. Springs were a haste of melting and blossoming; summers declared themselves boldly; autumns hurried toward winters; and winters came down like guillotine blades. She was accustomed to it. The prairie, incising the sky on all horizons, gave up these clinical seasons. But now for the first time Nancy was seriously worried. The adventure was not an adventure any longer. She had lost Travis, and Anna would not tell her why. The cool air and the shedding of the bur oaks seemed full of portents.

She watched the Burack house for a time,- for a time she waited with Anna at the switchman’s hut. Travis did not come to either place.

If he had not left Haute Montagne altogether, she thought, there was only one place he might be.

She put on a heavy cloth coat and took a hunting knife from the attic chest where the relics of her father’s life were stored. She attached the knife to her belt and slipped away from the house. It was an overcast Saturday, and her mother was off at a Baptist Women’s meeting. Fallen leaves pursued her until she was beyond the town, and then there was only the dry prairie grass. She followed the southern bank of the Fresnel toward the railway trestle.

She was frightened, though she tried not to admit it to herself. All her life she had heard stories about railway tramps. That they left encoded marks on people’s doors. That they stole babies. That they would kill you for the money in your pocket. Sometimes, especially these latter years, she had seen such men come into town looking for work. They had seemed less threatening than sad, worn-out, eroded. They wore helplessness about them like a suit of clothes. The church would occasionally feed them, though Nancy’s mother disapproved: “It only encourages them. And the smell!”

Sad. But Nancy did not doubt that they could be dangerous, too. How could such despair not breed anger?

She moved through the empty meadows toward the scabrous iron trestle, burdocks clinging to her skirt. When she saw a faint, line of smoke rising up, she reached inside her coat and closed her fingers on the reassuring whalebone handle of the knife.

It was not a big hobo jungle. Haute Montagne was too far from the big cities, too insignificant a stopover, and too chary a society for that. But there were men who lived here, at least briefly. She saw two huts made of tar paper, tin, and old two-by-fours in the darkness under the trestle. A tiny fire burned fitfully. A few men lay strewn on the ground like sacks of trash, asleep, their limbs at random angles. The sound of the river running came back in echoes from the arch of the railway bridge. She moved as far into that shadowy place as she dared.

“Travis?”

Her voice, too, echoed back.

She thought: He is not here.

But then a shadow stirred in the dark pebbly corner where the trestle met the bank, and Travis stepped forth.

She was relieved that he was not like these other men, some of whom had risen up to stare blankly at her; he was, still, better groomed, better dressed. He looked only down on his luck, not broken. It seemed inconceivable that he could have been living like this… for days, Nancy thought; almost a week since she had left him alone at the switchman’s shack.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

He had lost weight. He stood before her like a pillar of stone.

“I need help.” His eyes avoided her, and she added, “You left me.”

“Not you.”

“Anna? You mean Anna?” “Let’s not talk here.”

She followed him up the grade of the riverbank, up to the place where the trestle leaped across the water. Travis sat on a concrete abutment, gazing wearily off at the horizon.

“Travis,” she said, making herself brave. “I know there’s something wrong. I asked Anna about it. She wouldn’t explain, but she says it was a mistake—you saw something you shouldn’t have seen. You weren’t ready.” She licked her lips. “It was a mistake. Travis, please come back.”

He was a long time answering. The wind was brisk, and Nancy hugged her coat around herself.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said slowly, “what Aunt Liza believes about Anna. She’s not human.” For the first time he looked at her. “You understand that?”

“No! How could she not be human? She—”

“You’ve been with her. You know.”

Well. Of course there was so much she didn’t understand. Obviously, what was happening was not normal. Normal people didn’t need to be sequestered in ruined buildings for months at a time. But—not human? How could that be?

Travis’s fists were clenched.

“I gave it up for her,” he said. “I had it in my hand. A life. An ordinary life. She seduced me out of it.”

“She’s lost, Travis. I talked to her about it. She’s just lost, is all. I don’t know where she’s lost from, or how she plans to get back… but lost is lost. This town won’t help. We have to.”

She reached for his hand. But he drew it away, and the gesture was so quick and so instinctive that it shocked her. “Don’t,” he said.

“My God. It’s me. It’s me, isn’t it? It’s something I did.”

Travis shook his head no. His eyes, however, were blank.

“I trusted you!”

He turned back toward the bridge. “Travis! Travis Fisher, you son of a bitch! I trusted you!”

The wind tore at her.

He watched from the bridge as Nancy stalked away through the prairie grass. Part of him wanted to follow her. To apologize.

But he could not forget what had happened in the switchman’s shack. The thing Anna had become. The experience defied comprehension. He knew only that it was real, and that the Anna-thing was not human, and that she had seduced him into betraying any hope he might have had of a future here in Haute Montagne.

To the west, workmen were erecting a tent for the traveling revival. A clanking and the cry of muted voices came across the prairie. The tent revivals always came to Haute Montagne in the autumn, Nancy had said. It was a signal of impending winter, as unmistakable as the racing of the dark clouds across the sky.

There was nothing left for him but to move on … to move on the way these other men did, riding the boxcars and the flatcars. Racing the snow, looking for work. Travis had resigned himself to it.

But not yet, he thought, though he could not explain even to himself why he felt that way: not just yet.

He would stay here a while. Off west, the fluttering banners of the tent revival rose on their guy wires to the gray sky.

He thought: There is unfinished business here.