Something like that, he thought, half laughing at himself as one of the white men nearby said to another, “Pitch em and catch em, ay buddy,” and the other laughed a small tight laugh like you would in front of somebody you didn’t want to offend, and the other saying, “He just flung out there, didn’t he?” and the first — small, stiff-faced — laughing again the same cramped laugh; and Delvin thought, It hurt him too, that man getting killed.
He wanted to get off the train, wanted to walk by himself down a dirt road back toward that sharecropper light over yonder and knock on the door and ask if he could stay for a while. But what would he find there? Some old snaggle-toothed couple with their raggedy children. Cold grits and well water for supper. Wash your feet in a pan out on the back porch before going to bed. Lie down on the floor and listen to the skeeters whine around your head. Malaria bubbling in your veins.
An ache like a buckled-on harness clutched him. He wanted more than anything to reach his hand out to somebody he loved, just for a minute. It was like a sickness, a feverish radiance. He reckoned that was what was taking him back to Chattanooga after nearly three years away. People who love you, somebody said to him on the roads once, they’ll cover your nakedness. Guess you’d even risk jail to get that, he thought. But maybe not jail after all this time. He told himself this, charming himself, maybe not jail. But white men had long memories. But he was wily. Go on, go on — it was an endless chain. Not minding himself, not even figuring, he swayed in the doorway. He tilted toward the dark, starting to fall. A hand reached out and grabbed him. It was one of the white men, the little one who had mis-laughed.
“Watch yourself, shinola,” the little man said, grinning cooly. Delvin staggered back a step into the car.
“Thank you,” he said.
The little man turned away without acknowledging him further. He felt grateful to him, wanted to say something more, but he couldn’t; world wasn’t like that.
As if in a dream he returned to his small group and, taking just a moment to dust off a place on the cool rattling chestnutwood floor, lay down against the bulkhead. He slipped his notebook from his pocket into his shirt. His chest felt hot and he let his hand rest there. His heart beat into his fingers, same old cadence, nothing extra. I can’t sleep, he thought, and drifted off.
He left the train in Huntsville to wait for the Chattanooga-bound Tweetsy freight. He didn’t have the money to pay Mr. Rome for carrying a message but the little man said it was all right and got off with him. Josie stayed on the train. He was on the way, he said, to Denver, where there was a meeting of an anarchist group he wanted to join up with. “They talk about each man having full say in his life,” he said, “but they are generally as touchy as any others about who’s on top.” He and Delvin embraced and then Delvin and Mr. Rome walked off together with Frank into the night. The northbound freight wouldn’t be leaving until early in the A.M. — so they were told by a tall spindle-legged man striding along sheltering a young woman who toted a small guitar wrapped in a piece of checkered cloth. The man reminded Delvin of the professional mourner J. O. Shank back in Chattanooga.
Among thin dust drifts, broken bottles, bent gray grass, and a sprinkling of wild carrot in full white flower, Delvin sat up on an embankment, thinking of faces. They were maps, stories, timetables, confessions. The big celluloid pages in the museum each contained fifty faces, a hundred faces, every one contending with what must be revealed and what must not be, all but a few that had conquered the freakish truths trying to bust out or who had given up and stood back while they careened into view.
He broke off a stalk of carrot and pressed the flat white bracts to his nose. It smelled sour and slightly bitter. He wanted to get up and walk two miles through wildflowers. Beside him Frank was sleeping. Mr. Rome was catching a westbound freight. He said he would be in Chicago in two days and would find Celia and give her his speech. He had agreed to do it on credit, payable in ten days at the Constitution Funeral Home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
