Far off down the dark lanes of that first night in dreams he saw Celia standing in a trashy field, cartons and tin cans and pieces of rusted equipment around her, Celia looking lost. He called to her, but she couldn’t hear him; his voice wasn’t strong enough. He wished with all his might that he hadn’t left her letters on that low wall in Chattanooga. An emptiness then blowing through him, hollowing him. A dustiness and a picture in his mind, a memory really, of furniture and family items strewn around an old house he came on once standing in the middle of a cotton field. The knee-high cotton surrounded the house, running right up to the porch and windows, and the house deserted. He climbed the steps and looked in. Inside everything was still there, the clothes and the filigreed spread on the bed and an upright piano with its face broken in against the wall. All covered with dust. Undisturbed for how long — you couldn’t tell. He didn’t go in, though he saw a basket and a little box like a jewelry box sitting on a dresser that he could use — didn’t because he sensed he was not supposed to disturb the dust. In his chest then too a hollowness. Now he saw his old life drying and flaking away. He had to make himself stop. But when he stopped, the crackling, stinky blackness returned. He pressed his eyes with his fingertips until he saw stars, white stars and flashes of purple light and little quivery yellow dashes. Around him that night in the dark the moaning the crying the calling out as if from eroded patches in black space.
You could say they hadn’t quit on themselves. They were still breathing. It wasn’t because they were strong or brave. Certainly not noble. They would have sold each other out. Carl tried. Rollie tried. But they had nothing to offer. The white man didn’t even need confessions. It was as if the method was the only thing that mattered. Get that right. And they had nothing to do with that. They hadn’t quit because there wadn’t any way to and there wadn’t anything to quit in a universe of endless effort. No quit, boys. Unless you just slacked down until you died. But even that wadn’t allowed. Carl — after he tried the other — had tried that, tried rolling up against the wall and not moving, not eating, not drinking, but with a work-gloved hand they slapped him in the face until he changed his mind. Come on back to us, boy. Then they slapped him because of the trouble he’d caused them.
