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Jake Marlowe walks out of the desert but he does not leave it.
Theta finishes her last cigarette and stomps it into the ground. She shivers for no reason and boards the sleeping train. Roy and his men drive in the dark, tires circling against the rise of the road. Someone thinks they saw her in Kentucky with a circus, so Roy is going to Kentucky. Roy’s daddy was from Kentucky. He used to beat Roy with a belt buckle. Roy can still hear the clang of metal under the humming tires. His daddy was beat by his own pappy, and his pappy by his father before him. Roy used to joke that their family tree was just a big old belt passing from hand to hand. A circle. Roy thinks of Theta. Thinks of the belt. Presses the gas.
Theta sleeps. Something else is awake. Elijah shuffles up the steps of the train, trailing dead leaves. He finds her cabin. He can always find her. They are bound together now, forever. But not yet. First, a gift. A proper courting. He lays the daisies upon her pillow. They brown and curl under his touch. Worms wiggle under the covers, make a home in the future. Theta sleeps. Elijah strokes a filthy finger down her hair and is gone.
The sky crackles with light. The dead are in the woods. Along the quiet roads. Near the edges of towns. They ask for rides to see a brother in a prison that hasn’t been in use since the Civil War. Or to a town where they plan to be married. These cars will be found later, abandoned. Doors open. Headlamps still on. Perhaps a strange pattern burned into the seats. Scratch marks. Dust everywhere.
The ghosts reach the edges of the towns. The husband rouses from slumber and a dream of sun-stippled valleys for just a moment. “Did you hear that?” he asks his young wife. “Come to me, lover,” she says, taking him in her arms, and the warning is forgotten. There is lightning in the sky. The ghosts step into the streets.
The dead of Greenville float in the river. (“The river, the river is a witness.”) Here and there, a bloated arm catches on a half-submerged telephone pole. Shirttails snag against a section of severed fence. The dead are caught in riptides, swirl around and around, becoming a circle. The call is passed from mind to mind: “Rise up,” they say from the watery depths and float toward the levee.
Rise up, Memphis thinks, his pencil making its own swirls and loops upon the page, forming words. The hands of the ancestors guide his strokes. Witness. Witness. The river travels on, telling the story to any who will listen. It knows the people are unreliable narrators. They do not know themselves.
The radio ends its broadcast. A little music to play it out, burbling through speakers, sweet as a river. This is your radio announcer, wishing you all a pleasant evening. Good night. Good. Night.
Good night to the oil fields smelling of sulfur and profit. And to the miners’ shacks leering lovesick into streams shining up with fool’s gold. Good night to the boomtowns, built in fever dreams, jilted when spent. Good night to Alma’s arm across Ling’s body, the birth of something new. Good night to the railroads carving scars across the land. Good night to the atoms impatient for more, eager to rise up in new horror. Good night to the husband and wife, young lovers, as the dead watch from the foot of their bed. “Hungry,” they whisper. Good night to all. All the asleep with the dead on their doorsteps. All are sleeping.
Only the river is awake. And it is screaming.
RIVER
Memphis woke to Nate Timmons shaking him.
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“Memphis,” he said in an urgent voice. “I heard something you need to know. My cousin say he heard some guards talking. Say there’s some men on their way in from Washington to search the camp. Said they heard some poems from the Voice of Tomorrow had been mailed to a newspaper in New York, and those letters was stamped Greenville. And then they heard about healings taking place on the levee. Those Shadow Men you told me about? They coming for you and your friends, Memphis. You got to go. We got to get you out of here.”
“How we gonna do that?” Bill said, throwing off the thin blanket and pulling up his suspenders. “We need passes to get out.”
“Nate, you were wanting to go north, weren’t you?” Memphis said.
Nate rubbed a hand down his face, thinking. “Remy’s boat would do, I reckon. But we got to go past the guard to get it.”
“The Shadow Men aren’t here yet. And the camp’s eight miles long,” Memphis said.
Bill hurried into his boots. “Better hope they start at the other end.”
Quickly and quietly, Memphis, Bill, and Henry gathered their things. Nate Timmons had Bessie stuff what she could into a pillowcase. She was tearful about having to leave behind even more of what little they had.
Moses and Tobias were worried sick about their dog, Buddy. It had been several days since the levees had washed away, stranding them all in the refugee camps.
“Please, Daddy. Can we go looking for him?”
There was the issue of the passes—the National Guard wasn’t handing them out, except to white people. But two young boys desperate to find their lost dog pulled at the heartstrings of one of the guards.
“I can’t let you go, sir. But I can let the boys out,” explained the sympathetic guard to Nate Timmons. He handed over half his sandwich to the boys. “I got a dog back home, too. Here. He’ll be hungry. Give him this, compliments of me and my Rover.”
Bessie was beside herself with worry. “There’s all manner of things in that water—telephone wires and snakes! They can’t go alone!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Orders are orders.”
Henry wanted to say to him, You know this isn’t right, so why are you playing along? But he knew the answer: Rules. That was always the answer: Because this is the way of things. But the way of things was wrong.
“I’ll go with ’em,” Henry said, staring down the guard, who, with a nod, allowed it.
“Thank you,” Nate said to Henry.
Bill clapped a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Best be quick about it. Go and come back fast as you can. We got to pack up and slip out tonight.”
