A Hidden Place Read Free

forward, but that was a mistake; Deacon cried out and fell over, his feet tangled in his own Hudson’s Bay blanket.
    Bone pulled him up. But it was too late. A farmer in an orange hunting jacket swung his pipe and caught Deacon hard on the arm. Deacon shrieked and fell back. The farmer raised his pipe again, and Bone perceived that the man would kill Deacon if the blow were allowed to fall. To prevent it, Bone grasped the farmer’s right arm at its fullest extension and twisted until it snapped—a thing he had not realized he could do. The farmer gazed at Bone very briefly, his face gone white with shock and confusion; then he stumbled back, screaming.
    Deacon was weeping with pain but managed to scuttle forward with his rucksack in his good hand. Archie helped him up, gap-jawed: “Deacon,” he said, “Deacon, you see what that big man did ? Jesus!”
    “Go,” Deacon sobbed, “just for Christ’s sakes go!”
    Two more of the farmers came up on the heels of the first, and before Bone could decently run he had to swing out his long arms with their fists like weights so that these two men fell down also, one of them unconscious and one almost certainly dead. A sort of collective moan rose up from the raiders.
    This time Bone did not need to be goaded. He ran, keeping abreast of his friends. The fires roared behind him.
    “Boxcar!” Deacon shouted. “See!”
    A long, ponderous freight was just pulling out of the yards. The yard bulls and the railway cops had all congregated down by the hobo jungle; the open door of the boxcar gaped like a broken tooth. The three of them ran to catch it, Deacon favoring his injured shoulder. Before they reached it, though, a scissorbill stepped up from the shadows in the gully, and he was carrying a shotgun.
    Deacon and Archie fell to their knees. Bone didn’t think about it at all. Reflexively, he let his momentum carry him forward as the railroad cop leveled the gun; he was faster than the man’s reaction time and was able to duck under the line of fire before the big muzzles of the gun erupted into the night. Then his broad bony hand was on the cop’s face, twisting it back, snapping vertebrae; the scissorbill fell backward into the scummy slough, dead before the idea of death could enter his mind.
    Deacon helped Bone up into the boxcar. There were scraps of straw in the corners and the smell of cattle. They would be cold again tonight, Bone thought bleakly. But that hardly mattered now.
    Deacon gazed back at the body of the scissorbill as the train picked up speed.
    “He’s meat,” Deacon marveled. “Christ God, Archie, you were right.”
    Archie looked at Bone from his recessed eyes and said nothing.
    They slid the doors closed as the train accelerated into the night.
    Deacon, still favoring his left arm, slapped Bone on the back.
    “Stick with us, kid,” he said. “Stick with old Deacon and Archie.”
    The next day there were mountains again, and snow in the night. Bone huddled in his pea coat—it was tom now—and listened to Deacon and Archie swap tales about how it had been in Bakersfield and Terre Haute and Klamath Falls and how it felt to be crossing the Hump again. Deacon brought out a bottle of muscatel and the two of them drank until their conversation blurred and Bone could no longer understand them. They gave him little quizzical sidelong glances, called him “Buddy” and “Good Friend Bone,” and were careful to offer him what they had, more profusely when they were reassured that he would not accept. Eventually they fell asleep.
    Bone sat in the open door of the boxcar, the cold wind tearing at him. There was a pulsing in him, much stronger than it had been before. He could feel it.
    For the first time it made words inside him—the ghosts of words.
    Here I am, find me. Find me, here I am.
    The train roared down the eastern spine of the Continental Divide, and Bone felt the same unfamiliar strength rising up in him, the strength that had allowed him to