As he came closer to the houses he heard whistles in the woods around him, and just as he emerged in a clearing he found himself surrounded by three men of varying ages, from teen-aged to young manhood to whiskered and gray. And a dark young woman of uncultured robust beauty with them. One man held a dog at bay.
"Please," White said, "Some men were trying to kill me. I only just escaped."
The eldest man sized him up. "More likely from the bank or government. There are too many people we don’t know snooping around these days, taking our names and filling out papers and assessing our land. In any case you’re trespassing. Come with us."
And so they led him down the slope, shotgun at his back, to a house where they could deliberate, but as they loped the wild, beautiful girl squinted at him. "I know who he is. He aint no thief nor agent of the bank or the government. He’s that man rich man returned to town."
The youngest man huffed. "So you say! You’re talking smitten, and you’re hard enough to keep from runnin’ off as it is. We’ll see what someone with an ounce of sense says." And so they continued leading him downhill, but the old man looked at the girl and then at White and kenned the truth in what she said and let his shotgun lower a little.
*
At ten o’clock sharp the fair began. A parade of intimidating bodybuilders, contortionists, clowns, swamis, fakirs, knights, midgets, giants and veiled beauties walked up in silence and swung open the gate. A wonderland of exotic sights and smells waited inside, but for all that it was deathly quiet. As the menagerie of the human spectrum stood by the gate, none of the townsfolks dared be the first to go in. There was something both inviting and sinister about it, as if one were entering another world where temptation reinvented itself and stood right next to its twin, delight, and folks had better have the eyes to tell one from the other or they’d reenact the Preternatural Fall. Finally a strapping farm boy stepped forward and shouted out to no one in particular, "Mercy, I aint never seen gals so pretty nor smelled food so good before – I’m makin’ a day of it!" And the moment he walked through the gate a chorus of bands struck up from every corner of the fair, and rides suddenly glowed and churned and swung to life, and calliopes played, and a man on the back of an elephant reached down and had the behemoth hoist the young lad on its trunk to sit beside him in the parapet and march him further inside accompanied by drums and trumpets.
"Dang fellers, this is fine!" he shouted down, and the logjam was broken and the mass of humanity could not jostle one another fast enough to immerse themselves in the sights and sounds and tastes and smells, to enjoy the overbold and the sublime beauty, to jog and rearrange their thoughts, to make their memories, to feel the fineness of possibility that enters through the eyes and breaks down a wall and unleashes a light that is always behind it, to find the perfect pitch could crumble a mountain of uncertainty and let through a secret of how happy life can be.
The splendor of the fair made the commemoration ceremony grey and torpid by comparison. Because it was. Dignitary after dignitary droned on in speeches that all but the most civic-conscious tried to avoid. Even the guy who dressed as Abe Lincoln and stood on stilts and declared the dam to be the second great emancipation fell flat. Only a smattering of bodies filled the rows of chairs set up facing the dais, and most of the folks sitting in them only rested there to fan their feet before launching themselves into the fair again. But like all good bureaucrats, the speakers did not notice or care. They kept up their ritual while the hours spun by around them, with colors swirling brighter at the periphery than at the center.
And while they talked Otto found himself in a waiting area outside a hotel conference room wishing he could be anywhere else, even out in the sparse sea of folding chairs, listening to the monotone. He’d had breakfast with Constance earlier but that had long since burned off. He sat in the lobby in a stuffed chair that started out cushiony but quickly turned uncomfortable no matter how he sat. He tried to look stern and also ever-so-slightly bored and familiar with everything, but after a while even that got to be real work. He watched other young men with expressions remarkably like his own file in, eye him suspiciously, screw their posture up one notch tighter, and then disappear into the great beyond.
He waited and waited for hours, and every now and then a young bureaucrat or secretary would open the door and look out to ensure he was still there, as if checking for any demerit that might suspend an obligation on someone's part. But at last, about 2:00 in the afternoon, they let him inside.
*
His rural escorts got White to a low sturdy house, clean and warm and made tightly of rough-hewn cedar, with its rafters visible inside. The old man prodded him in and he could smell pies baking, and as his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light he could see past a sitting area to a long low table in a kitchen with two old women at the end. The men pushed him into the kitchen and gestured that he be seated. He sat and nodded to the women. The looked like ancient sisters, and they looked back at him, tightening dark-stained lips over toothless gums. He expected their faces to sour but instead one smiled wryly, turned her head, and spat.
"It’d be nice if just once you men could bring back something useful when you go out hunting. I don’t know how you found this one, but he’s a long way from the newsreels."
"Ernest White," the other one said. "You’re a long way from home – whatever corner of the world you’re calling home these days."
He looked at them. "Please," he said, "I just got away from some thugs. They were trying to kill me."
The lady squinted up at him. "Hell son, they’ve been trying to kill you before you were born. Sit down."
He startled at the comment, and the men who had escorted him into the house looked at each other, but the women waved them off with the admonition to make themselves useful, and so they left.
"Ernest White, aint it time you got over thinking you’re the one man ever who borned and baptized and resurrected hisself? Do you know much about Chris White? How he ran the town with Sweet and Larr, until they all had a falling out over the attentions of a young lady who ended up pregnant? How the whole affair messed up her mind and she tried to drown herself and the baby?"
"I’ve heard of it, yes."
"We knew that woman. She was a willful girl from these parts who took to thinking she liked the town better than the country, but when she turned up pregnant and the big men would have nothing to do with her, some of us folks up here took her back in. She delivered, but her mind was not right, and the men in town decided to get rid of her, just like they want to get rid of this whole valley now – for their own convenience, for their own vanity. But that baby got lucky – the one honest man in town chanced to be out hunting that night."
He opened his mouth to ask them something but then paused as if weighing something in his mind.
"You were that baby, White. They put the infant in an orphanage about the same time Chris’s own wife was with child, and then his wife miscarried. And so he and his wife adopt this foundling to fill the void and head out into the world to get the eyes of the damned town off of them."
Ernest looked at the old women.
"You're that child. You're everything that put those three men at each other's throats. Of course they tried to kill you today. They tried to kill you even before you can remember, but you got damn lucky."
He felt his world close in. He tried to stand but felt his legs felt weak and he sank to the floor.
"On our mother’s grave it’s true. So what you want to go back to town for? It's foolish to think you can ever dodge the bullet of their vengeance. There’s folks whose only goal in life is to hunt down grievances, as far back as they can to go, through every life that ever was."
He was kneeling on the floor and felt his fists curled at his sides.
"So what the hell you want to go back for, boy? Take your money and leave for those of us who can’t."
He got up, sat at the bench and ran a hand through his hair and breathed deeply.<
br />
"Look, I need to get back to town," he said. "What’s the quickest way?"
"Why you want to go back to town? You can never have peace there."
"Then I’ll have the thing that’s in its place."
"Which is?"
He told them about Atalanta.
One of the women fixed a look at the other. "Good Lord, they never outgrow it."
"We always heard you was pious and a little thick. But if that’s what you want, we can help you. Lord knows, you may have enemies but you’ve always been lucky."
"I’ve never thought of myself as lucky."
"Says the man with the good looks and the fortune."
"Hah!" the other lady laughed, and spat.
And so they told Ernest how they would let him hitch a ride back to town in a wagon hauling fruit.
*
At the fair events passed pleasantly until when a commotion broke out among the carnival rides.
"It's a convict - he's escaped!" someone screamed.
An observer from a distance would have seen the mass of milling bodies recoiling from the course of a chase that ensued across the fairgrounds, then reclosing behind it with a wave of chatter.
Rumor quickly spread that a pale young man had escaped from prison, a man who had shot at Mr. White only days before. Now he had made a mad dash for freedom while his lunch was being delivered to his cell.
"Look! There he is!"
His pale form in a ragged white shirt and a jagged crazy face dashed through the crowd. Women screamed. Even men sprang back from his deranged persona as if he were a contagion. As their ranks closed behind his jagged course they could hear him scream:
"Fight the system! All rules are shackles! All compassion is chains!"
"He's mad!"
He darted in between rides and booths like a crazed waterbug, easily eluding the clumsy efforts of two fat deputies to apprehend him. He hurdled over baby carriages to mother's screams; he overturned cotton-candy machines to make temporary barricades. And all along his voice sang bitter sad epithets:
"The silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread! Buy one free and get one at half price!"
"Now he's lost it."
He pushed two machine operators out of the way and began scampering like a mad spider up the side of the Ferris wheel. The riders shouted in panic as the escapee clung to the side with preternatural agility, going round and round, always trying to climb toward what was momentarily the top.
The operators quickly stopped the ride and let the lucky few passengers in the bottom car climb off. With that the exile scrambled to the pinnacle of the wheel as two panting deputies finally arrived. They paused to catch their breath then raised rifles to their shoulders and took aim. Two reports rang out but went well wide of the mark, so a farm boy grabbed the gun from one of them.
"Wing shot," he said.
A report rang out and the maddened escapee grabbed a sudden spot of blood on his right shoulder. That was enough to convince the refugee of the seriousness of their intent, and he signaled his surrender by waving his hands. The crowd led out a collective moan of disappointment and he shinnied back down into the deputies' custody. As he let himself be led away he bowed to the prettiest ladies in the crowd.
*
Michael had been sulking all day and all the days since Mr. White had refused to share his vengeful intent. He had been drinking, and now he began to pick his way out from under the trees and down the slope toward a familiar gray house.
He remembered the old man who used to live there, and the black man who used to work there. They were long gone now, and the man who lived there these days was no longer worthy of their memory.
Michael found a can of gasoline in the tool shed. He walked around the perimeter of the house, limping and sloshing the liquid. When he had poured out the last of the gasoline lit it. Then he limped away, back toward the hills, and soon the house was in flames.
As he limped away and gained the cover of the trees, he began to feel uneasy inside. He saw the reflections of the flames on all the tubes that encased him, flicking and lighting and chastising like a million tongues of fire. He hurried into the trees, but the cover was never thick enough to keep the flicker off his braces.
He hurried to the top of the rise. But there were no trees there, and he felt exposed. Sun poured down on him. He felt as if he had done something that had shown too much of himself and he could not reverse it. He wanted to get away and hide again.
In his hurry to regain the cover of the trees he misplanted his braces and fell. He fell and tumbled down a steep slope amongst trunks and branches. He looked up and saw his own scared face reflected in a thousand curved metal surfaces, distorted so that the faces laughed at him.
He fell off of a steep bank and down into a creek. His back hit a rock and he felt fire shoot through all his limbs, down to their tips. For one instant he felt supremely alive, then all fell numb again.
He could not move. His arms spread beside him as he lay in no more than 18 inches of water. He struggled through pain to raise his head out of the flow. But the effort was too great and his head fell back, under the water, shallow yet covering his face. The world was all blurred to his eyes. He felt god-struck. Light like tongues of fire danced all over his braces. His head went light and he laughed. He cried and the river carried away his tears. He felt alive and trapped, and his life itself became a blur upon whose surface light could dance, and at the last moment he felt his limbs go light and he imagined the cage door was opening and he was flying out like a bird.
*
It was late afternoon and Atalanta was looking out the window of the passenger train taking her back to town.
All her life in that town, she had watched the world lap up to the shores and recede. She had lived here a long time, seen the white foam of the world beyond sometimes approach the hills, but always pull back, leaving only little bits of what it bore, of what it promised.
She knew that the people of town had always thought that White looked down on them – on us, she corrected herself in her thinking. We were most of us poor. We walked to school barefoot in summer on grass-lined clay roads, and other children coming out of the valleys and the hollows and along our path and through the grove and out along the road to school.
Her people and most of the people in town had settled there when neighbor needed neighbor and there were no government nor industries for miles, just farms or loners' shacks, separated by miles, and places worn bare where travelers rested their horses beside springs, and at night the light of distant kerosene lanterns to be seen in the rippled glass windows from miles away, with frogs chirrups filling the air to a deafening pitch and forest pouring down the hills to the moon's reflection rippling on the wide Neosho. And neighbors who would cross those miles at midnight if need be to fetch the doctor, tend to the dying, help with a birthing, ease someone's pain, attend a wedding or a funeral, aid in lambing or harvesting – all in a world without fame or frame but full of silence pouring down from the wild dark land filled with green so dark it's black.
And he came in on the tail end of this, when trains and roads and brand names and catalogs were suddenly making the world much smaller and were irreparably tearing down the isolation of their world, and he was like no one they knew. He tried to live a normal life but news of his extraordinary circumstances got the best of him, and distanced him even more from everything and everyone. Sometimes it gave him a conscious pride, and other times it erected a barrier between himself and everything and everyone he tried to know. Eventually he relented of normalcy in that small town and launched himself out into the wide world.
After he left, Atalanta stayed there with her father, which was better than her father deserved, and the second he died she ran away and was gone 12 years, and when she came back she kept to herself, having lived events none too spectacular save for the fact that she had lived them, felt the bruises of life, felt a pulse in her veins and her heart break and re
knit and prove that she was strong, that her back could bear greater things that she could have imagined. But now that life was gone and he was back, one day the foam of the world brought that old dredge back here, and she remembered the depth his eyes had opened in hers at one time...
Atalanta was settled in her daydreams when she heard someone else speaking on the train. "Did you hear? There’s smoke on the horizon – folks say it’s coming from the old White place." She was shocked out of her thoughts. She looked out the window anxious to be home.
*
A man in the hotel in town entered the suite the congressman was staying in and had bad news to report.
"They lost him? They LOST him?" the old politician said. He wilted like a wet sack. "You know this means he could be anywhere. He could say anything – do anything. I want you to cancel my speech."
"Now Dad," his son Billy said, "I'll give it."
Billy looked into the contorted face of his father. A light like sun on milk had come into the old man’s eyes.
"I think he has a grudge against me from when I was sheriff here," he said.
"I'll give the speech," his son repeated.
"Ever the man to jump at opportunity?" the father asked with a squint. "Well you know if I won't go out then I can't stop you." Then he turned to the other men in the room. "But the rest of you, listen to me: you've got to watch for him at all the entrances to town."
The men looked at him.
"You heard me boys. You do your jobs. That nut likes to shoot his mouth off."
They looked at him, then at Billy, then nodded their heads and left the room.
"Now about that speech," the old man said. "If you're going to give it, give it right. Now look here, see how I've marked up the text."
"Of course, Dad, of course."
"Be sure to pause here after you invoke the Assistant Secretary's name..."
It was a fine speech, invoking God and the promise of America and that still small spark in man called Freedom, fanned to a prairie fire here in the USA, and barreling toward a destiny so great that none could see it except for its glow, just over the horizon. Bill did a fine job of delivering it, a natural for the role, and the crowd noticed and responded appreciatively. It was the first great speech of his career, and it left most of the men actually believing him and most of the women in tears. But in the middle it was interrupted by a blare of trumpets and the sudden appearance of a stately procession of wildly-garbed humanity pouring toward the podium from every direction. Jugglers and fire-breathers and clowns, strong men and acrobats and bearded women and inscrutable Chinese mystics, dwarves and giants and men on stilts and leering clowns and Hindoo fakirs in their turbans and diapers, carrying their cobra baskets or beds of nails. And there were boys like wolves or lizards. Calliope music suddenly filled the air and the group poured in from every direction and surged around the politician. A clown stole the papers of his speech and then two Red Indians juggled tomahawks to one another with the would-be politician standing stock-still in the middle. The crowd roared and laughed. Then the jugglers ceased and a sad clown came up and put an exaggerated crown on Billy’s head and three women dressed like harem girls salaamed at his feet while two strongmen lifted him by the elbows and seated him in an exaggerated purple throne. A clown came up and shined his shoes and a second snuck up behind, shushed the crowd, and replaced his crown with a dunce cap. The crowd laughed and then the troupe set the man in his throne back down, marched across the stage in all their strength, from the first man to the last, then down through the aisle between the rows of chairs and on to their city of tents. The crowd began to follow them, leaving only a few bodies still in their chairs and the dignitaries on the dais bewildered.