Neal Barrett Jr. by Dawn's Uncertain Light Page B

then. , . .
    Howie swept the thoughts aside. Damn it all, there wasn’t any time for that now. He had to get out of this place! Go somewhere. Anywhere there weren’t a bunch of people thick as flies.
    He remembered he had mentioned to Jones he had business in the north. Fine. In the morning, he’d tell the preacher that’s what he had to do. Thank him for the room and the meal and get on his way.
    Howie peeled off his clothes and stretched out on the bed. He felt better already, knowing this was the right thing to do. And there were girls most everywhere you went. Maybe not girls with blue eyes and yellow hair, but in a while he might forget about that.
    By the end of spring he had left the foothills of the high range behind. One day he turned and saw the distant peaks were only thin blue shadows on the horizon. Ahead, the land stretched flat and hard, and he knew he had reached the edge of the great southern desert of Mexico…
    He couldn’t remember when he had seen another person. He followed a dry riverbed and lost count of the days. Each one ended and began much the same as the one before. Until the morning when he awoke, sat up, and saw the man….
    He was walking east to west, trailing a small herd of stock. Howie counted eight—hardly enough to count it as a herd. The man was black, just as black and shiny as pitch. Howie had never seen a black man before—except the one they had stuffed at the Bluevale Fair.
    “How’d you lose the eye?” the man said.
    “A feller cut it out with a knife.”
    “You fight him back?”
    “There wasn’t much way I could.”
    After supper, the man took what was left of the beans and the bread and carried it out of camp into the brush. Howie was horrified. The man was giving the food to his stock! The meat jumped right in and dipped the beans out of the pot with their hands.
    “Mister,” Howie said, “it ain’t none of my business, but I never seen a man feed good beans and bread to his stock.”
    “They ain’t exactly stock,” the man said. “They just kinda ’pear to be.”
    “That don’t make sense,” Howie said.
    “I’m just telling you,” the man said. “They was wandering around half starved. Picking up leaves and bugs. Got all this far, though. Halfway ’cross the country.”
    Howie thought about that. It didn’t strike him right. “Now how do you know that? Where they come from and all.”
    “One of ’em told me, is how. Rest has got their tongues cut, but this one of ’em talks.”
    Howie stared. “Meat—you heard meat talking? Mister, I ain’t arguing with a man that’s feeding me breakfast. But if something talked to you, then it sure ain’t meat. “
    The man showed him a humorless grin. “Well, that’s what I’m saying, now ain’t it?”
    “It don’t make sense,” Howie said. “It don’t make any sense at all.”
    Then Howie looked up from the campfire, and there was Ritcher Jones, sitting at a table with a fine white cloth. Howie thought this was a peculiar thing to see, a man in the desert all dressed up nice, a table with a cloth and shiny plates and tall glasses that caught the light. Jones winked at Howie and jabbed his fork into a steak, and Howie saw the meat was still raw, that it wasn’t cooked at all. The preacher sliced deep with his knife and blood squirted in his eye. Jones laughed aloud and sliced again. Blood splattered in his face and pocked his clean white shirt. Howie yelled for Jones to stop, but he didn’t seem to hear. The preacher cut and sliced and the red pulsed out until Howie couldn’t see the man’s face or his arms or hardly anything at all. Howie screamed and-
    -sat up straight, clutching at the sheet and staring wildly at the dark. He heard the tail end of his fear, the awful sound that came with him from the dream.
    Howie groaned and put his feet on the floor. He could taste his own sweat. He stumbled to the dresser and splashed water in the bowl and drenched his shoulders and his face. He left