Folk of the Fringe Page 2

  Only the fat woman didn't get weird on him. "Don't point a gun at us again, boy," she said coldly. "Not unless you mean to use it."

  "Sorry," said Jamie. He shouldered the rifle again. "I was just trying to show you how easy it is to—"

  "We know how easy," said the fat woman. "And we're taking your advice. It was decent of you to warn us."

  "The Lord has seen your kindness," said the black man, "and he'll reward you for it."

  "Maybe so," said Jamie, to be polite.

  "Even if you do it unto the least of these my brethren," said the black man.

  "Which is definitely us," said the fat woman.

  "Yeah, well, good luck, then." Jamie turned his back on them and headed for the shoulder of the road.

  "Wait a minute," said the white man. "Where are you going?"

  "That's none of your business," said the black man. "He doesn't have to tell us that."

  "I just thought if he was going west, like us, that maybe we could go along together."

  Jamie turned back to face him. "No way," he said.

  "Why not?" asked the blond woman, as if she was offended.

  Jamie didn't answer.

  "Cause he thinks we're so dumb we'll get killed anyway," said the white man, "and he doesn't want to get killed along with us. Right?"

  Jamie still didn't say anything, but that was an answer too.

  "You know your way around here," said the white guy. "I thought maybe we could hire you to guide us. Partway, anyhow."

  Hire him! What money would they use? What coin was worth anything now? "I don't think so," said Jamie.

  "Me neither," said the fat woman.

  "We don't trust in the arm of flesh," said the black man, sounding pious. Was he their minister, then?

  "Yeah, the Lord is our Shepherd," said the fat woman. She didn't say it piously. The black man glared at her.

  The white man gave it one more try. "Well it occurs to me that maybe the Lord has shepherded us to meet this guy. He's got a gun and he's traveled a lot and he knows what he's doing, which is more than we can claim. We'd be stupid not to have him with us, if we can."

  "You can't," said Jamie. Warning them was one thing. Dying with them was something else. He turned his back again and walked back into the scrub forest alongside the road.

  He heard them behind him. "Where'd he go? Like he just disappeared."

  Yeah, and that was with Jamie not even half trying to hide himself. These folks would never even see the bushwhackers that got them. City people.

  Once he was up in the tall trees, though, he didn't just head out west on his own path. Without really deciding to, he climbed back into the same tree as before, to see what these people decided to do. Sure enough, they were turning their carts east.

  Fine. Jamie was shut of them. He'd done what he could.

  So why was he walking eastward, too, parallel to their path? The Lord is their shepherd, not me, thought Jamie. But he had some misgiving, some fear that he couldn't rightly name; and having taken some responsibility for them, he felt more.

  They didn't even make it back to Silas Creek Parkway. There were twenty highway patrolmen, dismounted and guns at the ready. Jamie had never seen so many all in one place. Were they expecting an invasion of mobbers?

  No. They were expecting this little group of travelers. This was what they had come for. Jamie couldn't hear what was said, but he got the message right enough, from the gestures, the attitudes, the gathering despair in the little group of refugees. The highway patrol wasn't letting them back into Winston, not even long enough to take the parkway north to Country Club and out. It made Jamie feel sick inside. He had no doubt that the patrol knew what I-40 was like, knew what would surely happen at the 421 interchange. The highway patrol was planning on having the mobbers do murder for them. For some reason, the highway patrol wanted these people dead. They had probably assembled there to go out and collect the bodies and make a report.

  Some favor Jamie had done them. There had been some feeling of hope before as they sang; now the hope was gone, there was no spring in the children's step. They knew now that they were heading for death, and they had seen the faces of the people who wanted them dead.

  They had seen such faces before, though, Jamie was sure of it. The adults among them had not been shocked when Jamie pointed a gun at them, and they showed no anger now at the highway patrol. They were convinced already that they had no help, no friends, not from the civilized towns and certainly not from bushwhackers. No wonder the blond woman had been so suspicious of him.

  But the white guy had shown some hope in the help of a stranger on the road. He had thought he could strike a deal with Jamie Teague. It made Jamie feel kind of good and kind of bad all at once, that the guy had found some hope in him. And so, as they headed west again, Jamie found himself paralleling them again, and this time going faster, getting ahead of them, crossing the freeway back and forth, as if he were scouting their path on either side.

  I am scouting their path, he realized.

  So it was that Jamie came to the 421 interchange, silently and carefully, moving through the thick woods. He spotted two bushwhacker lookouts, one of them asleep and the other one not very alert. And now he had to decide. Should he kill them? He could, easily enough—these two, anyway. And heaven knows bushwhackers probably did enough murder in a year to give them all the death penalty twice over. The real question in his mind was, do I want to get into a pitched battle with these bushwhackers, or is there another way? It wasn't like he was going to get any help from these people—not a weapon in the bunch, and not a fighter, probably, even if they had a gun. If there was any fighting, he'd have to do it all.

  He didn't kill them. He didn't decide not to, he just decided he had time to get a good look at the bushwhacker town under the overpass and then come back and kill these two if need be.

  The bushwhacker town was built on the westbound side of I-40, sheltered under the 421 crossover. It was like most he'd seen, made of old cars pushed together to make narrow streets, enough of them to stretch four car lengths beyond the overpass. Outdoor shade from cloths stretched between cars here and there, a few naked children running around shouting, some slovenly women cussing at them or cooking at a fire, and men lolling around sleeping or whittling or whatever, all with guns close to hand. A quick count put the fighting force here above twenty. There was no hope of Jamie taking them on by himself. By surprise he might kill even a half dozen—he was that good a shot, and that quick—but that'd still leave plenty to chase him down in the woods while others stayed and had their way with the refugees coming up the road. Jamie wasn't against killing scum like this, not in principle, but he did figure on its only being worth doing when you had a chance of winning.

  Right then he should have just gone on, figuring there was nothing else he could do for them. They were just some more statistics, some more people killed by the destruction of society. The fall of civilization was bound to mash some people, and it wasn't his fault or his job to stop it.

  Trouble was that these folks he had seen up close. These folks weren't just numbers. Weren't just the corpses he was always running across in abandoned farmhouses or old dead cars or out in the woods somewhere. They had faces. He had heard their children singing. He had bent them out of their path once, and it was his duty to find some way to do it again.

  How did he know that? Nobody had ever told him any such duty. He just knew that this is what a decent person does—he helps if he can. And since he wanted so bad to be a decent person, even though he knew as sharp as ever that he was surely the most inhuman soul as ever walked the face of the earth, he turned around, snuck past the sleeping lookout again, and returned to the refugees before they even got back to the place where he first met them.

  Not that he figured on joining up with them, not really. He might lead them west to the Blue Ridge, since he was going there anyway, but after that they'd be on their own. Go their separate ways. He'd have done h
is part and more by then, and it was none of his business what happened to them after that.

  Tina held her peace. Didn't say a thing. But she thought things, oh yes, she told herself a sermon like Mother used to before she died—of a stroke, back before the world fell apart, thank heaven. It was Mother's voice in her head. No use getting mad about it. No use letting it eat your stomach out from the inside, give you colitis, make you do crazy things. No use yelling at those sanctimonious snot-faced highway patrolmen with their snappy uniforms and manure-spouting horses and shiny pistols at their belts. No use saying, You aren't any different than the filth who massacred babies on Pinetop Road. You think you're better cause you don't pull the trigger yourselves? That just means that besides being killers, you're cowards too.

  No use saying any of that.

  But Tina knew that everybody knew what she thought, even if she did hold her tongue. Long ago she discovered that all her bad feelings got written out in big bold letters on her face. Tender feelings not so much. Soft feelings, they were invisible. But let her feel the tiniest scrap of anger, and people would start shying away from her. "Tina's on the warpath," they'd say. "Tina's mad, I hope not at me." Sometimes she didn't like being so transparent, but this time she was glad. Because she saw how each one of those patrolmen looked at her while their commander was telling his lies, how each one met her eyes and then looked away, looked at the ground, or even tried to look meaner and tougher, it all came to the same thing. They knew what they were doing.

  And Tina capped it by turning her back on the commander while he was still explaining about how he doesn't make the ordinances, the city council does—she turned her back and walked away. Walked slow, because folks her size don't exactly scamper, but walked nonetheless. The little orphaned kids from her Primary, Scotty and Mick and Valerie and Cheri Ann, they turned and followed her at once, and when they went, so did the Cinn kids, Nat and Donna. And then their parents, Pete and Annalee; and then those two black girls from the Bennett Ward, Marie and Rona; and only then, when everybody else was walking west, only then did Brother Deaver give up trying to persuade that apprentice hitler to let them pass.

  Tina felt guilty about that. To walk off and embarrass Brother Deaver like that. His authority was scanty enough as it was, being second counselor in a bishopric that didn't exist anymore, what with the bishop and the first counselor dead. No need for her to undermine it. But then she'd always had trouble supporting the priesthood. Not in her heart—she was always obedient and supportive. She just kept accidentally doing things that made the men look somewhat indecisive in comparison. Like this time. She hadn't really figured that anybody would follow her. She just couldn't stand it anymore herself, and the only way to show her contempt for the highway patrolmen was to turn away while they were talking. To leave while it was still her choice to leave, instead of when they got fed up and leveled their guns at them and frightened the children. It was the right time to leave, and if Brother Deaver didn't notice that, well, was it Tina's fault?

  Her legs hurt. No, that was too vague. With every step, her hip joints crackled, her ankles stabbed, her knees weakened, her soles stung, her arches sagged, her back twisted, her shoulders knotted tighter. Why, this is an honest-to-goodness exercise program, she realized, walking the twenty-five miles from the Guilford College Exit to the place we're going to die. I thought my muscles were in good shape from all that custodial work at the meetinghouse, all the waxing and washing and polishing and chair-moving and table-folding. I had no idea that walking twenty-five miles would make me feel like a mouse that got played with by a half-blind cat.

  Tina stopped dead in the middle of the road.

  Everybody else stopped, too.

  "What's wrong?" asked Peter.

  "You see something?" asked Rona.

  "I'm tired," said Tina. "I ache all over, and I'm tired, and I want to rest."

  "But it's only three in the afternoon," said Brother Deaver. "We got three good hours of walking left."

  "You in some hurry to get to the 421 turnoff?" asked Tina.

  "It might not be what that man said, you know," said Annalee Cinn. She always had to take the contrary view; Tina didn't mind, she was used to it.

  Besides, Peter had a way of contradicting her without making her mad—which was, Tina figured, why they got married. The world couldn't have handled Annalee Davenport unless somebody stood near her all the time to contradict her without making her mad.

  "I thought so, too, honey," said Peter, "till that cop sent us back. He knows 421 is death to us."

  "The real number of the Beast," said Rona. Tina winced. Whoever persuaded Rona to read Revelation ought to be...

  "Now you know you didn't think he might be lying," said Annalee. "You wanted to have him join us."

  "Well I can see why he didn't," said Tina. "Everybody talks real sorry about what happened, but they all wish the mobbers had finished the job so they didn't have all these leftover Mormons to worry about."

  "Don't call them mobbers," said Brother Deaver. "That makes them sound like outsiders. That's just what they want you to think—that nobody from Greensboro—"

  "Don't talk about them at all," said Donna Cinn. For an eleven-year-old, she was pretty plainspoken. No sirs and ma'ams from her. But she spoke plain sense.

  "Donna's right," said Tina. "And so am I. We might as well rest here by the side of the road. I could use some setting time."

  "Me too," said Scotty.

  It was the voice of the youngest child that decided them. So it was they were sitting in the grass of the median strip, under the shade of a tulip tree, when Jamie came back.

  "This isn't such a big tree," said Annalee. "Remember when they divided the First Ward into Guilford and Summit?"

  It was a question that didn't need answering. There used to be so many Saints in Greensboro that the parking lot was completely full every Sunday. Now they could fit in the shade of a single tulip tree.

  "There's still three hundred families in Bennett Ward," said Rona.

  Which was true. But it was a sore point to Tina all the same. The black part of town was just fine. Nobody was going to make them leave. Who would've thought, back when they formed a whole ward in the black part of town, that six years later it'd be the only congregation left in Greensboro, with most whites dead and all the white survivors gone off on a hopeless journey to Utah, taking along only a handful of blacks like Deaver himself. It was hard to know whether the blacks who stayed behind were the smartest or the most fearful and faithless; not for me to judge, anyway, Tina decided.

  "They're in Bennett Ward," said Brother Deaver. "And we're here."

  "I know that," said Rona.

  Everybody knew that. They also knew what it meant. That the black Saints from Bennett Ward were going to stick it out in Greensboro; that out of all of them, only these two girls, for heaven only knew what reason, only Rona Harrison and Marie Speaks had volunteered to journey west. Tina hadn't decided whether this meant they were faithful or crazy. Or both. Tina well knew it was possible to be both.

  Anyway, it was in the silence after Rona last spoke that they noticed Jamie Teague was standing there again. He'd come up from the south side of the road, and was standing there in plain sight, watching.

  Pete jumped to his feet, and Brother Deaver was mad as hops. "Don't go sneaking up on folks like that!"

  "Hold your voice down," said Teague softly.

  Tina didn't like the way he always spoke so soft. Like a gangster. Like he didn't have to try to talk loud enough—it was your business to hear him.

  "What did you come back for?" asked Annalee. Sounding hard and suspicious. I hope Teague doesn't think she really means that.

  "I saw the patrol turn you away," said Teague.

  "That was an hour ago," said Brother Deaver. "More."

  "I also went ahead to see if maybe the mobbers at 421 weren't too much to fight through."

  "And?" asked Pete.

  "More than twenty men,
and who knows whether their women shoot, too."

  Tina could hear the others sigh, even though they didn't voice it; she could hear the breath go out of them like the air hissing out of a pop-top can. Twenty men. That was how many guns they'd have pointing at them. All these days, and we'll face the guns after all.

  "So what I'm thinking is, do you plan to stay here till one of them wanders up here and finds you? Or what?"

  Nobody had an answer, so nobody said anything.

  "What I'm trying to figure," said Teague, "is whether you folks want to die, or whether it's worth the trouble trying to help you get out of this alive?"

  "And what I'm trying to figure is what difference it makes to you," said Annalee.

  "Shut your mouth, Annalee," said Tina, gently. "I want to know what you have in mind, Mr. Teague."

  "Well it isn't like you're in a car or anything, right? You don't have to wait for an exit to get off the freeway."

  "We do with these carts," said Pete.

  "Are those carts worth dying for?"

  "All our food's on there," said Brother Deaver.

  "They come apart," said Tina.

  The others looked at her.

  "My husband designed them so you could just take them apart," she said. "For fording rivers. He figured at least one bridge was bound to be out."

  "Your husband's a smart man," said Teague. But there was a question in his eyes.

  "My husband's dead," said Tina. "But we both knew from the first plagues that we'd end up making this trip, and without gasoline, either. I suppose most Mormons have thought some time or other that there'd come a time when they had to make their way to Utah."

  "Or Jackson County," said Annalee.

  "Somewhere," said Tina. "He figured the carts wouldn't be much good if we couldn't ford a river with them. Only in this case, I guess we're fording a freeway."

  "More like a portage around a rapids," said Teague.

  "I like that," said Pete. "These carts are boats, the freeway's a river, and the overpasses are waterfalls."