Читать книгу How Fire Runs - Charles Dodd White - Страница 8

SIX MEN arrive at the abandoned asylum on a late March evening. They pull the pair of moving vans into the deep bend of the horseshoe drive beyond the hemlocks, bail out of their cabs, and release the rear trailer doors. The metal shivers, rattles, and slams. Ramps drop from above both bumpers, slap the ground like heavy tongues. If the men communicate at all, it is in some crude agreement of murmur and gesture. Nothing precisely said. Just brusque sound drawn from the throat’s center.

Darkness falls, but the men do not pause in their work. They strap headlamps around their skulls and carry box after box into the halls of the building. Beams of light dance and scrawl over the brick walls, the Doric columns, the pediment. At the men’s bright glances, broken windows glimmer. Yet the dimensions within remained unexplored because even these men fear the stories of those mad who had been quartered there and they will not cross certain lines. The boxes and larger furnishings mount in the front hall until there is nothing more to unload.

When the trucks are emptied, they stand and smoke cigarettes, loiter with their personal kits and sleeping bags. They consider the advantage of indoors, but settle on a fire and the softest ground they can find. Even so, they keep an unofficial watch, sense the dark pull of something they will not admit. The fire never dies. It shapes itself against the living faces. They find their voices, use them as they would something they do not fully trust.

They used to drown them, one says.

Bullshit.

No, I heard the same. They took the wild ones down to the Watauga. Had a bunch of blacks down from Knoxville do their dirty work. Held them under. Was supposed to separate the ones that were truly crazy from the ones that only pretended.

Why the hell would you pretend something like that?

Because they was crazy, I guess.

You understand how little sense you make?

That’s what I’ve heard said, is all.

None sleep, though they do zip themselves into the mummy bags and shut their eyes for a time, let the gray dawn find them. After a breakfast of bacon and toast cooked over a Coleman camp stove, they divide their labor. Half move the boxes and furniture into the separate rooms. The others spell one another with a pair of posthole diggers, root out a place at the end of the drive fronting the gravel road. By midmorning they accomplish their depth and assemble a metal piece twenty feet long and big around as a girl’s wrist. Amid a flutter of curses, they settle the pole into the ground, pour in the sludge of hand-mixed concrete and brace it to settle. They take turns holding the staff and staring up the clean stroke of metal pointing toward the sky.

Once the pole can stand on its own they bring lumber down from the trucks, begin to nail pre-cut boards together and then paint them. After everything dries they carry the assemblage with great care and nail it to the trunk of a poplar tree. They do not hurry. They desire symmetry, precision. They desire impact.

When’s he supposed to get here?

Soon, I think.

Should we put it up then?

Yeah, go ahead and run that sucker to the top.

One takes the flag and snaps it to the halyards. It balls and bunches and cracks free in the crosswind. They all look up and salute, sing their patriotic song. Above them a red-tailed hawk wars with an echelon of crows. A good omen, they decide.

Not long after, the man they wait for arrives. He is middle-aged and handsome with thin golden hair and abstracted eyes. He has not driven. He has a man for that. He has men for everything he has dreamed and conjured here in the Tennessee woods.

He beholds it all now and smiles. He smiles at the lacquered sign with its simple and pure statement. He smiles up at the red flag and its brave insignia. He has brought this here. It cannot be undone. Their words match his heart, and he smiles again as they shout with a hoarse fury that sounds like joy.

Sieg Heil.