Free A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

“Don’t take that tone with me. I knew your mother, you little peckerwood.”
    Keep still, Travis thought desperately. He focused his eyes on a 1929 calendar, picture of a little girl, gingham dress, field of daisies. The sky in the picture was a deep and impossible Kodak blue, almost turquoise.
    “Travis?” Creath grinned broadly. “She was a whore, Travis.”
    So many daisies.
    “You understand what I’m saying? She fucked for money, Travis.”
    You could get lost in that blue.
    “She fucked strangers for money, Travis, and I know about it, and Liza knows about it, and the Baptist Women know about it, and I guess by this time just about every dumb shit in town knows about it. You hear me, Travis? She—”
    “Shut your mouth.” He couldn’t help it. His head was spinning.
    Creath stood up, and his grin widened into something truly awful, a jack-o’-lantern smirk of triumph. “No, you poor ignorant whoreson, you shut your mouth, how about that?”
    Travis raised his foot and kicked the old pine-board desk so that it racked backward across the floor.
    Creath fell forward, flailing into a stack of yellow invoices. Travis watched a moment as his uncle struggled up, cursing; then he turned, restraining a rage that ran in him like blood; he yanked open the door. His hand rested momentarily on the lower of the two keyrings, the one on which Creath carried the key to the truck.
    Well, why not? He had lost his job, had probably lost his room at the Buracks’—had lost all there was to lose in this town.
    His fist curled around the keyring.
    He left his uncle grunting in the heat.
    Nancy Wilcox knew as soon as Travis came through the door that something was terribly wrong. It was the afternoon, for one thing, that lull between lunch and dinner when the grill was allowed to cool and at least a little breath of wind stirred the tepid air of the diner. Travis should have been at work. He should not have been driving his uncle’s black Ford pickup, parked now on a crazy diagonal outside. And if that were not enough, she could tell there’d been trouble just from the look of him: his hair ratty and tangled, his eyes squeezed shut as if against some unbearable vision.
    She surprised herself by thinking, Now it begins. She had sensed in Travis even that first day in July a tremor of wild energy, pent up, volatile as a blasting cap. And maybe that was what had drawn her to him, that wildness. He was like a freight train carrying her down some dangerous track and away from her childhood. Now it begins.
    She untied her apron—her fingers trembled— and said, “Travis?”
    “Come and talk,” he said. “I need to talk to somebody.”
    She nodded and put the apron on a stool. The only customer, an unemployed bank clerk spooning mechanically at a bowl of Campbell’s soup, gazed at her in mute incomprehension.
    “Back by dinner, Mr. O’Neill!” she called out, and moved to leave before O’Neill, the owner, could stir himself from the kitchen. Maybe she would lose her job. Probably she would. But that was part of it. She would shed all that: job, town, her mother, respectability. Become some new thing. The bell tinkled behind her as she eased the door closed.
    They drove down The Spur toward the railway tracks.
    “I followed her last night,” Travis said. Far out this old dirt road he pulled over. The tracks lay baking in the Indian-summer heat, oily and bright. His voice was hoarse. “Followed her up here.”
    Nancy nodded. “What happened?”
    “I don’t know.” He frowned and shook his head as if there were some dream there he could not dislodge. “She watched a train go by. I fell asleep. I guess that’s all that really happened. But it seemed like —” He looked pleadingly at her. “Like she talked to me. Said that something big was on the way, and she was at the center of it, and she needed my help. And in a way it was like I said yes, gave her my promise. Ah, Jesus. I don’t know how to say