Free Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in) by James McBride Page B

g’wan.”
    Stamps eyed the kid, who lay across Train’s shoulder now, his eyelids fluttering slightly, looking feverish and pale yellow.
    â€œWe got to get this kid to a hospital.”
    â€œI don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no kid,” Train said. He held the boy up high again, the field jacket draped around him like a sacrificial blanket.
    Stamps turned and climbed down from the loft, to where Bishop waited below. “You talk to him while me and Hector take a look around,” he said disgustedly.
    â€œWhy me?”
    â€œYou the one made him lose his grip, man!” Stamps walked away, furious, stepping to the doorway of the barn to reconnoiter the outside, but seeing the forbidding hills and ridges around him, walked no farther than five feet before deciding to reconnoiter from the safety of the blasted-out doorway.
    Bishop dragged his heavy frame up the steps. He approached Train, who sat hunched in a ball in the corner, and stood in front of him, his hands on his hips. Train could see the far wall between Bishop’s legs. He noticed that Bishop’s brand-new boots, which he’d won off Trueheart Fogg in a poker game, were muddy and ruined.
    â€œWhere you going, Sam Train?” Bishop said softly. Train rubbed his hands along his face, his big shoulders heaving slowly as he breathed. He turned to look up at Bishop, whose eyes stared at him like headlights. Even when he was angry, Bishop’s eyes seemed mirthful and sly, like there was a secret between them that only he knew.
    â€œI know you, Bish. You kin talk the horns off the devil’s head. I ain’t fixin’ to go back.”
    â€œI ain’t ask you that. Did I ask you that? I asked you where you was going.”
    Train sighed heavily. “Dunno where I’m going, Bish. I’m ain’t going here no more.”
    Bishop figured he could move this mountain. There was always a way to move a mountain. If he had the time, he could’ve made Sam Train stand up, throw the boy out the window, and carry him, Bishop, all the way down the mountain on his back, clear to division headquarters, all by talking. Talking was his magic. Talking was his balm. But they were in the middle of who knows where, and with Germans around. There wasn’t any time for any fuckin’ magic. Bishop just wanted his money. He took a more direct approach. “Well, we do got to go back,” he said softly.
    â€œI never felt so lonesome in my whole life, Bishop. I been dreaming a lot,” Train said.
    Bishop shot a look over his shoulder to make sure that the loft was empty, then leaned down to talk in a low voice, so the others wouldn’t hear. “Nigger, I ain’t interested in your dreams,” he hissed. “You got my money.”
    â€œI’ll pay you. I ain’t never gone bad on no debt. I knows how to turn invisible now. Want me to show you?”
    Bishop stood up. “Stop talking crazy! We got to go back so’s you can pay me.”
    â€œI can pay you right now. I got something worth more’n fourteen hundred dollars.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    Train held up the head of the statue, the priceless Primavera of Florence, the seventeenth-century prize created by the great Frenchman Pierre Tranqueville, which he’d found in the gutter next to the Arno and couldn’t unload for fifty dollars. In the dim light of the barn loft, the dirty piece of marble looked like a piece of whitened shit.
    Bishop stared at it. “Naw. That’s just a hunk of rock. I wants my cheddar in cash.”
    Train’s brown face wrinkled in confusion. “I don’t understand why I’m heah, Bishop. It’s a mistake. They got the wrong man. I’m staying right in this heah spot till it’s all over.”
    â€œYou can’t do that, Train.”
    â€œWhy not? Nothing the white man say counts out heah. You said that yourself many times.”
    â€œThis little