THAT SAME NIGHT, Sugar arrived at the bridge leading over into Kentucky. He walked through the tunnel in a soupy fog so thick he could barely see his hand in front of his swollen nose. The midnight air was chilly and damp. Coming out on the other side, he nearly ran straight into a group of white men seated around a campfire just a few feet from the railroad tracks. They were passing a bottle around and laughing at something that had just been said. One of them looked up and saw Sugar trying to slip past undetected and yelled at him to halt. Several leaped up and pointed shotguns and rifles at the dark figure half-crouched in the shadows at the edge of the firelight. “Shit, it’s just some nigger,” one of them said.
“Come over here, boy,” a rough voice commanded. There were at least a dozen men around the fire, and they all carried weapons of some sort, including a crossbow and an antique blunderbuss left over from the Pilgrim days. His chances of surviving a run for it, he calculated, were next to nil. He straightened up and walked over to them slowly. Saddles and bedrolls and other gear were scattered here and there. The smell of meat sizzling in a skillet wafted through the air, and he became aware of just how empty and worn-out his body had become in the week or so since Flora had kicked him out. This evening he had dined on a moldy melon and a handful of dried peas. His eyes searched out the bottle, and he watched a brown-toothed country boy stick the neck of it halfway down his throat and guzzle like he was drinking springwater.
“Where ye comin’ from?” an older man with a beard asked. He was barefoot and seated on a stool by the fire. An antique hat of some sort, adorned with a couple of long, dirty feathers, sat upon his head at a cocky angle.
“Across the way there,” Sugar answered nervously, pointing back toward Ohio.
“Where ye headed?”
“Shadesville. It’s over by—”
“We know where fuckin’ Shadesville is, nigger,” another man said.
“What was ye doin’ in Ohio?” the bearded man asked.
“Working,” Sugar said.
“Thieving’s more like it, Captain,” said a fattish boy named Bill Dolly. He had the soft, hairless skin and flushed, jiggling jowls of a child. The biggest disappointment of his life so far had been, in fact, his life so far; and like so many other white do-nothings, luckless simpletons, and paranoid crackpots, he was convinced that somehow the black race was the root cause of all his miserable failures. “I ain’t never seen one that didn’t like to steal.”
“What the hell happened to yer nose? Was ye in a fight?”
“No,” Sugar said. “A bee stung me.”
“Come closer,” Captain said. “Hayfield, show him that poster.”
As Sugar stepped into the full light of the fire, a man with a metal hook for a hand unfolded a dirty leaflet with his teeth and held it up to him. Though the drawings on the paper were crudely rendered at best, he immediately recognized the three cowboys he had encountered along the road. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Sugar said. He could make out only a few of the words, but he’d seen enough wanted posters in Detroit to figure out that someone was offering $5,500 for the bastards, dead or alive.
“What?” Captain said. “You saw them?”
“I sure did,” Sugar said. “They stole my hat and tried to kill me.” He took another look at the poster, then added, “Took all my money, too.”
Some of the men began talking excitedly among themselves and Captain raised his hand to silence them. “When?” he asked.
“Two days ago.”
“He’s a-lying, Captain,” Dolly said. “Them Jewetts don’t try to kill anyone. Shit, they even shot down one of them aeroplanes.” Several standing near him concurred with vague mumblings.
“No,” Sugar protested. “I swear.”
“Where would this have been?” Captain said.
“Outside a town called Meade. ’Bout forty mile or so north of here.”
“But that don’t make no sense,” a voice in the shadows said. “Why in the hell would someone want a nigger’s hat?”
“It was a nice hat,” Sugar said defensively.
“Lawd God, those sonsofbitches must be worse than we thought,” another said.
“Don’t believe it, boys,” said Dolly. “A nigger will lie when the truth fits better. They can’t help it. It’s in their blood.”
“I ain’t a-lying, I swear.”
“But just supposing,” said another man, a tobacco farmer by the name of Cloyd Atkins, “what he’s saying is true. Why, if’n it is, and they’re in Ohio, there’s no way we’ll ever catch them now.”
“I swear,” Sugar said. “They was the men on your paper.”