SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Nine

47 Nine Sometimes I woke up and realized that the only thing I had moved was my mind. Everything else was stillness, silence. My eyes were closed, motionless in their darkness. Not even my heartbeat broke the faint buzzing in my ears that I have always taken for true silence, the absolute lack of sound that fluttered in my ears. Only my mind seemed to be moving, free to race through my body and limbs with a speed and clarity that full wakefulness would not allow. It was a curious feeling, one that I had often sought in those seconds just after awakening. It was the way I felt now, almost. Almost, because now I could hear the rat. I could hear a small sound, a tiny scratching, a scurrying along the wooden floor, a sound that was almost a whispering. I tried to concentrate on the whispering, but it came and went, quick little shuffling sounds. I lay on the cot in my small room high in the hayloft of Eli’s barn, feeling the dampness seep through the old blankets and into my skin. The room seemed thick with moisture and I thought it was going to rain soon, or maybe already had. I shivered. It was the moisture, I told myself, the wetness that makes everything cold. But maybe it was the rat. Gradually I opened my eyes. As they began to focus I could see the wall on the other side of the room. The faded planks picked up a faint glow from the one small window above my cot, the early morning light made weak by the layer of dust that coated the inside of the glass. The dull light gave the cell-like room a closeness that was even more intense than usual. There was nothing bright in the room, no welcoming spark to cheer a mind struggling up from 48 sleep. The walls and floor were bare wooden planks and the ceiling was tin. The tin was also the roof of the barn, one layer of metal between me and the rain, or me and the sun, or me and the cold. Earlier in the summer I had cut apart some cardboard boxes and tacked the stiff panels to the rafters of the ceiling. Helped to keep out the heat. Some. The room measured approximately four paces by four paces. For furniture, I had a cot, a straight-back cane-bottom chair and an apple crate. In the top of the apple crate were an extra pair of jeans and a clean shirt, things I had been able to buy since coming to work for Eli Rumson, the biggest farmer in Jubal County, Kentucky. In the bottom half of the crate was a worn copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was a strange book. I had found it at Lard’s house and he had given it to me and I had read it all in one weekend. And then I read the last chapter again. And again. Over the years I read it, and each time I was put in another place, my body so packed with strange feelings that I couldn’t breathe. That last chapter. I always tried to read it only when I was alone. Alone, like Robert Jordan. On top of the crate I kept some food, a small store of things to eat when I didn’t feel like going to the house—some crackers, a small jar of peanut butter, part of a loaf of bread. Awakening, I began to work at seeing things in my room, but I could see only shadows. I explored them as best I could, straining my eyes for better views without turning my head. Across from my cot, at the base of the wall, one of the shadows moved a few inches, stopped, then moved again, making its way carefully toward the apple crate. I knew the moving shadow was the rat, a rat nearly as thick as my forearm and easily as long. The rat and I had been playing a game for nearly two weeks. The rat would come into the room through a hole near the door and 49 make a try for the food on the crate. If I were there when the rat came in, I would freeze, motionless, not even blinking my eyes, letting the rat get closer, letting him...