The Beyonders

by Manly Wade Wellman

  "Look out the way," he warned Gander Eye. "This here stuff could eat the soles right off your shoes."

  With the utmost knowledgeable caution he drew the stopper from one bottle and leaned above the saucer to pour acid, drop by drop. He reclosed the bottle and squinted for a moment. He took a nail and probed the fragment. Then he opened the other bottle and dripped liquid from it in turn. A biting odor rose in the room. Again Bo used the nail to poke, and held it up.

  "Looky there at the point," he invited. "That there acid sure enough works on iron, but it ain t grabbing onto your little piece of stuff any."

  Gander Eye extended a cautious hand.

  "I done told you, don't let that acid touch you," reminded Bo sharply. "Here, let me put in some water to sort of thin it out."

  He did so, then poked the bit of metal back upon the flattened paper.

  "I'd be apt to call it gold, Gander Eye," he said soberly. "How much of it you got around?"

  "I told you, not much," replied Gander Eye, folding the paper and tucking it back in his shirt pocket.

  "You don't need any great much. An ounce of gold is worth near about two hundred dollars these times." Bo thinned a smile at Gander Eye. "You don't act like a fellow about to tell his choice friends anything. But if you've found a gold mine somewheres, I want to partner with you to work it."

  Gander Eye flashed a smile in return as he shook his head. "No, son, I ain't found no gold mine. Just a piece of it, is all."

  Bo was back at the shelf of bottles. He brought down a fruit jar.

  "I don't expect it's too early in the day for me and you to take a drink for old time's sake."

  "I'll drink with you," said Gander Eye, "but I ain't telling you no more than what I've done told you already." He took the jar and tipped it up. "Poor old Duffy," he changed the subject. "I'll banter you he'd enjoy to have a good whet of this."

  "Peggy wouldn't even let him dream about it," said Bo, drinking in turn.

  They walked out into the yard again. James Crispin was walking down from Longcohr's store, a paper sack of groceries under his arm. Gander Eye hailed him and trotted to fall into step with him.

  "How did you fare at the Kimber baptizing last night?" Gander Eye inquired.

  "It was tremendously impressive, I thought," said Crispin. "It was like something before history, when mankind was working harder to respond to the mystic. They baptized a beautiful young girl."

  "Shoo, is that a fact?" Gander Eye pursed his lips. "I'd have enjoyed to have been there and seen that."

  "Probably you would have, but I'm an artist," smiled Crispin. "An artist thinks of the human bodv as something worth painting, interpreting. That's all."

  "Shoo," said Gander Eye again. "I ain't going to buy that, Jim, about artists or either doctors looking at a pretty naked girl as no more than a business proposition."

  "You'll have to ask Doc Hannum about how doctors feel. I'm just an artist, I can't speak for any other profession." Crispin gazed far away, as though toward the distant settlement of the Kimbers. "I'm going to paint that baptism scene. Captain Kimber told me I couldn't bring my paints there, but he also said he could hardly stop me from doing whatever work I wanted to do at home. That sounds more or less like permission, wouldn't you say?"

  Crispin had a natural gift for getting whatever he wanted, Gander Eye reflected. They reached the road to the bridge and Crispin's cabin beyond. There they paused.

  "Tell me just one true thing, Jim," said Gander Eye, "Did them Kimbers or anybody give you some sort of present?"

  "They gave Slowly and me one of the best dinners I ever ate. They had deer meat, roasted in a pot buried underground like baked beans—"

  "Sure enough, I know. The Kimbers will feed you good if they like you. But I meant a present of some kind."

  "Why, no," said Crispin, "and I certainly didn't expect anything of that kind."

  Gander Eye started again along the street toward home. Crispin turned to cross the bridge and go to his own cabin. He opened the door, and . . . "Where did you come from?" he stammered.

  Struve sat in the front room, grinning harshly. He had turned on the television and was watching a morning newscast of weather throughout the nation. "Out of the nowhere into the here," he replied easily. "That's what it said about a cute little baby, in a poem back in about the third reader. But you shouldn't yell out like that. Your neighbors might come poking around to see what there was to yell about."

  Crispin came in, closed the door behind him, and set down his bag of groceries. "All right," he said. "I've been up to the Kimber settlement. I was there last night. I watched them baptizing. No stranger has ever seen that before."

  "But you're not a complete stranger, are you?" mocked Struve. "I've always understood that you were of the authentic Kimber blood. Anyway, it was bound to be managed out all right. You were given the words to say to them that would let them know you're here for a specific purpose."

  "Yes," said Crispin. "When I talked to Captain Kimber, I put the code words into what I said."

  He sat down, too. Struve looked him over wryly, as though choosing a place to stab him with a needle.

  "The time's beginning to get short, and we've got lots of work to do here," said Struve. "That Kimber place isn't enough of a base for the day it happens. Here in this little town, Sky Notch, things have got to be made ready for action. People here have got to be in a mood of acceptance, even welcome. What have you been doing to bring that about?"

  He squinted and crinkled the grained, swarthy skin of his heavy jaws. "How about what's-his-name, His Honor the Mayor of this little narrow place off the main road?"

  "Derwood Ballinger," said Crispin. "He's the sort that could be persuaded to anything that he thought was profitable, but it would take some telling to make him believe it."

  "Then it will be up to us to show him. But what real friends have you made?"

  "Gander Eye Gentry and Doc Hannum and several others," replied Crispin. "They're an independent set of people."

  "Independent," said Struve after him. "Then they'll have to be persuaded of the error of independent ways. See here, my friend, those others are going to need considerable help to come in. If they get that help, they'll be grateful. Maybe they've already been grateful to that one you call Gander Eye, if he's the black-haired man who plays the banjo."

  "That's who he is," said Crispin. "What do you mean about being grateful to him?"

  "Just generosity," Struve drawled out slowly. He extended a hand and shut off the television. "Just putting him on the payroll, so to speak. Gold doesn't look bad to any man, and they've got a lot of that on hand. If they've taken him over, they'll take over the others, too. This Sky Notch place will be good base of operations for them and for people like you and me, running things for them."

  Crispin looked at the floor. Struve yawned and stretched.

  "It isn't a bad little backwater, at that," he went on. "I'm beginning to see its rustic charm. Why don't I just move in here with you and get to know some of these folks better?"

  "No you don't, Struve."

  "I don't?" Struve's eyes glittered. "I happen to be the one who says yes and no."

  "I mean you'd spoil things. And don't glare at me, you know you'd spoil things."

  Struve got to his feet. He laughed silently, a quaking laugh.

  "Granted," he said. "I might do just that. But I'll keep looking in on you all the time. I told you we're getting close to D-Day for the Others. We'd better not keep them waiting."

  He strolled off through the back of the house and out among the trees behind, where nobody could see him.

  Crispin thought, silently and soberly and to some purpose. At last he went out the front door and crossed the bridge and headed for Gander Eye's little green house.

  He knocked at the door and waited. No sound within. After several moments he walked around the house. There was Gander Eye, down at the creek. As Crispin watched, Gander Eye threw something that struck the wat
er with a bright splash, then turned and came back through the yard. He saw Crispin and lifted a hand in greeting.

  "How you, Jim?" he called. "Glad to see you. Come in the house and stay a week."

  Crispin sat down on the back stoop, and Gander Eye came to sit with him.

  "What were you throwing away, Gander Eye?" Crispin asked.

  "Oh, just something I didn't reckon I wanted."

  Crispin looked at him expectantly, waiting to hear more. But Gander Eye only fished out a cigarette.

  "Nothing of value?" prompted Crispin at last.

  "Not to me, leastways."

  "Nothing of value to anybody?"

  Gander Eye grinned, showing his teeth around the cigarette. "I ain't much studying what other folks might could think was valuable. I just didn't want it. You can say, I don't want it from where it come from."

  "I see," said Crispin, who did see.

  "Well, what you got on your mind?" Gander Eye asked a question in turn. "I'm always glad to see you anyhow, but you must have come over here about something or other."

  "You might say that I was just wondering about what you want out of life," said Crispin, choosing his words carefully. "If you wouldn't be glad to have a lot of money, for instance, and be able to buy good things with it."

  Gander Eye looked at him sidelong. "You come here to offer me such things as that?"

  "Not me, exactly," said Crispin. "It's just that as I get to know you, I sometimes wonder if you don't have a wish for something you haven't got."

  "Sure enough," nodded Gander Eye. "A man's always got that kind of wish. But money wouldn't fetch it for me. I got enough to buy my needs, and I'll tell you I don't need nothing very bad. If I got just three taters in the house I'll tell anybody on this earth to go to hell."

  "I see," said Crispin, seeing again.

  Gander Eye blew a puff of smoke. "All right, Jim. If you ain't here to talk about a lot of money for me that I don't hanker after, what is it? If I can help you, I'll do it."

  He looked levelly at Crispin, who drew a long breath, like somebody making up his mind.

  "I'll tell you about a picture I'm going to make," said Crispin. "As a matter of fact, I've already told you something about it."

  "You're all the time making pretty pictures. Right pretty ones."

  "I mean my ideas of a picture of the Kimber baptism. I can't paint it at their place, I told you, but I can paint it at mine. And I need models—people to pose for me. I was wondering if you wouldn't pose for the figure of the Captain."

  Gander Eye cocked a black brow. "Him and me don't favor one another in looks, no way."

  "It won't be the Captain I'm painting, and I don't particularly want you to look like him," said Crispin. "This will be my own impression of the baptism. Stripped down, you'll have good muscles—"

  "You ain't never seen me with my clothes off."

  "I'm an artist. I can tell that sort of thing."

  Gander Eye pursed his lips. "If you get me for the Captain in the picture, who'll you have for that pretty naked girl?"

  "I'm going to ask Slowly," said Crispin.

  There was a silence, in which even the soft noise of insects and birds seemed stilled.

  "I reckon you mean, you already know how she'd look with her clothes off," said Gander Eye tonelessly.

  "And I reckon you mean you object," said Crispin, daring to smile.

  "Seems to me like as if the only person's got a right to object is Slowly," Gander Eye pronounced. "But look here, I ain't a-going to pose there with her, not both of us together without no clothes on."

  Crispin's smile came out all the way. "That means you've decided to pose. All right, Gander Eye, I'll paint only one of you at a time. All right?"

  "I reckon so."

  "Listen, Gander Eye," Crispin decided to say, "this was once a rich timber-producing part of the country, but has there ever been any mining?"

  "Yes, sir, there still is. They dig up some bauxite and talc, here and there and yonder a little copper."

  "Anything else?" asked Crispin. "Silver . . . gold?"'

  Gander Eye laughed merrily. "Once I remember seeing in the Bible, gold is where you find it. And I expect you can find it one place another hereabouts, if you want to stand up to your butt in cold water, all day and all year, washing it out in a little tin pan. You might could even make day wages thataway, but it's hard work and it's sure enough not for me, I do thank you."

  "You don't make it sound at all profitable," said Crispin. "Well, I'd better be getting on. I want to work on some preliminary details of my baptism picture."

  "Don't go rushing off, Jim."

  But Crispin went trudging away to his own cabin. He was glad that Struve was not there. He sat down with a drawing block and a soft pencil and began sketching experimentally. He seemed to work idly, but what he did made a composition. He blocked out a sinewy, bearded figure, its right hand raised high. Opposite that, he drew a naked woman with hair flowing to her shoulders, and in the background a whole cross-hatched press of onlookers. But he did not like it, tore off the sheet, and crumpled it and threw it into the soapbox that served him for a wastebasket. Out he walked again, and saw Slowly on Main Street, wearing a green-and-blue print dress and canvas shoes. She carried several letters in her hand, bringing them to Doc's door.

  Crispin quickened his steps to meet her at the edge of the yard. "Slowly," he said, "I still think that the baptism was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. I told you, I want to paint a scene like that."

  "Yes, sir," she said. "I heard you say that, Mr. Jim."

  "I wish you'd call me just Jim." Crispin gazed at a light in her hair, opened his lips, closed them, and opened them again. "About my picture, the one I want to paint. I was talking to Gander Eye. He said he'd pose for the figure of the Captain at the baptizing."

  "Yes?" said Slowly.

  "And I wish you'd pose, too. For the girl being baptized."

  "Without any clothes on?"

  "Just the upper part of you, as if you were waist deep in the water," he made haste to say. "And Gander Eye won't be there. You and he will pose at different times." He spoke persuasively. "I'm an artist, Slowly. Beauty is my business, and you're beautiful."

  "You keep saying that," she reminded him.

  "I say it because it's the truth. And you belong in my picture, Slowly."

  "I don't know, Mr. Jim."

  "Just Jim, please," Crispin pleaded again. "You say you don't know. When will you know? I don't want to plague you, high-pressure you about it, but—"

  "Let me study it over a spell. Let me figure on it," she said.

  "You aren't afraid of me, Slowly, are you? Afraid of anything I might do?"

  "No." She shook her head, and the hair stirred. "I'm not afraid of you, not a hooter."

  "Then I'll wait for your decision, and abide by it."

  He turned on his heel and went back to his cabin. Slowly walked to Doc's door. Doc was inside, and thanked her for bringing the mail.

  "I thought some of doing spareribs for noon dinner," said Slowly. "They got some good ones in at Longcohrs. How would those suit you and Mr. Jim?"

  "Splendidly, you can bet," said Doc. "Fetch them in when you come. And there's a can of kraut here to go with them."

  Slowly went out again, turned downhill on Main Street, and headed for her own living quarters. That little shedlike addition to the school building had been called the teacherage, back when Sky Notch had had Miss Barnett to teach the school. It was red-painted to harmonize with the old brick of the wall against which it lay. Inside, there were two rooms, as neatly kept as an officer's quarters aboard a ship. The front room held a small sofa, two chairs, a bookshelf. Some of the books were Little Women, a translation of Candide, a paperback Tender Is the Night, a poetry anthology called New Voices. There were also two or three detective novels, a dictionary, and a school mathematics textbook. All of these had belonged to Miss Barnett.

  Slowly walked through and
into the rear room. This was fitted up as a bedroom, with cot and bureau. One end of it was partitioned off for a bathroom. Slowly stood on the old rag rug and thought about things.

  She had never been baptized into the Kimber belief, she had been too young for that when she left the settlement to live with Miss Barnett in Sky Notch. But she had seen baptisms, and she understood Crispin's half-awed enthusiasm. In her mind she seemed to hear the singing voices again, to see the lights of the lanterns and torches and their reflected brightness on the dark water.

  After some moments, she reached behind her and unfastened the zipper at the back of the green-and-blue dress and carefully drew it upward over her head. She put it on the cot and took off her slip. Again reaching behind her back, she unhooked her brassiere and laid it on the dress. Dressed only in panties and shoes, she faced around toward the mirror on the wall.

  Miss Barnett had prized that mirror. It was four feet high and about a foot and a half broad, and if you stood just right you could see all of yourself in it at once. Slowly studied her image with appraising eyes.

  Her hair had been tumbled by pulling the dress and slip over it, but not much. She surveyed the splendor of her nakedness. It was pale where no sun had touched it since swimming time last summer. And her breasts were almost white, softly modelled globes with budlike points of pink. She drew a breath, and they stirred. Her shoulders were straight and her arms tapered. Her collarbones were so smoothly fleshed that she could barely see their outlines. Well-fleshed, she was well-fleshed, but with no loose, bubbly fat anywhere. She was looking at herself as maybe she had never looked at herself before.

  Maybe James Crispin was right. Maybe Duffy used to be right when he said she was lovelier than anything on earth, when he used to bless God for creating her. Maybe fellows loafing down at the county seat, or others she'd seen the few times she'd been in Asheville, maybe they truly meant it when they whistled at her and squinched up their faces. She never paid they any mind, never acted as if she knew they were alive or dead. But they always paid her plenty of mind. Maybe she was beautiful.