The Man in the Tree

by Damon Knight

  "You're just spinning the wheels," the giant shouted in his ear. "Try forward. Hurry up!"

  Larry slammed the gearshift lever into first. It was a moment before he realized that he had killed the engine again. He felt dizzy, and it was hard to focus his eyes: he was trembling all over. He got the engine started, let the clutch out and stepped on the gas. Nothing happened, except that the cab shuddered and slewed a little.

  "Oh, God!" said Larry. His voice was stifled inside his head by the unending, maddening roar. He jammed the gas pedal down, again and again. The idiot lights went on; he had killed the engine once more. He reached for the start button, but the giant's hand covered his. "Don't," said the voice in his ear. "The exhaust stacks must be covered by now. Leave it off."

  "What?" he said. "I don't -- Oh, God, oh, God!" He wrenched his hand away, grabbed the steering wheel and tried to shake it, then thought of the door handle and reached for it, but it would not move. The giant's arm came around him, pinning him to the seat. "Easy," said the voice. "Easy. Take it easy."

  The roar went on echoing unbearably in the cab, like an avalanche, a river of stone; darkness hurried past the windshield, the side windows."Easy!" Larry said. "Oh, God!" His mouth wouldn't work right, and when he wiped it with his sleeve, he found that his face was wet with tears.

  Bits of the solid darkness were bounding upward from the hood. Larry stared uncomprehendingly; then he saw the edge of the black mass creeping up from the bottom of the windshield. It was rising all around them. Coal! They were being buried in coal! He screamed and fought, but the giant would not let him go.

  Remorseless as sand in an hourglass, the darkness rose over the windshield. Now there was only a narrow stripe at the top where the black torrent was still falling. Now even that was gone. In the yellow dome light, the windshield and side windows were masked by a solid layer of tiny gray-glistening bits of coal. The sound had changed; it was more furious than ever on the roof, but muffled all around.

  Then there was another change: the roar of the falling coal was receding above their heads, dwindling, distant. At last it stopped. Larry could hear nothing but the painful ringing in his ears. The giant held him firmly. "Listen," he said. "Listen. We're going to get out. You understand me?"

  "Get out," said Larry. He heard how weak his voice was, but he couldn't help it. "How we going to get out?"

  "I'll show you after a while. Right now we have to wait."

  "Wait, why?"

  "Because the man who did this is still out there." He let go of Larry. "Okay now?"

  Larry wiped his face with his sleeve. "You know who did it?"

  "I think so. It's a man who wants to kill me."

  Larry looked at him in wonder. The giant's mouth was set in an expression he could not read: it was not anger or sadness, but something else.

  He could feel his body still trembling; he was cold all the way through, as cold as if he were already dead. Through the ringing in his ears he could feel the silence. There was nothing out there, nothing but stillness; it was like being entombed in the heart of a mountain. After a moment he fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette.

  "Better not," said the giant. "The air."

  "Oh. How long can we -- ?"

  "I don't know. Long enough, but it won't help if we fill the cab with smoke."

  They listened to the silence. The giant said, "You remember that thing that jumped at us? What did it look like?"

  "I dunno. It happened so quick. A dummy, I guess, like a scarecrow."

  "The face? Did you see the face?"

  "Yeah."

  "Was it a kid's face?"

  "Maybe. Yeah, I guess so. Listen, couldn't we break a window -- "

  "The coal would come in."

  "Yeah, but we could pull the coal in and then get out the window.'"

  "Unless there's too much coal. Even if there isn't, I told you, the man who did this is still out there. We've got to wait."

  "How long?"

  "Till he goes away."

  "Okay, if you say so." Larry fidgeted. "I gotta piss," he said, and clamped his knees together. "Oh, Jesus."

  "Is there a bottle or something?"

  He remembered the Coke bottle, reached for it, and unzipped his pants. It was hard to direct the stream through the narrow neck of the bottle; some of it ran down outside and some sprayed. He offered the half-full bottle to the giant. "Do you want -- ?"

  "No, I'll wait." Suddenly the giant raised his head. "He's gone."

  "You sure?"

  "Yes."

  "What do we do now?"

  "Wait awhile, just to make sure he doesn't come back."

  After a moment Larry heard himself saying, "There was a story we read in school, the cask of something -- "

  "'The Cask of Amontillado'?"

  "Yeah, that was it. Where they wall up this guy in the cellar?"

  "'For the love of God, Montresor.' I remember."

  "Yeah, when he put in the last brick. That scared the hell out of me."

  "Try not to think about it."

  "Some kids locked me in a closet once, when I was little."

  "Where was that, in Cleveland?"

  "Yeah. I can remember how it smelled in there. Kind of dead air. Ever since then -- "

  "What did your folks do?"

  "My old man's an engineer with the power company. He was sore when I dropped out of school Then he wanted me to volunteer for the army. Listen, it's getting real hard to breathe in here. Can you really do it, because if you can for God's sake will you do it?"

  "All right." The giant turned away and put his hands on the window.

  "That's jammed," Larry said.

  "I know it. Shut up a minute."

  Larry waited. After a few moments he heard a curious rustling sound. He leaned to look past the giant's body, and saw with disbelief that the particles of coal were sliding down past the window.

  The giant let his head hang for a moment, took a deep breath, and straightened again. The rustling sound resumed. Suddenly a shaft of pale light came in at the top of the window. It was the most beautiful and unexpected thing Larry had ever seen. It widened into a wedge-shape, expanding slowly and steadily. "What are you doing?" he whispered.

  "Getting rid of the coal," said the giant. He lowered his. head for a moment, raised it again. The wedge of daylight steadily widened; Larry could see now that a funnel was forming in the coal beyond the door, particles pouring down the sides as if they were falling into a hole somewhere.

  The giant opened the door and stepped out. Larry followed him. They were in a semicircular hollow space; beyond it the coal was still heaped chest-high. The buildings around them were silent and almost shadowless in the morning light; the sky was a pale greenish blue, and the air was scented with moisture. Larry filled his lungs again and again, experiencing the incredible fact that he was alive.

  The giant was climbing the slope. Larry scrambled up after him on hands and knees, got over the top and down the other side.

  The giant was a few yards away, staring at the front of the mound. After a moment Larry saw what he was looking at: a thin copper wire hung from a stairway on the hopper almost to the mound of coal. Another piece, not attached to anything, lay in loops on the road. "That's where he hung the dummy," the giant said. "He must have taken it away again. I was hoping it was still here."

  He turned, and they walked around to the back. The mound of coal covered all but the last five feet of the trailer. The giant turned long enough to say, "See if you can find a shovel. They must have some around for cleanup."

  When he came back with the shovel, the giant was standing at the side of the mound. Directly in front of him, Larry could see that a little funnel-shaped space had formed high on the slope, exposing the top of the door. As he watched, the funnel deepened abruptly. There was a pause, and it deepened again.

  The giant looked around and saw him. "Dig," he said.

  "It'll take me all day to shovel this. Why can't you -- " />
  "I can't do much at a time. Shut up and dig."

  By the time they had cleared the door, it was full daylight. Sweat was dripping from Larry's chin; the giant looked haggard and ill. Inside, the lighted interior of the trailer was like a room in a cave. The giant climbed in slowly, took off his robe and began to dress. When he was finished, he wandered around the trailer and put a few things in his pockets, then took a suitcase out of the storage space under the bed. "Let's go."

  "Aren't you going to put anything in that?"

  "No, it doesn't matter."

  Out in the road, the giant put the suitcase down. "This had better be good-bye. I can't go back to the carnival, and I wish you wouldn't either, because that's the first place he'll look. It would be easy enough for him to find out you were my driver. You understand?" He took some bills out of his pocket and handed them to Larry. "Take this and buy yourself a car, or get on the train and go wherever you want. And by the way, if there's anything in the trailer you want, help yourself."

  "What are you going to do?"

  The giant smiled faintly. "I'm going to find a place in the woods to sleep for about eight hours. After that -- it's better if you don't know. Good luck to you, Larry." He turned and walked away.

  Larry looked at the money in his hand. The first bill was a hundred dollars, and so was the next, and the next . . . there were thirty of them. When he looked up, the giant was already out of sight around the curve of the road.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In October of that year Gene Anderson landed in Le Havre, where he joined Le Cirque Tripp, a small traveling circus and sideshow. During the next few years he moved often from one circus or carnival to another; by the time he was twenty-six he had visited every country in Europe. He changed his professional name many times. in Great Britain he was John Livingston; in France, Belgium, and Holland, Peter Owen, le géant gallois; in Italy and Greece, Robert Lee. In his twenty-sixth year he grew only half an inch: he was then eight feet four inches tall.

  On a post at the side of his booth Anderson always taped a little card with the names of his childhood pen-pals on it: Gerd Heilbrunner, Claudina Neri, Yves Morand. One day in Paris, a woman said to him, "Why do you have my name on your card?"

  He looked at her intently. She was blond, slender, erect, with a thin aristocratic nose: not pretty but handsome. "Are you Claudina Neri?"

  "I was. Who are you?."

  "Gene Anderson. We used to correspond. I'm very glad to meet you."

  She put her hand in his and withdrew it. "My God!" she said. "I had forgotten, I was a girl at school. Let me think, you lived in -- what was it, Washington?"

  "Oregon."

  "You never told me you were a giant."

  "I wasn't one then."

  Two people were holding up photographs for him to sign. Claudina Neri wrote something on a card and handed it to him. "This is where I am staying. Come and see me."

  They met the next morning at her hotel. Her name was Faure now. Her husband was Belgian; she had married when she was eighteen. They lived in Antwerp; she came to Paris once or twice a year for the shopping. There was also a villa in Nice, and she spoke of frequent trips to Rome, Florence, Athens. Her father was Italian, her mother German; she spoke French, English, Italian, German, Spanish.

  "You are an extraordinary person," she told him at breakfast. "It is wrong of you to be so ignorant."

  "I didn't have your advantages," Anderson said.

  "If you mean the convent school, it was purgatory for me. I tried twice to commit suicide before I was sixteen. I was educated by force. You must educate yourself. Read, learn, think."

  She made him speak French and corrected his mistakes; she also criticized his table manners. "A polite person does not use his fork like a shovel, to scoop food into his mouth, nor use his fingers to push food onto his fork."

  They spent three mornings together before the circus left for Orléans, and after that Anderson saw her nearly every year. She seldom spoke of her husband, and Anderson met him only once, in the summer of 1968: a dark-haired man with pomaded hair, whose manners were almost too exquisite. She took him to the Louvre, which he disliked, and to the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie, where he found all the Impressionists whose work was still excluded from the Louvre. He discovered, however, that very good postcard reproductions of Monet and van Gogh were for sale in the gift shop of the Louvre; he bought stacks of these and carried them with him for years.

  They went to Notre Dame de Paris, in whose vast shadowy vault the rose windows stared down like celestial mandalas. Anderson was moved beyond speech. A woman near them was talking loudly and angrily in German.

  "Everyone hates the Germans," Claudina remarked afterward, when they were sitting in the sunlight at a brasserie across the street from the cathedral.

  "Because they invaded France?"

  "No, just because they are Germans."

  Once when she protested that he was paying too much at a restaurant, he said, "Don't worry about the money; I have plenty."

  "More than they pay you in the circus?"

  "Yes."

  "Then why do you stay?"

  "It's a community," he told her. "I'm accepted there; it's almost like having a family."

  "There are other families." She introduced him to artists and writers, to Dubuffet, Genet, Arenas. Some of them became his friends, and gave him notes to people in other places. He bought paintings and sculptures, because he liked them and because he wanted to help the artists; he bought books, more than he could carry with him. He put them in storage, in Paris, Rome, Athens, Berlin. He was spending much more than he earned, and he disliked counterfeiting currency. In Turkey he bought cut diamonds at wholesale, thirty carats in all. He copied them, distributed the copies into bags, copied them again. Three months later, when he was in Amsterdam, he took his diamonds to a dealer.

  "And where did you obtain these diamonds, Mr. Gordon?" the manager asked politely.

  "In Ankara."

  "And do you have an import license for them?"

  "No."

  The manager, a young man, rosy-checked, very well dressed, folded his hands on the table. "In that case, I could not offer you a very good price, I'm afraid."

  "It doesn't matter. I want to sell them."

  The manager stirred the pile of stones with his finger. "One hundred forty thousand guilders."

  After that, he came back at least once a year and sold larger and larger quantities of diamonds. He put his money in numbered accounts in Switzerland. Later he began to invest in stocks and bonds, real estate, precious metals. There were many pleasures in the world for a young man with money; but even as he took them, he thought, 'Is this all?'

  For a few years after Avila's death he had continued to make occasional small wood carvings; then even that had stopped, and he knew now that he had never had a real vocation. He had left everyone he had loved behind him. Although he had many friends, he knew he could get along without any one of them; he was proud of this self-reliance, this invulnerability, and he despised himself for it.

  During the late sixties and early seventies he spent a good deal of time in museums. One of his favorite places was the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, where they had Rubens' huge 'Fall of the Damned' -- all those plump pink bellies and buttocks tumbling through the air like clotted leaves on the wind. Another was the Musée Unterlinden, in Colmar. He kept going back there to see Grünewald's 'Isenheim Altarpiece,' the only Crucifixion that he thought was worth a damn: Christ's body, not afloat in Disneyland like the one in El Greco, with its silly spigot of blood and its loincloth slipping coyly down like the tresses of the Botticelli Venus, and not like van der Weyden's Oriental monarch, lily in one hand, girdle in the other, robe flapping open across his muscular midriff, about to flap further -- God the Great Flasher -- but hanging under the weight of its pain, mouth open in a rictus and the sweat of death on its skin. It was not so much that he wanted to see it but that he could not stay away.

/>   At a party given by a non-objective painter in London, he met a scruffy man named Hamilton who was drawing diagrams on the back of an envelope. "You see, here's the human population in the Middle Ages," he said. "See how it rises very gradually until you get to about seventeen fifty. Now it goes up more steeply. The population in nineteen fifty was about two and a half billion. By the year two thousand, it will be more like six billion."

  The woman on the other side leaned over, spilling her Martini on Hamilton's knee. "Oh, sorry," she said. "But after all, Reggie, what's wrong with six billion people?"

  Hamilton looked at her. "We can't feed that many," he said. "Even if we could, can we feed twice as many? Fifteen billion in twenty fifty? What about twenty-four billion? If we don't reduce our population ourselves, something else will reduce it for us."