Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  “What’s this about?” I asked.

  Blix said “What are you about?”

  “I asked first—what’s the powwow?”

  “Who knows? Just think of it as Mystery-of-the-Minute. There’ll be millions more before day—and day may get here before they finish talking.”

  They did seem Biblical now or T. E. Lawrencian, no longer sage and calm—a small knot of shepherds locked in suddenly urgent hassle over some microscopically trivial issue, beneath the sky and the wheeling constellations.

  After Dora’s first statement, the helpful drunk talked most—with raucous lunges from the pregnant girl, now hoarse from retching.

  Blix simply stood, showed no inclination to climb out of mud to the shoulder with me; so I said “Why this honor?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “—Letting me choose our fate—the stranger in your midst.”

  He hadn’t thought but he said at once “I’m tired.”

  “I didn’t sleep either—different reason, remember? And we clearly won’t tonight, whatever she decides.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I could transport us psychokinetically to a motel in Gallup—hot showers, blankets; ready?” I extended wizard arms, as he had earlier.

  “That’s why,” Blix said, “—why I told you to choose, not your magic games but your cool clear head. Frozen—Birdseye Brains.”

  “Meaning what please?”

  “You know,” he said, “—know I think you’re a monster.”

  “What kind please?”

  “There’s only one—the killing kind.”

  “Her?”

  “Yep. You know it.”

  “Not true,” I said.

  “Oh don’t get me wrong; I admire you,” he said, “—envy you your powers, all but worship you.” He bowed, where he stood, deeply from the waist; his right hand touched the mud.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “I’m just a man,” he said.

  And Dora started back toward us. She came to Blix, stopped four feet away and said “We better walk.”

  “On to your grandma’s?”

  “Back home,” she said.

  “Dunder?—that home?”

  “Yep.”

  “Which way?”

  “Back the way we come.”

  Blix said, “That’s miles—eight, nine—just to the highway. By the time we get there, we’ll never catch a ride—it’s not Times Square.”

  “We can’t walk that other way,” she said and again pointed my way, but still not looking.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe too dark.”

  “Can’t one of them lead us?—they walked it this morning.”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “He’s sober by now.” Blix meant the helpful drunk.

  “No he ain’t,” she said.

  I knew, whatever happened, I was in for mud and wet; so I scrambled down finally and walked up between them and asked Dora, “What about your grandma’s then? Can’t we stay there till morning and send for help?”

  She answered to Blix—“No.”

  He actually touched her—reached out and took her wrist in sight of her kin—and said “Why not?”

  She waited, then turned to me as if that were punishment (for her not me), then pointed and quietly said to Blix, “Him.”

  “He’s my friend,” Blix said. “He won’t hurt you.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I won’t never let him but my brother and them other people say No.”

  “No what?” Blix said.

  “They say they ain’t sleeping nowhere he sleeps.”

  “—And they sleep at your grandma’s?”

  She said “I guess so,” yielding one more lie.

  Blix seemed prepared to leave it at that. He opened one hand and jingled his keys, then walked to the passenger door and opened it, then looked back to me and said, “You need anything out of here before I lock it?”

  “No,” I said. What I needed now of course—if we were abandoning, striking for the road—was reasons why the drunks had refused only me. I stepped back a little from Dora—not to press her—and said “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  Blix had gone round to lock the other side.

  “They think you some kind of witch or something.”

  I looked toward them.

  With Blix’s taillights off, they were now all dark, standing close and waiting silently—for Dora, I guessed; to receive their own, however damaged.

  “Why would they think that?” I said.

  She shrugged, know-nothing.

  “You told them something?”

  Blix had returned, stood back and watched us.

  “Yep,” she said.

  “Then I want to know what please.”

  “—Your wife shoot herself.” She took a step toward Blix; he gave no answering step or touch.

  “And that makes me a witch?”

  “They say so, yep. “

  Blix said as calmly as a Hollywood doctor, “They think you’ll be followed by her ghost, at night.”

  I puffed out something midway between a laugh and an incredulous gasp. Then I said, “I am. That’s between me and her though. She won’t harm them—you either, I guess.”

  “Just him,” Blix said to Dora.

  She accepted that as true, nodded to us both.

  Blix looked to me. “We’d better start for the road then.”

  “Toward Gallup?” I said.

  “The way we came—we know that much.”

  I computed it again—eight miles of this mud (not a single waystation); then the Zuni-Gallup road by, say, midnight; rush-hour in the desert, The hope of hitching a ride to Gallup—twenty more miles. Then—what? by bus to Dunder? Well, adventure. “Pray for clouds,” I said.

  Blix looked up at our greenhouse-dome. “They’ll break,” he said. “With me along, they’ll clear in no time and then—Labrador!”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  He pointed to the truck. “I checked a map. Are you ready?—Remnant Mesa, just south of Remnant Mesa. Øremnant shall remain.’”

  “Who?” I asked.

  He turned to Dora. “Who are you going with?”

  Had she decided? Was it automatic yet? She waited ten seconds, looking at the dark ground. “You and him,” she said.

  So I was included. Odd—why? To show she didn’t fear me? didn’t countenance my powers or my hauntedness? Or maybe that she did— ranked me with her snake as a cause of woe—but was tolerating me as a necessary adjunct to her time with Blix? One more landmine in the field she must walk. I asked what Blix wouldn’t—“Do they know? Do they mind?”

  She nodded to me. “I tell them.” But she kept her place.

  Blix at last said, “You’ll tell them or you’ve told them already?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Already.”

  We both—Blix and I—looked toward them then.

  They were still in the dark at the front of Dora’s truck, twenty feet away, between us and the road. They stood close and silent; even the girl had recovered and stood straight and still, her blanket tight round her.

  Blix said “Where are they going?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They live round here.”

  Blix said “Why are they waiting?”

  She only shrugged.

  I laughed and said, “Do they ever kill witches?”

  Dora said “Yep.”

  Blix said “At intervals.” Then he asked Dora, “Anything else to tell them?”

  “I ain’t talking to them.”

  “We’re off then,” Blix said and took the first step.

  The drunks stood in place.

  “Blix. Wait,” I said. Oddly, I’d thought of the trucks—no one else had seemed to.

  He and Dora stopped, looked back.

  “What about all this hardware?”

  “It’ll wait,” Blix s
aid. “There’s a motorpool in Gallup. They’ll tow mine in.”

  “Dora’s?”

  “It’s OK,” she said. They started again.

  “We’re blocking traffic,” I said.

  “Whiz, whiz,” Blix said. “Walk-to-left-facing-traffic.” His next three steps were a bobbing-weaving dance as he threaded Broadway.

  The helpful drunk stepped forward from his group.

  “You’re fired,” I said.

  Blix didn’t turn; Dora followed him.

  “Blix, you were fired this afternoon. The VISTA SPY turns out to have teeth.”

  That stopped him, turned him. He walked three steps back toward me, past Dora. “I forgot him.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “He came by, did he?”

  “—And got an eyeful. And left you a message.”

  “What was the eyeful?”

  “Dora at her post—the bedroom door.”

  “What was the message?”

  “Wait—he also got an earful.”

  “Who from?”

  “Dora and me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she lived there.”

  “You?”

  “I sort of scared him—Leaves from My Life or The Bloody Wife.”

  We all were frozen still—Dora, the helpful drunk, the silent others.

  Blix said “And the message?”

  “To phone him collect by noon tomorrow.”

  “For what?”

  “He said you’d know, said you’d know what’s coming.”

  Dora had waited where she’d stopped, no nearer.

  Blix looked back to her now—“Did he?”

  “I guess so.”

  “He did,” I said. “I don’t tell real lies—not anymore. His name was Tim Neely—looked helpless, apparently isn’t.”

  “No, he’s not,” Blix said. He stood a moment, facing me. Then he beckoned to me, with a kind of kitchen gesture (stirring soup)—“On to the nearest phone. Bitter pills.” He turned and went.

  Dora let him take the lead again, then fell in behind—four, five paces. In a second they had flanked, then passed, her kin—who did not look after them but stared on at me.

  I knew no more delays; my lines to Blix and Dora were lengthening with each step; I was nearer her kin than she. They could not so much as start a fire though. So I followed.

  And they let me pass in silence—no muttered imprecations to meet my powers in dark midair, no visible gestures to turn my gaze, no movement, breaths held.

  Scared as I was, I longed to rush at them with some Halloween groan—Arrgh! It’s I!—but I only said “Thank you” to the helpful drunk and never broke step.

  No need to compel you through the first hour’s walking. You’d have nothing to do but play drill sergeant, counting cadence at my heels— unless you’re a fight fan, which I am not. Ordeal (the actions of ordeal, its present-time) is invariably unrevealing to a witness, except of his own fragility and blood-lust, no news to most adults—Harold Lloyd on a ledge, fingernails in mortar, or Jesus crucified or Jacob and the man who wrestled all night. What’s revealing there is not the grunt and groan—what holds were used and why, the man’s dirty move in crip pling Jacob’s hip—but what was said at dawn, the words between the battlers (“Your new name is Israel”—“What is your name?”) which flood the night backwards with terror and joy, the dirty winner having been God of course. So you and I will know, only at the end—and in my words—if the trip was worth joining. Not that I had a choice; the choice was to die.

  There were no sights to see—with the cloud-cover holding, thank God, no moon; and we walked in near blackness on the right-hand shoulder where the snow had not melted and the ground was mostly level. No acts to study, for character or motive (or grace or eros)—foot following foot, silent breath on breath. No talk to hear—not a syllable from Dora, only rare relaxed questions from me (“How fast are we walking?”) and Blix’s replies (“Not fast enough”). No thoughts to overhear.

  Not from me at least. I didn’t think—my brain a ball of cheese. Oh no doubt the ancient cellar lobes were grunting intermittently in their precious perpetual night; but mostly they were doing their oldest intended work—answering alarms, directing each nerve and muscle onward through snow toward warmth, dryness, food; and doing it with pathetic spaniel eagerness (being so seldom called upon, my life being largely safe as a stone).

  Till now. Safe till now. And in that first hour I felt more than safe— exhilarated, simply triumphant. I had won, would win. Won what?— freedom, competence. Two hours ago, I’d felt fragile as a glass, rocked round in mud by the hands of drunk Indians. Now the sense of fragility had changed to value and worthiness, plus the new-proved power to protect that value. I remembered my father once saying of my mother, “She’s fragile as a lamp-chimney but stand me behind her when the A-bombs fall.” I felt that now—a fine lamp-chimney that’s survived Hiroshima. Entirely undisturbed. Adamantine, in fact.

  Felt it though, as I said, not thought it. I was near as I’ve been since, say, age eleven to a state of pure being—the mind of God. I speak for myself of course, not the others. They were moving like me (Blix leading, Dora between us); we were even in step three-fourths of that hour; but what they were thinking or feeling or suffering, I didn’t guess or care. Not in the first hour.

  But soon after that, the charm began to fade. No sudden vanishing, no emergency bells, no change of weather or scenery. But my lower brain, for its own slow reasons, began to suspect it knew more than my upper—that it wasn’t merely chuffing me along through a lark, my first winter-carnival, but was straining to ram me through danger to safety (or ram itself through; I was mainly its luggage). After the hour of surprise that my lounge-lizard’s get-up was perfect kit for a forced march through desert snow—I had walked warm and dry—I began to feel stripped. Not instantly but slowly, and from the ground up. My feet, in suede, were finally ice; my scrotum was coarsening, tightening at its base like draw-strung marble-bags in my childhood; and my heart, warm till now in its Harris-tweed jacket, lurched into fast-time to flush down warm blood. And in its new rhythm, the coded message any fool could read: It is possible to die. Here. Soon.

  My first thought was defiance—“I refuse to die here, a foreign death, out of my element. I must fight to die in place, to die where I should (which is where? where?) not in some stray ditch, erroneous, muffled— Jesus in the sink of the Colosseum, not on high Golgotha; Cleopatra frigid in the mistletoe of Gaul; or the first man to die on Mars or Uranus. Will he have time to notice (or sufficient emotion?—will that have been trained-out?) that he suffocates in scenery which he cannot even use for metaphor, much less life? He won’t know the name of the rock he falls on. My wife on the tiles—to spare the rugs, upholstery. Me near Remnant Mesa. The answer is No.”

  By now the road had begun to rise and fall—hard climbs, steep drops—and the warmth of day, despite clouds, was rising. No remnant would remain. The ground beneath the snow was colder, the snow was thickening—not ice yet but poised. My feet were the ice.

  Look. This is not my line of work at all, not the tune to which my faculties march. I may have to die of boredom, embarrassment—one more failed scoutmaster, draped on the rocks. I’m capable of spelling it out for you, in every increasingly pressurized moment—finding stripped howling language to compel your company every step of my way toward agony, physical and mental desperation; but you’ve read Jack London, you’ve seen Yukon movies (Preston Foster, Bruce Cabot—eyelashes frosted). May I leave it to you?—Chinese-opera scenery? You have all the elements; build it around me—the night, the struggle. It had started well, was getting bad, would clearly get worse unless an Army tank—nothing else could make it—should have left Gallup, say, three hours ago intent on nothing but our personalized rescue. How much worse? of course. That is all no more than the gears of melodrama; do your work on the weather, the road conditions; leave me free to dissect the action for you.

>   After three or four hills and their drops, I was scared. Frost-bite, trench-foot, amputations, stumps. I called to Blix “Stop please.”

  He obeyed so quickly that Dora walked into him; and he not only stopped but, moving her gently aside, came toward me. He stood a moment, silent, a foot from my face.

  I extended my left hand and gripped his shoulder (to steady myself to remove my left shoe and check for frost-bite).

  He accepted, stood still but he said “What must I do?”

  “You’re doing it,” I said. “Prop me up a minute while I saw off this foot.”

  He said, “No, I mean me. What must I do now?”

  “Feel my foot and see if it’s frozen yet.”

  “It’s not,” he said, not even looking down.

  “Thanks, Doc,” I said. “You learned a lot in four years.”

  “No, tell me,” he said.

  “You’re the doctor,” I said.

  “You’re the man that’s made it—tell me what I must do. Now.”

  Massaging my wet foot—far warmer than my hand!—I tasted relief. I thought he meant now, our physical dilemma—how must he, our Volunteer-in-Service, serve us now? how dodge us past death? I was not alone then. So I said, half whispering to spare Dora (what?), “Go back up front and put right foot after left for another six miles and pray through your teeth for the clouds to hold and the highway to be there where we left it, bumper-to-bumper traffic, hot soup and warm baths and eiderdown beds.”

  “No.” He waited, bearing my weight. “No. After that—” as though that plain miracle were guaranteed, a matter of form, just round the next bend. I was alone.

  “Wait till then,” I said. “You may have me to ship east for burial, stiff as a popsicle, twice as sweet. That’ll keep you busy, take your mind off yourself.” I was done with my feet, I’d released his shoulder. My heart was still racing—the altitude—my breaths, even standing still, were little yips, love-breaths, ecstasy. I needed to move.

  But Blix held ground. In full voice, to spare nobody, he said “Help me.”

  “Why me?” I said. I could just see Dora’s back. She was still faced forward, awaiting her leader, her sneakers well out of sight under snow.