Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  “You’re the only white man within twenty miles.”

  “Then hump your black ass, boy, and tote me home.”

  “You’re my oldest friend.”

  I hummed three notes of “Hearts and Flowers,” as though blowing a comb. “Not good enough,” I said.

  “You’ve made it,” he said.

  “Made what?”

  “Your way out.”

  “Out to where?” I said, “—Remnant Mesa by night, on hoof through snow?”

  “Tell me how,” he said.

  I decided he meant it, was really asking. The truth seemed simple—“Because I wanted to.”

  “Not good enough,” he said.

  “Blix, I’m freezing. Lead me out and I’ll plan your whole future—an entirely happy life, money-back guarantee.”

  Dora came toward us three steps and waited, facing Blix’s back.

  Meaning what? I wondered. Is she audience or client or investigator for the prosecution? I spoke past Blix to her—“Dora, tell him what to do.”

  “Stay back,” Blix said but did not turn to her.

  She said “OK” and retracted a step.

  I said to Blix, “You’re asking about her?—or is she already settled?”

  “—Her,” he said.

  “Let her say then.”

  “She won’t do that.” He had spoken full voice from the start, no concealment. I’d accepted his lead.

  “Let me ask her,” I said.

  “For yourself or me?”

  “Oh Jesus—for you. All my questions were answered two weeks ago. You are facing a man who is Fully Informed.”

  “Liar,” Blix said.

  “Shall I ask her? She’ll answer. They answer me.”

  He turned and faced her.

  I remembered his chronic myopia—how much could he see? He could strike a match and test her. But then—O, Tara!—clouds broke on the moon. We were instantly blanched, our shadows pitched silently forward in snow.

  She was watching him—watching, not searching or consuming or extracting.

  Blix broke and turned to me. “Now you’re in trouble. Clouds lifting. You’ll freeze.”

  We all looked up and, as in some old DeMille Bible film, the dome had cracked. Our warming clouds were rapidly yawning on a sky like a gullet, black and bottomless. Where there had been only muzz and moisture, there were now fierce stars by the tens of thousands that seemed (for the first time in my experience) set, not in one plane of uniform distance (a Ptolemaic globe) but at infinitely variable heights and depths. Desert clarity. We seemed—all three, staring up, bathed with light—under desperate treatment, chosen for some titanic raytherapy as last resort and pinned here now under massive bombardment. Dora’s sclerosis. Blix’s bad lung. My what? Or was it therapy? Perhaps annihilation? We were withering as we stood.

  Blix said “We’d better move” and took steps to go.

  He was passing Dora when I said “No. Listen.”

  “To what?” he said.

  “My Last Words to Man.” I sniffed once to show that I thought I was joking. “You’ll never walk alone—but you sure as Hell can run.” I expected more would follow but my mouth hung empty.

  Blix said “Is that my answer?”

  “Yep.”

  “Warm thanks.”

  “Make ‘em hot,” I said and stamped my dead feet.

  He turned and took the lead again; we all trudged on.

  Another hour, worse with every step—and we never paused, never spoke a syllable (breath was too scarce). In the first twenty minutes of open sky, the snow had frozen stiff—so suddenly that in memory it seems to clank shut at the instant of rigidity. Our wet feet labored now to break its crust; and since in any case the shoulder was narrowing (the barbed wire on our right had snagged me now twice; my jacket was ruining, shoes long since ruined), Blix led us down into the road—a lesser evil. The mud was still soft, warmer than the snow though it couldn’t hold for long at the present rate of chilling. All wind had dropped. Nothing whatever could return the fleeing warmth—unless, by fiat, there should be another day, a sunrise tomorrow. Eight hours at least. We were utterly flayed. So was the desert, this half of the earth. Lidless, stripped. Nothing between us and entropy. Three runningdown lives in a running-down world.

  Maybe it had run down, the world, there—we the last hold-outs, doomed but here. Another victory—I’d have made it unaided to the absolute end (unless I should drop now, before Blix and Dora) when she had bailed-out with so little time to go, two bearable weeks. I was thinking by now—or tasting, touching triumph. I was bare of regrets as a six-weeks baby. I could see the questions that would go unanswered as clearly as the moon. Why did I want it? Simply because I had ceased to need her? How had I come to that so soon? How does it happen to a human being?—that after ten million years of herd-life, pair-life, he wants pure freedom, the freedom of a child (not to yearn or lean), of a primal cell with no need to divide, no thought of conjugation, bathed in hot salt seas for the few days it has, few hours, minutes? Unanswered and, now, unanswerable. By me at least. I will not care. I would die unpuzzled, if nothing else. Not appeased, not pleased but not defiant either and, now, not puzzled. A youngish ox (who might have pulled his load) led lowing, not bellowing, to the slaughter.

  Oh I knew the world was there, where we’d left it—the searchlight beacon from the Gallup airport showed clearly now that the sky had lifted, a rising-collapsing stroke of light on our left hand. Little PiperCubs could be puttering in every minute now, hauling what?—rich Indians to the Shalimar Motel? Steaks huge enough to gorge every mouth and doggy-bagsful for the wolves at the hogan, the children, Grandma; warm rooms, hot water, warm beds.

  But the light’s place was rigid. It would not recede, not fall behind us. When it first appeared—Blix pointed it out, not speaking—I had welcomed it as a buoy, a still point against which to judge our forward progress; but now, much later, it was where it had been. Was it following us, at precisely our speed? Or were we not moving at all but on a treadmill, the earth sliding beneath us, consuming our efforts? I would never arrive to claim my reward, to say what I’d learned—how I’d foiled her death, her punishment by the simple expedient of desiring it, requiring it. So by her own lights—motive and purpose—she has died in vain, her gunshot as silent as an ice-crack at the pole. No one there to hear it. Yet I did hear of course—not the shot itself (I’d been ten miles away) and not at once but now its fullest double meaning— her intent and mine; her accomplishment and mine. Now, could I ever tell it? To tell it is to beat her at her own hateful game. I called to Blix again—“Please stop!” My voice now was frail, the sound as scary and disembodied as though it had leaked from the power wire overhead that had been our companion every step of the way, silent till now.

  Didn’t he hear or did he refuse? He didn’t stop.

  I knew I’d made noise at least—Dora glanced back once but also kept moving.

  I would overtake her, touch Blix direct. But I’d need that strength for later—for worse than this. I stopped in my tracks, let them gain a few steps; then I called from that distance—“Blix, I’ll answer you.”

  He took another three steps before he spoke, still never stopping— “Too late. I know my own.”

  “Then tell me that. “

  They were twenty yards ahead now. “No use to you,” he said.

  “Let me decide that.”

  No word. They walked on.

  I would not catch up now. I would soon be alone. “Wait, anyhow, please.”

  Blix said “We can’t.” His voice was unshaken by his stride, unfatigued. He works here, he’s at home.

  I knew that was his answer, reached since he’d asked me—that his we meant them, him and Dora. They would make it safely out, regardless of me, and pack their junk and leave tomorrow together, without her children, by bus from Gallup. Or stay and sink here, two more litter factories, their own home-industry, their lifetime’s work—a mutual surrender: Blix to
a simple need fillable elsewhere, under a roof at least, in a dry bed at least, where his own simpler language is understood and answered; Dora to a further more humiliating bondage than any laid on her by her people, their past life, her own short ugly life, her body gone mad now and crawling toward its death. Not crawling—striding. I needed to laugh but again gauged my breath and knew I must wait. What mattered was to catch them.

  And in four minutes of agony, I did. (I’m speaking precisely; agony is accurate—the sense, with each step, of over-extension of every resource; my heart blundering wildly against chest and throat like a terrified child in a cell walled with paper from which air is draining; can the paper contain him as it crushes inward? can he tear through and breathe?) I reached out now and touched Dora not Blix. “Listen, please.”

  She stopped and turned and faced me, smiling.

  My eyes, blurred and dancing, saw a moving light above her—a star, not falling but belting the sky, laterally, slowly. “Look there,” I said.

  It was not a tactic but it stopped Blix and held him. He followed my pointing finger, waited a moment. He was breathing calmly.

  I said “What is it?”

  Dora shook her head—did she see it at all? or a different sky entirely, wreathed with crippling reptiles picked out in light, or opening in tunnels on her new safer life that Blix had confirmed?

  “A satellite,” Blix said. “First one I’ve seen, even out here.”

  “—Watching you,” I said. “Another VISTA spy.”

  “Good luck,” he said up toward it.

  Dora giggled and looked down to me. (The road sloped up; I was downhill from her, even three feet away.) “Watching you,” she said.

  “Why me?” I smiled too.

  “You know,” she said.

  I did. It was what I had run to tell them. “I killed her.”

  Dora nodded, murder no doubt weekly news to her.

  Blix stood in place, still watching the satellite, but said “What else is new?”

  “I did,” I said. “I’d know.”

  “You think you did,” he said, “—like to think you did.”

  “I know—yes.”

  He looked down toward me then. (Was the satellite gone? I’d lost it anyhow.) “That’s your answer,” he said, “—that you stopped us for?”

  “Yes.”

  “To what question please?”

  I could not remember. I laughed and said “Help me.”

  “That was it,” he said.

  He had lost me entirely—fear of him stood up now with other fears: night, cold, exhaustion. Blix would be her avenger—she had written to him, Last Written Words. He bore her blessing to condemn, punish, abandon me here. It had been her plan; she had won after all. For the moment, I believed that—or it squatted on my chest and throat, a stifling weight, therefore surely a fact. But I said “I’m lost.”

  He stood in place, watching me, offering nothing.

  “I don’t understand you,” I said, “—don’t live here, don’t speak the language, can barely breathe the air, what was the question?”

  Dora took one step down toward me. “He asked you, awhile ago”— she pointed behind me to where we’d been—“to say what must he do.”

  I remembered. Right—weeks, years, miles back. And I’d offered banter, shirked a clear duty. I waited a moment to be entirely sure— that I knew a true answer, that I wanted to give it. I knew and not only wanted but needed to give it. My earlier joke about Last Words had hardened—a serious possibility. I was near some extreme. They seemed merely inconvenienced—Blix and Dora—delayed in their flight toward a smiling South. Oranges, cures, children rising around them. But I knew better. I gave it to her. “Kill you now.”

  She turned back to Blix as though he would obey me instantly and she must meet him, ready but calm.

  He had heard me—I’d seen him flinch—but now he’d turned and started again. Four, five steps away.

  She looked to me and said “How come?”

  “Because you are dying this slowest death. Because he is planning to take you off from here, thinking he understands what you need and can use—when what’s got him trapped is your warm hole on cold bedsprings. They grow on trees. More than half the world’s got one— and yours is cooling.” I knew—as I said it—that it meant no more to her than a Mozart aria and forgave myself before I’d even finished. I knew it was that—an aria of my own (well-built, self-pleased) that barely concerned her; a soliloquy of rage simply flung at her as the nearest ear. I am not even cruel.

  But she stood and seemed to think. No more backward checks on Blix—I could barely see him beyond her. Then she said “How about me waiting?”

  “—Waiting?”

  “Just till I die.” She thumbed behind her, again as to a place, a clear geographical destination, visible on maps, toward which we would move if we moved again.

  “When will that be?”

  “Pretty soon”—no shrug, no smile; she was dealing in facts.

  “Who told you?”

  She pointed, not looking—the Gallup light. “Hospital doctor.”

  “Sclerosis?”

  She nodded.

  “You may have years; it can take twenty years.”

  “I won’t take ‘em though.”

  “You’ll stop it?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “When?”

  She calculated. In the dark and with her so foreign, it was like— what?—witnessing an animal’s decision. The stock analogies for primitive peoples—cats, panthers, cougars. Are they thinking at all or in a state of being as inviolate as bread?—that dense and pure. I thought of rushing on her, splitting skull in my hands to trap this thought she was boring through now, a mole in loam—children crush pet fish to see what they hold.

  She said “Let me wait.”

  “Sure,” I said. “OK by me. I was just giving answers, just aiming to please.”

  She waited again but with no hint of thought. Now she was searching—my face, eyes, hands. She said “Then you.”

  She had skipped several steps in a human argument. I said “Me what?”

  “You go on—do it now.”

  I meant to laugh but didn’t. “Kill you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why me?”

  “You good at it.”

  I waited, then looked round me—tracked snow, barbed wire, scattered brush ten yards away. I remembered her kinsman—no matches, no fire. I finally could laugh. “I forgot my tools.”

  “What you need?” she said. “I’m making it easy.”

  She was—I saw. Nothing so obvious as chin-back, throat taut; but in her silent breathing, her short bird-bones, entirely destructible. She could not only have been easily killed here by hand with the little strength I had, but killed entirely—razed, no remains, all instantly dissolved to earth, thin air; or departed, bag and baggage, for her afterworld. I said “Wait; you can wait” and stepped to go.

  She was in the path, not moving. “No. Now, you please.”

  I was ten inches from her. She was giving off cold, not body heat but cold more intense than the night’s—waste from her burning. A different animal. I looked again for Blix. Nothing. Gone. Past the crest of the next hill. Two dogs began barking then. A quarter-mile ahead— or five or at hand? Dogs? Coyotes? Wolves? Navajo wolves? “Blix will do it,” I said.

  She nodded—“Slow.”

  “But you wanted that.“

  She waited. “Yep.” Then she turned and led off. No waiting for me. No squaw’s place in line.

  We moved toward the howling. Wherever, whatever, it was strengthening, nearing. I thought of Blix, already torn and consumed and of us straining now in every fiber to add the remains of ourselves to the feast—as eaters or eaten? Cold suppers indeed.

  She spoke as she moved—no pause, no looking back, her breath completely adequate. “You think you winning.”

  I heard it as a question, though her voice never rose, and I quickly said �
�Yes.”

  “You ain’t,” she said.

  It had been a stated fact—what I’d taken as question. The first fact she’d stated since the cause of her illness, the snake touched in school. All the rest had been shifting—lies, questions, half—jokes, trashy speculations. (Who was she? Who was her father? Where was her mother, her two alleged children? Who were all those drunks and where had they vanished to? Whose truck had that been? Was her name what she claimed?—or what Blix had told me; she’d never said her own name, certainly not mine.) I said “Dora?”

  She didn’t turn.

  “Dora?”—again, louder. The howling could have drowned me. Or the wires overhead. They were humming now steadily with an idiot force-feeding power to whom? to start what engines? Or bearing what voices, planning what? in what language?

  No turn. But no quickening either, no fear or flight. This girl, whoever, was holding ground—only the ground was snow and was sliding beneath her as she pumped on toward survival, effortlessly. (She should be telling this—a calm winter’s tale, cool pastoral, a day in the hills by purling streams, ample breath, warming blood, obedient limbs. )

  Speech was difficult again, simple breath. But I said “I’ve won.”

  After three steps—“What?”

  “—That I’m free now in my life, have what I need.”

  “Need what?”

  “Room.”

  “You ain’t got room?”

  “—To live my life, work. “

  “What you mean by work?”

  “I’m a writer, I write.”

  “What sort of writing?”

  “Stories.”

  “What you going to tell them?”

  “What I know—how I’ve won.”

  Another set of steps—“That’s what you won?”

  “All I tried to win.”

  She laughed—a soft luxurious laugh, unjogged by her steps. “And you think you’ll get it home?”

  “With you helping,” I said.

  “I’m helping.”

  “How?”

  “—Leading,” she said.

  She was. Toward what? “What’s howling?” I said.

  “Dogs.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “Whose?”