“Bekis,” she said.
A name? A word? “You know him?”
Silence.
“He kin to you?”
Silence.
They are not dogs. She is leading me to them—as I sent Blix to them. But I didn’t feel more fear. Feeling had quit. “Where is Blix?” I said.
“Who?”
“Blix,” I said. “Blix, your friend.”
Silence. But her head shook, clearly, side to side.
What—and in what language—does she mean? Where is Blix—and on whose side? Who are we now? What do we become? “OK. Lead,” I said—as though she had stopped or was losing heart, when she moved like an engine, the perfect machine of my punishment, fed by power that leaked from the wires now roaring above us. For I was in punishment—I saw—to the eyes. What would constitute the end?—death, release, maiming? We were climbing a hill now, the first for a mile. Surely it was the last screen between the dogs and us—me. I dropped a little behind her, not from choice or fear but necessity—something was failing. Or trying to fail—every three or four steps, with a clear metal tick a spot on my brain, on the left frontal lobe (I could have found it with a needle, gouged it into action), attempted to refuse, to halt me here. A soft fall in snow warmer than I, sleep till they woke me. They?
The top of the hill. Moonlight flattened the foreground beneath us. At our left—a quarter-mile—the single dark house I had seen at dusk, one sizable tree, a parked truck, silvered. The dogs’ home—Bekis’s? Was Blix there now? Intending what? With Dora’s drunk kin?—their drunk wife as leader?
No. She said “Wait.”
I took the order, stopped, sucked loudly for air.
But she hadn’t meant me. Her own steps continued. Her right hand extended quickly before her and she said again “Wait.” She was calling to a distant, approaching figure—a man two hundred yards beyond her.
Though she had not raised her voice, he obeyed. Stopped, facing us. Us?—maybe only her. Or me.
I waited. Passive suffering. No ordeal at all nor the charged aftermath but a death dumbly welcomed—not even welcomed, borne. A guy with his frozen balls strangulated, his penis retracted to a bloodless little tit, takes death without a peep—from him or the sky. Sorry; I waited.
But she went on; her meeting-place was there, ahead, plotted where the man had been stopped and stood. No question of her waiting now.
I was the waiter and scrambled toward her will.
Blix—having gone where, for what, since he left us? Her last letter to him—light to your life. He seemed baked there by light—moonlight, monstrous cold cookery; unable to move or save himself, willing in fact to accept this death so he might obey orders. Punish me. Light to my life. There are things the dead forbid, have died to forbid and—even dead—have ample means to enforce.
She was six steps ahead now—I’d counted them off. She cast a shadow. I used her own call—“Wait.” Mine was plea not command.
But she stopped, again signaled Blix to stay; then she came back to me. She waited a step away, downhill from me now.
It’s her. The malignant part. No, the just part, at last. Whatever other senses and functions were failing, I saw that clearly. Registered. I opened my mouth (I had caught a second wind in my moments of rest and was nose-breathing quietly); thin frozen air rammed in. Something still fought to stop me. But I won and said “Pardon”—and intended it chiefly as question not gift.
She shook her head slowly, then giggled, stamped her sneakers.
She didn’t know the word.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“OK” she said. She still was baffled. But not by my second word— simply by newness. She was twenty-two years old. No one had ever yet asked her forgiveness. Or offered it.
I thought I was dying—simply failing in my tracks—but I said “OK what?”
“OK we got to move.” She pointed to the hogan—“Or he be mad.”
He was. He tried to kill us—mad or afraid? I could understand anger—that Blix stood in moonlight on the road before his house (a hundred yards before) and waited for us or for Dora as she’d asked; that this world was not big enough for him, his dogs and us—but as his first shot fired, I consciously thought, “No fear, no fear. I’m not followed now—actually alone; what I’ve meant to be.”
The bullet struck the snow six feet ahead of Dora. She was twenty yards from Blix.
I walked on in silence but I studied her for advice—my own reflex, exhausted as I was, was to hit the deck, proceed by crawling or sleep here and die. I thought, “The first shot ever fired at me.” Then remembered—“The second. Will there be a third? Will that one land?” I tried to care but couldn’t.
Dora strode on as calmly as on Miami Beach; and the dogs at least had quieted, gun-shy, in terror.
So I tried to mimic her and managed at least continuance. I wondered only one thing and asked her as we moved through the trough of that shot—“You know him you said?”
She nodded, a silent “Yep.”
Another shot. Still just ahead of Dora and a little beyond, only this much more conclusive than the last—that if he had a target, the bullseye was Dora or else he was wild and striking out blind. I remembered how tender, how at-mercy I’d felt last night, earlier today, and wondered why not now—with a crazed redskin pumping hot lead my way and I under moonlight brighter than some noons? But again I didn’t, couldn’t—no certainty of safety, no clear death-wish, but no reluctance to die—and when we reached Blix—Dora stopped three steps from him—he must have seen me smiling. I was too cold to know or to alter a muscle.
He looked past her to me and smiled—first since when?—and said “How are you now?”
“Dying happy,” I said—I’d read my own state backward from his grin.
“Why happy?” he said, not denying I was dying.
No answer came to me—not to that; I couldn’t think. Yet happy I was, if being past fear and with all debts paid is a brand of happiness. I stepped up toward him, leaving Dora behind us.
Another shot, in my old tracks behind her.
“What’s his problem?” I said.
“This is his,” Blix said.
“She knows him,” I said.
He had not looked to Dora since our present meeting but said to me quietly, “She may say she does.”
The links in Blix’s thought and speech were weak now as mine— like tramps in Beckett, all connectives dissolved by acid fatigue; or like Jesus and Mary, Jesus and Judas, all courtesy, all human ritual abandoned—for pure discourse, intercourse (intention, comprehension). One dog cranked up again—his master back asleep? his master dead, vanished? or waiting to draw an infallible bead? I stepped between Blix and him, as best I could figure. Did I think I was a shield?—and if so, shielding what? Blix’s simple head and heart? For what?—a future of nursing Dora? stuffing bedpans to a paralyzing Indian for ten, twenty years in a filthy room? Too tired to know. I had simply moved, acted, abandoned myself again to accident—or plan. To die together maybe, one bullet for both, Dora our survivor. What would Dora do? Stand a moment and look, then leave us to stiffen six miles from her truck (was it hers at all?) and walk straight forward in her socks and sneakers to Bekis’s house (was Bekis a person?), join him there in the dark. Warmth, giggle, hump, sleep, warmth. The wires overhead had quieted, were silent—a safety blackout or mission accomplished?
Blix renewed his smile. “Why happy?” he said.
“I know,” I said. “There are people like me.”
“So what,” he said—no question at the end. “There are more like me.”
“Should I go on smiling then? Or bellow? Or die? Doc—prescribe! prescribe!”
“Just hush and breathe gently. You’re getting air. There’s air to go round. Uncle Sam provides it for all us white folks, even out here— just a small service charge; we’ll bill you in April. Colored don’t use it.” He smiled again, breathed deeply, a demonstration—that this air, a frigid blade t
hin enough to pare cells, was the warmest stoutest drink at a good day’s end.
I was better. I nodded “Look. You left us,” I said. “Why were you headed back?—just now when we saw you, the top of that hill.”
“I can hear the road. I was coming to tell you.” His arms stayed down, too tired to point; but his head ducked backward.
So he could. So could I. Above the dogs, the still-silent wires and despite the fact that the airport light still searched there beyond us, unpassed, uncaptured—the wheels of cars. There was another world. This one. Ours joined it. Waiting, reachable, if not engaged in rescue. I asked Blix still—“Why did you come back?”
“To tell you to hurry.”
“I can’t.”
“You’ll have to. Basketball traffic’s what you’re hearing now, two miles ahead. Game over in Zuni. When the last fan’s passed on his way to Gallup—forget it; road closed; we’d have to walk till dawn. Twenty more miles.”
Dora took three steps—obedience—then stopped beyond Blix and looked back, waiting.
The dogs were asleep or dead or had got her family scent.
Blix moved in on me, took my elbow, pulled me toward him—the direction of safety.
Oh Jesus I’m safe. “I can’t,” I said. (I had been safe here; why depart for the world?)
He still was smiling—so now was Dora. “We can’t tote you.”
“I don’t ask that,” I said.
“Then why are you smiling?”
I felt that I knew, that if they would wait—postpone their precious lives, say, twenty seconds till I organized my heart, lungs, freed my dry tongue—I could say it for them here in a line so lucid, so instantly permanently usable as to constitute recompense for all my family’s damage, hers and mine—paid in full now to Blix Cunningham and the girl he’d chosen (whatever her name), to Atso and Neely, Mae Clain, the apple-brandied drunks, and paid where I’d won it: on a lethal little sideroad near Remnant Mesa under Navajo guns, an unfiltered moon, seven thousand feet in the air above my home. But it gobbed my throat (just the words, short breath; no hand at my larynx now, spectral or human). So when Blix pulled again—on my wrist now, still holding me, my pulse warming under him—I moved off beside him; and when I could speak (knew it all, controlled my means), the paved road stretched there clearly before us (taillights, heaters—my goal) and Blix had run ahead again to flag salvation; so I said to myself (which is to say, to you) since Dora lacked the English words to hear me, even— “You know every answer now, or all you need. What we are—we three, the name of our spectacle: Happy Though Breathing. And beyond this night—how I caused it, how I didn’t. Why she did it, why I’ll never know. Why I’m glad and smiling. Glad despite my begging pardon, two miles back, under force but not from guns—because, look, she has given it, an act of oblivion. I am both free and working. I have forced you this far. You know this story, know all I know once I’ve told you this last—she is dead and dumb. Hammer-dead. Her name was Beth.”
HIS FINAL MOTHER
CRAWFORD LANGLEY was twelve years old and still a child; but the first traits of manhood were on him—tall for his age, no baby fat, no pointless smiles, a broad forehead and steady gray eyes that gave his head a claim on the dignified notice of adults. So it was early in that crucial year when he took what he saw as his first grown step. He managed to stamp out his old nickname. It was nothing more obnoxious than Ford, but he calmly told his friends not to use it.
A few children laughed and tried to taunt him—Fordie or even Model-T. He smiled but then refused to know them; and since he was anyhow the main child to know in his town and school—the funniest surely, the most open-handed—they all came round in a matter of days, even his teachers and the baseball coach; even his mother, who privately called him Strut and Dub. All but his father. Crawford’s father stuck with Ford since that had been his own father’s name. Crawford liked and trusted his father enough to humor him, and causes for that came thick and fast once his mother was gone.
She left in an instant—no warning or pain, so far as they knew. She was in the backyard, hanging an ancient quilt on a clothes line and then she knelt. Crawford and his father had left for the day, but the cook had watched it clearly from the porch. She said “Miss Adele went to her knees like somebody needing to pray, hard. Then it look like she needed to rest her head—she went right on down slow to her side and smoothed the grass and stroked her hair. She was cool as a window by the time I touched her.”
The cook phoned school and Crawford was home on his bike in ten minutes (his father was an hour away, taking an Irish setter pup to his lonely aunt). By then the ambulance men were there; her body was covered in the dim front hall. Young as he was, Crawford walked straight to her, lifted the sheet and leaned in a slow curve to kiss the forehead. Cold as glass—he thought it before the cook could warn him. And though he loved his mother deeply, they’d all understood her racing heart would take her soon.
He expected tears and when none came, he told himself his natural feelings were in shock now. But before he took his hand off her arm, a tall new thing stood up in his mind. It was not a thought or even a feeling. It was more like watching his hands grow strong in a slow instant. He hoped it was one more sign of manhood. It calmed him at least and dried his eyes.
He told the ambulance men where to go, Bond’s funeral home. Then he tested the newborn strength again—it poured right through him like iron in his blood. So he thanked the cook and asked her to wait till his father was back. She nodded and went to fix normal supper. Then Crawford thought he had to go pray. The word surprised him— Pray for what? But when the cook had shut the kitchen door, he obeyed himself and climbed to his room.
There he stood in the midst of the rug and waited to see if any word came, any message from him for God or man. But again his mind was still and firm. He thought he’d taken another grown step, no need to lean on others or the sky. He could handle this trial with his own strong body and his new brave mind—bravery was still his main ambition. He went to his shelf and found the old copy of Robinson Crusoe, his pick among books in recent months. Then he stretched on his bed and turned to page one.
Crusoe was sunk in waste and shame, and hellbound for shipwreck, before Crawford thought of himself again or the world below his silent room. What brought him back was his father’s car door, slamming in the drive. Crawford said one sentence aloud to his ceiling, “This’ll kill Dad too and I’ll be gone.” He knew it was hardly courageous thinking, but he didn’t wait to understand the solemn further questions he raised—Gone where and why? He sped downstairs to tell the sizable news before his father could step indoors and call “Adele?” and find her vanished. One of the main things Crawford knew was strong in his mind as he faced the father he’d long since tried to shield from harm— This boy is a whole lot shakier than me.
Later that night when their friends were gone, Crawford’s father said they better take a walk before bedtime if they meant to sleep. They hadn’t gone walking at night for years—since the time they had to admit in silence that they had nothing better to talk about than baseball or school—and tonight anyhow Crawford wanted to keep on reading Crusoe. But his father stood, so the boy said “Yes sir.” And they went right out through a kitchen that now was broad and empty as the plains of Gobi.
After a speechless fifteen minutes, they left strong moonlight and entered the woods. His father was leading and, though they were taking their same old path, the whole idea of a walk was strange. So Crawford asked himself What will we be when all this settles? He was still not asking Where are we going, here tonight? In any case no answer showed. He guessed he was safe though and tried to keep step, but his father stumbled a time or two, and then Crawford brushed his enormous back which seemed too hot for the time and place.
The woods stopped sooner than either one expected, and their feet were on the verge of the river before their eyes had opened enough to see the sudden end of the path. Crawford laughed a little at the near e
scape.
But his father said “It might have been better.”
“Sir?”
“Drowning tonight, not waiting around—I mean me, Ford. Not you, not yet.”
Crawford knew his father was an excellent swimmer; so he thought the words were no cause for worry, just some kind of smoke from the hot pain in him. The boy moved on into reaching distance; but his father stayed still—no touch, no look. Then fear, like a tickling feather in sleep, flicked Crawford’s mind. This man could do his will on a boy—Has he lost his mind? Does he blame me? So the boy chose his latest version of a grown man’s voice and told his father “Sir, she’s fine now. You just need to wait.”
“For what?” His father’s voice was changing, darker and deep. Crawford said “You mostly tell me time’s the big doctor.”
“I’ve told you some lies.”
The fear struck now in Crawford’s throat and begged him to run, but the boy knew he had to keep talking. “What I really meant—she’s waiting for you. In Heaven, all well.”
The man’s throat rasped at itself to spit, and his new voice said “You don’t believe that.”
Crawford was suddenly shivering cold, though the night was warm. He told himself the man was wrong. With his mother’s encouragement for years the boy had thought of her long-dead pitiful father as safe in Heaven, literally hunting and a far better shot than ever on Earth. And since Crawford’s own father prayed every night and often commended the habit to him, the boy now felt a huge trapdoor fall open in the ground nearby—if he took three steps in any direction, he’d surely drop through an endless hole. In an almost final hope of rescue, the boy said “Sir, I don’t feel right about any of this.”
The man said “Then you must be growing. “
“Sir?”
“Nothing’s right and won’t ever be again. Get that through your head.”
It was already there; Crawford felt it as a hot ball stuck far back in the quick of his mind. So he said “I need you to calm down now.”
The man’s big hand shot out and seized Crawford’s neck.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 33