Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  I wanted to speak to let him know I was there—that I hoped he hadn’t come for nothing—thinking if I could make him say one word, I would know why he was here—whether to say my mother had just now passed on unexpectedly in her chair or my father had taken the first drink since the day I was born (when he went out to the woodshed, the only place you couldn’t hear my mother screaming—I came feet-first—and fell down and promised to give it up if I lived and I did) or German paratroopers were falling on our house like butterflies or that he was sorry. So “Falc—” I tried and that was it. The knot filled my throat like dry bread.

  “Nobody but Falc,” he said and started in the direction of his name I had offered, holding out in front of him like somebody blind his arms that changed color as he came the way a crow’s wings will in the day—black if he folds them but blue as steel in flight, leaving you glad you noticed him. He came on till his fingers touched my chest. Then slow and straight like an old Indian at a Last Council, he took his seat on the dry ground. I tried to make out the shape of his head but I couldn’t yet, except that row of light—maybe it wasn’t Falc? But what except Falc smelled like that, like money at the roots of his hair?—so I sat beside him, near as all my doubts and griefs would let me, swallowing hard at my full throat.

  How long we stayed that way I don’t know—not making a sound and, as if wind was in our hair, our heads rolled back to the round hole in the trees over us that was the sky—but long enough for the stars, which were all the light we had, to begin doing what they normally did when I was that age and sad and looked at them long enough—wheeling down the sky to the left, slow, and when I almost shut my eyes, connecting up in the pictures I saw then wherever I looked—the elephant I prayed regularly to get and Johnny Weissmuller that I wrote letters to, asking if I could be Tarzan when he died, and a lot of people dancing—and the light left over fell down on Falc and me, so bleached and cool that all it touched—our arms and necks and folded legs—was like curved bones you find some days when you are out walking in the woods and bare bones laid neat in the leaves are the last thing you hope to meet.

  But that went on in silence so deep my swallowing sounded like rock wrenched out of quarries, and we were so close I could hear Falc’s body making its own noises—his slow heart and whatever else was inside him putting up a roar like the sea and the dry sound like feet in sand of a hand rubbing down the calf of his leg—and I kept thinking we would touch, he being all I had, not by reaching out our hands on purpose but maybe by thinking of it till magic took over. It takes two to work that though, and whatever Falc was thinking it wasn’t on similar lines so we didn’t meet. The only sign he gave of not being dead was—every time he could work one up—a long-range spit through the teeth though my mother had warned him to give up the habit or go hard and dry before his time like Mr. Coley Dickerson, a man we knew who spat in public and was dry as a used whisk broom already, at only middle age.

  But I was improving—physically anyhow. My tears and my throat had eased, and that energy went towards making up hurt questions to say, hot and fast, such as “Falcon Rodwell, why in the world—if you are going to be my cousin and spend every summer with me and take what I give—do you do things like tonight?” But I never said it. Ask Falc a question like that, and you’d be in silence up to your ears. He didn’t work that way—making up reasons for what he wanted to do. He did it and then if it was a bad idea (and nobody knew in advance what would strike him as a bad idea), he came and sat down where you were, even if it was the bathtub—not speaking or looking at you, but waiting to find his own way out of what he had done, and if that way didn’t appear, well, waiting still like a box of Christmas oranges under the tree which if you don’t open soon will sit till Doomsday, nailed shut and going bad by the minute.

  The trouble was, my terror was gone and with it my joy that those sounds had been Falc’s face and name, and I was left with only bitterness that wouldn’t let me move—not first—and since moving first was my job, we might have stayed there all night if the sound of a plane hadn’t started, out of sight in the back of our heads. We waited for it like our last hope, knowing the chances it had of crossing the hole in our trees were slim, and when we had all but given up, there it was for eight seconds—I counted them, I remember—with red and green lights answering each other back and forth like rhymes, taking soldiers most likely someplace they would rather not go.

  So Falc spoke. He had found a way. “Where do you wish we were?”—meaning to get an answer, trusting I knew what answer to give.

  “Dead,” I said—the thing I had to say to start his game and the thing I meant, this night.

  “Who do you know that’s dead?”—meaning me to fill in while he made his plan.

  All I could think of were two grandfathers and a grandmother I had never seen and Will Rogers and those frogs and an alligator named Popeye that was sent to me from Florida and lived for two years in my aquarium on lean bacon and was just learning to sing when we got hooked to the city water line with so much chlorine in it, and he stretched out and died. I told him those seven names that were dead, and he said that didn’t sound to him such a wonderful group to be so anxious about joining so soon. But that didn’t mean for me to stop.

  “Where do you wish?” I said.

  He knew. “Someplace with bears. Like Alaska.”

  “Yes, and we’d die there in five minutes.”

  “You might but I would go prepared and I would last. I would have a long knife and cut us out a house in the ice and make us a cave to sleep in, and I would peel the skins off of bears for us to wrap up in when the sun went down—except for one bear that I would save named Maurice who would be our friend and stick by us. I would give little birthstone rings and sun shades to every Eskimo we met, and they would come to visit us and drag up whales for us to eat, and I would make a pact with them about how if they did unto us, we would do unto them and vice versa.”

  “What if we didn’t like eating whales?” I said because he was saying “us” and “we” as if he had carried me with him.

  “Pemican,” he said. “And the Eskimos would take us fishing, and we would divide up what we caught.“

  “And you would get two times more than anybody else.”

  “Well, if I did, it would be because I was working two times harder than you and Walter.” (So Walter was with us, making it a three-man party. I liked thinking of Walter, black amongst that snow, cool for the first time in his life.) “And if you didn’t like it, you could leave. You and Walter would have to go anyhow when winter set in, but I would stay on, making daily broadcasts to the National Geographic magazine about what my thermometer said and taking pictures for them, and if you wanted me to, I would play you a record of a song sometimes on Saturday nights and you could listen in. Then one night I would announce I was surrounded by blizzards and how even the Eskimos’ blood was freezing fast and how I was alone with the dogs who were lying there staring at me, not bothering to hunt up any rabbits, just waiting for me to go to sleep. But Maurice would be at my side, and if I nodded or took a bath, he would slam off any hungry dog that got ideas—till the germs moved in and everybody started having fever. Finally there wouldn’t be anybody left but me, sitting there with Eskimos and dogs dead and frozen all around me and even Maurice stiff as a poker at my side and my flashlight batteries gone, and then I would run out of sulfa medicine, and there wouldn’t be anything to do but say The Shields till my throat closed up and I couldn’t whisper ‘Help!’ The germs would know and close in by dripping from the ceiling onto my face and grabbing hold of my fur suit and holding me so I couldn’t reach the radio to SOS or even make my will, and nobody would ever hear of me again.”

  He had told me that story, or one similar, a hundred times, and he always went that way—alone as Custer, staving off every natural foe for days, giving in to germs because you couldn’t see germs. When we played cowboys, everybody else who had to die died of bullets or arrows, but Falc never died of
anything but blood poison or brain fever or milk leg and even then only after he had called me over to where he lay and whispered his Last Will and Testament, leaving me his radio (the only one we knew of that you could get Hitler on, twenty-four hours a day) and making me give my oath to bury him in a copper casket and go to Sunday school and church weekly and turn into a great scientist and destroy germs. I would cry and offer to go with him if he would let me, but it would be too late, and presently he would stop whispering and lower that curtain he kept at the back of his eyes, and I would fall on his chest and listen for his heart (not knowing what a heart sounded like), thinking to myself, “No radio on earth will ever be what Falcon Rodwell was to me.”

  But no matter about me—Falc had finished his dying and sat quiet—not from sadness but as if the story was a grand bird he had made out of nothing, and when it breathed and spread its wings, there was nothing left but to sit back and maybe smile and watch it take off and circle and sail out of sight forever. Then he cheered up and said, “I am going home now”—not seeing he had left me worse than ever with his sad cold journey and his cheating and my father not trying to understand and the dark laid on me heavier than ice or what I knew about death.

  He unfolded his legs and stood and waited. I was supposed to go first, but I sat still and “Falcon,” I said, “we have got to lie down and die in real life.” I didn’t know what he would say, only that I could count on him not to say “Why?”—the thing anybody else would want to know. Falc knew.

  “How?” he said and I thought he was with me, and how?, I thought, was the last problem we had, not noticing that my troubles didn’t have to be his. All I saw were ways to go for good and take Falc with me.

  “Blood Brothers?” I said, having tried two whole summers to make Falc cut his thumb a little and pass a few drops into mine and me into him, but every blade I produced he would look at and say “Not surgical enough” though any number of times he let me go so far as to cut my own thumb before he decided No and left me with blood wasting all over the ground—who knew? maybe the one drop of Indian blood my mother said we had—unless Walter was there to stand in. (After Walter had Brothered with me for the third time, he wanted to know, “When you joining the Niggers, Ed?” And I considered joining.) “Listen, Falc, we would just slice each other’s thumbs real easy and lay them together and pass a little back and forth and let the rest run out on the Ring until we went to sleep and didn’t wake up, and they would find us in the morning, lying on the bloody Ring, drained-out.”

  “There’s one thing you forgot,” he said—there always was—“your personal salvation.”

  “Oh no. Miss Ellie is in charge of that.” (Miss Ellie taught my Sunday school.)

  “What makes you so sure Miss Ellie is all that saved herself to go taking on a dozen others?”

  “Miss Ellie is a saint.”

  “Saints don’t grow on trees these days, and Miss Ellie wasn’t any more baptized than you.” (I was going to be a Methodist with my mother, but Falc was from the Baptist part of the Rodwells and knew all about how when Matthew 3:16 said, “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water,” Matthew meant going under, head and foot, otherwise how could you come up out of it?) “So if we walk down to the creek, I’ll give you Immersion and take it a second time myself to make sure, and we’ll stay under and drown.”

  I felt that would be going back on my mother and on Miss Ellie who was the only person I knew that wouldn’t call John “the Baptist” so I reminded him, “I’m a born floater and you know it.”

  “Then we could go to a field and start running and run till our hearts popped and we fell out.” But Falc could outrun me by miles, and I could see in my mind Falc saying “Go!” and us starting out together and Falc tearing ahead, looking back every now and then, finally seeing me crumple to the ground, and running back and deciding it was his duty now to give up and go home and tell my father. I kept that to myself though, and it looked as if surrender was the one thing left—to feel our way home in our bare feet, knowing one of us was bound to step on a snail before we got there, and take whatever my father decided to give.

  But then the moon came up, breaking into our piece of sky, looking the way it ought to look—the way people say it does—and giving us light enough to read the finest print. I turned and when I had seen Falc—really seen—for the first time in three hours, he spoke.

  “That’s how,” he said, pointing up at it.

  “How?”

  “The moon. The moon will make you crazy.”

  And it would. Would Walter think of standing in moonlight? No—if ever he was playing with us after dark and the moon rose, he would spread his hands over his head and say, “I don’t know about you all, but I ain’t risking the sense I got out in this stuff” and leave and we wouldn’t see Walter till morning. And didn’t everybody know what moonlight did to Tom-Boy Thompson who got left in it by mistake at the age of six and rose up next morning turned to a general embarrassment who collected stray dogs that followed his bicycle in bony dozens and wore flannel rags around his neck in the scorching weather without offering a reason and threw cats down garden-house holes and was six years old every day of his life until he passed away, as a blessing, by the side of the road to Wise one evening when everybody was at prayer meeting and only his dogs, wandering into church and sniffing out his mother, told the tale?

  “Falc,” I said, “we will take off our clothes and stretch out in it and go to sleep and that will be the end of us.”

  “All right,” he said—and I thought I had won—“but what if we don’t die?

  “We’ll get enough to send us crazy anyhow which will embarrass Daddy and Mother when they take us places.”

  “And I could act like the lady that played tunes to your Daddy on nothing but the window sill.” (That was something my father had told us from when he was eighteen and took a tour of the State Hospital in Raleigh and got cornered by a very fine-looking lady who said she was North Carolina’s finest pipe organist and a pupil of Edward MacDowell and would anybody like for her to prove it? My father said “Yes” and she played “To a Wild Rose” with her long blue fingers—not singing or humming but silent, just on the concrete window sill that was an organ to her mind. And Falc partly lived for the day when he would be old enough to take the tour and see that lady if she was still alive and ask her to play.)

  Then I pulled my sweat shirt over my head for what I reckoned was the last time and unbuckled my pants and thought and decided to leave them on so as to ease the shock on whoever would find us in the morning. I lay back on the cool ground and threw my arms straight back as if I was in water and watched Falc undress exactly that far and lie down too.

  “Falc,” I said—it was the last thing I ever wanted to know—“what will you miss most?”

  “Mosquitoes’ singing,” he said as if he had settled it years ago for some occasion like this. Then he was quiet. He hadn’t wondered once what I would miss.

  The moon had turned the Ring around us to the image of the moon, and when we took our places to one side of the center (because nothing ever touched the center but fire and Walter who made the fire), the moon took our bodies, and I thought then we were two narrow boats left together in a silent bloodless world like those that Time Forgot where nothing ever moved or breathed but only quivered in the grip of that devouring light. Like that—together, I thought—we waited for sweet avenging death.

  But I have never slept well, and before I had thought of closing my eyes, I could hear Falc’s breath slow down with longer spaces between each sigh till there was no sighing at all and maybe no breathing. I said “Falc?” but there was no answer, and I raised up to see him. His head had turned away from me already, and I leaned over to find his face. Not a breath of anything came out of him, no more than if I had been in the valley of the Nile and struck the last blow at the sealed mouth of some great pharaoh’s ancient grave and had centuries of dry nothing rush out to meet m
e. “Falc?” I tried again and took his shoulder that was hard beneath my hand and cool and shook it. But Falc had never been too strong on touching people, and I didn’t want to touch him now he couldn’t draw back.

  Falc had gone ahead as usual and left me here no better than when the night began and with this body by me now, cold and stiff as Maurice our bear and those poor Eskimos, and the moon still pouring down. How was I to know that once you tried you could go as easy as that, so easy that your closet friend, one foot away, couldn’t say what breath had been your last or next-to-last? All I knew was, I had to follow. I owed Falc that much and where else was there left to go? Again I fell back and closed my eyes and waited, but I saw things that wouldn’t let anybody sleep—me finally dying and coming to in a golden field that looked happy, with ripe wheat and trees and a river and rafts full of laughing people and suddenly Falc standing at the front of the biggest raft by the white sail, talking to the boys all around him and joking, and every now and then one of them would dive in the water and circle the raft and shout up to Falc a name I had never heard and he would notice them. I ran down to the bank and called out “FaIc—” and he turned just his eyes towards the sound of his old name, but they looked straight through me and on past as if I had never come all this way to join him. He turned back and the wind rose and the raft drifted on out of my sight till all I could see was the top of Falc’s head by the mast, but that went too and those boys’ laughing was the only thing left.

  Seeing that, knowing that for the first time brought tears I had never wept before, choked out like iron that lay blue and cold on my cheeks and wouldn’t fall or dry.

  Then Falc stood up alive like fire—from sleep or from a game, I couldn’t say—and said, “I am going to pee” and walked straight through the center of the Ring and the ashes towards a low blackjack tree by the edge that we always peed against to kill it, but he walked past that and took the path away. For a long time I could hear him whispering The Shields. They died out though and enough time passed for even Falc to finish, but there wasn’t even the sound of him trying to come back.