The Centaurus

by John Updike

  Hummel bent down and picked something up. He held it to his nose and sniffed. Then he set it in Caldwell ’s palm still piping hot. It was an arrowhead. Three-sided, so sharply pointed its edges were concave, it seemed too dainty a thing to have caused such a huge dislocation. Caldwell noticed that his palms were mottled with shock and exertion; a film of sweat broke out on his brow. He asked Hummel, “Why did you smell it?”

  “Wondering if it was poisoned.”

  “It wouldn’t be, would it?”

  “I don’t know. These kids today.” He added, “I didn’t smell anything.”

  “I don’t think they’d do anything like that,” Caldwell insisted, thinking of Achilles and Hercules, Jason and Asclepios, those attentive respectful faces.

  “Where do the kids get their money? is what I’d like to know,” Hummel said, as if kindly trying to draw Caldwell ’s mind away from a hopeless matter. He held up the headless shaft and wiped the blood off on his glove. “This is good steel,” he said. “This is an expensive arrow.”

  “Their fathers give it to the bastards,” Caldwell said, feeling stronger, clearer-headed. His class, he must get back.

  “There’s too much money around,” the old mechanic said with wan spite. “They’ll buy any junk Detroit puts out.” His face had regained its gray color, its acetylene tan; crinkled and delicate like an often-folded sheet of foil, his face became almost womanly with quiet woe and Caldwell became nervous.

  “Al, how much do I owe you? I got to get back. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

  “Nothing, George. Forget it. I’m glad I was able to do it.” He laughed. “It isn’t every day I burn an arrow out of a man’s leg.”

  “I wouldn’t feel right. I asked a craftsman to give me the benefit of his craft-” He groped toward his wallet pocket insincerely.

  “Forget it, George. It took a minute. Be big enough to accept a favor. Vera says you’re one of the few over there who doesn’t try to make her life more difficult.”

  Caldwell felt his face go wooden; he wondered how much Hummel knew of why Vera’s life was difficult. He must get back. “Al, I’m much obliged to you. Believe me.” There was never a way, somehow, of really getting gratitude across. You went through life in a town and sometimes loved the people in it and never told them, you were ashamed.

  “Here,” Hummel said. “Don’t you want this?” He held out the arrow’s bright shaft. Caldwell had absent-mindedly slipped the point into his side coat pocket.

  “No, hell. You keep it.”

  “No, now what would I do with it? The shop’s full of junk as it is. You show it to Zimmerman. A teacher in our public school system shouldn’t have to put up with crap like this.”

  “O.K., Al, you win. Thanks. Thank you very much.” The rod of silver was too long; it stuck up out of his side coat pocket like a car aerial.

  “A teacher ought to be protected from kids like that. Tell Zimmerman.”

  “You tell him. Maybe he’ll take it from you.”

  “Well, he might. That’s no joke. He just might.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

  “I was on the board, you know, that hired him.”

  “I know you were, Al.”

  “I’ve often regretted it.”

  “Hell, don’t.”

  “No?”

  “He’s an intelligent man.”

  “Yes-yes, but there’s something missing.”

  “Zimmerman understands power; but he doesn’t keep discipline.” Fresh pain flooded Caldwell ’s shin and knee. It seemed to him that he had never seen Zimmerman so clearly or expressed himself so well on the subject, but Hummel, annoyingly obtuse, merely repeated his own observation. “There’s something missing.”

  His sense of passing time was working on Caldwell’s bowels, making them bind. “I got to get back,” he said.

  “Good luck. Tell Cassie the town misses her.”

  “Jesus, she’s happy as a lark out there. It’s what she’s always wanted.”

  “And Pop Kramer, how’s he?”

  “Pop’s tops. He’ll live to be a hundred.”

  “Do you mind the driving back and forth?”

  “No, to tell you the truth I enjoy it. It gives me a chance to talk to the kid. The kid and I hardly ever saw each other when we lived in town.”

  “You have a bright boy there. Vera tells me.”

  “It’s his mother’s brains. I just pray to God he doesn’t inherit my ugly body.”

  “George, may I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “For your own good.”

  “Say anything you want, Al. You’re my friend.”

  “You know what your trouble is?”

  “I’m stubborn and ignorant.”

  “Seriously.”

  My trouble is, Caldwell thought, my leg is killing me.

  “What?”

  “You’re too modest.”

  “Al, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Caldwell said, and moved to turn away.

  But Hummel kept pinning him. “Your car’s holding up all right?” Until they had moved ten miles out of town, the Caldwells had done without a car. They could walk everywhere in Olinger and take the trolley to Alton. But when they bought back the old Kramer place they needed a car. Hummel had put them on to a ‘36 Buick for only $375.

  “Just wonderful. It’s a wonderful car. I kick myself every day for smashing up that grille.”

  “That can’t be welded, George. But the car runs all right?”

  “Like a dream. I’m grateful to you, Al, don’t think I’m not.”

  “That engine should be all right; the man never drove it over forty. He was an undertaker.”

  If Hummel had said that once, he had said it a thousand times. The fact seemed to fascinate him. “I’m not scared,” Caldwell said, guessing that in Hummel’s mind the car was full of ghosts. Actually, it was just an ordinary four-door sedan; there was no room to carry corpses. True, though, it was the blackest car Caldwell had ever seen. They really put the shellac on those old Buicks.

  His conversation with Hummel was making Caldwell anxious. A clock in his head was ticking on; the school called to him urgently. Disjointed music seemed to be tugging at Hummel’s exhausted face. Images of loose joints, worn thread, carbon deposits, fatigued metal webbed across Caldwell’s apprehension of his old friend: Are we falling apart? In his own mind a gear kept slipping: Shellac on those old Buicks, shellac, shellac. “Al,” he protested, “I got to high-tail it. You won’t take a cent?”

  “George: now not another word.” And this was the way with all these Olinger aristocrats. They wouldn’t take any money but they did take an authoritative tone. They forced a favor on you and that made them gods.

  He walked toward the door but Hummel limped along with him. The three Cyclopes gabbled so loud the men turned. Archy, outpouring from his throat a noise like a butchery of birds, pointed to the floor. On the stained cement one shoe had left wet prints. Caldwell examined the injured foot; the shoe was saturated with blood. Black in the brown light, it was leaking out above the heel.

  “George, you better get that tended,” Hummel said. “I will at lunch. Let it bleed itself out.” The thought of poison haunted him. “Let it flush itself.”

  He opened the door and a box of cold air encased them. In stepping out, Caldwell put too much weight on the bloody foot and hopped in surprise.

  “Tell Zimmerman,” Hummel insisted.

  “I will.”

  “No, really, tell him, George.”

  “He’s helpless, Al. The kids today just aren’t the old kind; Zimmerman wants ‘em to chew us up.”

  Hummel sighed. His gun-colored coveralls seemed deflated; a sprinkle of iron filings fell from his hair. “These are bad days, George.”

  Caldwell’s long drawn face tweaked unusually; he was going to make a joke. He was rarely a formally humorous man. “It’s no Golden Age, that’s for sure.”

  Hummel was patheti
c, Caldwell decided as he walked away. Lonely devil, couldn’t stop talking, he couldn’t let you go. No need for mechanics like him anymore; everything mass-produced. Waste. If one wears out, get another. Biff. Bang. Smash ‘em up. Can only get one-eyed morons to work for him, wife sleeps all around town, Mobilgas moving in and now the rumor was Texaco too, Hummel was dead and de pressing. Sniffing the point so matter-of-factly for poison; brrough.

  But as his hobbled walk toward the school building continued, and the cold flattened his threadbare brown suit against his skin, Caldwell’s heart changed tone. The garage had been warm. The man had been good to him. Had always been; Hummel was Pop Kramer’s nephew-in-law. He had been the key influence on the board when Caldwell had got the job, in the depths of the Depression, when all the olive trees died, and Ceres roamed the land mourning her stolen daughter. Where one of her tears fell, grass never grew again. The garland she was wearing turned venomous, and now poison ivy flourished by every barn. Hitherto everything in Nature had been kind to Man. Every species of berry had been gently aphrodisiac, and coming from Pelion at a canter he had spied the young Chariclo gathering watercress.

  He drew near the immense orange wall. Classroom sounds like snowflakes drifted down on him. Metal tapped a brittle pane. Pholos appeared at a window, holding a window-pole, and looked down startled upon his fellow-teacher. His oblong, old-fashioned spectacles flashed in surprise beneath the neat cap of centrally parted hair. Pholos had once been a semi-pro shortstop, and the line of the cap still indented the hair above his ears, though his broad forehead was a river of middle-aged wrinkles. Caldwell tersely waved at his friend, and exaggerated his limp, as if that explained his being out of school. Though he bobbed like a ten-cent toy, it was scarcely an exaggeration; the pain in his ankle felt plaintive and forsaken after Hummel’s radiant attentions. At every other step, the hot earth climbed higher toward his knee. Caldwell gained the side door and grasped the bronze bar. Before entering, he gasped fresh air and stared sharply upward, as if in answer to a shout. Beyond the edge of the orange wall the adamantine blue zenith pronounced its un ceasing monosyllable: I.

  Back inside the school, he paused, lightly panting, on the rubber mat of the landing. The lustrous yellow wall still said FUCK. Afraid of having to clatter past Zimmerman’s office on the first floor, Caldwell took the subterranean route. He went down the steps, past the boys’ locker room. The door was open; clothes were flung around in disarray and some clouds of steam loitered. Caldwell pushed through reinforced glass and entered the great basement study-hall. Through its length and width the children were unnaturally still. Medusa, who kept perfect discipline, was at the head desk. She glanced up, yellow pencils thrusting from her tangled hair. Caldwell avoided looking at her face. Head high, eyes forward, mouth in a prim determined set, he walked along the wall at his right hand. From the other side of the wall, where industrial arts were taught, arose the spurt and cry txz! aeiiii, of wood being tortured. On his left he heard the children rustle like shingle in a threatening tide. He did not look around until he had gained the safety of the far doorway. Here Caldwell turned, to see if he had left tracks. As he feared: a trail of red crescents, moons from his heel, marked his path. He pinched his lips in embarrassment; he would have to explain and apologize to the janitors.

  In the cafeteria, the green-gowned women were bustling, setting out 8¢ cartons of chocolate milk, arranging trays of sandwiches bound in waxpaper, and stirring the cauldrons of soup. Tomato today. The sickly plangent odor filled the tiled volume. Mom Schreuer, a fat soul whose son was a dentist and whose apron was black beneath her bosom from leaning against the stoves, waved a wooden paddle at him. Grinning like a greeted boy, Caldwell waved back. He always felt securer among the people who staffed the school, who fed its furnaces, the janitors, the cooks. They reminded him of real people, the people of his boyhood in Passaic, New Jersey, where his father had been the poor minister of a poor church. Along the neighborhood street each man had ‘an occupation that could be simply named-milkman, welder, printer, ma son-and each house in the row wore to his eyes, in its individual nicks and curtains and flowerpots, a distinct face. A modest man, Caldwell was most comfortable in the under-reaches of the high school. It was warmest there; the steam pipes sang; the talk made sense.

  The great building was symmetrical. He left the cafeteria by climbing a few steps and passing the girls’ locker room. Forbidden territory; but he knew from the tumble in the boys’ locker room that it was a male gym period, so there was no danger of blundering into the sacred. The sanctum was empty. The thick green door was ajar, exposing a strip of cement floor, a bit of tan bench, a tall segment of shut lockers under high frosted windows.

  Hold!

  Here it was, his feet frozen to this same spot of scratching cement, careless in his weariness, his eyes worn by correcting papers in the boiler room, the building growing dark, the students fled, the clocks ticking in unison throughout the empty rooms, that, climbing toward his room, he had surprised Vera Hummel, this same green door ajar, standing in view wreathed in steam, a blue towel held gracefully away from her body, her amber pudenda whitened by drops of dew.

  “Why should my brother Chiron stand gaping like a satyr? The gods are not strange to him.”

  “Milady Venus.” He bowed his splendid head. “Your beauty for the moment ravished me into forgetfulness of my fraternity.”

  She laughed and, twisting her amber hair forward over one shoulder, indolently stroked it with the towel. “A fraternity, perhaps, your pride disdains to confess. For Father Kronos, in the shape of a horse, sired you upon Philyra in the fullness of his health; whereas at my begetting he tossed the severed genitals of Uranus like garbage into the foam.” Turning her head, she gave the negligent rope of her hair another twist. Sudden wrung water slipped along her collarbone. Her throat showed crystalline in silhouette against a red wet cloud; her near hair held the motion of running horses. With downcast eyes she displayed her profile. The pose overwhelmed Chiron; his guts became a harp. Her profession of sorrow at her barbarous birth, though its insincerity was patent, sent his tongue stammering in search of consolation.

  “But my mother was herself a daughter of Oceanus,” he said, and instantly knew that, in giving her light self-abuse an answer even so delicately serious, he had presumed.

  Her brown eyes blazed with a force that struck from him all consciousness of her body; that shining form became the mere mounting of her angered divinity. “Yes,” she said, “and Philyra so loathed the monster she bore that rather than suckle you she prayed to be metamorphosed into a linden tree.”

  He stiffened; with her narrow woman’s mind she had cut through to the truth that would give most hurt. But in recalling to him the unforgivable woman, Venus fortified him against herself. In contemplating the legend wherein on an island so tiny it seemed glimpsed through many refracting layers of water there lay neglected a half-furred and half-membranous squid of fear that was his infant self, in contemplating this story, one among many stories save that an unrecognized image in it bore his name, Chiron had arrived as an adult at a compassionate view, framed in his experience of creatures and his knowledge of history, of Philyra as a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, more beautiful than bright, set upon by savage Kronos who, surprised by watchful Rhea, transformed himself into a stallion and galloped free to leave his interrupted seed work its garbled growth in the belly of the innocent daughter of the sea. Poor Philyra! His mother. Wise Chiron could almost reconstruct her face as, huge in tears, it begged a heaven whose very patterns had passed away to release her from the decree, antedating even the Hundred-handed and stretching backward to a time when consciousness was mere pollen drifting in darkness, that appointed the female copulation’s field of harvest, begged this cruel heaven to forgive her the ugly fruit of an assault but dimly comprehended and shamefully de sired: it was here, on the very lip of her metamorphosis, that Chiron most clearly envisioned his mother; and when as a youth in many moods of sad
ness and wonder he had gone to examine linden trees, a lusty scholar newly maned, glossily fleshed yet already slightly stiffened by the prudent dignity that he had willed to protect his wound and by the pious resolve that was to make him the guardian of so many motherless, Chiron standing embraced by the tree’s wide soft shade had believed himself to discover in the tentative attitudes of the low branches and in the quiver of the heart-shaped leaves some protest, some hope of return to human form, even some delight at finding her son fully grown, which, together with his eager and exact researches into the chemistry of the lime-flower’s quiet honey, enabled him to augment his vision with the taste, odors, and touch of a pathetic, too-docile personality betrayed by a few hysterical moments into the arboreal benevolence that, had she remained human, would have been his mother’s and would have branched into words of nonsense, calm attentions, and gestures of love. Then touching his face to the bark he had spoken her name. Yet, for all his painstaking work of reconciliation, often when he contemplated the fable of his birth an infantile resentment welled up bitterly within his mature reconstruction; the undeserved thirst of his first days poisoned his mouth; and the tiny island, not a hundred yards long, on which he, the first of a race by nature reared in caverns, had lain exposed seemed the image of all womankind: shallow, narrow, and selfish. Selfish. Too easily seduced, too easily repulsed, their wills wept self-indulgently in the web of their nerves and they left their dropped fruit to rot on the shore because of a few horsehairs. So, seen through one side of the prism he had made of the tale, the taunting small-faced goddess before him was to be pitied; and through the other, to be detested. In either case Venus was reduced. In a voice grave with composure he told her, “The linden has many healing properties”: a deferential rebuke if she chose to accept it; otherwise a harmless medical truth. His long survival had not been attained without a courtier’s tact.