by John Gardner
But Peter Wagner was adamant. The Indian beside him grew more still and morose. Except for the movement of his arm and throat, his body was motionless. His eyes were filled with rage. Peter Wagner said: “It’s all craziness. Hasn’t changed in ten thousand years, people still making up gods and devils, out of nothing, not a scrap, nothing but their scrawny need.”
“Come now,” Santisillia said again. “People don’t have to have gods to go on living.”
“Not if they’re lucky,” Peter Wagner answered, “and after you count out the early mortalities and suicides, most people are lucky. That’s statistics.” He grinned unpleasantly. “Some people aren’t, though. Lucky, I mean. I had a sister—or have. I don’t mean to make too much of it. Once she was pretty and more or less smart, and rich besides—real catch, you’d say—but she got hit by this fellow who didn’t see the light, and now she’s ugly and has the brains of a potato, can’t even pee without instruments. Such things are common—wrecked promise, obscenity, injustice. Not so common as to make you believe in a god who’s evil. Even a man like Chairman Mao, with his sixty million murders—most people survived it. It was just a little ripple, statistically. But if it happens to be you that the bad luck hits, that’s different, brother! You reel and stagger and clutch at your head, and if you mean to get up again, you quick make up one kind of idiotic book or the other. You make up some god who can make it all right, or you tell the truth, which takes your mind off it. They’ll drive you to suicide in the end, books.”
He fell silent. The lizards stood like dogs, looking up at him.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Santisillia said.
Peter Wagner glanced at him, his eyes as sharp and angry as the Indian’s. “Fuck it, man. I made it up.”
Then for a long time no one spoke. There were fewer lizards now, though still too many, and those that were left moved more slowly, cooling with the night. At last Santisillia said, almost crossly, “Why don’t one of you people make a fire?”
“Good idea,” Jane said, and though her lethargy was so heavy she was sure she couldn’t move, she found herself getting up.
Captain Fist watched them like an old wolf peeking through trees.
• • •
Jane cooked, working a sweat up. The men hunkered around the fire doing nothing, hardly talking—all but Captain Fist, still sitting, tied up, near the cave mouth. Mr. Nit was peevish because no one had come to take over the watch. He sat with his legs crossed, feet under him, elbows on his knees, and glared at the fire. Peter Wagner sat against a rock, smoking pot, gazing at the western rim of stone, or at the stars perhaps, or at nothing.
Santisillia poked the fire, making it flare up, lighting all their faces. “Peter,” he said, “let me tell you about Captain Fist.”
Peter Wagner turned his head.
“I tell you the story partly because you’ll be interested,” Santisillia said, “partly because it has a moral. At least I think it does.”
Mr. Nit held the marijuana pipe toward him. Santisillia shook his head and looked over at the Captain, then back at Peter Wagner, and smiled. He said:
“Some people get their souls beaten out of them—bad luck, the pressure of events, and so forth. Some lose their souls through carelessness, neglect. But once in a while you have the honor of meeting a man who’s sold his soul outright, made a deal with the Devil. Now there’s a man worth knowing! And such a man is Captain Fist.” He pointed. Fist’s eyes squeezed shut. Santisillia grinned, drew out a plastic-tipped cigar, and lit it. “Our Captain Fist is a man deeply versed in philosophy. A stupid man, perhaps, and a vile toad even among stupid men, but nevertheless, well read. He has discovered beyond any shadow of a doubt that all life is mechanics, that faith, hope, and charity are the desperate stratagems of people who would blind themselves to truth. All men, he has come to understand, are victims, objects in fact no more rational than planets; good men, he’s discovered by his books, are as much the victims of random concussions in the universe as are bad. All this he will tell you in the greatest detail, quoting the best authorities. And every word he says is in some sense true.”
Jane frowned, waiting, then spatula’d the fish and corn meal out of the pan onto their plates and passed them around. Only Dancer thanked her. The others were too intent on Santisillia, or—except for Santisillia—too drugged. She glanced at Captain Fist. He couldn’t eat with the gag on, and if they took it off, the night would go black with his obscenities. She decided to let him starve. Mr. Goodman poured and passed out coffee. Santisillia carefully scraped off his cigar, set it on a flat rock beside him, and began to eat.
He said: “I’ll tell you how we met. We happened to be in Mexico, at the same time at the same place, on a buying trip. We took it out by road, in those days. Since Dusky’s capital was limited, all we had was a car—built-up fenders and so forth, you understand. As for Captain Fist—” He smiled, rolled his eyes up. “Ah, Captain Fist! He had, of all things, a nitro-glycerin truck.”
Dancer shook his head. “Lovely.”
Santisillia smiled on. “It used to be, in those days, there’d be convoys of the things, taking the nitro to someplace in Colorado. Fist knew the schedule. There we were, loading up, me and Dusky and Dancer cramming the stuff up in tight little holes, Fist and his apes throwing it in by the forkful, brazen as hell. I just stood there, all amazement. I didn’t know what kind of truck it was, he had a canvas on it at the time he loaded. He drives away in front of us, before it’s even good and dark, and we think we’ve seen the last of him in this Vale of Tears—at least Dancer and me do. Dusky’s not talking, as usual. Bout ten o’clock we pull out and start north. We drive fifteen minutes, with Dusky taking a little nap in back—cool old man with this long woolly hair—he looked like a sheep was growing out of him—and all of a sudden you’d think the whole Mexican army was on us. Blam blam blam! Old car of ours slams into the ditch with fire coming out of her, ready to blow any second, and we jump like a couple of rabbits and yell ‘Hey you got us! Señors, you got us! Surrenderons!’ And we stand on the road with our hands on our heads. Dusky’s gone. No sign of him. He was always like that. Maybe he’d slipped off miles ago. When trouble was around he could smell it. Show up weeks later, and someway talk us into working for him again. So boom, goes the car, and it knocks us fiat on our faces.
“Then out of the bushes comes Fist and his two apes. ‘Get in,’ says Fist, and now I see his truck’s parked under the trees. We start over, both of us, myself and Dancer, but Fist says, ‘Just you,’ and points the heat at me. We stare at him, his face all lit up from our burning car, crazy looking. I look at Dancer. ‘Hey man,’ he says, ‘it’s twenty miles from noplace.’ Far as you can see all there is is those desert bushes and pricklypears and maybe a half-dead burro. ‘Get in,’ Fist says, and he waves the gun. Since I got no choice, I do it. I hear him say behind me, ‘Start runnin, boy.’ I’m scared as hell and I look at the apes. They shake their heads, and when I start to climb out, they grab me. Then I hear the shot and I do climb out, and Fist’s there with the muzzle in my belly. So I got to go with him, and I don’t know if Dancer’s alive or dead. Maybe they’ve finally snuffed even Dusky. As for Dancer, I find out later old Fist just winged him; so crooked he can’t even shoot.
“But I don’t know that then. All I know is we go about fifty kilometers and then Fist pulls into some trees again, and we sit waiting. The apes pull the canvas off the truck and shove it down inside with the pot. Along comes the nitro convoy, pretty soon after that, and now they’ve got me behind the wheel, with the pistol in my ribs, and they make me pull in behind like we’re part of the group. He doesn’t tell me what’s happening—I don’t ask; I’m too scared. ‘Just drive, boy,’ he tells me. ‘Misbehave and I’ll blast your top half off.’ I know he’d do it. He’s decided he needs me because there’s not many white men drive that load. Just Mexicans and blacks. Any time we come near anybody, these three hombres duck down under the dashboard. I decide he�
�s crazy. Sometimes he even laughs. ‘What do I do when they stop me at the border?’ I say. ‘They won’t,’ he tells me. I think about it. It makes no sense. We drop back from the convoy, Fist’s orders.
After a while, about five kilometers short of the border, we come to a town where something’s happening—crowd of people in the street, lot of broken out windows, some smoke from a fire, bodies and parts of bodies all around, some of ’em children, and of course a big detour. Everybody runs from the truck, screaming and waving. Old Fist peeks through the window, smiles like crazy, ducks down again. When we come to the border, about five kilometers farther on, Fist tells me ‘Talk nice.’ I’m ready. They don’t even put the gate down in front of us, just wave us through. I’m hip by now. How’d you arrange it?’ I say. ‘That truck that blew up.’ ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘I arranged it.’ Man, I believe him.”
Santisillia stopped, smiling as if with admiration, and finished off his coffee. He reached down for the cigar he’d started before.
“Is all this true?” Peter Wagner said, looking over at Fist as he would at, say, a dead animal bloated for a week. He looked at Mr. Goodman. “You went along with it?” He glanced at Jane.
I wasn’t there, she thought of saying.
“You’re crazy, all of you,” Peter Wagner said. There was sweat on his forehead. “I mean, innocent people, harmless villagers—You know that about him and—”
“Now, now,” Santisillia said. He lit the cigar. “They had no choice, you see—Mr. Nit, that is, and Mr. Goodman. They were accessories and, from a narrow, legalistic point of view, horrible vicious smugglers. They had families to think of. Their children’s future. And then too, if they were to turn on their leader and then he should somehow escape the constabulary—vindictive old bastard that they knew him to be …” He smiles as if the whole thing delighted him. “And of course we must understand Captain Fist’s point of view. A ghastly accident of consciousness in an accidental universe …” He let it trail off.
“He should kill himself,” Peter Wagner said.
Santisillia laughed. “Ah, but that was not the direction in which he was predetermined.” He tipped his head back, blew tobacco smoke at the stars.
Peter Wagner leaned forward a little, studying Jane as if to understand Santisillia by means of her expression. She smiled unhappily to herself and she knew she could be no help—indeed, had no wish to be. She’d stopped thinking about it. Men were forever worrying unanswerable questions. She got up to get their plates, ducking away from the smoke of the fire, and, when she’d collected them, carried them back to scrape into the flames. She kneeled, set the plates in a pile—she’d wash them later—and poured herself another cup of coffee. The fire troubled the rock walls with shadows like bad dreams.
Peter Wagner said to Santisillia, “You don’t believe all this. You said yourself, he sold his soul to the Devil.”
“Ah, Peter,” Santisillia said with a smile, “you know there’s no god, no devil.”
“Shit,” Dancer said.
Peter Wagner turned his head away. He wiped sweat from his forehead and compressed his wide lips, glancing left and right like a cornered rabbit. He knew there was something he had to figure out, but he was drunk and high, too foggy to get it straight.
Jane lit a cigarette, indifferent to it all, and held the marijuana in her lungs. At last she lay back on the flat stone and looked at the stars. Still no movement in the sky, no sign of life. The ground was cool now. The fire had burned down to coals, so that the walls had only a faint glow.
Santisillia said, “Everything’s got to be an accident unless you decide there are gods and devils. We do nothing. Peter Wagner’s uncle plows out snow and saves freezing people by pure accident, because he’s caught in the Sundayschool bag, or his father was a doctor, or God knows what. Captain Fist does all these ungodly things because it happened to rain all through his childhood, or his father was a drunk, or he’s an XXY, or his blood’s deficient in, say, riboflavin. So everybody’s a machine, an automaton, unless you decide there are gods and devils and there’s some magic way they can get to you.”
“Luther, are you telling me there are gods and devils?” Peter Wagner said.
“There are no laws but the laws of science,” Mr. Nit said.
Dancer looked disgusted. “Shit man, gwon down where you come from.”
“A fact,” Mr. Nit said.
“An’ I say shit.”
“Take it easy, Dancer,” Santisillia said. “Mr. Nit’s right enough, far as he goes. What’s physically knowable, science will sooner or later know.”
Peter Wagner bowed his head. “I’ve heard all this,” he said dully.
“Everybody has,” Santisillia said. “But nobody understands it.
Listen. Nothing’s knowable but the present and the past. That’s the bucket of ashes.”
Peter Wagner sighed. “Terrific. Maybe tomorrow there will be gods.”
“Exactly!”
Jane looked at Dancer and thought him handsome. Maybe she’d saved his life that night; no telling. Maybe he’d have come around anyway. She got up on one elbow to get her pipe and plastic bag of grass from her tight jeans pocket. Pipes had more oomph.
Santisillia said: “Think about it, though. It disgusts you that Fist blows up Mexican villagers he doesn’t even know.”
“I understand all that,” Peter Wagner broke in impatiently. “‘I assert for all men for all time ta-dum-ta-dum.’”
“Wrong,” Santisillia snapped. “It’s not some arbitrary, private assertion, like Bluebeard’s assertion that murdering wives would be the meaning of his life. Those Mexican villagers were innocent, vulnerable, like everything alive—like your imaginary sister crossing the street when some fat-head wasn’t watching the light.”
Peter Wagner pressed his hands to his head, avoiding the sore place. “Say it again. I don’t follow.”
Dancer said, pretending he understood, “Break it down for him, Luther.”
Jane leaned upon her elbow again, holding the lighted pipe out toward Dancer. “You want some?”
“Grass?” he said.
She nodded.
He took the pipe, held one hand over the bowl and drew in. When he started to hand it back she nodded toward Mr. Nit, and Dancer passed it on. Mr. Goodman got out his own pipe, loaded it, and lit it. When he’d drawn in, he passed it to Santisillia. Santisillia waved it off. “Man, I can’t smoke and think,” he said. “Shall I be tempted to infringe my vow in the same time ’tis made?”
Dancer smiled. He said, “Hey, Luther, we still gonna try the Captain for atrocities?”
Santisillia shrugged. “How can we? We just finished proving that nobody’s responsible for anything.”
Dancer looked doubtful. “Maybe we could figure something out, if we once got into it.”
Mr. Goodman said soberly, holding out the pipe again, “I think we should try him.”
Again Santisillia laughed, and this time it sounded, to Jane at least, downright sorrowful. “Try him, don’t try him, what’s the difference?” he said. “Better to shoot him, or let Injun Joe here strangle him. We were supposed to be talking about something more important—justice for the future, how to make gods that exist.”
Peter Wagner continued to sit with his head down. If he tried to walk, Jane saw, he would be sick.
Mr. Goodman said, “The future’s all there is.” “Mr. Goodman,” Santisillia said, “you’re stoned.” It was true, she saw. He hadn’t gotten down from the last one, and was rising again like a balloon at the Zoo. She felt her mind crinkling open like wadded up paper. Maybe she was stoned herself. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen a leprechaun. Whenever she was able to remember it clearly, it was a sign that she was stoned.
They sat for another half hour, or two hours, she had no idea, drifting like a glider, a leaf on a brook. Santisillia kept trying to talk philosophy. She smiled, and eventually even he understood that it was useless. Dancer lay with his head in he
r lap. She put her feet on Mr. Goodman’s chest, her free hand on Dancer’s. The bare skin was hairless as a boy’s. Peter Wagner looked over at her and suddenly, drunkenly, got to his feet and staggered out to find more sticks. They laughed at him, too high to be bothered by his anger—all but Santisillia—and like a devil, a misanthrope from the woods, he laughed back. After a moment Luther got up, cold sober and graceful, and went to help him. She inched her hand down under Dancer’s belt and under the elastic of his underpants. Peter Wagner and Santisillia came back—hours later, it seemed—with their arms loaded, dropped their loads with a crash by the fire, put on a few sticks, and poked it back to life. Then they stretched out on the cool rock a little way away from her, judgmental. Even now Santisillia was trying to make Peter Wagner talk philosophy. Dear God save us from fanatics, she thought. “It’s a matter of life and death,” he was saying. Peter Wagner was rubbing his aching head, watching her. Dancer’s hair, under her fingertips, was soft as silk. Her desire was an ache—for Peter and Luther especially. She would, she knew, have to be the one to act, but she was so dopey she could hardly think. She unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, smiling sleepily toward Peter and Luther, to show she was theirs if they wanted her, then put her hand back down inside Dancer’s pants. She said softly, just loud enough for him to hear, “Peter, come be close to me!” He didn’t move at first. Then suddenly, making up his drunken mind, he came to her, took her shoulders in his hands, and kissed her forehead and cheek. She smiled, then lazily raised her head to kiss him on the mouth. She felt as if she were floating, one hand sliding down to close gently on Dancer’s enormous crooked penis, the other sliding to Mr. Goodman’s. “Luther!” she called softly. “Oh God, Luther, come help!” He thought a moment, then threw his cigar away and crawled toward her, his expression half hunger, half anger.
Quickly Luther and Peter finished unbuttoning her blouse. She felt her breasts tensing more. Their fingertips rang like church-bells on her skin. Peter’s lips came to her right nipple, then Luther’s to her left. She groaned, then laughed, and in a moment they too were laughing, finally even Luther and Peter. Mr. Nit, over by the fire, was bent like a monkey, jerking frantically, pulling off his pants. Dancer was sliding her jeans and panties off. The laughing gave way to a great, silent tenderness that seemed to her almost holy. She felt herself opening like the Grand Canyon and pulling as if to draw in the whole calm night. She gave herself to them, hardly knowing who was where, as though she were, say, a field of wheat. They hugged each other like lovers as they took her. She felt beautiful, unspeakably alive, loved like a saint in a passionate vision. This is my body … She thought of poor somber, stiff-necked, ridiculous Nebraska. Take, eat . . . She kissed the drunken Indian’s tear-stained cheeks.