“You look down and nod approvingly. You nod real slow and proud. You say: ‘I had to know. I had to.’
‘Had to know what?’ she asks all mixed up.
‘Had to know if you were solid.’
“You tell her you knew how bad she wanted in, but you had to be sure that she had the makin’s of a real hustling girl. You tell her that as long as she takes a cuff so well you are sure she will stand a pinch. You are very proud of her; she has just made the first team, she thinks.
“You tell her you are doing her a favor because the other guys might laugh she is so young an innocent looking. She eats this up, naturally. She feels lucky and wanted. You stay up drinking with her all night explaining her duties. You sleep with her but you never touch her. If you lay her you are like other men and dead.
“You find her a spot and put her in a joint. She soon feels disgusted, naturally. She discovers that society frowns on whores. But she has done it and is too proud to back down. You are the only one that understands her. You take her money every week. You will be surprised how quickly they will hand it over; it is all worth the time you give them, the understanding.
“Later on you tell her you have had reverses and that the money you have been saving has been used up. You tell her that if the two of you got another girl working that you and her would split the other broad’s dough. She’ll help you nail this other broad as by this time she will want some scratch for herself because you have taken everything from her, and she will not have as nice things as her fellow girl workers. You pull the same with the two to get the third and, Johnny boy, you’re ridin’ high.”
“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Danforth had said. “How many girls you got?”
“Three. And you and I are a perfect team. You ought to have them crazy. The broads go only for the very light or the very dark,” Dalle ran his hand through his blonde hair.
They shook on it, and they did damned well together. Three months later Danforth had two girls working for him, a new car, clothes, and was seriously thinking of buying himself a, couple of fighters.
He had stopped drinking and people were beginning to know him as a sportsman. Even the headwaiter at the Olympic Hotel had begun to treat him like he was somebody, and when he found that his money would buy his brother a new trial he swore he would never be without it again.
The brush moved. For a second he was startled, then he saw Ringa crawl up next to him. He looked back down at the totems. Always it seemed something was pushing him back to the reservation, away from everything that he had made of himself.
He hated the army; it had cut into him when he was riding highest. He had found out that he couldn’t keep his girls from a distance and the very men that promised to protect his interests had stolen his girls away. He began to believe the men and the army were all part of some vast conspiracy to send him back to the reservation or to liquidate him completely. He believed that his was the first step; being buried in the anonymity of soldiering.
And too, he might die, he thought, his eyes sweeping to the post where Island hung. He didn’t want to die, yet there was something about fighting that appealed to him. It did not appeal to him when he was not fighting, he knew, but when the fighting came close, when it was minutes away like now he wanted to get into it. Then once it had started he liked but hated it all at once.
It was like taking money from a woman you did not sleep with but wanted to sleep with; but you deprived yourself of sleeping with her for the money she earned by sleeping with other men. It was the same kind of sensation, a warm and evil sensation, that he got when he would lie in bed with this woman and deprive himself of her while she told him how much she hated the life, and he thought up one more angle to keep her going a little longer, knowing she was just about out of gas and that he would have to dump her soon and find other ones. It was a terrifying but warmly evil sensation lying there, it was very much that kind of thing right now.
He wiped his dripping forehead with his sleeve and turned to Ringa.
“No cold water,” Ringa said.
“I ain’t thirsty now, anyhow. What kept you?”
“I helped them set up the mortar. Jesus, they had it angled right through a tree.”
Then they heard the planes and the pilots’ voices came alive over the radio, then they saw them circling high above in the cloudless sky. They zeroed in the mortar on the fourth shell and the planes came in low bombing one run, then back again and again strafing.
The smoke covered most of the village but Danforth saw one vulture-wing and part of its body spiraling upward dripping, feathers flying. The Japs broke running with the first mortars, scattering right down the trail into Niven’s ambush.
They cut Island down and packed him on a now-empty pack-mule. They found the girl in the brush, hysterical and in shock but only slightly bruised. Danforth heard Niven engaging them down the trail and followed, catching them flat footed from behind. The Japs tried to banzai out first against Niven, then against Danforth and they cut them down, the remnants scattering pell mell.
They reorganized and marched towards 1st Company, after Niven and Danforth had impetuously lavished lavish praise on each other, how neatly they had pulled it off.
They reached 1st Company. Nautaung had had the grave dug and the priest read the burial service for Island. Niven outposted, ordered full fires, and broke a small barrel of laku, then wandered to the radio area to code the evening messages.
NIVEN TO PEARSON FOR REYNOLDS12 Jan 44
BODY RECOVERED NO CASUALTIES 15 JAPS DEAD EN ROUTE NEW TRAINING AREA HOW COME I DONT RATE A LEAVE
NIVEN
Con read the message twice and handed it to Danny. It had rained again all that day and they had just come from the evening movie.
Danny read and smiled and threw the message into the fire. “Let’s get some sleep. We’re riding early. Carla will be at the stables at eight if the weather’s good.”
Danny yawned, stretched, and started for his room.
Con walked to the porch windows and looked out. The clouds had disappeared; the night was a dome of stars.
CHAPTER XVII
The early morning sun came through the windows in lines in her rented cottage situated at cliffs-edge amid a cluster of giant pines one mile from the town. Carla lay in her bed drinking tea, smoking the first cigarette of the day in luxurious laziness.
She stretched and glanced at her calendar, then reached for her Bible running her fingers over the Table for Daily Reading. It was the thirteenth: Genesis 37, 38, 39 and Proverbs 12. She read slowly, absorbedly, lighting another cigarette. She finished and placed the book methodically back in its drawer in the nightstand. She similed idly, thoughtfully for a moment, took another book, Hindustani Made Easy, and studied for fifteen minutes.
The room was cool and the air came crisp through the open windows faint with the smell of burning leaves. She called for her ayah to lay out her riding habit and went into her large bathroom where an electric heater glowed warmly. She sat down at her vanity and stroked her long hair ninety-six times, finally parting it in the middle but pulled straight back down tight and tying it with narrow black ribbon in a pony tail.
She stood up and carefully removed her red and white candy striped men’s pajamas, staring at herself in the mirror. She cupped her hands over her naked breasts rubbing them soothingly for a moment remembering how they had ached for a while in the night; the mirror staring back at her with that constrained look of a pouting child, taken unaware as she always was that she actually looked such a child in her aloneness without make-up. She made a little face wrinkling up her nose at the figure in the mirror.
Then she bent over and examined the white Y of a stretch mark on her hip: The sign of a fulfillment. The only fulfillment she had ever known. Not allowing herself to think of her child she moved quickly to her right feeling the icy cold of the steel scales. One hundred-sixteen. She smiled inwardly. She still had two pounds to toy with.
She
sighed deeply, regretfully and ran an icy cold tub.
When she had completed her toilet she dressed. Her body glowed prickly alive from the water and she felt the warmth of her brown plaid sport jacket over her thin blouse; the soft silk of her brown scarf a blanket of coziness against her neck.
She called to her ayah that she would take breakfast on the porch. Then humming from Mozart’s The Abduction of the Seraglio, she visualized the beginning of that opera, the Turkish cymbals, drums and triangles conjuring up the fairyland of the Orient. She brushed her black derby riding hat, selected doeskin gloves, humming still; and twirling the hat atop her riding crop strode majestically from her room.
The French doors to the porch were open and the air was rain fresh, clean crisp, white clouds drifting aimlessly, bright sunny after the two day rain. Carla rested her hands on the porch rail and looked over down, down the bronze red chasm that fell sheer for three thousand feet, seeing the snaking twisting outlines of a river far below reflecting, glimmering hither and thither in the early morning sun.
“Your orange juice, mem’sahib.”
“On the table, thank you, Rima. Have you heard from your mother?”
Rima was chubby, brown, moonfaced and middle aged.
“I had a letter yesterday. She is very bad my brother said. She cannot see from the other eye at all now. She is blind.”
Carla studied her for a moment. “I thought as much. There’s an envelope on my desk with a hundred rupee note. Now I want none of your tears and wailing. Take it and find out what else she’ll need. If she can’t find a proper doctor I’ll write a friend in Delhi myself.”
“Oh mem’sahib,” the ayah began to wail, rushing to her knees, scrambling to kiss Carla’s feet.
“Stop it,” Carla half-screamed. “Get up at once, Rima, and stop this nonsense. Get up, I say, or I’ll do nothing for your mother. And not a word of this to anyone or I’ll have you wrapped in a pigskin. You hear.”
When the ayah heard the word pigskin she stopped abruptly, crazy-eyed, and fled from the porch gesturing silently to the heavens.
Carla smiled and turned around, her eyes roaming the button hook curve of her promontory from her position at the tip of it, following the line of trees that paralleled the road, indenting in places to a narrowness barely wide enough for the road, falling sheer rocky on both sides, and the small wooden bridge made of giant planks that hovered over the gorge of the river that gnawed at the rock below, then the promontory widening with green tall trees to the handle of the button hook; the town with the houses perched precariously on the rocky cliffs, the big houses and hotels awakening, dark smoke from the chimneys spiraling placidly upward into the clean, crisp morning. She had traveled the world, but she had never seen anything to match it. It was unreal. This morning above all mornings.
It was at once all awesome and frightening. The jagged bronze cliffs had an evil allure, an inviting destructiveness that seemed to call an endless ghostly challenge. Then again it was not that at all. But rather the closest thing to the perfection of nature that she had ever seen. Here for the first time the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms seemed to harmonize with a serene co-ordination of form and life. The ancient conflict between each to have blended into a love and willingness to sacrifice when beneficial; as if the rocks might at will throw the houses from the cliffs, or the river cut away the rocks, or man dam the river, but no, here was harmony and love and interdependence of all form blending beautifully in a perfect expression. Perhaps, she thought marveling, except for the sound of beautiful music nowhere in nature was there a parallel for the expression found here.
Never had she seen trees so tall and sturdy and straight. Never such a synthesis of form and life; as if everything had blended, the material and spiritual, all, all, in one heavenly eruption and in that fraction of an instant she knew the reason of the harmony of all nature’s color. It almost brought tears to her eyes as she thought of the twisting turning seeking for beauty in all life. No matter how the plant would twist or turn or grow, always seeking only the beauty of perfection through the energy of all growth.
How had she ever thought it ugly? It was man’s hereditary fears, she thought. Always fear, and solitude was to man even more frightening than his instincts against the forest. Fear hid the beauty. And man created the fear. The ugliness was within him, she knew.
But man changed, evolved, and nature too. She seemed to understand it all now; the long ago when man hated forests, the lurking animals that hid in its shadows, enemies of the infant human race. Still the fear that was hidden among the trees had not been alleviated. Yet, she knew now that the fear had reached its peak.
Her eyes wandered, fell fixedly on a cluster of trees in the valley. She felt the shame of not having believed until she had seen with her own eyes that perfection was such that a man might set fire to the trees but the climate would intervene; it being the strange nature of this land that the heat of the smoke would condense the air, a cloud would form, and rain spill upon the flames.
She sighed a placid, spent sigh. Her hunger was gone. She didn’t want to ride. To be with anyone. She had found something in being alone. She had touched, felt, what? Those soldiers would only ruin it for her, she knew.
Finally she took some tea and called Rima to take her egg and toast away. She said she wasn’t sure, she didn’t know where they would ride but to have tiffin prepared for three maybe they’d stop by here. And she was dining out and please instruct the houseboy no fire in the fireplace tonight.
She looked at her watch. Seven fifteen. She could walk leisurely to the stables and stop for a while and watch the river from the old wooden bridge. As always she could think of her child. And again she thanked God that the child lived in the country away from the air raids. Then it suddenly occurred to her that if the child were bombed it would be by some adventuresome young American probably very much like the American, Con. Quickly she tried to dismiss the thought but it wouldn’t go away.
“You neck rein these animals,” Carla said.
They were Arabians from the Maharaja of Cooch-Behar’s stable that M. J. Turner had arranged for. She had just been seated and was adjusting a stirrup strap. “They’re all ex-polo ponies but they hack quite well.”
Danny suggested they take the Simla Trail, which was the main trail that led over three hundred miles to India’s summer capital, that they take the Simla Trail out five miles to Rest House No. 14 and take tea there, then cut off on a diagonal above the Rest House on the trail to the caves where the young sadhus meditated.
They agreed and stopped on the edge of town to make silver change for gifts, then passed through the arched entranceway onto the dirt trail. There was no guard rail and as Con’s horse edged to the outer edge he felt a hollow emptiness looking down several thousand feet of jagged rock.
They were no more than ten yards on the trail, Carla first, then Con, Danny following, when Con saw Carla take her crop up high and come down hard, the Arabian springing away in a cluster of dirt and rock as she raced easily to the saddle, Con straining for a moment to straighten his mount and then letting it go free full of run, hearing Danny riding hard close behind him, she opening up more distance all the time, taking a corner smoothly up ahead of them and cutting right back so that she was riding almost directly toward him but on the trail below, then he taking the corner seeing the valley far below blurrred redly bronzed for a moment, she going to the crop again, hearing Danny press him from the rear again, he going to his crop then and beginning to move on her, coming down hard and the grey Arabian stretching out underneath him closing daylight quickly as her horse lost footing momentarily, knowing that he was going to have to take her from the outside, then hearing Danny press him again from the rear, Con going forward and low in the saddle digging in with his heels and the rush, rush of the wind, down, down, then the trail leveling off as he gained on her, she giving a wild Hungarian yell like some foreboding woman Cossack, leaving him again, then he coming ri
ght back to her with a loud whoop, driving hard, then head to head they rode, the horses foaming now crazy-eyed, she real low urging, prodding with crop, head to head, swish, and Danny taking them both in one rush from the outside then reining in ahead as a party of natives pushing a cart blocked the trail.
They were taking tea in the rest house. “I’ve often wanted to see the caves but I’ve never managed it,” Carla was saying.
“Danny lived in one once,” Con said.
“For a while. But not here.”
“You enjoy your solitude, Danny?” Carla asked.
“I’ve found the best things in it. Don’t you enjoy it?”
“More than anything,” she said matter-of-factly, then remembered this morning. “You believe in reincarnation, don’t you?’ she asked pointedly.
“I believe that nothing is destroyed,” Danny smiled rubbing the back of his neck. “Only changed.” He had broken into a sudden sweat, greyly.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” she repeated pointedly, specifically, smiling.
“Yes.”
“Can you explain why it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible?” she asked interested.
“Ask Con.”
“It was mentioned,” Con said. “At least according to Danny. It’s a matter of interpretation I guess. Danny thinks that when Christ said ‘the last shall come first and the first last’ he was speaking of reincarnation. I’m not sure. He also believes that the Emperor Constantine had all references to reincarnation stricken from the Bible at the Council of Nicea. That the actual testimony lies in the ashes of the Alexandrian libraries that were ordered burned.”
She shifted her eyes to Danny. “Do you feel all right?” she asked him suddenly, concernedly.
“A hot flash,” Danny smiled. “Too much night life and lazy living, eh Con?”
“We’re not used to it.”
“If there is such a thing as reincarnation,” she said, her face a mask again. “Why can’t we remember anything of our past lives?”
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