The Beetle Leg: Novel

by Hawkes, John

  There was a beginning, a middle, and finally a scrubbing down of the wagon. The mere steam of a croup kettle set him in mind to pay a visit and was enough to recall one by one his pictures of the great troop of the afflicted. He was a midnight vivisectionist in a cat hospital. When the kettle sang there was no stopping until the point was put to flesh. The little ribs clicked along the backs of his hands, he looked at them and then at the Indian who would sit for him until he ended on his knees with a pail and lick of sponge.

  “That’s bad. That feculence buries itself in the root and then one night it comes out in the brain. Even the black salve won’t stop it.”

  The beginning was nothing but a look into his pockets, a tug on the vest, a pacing now and then interrupted with a quick, open mouthed inspection. It was a moment of osmotic consideration when, from the vantage of his long walk across broken backs, he could again with serious brows glance down upon the undecided paths of youth. Even when he was only thinking of what he would do to her, before the old deftness came into his warty fingers, he was a man apart, not to be disturbed. So cheerfully preoccupied that when the wagon shook he merely steadied himself with a violinist’s precious hand. And when they shouted, “Come on out of there. We’re going to steal your horse,” he simply put his ear to the wood and nodded.

  From the darkness Bohn challenged the wagon, his mastiff voice close upon the back steps. “Ho, Doc, we’re going to kill the Finn.”

  But Leech was already to the middle of the one last operation. Slippers padding, pushing the pan near with his toe, he gripped the Indian’s face to his hip. Smashes of greasy hair rubbed the smoking vest. “Black salve … won’t help.”

  Bad breath, his whole failing system came through his open teeth, second only to the ether. It was the odor of a lopsided, glistening face, the smell of air tasted in advance before it leaves the bloodstream. Closer, that taint of breath, always absorbing, draining, smelling of a dozen others, it clicked short then commenced again with spores and a squinting whistle. He breathed off the aroma of a poultice. The crook stayed in his arm until he was done.

  Not once did the Indian with violet pudendum close her eyes. A shifting of the fat woman leg tops, a twitch of the jingling body and she was still, reaching upward mutely a dark spot on her forehead. The ether, tilted under her nose as if he would make her drink, slowed the rise and fall of the sweatered chest, brought no unconsciousness.

  Leech staggered coldly with it himself, pulled her into a better light. The pitch of his bland probing, the ether jag height of diagnosis was upon him and he began, pressing the lip, to make out the selected crooked shell as with a red line.

  Once more there was the squawk of wheels, a thudding against the wagon and Cap Leech’s hold was jarred. Sensing the cut of leather, the tramp of feet, he felt the shafts fall dead and knew that the wagon was no longer powered.

  “Finn, can you climb up there alone?”

  Only the far voice of falling animals, the inconsequential distraction of merry fleas. His mouth worked, he let the backs of his trousers fan to the stove a moment, bent down once more and with blank face looked into the Indian’s pulsing gullet. A few quick movements and he had passed over the crushed strawberries on her breasts.

  The elbow remained contracted, unbreakable and hard, tensed as with some nerve disorder, hooked in the invisible sling. He felt no tiredness in that passive arm hypnotically closed on the Indian’s head. It waited while the lively fingers of the other hand fished as into the mouth of a bottle and massaged. Once, twice, he pushed at the tooth, curiously, a squatted child pushing his finger into the ribs of a drowsing dog. With mathematical patience he tried its give: nothing, deep through the jaw. Then he stopped, cocked his ear toward her, suspicious, listening.

  Emanations. With hovering hand this time interrupted, Leech became aware of the trick. The Indian, in a last bodily defense, slightly bulged some muscles, loosed others, and secreted from licentious scent spots and awakened nodes, a sensation of difference marvelous as anything he had ever seen. The captive, still watching him with unchanged eyes, generated like an octopus the ink of desire. He could see not even a garter, there were no words, not a gesture, but he knew his momentary pause was measured against some beating in her inward temples. A thorough discoloration, a pointed glowing of hidden skin for the old man, and it led him a few steps away, among the moistened ferns. She was waiting to see if he would strike.

  “Ride for a fall, Finn,” outside there came a four footed whispering from the bronc stockade, “they’s burrs in that saddle!”

  Cap Leech heard it. But he began.

  He carried a face with the jaws clamped at his breast and against the weak spot, a freakish indentation, of his missing rib. The tooth crumbled. No bigger than the eye of a bird frozen to a twig, it splintered, broke apart, as he gauged with the tip of the instrument, worked with a strong twisting of the wrist. Leech applied a woodcarver’s rhythm to the crown and neck of the belated thirty-second tine. Now and then the metal, in its circular and steady thrust, touched her lip or knocked against her other teeth.

  Often, out of earshot of lonely houses, he had picked miniature incisors from children with only the slightest bleeding, often he had lifted some powerless smooth stone from a senseless gum, but this was a tooth long since died crookedly, the snag shaped microscopic carrot nearly upside down. Behind him ash lumps rustled in the fire, amorphous gray flames walked with suction cups around the stove’s inward belly. From beyond the wagon came a sudden soprano quailing, a meaningless “yip, yip, yip,” the singing scream. But now, faced with the incomplete incision, having taken the liberty of nursing a flower of tubes from pubescent flesh, he longed only for extraction and the cautious, painful closing of her mouth.

  He pulled and the lower half of the Mandan’s face followed the swing of his arm, then back again, elastic, cross-eyed, an abnormal craning of the skull to the will of its tormentor, stretched sightless over the shoulder with each plaguing timeless yawl. Leech pulled in waltz-like slow arcs, now breaking the pressures of motion to apply a series of lesser, sharp tugs which caused the Indian’s head to nod obstinately up and down and one knee, wide and soft, to fold slowly backward into the privy bronze stomach.

  He pried between the overlapping rows with a firebrand. Small, impersonal fingers dipped in foraminous jelly. The ether can spilled into the girl’s lap, rolled on the wood. And Cap Leech, after the pincers slipped and marked a blood blister on the inside of her cheek, danced a few gnome-like steps, shuffled quickly, and held the stubborn bedeviled fragment up to the light.

  “Outside.”

  He looked for a moment at the eyes which still unflickering pointed toward the low door. He looked at the raised skirt and, hardly believing, at the mouth from which he had just withdrawn and through which in a single word the girl had spoken. The little vertical creases came again into his face. He stooped, moved, and obeyed, helping her up and to the door, down the steps and into the darkness where she disappeared to some earthen nest or hole where she would recover, packing the wound with clay, or not.

  Cap Leech drifted to the front of the wagon where the red tipped springy shafts lay bent to the left, wheels stopped dead in an unfinished sudden turn, kicked the wood lightly and hunched off toward the out buildings. He stood still a moment in the black yard and, feet apart, hands in pockets, peered into the dizzy triangulated night. Between heaven and earth not a rattling cough as he moved and approached the barn.

  Wood, sapless, creosoted, he smelled it briefly anchored to the leveled sand. Whatever grass there was grew like a fire at the edge of a ditch along the uneven beginning of the barn floor, a few blades trickling inward between cracks in the faintly urinated planks; a clump also at the bottom of one adjoining fence post. He looked up at, listened to, the open loft. A bundle of unused hay sat there across the brittle arms of a stored and dusty rocker.

  Leech stepped toward the barn, away from it, knowing scarcely where to begin, but feeling all the
while—there were cicadas under his feet, over to the rise a redolent horse face in the sand—as if he were treading a place of windgall. Back again, softly, he peered inside, craned. There were the bins and roosts, pigeon holes for the ghosts of an animal world under an unsafe roof, all the bitter windings of a fence to be restrung or left barbed in the corner; here he could listen to the twilight of newborn field mice or hide wrapped in a litter of old ropes.

  He heard the strut of a rooster. And Cap Leech, hardly beneath the scratching rafter, turned to the moonlit yard.

  It mounted to the light with unkempt saddle hack and broken spurs, with an aged flitting leapt between rails and sidled to a remembered mark in the clay. Black sickle feathers hung on the air. The rooster poked, flinched with one talon as if exactly picking over the spot for a certain needle or feeling for a white grain. The aggressive, powdery bird began to twist its neck, cocking the eyes into a startled question, and the wattles fell to the side of the head. Again and again it inflicted upon itself some senseless doubt as the unjointed finger swept over the ruts and maggots.

  Then it threw back the stunted limb atop the skull and paced the diameter of the pond, stepping now and then into the blackness and reappearing on the opposite side to hark again toward the center. It dropped one long feather in its tracks from the thinning tail bunch. It could not stay for long in the ring nor too long in shadow, marched before the barn dusting the downy leggings.

  The rooster suddenly began to run, a companionless skipping around the circle, and passed the barn each time with averted head and one lifted, rejecting wing. The spared fowl with the comb who could not crow sped with a lunacy to cover its path, and when it slowed at several quarters of the circle it appeared that it would stop on the other side of the yard and beyond reach of the red fox. But the end of the circle brought it to a standstill before the barn, motionless for breath. Then the scabious old cock walked deliberately to the wagon entrance.

  Cap Leech was unable to spread his arms or retreat into the passage of webbed stalls. He waited before this dwarfed image, until as it drew close, indifferent now to watching beasts or stones in its way, it finally bumped his ankles and hurtled itself, the midget incubus, to the far stanchion with an imaginary thump.

  The beak, the breast, the screw wound shanks and brass toes grew cold against his legs before the black ball flew from under his feet and he escaped the barn.

  Leech could hang that bird from a hook. With one stroke, a cupping of the wand hand, he could withdraw the rooster’s coiled meld while it died vertically on the wall. He was the dismantler of everything that flew or walked or burrowed at the base of a tree—he could not stand peacefully in the barnyard accepting his eviction by the chicken. So he crept again toward the beam where it had fallen. A slow, noncommittal clucking and the barn held over him its dusty peak, a shadow closing upon the doors rolled aside for the passing of some nocturnal elephant or roach. He felt, in the rags of the chicken thief scratching the grated wire of darkness through which the prowler glides, that he was guided by the slippery fingers of one who carries a gunny sack, a hood, for the squatting quarry.

  The bird was hiding. He could hear the wind chortle in its gullet, then the sudden tripping of hooked feet, the flurry of straw against the wing bow as it moved, re-took its position. He waved out-lifted hands, barring its flight as if the cock could stay in the air long enough to escape, and pushed to the rear where one jump would land him on the sudden squawk.

  There was no hen house, no setter walking on her breast over abundant eggs, nor was the one-legged guardian posted windward on the gable. Cap Leech did not have to climb, only explore each changing, still warm niche, approach with velvet crouching feet. In and out of a child’s late cradle, perched for a moment on the rim of an enamel pitcher, then behind it, pink helmet in full view; it adorned a tilted dry commode and backed off bowing and scraping.

  He thought of the face, all nib, and followed the body, the simplest shape, a bag for the intestines, as it puffed and shrank. He stopped, clapped his hands twice and listened as it fell over and over itself. He climbed through the collars, the leather loop, harness for a whale, until he saw the plumes and heard the ligatures and chalk of the bare head batting against the wall. Down came his two stiff arms as one.

  Out of the barn slid a short dark tousled figure who carried a handful of tight feathers around the side to the fence and who, moving to his moonlit chores, tossed it over the rails for the horses. Then, crossing the yard briskly, he disappeared into the cabin.

  He undressed in front of the open door and by the smudged light of the hurricane lamp. Off came the vest with a careful crick of the arms, picking the buttons, dropping another bit of white cloth to the floor, and there was no curiosity for the place upon whose husks and hides they had slept so long switching their faces. With an old maid agility he skipped into the nightshirt. He left the light smoking for his sons. He tested the bed. And, with low white neckline and tremulous drawstrings, thin loose cuffs and deckled folds, fluttering like a small moth, Cap kicked off his slippers, lay flat, drew the blanket to his chin. Arms straight at his side he slept, waiting, eyes boring through the roof.

  My place.

  “Shall we let him go,” shouting above the engine, “or take him to the hollow?”

  “Put me down!” And Camper watched the crusty truck jog from sight. Alone, dun flies dropping from his collar, he began to run toward the dormitory where his wife—wet trouser legs ran faster— had met the fiends.

  “I told you to keep that shade drawn. I told you.” Even now they might be circling for another look, the amphibiotic eyes. She sat by the child’s cot side, feet tightly together, hands folded in her lap. She shook her head. The boy lay on his sheet of white canvas, without fever or chill, the short body draped from top to foot in the translucent gauze of a mosquito net. It clove to the pointed face and thinly hid the open lips. The snake’s breath hung about the body.

  Camper went to the other cot, stood over it, reached beneath the pillow for the revolver. “Pearl handle,” he thought turning it over, still seeing the child’s face cut from stone outlined under the white stocking mask, “it ought to have a pearl handle.” Fumbling, for useless protection, he stuffed the pistol butt-down in his pocket.

  And at last the woman got up, crossed the room, and pressed herself against the open window. For Lou the road to the hills was cut with barbed barricades and red lanterns, or through hundreds of miles of shrub and sand, was stopgapped at little towns. There, become the possession of local officers, it slowed cars to a standstill and subjected travelers to the arm of a wry sheriff. And the gritting voice, sharp jowls and eyes picked over the bodies of those who fled. The driver was taken from his car, the deputy posted with his wife.

  “Why, you ain’t from around here! You’ve brought that woman just a piece too far, mister.”

  The deputy kept a yellow stained hand on the door. “Lady, if he ain’t really your husband, it’s too late now. And if you ain’t always been as pretty as you say, God help you.”

  Stocks greasy from unshaved cheeks, rubber padded rifle butts and hair triggers met any couple fool enough to show their faces in that hell’s place twice. “Mister, if you ever made any money off her, you better give it here.”

  The deputy was the tallest and craned to the window: “Well, then, what about you, lady?”

  When again she looked it was as if her face was on the other side of the screen, solemnly her nails scratched a waiting tattoo on the wire mesh. She whispered and for a moment he could not move. A soft, unfamiliar, lucid condemnation: “Take me out of here.”

  The gasoline burner sidled down the shale. Brake bands smoked, springs lightly bent, probing. Only the sound of changing gears and an airy pumping of the engine, the flapping of a pulmotor, followed it through the darkness. The mechanical mule felt hoof by hoof for the running scent, balking downward through the young everglade.

  “Where are they?”

  “Fu’th
er.”

  Bohn himself sat at the wheel. “If I don’t get a shot, Sheriff,” stamping the pedals with big boots, “I’ll be coming in to Clare.” The truck dropped around cover of a boulder, descended into the bog. Three men peered through the isinglass with itching fingers.

  “Kill most anything tonight.” And after a silence he muttered, “Bound to. In Saggitarius.”

  “Keep going, Bohn,” said Luke.

  In the back of the hunting truck, lolling against the cab, Wade cradled the weapons across his lap, and into each, gazing up at the black heat or turning to look through splintered slats, attracted by some flipping tail under the wheels, he carelessly inserted two twelve gauge bulging shells, the lumps of explosive wadding. “I ain’t going to blow my head off,” he thought and waved away with fat hands the longest barrels. The shells had golden, corroded crowns, rusty paper shanks. “Is this one here fixed, or isn’t it?” His long hide shoelaces danced on the wood, he clapped a hand on the ammunition box.

  The driver, now full of the smells of duck congealed canvas, allowed himself a mouthful of the tar-layered plug for the better taste of game. Gasoline, tobacco, death, he felt the satisfied warning in his groin.

  And Luke: “Bohn, bite me off a piece.”

  Down they came with switching sensitive ears and a mania for scouring the crabbed hiding lands below the dam, rucksacks ready for the first bag. The loose disconnected eyes of the truck turned one way then the other, goaded over the fresh foot holes.

  “I didn’t bring no carbines. Buckshot’ll do.”

  Haunch up, falling haunch, they nuzzled the beating bush, silent again as the suckless engine geegawed cautiously into the hollow: that intense silence of set jaw and frown, waiting to pick up the scratching of a bird’s ear. Strain, and they perspired, three abreast on the front seat, lips tasting the far-off fur. Sand splattered over the lead wrapped wire through a hole in the floor boards. Wade carried peaceably his load of metal cordwood. He did not like noise.