Collected Stories, page 12
Lucy was silent. She believed him completely, the pattern matched at every edge, but she rebelled at the triumph and contempt in his voice. Suppose he was completely right: Tommy Probst was still his student and presumably his friend, somebody to like and help, not someone to triumph over. Sticky with the slow ooze of perspiration, feeling the hot night dense and smothering around her, she moved restlessly on the rail. Latour reached into the pocket of his seersucker jacket and brought out a pint bottle.
“Drink? I’ve been avoiding the bellywash everyone else is drinking.”
“No, thank you,” Lucy said. “Couldn’t I get you a glass and some ice?”
“I like it warm,” he said. “Keeps me reminded that it’s poison.”
She saw then what she had not seen before, that he was quite drunk, but out of her vague rebelliousness she said, “Mr. Latour, all the boys are in Tommy’s position almost exactly, aren’t they? They’re right at that edge where they have to be fully responsible adults. They all work much too hard. Any of them could crack just the way Tommy did. Charley could do it. It isn’t a disgrace.”
Latour’s head went back, the bottle to his lips, and for a moment he was a bird drinking, his iron beak in the air, at once terrible and ridiculous. “You needn’t worry about Charley,” he said when he had brought the bottle down. “Charley’s another breed of rat. He’s the kind that wants to wear the old man’s breeches even before they’re off the old man’s legs. Tommy’s never got over calling me ‘Sir.’ Charley’d eat me tomorrow if he thought he could get away with it.”
“Who’d do what?” Charley said. He had appeared behind Latour with two glasses in his hands. He passed one to Lucy with a quick lift of the eyebrows and she loved him again for having seen that she was trapped.
“You, you ungrateful whelp,” Latour said. He dropped the bottle in his pocket; his blank stare and forward-thrusting face seemed to challenge Charley. “I’ll tell you what you think. You think you’re younger than I am. That’s right. You think you’re better-looking than I am. Maybe that’s right too. You think you could put me down. That’s a foolish mistake. You think you’re as smart as I am, and that’s even more foolish.” His thumb jerked up under Charley’s wishbone like a disemboweling knife, and Charley grunted. “Given half a chance,” Latour said, “you’d open your wolfish jaws and swallow me. You’re like the cannibals who think it gives them virtue to eat their enemy’s heart. You’d eat mine.”
“He’s distraught,” Charley said to Lucy. “Maybe we should get him into a tepid bath.”
“You and who else?” Latour said, like a belligerent kid. His sardonic fixed grin turned on Lucy. “You can see how it goes in his mind. I develop a lot of apparatus for testing perception, and I fight the whole damn university till I get a lab equipped with sound equipment and Phonelescopes and oscillographs and electronic microscopes, and then punks like this one come along and pick my brains and think they know as much as the old man. I give them the equipment and provide them with ideas and supervise their work and let them add their names to mine on scholarly articles, and they think they’re all ready to put on the old man’s breeches.”
“Why, Paul,” Charley said, “you’ve got an absolute anxiety neurosis. You should see a psychiatrist. You’ll brood yourself into paranoia and begin to have persecution complexes. You’ve got one now. Here I’ve been holding you up all year, and you think I’m secretly plotting to eat you. You really should talk to a good psychologist.”
“Like who?” Latour said, grinning. “Some punk like you whose soft spot hasn’t hardened yet?”
“There are one or two others almost as good,” Charley said, “but Graham is the best.”
Latour took the bottle from his pocket and drank again and screwed on the cap and dropped the bottle back in the pocket. His stare never left Charley’s face; his soundless chuckle broke out into a snort.
“A punk,” he said. “A callow juvenile, a pubescent boy, a beardless youth. You’re still in the spanking stage.”
Winking at Lucy, Charley said, “Takes a good man.”
“Oh, not so good,” Latour said. “Any man could do it.”
His hand shot out for Charley’s wrist, and Charley jerked back, slopping his beer. It seemed to Lucy that something bright and alert had leaped up in both of them, and she wanted to tell them to drop it, but the noise of singing and the moan of dance music from the lounge made such a current of noise that she didn’t trust her voice against it. But Latour’s edged foolery bothered her; she didn’t think he was entirely joking, and she didn’t think Charley thought so either. She watched them scuffle and shove each other, assuming exaggeratedly the starting pose for a wrestling match. Latour reached in his pocket and handed her the almost empty whisky bottle; he removed his glasses and passed them to her, and she saw his eyes like dark holes with a glint of light at the bottom.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “you’re not going to …”
Latour exploded into violent movement, reached and leaned and jerked in a flash, and suddenly Charley’s length was across his shoulder, held by crotch and neck, and Latour with braced legs was staggering forward. He was headed directly for the rail. Charley’s legs kicked frantically, his arm whipped around Latour’s neck in a headlock, but Latour was brutally strong. Face twisted under Charley’s arm, he staggered ahead.
Lucy screamed, certain for a moment that Latour was going to throw Charley over. But her husband’s legs kicked free, and he swung sideward to get his feet on the floor. Latour let go his neck hold, and his palms slapped against Charley’s body as he shifted. Charley was clinging to his headlock, twisting the blockier Latour into a crouch. Then somehow Latour dove under him, and they crashed.
The whole crowd was around them, shutting off the light from the lounge so that the contestants grunted and struggled in almost total darkness. Lucy bent over them, screaming at Charley to quit it, let go. Someone moved in the crowd, and in a brief streak of light she saw Latour’s hands, iron strong, tearing Charley’s locked fingers apart, and the veins ridged on Charley’s neck as he clung to his hold.
“Stop it!” she screamed at them. “You’ll get all dirty, you’ll get hurt, stop it, please, Charley!”
Latour broke free and spun Charley like a straw man, trying to get a hold for a slam. But as they went to the floor again Charley’s legs caught him in a head scissors and bent him harshly back.
“Great God,” Henry Earp said beside Lucy. “What is this, fun or fight?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Fun. But make them stop.” She grabbed the arm of Clark Richards. “Make them stop, please!”
Richards bent over the wrestlers, quiet now, Latour’s head forced back and Charley lying still, just keeping the pressure on. “Come on,” Richards said. He slapped them both on the back. “Bout’s a draw. Let go, Charley.”
Latour’s body arched with a convulsive spring, but Charley’s legs clenched tighter and crushed him down again.
“Okay with me,” Charley said. “You satisfied with a draw, Paul?”
Latour said nothing. “All right,” Richards said. “Let’s call it off, Paul. Someone might get hurt.”
As Charley unlocked his legs and rolled free, Latour was up and after him like a wolf, but Richards and Henry and several others held him back. He put a hand to his neck and stood panting. “That was a dirty hold, Graham.”
“Not so dirty as getting dumped twenty feet into a courtyard,” Charley said. His T-shirt was ripped half off him. He grinned fixedly at Latour. Sick and fluttery at what had happened, Lucy took his hand, knowing that it was over now, the support was gone, the rest of the way was against difficulties all the way. “You foolish people,” she said. “You’ll spoil a good party.”
Somehow, by the time she had got herself together after her scare, the party had disintegrated. The unmarried graduate students who had been noisily there all evening had vanished, several of the house couples had gone quietly to bed. The keg was empty, and a half-bottle of whisky stood unwanted on the table. A whole carful of people had gone out the Terre Haute road for sandwiches, taking Paul Latour with them. The court below the rail was empty except for Charley’s jeep and Clark Richards’ sedan, and the deck was almost deserted, when Richards stepped out of the lounge with his white coat on, ready to go home.
He came from light into darkness, so that for a moment he stood turning his head, peering. “Myra?” he said. “We should be getting on.”
“She isn’t out here,” Lucy said, and jumped down from the railing where she had been sitting talking to Charley. “Isn’t she in the lounge?”
“I just looked,” Richards said. “Maybe she’s gone up to the ladies’ room.”
He came out to lean against the rail near them, looking out across the darkness to the floodlighted clock tower floating in the sky. “It’s a little like the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, isn’t it?” he said. “Salisbury Cathedral across the Avon.” He turned his face toward Lucy. “Isn’t that where you’re from, Salisbury?”
“Yes,” she said, “it is rather like.”
Then an odd thing happened. The southwest horizon leaped up suddenly, black and jagged, hill and tree and floating tower, with the green glow of heat lightning behind it, and when the lightning winked out, the tower went with it, leaving only the unbroken dark. “Wasn’t that queer?” she said. “They must have turned off the floodlights just at that instant. It was almost as if the lightning wiped it out.”
They were all tired, yawning, languid with the late hour and the beer and the unremitting, oozing heat. Richards looked at his watch, holding it so that light from the lounge fell on it. “Where can Myra be?” he said. “It’s one o’clock.”
Slowly Charley slid off the rail, groaning. “Could she be sick? Did she have too much, you think?”
“I don’t know,” Richards said. His voice was faintly snappish, irritated. “I don’t think so, but she could have, I suppose.”
“Let me just look up in the shower room,” Lucy said, and slipped away from them, through the immense hot lounge. Art Morris was asleep on the big sofa, looking greasy with sweat under the bluish light. Down the long wide hall she felt like a tiny lost figure in a nightmare and thought what a really queer place this was to live in, after all. So big it forgot about you. She pushed the door, felt for the switch. Light leaped on the water-beaded tile, the silence opened to the lonely drip of a tap. No one was in the shower room, no shoes showed under the row of toilet doors.
When she got back to the deck, someone had turned on the powerful light above the door, and the party lay in wreckage there, a surly shambles of slopped beer and glasses and wadded napkins and trampled cigarette butts. In that light the Earps and Charley and Richards were looking at each other abashed.
“It’s almost a cinch she went with the others out to the Casino,” Charley was saying. “There was a whole swarm of them went together.”
“You’d think she would have said something,” Richards said. His voice was so harsh that Lucy looked at him in surprise and saw his mouth tight and thin, his face drawn with inordinate anxiety. “She wasn’t upstairs?”
Lucy shook her head. For an instant Richards stood with his hands opening and closing at his sides. Abruptly he strode to the rail and looked over it, following it around to the corner and peering over into the tangle of weeds and rubbish at the side. He spun around as if he feared guns were pointed at his back. “Who saw her last? What was she doing? Who was she with?”
No one spoke for a moment, until Henry Earp said cautiously, “She was dancing a while ago, a whole bunch of us were. But that was a half-hour ago, at least.”
“Who with?” Richards said, and then slapped at the air with his hand and said, “No, that wouldn’t tell us anything. She must have gone for a sandwich.”
“We can go see,” Charley said. “Matter of fact, I’d like a sandwich myself. Why don’t we run up the road and see if she’s at the Casino? She probably didn’t notice what time it was.”
“No,” Richards said grimly. Lucy found it hard to look at him, she was so troubled with sympathy and embarrassment. “Probably she didn’t.” He looked at Charley almost vaguely, and sweat was up on his forehead. “Would you mind?” he said. “Perhaps I ought to stay here, in case she …”
“I’ll stay here,” Lucy said. The distraught vague eyes touched her.
“You’ll want something to eat too. You go along.”
“No,” she said. “I’d rather stay. I would anyway.” To Charley she said, “Why don’t you and Henry and Donna go? You could look in at the Casino and the Tavern and all those places along there.”
With his arm around her he walked her to the lounge door, and everything that had passed that evening was in their look just before he kissed her. When she turned around Richards was watching. In the bald light, swarming with insects that crawled and leaped and fluttered toward the globe above the doors, his eyes seemed to glare. Lucy clicked off the light and dropped them back into darkness.
“Should you like a drink?” she said into the black.
After a moment he answered, “No, thank you.”
Gradually his white-suited figure emerged again as her eyes adjusted. He was on the rail looking out across the river and woods. Heat lightning flared fitfully again along the staring black horizon. The jeep started down below them; the lights jumped against the bluff, turned twisting the shadows, and were gone with the diminishing motor.
“Don’t worry,” Lucy said. “I’m sure she just forgot about the time and went for something to eat. We should have had something here, but somehow with so many to plan things, nothing ever gets planned.”
“I don’t like that river,” Richards said. “It’s so absolutely black down there …” He swung around at her. “Have you got a flashlight?”
“I think so,” she said, “but don’t you suppose—”
“Could I borrow it, please?” he said. “I’m going down along the bank to look. If you’d stay here—if she should come back …”
She slipped in and past the still-sleeping Art Morris and found a flashlight in the kitchen drawer, and now suddenly it was as if she were five years back in time, the cool tube in her hand, the intense blackout darkness around, the sense of oppression, the waiting, the search. That sense was even stronger a few minutes later as she sat on the rail and saw the thin slash of the light down along the riverbank, moving slowly, cutting on and off, eventually disappearing in the trees.
It was very still. Perched on the rail, she looked out from the deck they were so lucky to have, over the night-obliterated view that gave them such a sense of freedom and space, and in all the dark there was no sound louder than the brush of a moth’s wings or the tick of an armored bug against the driveway light. Then far up the highway a point of sound bored into the silence and grew and rounded, boring through layers of dark and soundless air, until it was a rush and a threat and a roar, and headlights burst violently around the corner of the bluff and reached across the shine of water and picked out, casual and instantaneous, a canoe with a couple in it.
It was there, starkly white, for only a split instant, and then the road swung, the curtain came down. She found it hard to believe that it had been there at all; she even felt a little knife-prick of terror that it could have been there—so silent, so secret, so swallowed in the black, as unseen and unfelt and unsuspected as a crocodile at a jungle ford.
The heat lightning flared again like the flare of distant explosions or the light of burning towns. Instinctively, out of a habit long outgrown, and even while her eyes remained fixed on the place where the canoe had been, she waited for the sound of the blast, but nothing came; she found herself waiting almost ridiculously, with held breath, and that was the time when the lion chose to roar again.
That challenge, coming immediately after the shock of seeing the silent and somehow stealthy canoe, brought a thought that stopped her pulse: “What if he should be loose?” She felt the adrenaline pump into her blood as she might have felt an electric shock. Her heart pounded and her breath came fast through her open mouth. What if he should be loose?
What if, in these Indiana woods by this quiet river where all of them lived and worked for a future full of casual expectation, far from the jungles and the velds where lions could be expected and where darkness was full of danger, what if here too fear prowled on quiet pads and made its snarling noise in the night? This fraternity house where they lived amicably was ringed with dark water and darker woods where the threat lay in wait. This elevated balcony which she could flood with light at the flip of a finger, this fellowship of youth and study and common experience and common hopes, this common belief in the future, were as friable as walls of cane, as vulnerable as grass huts, and she did not need the things that had happened that evening, or the sight of Clark Richards’ tiny light flicking and darting back toward her along the riverbank, to know that what she had lived through for six years was not over and would perhaps never be over for any of them, that in their hearts they were alone, terrified, and at bay, each with his ears attuned to some roar across the woods, some ripple of the water, some whisper of a footstep in the dark.
Volcano
Once they had turned off the asphalt onto the rough graded road the driver nursed the car along carefully, creeping across bridges and through arroyos and along rocky stretches. While lighting a cigarette he explained to his American passenger.
“It is a car which cost seven thousand pesos,” he said. “One does not treat it as if it were a burro.”
“Truly,” the American said.
“Partly it is the tires,” the driver said. “Tires one cannot buy without paying too much to those who sell them illegally. But partly it is the engine. In the dust an engine suffers.”
“I believe it,” the American said politely. He was watching out the closed window, seeing how the ash had deepened in the last mile or two, how the bridge rails now were mounded with it, and how the pines, growing thickly on the sides of the countless little volcanic hills, rose listless and gray out of a gray blanket as smooth as new snow and as light under the wind as feathers. Across the west the cloud of smoke was blacker and angrier, funneling down so that its compact lower plume was hidden behind the hills. The sun, at the upper edge of the cloud, was an immense golden orange.
