Call If You Need Me (21 page)

At the entrance to their quarters she clings to him, whispering and stroking his neck. “I do love you! I love only you.” She pulls him to her, her fingers digging into his shoulders, pulling his face to hers. And then she turns and runs for the entrance.

He shouts: “You’ll have to hurry if you’re going to dress!”

Now he is walking in the late afternoon green shadows and now crossing a deserted square, his sandaled feet settling into the hot crumbly dirt. For a moment the sun has gone behind a skein of white clouds and when he comes onto the street leading to the Arena, it is very pale and light and there are no shadows. Silent, small groups of people shuffle down the street but they keep their eyes away and show no recognition when he passes them. In front of the Arena a group of dusty men and women is already waiting. They stare at the ground or at the white-laced sky, and a few of them have their mouths open with the backs of their heads almost touching the shoulders, swaying back and forth like ragged stalks of corn as they follow the clouds. He uses a side entrance and goes directly to the dressing room.

He lies on the table, his face turned toward the dripping white candle, watching the women. Their distorted slow movements
flicker on the wall as they undress him, rubbing his body with oils and scent before dressing him again in the white rough-textured garment. Dirt walls close in the narrow room and there is barely space for the table and the six women who hover over him. A wrinkled, oily brown face peers into his, blowing a wet breath of old food, the breath scraping in her throat. The lips crack farther until they part, open and close over hoarse ancient syllables. The others pick it up as they help him off the table and lead him into the Arena.

He lies down quickly on the small platform, closes his eyes and listens to the chanting of the women. The sun is bright against his face and he turns his head away. The band flares up, much closer, somewhere inside the Arena, and for a moment he listens to that. The chanting drops suddenly to a murmur, then stops. He opens his eyes and turns his head first to one side and then to the other. For an instant all the faces are focused on him, heads craning forward. He closes his eyes to the sight. Then the dull
chink
of a heavy bracelet close to his ear, and he opens his eyes. She is standing over him dressed in a white robe and holding the long shiny obsidian knife. She bends closer, the cluster of flowers woven into her hair—bending lower over his face as she blesses his love and devotion and asks his forgiveness.

“Forgive me.”

“What is the use?” he whispers. Then, as the knife point touches his chest he screams, “I forgive you!”

And the people hear and settle back in their seats, exhausted, as she cuts out his heart and holds it up to the lustrous sun.

He saw nothing only suddenly the wind stiffened and blew mist up off the sea and over his face, taking him by surprise. He’d been dreaming again. Using his elbows, he worked a little closer to the edge that overlooked the beach and raised his face out toward the sea. The wind struck his eyes, bringing tears. Down below, the other boys were playing war but their voices sounded watery and far away, and he tried not to listen. Over the voices came the squeak of the gulls, out where the sea thundered on the rocks below the temple. Poseidon’s temple. He lay again on his stomach and turned his face a little to one side, waiting.

On his back the sun slipped away and a chill broke over his legs and shoulders. Tonight he would lie wrapped in his cover and remember these few minutes of felt time, day fading. It was different than standing in Naiad’s cave up in the hills, someone holding his hand under the water that trickled steadily out of the crack in the rock. It had been dripping for no one knows how long, they said. Different too than wading in the surf up to his knees, feeling the strange pull. That was time too, but not the same. They’d told him about that, about when to wade and when to stay off the beach. But this was something of his own and every afternoon he lay on his stomach up over the sea and waited for the change, the prickly passage of time across his back.

Out loud, tasting the sea salt on his lips as he did so, he said a few verses into the wind, new ones that he’d heard last night. Some of the words he liked he rolled over again in his mouth. Below, he heard Aias curse another boy and invoke one of the gods. Was it true, what men told of the gods? He remembered
every song he’d heard, every story handed down and recited at night around the fire, as well as all the eyewitness accounts. Still, he had heard some men speak of the gods with disrespect, even disbelief, so that it was hard to know what to believe anymore. Someday he’d leave here and find out for himself. He’d walk over the hills to Eritrea where the trading ships came in. Maybe he’d even be able to board one of them and go wherever it was they go, the places men talked about.

Below, the voices were louder and one of the boys was crying jerkily against the clatter of their sticks on the shields. He raised up onto his knees to listen and swayed blindly, dizzy with memory and idea as the evening wind carried up the angry voices. He could hear Achilles yelling loudest of all as the two groups ran back and forth over the beach. Then his own name was called, and he lay down quickly to keep out of sight. Nearer, his sister called again. Now the steps behind him and he sat up all at once, discovered.

“There you are!” she said. “I had to walk all this way for you! Why didn’t you come home? You never do anything you’re supposed to.” She came closer. “Give me your hand!”

He felt her hands take his and begin to pull him. “No!” he said, shaking. He jerked free and with the stick he sometimes called Spear began to feel his way down the trail.

“Well, you’ll see, little man who thinks he’s so big,” she said. “Your time’s coming, Mama said.”

“I can’t make water, Mommy,” Old Hutchins said, coming out of the bathroom with tears in his eyes.

“Close your barn door, Pa!” Rudy shouted. The old man disgusted him and his hand twitched in anger. He leaped out of his chair and looked around for his boomerang. “Have you seen my boomerang, Ma?”

“No, I haven’t,” Mother Hutchins said patiently. “Now you just behave yourself, Rudy, while I see to your pa. You just heard him say he can’t make water. But close your barn door, Daddy, like Rudy says.”

Old Hutchins sniffled but did as he was told. Mother Hutchins came over to him with a worried look, holding her hands in her apron.

“It’s just what Dr. Porter said would happen, Mommy,” Old Hutchins said, sagging against the wall and looking as if he were going to die right then. “I’ll get up one morning, he said, and not be able to make water.”

“Shut up!” Rudy shouted. “Shut up! Talk, talk, talk, dirty talk all day long. I’ve had enough of it!”

“You keep quiet now, Rudy,” Mother Hutchins said feebly, moving back a step or two with Old Hutchins in her arms.

Rudy began stalking up and down the linoleum-covered floor of the sparsely furnished but tidy living room. His hands jumped in and out of his hip pockets as he threw menacing looks at Old Hutchins, who hung limply in Mother Hutchins’s arms.

At the same time, a warm smell of fresh apple pie drifted in
from the kitchen and made Rudy lick his lips hungrily, reminded him, even in the midst of his great anger, that it was nearly snack time. Now and then he glanced nervously out of the corner of his eye at his older brother Ben, who sat in a heavy oak chair in the corner near the treadle-operated sewing machine. But Ben never raised his eyes from his worn copy of
Restless Guns
.

Rudy couldn’t figure Ben. He kept tramping up and down the living room, from time to time knocking over a chair or breaking a lamp. Mother Hutchins and Old Hutchins inched back toward the bathroom. Rudy stopped suddenly and glared at them, then looked at Ben again. He just couldn’t figure Ben. He couldn’t figure any of them, but he could figure Ben even less than the others. He wanted Ben to notice him sometimes, but Ben always had his nose in a book. Ben read Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Ernest Haycox, Luke Short. Ben thought Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, and Ernest Haycox were all right, but not as good as Luke Short. He thought Luke Short was the best of the lot. He’d read Luke Short’s books forty or fifty times. He had to have something to pass the time. Ever since his rigging had come loose seven or eight years ago when he was topping trees for Pacific Lumber, he’d had to have something to pass the time. Since then he could only move the upper part of his body; also, he seemed to have lost the power of speech. Anyway, he had never uttered a word since the day of the fall. But then he’d always been a quiet boy when he was living at home before; no bother at all. Still no bother, his mother maintained, if she was asked. Quiet as a mouse and needed very little seeing to.

Besides, on the first of each month Ben got a little disability check in the mail. Not much, but enough for them all to live on. Old Hutchins had quit work when the disability checks started coming. He didn’t like his boss was the reason he gave at the time. Rudy had never left home. He’d never finished high school, either. Ben had finished high school but Rudy was a high school dropout. Now he was afraid of being drafted. The idea of being drafted made him very nervous. He didn’t at all like the
idea of being drafted. Mother Hutchins had always been a housewife and a homemaker. She was not very shrewd but she knew how to make ends meet. Once in a while, though, if they ran short before the end of the month, she had to walk into town with a nice box of apples on her back and sell them for a dime each on the corner in front of Johnson’s Pharmacy. Mr. Johnson and the clerks knew her and she always gave Mr. Johnson and the clerks a shiny red apple that she polished against the front of her dress.

Rudy began making violent slashes and sword thrusts in the air, grunting as he gouged and chopped. He seemed to have forgotten about the old couple cowering in the passageway.

“Now, dear, don’t you worry,” Mother Hutchins said faintly to Old Hutchins. “Dr. Porter’ll put you right. Why, a prostrate operation is, is an everyday occurrence. Look at Prime Minister MacMillian. Remember Prime Minister MacMillian, Daddy? When he was prime minister and had his prostrate operation he was up and around in no time. No time. Now you just cheer up. Why—”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Rudy made a frightening lunge toward them, but they drew back farther into the narrow passageway. Fortunately, Mother Hutchins had enough strength left to whistle up Yeller, a shaggy giant of a dog, who immediately ran into the room from the back porch and put his paws up on Rudy’s narrow chest, pushing him back a step or two.

Rudy retreated slowly, appalled at the dog’s rank breath. On his way through the living room he picked up Old Hutchins’s prized possession, an ashtray made from the hoof and foreleg of an elk, and hurled the smelly thing out into the garden.

Old Hutchins began to cry again. His nerves were gone. Ever since Rudy’s vicious attack upon his life a month ago, his nerves, which weren’t good to begin with, had gone.

What had happened was this: Old Hutchins was taking a bath when Rudy sneaked up and threw the RCA Victrola into the bathtub. It could have been serious, fatal even, if in his
haste Rudy hadn’t forgot to plug it in. As it was, Old Hutchins had received a bad bruise on his right thigh when the Victrola had made its flying entry through the open door. That was just after Rudy had seen a movie in town called
Goldfinger
. Now they were more or less on guard at all moments, but especially whenever Rudy ventured into town. Who could tell what ideas he might pick up at the movies? He was very impressionable. “He’s at a very impressionable age,” Mother Hutchins said to Old Hutchins. Ben never said anything, one way or the other. Nobody could figure Ben, not even his mother, Mother Hutchins.

Rudy stayed in the barn just long enough to devour half the pie, then put a halter on Em, his favorite camel. He led her out the back door and safely through the elaborate network of snares, covered pits and traps, laid for the careless and the unwary. Once clear, he pulled Em’s ear and commanded her to kneel, mounted, and was off.

He clop-clopped out across the back forty, up into the dry, sage-covered foothills. He stopped once on a little rise to look back at the old homestead. He wished he had some dynamite and a plunger to blow it right off the landscape—like Lawrence of Arabia had done with those trains. He hated the sight of it, the old homestead. They were all crazy down there anyway. They wouldn’t be missed. Would he miss them? No, he wouldn’t miss them. Besides, there would still be the land, the apples. Damn the land and the apples anyway! He wished he had some dynamite.

He turned Em into a dry arroyo. With the sun bearing down fiercely on his back, he cantered to the end of the box canyon. He stopped and dismounted and, behind a rock, uncovered the canvas that held the big Smith & Wesson service revolver, the burnoose and the headgear. He dressed and then stuck the revolver in his sash. It fell out. He stuck it in again and it fell out again. Then he just decided to carry it in his hand, though it was heavy and it would be hard to guide Em. It would call for a skillful bit of maneuvering on his part, but he thought he could do it. He thought he was up to it.

Back at the farm, he left Em in the barn and made his way to the house. He saw the elk-leg ashtray still in the garden, a few flies working away on it, and he sneered; the old man had been afraid to come out and retrieve it. But it gave him an idea.

He burst in on them in the kitchen. Old Hutchins, sitting rather comfortably at the kitchen table and stirring his coffee and cream, looked completely stunned. Mother Hutchins was at the stove, putting in another pie.

“Apples, apples, apples!” Rudy shrieked. He followed this outburst with a wild laugh, waving his Colt .45 around in the air, then herded them into the living room. Ben looked up with a slight show of interest, and then went back to his book. It was Luke Short’s
Rawhide Trail
.

“This is it,” Rudy said, his voice rising. “This is it, this is it, this is it!”