More Than Human (15 page)

PART THREE

Morality

“What’s he to you, Miss Gerald?” demanded the sheriff.
       “Gerard,” she corrected. She had gray-green eyes and a strange mouth. “He’s my cousin.”
       “All Adam’s chillun are cousins, one way or the other. You’ll have to tell me a little more than that.”
       “He was in the Air Force seven years ago,” she said. “There was some—trouble. He was discharged. Medical.”
       The sheriff thumbed through the file on the desk before him. “Remember the doctor’s name?”
       “Thompson first, then Bromfield. Dr Bromfield signed the discharge.”
       “Guess you do know something about him at that. What was he before he did his hitch in the Air Force?”
       “An engineer. I mean, he would have been if he’d finished school.”
       “Why didn’t he?”
       She shrugged. “He just disappeared.”
       “So how do you know he’s here?”
       “I’d recognize him anywhere,” she said. “I saw... I saw it happen.”
       “Did you now.” The sheriff grunted, lifted the file, let it drop. “Look, Miss Gerald, it’s not my business to go advising people. But you seem like a nice respectable girl. Why don’t you just forget him?”
       “I’d like to see him, if I may,” she said quietly.
       “He’s crazy. Did you know that?”
       “I don’t think so.”
       “Slammin’ his fist through a plate glass window. For nothing.”
       She waited. He tried again. “He’s dirty. He don’t know his own name, hardly.”
       “May I see him?”
       The sheriff uttered a wordless growl and stood up. “Them Air Force psychos had any sense, they’d’ve put him where he would never even get near a jail. This way.”
       The walls were steel plates like a ship’s bulkhead, studded with rivets, painted a faded cream above and mustard color below. Their footsteps echoed. The sheriff unlocked a heavy door with one small high grating and slid it aside. They stepped through and he closed and locked it. He motioned her ahead of him and they came into a barnlike area, concrete on walls and ceiling. Built around it was a sort of balcony; under and over this were the cells, steel-walled, fronted by close-set bars. There were perhaps twenty cells. Only a half dozen were occupied. It was a cold, unhappy place.
       “Well, what did you expect?” demanded the sheriff, reading her expression. “The Waldorf Plaza or something?”
       “Where is he?” she asked.
       They walked to a cell on the lower tier. “Snap out of it, Barrows. Lady to see you.”
       “Hip! Oh, Hip!”
       The prisoner did not move. He lay half on, half off a padded steel bunk, one foot on the mattress, one on the floor. His left arm was in a dirty sling.
       “See? Nary a word out of him. Satisfied, Miss?”
       “Let me in,” she breathed. “Let me talk to him.”
       He shrugged and reluctantly unlocked the door. She stepped in, turned. “May I speak to him alone?”
       “Liable to get hurt,” he warned.
       She gazed at him. Her mouth was extraordinarily expressive. “Well,” he said at length, “I’ll stay in the area here. You yell if you need help. S’help me I’ll put a slug through your neck, Barrows, if you try anything.” He locked the barred door behind the girl.
       She waited until he stepped away and then went to the prisoner. “Hip,” she murmured. “Hip Barrows.”
       His dull eyes slid in their sockets until they approximated her direction. The eyes closed and opened in a slow, numb blink.
       She knelt beside him. “Mr Barrows,” she whispered, “you don’t know me. I told them I was your cousin. I want to help you.”
       He was silent.
       She said, “I’m going to get you out of here. Don’t you want to get out?”
       For a long moment he watched her face. Then his eyes went to the locked door and back to her face again.
       She touched his forehead, his cheek. She pointed at the dirty sling. “Does it hurt much?”
       His eyes lingered, withdrew from her face, found the bandage. With effort, they came up again. She asked, “Aren’t you going to say anything? Don’t you want me to help?”
       He was silent for so long that she rose. “I’d better go. Don’t forget me. I’ll help you.” She turned to the door.
       He said, “Why?”
       She returned to him. “Because you’re dirty and beaten and don’t care—and because none of that can hide what you are.”
       “You’re crazy,” he muttered tiredly.
       She smiled. “That’s what they say about you. So we have something in common.”
       He swore, foully.
       Unperturbed, she said, “You can’t hide behind that either. Now listen to me. Two men will come to see you this afternoon. One is a doctor. The other is a lawyer. We’ll have you out of here this evening.”
       He raised his head and for the first time something came into his lethargic face. Whatever it was was not pretty. His voice came from deep in his chest. He growled, “What type doctor?”
       “For your arm,” she said evenly. “Not a psychiatrist. You’ll never have to go through that again.”
       He let his head drop back. His features slowly lost their expression. She waited and when he had nothing else to offer, she turned and called the sheriff.

It was not too difficult. The sentence was sixty days for malicious mischief. There had been no alternative fine offered. The lawyer rapidly proved that there should have been, and the fine was paid. In his clean new bandages and his filthy clothes, Barrows was led out past the glowering sheriff, ignoring him and his threat as to what the dirty bum could expect if he ever showed up in town again.
       The girl was waiting outside. He stood stupidly at the top of the jailhouse steps while she spoke to the lawyer. Then the lawyer was gone and she touched his elbow. “Come on, Hip.”
       He followed like a wound-up toy, walking whither his feet had been pointed. They turned two corners and walked five blocks and then up the stone steps of a clean, dried spinster of a house with a bay window and colored glass set into the main door. The girl opened the main door with one key and a door in the hallway with another. He found himself in the room with the bay window. It was high ceilinged, airy, clean.
       For the first time he moved of his own volition. He turned around, slowly, looking at one wall after another. He put out his hand and lifted the corner of a dresser scarf, and let it fall. “Your room?”
       “Yours,” she said. She came to him and put two keys on the dresser. “Your keys.” She opened the top drawer. “Your socks and handkerchiefs.” With her knuckles she rapped on each drawer in turn. “Shirts. Underclothes.” She pointed to a door. “Two suits in there; I think they’ll fit. A robe. Slippers, shoes.” She pointed to another door. “Bathroom. Lots of towels, lots of soap. A razor.”
       “Razor?”
       “Anyone who can have keys can have a razor,” she said gently. “Get presentable, will you? I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Do you know how long it is since you’ve eaten anything?”
       He shook his head.
       “Four days. ’Bye now.”
       She slipped through the door and was gone, even as he fumbled for something to say to her. He looked at the door for a long time. Then he swore and fell limply back on the bed.
       He scratched his nose and his hand slid down to his jaw. It was ragged, itchy. He half rose, muttered, “Damn if I will,” and lay back. And then, somehow, he was in the bathroom, peering at himself in the mirror. He wet his hands, splashed water on his face, wiped the dirt off on to a towel and peered again. He grunted and reached for the soap.
       He found the razor, he found the underclothes, the slacks, socks, slippers, shirt, jacket. When he looked into the mirror he wished he had a comb. When she elbowed the door open she put her packages on the top of the dresser and then she was smiling up at him, her hand out, the comb in it. He took it wordlessly and went and wet his head and combed it.
       “Come on, it’s all ready,” she called from the other room. He emerged. She had taken the lamp off the night table and had spread out a thick oval platter on which was a lean, rare steak, a bottle of ale, a smaller bottle of stout, a split Idaho potato with butter melting in it, hot rolls in a napkin, a tossed salad in a small wooden bowl.
       “I don’t want nothing,” he said, and abruptly fell to. There was nothing in the world then but the good food filling his mouth and throat, the tingle of ale and the indescribable magic of the charcoal crust.
       When the plate was empty, it and the table suddenly wanted to fly upward at his head. He toppled forward, caught the sides of the table and held it away from him. He trembled violently. She spoke from behind him, “All right. It’s all right,” and put her hands on his shoulders, pressed him back into his chair. He tried to raise his hand and failed. She wiped his clammy forehead and upper lip with the napkin.
       In time, his eyes opened. He looked round for her, found her sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him silently. He grinned sheepishly. “
Whew!
”
       She rose. “You’ll be all right now. You’d better turn in. Goodnight!”
       She was in the room, she was out of it. She had been with him, he was alone. It made a change which was too important to tolerate and too large to understand. He looked from the door to the bed and said “Good night,” only because they were the last words she had said, and they hung shimmering in the silence.
       He put his hands on the chair arms and forced his legs to cooperate. He could stand but that was all. He fell forward and sidewise, curling up to miss the table as he went down. He lay across the counterpane and blackness came.

“Good morning.”
       He lay still. His knees were drawn up and the heels of his hands were tight on his cheekbones. He closed his eyes tighter than sleep to shut out the light. He closed his kinesthetic sense to shut out the slight tilting of the mattress which indicated where she sat on the bed. He disconnected his hearing lest she speak again. His nostrils betrayed him; he had not expected there to be coffee in the room and he was wanting it, wanting it badly, before he thought to shut it out.
       Fussily he lay thinking, thinking something about her. If she spoke again, he thought, he’d show her. He’d lie there till she spoke again and when she spoke he’d ignore her and lie still some more.
       He waited.
       Well, if she wasn’t going to speak again, he couldn’t ignore her, could he?
       He opened his eyes. They blazed, round and angry. She sat near the foot of the bed. Her body was still, her face was still, her mouth and her eyes were alive.
       He coughed suddenly, violently. It closed his eyes and when he opened them he was no longer looking at her. He fumbled vaguely at his chest, then looked down at himself.
       “Slep’ in my clothes all night,” he said.
       “Drink your coffee.”
       He looked at her. She still had not moved, and did not. She was wearing a burgundy jacket with a gray-green scarf. She had long, level, gray-green eyes, the kind which in profile are deep clear triangles. He looked away from her, farther and farther away, until he saw the coffee. A big pot, a thick hot cup, already poured. Black and strong and good. “Whoo,” he said, holding it, smelling it. He drank. “Whoo.”
       He looked at the sunlight now. Good. The turn and fall and turn again of the breeze-lifted marquisette at the window, in and out of a sunbeam. Good. The luminous oval, a shadow of the sunlight itself, where the sun glanced off the round mirror on one wall to the clean paint on the adjoining one. Good. He drank more good coffee.
       He set the cup down and fumbled at his shirt buttons. He was wrinkled and sweaty. “Shower,” he said.
       “Go ahead,” said the girl. She rose and went to the dresser where there was a cardboard box and some paper sacks. She opened the box and took out an electric hot plate. He got three buttons undone and somehow the fourth and fifth came off with little explosive tearing sounds. He got the rest of his clothes off somehow. The girl paid him no attention, neither looking at him nor away, just calmly doing things with the hot plate. He went into the bathroom and fussed for a long time with the shower handles, getting the water just right. He got in and let the water run on the nape of his neck. He found soap in the dish, so he let the water run on his head and then rubbed it furiously with the cake of soap until he was mantled in warm, kind, crawling lather.
God
, the thought came from somewhere,
I’m thin as a xylophone. Got to put some beef back on or I’ll get sick and
... The same thought looped back on him, interrupting itself:
Not supposed to get well. Get good and sick, stay sick. Get sicker
. Angrily he demanded, “Who says I got to get sick?” but there was no answer except a quick echo off the tiles.
       He shut off the water and stepped out and took an oversize towel from the rack. He started one end of it on his scalp, worked it on his hair from one end to the other. He threw it on the floor, in the corner, and took another towel and rubbed himself pink. He threw that one down too and came out into the room. The robe lay over the arm of an easychair by the door so he put it on.
       The girl was spooning fragrant bacon grease over and over three perfect eggs in a pan. When he sat down on the edge of the bed she slid the eggs deftly on to a plate, leaving all the grease behind in the pan. They were perfect, the whites completely firm, the yolks unbroken, liquid, faintly filmed over. There was bacon, four brief seconds less than crisp, paper dried and aromatic. There was toast, golden outside, soft and white inside, with butter melting quickly, running to find and fill the welcoming caves and crevices; two slices with butter, one with marmalade. And these lay in some sunlight, giving off a color possible only to marmalade and to stained glass.
       He ate and drank coffee; ate more and drank coffee and coffee. All the while she sat in the easychair with his shirt in her lap and her hands like dancers, while the buttons grew back on to the material under their swift and delicate paces.
       He watched her and when she was finished he came to her and put out his hand for the shirt, but she shook her head and pointed. “A clean one.”
       He found a knitted pullover polo shirt. While he dressed she washed his dishes and the frying pan and straightened out the bed. He lay back in the easychair and she knelt before him and worked the soggy dressing off his left hand, inspected the cuts and bound them up again. The bandage was firm and comforting. “You can do without the sling now,” she said, pleased. She got up and went to the bed. She sat there facing him, still again except for her eyes, except for her mouth.
       Outside an oriole made a long slender note, broke it, and let the fragments fall through the shining air. A stake-bed truck idled past, busily shaking the string of cowbells on its back, while one hoarse man and one with a viola voice flanked it afoot, chanting. In one window came a spherical sound with a fly at its heart and at the other appeared a white kitten. Out by the kitten went the fly and the kitten reared up and batted at it, twisted and sprang down out of sight as if it had meant all along to leave; only a fool would have thought it had lost its balance.
       And in the room was quiet and a watchfulness which was without demand, except perhaps a guarding against leaving anything unwatched. The girl sat with her hands aslumber and her eyes awake, while a pipe-cleaner man called Healing was born in all his cores, all his marrow, taking the pose of his relaxed body, resting and growing a little and resting again and growing.
       Later, she rose. Without consultation, but merely because it seemed time to do so, she picked up a small handbag and went to the door where she waited. He stirred, rose, went to her. They went out.
       They walked slowly to a place where there was smooth rolling land, mowed and tended. Down in the hollow some boys played softball. They stood for a while, watching. She studied his face and when she saw reflected in it only the moving figures and not the consecutive interest of the game itself, she touched his elbow and moved on. They found a pond where there were ducks and straight cinder paths with flower beds. She picked a primrose and put it in his lapel. They found a bench. A man pushed a bright clean wagon up to them. She bought a frankfurter and a bottle of soda and handed them to him. He ate and drank silently.
       It was a quiet time they had together.
       When it began to grow dark, she brought him back to the room. She left him alone for half an hour and returned to find him sitting just where she had left him. She opened packages and cooked chops and mixed a salad, and while he was eating, made more coffee. After dinner he yawned. She was on her feet immediately. “Good night,” she said, and was gone.
       He turned slowly and looked at the closed door. After a time he said, “Good night.” He undressed and got into bed and turned out the light.
       The next day was the day they rode on a bus and lunched in a restaurant.
       The day after that was the one they stayed out a little later to see a band concert.
       Then there was the afternoon when it rained and they went to a movie which he watched wordlessly, not smiling, not frowning, not stirring to the musical parts.
       “Your coffee.” “Let’s get these to the laundry.” “Come.” “Good night.” These were the things she said to him. Otherwise she watched his face and, undemandingly, she waited.