Pretty Leslie (13 page)

It was not enough. His hands were still two feet away when the beast darted sideways again, and he had only hurt it more by trying.

He knew that his polo shirt was sopping as if he had been in the river. He had an almost uncontrollable urge to urinate and dirty his pants. He could not seem to get his breath right. And he said to himself, They left him. Why shouldn't I?

He uprooted the weeds in which the line was tangled. As best he could he freed the pole and line so there was no longer a tension on the hook. Maybe someone who could help would find the dog, he thought. Then he climbed the embankment to the gravel road.

He saw the cars parked a quarter-mile ahead of him by the picnic grounds, but he could not seem to walk toward them. He sat down at the roadside, felt the wind begin to cool his shirt.

He looked at the clouds and began to tell himself stories—the stories and fragments of stories his crazy mother had told him about his dead father—God himself among the poor black Kasais distributing medicine, distributing food from his sick hands, doling out loaves and fishes. While he stared at the white stacks of clouds, miracle seemed possible to him. The Voice of the Lord called, “Samuel, Samuel” to him. He answered, “Here am I.”

He stood up feeling quite strong and refreshed. He didn't even think now of the cars down the road. He didn't need help. He peed in a clump of bushes and descended again under the bridge. The dog was lying on its side now, near the water. Its sides were heaving. Eyes closed. Midges were spiraling around its head. The line drooped slackly from a bleeding mouth.

Ben stood watching for an unmeasured time. He was waiting for guidance, waiting for a Voice to tell him what to do. He could feel nothing of himself but the stretch of a benevolent, righteous smile on his face. He would be told how to save this creature.

If he could get a sharp stone, he thought, he could saw through the line (too tough to break with his hands) near the dog's mouth. With drunken patience he climbed up to the road again and hunted back and forth in the gravel until he had found a pocketful of stones that might do. Three cars passed him while he was searching. They might have been chariots full of angels, mustering to help him.

The dog felt the vibration of his feet on the mud when he approached this time, was on its feet running and had fouled the line in weeds again before Ben could get to work on it.

He did not believe the pain could have been greater for the dog than it was for him while he clutched the cord and sawed with the dull edge of his stones. His stomach was in total revolt. The spasms came one after another without pause. The first strand of the cord came fuzzily apart. He tried another stone.

There was a final, hard jerk that seemed to evacuate his own innards and leave them spilled on the mud loam beside the water. The dog ran free, trailing blood. On the hook at the end of the slack line there was a streamer of tissue like a long wisp of Christmas wrapping paper.

Nothing was passing on the bridge. No voice called, “Samuel, Samuel.” The clouds sailed northeast at a pace too slow to be visible. The world beyond the black proscenium of the bridge seemed to be all transparent and made of colored glass.

He had failed. He had accomplished nothing except to torture the dog more. His sense of failure was too great to bear. It became rage. He knew how badly he had been cheated. Now someone had to pay.

For the rest of that scorching afternoon he chased the other children. In their guilt they had fled on down the river away from the picnic, and while they had probably found other things to do in the hour he had tried to help the dog, they were also, it seemed, waiting for him to appear in pursuit.

Across a pasture half a mile down, he saw the tops of heads bobbing above an old straw stack. When he had run to the stack he saw the white of Irene's Sunday dress disappearing among some willows in the draw below Lindsay's barn.

He lost them for a while after that, but he did not stop running. His vision had contracted to a red-rimmed circle, like a hoop a hundred yards in front of him that he meant to dive through when he reached it. The ends of his hair, slapping against his forehead and temples, seemed to have been heated white-hot by the sun. His throat was swollen with a dry ache. His tennis shoes had raised blisters on both heels. He would not stop running.

They let him catch them back near the bridge. The sun was halfway down the sky then. Nearly time for their parents to be looking for them if they didn't return soon to the picnic grounds. They had circled back around him through the low rolling hills and not yet harvested wheat. But they stood for a showdown at the edge of a cornfield, all six of them strung out, defiantly waiting for him, meaning to straighten him out before he told on them.

They were prepared to argue. If he felt bad about the dog, so did they. But it was partly accident, wasn't it? Wasn't he as much to blame as any of them? (If he had still been within range of argument, however woolly, they might have persuaded him that he was. There had been that false moment when he hoped the dog would take the bait.)

He gave them no chance. Without even slowing his run, he was on Billy Kirkland, tearing at his overall straps, slapping, kicking, trying to get his eyes, crying, “You're a mean devil.”

Billy and Alberta and George Jr. got him down. Alberta sat on his chest. “It was only a mutt,” she said. “We don't think it was anybody's dog. You've got to straighten up, Ben.” George Jr. sat on his legs. Billy knelt on his arms and funneled hands full of dust into his hair and onto his face.

“I'm going to kill you,” he said to Billy.

“You and who else?” Billy said. “Let him up. If he comes at me again I'll rabbit-punch him. I don't want to, but I will.”

“Don't hit him,” Alberta said. “Ben, gosh, you don't have to take on this way.” She heaved her soft weight off him. Confident that he must have understood her, she let him get up. “Your face is like a fire,” she said to him. “You better go to the river and throw water on it or you'll have sunstroke.”

He walked away from them quietly when they let him go. He passed the family cars parked by the picnic grounds without pausing. He hardly even noticed them, because he was on his way to town to get his Uncle George's Winchester from where it was kept in a woolen stocking under the bed. Too tired to run any more, he only prayed for strength to walk there and come back.

He had gone less than a mile of the three miles in to Green Rock when his Uncle's Chevy caught up with him and stopped. Uncle George, Aunt Vivian and Aunt Peg were in the front seat; the kids were with the picnic baskets and quilts in back.

Ben didn't answer his Uncle George's good-humored cry, “Want a ride, Mister?”

“I told you,” Alberta piped. “He's crazy.”

“You hush,” Aunt Louise said. “Ben, come on now. Come on, Ben.”

Aunt Peg got out of the car and walked to him. She was a square, small-breasted young woman with a sullen, square face. She put gentle fingers under his chin to lift it. “All right, baby, you don't have to say anything,” she told him. In spite of his trying to push her away, she gathered him into her arms. All the way into town she held him on her lap with his face hidden in her shoulder.

Uncle George carried him upstairs to bed in the stifling room he shared with George Jr. and young Allan. Peg came along with a basin and washcloth. She took his temperature, firmly pressing his bare arm against his side so the thermometer wouldn't fall from his armpit. “It's going to rain,” she said matter-of-factly while she sat on the bed beside him, waiting for the reading. “I thought those old thunderheads meant something. I can see the leaves are all white over on the Humphrey's maples, just the way I like to see them. The sun's so pretty on those black clouds.”

She could not persuade him to open his eyes—under whose lids squirmed the horrors that he dared not forget.

“Baby, you've got a hundred and three,” she told him. “I'm going to give you aspirin.”

He vomited the aspirin, mashed to a powder between two teaspoons and washed down his throat with water. Because she didn't know any better, she gave him more. He vomited again.

They called Dr. Benson for him that night. The doctor said he might have got a touch of sun but that there wasn't much wrong. “Give him some ice cream later if he feels like it. Let him stay in bed tomorrow. He'll come around all right.”

“But something's happened to him,” Peg said, shades of panic in her voice as she implored the doctor. “He won't say anything. I don't know if he can.”

The doctor laughed quietly. “Enjoy your blessings, Miss Rainey. He'll talk your arm off after a good night's sleep.” Then he said, “Maybe the other kids know what happened.”

Later Ben heard Uncle George and Aunt Louise questioning Alberta and George Jr. on the front porch. The promised rain had begun then; the first furious onslaught was over, and the wind that brought it had fallen. There was only a muggy drip in the dark beyond the windows, but enough to muffle most of the conversation.

He heard Louise's voice rise once when she said, “Why, that's terrible, terrible. No wonder he's sick.” So he knew the story was told, part of it, at least.

He supposed the other children would be whipped—by now he saw them all stained and spotted with guilt, not only for the animal's suffering but by their filthy purpose in going under the bridge; saw the torture as a consummation of their lust; knew Uncle George to be a strict and God-fearing man. It was easiest to think Billy Kirkland was responsible for the whippings, too, and because he liked his cousins ordinarily, Ben promised that pain too would be paid off. He dozed, identifying himself dreamily as a Western gunman, riding into town under a gloomy sky, bringing justice in his holsters.

An icy, burning circle of pain in the middle of his forehead woke him. It was Aunt Peg who had playfully touched him there with a spoonful of ice cream. “Hey, were you asleep? I couldn't tell since you won't open your eyes. We made a new freezerful to eat before bedtime and I brought you yours.”

He stared at her for a while and took a few bites of the ice cream. Then he closed his eyes again and submitted to her when she straightened him and made him comfortable on the bed. He wanted to talk to her, but his throat was sore as if the fishhook had been there. What he wanted to ask her was whether the dog was dead. Presently he dreamed that the sun had made a round hole, just its own size, in his forehead. Something was in there, fooling with his brains, setting them the way Uncle George set the timer on his car, with a greasy, probing forefinger.

He was allowed to sleep alone that night, though usually he shared the bed with George Jr. He woke late the next morning. As soon as he was dressed he went into his uncle's bedroom and got the rifle from under the bed. He was going downstairs with it when Aunt Louise caught him. Whatever she guessed, she was at least badly startled to find him with the gun.

“Here now, here now,” she said. “You know how mad Uncle George will be if I tell him.”

She climbed a few steps toward him, reaching ahead of her, scared of him. As if something that had already happened was happening again, he felt her fear draw the muzzle of the gun toward her like a magnet swinging a needle. Until the instant her hand closed around it, he was not sure he would not cock it and fire. He felt no antagonism toward her—she was merely in his way and people had lost their importance for him, except as they helped or hindered his boiling need for relief.

She made him go back to his room. In a little while he heard her on the telephone and he supposed that she might be calling Uncle George to report that he had had the gun. But it was Aunt Peg who drove the Chevy home a little while after that. She was going to take the day off from her job at the Light and Power office. Ben and she would drive over to the county seat and go swimming.

She didn't go back to work all that week. She spent every day and every evening with Ben, trying to make him “come out of himself.” She got him talking about all the books and magazines he had read (they sat on a comfort in the yard behind the lilac bushes and discussed like equals the merits of the illustrations in
The American Boy
and
Collier's
, whether
The Pony Boys in the Ozarks
was better than
Andy at Yale
, and if Tom Swift could really have done all the things the books said). They went to the drugstore for Green Rivers or ice cream. Guardedly she talked to him about his mother and the days when she and Louise and Vive (his mother) had been children on his grandfather's farm eight miles west of town.

He liked this attention. Ordinarily he would have been wildly happy with it (liking adults better than children, impatient with being a child). He had not guessed that Aunt Peg could be such a good sport or so much fun to be with. Ordinarily she kept very much to herself, grumped at breakfast, and seldom spoke to the children except with that light sarcasm of one who feels herself the excess baggage of a family.

She might have succeeded in restoring the precarious, sufficient equilibrium of things as they had been before the episode with the dog. But they had bad luck.

The weather was against them. After the rain a relentless heat wave settled on the country. Under windless clear skies the temperature rose each day to one hundred and four or five. The neighbor's collie went mad, began killing chickens and menacing babies. Uncle George fought with his wife and children, an untypical occurrence. Every night there were fires in one or another wheat field visible from the yard.

Beyond that, as if there were a perverse force demanding appeasement and determined that Ben should have no rest until he acted, he broke out with skin poisoning the day after he had gone swimming with Peg. A crusty rash covered his chest, the inside of his wrists, his ankles, and—most tormenting, most like an evil sign—clear across his forehead. He looked devilish in the mirror. His cousins were disgusted to look at him, and even Peg got nervous in trying to persuade him not to scratch.