The Beast (v1.0), page 4
Bo got up and walked over to the table. He was a foot taller than the woman and, although he had lost fifty pounds in the last few weeks, was probably still sixty or seventy pounds heavier. Standing beside her as she mixed a white powder into the milk, he felt protective toward her; but there was something about her that was very strong, too, something he could sense. Bo wondered if anyone had ever tried to get funny with her. She might know some secret technique or a magic word that would really wreck a man who did that. She had a—what could he call it—a way about her, a presence, as if she was so certain who she was that no one and nothing could ever harm her. He also liked her looks when he had leisure from the pain to think about it. She wasn’t pretty, really, but she was fetching in a way he could not recall seeing in a long time.
“What’s that stuff now?”
“It’s not ready yet,” she said, smiling as she saw his nose wrinkling with disgust at the smell. “But it’s going to be yoghurt.”
“Ye gods,” Bo said. He liked standing beside her. “You already got me doing Yoga and now I have to eat yoghurt too.” He laughed briefly and was rewarded by a dazzling smile from Lilly.
“But you can’t have much.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re talking to my body, right7”
“That’s right, sending messages it can understand. No 32
more cigarettes or cigars or pipes, no more coffee or alcohol, no more meat and, especially, no salted meat.’* She made a face that Bo thought with some surprise only made her cuter.
He went back to the bed and sat down, feeling exhausted. He found himself watching the slender, small woman as she worked to prepare his meal and set the yoghurt aside to work. If it wasn’t that he was feeling so punk, he would actually be attracted to Lilly. He felt a faint stir of attention somewhere far down and turned his mind away quickly. Jesus! Here he was, a dying man, and thinking about doing it to his nurse. He looked up, surprised, as she sat beside him with a plate in her hand. He looked for an instant like a guilty child.
“This is very good soup,” she said, catching the look on his face but putting it aside to think about later. “It has lentils and other good messages for your poor body.”
“As usual, there isn’t much of it.”
“Enough for now.”
He ate the soup willingly enough, thankful that the pain was gone so he could enjoy it. The soup was just warm, not hot, and it tasted like soybeans and needed salt, but he knew he couldn’t have salt, either. There was no more than a cupful altogether and it was soon gone.
“That must have been a telegraph message,” Lilly said. “It went so fast.”
“You don’t have to treat me like a little kid,” Bo said, wiping his mouth on his handkerchief.
When the woman was silent, he felt he had to say something else.
“I feel better this afternoon—now, I mean.” He was afraid as he said it, afraid the pain would begin again. He knew it would, that this was only a short vacation during which the world seemed real again and there were other things than his wretched, dying guts.
“You’ve been getting better right along,” Lilly said quietly. “But”—and she paused and looked at him with such open sympathy that he almost reached over to touch her—“there’s still a long way to go.”
“I just want to know if you think I’m going to make it?”
“I’m sure of it. But it’s all got to be gone through if you are to live right afterwards.” He would remember the compassion on her face as she said that, remember it when the pain was so intense he was sure he would die.
“Times like this, I mean, like now when I haven’t got the pain, I feel like it might really be true,*’ he said, and in his voice he heard himself that undertone of childish fear. That was why she treated him like a kid. He felt like one, like a poor little kid with a bad pain wanting his mommy to make it well. He decided he would try to get rid of that tone.
“What about you, Lilly?’’ It was the first time he had said her name, and it sounded strange and exotic to his own ears. “What do you do to stay on the sunny side of the street?”
“Oh I’m just another working girl,” she said lightly, happy that his voice had lost its fear for a while. “I take a streetcar downtown every day and put books together. I work in a printing plant.”
“You have a family, I guess,” he said, trying to remember if she wore a wedding ring. He hadn’t noticed, and now she had her hands in her lap and he couldn’t see her left ring-finger.
“I live with my folks,” she said, and stopped, as if there were something further she did not care to say.
“Your parents, father and mother?”
“You’re very curious for a sick man.”
“I didn’t mean to get personal. I haven’t got any right to pry.”
“That’s all right, Bo. I call them my folks. Actually, they’re my very good friends, Dan and Polly Carruthers. My parents are dead.”
“You got a boyfriend, I bet.”
“Ob, there are men who ask me out once in a while. I’m not a wallflower.”
He wanted to go on with the questioning, wanted to ask her more about the boyfriends, but he caught himself. He was acting like a man half his age, for crissake. What about his own Mary Louise back in Whitethorn, taking care of the house and the bills on his savings, trying to make ends meet and not knowing what was going on or where he was even. He felt a pang of remorse about his wife. She had always tried so hard, and … the death, had been hard on her, too, harder since she couldn’t have any more kids. He guessed she couldn’t have any, but that had been pretty much a dumb question for the past few years, Since they didn’t even try much anymore. -
“Are you feeling okay?” Lilly asked, looking at him closely.
"Just thinking about home,” Bo said, and at that mo-ment he felt the faintest creeping in of sensation in his side and knew the pain was coming back. He lay back on the bed, his hands pressed to his stomach, ready for it to begin again.
“I don’t guess you could get hold of some aspirin or something,” he said, his eyes closed.
“I’m sorry, Bo.” Lilly’s voice came to him out of the darkness of his closed eyes. “If we’re going to win, we’ve got to do it alone.”
“I thought probably that was it.”
He was startled by a cool, soft hand on his cheek. “Now, Bo, here’s a thing our animal friend told me you should do when the pain gets bad.” Lilly’s voice went on softly as she stroked his forehead, and although the pain returned inexorably as she spoke, it had that distant quality again, as if her voice were somehow shielding him from its full impact. He was paying close attention to her words, as he always did when she gave him instructions, but he seemed to be listening without trying, with his whole self rather than with just his ears and mind.
“… stretch the stomach out, you see, by bending back in that position I showed you a couple of days ago. And then you breathe in the short way, always through the nose, never through the mouth, ten breaths, then you come up to sitting again. Got that?”
He nodded, grateful for her voice, her interest in him, her certainty around him when he himself was so uncertain that he might die just from being uncertain.
“And you will do the chants, as you have done before,” she said, her soft voice almost lulling him totally away from the pain. “But …*’ and here she reached her other hand to take his face in both her hands so that he opened his eyes and looked at her. She was very close to him. He could feel her breath and smell how nice it was. The pain was far back, but still there. “… if you leave your body again, Bo,” she said, very serious now and intent, looking with her deep green eyes directly into his so that he felt faint, “then you must say your own name and come back.” She shook his face lightly between her hands. “You must come back. It’s not bad to leave it for a time, but you must come back right away.”
“I thought that was a dream,” Bo said, his voice weak.
“It was real enough,” Lilly said, sitting back with her hands again in her lap. “But it’s not time for you to go yet, and in your condition you might just make it across that way and not be able to get back.”
The pain surged into his guts again as he thought of that dream, what he had thought was a dream, his son in the meadow, the peace.
“I wanted to stay.”
“You can’t go that way,” Lilly said, her face all serious now.
“If I die, then will I go there?”
She was silent so long that he grew afraid: afraid that there was nowhere like that, that his boy was gone and he himself would only go into the empty grave and be like a candle that is blown out, nothing more. The pain was bad.
“I don’t know about that,” she said, finally. “But I do know that if it isn’t your time, if you can make it but you give up, I know that’s bad. I don’t know any more than that.”
“Even if it’s terrible?” He felt tears squeezing out of his eyes in spite of himself. He didn’t want her to see him cry, although he cried a lot when he was alone.
“It’s going to be better soon, Bo,” she said positively. “I’m going to make it a little better right now.”
“How can you do that?”
“It’s a trick, and it’s not good to use it all the time, but we need something right now to help.” She looked into his eyes. “Just listen and trust me.”
*1 do,” he said, and it was true.
“Close your eyes and relax. Let the pain hate you, let it have you, you can move away from it for a time. That’s right. Now let your hands go loose, that’s right.”
She talked to him, just talked for a few minutes, and the pain got off to a distance, sending him messages like crazy; but now he had time to decipher them instead of just getting torn up about the way they were written. The pain became like a long paper tape, like the ticker tapes they showed the big stock market boys reading before they jumped out their office windows. He could take the pain in his hands now like a long white tape and read what it said, or, rather, could almost read it. There were words there, some of them in red and some in what looked like a foreign language. They were more than print on paper. They rose up off the paper and flew toward his eyes as he tried to read them. They were flying into his eyes before he could make out what they said, but then he realized they were flying into his mind directly so that he could read them there, and while he was trying to put them back in order so they would make sense there in the big red room of his brain, he fell asleep.
After a long time he dreamed, as he often did, that the Beast came again. She was looking down at him with her big green eyes, and there was such compassion in those eyes that Bo imagined it must have something to do with love. But then the Beast raised one huge paw that had almost human Angers but also long ivory claws and, with one swift downward stroke, plunged the claws into Bo’s stomach. He tried to scream, thrashing about to keep the terrible claws from tearing into him, but he could not get away. And then he watched quietly as the claws sank into his body. What he felt then came not from the claws but from the pulling away as the pain itself tore loose. It flowed up into those ivory channels that grew a clear, translucent red as the pain seeped up into them, out of his body and into the blue-gray arm.
The Beast seemed to be smiling.
Will he remember this?
Asa dream only. You have done well.
He almost died today.
He still wants to die with part of himself, but now he will be better.
I And the human will, unlike my own, is capable of turning upon itself, a strange act that I cannot entirely understand. The man who lies on the bed as I assist in his healing watches me with blank eyes. He has been acting out his sorrow, and his will is so strong it has transformed his body into this artifact of grief. I have learned to care for these creatures. They have, in their madness, that quality I need for my life.
I leave the sick man’s room, treading lightly down through Mrs. Peavey’s house in the early morning hours. Lilly is asleep now. I will have a run to refresh myself and neutralize the poison I have taken in. The streets are lit at distant intervals, and the houses are dark along my way to the beach. I smell the ocean, its fecundity and exciting battles. Salt spray lightly coats my fur as I pace along the rocks looking for a way down to the water. The surf is quiet tonight, low rollers breaking far out in the bay as I reach the dark sand and feel the dampness that prickles my fur and excites me. I will swim. I run fast along the shallowsr splashing a long line of spray behind me, dive into the cold rush and swim out into the bay. The water submerges my ears momentarily, and I hear the creatures swimming, scuttling, writhing in the water around me. My spatial sense reaches below, and I feel the sandy bottom and the life there with a brilliance that is pleasure over my whole skin. I am complete, delighted with my muscular body that surges through the freezing element. I feel about in the dark water for something more substantial than the shellfish I could scoop up or the somnolent flounders in the sand. It enters the sphere of my spatial sense like a palpable shadow, lazily casting about for its own late-night snacks close to shore, a thickbodied fish half as long as I am. I tread the cold water in slow time with the fish’s own movements, feeling out with my mind to touch that cold, intent brain, listening to it with my own. I have for a long time lacked singleness of will that would bring the fish helplessly to my jaws, but I can feel its intentions by relaxing into its mode of being. I tread lightly, just enough to keep my nose above the low waves and follow the fish as it moves in near the bottom. Now it is swimming just beneath me, and I turn to follow it to more shallow water. It seems unaware of me. I feel its mind that is like a cold, carven jewel giving off a single ray of intelligence: the endless search to fill the jaws.
Now I can feel it sensing the shallows and about to turn. As it swings back I move so that it will pass under me and wait, swaying upward with each incoming wave. I feel the smooth rounded body coming so close under me that my hackles rise with pleasure and—now! I dive and snatch it cleanly with both sets of foreclaws, digging deeply into its solid flesh as it gives a mighty heave and pulls me under. I go with the big fish, letting it drag me to the bottom and there put all four sets of claws into the thing and give it a quick bite behind the head.
Leaving the water, I carry my bead high, the weight of the big fish coming onto my neck muscles as I splash out of the surf. I do not like sandy fish, so I carry it up instead of dragging it until I get to the rocks. There I drop it and give a couple of good, satisfying shakes so that the saltwater flies around me. The fish is firm and cold on the outside, warm and bloody on the inside. It is so good I have to pause and dance around it several times after taking bites. At one point I lie on my back, holding the fish with all four paws and gnawing it as a human child sucks its bottle.
After my meal I clean myself thoroughly and feel utter* ly washed free of my night’s work with the sick man. There is no danger to myself in healing sick humans as long as I do not take in their wretched emotional twists by mistake. The physical poisons are easily overcome by a few hours of simply enjoying my own existence.
Later, on my way back along the beach toward the town, I feel a pulling sensation, as if something inside me were tied by a long cord to a distant object that moves away. It is like the pull I sometimes feel from one of my former Persons who again wants to come awake but cannot rise enough to speak. I pause and search in that emptiness where my Persons still wait—all but the youngest, who has passed on to her own destiny. But none of them is aware. They wait, held in my necessity, and do not speak. The pull is from something in the near future, something coming that is even now altering my next days and nights. But I cannot tell yet what it will be, and it does not feel dangerous.
I roll in the sand to shut out the strangeness and become whole again. The grains get all the way down to my skin, feeling itchy and good. I roll, kicking my legs and twisting my head like a cub, then stand up and shake, whirling the grains in all directions. Whatever is coming, will announce itself in time. To the east, out over the ocean, I see the sky beginning to pale. I turn back toward the town.
Chapter Three
Barry drove over to Rio Grande Boulevard and turned left. He would pick up Johnny Strong Horse at a cousin’s house in Alameda, and they would take route 44 up toward Jemez. The day was bright blue and clear as usual, but there was an ominous haze high up in the eastern part of the sky, a faint yellowness that stained the northeastern sky above the Sandias. Damn dust storm coming, he thought, and felt a drop in his spirits. If it’s a bad one, we*ll have a time getting there.
The address in Alameda was a little, square adobe hut, unplastered, with crooked vigas sticking out over the front door and single window, looking as if it were slowly dissolving back into the caliche clay from which it was made. A rickety screen door opened and Johnny stepped out, black cowboy hat in his hand, blue shirt, Levi’s and a single band of scarlet around his head to hold the hair back. Very Navajo-looking today. He might be any Injun on the reservation, Barry thought, looking at the high squared-off cheekbones, the impassive, wide mouth, the dark eyes that were expressionless at the moment. Johnny tossed an old wicker suitcase into the back seat and got in.
“Dust cornin’,’’ he said, glancing at the sky.
“It’ll be at our back, I hope,” Barry said, pulling out onto US 85 and heading north. They turned left at the Coronado sign onto the lumpy, tarred New Mexico 44 that led off northwest toward the dark blue mounds of the Jemez mountains. A low mass of cloud blended in with the mountains and made it impossible to tell where earth stopped and sky began. Barry settled down for the long trip, trying to keep the speed around thirty-five but finding that somewhat slower was more comfortable on the wretched road. They traveled in silence for a few miles as the road gradually angled more and more north until they were quartering the approaching yellow cloud, which was now clearly visible as a gigantic standing wall of dust reaching up for miles into the clear morning air.
