Dagon (10 page)

But he didn't come forward; kept still, watch­ing the swing of the handle. Was
he
going to duck under the house now? That would be too much; Peter thought he would laugh himself sick if he drove the boy to ground like a rat, as he had been driven. No, now Coke began to sidle away from the porch, going back down into the yard.

“It won't do you no good. I can throw this here knife.” Almost without looking, and with the one hand, he reversed the knife, holding it lax between thumb and forefinger about half­way down the blade. But there was no conviction in his eyes, and his voice was again teeter­ing on the edge of a falsetto. Peter jumped for­ward and poked him in the stomach with the handle, holding it like a broadsword. Not a hard blow, but telling, assertive of his advantage. The watery blue eyes bulged; the yellow face splotched with red.

“Throw down the knife,” Peter said. He was surprised; his own voice was whispering and rough. “If you throw the knife down I won't have to knock your brains out.”

“Hell you say. I ain't putting this knife down for no son of a bitch. I throw it anywhere, it'll be in your belly.”

But surely it was obvious, even to the boy, the superiority…

“Go on, go at it. I want to see you kill each other off.” Mina, of course. She stood on the porch watching and now began to let herself gently down into the broken rocking chair. She rocked complacently, enfolding the whole scene with her still gaze. “Go on,” she said. “Kill each other off, why don't you? Ain't neither one of you worth what it takes to keep you alive. It's been a long time since I seen a good fight. Let's see you do it.”

They looked at one another helplessly. Their animosity was smothered completely.

She saw it too and laughed, a hard flat faceless laugh. “And I guess it'll be a good long time before I ever see another good fight, if it's up to you two. You ain't hardly got no fight in you, have you?” Again, the flat hard laugh.

“Aw shit,” Coke Rymer said. He stuck the knife listlessly into the porch steps. “I can take care of honeybunch here any time I want to. He don't bother me none, him and his goddam pump handle. I can take care of him without batting a eye.”

Peter knew better; he was silent, vowing not to let the handle out of his sight. His life was bound to it now; he could see the connection as simply as if it were a glittering chain, a handcuff which held him to the junked iron. For a while now his life had been bound to iron, and the necessity of the handle didn't surprise him; it was inevitable.

“I don't know whether you can or not,” Mina said. “Mr. Leland might be some tougher than you think. What I do know is, you ain't going to try it no time soon. It ain't something I'd just let go on and on. Work to get done around here. We got to get packed up to leave and you got to help get it done.”

“That's all right with me,” Coke Rymer said. “I'm ready to go any time, anywhere you want to.”

Peter was ascending the steps, clutching the iron tight. It was the only thing solid in him now. His legs trembled, and his empty right hand. The delayed fear in the struggle with the blond boy had settled on him now and his heart stag­gered in him. His seeing was blurred with fear. He stopped at the porch edge, Mina watching him amused.

“And what do you think you're up to?” she said.

He licked his caked lips. He was careful to look away from her face, over her head into the shadowed sullen air. “I'd like to have a drink,” he said.

“I guess you don't mean water then,” she said. “I guess you mean you want liquor.”

“Yes.” He was still not looking at her.

“What makes you think you'd get any? What have you done to get any? Have you done any­thing for me lately?”

“No.” He spoke slowly. “No, but…”

“But what?”

His mind was empty. He let his shoulders rise and drop. Helpless.

Coke Rymer spoke, his voice at once belliger­ent and whining. “I don't see why you want to put up with him. What do you want with some crazy old drunk anyhow?”

“Hush,” she said. “Me and Mr. Leland's still got lots of things to do together. Don't we, Mr. Leland?”

He nodded numbly.

“Even if you can't fuck no more.”

He nodded again.

She rose easily and came toward him and he sank back in himself, though his body didn't move. Her silvery eyes held the whole range of his knowledge; she placed her hand casually on his penis, withdrew it without haste. “No. Not any more. But there's always something else, ain't there? Why don't you just go and set down in the rocking chair and I'll see if I can't find what you're looking for. Something'll put hair on your chest.” She grinned. “Make a man out of you.” She stepped lightly away and went to the door and turned. She spoke to Coke Rymer; her voice was sharp and peremptory. “Quit that fiddling around and come on in here. They's work got to be done if we're ever going to get going.”

“All right,” he said. “I done told you I'm ready to go.” He stopped his scraping of the notched edge of the porch step and folded the knife and put it into his pocket. He came up the steps with his buoyant grace and followed Mina into the house, pausing only to give Peter a single swift foul-natured glance.

Peter giggled. That one last glance had so much about it of the impulse of the hindered child who sticks out his tongue. That was Coke Rymer, all right: a spoiled child. Spoiled, soiled; but also despoiling, assoiling. He darkened the heavy brightness of the air, and even in his total blind paleness there was a dimness, as of a furry rot-inducing mold. He tipped the rocking chair forward and back, but the motion augmented the queasiness that his belated fear had brought on and he stopped quickly, sat in the shadowed porch gazing out. The settled heat had not moved. The limbs of the wild cherry tree dropped, the sharp leaves looked buttery in the sunlight. He was simply waiting, and in a while Mina did appear, holding one of the too-familiar jars loosely at the ridged top.

“Here now,” she said. “Here it is, you can drink it. But I don't want to see that you've poured none of it out or spilled it or wasted it, or you'll never see another drop from me as long as you live.”

She went back into the house. He looked through it at the landscape, which was streaked and crazed and looked even hotter through the yellowish liquid. He began to drink, drank steadily, and within the hour he was delirious and lying on the porch in foetal position, his hands clasped tightly between his knees. He was prophesying in a loud voice, heedless. And then he began to whisper. “Mina's right,” he said, and the sibilance of his whisper was echoed in the sibilance of his clothing as it rasped on the boards of the porch. He squirmed on the floor but made no progress. “Mina's right about the snake. We live as serpents, sucking in the dust, sucking it up. The stuff we were formed of, and we ought to inhabit it. We ought to struggle to make ourselves secret and detestable, we should cultivate our sicknesses and bruise our own heads with our own heels. Where's the profit in claiming to walk upright? There's no poisonous animal that walks upright, a desecration. It's better to show your true shape, always. It's bet­ter to s—…” But now he had squirmed forward, to the edge of the porch, and his forehead knocked against a supporting post. He raised his head and began to gnaw feverishly at the base of the post. The wood tasted of bitter salty dust. He closed his eyes and kept gnawing until the fit had passed off him and then he lay weak throughout his whole body. He was sweating, the bitterness of the post streamed out his pores; and a fine-edged clarity possessed him. He felt unutterably ashamed, and he turned his eyes toward the door, knowing already what he would see, his face and mouth and ears burning with fearful shame.

“Ain't you something?” Mina said. “Ain't you a sight?” She didn't laugh, but turned away and disappeared again.

Grasping the post, he pulled himself shakily upright and shook his head hard, trying to clear it. He staggered to the rocking chair and folded into it and began to drink again. That was Mina's way, that was always her way: she simply ap­peared and disappeared when she liked, every­thing was always under her control. He remem­bered that only a few weeks ago he had day-dreamed that when she had finished the life of his body she would have it discarded—dumped—in the fields under the brutal sun. Naked to the corrupting heat…Now he realized that he wouldn't be so lucky. That fate had been reserved for his wife's white body; Sheila, whom he had murdered, lay out there somewhere, going to pulp in the southern weather. Trying to turn the thought away, he turned his head, shook it hard again. He didn't have to guess about Sheila; Mina had told him what she had had done, repeated it again and again. Of course.…Mina would always do exactly as she pleased. Coming and going, her movements ad­mitted of no prediction, except that she would continually find him in the moments of his worst shame. Now he had guessed that this was her motive in keeping him, to observe how far downward he had gone. He had become a queer experimental animal; Mina used him purposely to try to gauge through him the fiber of the whole species. And he too felt a chilly detached curiosity. How far into this rushing darkness could a man go? When he had devoured his heart, what was there to push the machine along? At what point was this machine no longer recognizable as himself? He glimpsed a blurred moment of illumination: at that bodiless point—whenever, wherever it was—that the humanity in him melted, disappeared, the universe rested. At least one universe, the humane one. In this momentary half-vision (which he could hardly believe he had been granted) he felt ob­scurely the presence of other systems, other uni­verses, to which humanity—his humanity—was irrelevant. Mocking crowded points of corrusca­tion. Infinite coldness. He shook his head for the third time and drank again, feeling gratefully the flush of the liquor leap upward in his body from his belly.

THREE

They were traveling. They had loaded Peter into the back seat with the same uncaring gesture they had loaded whatever it was Mina was carry­ing into the trunk of the car. He sat numb while they made the final preparations, overwhelmed by the all-too-familiar look and odor of the ma­chine. It was his car, of course; Mina had taken possession of everything that had once belonged to him and Sheila. No question about her pur­poses with his possessions; she would waste them totally and carefully. He observed the scratchy ribbed felt overhead, the frayed latticework of the seat covers. Wouldn't it be funny if the dome light worked, now that Mina had the car? It had never once worked when the car was his. He wondered if the little leather-bound copy of the Gospel of St. John was still in the glove compart­ment; surely Mina would have no use for that. He was still slightly drunk; he sat carefully steady and kept his hands clasped between his knees.

They were simply leaving, no goodbyes. Nei­ther Morgan nor his wife—who was almost never seen in the house—came out to speak or to wave. She and Coke Rymer finished what business they had inside the house (without doubt she bore Coke Rymer, too, desperate down into the rancid quilts) and got into the car. He drove and she sat listlessly, her bare arm stretched along the top of the front seat. She glanced about with a placid curiosity. Peter had none; sat stolid, feeling the pour of warm air on him, heaviness of the moving landscape. Behind the car the reddish-yellow dust rose solid as wood and then dispersed to separate particles. Peter looked behind once to see the tenant cabin tossing, as if swimming away in the yellow haze.

They passed the big brick house, the house of the murder, and Peter turned his head. There, it had loomed before him suddenly round a sharp curve of the road and stood shocking in the glacis of the hill. He turned his head. Even the single glimpse of it disturbed, served to force into his gullet the sour taste of the guilt he had been so long now trying to swallow and to keep down. No specific memory—nothing so acutely defined—but a shapeless huge nausea overwhelmed his nerves, and he kept his head turned. He simply would not remember, he de­nied it all.

On this road it was farmland all the way. On a board fence bordering the roadway, a large gaudy metallic-looking rooster flapped wings and crowed, too late in the day. The racking crow sounded mechanical. Through the bottom fields the creek wandered, not appearing very different from where it ran by Morgan's cabin. Sunlight burning in ovules on the glassy leaves of poison oak. Two white butterflies involved in hectic acrobatics. The passing in and out of the shadows dropped by massy oaks. Splotched cat­tle on the splotched hills. Barbed-wire fences, the weathered posts leaning awry, sagging rusty wire. Hot gray roofs of squat chicken houses. Barns red and gray, looking fat and hollow at the same time. The neat white houses and the battered tenant cabins, each garnished on one side with lines of hung washing, spectacular in the breeze. Noise of flung gravel, of wind.

And then they hit pavement and Coke Rymer drove faster. The wind that poured in on Peter cooled and increased in volume. Coke was in­tent on his driving; he drove savagely but with a flashy accuracy, carefully watching the road before him, though he never seemed to look into his rear-view mirror. Nor did Mina glance into the back seat at Peter. Now and again she would draw her fingers slowly along the top of the front seat; she was caught up in her own listless thoughts, and even the slight curiosity she had at first shown in the passing scenery had vanished. Peter let himself relax; the first mo­tion of the car had made him feel faintly ill, but now he let himself drift with it, tried to enclose the oblique movements of the machine in his body and, lax now, felt that he had partially suc­ceeded. It was not a good car, an old one—it was what he had been able to afford—and it quiv­ered mercilessly and, after a full stop, shuddered alarmingly climbing into the gears. He ought to have got a new car long ago, but there hadn't seemed a real need and, of course, there was the question of money. Even now, he didn't know what the need for the car was. He had no notion where they were headed, except that the direc­tion was easterly, out of the mountains. He didn't even know whether Mina had planned a definite destination. She was perfectly capable of truly aimless movement, he thought, but then he knew the thought was false. Even if there was no destination, her moving would never be purposeless; all her energies were bent to a sin­gle purpose, she never swerved. This he had observed again and again—and a lot of good his observation was. What this purpose was he had never fathomed, so that all her actions were mysterious and sometimes seemed almost crazy; but he didn't doubt that there was a single principle which would bring it all to him clear if he once could grasp it. These thoughts made him restless and he shifted his feet on the floorboard, feeling for the solid presence of the pump handle. He touched it with his toe and was grateful and comforted. He glanced down at it, permitted himself a faint smile in the roar­ing windstream. He planned to take care of the weapon, to polish it till it gleamed, and then—and then a light oil bath to prevent its rusting again. He pondered. And perhaps too, a rubber grip for it; he would need only a few inches from a rubber garden hose.…

He felt that he really ought to know Mina's purpose: it seemed so closely dependent on Peter himself. There was a reason, yes, why he had been subjected to what he had. The idea of punishment formed in his mind, but the idea of the crime for which he was being punished would not come. It was not murder—ah, that was a mere word to him now; the memory of Sheila herself had disappeared, to leave only an impression of bright sheeny light, no person at all—no, not murder, but something more ter­rifying, something previous to anything he could ever remember, previous, he sometimes thought, maybe to his whole life, previous to his birth.

Regular monotony of the passing telephone poles, dark, spearlike. The shadows slipped through the interior of the car like spears. Now racing the candescent threads of railway track which lay along the road. He could follow the progress of the stretched shape of the sun as it zipped on the iron. Impression of heatless light. And then they caught up with the train, passed the red caboose, went exhilaratingly by the rol­licking freight cars. He heard them bounding along the track.
Rocker unrocker rocker unrocker
. Passed the diesel engine which let go with its ugly sour horn. Shot through narrow concrete bridges. Up and breathtakingly down dark wooded hills. Coke Rymer was taking the secondary highways; Mina must have asked him to keep off the broad fast interstate system. Again Peter couldn't guess her reasoning; it was no less public the way they were going. Cars came toward them and slipped by, momentary as a wink. Trucks loaded with heavy paper bags of fertilizer lumbered along before them, and Coke Rymer cursed, slowing suddenly; Peter was always certain they would bang into the trucks. He cowered inside himself; imagined smothering under a flood of smelly fertilizer.

They rode on and on. Occasionally they would pull into a nondescript service station for gas, or Coke Rymer would say, “I got to go to the little boy's room,” or “I got to powder my nose.” His coy silliness, something always grim about it. Mina would go into the station and return, bringing Peter a soft drink and cheese crackers with peanut butter. The cellophane packages were always dusty, he wiped his fingers on his trousers. But he ate and drank dutifully. Four empty soft-drink bottles rolled clinking to­gether on the floor. In one station Peter went to the restroom, and there, in the acrid odor of the disinfectant, looked out the window before him, a narrow slot in the white concrete block wall, and thought absurdly of escape. But there was nothing to escape from. He was not a prisoner, not held by force. He was simply bound to Mina wholly; he was his own prisoner, he could escape by dying, by no other way. He uttered an invol­untary sob, zipped his fly, lurched out. The sun­light struck his eyes like a slap.

It got later, the sun was behind them. The eastern sky was orange, wild with queer cloud shapes. Still they went on. The land got flatter, and towns were glimpsed before they were ar­rived at, the lights making ghostly white au­reoles on the horizon. The young men were out, dolled up, restlessly courting the girls. Gay con­vertibles; shaggy fox tails pendent from radio aerials. One little town like the others, all flat on the landscape like stamps pasted in an album. Sharp brick buildings in the evening light; they looked like biscuits set out of the oven to cool. And yet it all fitted. The landscape was perfectly integral. Across the slim horizontal rows of cot­ton or cane, the weathered vertical form of the farmhouse seemed truly correct: its gabled porches, its uprightness, its bony angularity. On the whole land a somnolent watchfulness, a waiting for the night, for coolness, for the justice of stars. They passed drive-in movies, and the great flat faces of strangers fluttered away in the darkness; they were quickly oppressive, these visions of bright love and violence, a tipsy staggered glimpse of the secret heart of the land. Peter felt conspicuous and embarrassed at seeing the great screens; it was like peeking into bathroom windows.

It had begun to cool, but he still felt hot. His body was gritty with dust, filmed over with evaporated sweat. The oncoming headlights burned his eyes, scraped on his exacerbated nerves. They kept driving on and on, and he wanted to cry out for them to stop it, to stop it: they were going nowhere, there was nowhere to go. Why couldn't they let up? Why was it so necessary to squash oneself to a handy ball and keep torturing it along over the flimsy land­scape? He leaned and picked up the comforting pump handle and held it tightly across his lap. He gripped it hard, not to let go, and the tight­ness began to seep out of his chest. He ran his finger along the clear curve of the metal; it was he, this weapon; he could punch holes in the world, he possessed heroism kept carefully in check. He settled his head back against the seat. His eyelids flickered. He dozed resistlessly, still gently fingering the pump handle.

In the sharp restive dream he was a spider; no, a daddy longlegs. He scoured in jagged lines over the fields, searching out water with an unerring hunger. His size was protean; grew monstrously; diminished. On the skin of the great water, when he found it, he would drift in coolness, the big overhanging leaves of the weeping willow would keep away the sunlight. The soft fields were singing softly. In the harsh embittering dream was a peaceful dream, of wa­ters shot with healthy shadows, of the rounded spaces under trees enclosing as with cool arms. But in the heated fields his six-legged unstable body was painful, crazy. All his eyes had no­where to look; a glazed glare held his vision with unbreakable force. He moved crookedly; he did not want to move. There was no reason for it, there was no purpose in it. The six-legged ma­chine was its own volition, and he a prisoner trapped. It came to him that this at last was the true image of his sickness, and in his sleep he was somewhat mollified. The sweat ceased to trickle down his sides from his armpits and his grip on the pump handle gentled.

“All right, honey, you can climb out of there. You've got the place we're looking for.”

He was awake immediately. They had stopped. Coke Rymer tugged at his shoulder through the open window. He didn't know where they were. It was full dark and cool. All round the car were trees, sibilant in the night breeze. He clambered out, stiff and dizzy, and raised his head to look at the sky. Random stars pierced the foliage, and the tree limbs moved now to sweep them from sight. He flexed his arms, held them out straight, rotated his neck on his shoulders. He breathed deep, grateful, but when he walked forward he staggered, the stiff­ness still in his legs.

Mina was leaning against the front fender, resting easily. Nothing bothered her; she knew where they were, why they were here. “I hope you had a good nap,” she said. “That might be what you're good for, you know it? Just to sleep. You might could get to be a real expert.”

He turned away from her, scratched the small of his back with both hands.

“Or you could drink liquor,” she said. “I for­got about that. There's two things you can do, right there.”

He wandered away from the car, heading ig­norantly into the darkness.

“Where do you think you're going?” Mina said.

“I'll be back in just a few seconds,” he said.

“He's going off to take a leak,” Coke Rymer said. “Do you want me to go with you, honey? To hold your hand?”

It was dark and cool, and he began to feel better, not so heavy. His body was still sticky with travel, and as he stood to urinate he lis­tened hopefully for the sound of a stream nearby, water to slice away some of the road dust. No sound of water, but a sound, the night breeze hazing the foliage, like water; and even this seemed to help, to refresh. There…Now he did feel refreshed, and as he walked back toward the car he permitted himself a vague half-smile, thinking,
1 woke and found that life was duty
.

They were waiting, still standing by the car. “We're going to sleep in the back. You can sleep up in the front, if you want to,” Coke Rymer said. “The steering wheel gets in the way, that's why.”

“All right.”

“Or if you want to, you can sleep out here on the cold ground. I don't give a damn what you do.”

“All right,” he said.

His acquiescence robbed Coke Rymer of any­thing to say. He stood uncertainly. “Well…”

“Oh goddammit, come on,” Mina said. She caught the blank boy by the arm and opened the car door and propelled him into the back. “If it was up to you-all, I guess you'd just stand around talking all night. There's better things to do than that.” She turned. “Why don't you just take an­other nice little walk? I don't reckon they's any­thing around here to eat you up. So all you have to do is just not to get lost. You can take a little walk and watch out where you're going.” She got in and closed the door.