Dagon (2 page)

“Come on outside, Peter,” she said. “Come away.”

TWO

I didn't have the faintest idea it was even near lunchtime,” he said. Standing out here under the shiny June sky, he felt perfectly at ease to stretch his arms and shoulder muscles, as if he had just awakened from a dreary, unrefreshing sleep. He opened his mouth, tasting the bright air. It was warm; he hadn't realized how cold he had become in the house. Not far away he could hear a bird singing unstintingly, pure filigree of sound. “Here,” he said. “Let me take that.” He lifted the big wicker basket from his wife's strained hand. “Where are we going?”

Her voice was clear and easy as water. “It's your farm; you tell me. Where is the best place on this magnificent estate to have a picnic?”

“I don't know any more about the place than you do. But maybe we'd better not go too far. They're liable to deliver our stuff today.”

Sheila looked at Peter with a secret eye: her tall gangly husband, all bones and corners his body was, had already begun worrying himself. The “stuff” which was to come was mostly books and notebooks and cryptic files of index cards. Already he was concerned about finishing his book—he called it his “study”—in time. They still had about twenty-five hundred dollars left of the amount they had allowed themselves and now this nice quiet place to work, this farm willed to him by his grandparents, had dropped into their laps, and still he was worrying himself. In this warmly glowing landscape his eyes were turned inward. As they went through the sparse front lawn of the house she broke a tall stalk of plaintain off at the top and put the oozy stem end into her mouth.

He swung the basket unrhythmically as he walked. His height and boniness made him seem loping. When they came to the reddish-yellow dirt road which ran northward past the house, he hesitated. “Now which way?” he said. “We can go either way here and still be in our own domain.”

It was true. The big ugly house sat almost in the center of the wide farm, the four hundred acres shaped vaguely like an open hand. It sat among smooth hills, so that if they went very far in any direction they would have to climb.

“Your wish is my command,” she said.

“Well…” He gave her a look. Lightness and irony more or less sweet, that was Sheila. He shrugged a shoulder and started toward their car, the old blue Buick parked in the sloping driveway behind the house.

“But let's
do
walk,” she said. “It's a warm lovely day, and walking won't take so terribly much time. It'll be soon enough you're back to your nasty old books and note cards. Surely we're not here just for you to work.”

“Still, that's mostly why we're here. At least, I hope it is.” But he gave over anyway, and turn­ing suddenly to her took her hand.

As quickly, involuntarily, she almost drew away. His hand on hers was dry and cool, actually cold, and startling in the warm sunlight. “You'll have to get used to walking,” she said. “Now that you're in the country, you'll have to do all sorts of rustic things. You'll have to drink fresh milk and rob the honeybees and eat wild flowers. You're going to become a happy child of nature. I'm sure you'll make a great success of it.”

“Oh, that's me. A happy child of nature.”

In a hundred yards or so the road had climbed, cutting along the side of the hill. A slow dark stream ran in the narrow bottom field below; serpentine, sluggish, it reflected no light through the tall weeds and bushes that crowded to its edges. Sheila pointed toward it. “Maybe we could spread our blanket by the creek down there,” she said. “It looks so nice and cool.”

“Do you really want to go crawling through those weeds? I bet the whole field is full of snakes and spiders. And the ground down there'll be wet, so close to the stream.”

“Weeds won't hurt you,” she said. She patted the smooth leg of her pink cotton slacks. “Come on, chicken heart, it'll be very nice, bet you a pretty.” She tugged at his hand, drew him to the side of the road.

“Hold on a minute.” He shifted the basket to his other hand, and his body tilted perceptibly with the weight. “What in the world did you put in here, anyway? Heavy as lead.”

“All kinds of surprises,” she said. “Lead ham­burgers, lead rolls, lead mustard…”

They got through the field without much diffi­culty and she was right, here by the stream it was cool. They found a circle of long cool grass, almost free of weeds, and shadowed by a stand of scrubby willow bushes. Sheila wafted a blue tablecloth over the ground and crawled over it on hands and knees to smooth it out. Then she stood and fingered her fine blond hair back from her temples. “Oh, this is lovely.” She looked at him, an anxious inquiry. “Isn't it lovely?” The stream lapped intermittently at the banks, the dark water moved slow and dreamy through the shadows; now and again it splashed up a wink of reflected sunlight. Her face gleamed momentarily in a pure reflection of the sun. “We ought to take all our meals down here.”

“Not me,” he said. “I m not getting out of bed and wallow through weeds and mud for break­fast.”

“No, not breakfast. You don't have to be silly about it.” She laughed. She began taking paper plates from the basket: held one up and flour­ished it ruefully. “These really ought to be very fine china,” she said. “I've decided that we're celebrating.”

“If those had been china, I'd never have got here with the basket.”

She produced a large brown paper bag and drew a pretty baked hen from it. “Volla!” And there was wine too, a California white wine in a green bottle with a red foil wrapping over the top. And a mixed salad tied up in a little plastic bag. “The plates are just for the salad, anyway. You'll have to be a child of nature and eat the chicken with your own crude hands. And look: I bought some ready-made dressing.” She held up a small bottle and began shaking it furiously.

He had been staring at her, awestruck. “Where did you get all this stuff? The chicken and everything.…What is it we're supposed to be celebrating?”

“There's a little old restaurant in the town. They were just delighted to sell me a nice baked chicken. See—while you were mooning around the house all morning I kept myself busy, plan­ning and preparing these nice things for us. Ev­erything just to make you happy.”

He sighed. “And what is it we're celebrat­ing?”

“Our vacation.…Or just being here in this good cool spot by the water. Or anything. Why not?”

“Mmnh.” Descending tone of regret. He felt that he had so much yet to do that even to be happy for the opportunity would be in some way to harm it, to jinx the chance for finishing.

“Anything, we're celebrating anything you like.
Remnant Pagan Forces in American Puri­tanism
.”

“A bit prematurely, perhaps.” He cut his words short, isolated each of them with brief pauses. He couldn't help it.

She pouted. “Now please don't be a grouch. If you begin now, you'll just be a grouch all sum­mer and neither of us will have a good time, and you won't get any more work done than if you'd been cheerful.”

“Sorry,” he said. But still the word was clipped.

“Look now…” She leaned carefully from her kneeling position, carefully across the spread ta­blecloth and pulled his ear lobe. “Eat. Drink. Enjoy. Relax. Nothing bad has happened, and nothing bad is going to happen.…And look what I got for you for after lunch.” She fumbled in the basket for a moment and took out a fat masculine cigar. “If you don't like it, I'll strangle you,” she said. “It was the most expensive one they had.”

Finally he relented, or at least his body did; he threw himself back on the grass and laughed. Sunlight spotted his chest and face, spots like shiny yellow eyes.

She was laughing too, a liquid twittering, but suddenly stopped. “I hope you're not laughing at me,” she said. She blinked her eyes wide.

He only laughed the harder, laughing at both of them, laughing most of all at the hard core of stodginess in himself that he was afraid of. Unresting shadows poured down his throat, leaf shadows twinkled on his face.

“Oh, you
are
.” She was going to become angry. She looked about for something to throw at his convulsed thin chest.

“I'm not laughing at you.” He lifted his hand, smiled at her. “No, really, I'm not.…But you're too much for me. You're simply too much.”

“Yes, that's right. You're a happy child of na­ture. Simple. Pure. You can't understand my sophisticated complexity.” She dumped salad from the moist plastic bag onto a paper plate. “Here, nature boy, eat.…You're an animal.”

“In a lot of ways, that's true,” he said, his voice taking an unconsciously serious edge. “I am sim­ple, and you are pretty sophisticated. Anyway, you understand both of us better than I under­stand myself.”

She took the wine bottle, peeled away the foil, unscrewed the top and poured. “Here,” she said. “Drink this down and shut up. You'll give me a headache with all that psychological talk.”

He hushed and they ate in silence. He kept looking at her, at her cool blond hair so spattered with light and shadow, at the way she moved her hands so freely, at the whiteness of her throat. So pretty she was, small and wom­anly, clear-eyed; it was a catch in his breathing. Her emotions were so mobile—she felt and re­sponded to the slightest movement of things about her immediately and without hindrance —that he often forgot the chromium-bright hard mind which shone in the center. She was, after all, possessed of a nice intellect, superior perhaps to his own. In the core of his throat he breathed a wistful sigh, still looking. She colored slightly under his fixed gaze; she had misinter­preted it. Ho-ho-ho: so that was the drift of the breeze, was it? Her careful picnic was really a praeludium to the unaccustomed joy of making love in the open air. “In sight of God and everybody.” He leaned back and got out his handker­chief and wiped at his fingers all runny with the juices of the bird. He smiled a slight dark smile.

She moved again, looked away; grew fretful under his stare. “Well, what is it then?” she said. “Do you see something you haven't seen be­fore?”

He grinned, picked up the waxed paper cup and held it toward her, “Let's have another drink.”

She mimed drawing away. “I don't know,” she said. “Maybe you've had enough already. Maybe too much. You've already got staring drunk.” She poured the cup full.

“That's the way, baby,” he said. “Lay it on me.”

She put down the bottle and flung a chicken bone at him. He sprang at her—the motion ex­aggerated, sudden—caught her shoulder and tumbled her over. She almost wiggled loose, but he caught her forearm and held her. She tugged as hard as she could; her face was hot and scar­let. They rolled wildly over and over in the grasses and tablecloth. Finally she got his shoul­der under a pink-clad knee and held him pinned fast on one side. Her voice took a hoarse false edge. “You idiot.”

“Who, me?” He lay still. He touched her breast gently with his forefinger; held it cupped. “Yes, yes indeed,” he said.

“You idiot,” she said. The hard edge had melted off her voice.

He felt soft and lazy, murmuring, “Yes, yes indeed.”

Her hair had come undone; a twig and a few blades of grass were caught in the bright net of it. She loomed above him, as eminent as if she leaned out of the sky. She seemed yielding and fiercely happy. Caught in the top limbs of the undergrowth behind her was a red round flicker he had first took to be a balloon. It bobbed, dis­appeared.

“Stop a minute,” he said. He clasped the back of her hand, squeezed it firmly. “Wait…Let me up.”

She got off and sat, clasping her knees with her forearms. He rose and the little fat man stepped out of the alder thicket. His face
was
like a balloon, red as catsup from wind and sun, and his grimy grin was so fixed it might have been painted. Yellowish whisker stubble was smeared on his chin and neck. He came forward in a sort of rolling slouch, his hands balled, stuffed into the pockets of his overalls. Under the overalls he wore no shirt and the fat on his chest moved with a greasy undulation as he breathed; one nipple was not covered by the bib of the overalls and it shone, obese; it was like the breast of a girl just come to puberty. Though he wore no shirt he wore a hat, a misshapen black felt object which looked as if it had been kicked a countless number of times. He must have been in his late fifties.

“Who are you?” Peter asked. Thin and ragged query.

“Well,” he said. “I'm Ed Morgan. I live a little ways back over yonder.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder pointing north. “I was just kind of follerin' along the creek here. I've got me some muskrat traps strung out along the creek, and I was just checking up on them. Course it's a little late in the day, but I been busy all morning.”

He didn't ask the question he wanted to, but the first one that came to his mind. “Why is it late in the day?”

The fat man gave him a wide ingenuous stare. “Why,” he said, “a man ought to get down to his traps first thing in the morning. A mushrat'll just chew off his foot and get away. Or even if he is good and drownded might be an old mongrel dog'll come along and carry him off. I ought to got down here real early, but like I said I been busy this morning.”

“Who gave you permission to trap along here?” In the fat man's manner there was a careless oily geniality, an attitude of unmovable self-possession, which irked Peter, made the muscles along his shoulder blades feel as if they might begin to twitch. He gave his question a flat tone.

“Well now, I guess nobody did,” he said. “I never have thought about that. I just always have set out my traps here. My daddy did, and I reckon his daddy before him. Tell the truth, I was just getting ready to ask you folks what you was doing here. And then I thought maybe I better not.” The dingy grin never left his face, not even when he jerked his head aside to loose a spate of tobacco.