Fabulous Creature (15 page)

James resented her curiosity. He wished she’d just leave him alone. It had nothing to do with her, and he didn’t want anyone prying into his personal affairs and feeling sorry for him. Of course, William hadn’t noticed anything. He wouldn’t. His only son could have had delirium tremens, rabies and two broken legs and he probably wouldn’t have noticed a thing. James resented his indifference.

On the morning of the fourth day he decided to go to the tennis courts. He didn’t know why. He certainly didn’t feel like playing tennis or anything else; and if Diane showed up and ignored him, it would only make things a million times worse. But somehow, once he’d thought of going, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He put on his favorite shirt, the bulky terry cloth one that tended to give his chest and upper arms a more muscular appearance, combed his hair very carefully and headed for The Camp.

He was sitting on the sidelines when she came in and she saw him right away and waved her racket. His heart did a kind of lurch, but he stayed where he was, waiting to see what she would do. She stopped near the gate at first and looked around the court, and he was beginning to wonder, but then suddenly she whirled around and actually ran to meet him. For a moment he thought she was going to throw her arms around him right there in front of everyone. She didn’t, but she was smiling her most devastating smile as she pointed the handle of her racket at him and said, “Ka-pow.”

“Ka-pow,” he said. “How are you?”

She made a kissing face. “Right at this moment I’m A-1, dynamite, primo. How about you?”

“More or less the same,” he said.

Everything was right back the way it had been before, only better. For the next three days he saw Diane every day. They went swimming, played tennis and handball, sat around in the snack bar, or just hung out around the Parade Grounds together. Several times they went on short hikes into the woods. All of it was great, particularly the hikes, even though they were all very short.

The hikes, as James told Max, weren’t primarily explorations of nature, unless you were referring to human nature. The only fauna involved was human, and the flora was only important because it provided privacy. And all forward progress tended to end at the first secluded spot on the trail. His letter to Max didn’t go on to specify the other places at which his forward progress always ended. He wouldn’t have told Max anyway, because it concerned Diane and was personal; but there was, he had to admit, another reason. Since most of the girls Max met seemed to have no set boundaries whatsoever, James wouldn’t have been eager to tell him that Diane definitely did. Outside of those boundaries, she could be wildly, recklessly, maddeningly passionate, but at certain places everything came to a stop. James told Max it was all wildly, recklessly passionate, and let it go at that.

Every day seemed better and more exciting than the last, and the nights changed, too. Instead of lying awake brooding and sighing, he was now lying awake daydreaming and fantasizing. All of the fantasies were about Diane, and some of them weren’t even sexy, at least not very. Nearly all of them were about the future and concerned things that might happen in the fall, or in the next five or ten years. One of the most vivid was about what it would be like to have Diane as a girl friend when the summer was over and they were both back in school. There would be visits back and forth—Sacramento wasn’t all that far away; and perhaps if Charlotte got to know the Jarretts and offered to chaperone, Diane might even be allowed to stay for a weekend. The weekend visit fantasy always included the introduction of Diane to Max, and the comments he would make afterwards, and football games and dances to which James would take Diane and the sensation she would undoubtedly create.

Of course, he realized that such daydreams were on a par with that old favorite—“the triumphant return to the old home town”—and as such not only egotistical, but also juvenile and unoriginal. But at least he was aware of it, and capable of kidding himself about it. It was the kind of thing he intended to outgrow in the near future, but in the meantime it was a lot more fun than counting sheep.

There were other fantasies, too, that had to do with the future. Some distant, dimly seen future in which he and Diane would be living together in a tastefully funky apartment—old wicker furniture, huge floor pillows, Chagall prints and a jungle of hanging plants—and saying and doing sophisticatedly romantic things together. And when he got tired of that one, there was another about being world travelers, in which he pictured them walking hand in hand across picturesque bridges in ancient cities, stopping to look first at the view and then, passionately, at each other, and then hurrying back to make love until the first rays of morning sun crept through the wrought iron balcony beyond their window in the quaint seventeenth century hotel.

It was during those days of wine and roses that Charlotte obviously stopped being concerned about the state of James’ emotions and William suddenly began to take an interest. Charlotte, it seemed, had told him about Diane, and it turned out that William knew something about the Jarretts. It figured. If there was one thing James had always been able to count on his father for, it was that he would know something about any subject that might happen to come up. In the case of the Jarretts, he’d learned about them from Dan Willowby, Ph.D., professor of environmental studies and author of several books on ecology and conservation, and of course, the present owner of the Willowby cabin. It seemed that Henry Jarrett, Diane’s father, had been one of the original backers of Major T. J. Mitchell’s plan to develop the whole southern shore of New Moon Lake and turn it into The Camp. And, in the course of the early negotiations, Jarrett and Dan had had several meetings, or more strictly speaking, confrontations. After that, William said, Dan had gone on taking a special interest in the affairs of Hank Jarrett and had collected quite a bit of information on him.

“It would seem that as a contractor, Mr. Jarrett’s record on ecological matters has left something to be desired,” William said. “At least, according to Dan. But then Dan does tend to be a bit dogmatic where such things are concerned.”

“Yes. I know,” James said. Dr. Willowby was the type who would advocate relocating a fairly large city in order to protect the breeding grounds of a fairly common species of earwig.

“They met at a social function set up by Jarrett’s people to recruit support among New Moon landowners. Can’t you picture it? A doomed relationship, I’m afraid. It transpired that in addition to everything else, Jarrett is an avid hunter.” William’s smile invited James to enjoy the imagined scene—dedicated hunter meets dedicated conservationist.

James found himself beginning to feel a little bit defensive. He knew how Dr. Willowby felt about hunting, and he also knew how Dr. Fielding felt about it, and it wasn’t all that much different. Except that William didn’t quite go along with his friend’s proposal that all hunters should be given licenses to hunt a more dangerous and expendable species—namely, each other. James’ defensiveness increased when his father asked, “And your friend—Diane, I think your mother said her name was—how does she feel about her father’s interest in hunting.”

James found himself saying, “I don’t see why people like you and Dr. Willowby take the attitude that all hunters are just bloodthirsty killers. There are some good reasons for hunting, you know.”

“Oh?”

James looked carefully for the sarcasm he felt must be lurking beneath his father’s smile. “Yes,” he said. “What about the species that have overbred because all their predators have been killed off, so that a lot of them would die of starvation if the hunters didn’t keep down the overpopulation?”

William nodded. “Yes. It’s quite true that some species would overproduce without some kind of human interference. But wouldn’t it be better to have them harvested by teams of trained rangers? Professionals who would all be excellent marksmen and who would be less apt to be under the influence of extreme excitement and/or alcohol when they pulled the trigger. And who would take care to kill the weak and inferior specimens as nature does, rather than the most perfect, thus improving the species rather than weakening it as hunting does.”

“But what about poor people who depend on hunting for part of their food supplies?” It didn’t have anything to do with the Jarretts, of course, but it seemed like a good point; and anyone who argued with William Fielding needed all the good points he could get.

“Game killed by rangers could be given away; but even if it were sold, a great deal of it could be purchased for less money than most modern-day hunters spend on one hunting expedition.”

James could feel his defensiveness turning into anger, or something fairly close to it. It wasn’t so much that he disagreed with what his father was saying. What he really resented was the way William always managed to back people into defending a position they didn’t really believe in, and then went on smiling calmly without even noticing how the other person might be feeling.

“But as I’ve often said, James,” William was going on, “the welfare of wildlife, as important as it is, is not my major concern in this matter. What I really worry about is the type of civilization that produces people who choose killing as a form of recreation.”

James got up and went out on the veranda. He sat on the railing staring in the direction of the lake, but not seeing anything. He felt angry and uneasy, and the fact that he wasn’t sure who or what was to blame only seemed to make him angrier. After a while he got up, went to his room and, a few minutes later, came out wearing his hiking boots and with his pocket bulging with bread and apples. Vaulting over the railing, he started down the path toward the lake. When he came to where the west gate path branched off, he stopped for a moment and stood looking down it, thinking about the various things he might be able to do with the next three or four hours. But in the end he went on, straight down the hill to the lake and then up through the gullies that led to the Peter’s Creek crossing. He pushed himself, climbing at top speed, and in only a little over an hour he was sliding down the steep incline into the deer’s valley.

The stag wasn’t in the first meadow so, without stopping, James went on through the wooded area, across the second meadow and into the small, dense grove at the end of the box canyon. As he approached the spring, the anxiety that had accompanied him since he left the cabin sharpened and tightened. By the time he reached the spot from which the deer’s favorite resting place was visible, he was actually holding his breath—and then stale air rushed out and in again, in a gasp of relief. He was there.

In spite of James’ long absence, the deer seemed calmer, less tensely wary, than ever before. Getting to his feet without apparent haste, he tested the air for only a moment before he began to move slowly toward the spot where James was standing. At about twenty feet he stopped and waited until James had placed his offerings on the ground and begun to back away; and then he came on again, until he reached the food.

Sleek, powerful and yet superbly graceful, the stag managed to make even the eating of an apple an act of dignity and grace. His antlers were smooth and burnished now, free of the last tatters of velvet, and his body seemed thicker and more muscular. The apples went down quickly, but the bread, rye this time, seemed to require discriminating inspection and thoughtful, head-tossing tasting. When the last bit of food was gone, he retreated a few steps and then stopped and half turned, presenting a magnificent silhouette.

James wished he’d remembered his camera. He’d photographed the stag several times before, but not recently, not since he’d been coming so close. Raising his hands, he pressed an imaginary button, attempting to impress the scene on a mental camera so indelibly that it would never be lost.

“You are really something, old man,” he whispered.

The broad ears twitched, the crowned head tossed and one slender foreleg pawed the earth. “Okay. Okay, your majesty. I get it. The audience is over,” James said, retreating to the edge of the grove. Among the trees he stopped once more to look back, in time to see the deer, legs gathered, subsiding onto his soft bed of pine needles.

Back at the flat boulder, James climbed up, stretched out and contemplated the sky. He thought briefly of his argument with William and of the hectic excitement of the last few days with Diane, but gradually as he lay quietly with his eyes wide open, the pure blue immensity above him seemed to flow down to fill his eyes and mind and seep through his veins, filling his whole body with peaceful calm. The silence was so complete that after a while it began to seem like a sound in itself, a pure, clear pulsing sound like the distant ringing of a great golden bell. Thoughts and feelings about people and events blurred and blended with the blue purity and the golden silence. And all of it, the silence and the calm and a strange whispering promise, began to seem like a mysterious gift that in some strange way came from the hidden valley and the stag sleeping quietly in his secret grove.

After a long time he rolled over on his stomach and with his chin on his fists, began to take a long last look around the valley, as he always did before starting back to the outside world. Everything was as it had always been—the meadow, the crouching boulders, the circling trees and behind them the sheer gray cliffs. But then, as he leaned forward to look down into the miniature jungle of meadow grass at the base of his boulder, he suddenly stiffened with amazement. Directly below his head a circular area had been cleared of grass and outlined by a ring of shiny pebbles, and in the midst of the cleared area, on a small pyramid of stones, there, stood a small bronze deer. Of course, he realized immediately who was responsible.

I
T WAS LATE
afternoon and there was only one car in the driveway when he knocked at the side door of the Westmoreland’s A-frame. It was opened by a stranger, a young woman wearing a kerchief over her hair, a flowered smock over her slacks and a dust mop over her arm. Surprise rendered James momentarily speechless. There certainly wasn’t anything surprising about her appearance. In fact, it was her extreme ordinariness that created the shock, in the context of the Westmoreland’s pop-art super-trendy decor.