Love, Let Me Not Hunger (25 page)

Deeter replied to Mr. Albert with another obscenity, and then added, “Your money, my ass! You should’ve handed it over long ago when we all pooled what we had.”

His guilt feeling at having held back his nest egg prevented Mr. Albert from probing the illogicality of Deeter’s statement, and besides, the old man was a little afraid of the ex-cowboy. He mumbled, “Whatever you say, Fred.”

Deeter looked to Toby. “What do you say, kid?” He did not even bother to include Rose.

Toby said, “I suppose we’d better get hay while we can.”

Janos bleated, “You no give meat to my doks?”

Deeter told him what he could do with his dogs, and the dwarf said no more and followed them silently, trotting along on his bandy legs, as they went off to the farmer who had supplied them with timothy at the time that they were in funds. They spent the rest of their pesetas, which yielded a supply sufficient to restore the strength of the horses and feed them for the next three or four days, with some left over for the elephant.

C H A P T E R
1 7

T
he stillness of the hot Spanish night, milky with moonlight, was shattered by the death cry from the shed where the horses were tethered. It was an eerie, horrid, bubbling shriek of dying, an agony of life departing under violence. Twice it came through the soundless night, once invading Toby’s dreams, and again in dreadful reality as he leaped from his bunk to the floor, naked, but fully awake to the sound ringing in his ears. His heart was pounding and his knees shaking beyond control.

From within her compartment Rose cried out twice, “Toby, Toby!” And then her voice was drowned in the hubbub.

Awakened in terror, the animals poured forth a cataract of noises. To this were added the jangle of the elephant’s chains as he strained at them, the thumping and crashing of the big cats hurling themselves in panic with their remaining strength against the bars of their cages, the shuffling, skittering and scrabbling of the bear, the fox, and the monkeys.

Half expired with hunger though it was, the eagle flapped its wings and joined the clamour.

From the window of his caravan Toby saw Mr. Albert standing before the clown wagon where he and Janos lived, shaking and bewildered, naked except for a shirt.

An instant later, Deeter appeared tumbling from his quarters, nude too, except for his pair of hand-worked, embroidered, high-heeled cowboy boots which he had slipped onto his feet. In one hand he carried a torch and in the other an object, long and black, but which nevertheless picked up and reflected a ray of the moon. Toby instinctively knew what it was. He forgot his trembling knees and the panic throbbing in his throat, seized his own torch from the shelf by his bunk and ran across the enclosure, his bare feet unmindful of the flinty stones. Just ahead, vanishing into the horse shed, was Deeter. The symphonic discords of the beasts filled the air. Toby’s ears were still ringing with that awful retching sound of life fleeing before death. Something terrible had happened. He quickened his pace and plunged into the shed, snapping on his lamp.

The beam picked up the white body of Janos astride a horse like some ghastly caricature of a cherub; but the horse was lying on the ground with the dwarf sitting on it, his bowed, stumpy legs not yet able to touch the ground. One child’s hand was entwined in its mane, the other still clasped the broad kitchen knife with which he had cut its throat. Unable to reach up high enough, he had managed to climb on to the back of the animal and, leaning forward and around, saw at the throat until he had severed the jugular vein. There was a pool of blood, black in the torchlight, on the ground and great gouts of it still pumped from the wound gaping like a second mouth.

All this Toby saw in an instant, and at the same time he took in the lean figure of Deeter with the band of untanned skin around his buttocks, and the ridiculously fancy boots, his right arm raised, and the long barrel of the .45 aimed down the beam of light from his own torch focussed on the ugly head of the dwarf.

In a voice that was strained, high-pitched and almost feminine, Deeter shrieked, “Oooooooh! You bloody, murdering son-of-a-bitch!” and pulled the trigger.

The cartridge exploded in the chamber with an ear-splitting, nerve-jangling
spang,
but the bullet went wild because in the moment of Deeters outcry, in pure reflex, Toby had thrown his torch and struck him on the temple.

The noise of the shot set all the other horses, their eyes rolling, to tossing and plunging at their halters, rearing and whinnying.

The faces of Rose and Mr. Albert appeared in the background, ashen with terror. Before Deeter could fire again, Toby brought him to earth with a rugby tackle and simultaneously groped for the gun. Deeter was strong and wiry, but Toby was younger, his muscles fresh and virile and made many times more potent by the adrenalins of fear discharged into them. He tore the gun from Deeters grasp and reversed it, holding it by the barrel like a club as the ex-cowboy staggered to his feet, dazed.

Deeter pointed a finger at the naked white gargoyle sitting astride the carcass of the once lovely chestnut animal. “He murdered a horse!” he gasped. “He killed a horse!” And then added, “My God, he meant to kill mine!”

Only Janos was unmoved, with the blood-blackened knife in his pudgy little hand. He said, “Now my doks going to eat.” The place stank of blood, sweat, urine, and death.

Deeter looked about him for a moment, flashing the rays of his torch until they picked up the
café-au-lait
colouring of his own performing horse, the palomino Marlene Dietrich, standing next to the murdered beast. In the uncertain shadows of the dark shed plus his excitement, Janos had mistaken one of the Liberty horses for Deeters animal. Deeter staggered over, took the halter of his mare, and pulled her tossing head down, soothed her with a hand, and then, as she quietened, suddenly put both arms about her neck in relief and burst into tears. He wept like a woman.

Rose and Mr. Albert came into the area striding side by side, and oddly in step as though making an entrance into the arena. Rose had wrapped herself in her dressing gown, but Mr. Albert was still in his undershirt and needed only a red nose and a funny hat to make him look the perfect clown.

They stared transfixed at the dead horse upon its side and the grotesque figure still perched upon it, almost like a burlesque of the high school riding act where the mount goes to its knees and then lies down and plays dead beneath the feet of its rider.

For a moment Rose’s mind was steeped in the horror of the scene. Rose, who never had known beauty before, now turned to beauty as an anodyne to abomination. She raised the poor horse from the dead and recreated it in her mind as it had been in life in gleaming brass and leather harness, muscles moving exquisitely beneath the dark gloss of its hide, and the proud, tossing head topped by the gay feathers in red, white, and blue, nodding and waving as the handsome, vital animal went through its evolutions, turning and wheeling, circling, always finding its numbered place. She had been a part of this act and its beauty, clad in a blue spangled evening gown; she had learned the rhythm of the horses and how to move in and out of their patterns, and bring applause to the tall, thin man in immaculate riding clothes who guided their performance.

Now he was a naked, ridiculous figure in cowboy boots, sobbing upon the neck of his palomino. The Liberty horse lay dead at her feet. And the dwarf, at whose antics and tumbles she had so often laughed, was now a hideous, maggoty little figure perched upon the cadaver.

She stole a glance at Mr. Albert and saw, to her surprise, a curiously avid expression upon his features, and was astonished to find that she read his mind as though what he were thinking were printed in large letters upon a bill-board.

Indeed, the next moment her guess was verified when Mr. Albert, reaching far back into the time of his childhood when he was a schoolboy before the first war, said, “Bags I for the cats.”

It seemed, then, to Rose that this simple phrase dispelled some of the horror and the terror and the foulness, and that what had been done needed to be done. She thought of the great tiger, his fur now matted and mangy from malnutrition, his incandescent eyes dulled, and the gusto with which he would devour flesh and crunch bone, and of how the fire would return to his glance, the gloss to his coat, and the deep, contented purr to his throat. Pity was something Rose had only recently learned. It had never been in the curriculum of the hard school in which she had been brought up. She put it aside now. First things, like surviving, came first, and she dearly loved the tiger.

She said, “We can feed Rajah, King, and Bagheera now.”

Mr. Albert’s eyes gleamed in the lantern light, and he said, “Yes, yes, yes!”

The heavy features of the dwarf composed themselves into a smirk of satisfaction, and he pounded the neck of the dead animal with a little fist as though claiming possession. “Hokay,” he said, “I not afraid to do it, any time. I give you but first I give my doks. Hokay?”

From without the wall came the noisy grinding of a vehicle coming to a stop, heavy breathing, footsteps, the creak of leather and the clash of arms and equipment. Two of the Spanish
guardias civiles
who had been patrolling nearby burst into the
finca,
carbines at the ready. One of them shouted in Spanish, “Stand still! Nobody move!
Qué pasa aqui
?”

There seemed to be blood all over now, red in the rays of the augmented light produced by the lamps of the police. There were the mother-naked figures of Janos and Toby, and Deeter except for his boots, the long-barrelled black gun still clutched in Toby’s hand and the knife in that of the dwarf, and the old man and the girl looking down seemingly unmoved.

One of the policemen asked again sharply, “What is this?” and waved the carbine at all of them, as though he wished only a move to be made so that he, too, could shoot and bring about blood and death.

And now a strange thing happened. It was the unstrung Deeter who brought about the closing of their ranks against the aliens, as though he had never gone to pieces and wept over the escape of his horse like a frightened girl. For he took his arms from about the neck of the palomino as if he had been only adjusting her bridle and, with his countenance quite changed, stern and sardonically set, moved into the circle of light.

“Why,” he asked in his border Spanish, “what does it look like?”

The cool, drawling voice took the wind and bluster out of the policeman, who could only repeat, somewhat ineffectually, “What has happened? A shot was fired.”

Deeter’s eyes were mocking now. “We’ve killed a horse,” he said.

“Why?”

“To feed our animals. What do you think?”

“You had no right—”

“Why not? It’s our horse.”

The policeman said, “It was forbidden to touch anything. These are the property of the Court until released.”

Deeter managed to laugh, lapsing into English. “You ain’t going to have any property at all pretty soon, you silly bastards. What’s worth more—a horse or them there wild animals? They’ll be starved to death in another week. Go back and tell that to the Court. We told you we didn’t have any more money for food. All they gave us was a run-around.”

The two
carabiñeros
shrugged and relaxed their weapons. The spokesman said, “The judge will hear about this in the morning. In the meantime no one is to touch the carcass.”

Deeter said, “Sure, sure, that’s all right. You tell your judge. We’ll see him in the morning.” And he smiled amiably at the police and then said, in English, “Okay, boys, beat it!”

The two stood uncertainly for a moment, and then turned and went out. The engine of their jeep started up and they drove away.

Deeter said, “I don’t suppose any of you punks can skin a horse?” He went over and took the knife from the hand of Janos. The dwarf cringed and for a moment a look of fear came over his heavy features.

The smile was still on Deeter’s face as he said, “I’ll just keep this. I ain’t going to hurt you. It’s done, you bloody little bastard. Now get out of my way!” With the implement he made the first incision in the median of the horse’s belly, and with a single stroke opened the hide as though it had been fastened with a zipper.

With Toby and Mr. Albert assisting, Deeter butchered the horse then and there. The smell of blood had been wafted to the menagerie, sending the starving carnivores into a frenzy. Terrible sounds burst from their throats as they attacked the bars of their cages. The place was a pandemonium of screams, yelps and ear-shattering roars.

They fed them as the pearl-clear Spanish dawn broke over the horizon. There was no question about Mr. Albert’s distributing the food in the usual manner, opening the hatch to the cages and pushing in the pans. The portions had to be fastened to the ends of poles and thrust in between the bars where the maddened animals ripped and clawed at them, splintering the wood in their rush to get at the food.

Rose forgot her own hunger in the satisfaction of seeing them eat. The horse that was had been forgotten; here was only meat as she was used to it hanging in butcher’s shops on the high street, and she herself took morsels of it to the smaller animals among the flesh eaters and tossed some entrails to the eagle.

Toby and Deeter, their arms and legs splashed with blood, continued the quartering and the hacking, for it was agreed they would persuade the butcher with whom they had dealt in the market place to keep the meat in his cold room; otherwise in the summer heat it would spoil before it had been used up.

After they had finished and the scene of the slaughter was covered over with fresh dirt, the men washed themselves. Deeter had gone grim and silent. He now wore the gun, which Toby had restored to him, hanging western style from the cartridge belt at his waist. He had removed Marlene Dietrich from the shed and tethered her to a wheel of his living wagon. He did not speak to Janos or issue threats against him. Strangely, the little man by his deed had grown very tall in their midst and his presence and his action were felt by all of them. Toby, too, was aware of the fact that from then on he must be extra vigilant for the safety of the valuable rosin-backs and the fine Arabs that were the livelihood of this family and himself.