Chapter 54

“So do you see, Viv? It’s been like that all my life. Smothered. Until I finally could see no reason to—to keep trying to breathe. Not that he was entirely to blame by any means, but I felt that unless I was just once able to have something over him, to beat him out of something, that I could never breathe. And that’s when I decided—” Lee ceased abruptly. He saw that she was not even listening— maybe had never been listening!—but was staring off into the dark as though in a trance. —what’s happened? Does he really need? Oh, it’s the dog (. . . Molly opened her mouth to bay but her tongue stuck hot to her teeth, and she fell back again); she’s stopped—Not listening at all! She hadn’t heard a word! In anger and humiliation he jerked his hand from her throat where she—where he had thought she had encouraged him by allowing the fingers to slip far into the neck of the shirt . . . just to let him make a fool of himself! Startled by the abruptness of his action, Viv turned toward him questioningly, just as old Henry came back into the ring of firelight. “Listen: that Molly dog, you notice? She’s hushed. I ain’t heard her call in a good while now.” He was quiet a moment to let them listen, not quite trusting his own ears. (The bear’s shiny black eyes appeared in the moonlight over the rock, his face quizzical, almost regretful as he watched the dog. Fired by a thirst near to panic, she fled back down the ridge, seeking the wash she remembered.) Convinced that they were hearing nothing he wasn’t, Henry cast an expert’s eye down the slope and decided, “That bear, he either lost her or he run her off, one of the two.” He pulled his watch from his pocket, tipped it toward the fire, and made believe he could read it. “Well, that’s the show as far as this nigger is concerned. I ain’t about to sit up here and listen to them other dirteaters carry on about a little ol’ fox. Sounds like they just about got him, anyhow. I’m gonna head on back is what. You kids suppose you’ll come or stay a while?” “We’ll stay a while longer,” Lee supposed for both of them, and added, “To wait for Hank and Joe Ben.” “Suit yourself.” He took up his cane. “But they’re liable to be a good stretch yet an’ then some. G’night.” He faded from the light, stiff and weaving, like an old ghost of a tree haunting the midnight forest in search of his stump. Watching him leave, Lee chewed nervously at his glasses— good; now there would be no more reason for this spy-movie dialogue; they could just talk . . . God, when he’s gone, I’ll have to talk!—and waited for the sounds of his departure to cease. . . . Molly half ran, half rolled back down the ridge. By the time she found the wash again her hide was haired in flame, her tongue melting—HOT HOT MOON HOT—and the thing hooked to her hind leg as big as leg itself now. Bigger. Bigger than her whole burning body. —As soon as the old man’s crashing and cursing disappears down the dark hillside, Viv turns back sometimes a great notion to Lee, still with that startled, uncomprehending expression, waiting for an explanation of his violent withdrawal. And an explanation for the touch in the first place. His face is rigid. He has stopped chewing on the eyeglasses and he’s taken a twig from the fire and is blowing on the end of it. His face. The cupping shield of his hand hides a glowing ember, but still ...each time he blows his features are lighted from within by something a whole lot hotter than a spark on a twig. Like something inside there burning to get out, something burning, it needs so bad to get out. “What is it?” She reaches to touch his arm; he gives a short, bitter laugh and tosses the twig back into the fire. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry. For the way I acted. Forget what I was saying. I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, ‘The fit is momentary.’ Regard me not. It’s not your fault.” “But what’s not my fault? Lee, what were you trying to tell me, before old Henry left? I don’t understand...” At her question he turns and regards her with amused wonder, smiling at his own thoughts. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Of course it isn’t your fault.” (Yet, as it turned out, it was very much her fault—) Tenderly, he touches her cheek, her neck where his fingers had rested, reaffirming something. ...“You didn’t know; how could you know?” (—though I had no way of knowing this at the time.) “But didn’t know what?” She feels she should be angry for the way he speaks to her and for—for the other things. . . . But that awful burning hunger behind his eyes! “Lee, please explain—” Don’t explain! Leave me alone; I can’t be everybody’s something! “What was it you started to confess?” Lee walked back to sit by the fire. . . . Molly dragged her body into the crackling water. She tried to drink and vomited again. Finally she stretched out on her belly, only her eyes and gasping muzzle above the surface: HOT HOT COLD cold moon MOONS HOT HOT HOT HOT . . . He situated himself on the sack so he was facing her and took her hands between his. “Viv, I’ll try to explain; I need to explain to somebody.” He spoke slowly, watching her face. “When I lived here, as a child, I thought Hank was the biggest thing created. I thought he knew everything, was everything, had everything in this whole waterlogged world ...except one particular thing that was mine. What this one thing is, was, doesn’t matter—think of it as an abstract thing, like a feeling of importance, or sense of self—it only matters that I needed it, as any kid needs something all his own, all, and I thought I had it, forever, never to be taken from me...and then I thought he took it away. Do you follow me?” He waited until she nodded that she understood—his eyes softer now, tender, the way his hands were; but still the burning—then went on. “So I tried to get it back—this thing. I mean I needed it more than he did, Viv. But I found...even after I had it ...that he was too much for me. It was never mine again, never all mine. Because I couldn’t ...ever take his place. See? I wasn’t big enough to take his place.” He released her hands and removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with thumb and finger (my failure to Come Clean that evening I blamed, of course, on Hank—) sitting in silence for a long moment before he continued. (—though I know now that she was as much at fault as my brother, or as myself, or as any of the other half-dozen principals in the plot, dead and alive. But at the time I was capable of no such painful insights, and quickly blamed the about-face I made in my march toward Brotherly Love on the brother I was marching to love, on my brother and on the Tin Pan Alley moon and his old hack magic . . .) “And never being big enough to take his place left me no place of my own, left me no one to be. I wanted to be someone, Viv, and there seemed only one way to do it—” “Why are you telling me this, Lee?” Viv asked suddenly, in a fearful voice barely louder than the breeze rustling the dry flowers behind her. Her voice seemed to come from a great, empty cavern. She was reminded of the hollow weight that had grown inside her when she had tried to give Hank a live baby. The memory filled her with nausea. —He wants something from me. He doesn’t know that the only thing I have left is the hollow of something gone— “What are you telling me for?” He looked back up at her without putting his glasses back on. He had been ready to go on by telling her how his whole return home had been motivated by the desire for revenge, how he planned to use her as an instrument in the revenge, how he had realized the error of his ways because of his growing fondness for all of them ...but now he was stymied by her question: Why was he telling her? what reason had he to tell anyone, except, “I don’t know, Viv; I just needed someone to talk to. . . .” (Not that she did anything antagonistic toward me—it certainly wasn’t that—her blame lies in the way she tossed her hair back from her face, in the softness of her throat and the shine of firelight on her cheekbones . . .) “But Lee, we’re hardly good friends; there’s Hank, or Joe Ben—” “Viv, I needed you, not Hank or Joe Ben. I can’t...look, I couldn’t tell them the things I can tell—” Something sounded in the darkness. Lee stopped, relieved momentarily by the distraction. Then from the direction of the slough bottom came a drawn-out “Heayoo-ooo . . .” and his relief turned to disappointment. “Damn. That’s Joe Ben. They’re coming back.” He made a desperate calculation. “Viv, listen; let me meet you tomorrow, please, and finish this. Let me talk to you somewhere alone tomorrow.” “What do you mean?” “Hey! I already have your invitation, if you remember right. To dig clams?” “Rock oysters. But I was just kidding with you.” “I’m not kidding now. Meet me...where? On the jetty at the beach, was that it?” “But why, Lee? You still haven’t told me why.” “Because. I need to talk with somebody. With you. Please . . .” She put on her teasing face. “Why, suh, a lady o’ mah position—” “Viv! I’m asking you...I need you!” The hand swung her facing him, gripping her wrist demandingly; but her attention did not fasten this time on his fingers, or even on the eyes gripping with the same demanding pressure, but beyond the fingers, behind the eyes, where ...she can see the concentrated strain of his need to be, see the agonizing, stiff labor of unfolding, of opening, of trying to proclaim, This is me! “Viv, please?”—like the efforts of a dark, diseased flower, too long in the bud, struggling to unfurl its crippled petals before a last-chance sun. And, watching, feels that desperate blooming draw for the air and water and light that was her bounty, feels it at the same time swelling to try to fill that icy bubble beneath her breasts. —Maybe. Maybe that is it. Maybe the hollow is not something gone, but something not given! “Viv, hurry . . . will you?” This is me, the flower pleads, drawing, and she feels herself just beginning to fly toward answering that plea when the vetch pods rattle the dark behind them and Hank shouts, “Here ya go; ornament for the aerial!”—and she flew instead to throw her arms about her husband, bloody foxtail and all. “Hank! Oh, you’re back.” “Yeah, I’m back. But easy, I ain’t been gone a month, you know.” Leaving Lee to kneel and hide his disappointment in the chore of tending the coffee. He bit his cheeks over the blurred sight of the girl forsaking him so quickly to run to the mighty hunter—(The dumb cow! I should have had more sense than to expect her to understand anything except how to run mooing to her bull)—and cursed the smoke making his eyes burn so. (Yet, taking everything into consideration, I still deem it a very interesting evening with some very interesting results: first, while the old man muttered and masticated beside us, and Hank and Joe Ben and the hounds chased smaller animals in the slough bottom, Viv and I had a most pleasant chat and seeded a relationship destined to bear a very tasty fruit for me later; and second, the excitement of the hunt prompted brother Hank to get even drunker later that evening, enough so to shake loose his hold on the mean streak he had been hiding since my arrival (also, I think he saw Viv and me getting a bit too cozy at the campfire for his liking) and he tried to provoke a fistfight with me back at the house, called me a “pantywaist” and other endearing terms when I refused to indulge him, and thereby snapped me out of my sentimental somnolence and put me back on my road to revenge once more after much time lost dawdling; and last, as well as foremost, the detailed scheme that I fictionalized to have ready for my Clean Breast of It All proved precisely the plan I had been searching for. A scheme meeting all the requirements: safe enough to pass the cautionary restrictions set up by Old Reliable WATCH OUT AT ALL TIMES; certain enough of success to give my workworn body the patience to last out the few weeks necessary to the plan’s completion; diabolic enough to soothe my every mangled memory and vindicate each outraged obsession; and potent enough to stir up a spell capable of transforming a giant into a mewling babe...and vice versa.) Viv realized too late how overdone her greeting had been, and looked to Hank to see if he suspected anything—There is nothing to suspect, though; Lee was just talking, and not even making sense; I barely heard—Hank was looking about the fire-lit area with a puzzled frown. “I thought the old man was here,” he remarked, watching her nervously. “Henry just this minute left,” Viv said. “Most of the dogs are still out,” Hank told them, coming to warm his hands at the fire. “On another fox, the way it sounds. But I thought I’d check here before we did anything else. Old Molly show up back here?” “Hank doesn’t care for the way she hushed so fast,” Joe Ben explained gravely. “We haven’t seen her,” Lee said. “Henry’s conclusion was the bear either scared her off or lost her.” “Henry’s full of beans. Molly ain’t about to be scared off by any animal. Just about as unlikely, too, that she’d lose a trail hot as that one sounded. That’s why her hushing so sudden worries me. Any of the other dogs, it might not. But Molly’s too much dog to just hush like that unless she got into it some way.” The weeds rustled. “Here’s Uncle and Dolly’s Pup,” Joe announced as two dogs slunk guiltily into the firelight, like criminals throwing themselves on the mercy of the court. “Little-bitty fox,” Joe scolded, then, hands on his hips. “Chasin’ a poor little-bitty fox . . . Why didn’t you help out with that bear? Huh?” Uncle slunk on into the shack and Dolly’s Pup rolled onto her back as though her exposed undersides would explain the whole thing. “What do you plan to do?” Viv asked. “One of us ought to go look for her,” Hank said without enthusiasm. More dogs were coming into sight now. “You all take the dogs, except Uncle, to the house; I’ll take him on a leash and walk up toward the ridge.” “No!” Viv said quickly, holding on to his arm. They all looked at her in surprise. “Well, you’ll be gone all night. She’ll be all right. Come on to the house, now.” “What ...?” They stand, radiating out from the fire.