Dagon (9 page)

He stood angled away from view. The room was choked with large forms of men. Along the edge of the table next the window a hand lay asplay in the lamplight. It looked huge. The freckles on the hand seemed large as dimes, the distent veins thick as cord. It didn't look like a hand, but, oversized, like a parody of a hand, an incomprehensible hoax. Against the far wall, by the door to the bedroom where Peter slept, a tall farmer leaned. He was dressed in blue jeans and wore a cotton plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled to his biceps, exposing long bony forearms and sharp elbows. His face was narrow and small for his body, seemed as disproportionately small as the near hand seemed large. His nose was prom­inent and sharp, but his eyes under the shaggy eyebrows looked shrunken, aglitter with con­centration. He gazed fascinated at something out of Peter's view, and he licked his thin mouth with a sudden flicker of his tongue. He rubbed his chin with the back of his wrist. Then he moved forward to the table and took up a jelly glass half filled with corn whiskey and drank it suddenly. It spilled a little from the side of his mouth and darkened his shirt, and as he stood by the table close to the lamp his shadow loomed big and fell dark on the bedroom door. Then he stepped back and leaned against the wall once more; and he had not once moved his fierce gaze from what he stared upon.

Peter wanted to see, but he was afraid Mina would see him. Then what? It would be bad. He had to go all the way back up to the road and skirt round the patch of light. Again he picked up a stone and kept rolling it in his hands. His hands were damp with mounting excitement. What was it that everyone in the world knew but he? There was something grave and black being kept from him, and he could feel how important it was, how imminent, and he was desperate to know. There were two other men aligned against the west wall, by the door to the living room. Both wore bibbed overalls. One, a blondish thickset man, wore a faded red sweat­shirt, looked yellow in the yellow light. He too stared—as did his companion. His face twitched and he was almost smiling, but not happily; in anticipation, perhaps, as one smiles involun­tarily the moment before a vaccination. The other wore a rough blue workshirt, the collar open below the high bib of the overalls. He was taller and looked older than the other man. Spriggy gray hair lay on his chest. He wore an expression almost as unmoving as Mina's, but his stare was as intensely fixed as the others'. Mor­gan himself stood by the outside door, his hands in his pockets. His face was red as always, his eyes filled with lazy mischief.

Mina had her back toward him. At first he could not make it out: her dark tangled hair on her shoulders; the blouse loose, obviously open all down the front; her thigh olive and bare be­neath the edge of the table. He could not see her waist. She was reversed, sitting backward in the chair, straddled on the short fat man who sat round the other way. Her bare leg swung rhyth­mically and not idly, and it seemed to Peter that she was singing, singing softly music he could not hear. Astraddle, her leg moving to and fro. She gripped the farmer's shoulders and stared intently into his face; it was the way she treated Peter when she was calming him from one of his bad hours. The red fat face was thrown against the chairback, the mouth was open, and the lips tightened and relaxed like a pulse around the dark cavity; lips were frothy and saliva trickled gleaming from one side of the mouth. And now the mouth began to open wider and then almost to close: a fish drowning in air. Mina's naked leg swung easily but more quickly now. And now the muscles under his eyes twitched, this tic rhythmic also, and the man's breath was a hoarse clatter in his throat. Still gripping his shoulder with her right hand, Mina reached be­hind to the table without looking. She drew forth a snake which was limp at first and then grew taut. She held it just below its head and it wrapped about her forearm. It was brown and splotched with a darker brown; he didn't know what kind it was. She held it apart from her for a moment and then began slowly to bring it toward the man's face. Below the edge of the table her leg swung ever more quickly. The farmer breathed a big bubble of spit; his breath­ing was louder now. Mina knew when. In time she brought the snake to his face, rubbed it slowly on his cheek. The mottled body writhed carefully, a slow cold movement of the skin without a catch. The man cried out, but the sound seemed not to come from him, but to fall from everywhere out of the hollow air of the kitchen; the sound totally itself, pure unintelligi­ble feeling. “Iä! Iä!” he cried.

Mina spoke gravely and quietly. “Iä!” She spoke in affirmation.

It was over. Again she held the snake apart from them, and then leaned her head forward and put her mouth to the man's neck. When she straightened, the white oval impress of her teeth was plain to Peter. Her leg had stopped swinging. She unbound the snake from her forearm, just as she might take off a spiral bracelet, and dropped the thing carelessly on the table. There it crawled a moment and then lay still; Peter thought that it might be dead now. She got off the lap of her victim easily—it was like crossing a low stone wall—and stood on the other side of the table straightening her black skirt. She brushed her thighs slowly with her fingers. The drab blouse still hung open all down the front and one small solemn breast peered blindly through the window at Peter.

He stepped back quickly out of the light. He turned his back to the window. They had begun talking again. He went again, avoiding the ob­long of yellow light, to the road and came back down into the yard. It felt much cooler now than when he had first come outside. Passing the dimly lit living-room window he glanced inside and then stopped. At first he couldn't understand, but looking more carefully, he saw that it was he himself who sat in the ugly stuffed chair. His gangly body was all angles and still. There he sat, uncomfortably asleep, the quart jar still half filled beside him. He stood looking for a few minutes until it all came clear; then he went on, round the house and up the steps; entered the living room and went to sit in the chair. He arranged his body carefully in an angular repose. It was all going to be a bad dream, one of the terrible dreams which caused the sweat to stand on him unmoving and cold. He arranged himself carefully, according to plan, and almost immediately he fell asleep, breathing easily and regularly, not stirring. He stirred once, only slightly, when that hard inexpressive cry sounded again; a different voice, and this time followed by an outbreak of hoarse laughter.

TWO

In early August Mina found what she wanted. Now the heat was tortuous. The sky pressed more closely than before, the landscape seemed flatter, rolled out before the eye, baked, seam­less; in the metal heat the different kinds of plants were not to be distinguished. The great white sun was cluttered with yellow and black specks.

“I got somebody who can drive us,” Mina said. “I'm sick of this place. I don't want to hang around here forever.”

The short blond boy leaned against the doorframe, relaxed and indifferent. He always had about him a liquid uncaring gracefulness. His arms hung at his sides and smoke rose along his body from the cigarette he held in his fingers with a cool exquisite droop. His name was Coke Rymer. Peter, sitting in the stuffed chair, looked at him. He detested Coke Rymer thoroughly; he hated him. He couldn't remember when the fel­low had shown up, yawning, glancing about with watery blue eyes which seemed to take in nothing and yet seemed always observing, ob­serving without curiosity. The dark-streaked blond hair was gathered upward in a stiff greased pompadour and was bunched behind in a shabby d.a.

“Coke here can drive,” Mina said. “He can take us anywhere we want to go.”

Peter nodded. Why was she telling him? She didn't care what he thought about it; she had given him up, for a while at least. He sat in his chair all day, slept in it at night; had denied himself Mina's bed, or had been denied it. “What good are you if you can't fuck?” she had asked, and the question had no answer, of course. He couldn't care, either; for the moment at least that was one ordeal he was spared. Many things in him were damaged; one thing in him was broken, but he didn't know what exactly, was hardly interested. He had gone stale in the ability to suffer, but was certain that Mina knew it; she would find some way to rouse him again. He could contemplate without rancor long in­tense days of pain, thought of it dispassionately, as if it were a solid library of books that he had to read through.

“I can drive anything with wheels on it,” Coke Rymer said. “Take you anywhere you want to go, honey.” He had a thin watery tenor voice which wavered on the verge of a grating falsetto. “Just point me on the road and we're gone.”

Peter nodded again. What difference did it make?

“They's some things I got to look after first,” she said. “But it won't be long now.” She sidled through the door by Coke and went through the kitchen into the back bedroom. She'd grazed him with her thigh.

The blond boy stood where he was, watching Peter with nonchalant eyes, not moving except to puff slowly at his cigarette, which was burned almost down now. Peter was thirsty again; these last few days that he hadn't been drinking the corn whiskey he couldn't seem to get enough water, made innumerable trips to the bucketed dipper in the kitchen. He rose and went toward the door, and Coke Rymer shifted his stance slightly, setting his right foot in the opposite cor­ner of the doorsill. Peter stopped immediately before him, looking carelessly into the pasty blond face with its fixed smile, a meanly dissem­bling expression. He was indifferent; it wasn't worth it. He turned about and went out the other door onto the porch, down the steps into the yard.

The heat was impossible; stuffed the air like metal wool, would abrade the skin. The copper clangor of the sun filled his ears. There was no breeze, not a hint of it, not even a current in the air. It was so still and hot he felt a match flame would be invisible here in the open. The roaring heat quite overpowered the sound of insects. Under the rough cotton shirt—it was one of Morgan's which Mina had brought him—his ribs trickled with sweat. He walked into the unmov­ing shade of the wild cherry and stood looking across the glaring fields to the tall glaring hill beyond.

He heard footsteps on the sagging porch steps and turned. Coke Rymer came toward him through the brassy light. In the heat the blond body seemed to waver like steam, to have less weight than a normal human body. He stopped before Peter once again, still wearing the creepy unmeaning smile. “Was there something you was looking for out here, baby?” He in­clined his head gently to one side.

He shrugged heavily. The only thing he no­ticed was how silly this boy was. How old was he, anyway? He couldn't be over nineteen or twenty, was probably seventeen or eighteen. Merely a beer-joint hood, cheap as a plastic toy; something you could wind up and let scoot across the floor, its movements predictable and dull: before long the stretched rubber that made it go would snap and you'd throw it out. What use was he to Mina? He couldn't see what she saw in him. He began to turn away to go back into the house.

Coke Rymer put a wet hand on his shoulder. “Wait a minute, feller. It ain't polite to go walk­ing off while somebody's talking to you. I don't much like it when people don't treat me polite.”

He turned again. “Get your hand off,” he said. His voice was drowsy.

“I don't much like people giving me orders, neither. Especially when it's some chicken bas­tard like you. I don't know what you're doing, hanging around here anyhow. Why don't you just cut out while you got the chance? There ain't nothing to hold you here. If I was you I'd just point myself on the road and get gone.”

Without hesitating, almost without thinking, he aimed a kick at the blond boy's knee; missed. His foot caught him on the lower thigh.

Coke Rymer blundered backward a couple of steps. “You're right mean, ain't you? By God, we'll see about that.” But in the middle of his speech his voice cracked into a hoarse falsetto, and this as much as the kick seemed to anger him finally. He clenched his fists and held them apart close to his body and lowered his head and charged at Peter like a clumsy yearling.

He was calm as wood, unthinking. Again he didn't hesitate, but stepped forward and brought his elbow up fair into Coke Rymer's face. It jolted through his arm like an electric shock, but he disregarded it. This sort of pain was meaningless; the whole struggle was mean­ingless. It was simply one more task he hadn't asked for but which he had to get through.

Again Coke Rymer staggered back. Peter had clubbed him on the forehead. The yellowish skin reddened, but Peter guessed that it wouldn't bruise or cut easily. “You…son of a bitch.” He was gasping. Peter could almost feel in his own lungs the weight of the heat of the boy sucked in. He came at Peter again in exactly the same way, but then stopped short and threw an awkward punch with his left hand, catching him on the biceps.

He was surprised at the lack of force in the punch and, without bothering to guard himself, stepped backward. Coke Rymer came on unsteadily, and they began circling. In the intense heat it was like fighting under water. Coke made innumerable foolish feints with his fist and kept gulping the hot air. Peter backed slowly, keeping his eyes dreamily over the boy's left shoulder. Somehow that seemed a very clever strategy. He could draw the kid off guard and step in when he pleased. He was momentarily delighted. The mechanics of this struggle, inept and silly as it was, had begun to interest him. He felt a paternal pity for the boy, for his stupidity and awkwardness; it was too bad how he was floundering himself to fatigue out here in the heat. Surely this boy ought to be smarter about fighting than he was. He was still backing, and now he made a feint himself; stepped forward and flicked a short left jab.

He had surprised him. Coke Rymer hadn't been touched, but stumbled over his own feet and fell backward, rolling in the dust. He came up breathing hard, his tee shirt caked with the reddish grit. Lips apart, he breathed through dark crooked teeth. He looked warily about him and again assumed his ludicrous boxing pose.

It was too much. Peter giggled, then laughed hard. He smiled at the boy, fondly amused for the moment. He turned abruptly and walked toward the porch steps, and would have gone back into the house if he hadn't heard Coke Rymer come stamping after him. He looked and ducked; began backing again slowly and care­fully. The knife was shining in Coke's hand; the boy held it loosely but confidently. This was dif­ferent, he could kill him with that knife, he was that silly. Peter felt completely at a loss, kept his balance gingerly and made himself stop looking at the weapon. Where had he read that you mustn't look at the knife but at the man's eyes instead? Some stupid crime novel probably. He wasn't at all certain that it was a wise policy. Out here, even in the broad light, Coke Rymer's eyes were all iris; the pupils had diminished to mere dots. Now he was frightened. He remem­bered the boy's queer clumsiness and thought of it as his only advantage; he was backing slowly and weaving, careful to keep his balance. He tried his former tactic, stepping forward sud­denly and feinting a jab, but it was a mistake. Coke Rymer leaned out casually and pinked him in the left shoulder. He jumped away and began circling again. The cut itself hadn't hurt much, but in a few moments it began to sting; he hadn't realized he'd been sweating so hard. He took a quick peep over his shoulder and then broke and ran, ducking under the floor beams of the porch.

The space under the house was wedge-shaped, the building resting almost on the ground in the ascent of the hill, stilted up on crooked log lengths down toward the west. It was dim and silent under here but not cool. The air was no easier to breathe, stuffed with dust, stagnant. His body remembered it as the air that had stuffed the black attic room before. He ran up a little way under the house and stopped and turned. He couldn't see about him yet; he watched the open space beneath the porch where Coke Rymer would come through. Ca­sual appearance of legs in the blue jeans with the broad glass-studded leather belt, the soiled tee shirt. He heard the boy giggling furiously.

“Why don't you run one time, you bastard?” Coke Rymer said, “I'd just like to see how good you can run.” He broke down into giggles. He held the knife at his side, then began carelessly whittling at one of the porch steps. “If you think I'm going to go crawling around in there after you, you're crazy as hell,” he said. “That ain't my way, to go crawling around under a house for some chicken bastard. No sir, baby, I just don't cotton to it. Me, I'm just going to wait right here till you come out.” He jabbed the knife into one of the log supports and let it remain, near at hand. The sound of his high voice under the house was hollow, had an unearthly whistle in it. “I'll wait right here, me, if I have to for five years. And when you take a notion to come out I'll cut your ass good.” More giggling. Slowly the boy took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jeans and lit one.

Except for the open end of the porch the space beneath the house was sided with raw boards which let streaks of light between them. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the dim­ness. He was half bent now and to get comfort­able he would have to squat; he didn't want to do that, he didn't want to see that yellow fixed face. The dust was thick, came almost to his shoe tops. He maneuvered about a bit, trying to find a measure of comfort, and glass snapped under his foot. Looking, he saw bits of a broken Mason jar.

“I'd sure like to know what the hell you think you're doing under there,” Coke Rymer said. “There ain't no way out for you, sweetheart, except just by me. Why don't you just face it?”

He moved to his left and squatted. Now the boy's face was hidden by the porch steps; visible were a blue knee, a hand laxly holding a burning cigarette, the knife protruding from the log support. He waited to grow calm again, to steady his breathing. He thought of trying to get out, going quietly and keeping the steps between them, but he knew it was no good. The boy, standing, would see him; he wouldn't get halfway down into the yard. But if he waited here long enough Mina would stop them. Surely she wouldn't let the blond boy kill him.…But why not? What did he know about her, anyway? She was unfath­omable. The simple fact that she countenanced Coke Rymer at all was unfathomable. All her motives were buried under the ocean. He sighed.

Moving to the left still, still trying to get out of his sight every part of Coke Rymer and the knife, he struck with his foot something solid and metal. At first he couldn't find it; buried in the deep dust. He dug in and dredged it out: a handle for a water pump: It was lovely, it was about two and a half feet long, dull iron. It had a very slight S curve and the end of the handle was smooth, his hand fitted it perfectly. The op­posite end of the handle tapered to a flat iron plate which contained three quarter-inch holes evenly spaced. He imagined how the holes would whisper when he swung the weapon. It fitted his hand perfectly, it was proper. He held it before him, admiring the heft and the subtle curve of it. Suddenly in love, he wagged it be­fore him.

Now he could go out. He could keep the steps between him and Coke Rymer—if he could just move silently under the house (the dust would muffle the noise)—and he could come out stand­ing and ready to fight. He went forward on his knees and crawled toward the light. He pushed the pump handle gently along before him, breathed shallowly and quickly, not wanting to sneeze with the dust. When he reached the edge of the house, he took a ready grip on the handle, then rose slowly to a crouch.

The boy was talking again; he talked a great deal, Coke Rymer. “I'm telling you, sweetheart, I don't mind waiting five years for you to come out if I have to. I got all the time in the world.” He stooped and flicked the live cigarette butt under the house, into the dust.

Peter came out immediately; his eyes had got used to the light. The boy heard and turned, plucking the knife from the log with the quick careless movement one would use in striking a match. They stared at each other over the de­scent of the sagging steps; it was a moment or two before Coke Rymer glimpsed the pump handle. “What's that thing you've got?” he said.

He began to edge round the steps.

“That won't do you no good, just a ole pump handle. I got something here can cut your ass good.”