Psyche (9 page)

The license plates—he must get them off. With the spanner he did this as fast as he could, and then, bending and hammering them, reduced them to a size he could stuff into his pockets.

Taking out a comb, he ran it through lifeless dark hair, combed too often and washed too little, while he wondered confusedly if there was anything else he could do to remove any possible connection between himself and this wreck he should leave behind him as quickly as possible. The black bag—he dared neither leave it nor open it. Eventually, his connection with the car would be established: to abandon the black bag would be madness. Yet— the fear which he had been forcing into the farthest recesses of his mind leapt gibbering into the light—if the child were dead he did
not want to know it, and what but death could have kept her silent so long? Why had she not cried out when the car struck? Why was she not crying now?

He took two steps away from the car, and then stood still. He could not, must not leave that glaring clue. And what if the brat was dead? He hadn't killed her—they couldn't say he had killed her. He could open the bag without looking at her, could dumpher on to the floor without even touching her. If they ever caughthim he could say she was alive when he left her—they would haveto believe him, because it would be true—it would be true—itwould be true

Mumbling incoherently, he opened the rear door of the car, pulled the black bag up on to the seat, unfastened the catches, hesitated an instant, and then, his eyes screwed shut, turned it upside down above the gap between front and back seats. There was a slithering sound, a soft thud, and silence. A horrid, wordless noise escaped from his slack mouth, and he sprang backwards as though from a pestilence, slamming the door with such force that the windows rattled and fresh fragments of glass from the broken headlight fell to the ground with a cold, musical tinkle.

Briefly, he stood frozen where he was, his teeth chattering audibly in a silence now unbroken by any other sound. Then, the empty black bag bumping against his legs, he turned and ran down the road pursued by devils which would never again be far behind him.

T
HEY
came along the deserted road that wound through the slag, just as the first yellow streaks of dawn were staining the eastern sky. There were two of them, and they employed a shambling walk that covered the ground with a minimum of effort while producing a very fair rate of progress. They were on their way south to a “jungle” in a city ravine, and an autumn conference of their kind in which it pleased them to play a yearly part. Like migrating birds, they had habits. Following the sun, propelled not only by their own whims but by a constabulary that wasted neither sympathy nor affection on them, they steered a seasonal course that varied amazingly little from year to year. This time it had taken them longer than usual to beat their way across the continent, and they were in a hurry lest they be late for their conference and the always interesting debacle that ensued when the police, spurred by an irate citizenry, moved in to break it up. Normally they rode the rods, but a small incident involving a brakeman now suffering from a sore head had made it advisable to desert the railroad in favour of the highway.

Approximately the same height, dressed in much the same
mélange
of cast-off clothing, they were scarcely distinguishable one from the other. They were neither of them young, but their faces, weathered and not unamiable, had an ageless quality common to men who carry no responsibilities heavier than the light packs on their backs.

They both saw the car at the same moment, and without need
for verbal communication became host to the same speculations. Anything was grist to their mill, and a deserted and partially wrecked car promised, to the enterprising, a number of small items that could later be negotiated for beer, cigarettes, or even cash.

Glancing casually over their shoulders, they quickened their pace, and approached the car. Sharp eyes alert, they noted its age and make, the dust that lay thick over it, the extent of its damage, and, most particularly, the absence of license plates.

“The heap's hot.”

“I reckon.”

There was evident satisfaction in both their voices. A stolen car was anybody's prize, to be looted as thoroughly as was humanly possible.

Before touching anything, they prowled around it like stray dogs around an intriguing garbage can, while a possibility, so glorious they were at first afraid to entertain it, began to dawn on them. When they saw the keys, an open invitation, in the ignition, they wasted no time on making an inventory of the car's contents.

“Think we can shove her out?”

“Nothin'toit.”

“Enough juice to get her there?”

Distrusting the gauge, a rusty nail was attached to a piece of string, lowered into the gas tank, drawn out and examined. “More'n enough.”

They had said all that was necessary. Less than sixty miles further south was a wrecker who had the good taste not to ask questions, and whose establishment could be reached via rural roads unprofaned by police patrols. Laying down their packs, they put their shoulders to the fenders, and a minute later the car rolled backwards on to the highway.

Smiling broadly, they recovered their packs, and climbed in.

“Damned if I ain't forgot to renew my drivin' license,” remarked the man who had elected to drive. Stepping on the starter and rewarded by an engine that turned over at once, he settled back with an air that royalty in a Rolls Royce might have attempted in vain. He was on the verge of throwing in the clutch
when his eye was caught by the dislodged bumper lying at the foot of the mutilated hydro pole. He looked up at the sky. It was nearly morning, and he knew that it was tempting an already too beneficent fate not to get the hell out in a hurry, but it was not in his nature to leave anything behind that could be turned into profit. He pointed to the bumper, and his shabby companion, in agreement with him on this, as on most other matters, immediately got out and retrieved it.

“Shall I throw it in back?”

“Good enough.”

“There's some right nice blankets in—Christ Almighty, there's a kid in here!”

In an instant the driver had eased his bulk out from behind the wheel and opened the rear door on the far side of the car, to find himself looking down at a small, tear-stained white face, and fair curls not thick enough to cover the ugly swelling on one side of a small head. A slow, hot wrath suffusing his blunt features with red, he said heavily, “Afore God, I'd like to kill the bugger that done it.”

“She's out cold, but she's breathin' all right.”

“Let's git her up off the floor.”

With horny hands, clumsy but amazingly gentle, they lifted the unconscious child on to the back seat. “You reckon she was left for dead?”

“I reckon.”

“You remember what I done to Alf when he kilt that little dog?”

It was a memory the other man had no wish to resurrect. “Forget it,” he said abruptly. “It's the kid we got to think about. She ain't hurt real bad. What are we goin' to do with her, though?”

Their two faces a study in disturbed perplexity, they stared at the child whom they both assumed had been wantonly abandoned by its own kin. Theirs was a world that acknowledged no ties of any kind, but it bordered at times on a more domesticated existence where such a thing was a not uncommon occurrence. They were angry and upset, but they were not surprised. Man's inhumanity to man was not the least of the causes that had driven
them away from society. They were unquestionably shiftless, immeasurably lazy, and could not, by the wildest stretch of imagination, have been called honest men, yet they never for an instant thought of leaving this little creature in the ditch for someone else to find—or not, as the case might be.

The man who had discovered the child pushed a battered felt hat back from his face, and rubbed his hand slowly across a square, unshaven jaw. Then his eyes sought something fifty feet further along the highway which he had earlier noticed and dismissed as of no interest. Now he pointed to it, automatically using a thumb on which he had traveled thousands of miles, and said slowly, “See that old mail-box over there a ways? Probably a shack back a piece from the road.”

1

T
HE
first rays of the rising sun struck across a lost world of slag that could have been a surrealist's conception of prehistoric times; a barren, repellent landscape of unheroic peaks and valleys filled with purple shadows; a tarnished earth's surface as unyielding as volcanic lava, too raw, too sterile to produce growth of any kind, stranger and bleaker than the fabled mountains of the moon, shaped in haphazard ridges melting one into another without drama or individuality; a treeless, grassless, man-made desolation, naked in a crude, inhuman beauty uniquely its own.

In a gully still unwarmed by the flaming orange of a sunrise slashed with thin black streamers of cloud, the shack crouched against the inhospitable slag like the last relic of a forgotten, and unsuccessful, civilization. A low wind, overlooked by the night in its passing, whined around its box-like contours and tore with idle malice at its tattered tarpaper sides. A twist of newsprint, blown against a ramshackle outhouse, pawed at a half-open door, and fell back, again inanimate. In a crevice in the slag devoted to refuse, a can clattered as a rat lifted its head from its scavanging to gaze with cruel ferocity at the bundle lying on the single, shallow doorstep of the shack.

As daylight strengthened, the formless shadows in the gully became absorbed by the dark grey slag. The air, heavy with
minute dust particles, took on a copper-coloured hue, and the sun, its brilliance muted as though by the smoke of many forest fires, revealed itself as a burnished copper disc.

Inside the shack, the miner's wife turned over in bed, opened eyes still bleary with sleep, and looked at a battered alarm-clock on a bureau of necessity so close to the bed she could have reached out and touched it. It was a purely automatic gesture, for the clock was never right, was, in fact, rarely wound. With a prodigious yawn, she swung her feet out on to the worn board floor and heaved her great bulk upright, her hair a soiled red banner cascading to her waist. From a row of nails, on which hung an assortment of clothing, she took a faded pink wrapper, and, still yawning, struggled into it.

“Butch!” Her voice was hoarse but not unpleasant.

No reply was forthcoming from the mountainous hump on the farther side of the brass bedstead.

“Butch! You hear me, you big ape? It's time you got movin'.”

Like an amiable hippopotamus rising from a wallow it had no desire to leave, Butch sat up and blinked at a new day from under shaggy black eyebrows. “You say somethin', Mag?”

“You hear'd me.”

“You got breakfast ready a'ready?”

By the light of a single, long-unwashed window, Mag scrutinized herself in the clouded mirror of the bureau while she took ineffectual swipes at her vivid hair with a brush whose bristles were worn down almost to the wood. Her voice as tranquil as her fat, good-humoured face, she said, “Don't you go a‘wastin' time askin' no stoopid questions. Get up.”

“Who's askin' stoopid questions?”

Bunching her hair in a careless knot at the back of her head, and skewering it with a few large hairpins, Mag did not bother to reply. She dabbed pink powder on the end of her nose, more from habit than from any remnant of once warranted vanity. Then, prepared to face a renewal of the few daily tasks her life demanded of her, she pushed aside a limp green curtain in the partition that divided the bedroom from the main room of the shack.

Ashes still warm from the previous evening made the lighting of a fire in the coal stove a relatively simple business. Moving heavily, but with a certain slow efficiency, she filled a kettle from one of the two pails of tepid water standing on the back of the huge stove. A few dirty dishes were collected from amongst an accumulation of odds and ends on a long trestle table and put into a primitive sink. Clean dishes were taken from open shelves above the sink and set on the table in a space which she cleared with a sweep of a large freckled arm. Knives and forks were sought for, and found, in a cardboard box in the top drawer of a golden-oak dresser that was her chief pride and joy. Aluminum salt and pepper shakers were set down between a greasy pack of playing cards and an unfinished piece of brown knitting whose purpose defied conjecture, and she was ready to prepare bacon and eggs. These were kept in a refrigerator that was much too frigid during the winter months, and totally useless in the summer, consisting, as it did, of nothing more than a hole in the floor reached by a trap-door.

She was already on her knees, for her a difficult process in itself, when she paused, the trap held partly open, and listened for a repetition of a sound so alien in those surroundings she thought her hearing must have been playing tricks with her. Protesting floor boards and an unhappy grunt told her that her lawful wedded husband was dutifully wrestling with the uncomplicated garments in which he was soon due to set out for the mine. The crackling of the fire, and the hiss of a kettle about to come to the boil, assured her that his breakfast would be ready as soon as he was ready for it. These were the familiar sounds she heard every morning of her life, and, unless the weather were bad, almost the only sounds, for the unproductive slag gave birth to no stir or rustle, no change or movement, simply an immense silence as profound as that which must have preceded the creation. Occasionally, high against the sky, the cry of a bird could be heard, a lonely repudiation of the brutally arid land over which it passed. But that was all.

“It musta been a bird,” Mag told herself. “It couldn't have been nothin' else.”

And then she heard it again, and knew that it was no bird.