The Beyonders (12 page)

He took two strides and poised a foot to kick it into the creek. It would splash in and be gone. But he did not kick.

"Nothing doing, friend," he called into the thicket across from him. "Nothin' I got's for sale to you. Leave it lay there. Let somebody else pick it up. Why don't all you Beyonders just go back beyond one time and stay?"

Not a sound. No flicker of anything to see. But he felt sure that it was waiting in there, that it had watched his act of disdain and refusal. He tightened his muscles in a moment of impulse to go sloshing and charging across the creek, to get to closer quarters. He put down that impulse, too.

"I'm a-going back to my house now," he announced. "I'm a-turning to go. You got anything with you to shoot me in the back with?"

He swivelled on his heel and walked through his yard, making himself move deliberately, making himself hold his shoulders straight without tightening them, without making himself look as if he was about to flinch. He pulled the kitchen door open and went in. Another look through the window. No motion in the laurels. Stooping, he picked up the fork he had dropped. He dug out more salmon from the can and ate it. It tasted good.

He kept watching through the window to see if his visitor would emerge, trying to recover the gold ingot he had so gruffly disdained to pick up. But there was no sign anywhere on either side of Bull Creek. Might that creature be just a trifle afraid of Gander Eye? More likely it was only carrying out orders from somebody, or something. It might not even have understood any of the things Gander Eye had shouted at it.

He sat and wondered if this was how old Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw that footprint on his sandy shore. What had Crusoe done then? As Gander Eye remembered, Crusoe had made ready to defend himself against anything that came attacking. The best thing to do was follow Crusoe's example, follow it right now.

He washed the fork and threw the salmon can in his trash bucket. Then he went to the rack of guns in his front room. He fed a clip of cartridges into the Springfield, loaded the little twenty-two, and slid shells, one by one, into the tubular magazine of the automatic shotgun. Finally he took his rifle for hunting deer, the one with the telescopic sight, of which he was so proud.

He had bought it years ago from a gun collector in Asheville and had had Bo Fletcher make a special stock for it. It was a Mauser 98. That meant it was the model of 1898 rifle the German army had carried through two wars, wars those armies had lost. You had to buy special ammunition for it. He drew back the bolt, opened a box of the special cartridges, and took one out. It had a lean copper-coated bullet, almost like a dagger, set in the hull. He pushed it down against the floor plate until it went into the magazine, fed another in, another and another and another until the magazine was full and one was in the chamber. He pushed the floor plate down with his thumb, slid the bolt back into place, and flicked on the safety catch.

He racked the Mauser up with the other rifles and the shotgun. Then he took his pistol from its drawer and put it in his hip pocket. He'd better not be going out any more without some sort of weapon.

For, he told himself, he'd been left all alone in this matter. No, not all alone. Others seemed to know a thing or two. He just couldn't talk to others.

On his table he found a pad of yellow paper and a pencil. Very carefully he began to write down a series of things to think about:

Mayor B. know Stroove knows about what he calls Beyonders

Stroove is up to somethin or other he trains with Beyonders says they will hep him

Jim Crispin knows about em but he says he doesnt

Gander Eye crossed that line out:

Jim Crispin wouldnt say one way the other if he knows em when 1 asked him but Stroove said he knowed Jim Are they friends

What does Slowly know She was adopted Kimber She likely knows things I dont know

Cant talk to nobody here bout all this they think Im foolin

What are the Beyonders sure enough up to What is Jim and Stroove a doin here

He finished and sat with the pencil in his hand. Then he carefully wrote the date beneath the series of sentences and signed his name. He did not know why he did that, but somehow it made his written words seem official.

It was getting dark outside. They would be starting the music up at Longcohr's store. He wouldn't be there picking banjo, but after a time he went outside. He stood still and looked, but nothing stirred in the gloom. He locked his door, for the first time in many months, and headed up Main Street.

It was a clear, starry sky. The moon, wasted down since the night when the Kimbers had baptized, hovered like a gaunt, curved slip of light. Stars sprawled everywhere, in patterns. Gander Eye made out the Dipper, the W of Cassiopeia's Chair, other constellations. He thought of Doc and Crispin talking about space travel; he remembered stories he had read, moving pictures he had seen, about things invading from other worlds, other stars. Like Doc, he had always been skeptical of such tales. Up until now.

Nobody was walking on Main Street as he headed up. Folks must be already gathered up yonder at the store. As he approached, he saw lights through the big front windows and heard the music flowing out like a bright flood of sound. They were playing "Cabin in the Pine," and a banjo was in there. Who? If he, Gander Eye Gentry, were to walk in all of a sudden, whatever banjo-picker was trying to take his place would just stop between picks and hold the banjo out to him. But he wasn't going to walk in. He'd told Mayor Ballinger that he had business to attend to tonight. Let Mayor Ballinger wonder what that business might be.

He trod along the far edge of the pavement and stopped next to Duffy's gas pumps. From there he could see into the store as well as hear the music. Sure enough, they'd pulled back all the counters and were dancing. He moved to where he could make out the musicians. Doc with his fiddle, Slowly with her guitar. Yes, and there was the banjo man.

He sat between Doc and Slowly, squat and dark. It was Struve. He was picking all right on the banjo, too, by God. Nowhere near as well as Gander Eye could pick, but mighty well at that, mighty well. Gander Eye strained his gaze to make out the banjo. He knew it, an old one that Bo Fletcher had found somewhere and fitted with a new neck. It had a good tone.

Gander Eye wasn't anywhere in that store making music, but nobody seemed to be missing him. They clapped loudly for the music when it was through, and Struve got up from his chair and smiled and bowed, like somebody in a show. His teeth shone in the light. He said something to Doc, who handed over his fiddle. Standing erect beside his chair, Struve set the fiddle to his chin, laid the bow across, and began playing all by himself.

The dancers had come back on the floor, but they stopped and listened. Gander Eye saw Duffy and Peggy holding hands close together, scarcely breathing. The fiddle's notes slid out into the night. The piece Struve played was the Kimber song about "Ring Them Chimin' Bells." He made it sob and sigh. Struve might not be able to pick the banjo as well as Gander Eye, but he could play that fiddle even better than Doc.

Gander Eye stood motionless to listen. All of them in the store were motionless as they listened to the last breathing note. Struve lifted his bow clear of the fiddle. Then, before anybody could start clapping, he quickly played the first bars of "The Devil's Dream," grinning and grinning above the swift-flying bow. He stopped again, handed the fiddle back to Doc, snatched up the banjo, and started picking "The Devil's Dream."

Slowly picked up the tune on her guitar and joined in. Doc, too, played. Everybody laughed happily and came back on the floor to form sets. Bo Fletcher moved out and started calling the figures.

Gander Eye shrugged, all to himself in the night, as though he admitted defeat. He turned slowly around and headed back toward his home. His feet fell heavier, wearier, than when he had come up Main Street.

He would be everlastingly dogged if anybody around Sky Notch would be sorry if Gander Eye Gentry was dead. Nobody would much miss him. They'd still have Struve, moved into town with them to pick banjo and make everybody happy, as he'd promised. He was moving into Sky Notch, just the way Crispin had moved in. If Gander Eye didn't like him, nobody else seemed to mind having him be there, with his slaty-shaved face and his big, hay-bale body. Coming to live in Sky Notch? Hell's gates of brass, Struve was already in Sky Notch. And those Beyonder things, they would be coming along, too. Probably folks would decide to welcome them, the way they'd welcomed Struve.

But Gander Eye didn't like Struve a bit, and he didn't like the Beyonders. He wondered if he was out of step, if he mightn't do well to become a wanderer on the face of the earth.

Thinking such things, he walked past the schoolyard where Slowly's little shed stood dark and alone. On he went to the empty end of Main Street and into his own front yard.

They were in that front yard, three of them in what little light the moon shed.

Three of them, drawn together to make a shadow except for the blink of light on the front of their headpieces. Three dark outlines with lumpy heads and no legs and steam around them.

"God damn you all to hell!" roared Gander Eye. "When did I tell you to come back visit me? What are you, a bunch of hants?"

He fairly charged into his yard, tugging the pistol from his pocket. The three fell swiftly away from him, gliding backward in three directions like cautious reptiles. They drew themselves out of sight as he came to his door. He snatched out his key and turned it in the lock.

"Whatever you think you're up to, I don't like it no way," he said into the night. "Whatever it is you want out of me, you ain't about to get it. There's something all wrong about this here business, and you know what it is and you know I know that. Now, God damn it, you get off my place and stay off it."

In he went and locked the door behind him. The house was as still as a grave. Without turning on a light, he went straight to where he knew waited a fruit jar of blockade whiskey. He poured a glass full, almost to the brim, and drank it in two big gulps. The fierce, strong liquor didn't seem even to catch hold of him.

Tomorrow morning, he'd be in Crispin's cabin with his shirt off, to pose for that baptizing picture. Also to ask Crispin what was what.

And why.

XII

When Gander Eye woke, he wondered if he had been asleep at all. He slid his sinewy, naked body out of his cot and crouched down at a window to look out. Nothing strange in his front yard. He looked from the side windows and went into the kitchen to peer across the back yard toward Bull Creek. Nothing anywhere.

He washed but did not shave. He put on a pot of water to heat for coffee while he got into pants, socks, boots, and shirts. Pouring a cupful, he stepped out at his front door.

The scorches were there, plain to see on coarse grass beside his path on a sprawling clump of bushy juniper, at the edge of the flat-hewn top of the length of oak that served as door lock. Once again he bent close to examine those traces.

No, they weren't burns, not chars of black, not cinders. These were toasty brown clues of heat. That had been enough heat to parch and sear but not to send things afire. If it had been just a little hotter, hot enough to kindle fire, perhaps his house would have burned down around him last night.

"They can all go back to hell where they belong," he said aloud, and then wondered if he might be going crazy, talking with nobody in sight to listen.

Sipping coffee, he paced around the house, studying the yard. It was harder to find any clue in the side stretch, but he traced a thin streak of brown dryness in the grass. That would be where one of them had gone, moving along on the tip of his tail, the way they said a seahorse moved on his tail under water. In the back yard were stronger traces. They ran all the way down to the creek. He followed them there, and stood looking.

There lay the chunk of gold, and beside it lay another, with a damp glow to it. Then they had fetched out the bribe Gander Eye had thrown into the water days ago. He looked down at them. He could make out the scraped place where he had pried off a flake to test. That gold, where had it come from?

"You want me, but I don't want you," he growled, just loud enough to be heard by himself and by anything else that might be prowling under cover close enough to tune in on him.

Returning to the house, he boiled an egg hard and ate it with the last of his cold corn bread. He went to the drawer where his pistol lay, took it out, but then put it back, shaking his head to banish the idea of carrying it in his pocket to Crispin's. He was in Sky Notch, his own town. He could go up Main Street without being all weighted down with shooting irons.

At least, he hoped so.

Looking out at the side window again, he remembered how he had been glad to be alone at this end of Main Street, with only empty houses to either side. It had made him feel a sense of privacy; now it gave him a sense of isolation.

It was the way it must have been in old days, alone on the frontier; in just your own cabin, in a clearing away from neighbors. Nothing was apt to come to your door except wolves or Indians, and a good man with a gun could handle those. But in Gander Eye's case, it was those Behinders or Beyonders or whatever they were that had been at the door. Right at it, putting a singed mark on his door log.

He cursed to himself, wondering what a smart man ought to do and not coming up with any answer. At last he went out and locked his front door behind him.

As he stepped out on Main Street, he heard a stealthy roll of thunder away to his left, up there above Dogged Mountain. He stopped where he was and peered into the cloudless sky. Thunder on your left was some kind of prophetic sign, he'd been told when he was a boy. Good luck or bad luck, it meant one or the other. Gander Eye hoped it meant good luck—that was what he needed now, carload lots of good luck. On he trudged, turned past Doc Hannum's house to cross the old iron bridge, and went on to knock at Crispin's door.

"Come in, Gander Eye," Crispin greeted him, coffee cup in hand. "Before we go to work, let me pour you some of this."

"None for me, I thank you," said Gander Eye, stepping into the front room. "I had me some at home." He looked straight at Crispin. "Jim," he said, "them's right pretty flowers you got out in your yard."

Crispin drank coffee. "I think so," he said cheer-folly. "I don't know the names of all of them. I ought to get myself some sort of guidebook to flowers in this region."

"I can give you the names," said Gander Eye. "I recollect how them flowers began to jump up, the very first day you moved in here. Since then, you've got wake-robins and cucumber root, the sort of stuff that grows up mostly in wet woods. But dry-ground ones, too—pinky-blue spider flower and Turk's cap and three-bird and grass-pink. Them and some chinquapin, though I never thought that come up 'round about here. It's a right much of a flower garden."

"Thank you," said Crispin. "Well, take off your shirt and let's go to work on the painting."

He drained his cup, set it down, and took his palette from a chair.

"Slowly will be coming in about an hour," he said. "I want to work a little with you before then."

Gander Eye dragged out his shirttails and stripped to the waist. His muscles bunched as though to get ready for an effort.

"I don't recollect no place in town where the flowers grow the way they do for you," he said. "Derwood Ballinger works hard in his yard, all the time. And he ain't got nothing like what you got, no way whatever."

Crispin smiled as he squeezed out dabs of color on the palette and blended them with the point of a knife.

"You know what they say about that," he said. "There's quite a literature on the subject, as a matter of fact. Talk to plants, they say; get their confidence and make them grow. There may be something to the notion."

He worked judiciously at mixing several blobs of paint, studying his model with an expert eye.

"You may not be as big as Captain Kimber, but you're exactly the sort of physical specimen I want for this figure," he said, as though changing the subject. "I'll give you a white beard, but I'll leave those swelling young muscles in. There now, I got a pretty good effect there. You'll loom up out of that dark pool like—"

"I just might could learn to talk to my flowers from you, Jim," Gander Eye interrupted bleakly. "My own yard ain't a-putting out none to amount to much." He kept gazing at Crispin. "The way I might could learn to talk to a car motor, the way you did up at Duffy's station to fix it."

"There may be a lot in what you say," nodded Crispin, busy with one brush, then another. "Listen, Gander Eye, you look all bunched up and tense. You're supposed to be baptising a beautiful girl, not setting yourself to throw a punch."

"I'm just a-thinking about something," said Gander Eye, his voice going utterly toneless. "In my yard I ain't got no flowers. But I got some scorched-out grass and all like that. It looks like as if somebody's been a-using around my place with a big hot iron, some such matter."

Crispin looked up nervously. "What do you think caused that?"

"I wonder myself if you might could tell me, Jim. Because I think you know already."

Gander Eye's lips were dry as he spoke, hut he kept from licking them.

"I know a thing or two already," he went on. "I know about a right much of great big rocks, piled up above the road to the Kimber settlement. I had some talk with Struve, and how he wants to take over here. And I know something about them things that look like big old machines a-sliding round on their tails, a-giving off' steam and a-making a little purry sound at you."

Crispin stepped back from his easel. "You made me smear what I was trying to do," he said, and reached for his palette knife. Carefully he scraped at the canvas. He acted as if he wanted to change the subject, but Gander Eye refused to let him.

"I say I know about all them things," he repeated, "and I reckon so do you."

Crispin stepped clear of the easel. "I've really wanted to talk plainly about these matters to you," he said in a low, sad voice.

"All right, start talking now." Gander Eye left his pose and picked up his shirt. "I don't much reckon we're a-going to do any more with that picture for the time being. Maybe we ain't a-going to do much more with it from this on, not unless you can fill me in on a few things, show me what they mean."

Carefully Crispin deposited his palette on the chair and slid his brushes, handle first, into a vinegar bottle. He thrust his hands into his pants pockets and faced Gander Eye.

"You've got to understand, first of all, that this place is fated to change," he began. "That what happens at Sky Notch is going to change the whole world." He furrowed his brow unhappily. "Gander Eye, change of some sort is needed in this world."

"Amen, but what sort of change you got in mind?" inquired Gander Eye, putting on the shirt and buttoning it up.

"You spoke just now of some little things," said Crispin. "Of growing flowers—or maybe particularly good crops, like the Kimbers. Of making machines run better. Those are scientific advances, Gander Eye. Science means wisdom. It means method. A new age is coming. It's ready to begin, right here in Sky Notch."

"How come?"

Crispin looked at him earnestly. "The greatest scientists on earth will gather here to help it happen," he said. "This change will mean a new way of living, here and everywhere. Better food for people, better places to live in. You know as well as I do how the whole country, all the countries of the world, have been made poor by exploitation. Now the air and water will be clean. Work won't be so miserably hard."

"I recollect hearing something like all this from your friend Struve."

Crispin threw back his head. Unhappiness came back to his face.

"Struve isn't any friend of mine, Gander Eye."

"No, but you and him's together in this here business. He done told me about how well dogs live, how they eat better and sleep warmer than a wolf, and they do it by wearing a collar for their master. And a wolf, Struve was a-going on to say, is always a-getting himself killed off." Gander Eye tucked in his shirttails. "All right, Jim, if I was by God a-going to be a dog, or a steer to butcher, or a horse to get myself worked to death, I'd a-been born that. I was born one of the wolves, you see."

"And you may die like a wolf," said Crispin.

"Sure, that might could happen. But if I die like a wolf, I'll die with my teeth in a throat. I didn't like no part of what Struve talked about, nor yet how he said it. Nor I don't like it when you say it to me."

Crispin stepped toward him, spreading out his hands as though in appeal. "I'm only trying to help you, Gander Eye," he said. "I'm your friend. I say that when this thing happens, people everywhere must fall in line and go along with things. If they don't—"

"If they don't, they'll be treated like wolves," Gander Eye broke in. "You done already said that, Jim. And I told you I was born a wolf. Maybe I won't have to die with my teeth in a throat. Watch and see if I can be trapped or shot or hunted down." He glared. "No, sir, I ain't buying your proposition a nickel's worth."

He made two heavy strides to the door, dragged it violently open, and stepped out among all the flowers in the yard. His nostrils flared violently to drag air into his lungs. He felt as if he had been running hard.

Slowly was coming along the path toward him. "Hello, Gander Eye," she greeted him in her soft voice, and, "Hello," he half snapped back at her. His hand came halfway out as though to seize her arm, make her wait while he said something—

Said what? Where did Slowly fit into this? On which side?

He walked along, more wearily now. He almost turned in at Doc's front door, but he remembered how Doc had laughed at him. Where did Doc fit in, when it came to that? Was Gander Eye Gentry Sky Notch's only holdout in whatever deal was being offered, take it or leave it, and no luck if you left it?

He looked back once at Crispin's cabin, into which Slowly had gone to pose naked, maybe to talk and be talked to, maybe to be courted. Looking backward at the door through which he had gone, he reached Main Street and almost bumped into somebody.

"I been a-looking for you, Gander Eye," said the wrathful voice of Captain Kimber.

The Captain towered where he stood on the pavement. He hunched his huge old shoulders, as though he tried to look taller still. His great snowdrift of a beard stirred and bristled.

"I reckon just a few words will do us," he said deeply. "I come into town today to tell you, stay out of our place on the mountain."

"What you a-talking about, stay out?" Gander Eye demanded. "I ain't been nowheres near your settlement."

"You know right well what I mean. You been a-using round where we baptize. That's private, Gander Eye. If we'd a-wanted you there, we'd a-bid you come."

"Who says I been there?" Gander Eye challenged.

"Now, don't make it no worse by lying me a lie," growled the Captain.

Gander Eye swelled with new fury. "I ain't a-lying no lie. I inquired you, who says I been there? Maybe a fellow by the name of Struve, is that right?"

"Just you never worry your mind about Struve," snapped Captain Kimber, his teeth showing like pebbles in his beard. "We're a-talking about you. I said, you stay out of our part of this country. We'll stay off the land you own. We won't work your land no more, you can have the crop that's a-growing on it now."

"Well, thanks a heap," snarled Gander Eye. "I wouldn't touch a thing you put the seed down for."

Captain Kimber drew up his shoulders again, as though to focus power in them. "If I was thirty years younger—" he began.

"Oh, stop with such talk!" exploded Gander Eye. "You're bigger than I am, but you ain't never seen the day you could whip me. Go get some other Kimber fellow to try it on with me. And quit your trying to get me told, I ain't a-harking to one mumbling word you say."

He stepped away, walking on his toes, ready if the fierce old man should jump on his back. That didn't happen, though he heard a deep, gruff curse behind him. He looked toward Doc's house, toward the bridge across the creek, beyond it to Crispin's cabin.

Somebody was coming out of Crispin's door in a hurry.

Gander Eye came to a quick halt and stared. It wasn't Crispin, it wasn't Slowly. Struve, that was who it was. Gander Eye drew in his breath to yell, but Struve ran, swiftly for all his squatness of body, and plunged into the thicket on the far side of the yard.