The Genocides (19 page)

Deeper down: the stream became less chill, grew thicker, like pudding coming to a boil. But its pace did not slacken. It was like going down a ski trail on a piece of cardboard. At least they need not worry about repeating their mistake: it was no longer possible to move “upstream” toward the lake.

At this depth there were now whole stretches where the hot sap filled the entire hollow of the root. Hoarding a lungful of air, Orville (who was the first to test any new passage) followed the current resistlessly and hoped. There had always been some branch root feeding into the flooded root from above, too small to ascend through perhaps but large enough to butt one’s head into for a breath of air. But the next time, of course, there might not be such an opening. There might only be a dead end.

That fear—that the current was leading them down a blind alley—absorbed their whole attention. More and more often their bodies were swept into entangling networks of the sap-swollen capillaries that lined the unexplored passages. Once Orville was caught in such a net where the root had split abruptly in two. Buddy and Blossom, next behind, found him there, his legs moving only as the current moved them. His head had struck against the hard wedge separating the two branches of the root. He was unconscious, perhaps drowned.

They hauled at his pants leg, and his pants slid right off his narrow hips. Then they each took a foot and pulled him out. A short distance away they found an area where the root, sloping gently upward, was only half-filled with sap. Buddy embraced Orville in a bear hug and began squeezing the water out of his lungs rhythmically. Then Blossom tried mouth-to-mouth respiration, which she’d learned in Red Cross swimming classes.

“What are you doing?” Neil asked. Unfamiliar sounds made him nervous.

“She’s giving Orville artificial respiration,” Buddy answered testily. “He half-drowned back there.”

Neil reached out fingers to confirm this. The fingers came between Orville’s mouth and Blossom’s, then clamped down tightly over Orville’s. “You’re
kissing
him!”

“Neil!” Blossom screamed. She tried to tear away her brother’s fingers, but even desperation did not lend her sufficient strength. One can only be desperate so long, and she’d passed that limit long ago. “You’ll kill him!”

Buddy struck a blow in the direction he supposed Neil to be, but it glanced off Orville’s shoulder. Neil began to drag Orville’s body away.

“He doesn’t have pants on either,” Neil fretted.

“They came off when we were pulling him out. We told you that, remember?”

The sudden deprivation of oxygen, coming after their efforts at revival, proved to be exactly the stimulus Orville required—he came to.

When the body he was carrying began to stir, Neil let go abruptly, spooked. He had thought Orville was dead, or very nearly.

Buddy and Neil then had a long debate on the propriety of nudity (both in the particular case of Orville and in general) under the present, exceptional circumstances. The argument was mainly a pretext on Buddy’s part to give Orville a chance to regain his strength. “Do you want to get back to the surface,” Buddy asked, “or do you want to stay down here and be drowned?”

“No!” Neil said, yet once more. “It isn’t right.
No!”

“You’ve got to
choose
. Which is it?” Buddy was pleased to discover that he could play on Neil’s fears as easily as on a harmonica. “Because if we’re going to go up, we’ll have to go up together, and we’ll need some kind of rope.”

“We
had
a rope.”

“And you lost it, Neil.”

“I didn’t. I did not. I—”

“Well, you were the last one who had a hold on it, and now it’s gone. Now we need another rope. Of course, if you don’t
care
about getting back…. Or if you think you’ll do better on your own…”

Eventually Neil agreed. “But Blossom ain’t going to touch him, understand? She’s my sister, and I ain’t going to have it.
Understand?”

“Neil, you don’t have to worry about anything of that sort till we’re all home safe,” Buddy temporized. “Nobody’s going to—”

“And they better not speak to each other either. Cause I say so, and what I say goes. Blossom, you go on ahead of me, and Buddy behind. Orville goes last.”

Neil, naked now except for belt and holster, knotted the legs of their several trousers together, and they set off, each with a grip on the line. The water was deep and so hot their skin seemed to be coming off their bones, like a chicken that boils too long. The current was weakening, however, and they moved more slowly.

Soon they had found a root angling upward from which the trickle of water was not much worse than when they’d first noticed it—how many days ago? Wearily, almost mechanically, they began to climb again.

Blossom remembered a song from nursery school days about a spider washed down a water spout by the rain:

She began to laugh, as she had laughed at the strange words of Jeremiah’s poem, but this time she couldn’t stop laughing, despite how much the laughter hurt.

Of them all, Buddy was the most upset by this, for he could remember the winter before, in the commonroom, and the people who had run out into the thawing snow, laughing and singing, never to return. Blossom’s laughter was not unlike theirs.

The root at this point opened onto a tuber of fruit, and they decided to rest and eat. Orville tried to calm Blossom, but Neil told him to shut up. The pulp, which was now semiliquid, dropped down on their heads and shoulders like the droppings of huge, diarrhetic birds.

Neil was torn between his desire to go away where the noise of his sister’s laughter wouldn’t disturb him and an equally strong desire to stay close at hand and protect her. He compromised, removing to a middle distance, where he lay on his back, not intending to go to sleep, just to rest his body…

His head came down on the handle of the axe that Jeremiah had dropped there. He let out a little cry, which nobody noticed. They were all of them so tired. He sat for a long time, thinking very hard, his eyes crossing with the effort, though you couldn’t see anything in that uncompromising dark.

The softened fruit pulp continued to fall from overhead and spatter on their bodies and on the floor with little crepitant sounds, like the sounds of children’s kisses.

His hand touched her dead body. Buddy thought at first it was his father’s corpse, but then he remembered how he had once already stumbled across that same cold body, and delight displaced terror: there
was
a way back! This was the thread that led out of the labyrinth. He traced his steps back to Orville and Blossom.

“Is Neil asleep?” he asked.

“He’s stopped whistling,” Orville said. “He’s either asleep or dead.”

Buddy told them his news. “… and so, you see, that means we can go back the way we tried to in the first place. Up the shaft. It was a mistake, our turning back when we did.”

“Here we are, come full circle. The only difference now,” Orville observed, “is that we’ve got Neil with us. Perhaps we’d do best to ignore that difference and leave him behind. We can go now.”

“I thought we’d agreed to let the others decide what to do with Neil.”

“We won’t be doing away with him. We’ll be leaving him in almost exactly the same place we found him—caught in the trap he meant for you. Besides, we can leave Alice’s body in his way, and he can figure out for himself that the way back is up the shaft he threw her down.”

“Not my half-brother. Not Neil. He’d only get scared if he found her body. As for figuring his way back, you might as well expect him to discover the Pythagorean theorem all by himself. Hell, I’ll bet if you tried to explain that to him, he wouldn’t believe it.”

Blossom, who had been listening to all this rather dazedly, began to shiver, as the tension which her body had sustained so long began to drain away. It was like the time she’d gone swimming in the lake in April; her flesh trembled, yet at the same time she felt strangely rigid. Then her body, naked and taut, was suddenly pressed against Orville’s, and she did not know if he had come to her or she to him. “Oh darling, we’ll go back! We
will
—after all! Oh, my very own!”

Neil’s voice shrilled in the darkness: “I heard that!”

Though she could hear Neil gallumphing forward, Blossom sustained the kiss desperately. Her fingers tightened into Orville’s arms, grappled in the wiry muscles. Her body strained forward as his tried to pull away. Then a hand closed around her mouth and another around her shoulder and pulled her roughly away from Orville, but she didn’t care. She was still giddy with the high, maenad happiness of those who are reckless in their love.

“I suppose you were giving him some more artificial respiration?” Neil sneered. It was, perhaps, his first authentic joke.

“I was kissing him,” Blossom replied proudly. “We’re in love.”

“I forbid you to kiss him!” Neil screamed. “I forbid you to be in love. I forbid you!”

“Neil, let go of me.” But his hands only shifted to secure a better grip and closed tighter.

“You,
you
—Jeremiah Orville! I’m going to
git
you. Yeah, I’ve been on to you right along. You fooled a lot of people, but you never fooled me. I knew what you was up to. I saw the way you looked at Blossom. Well, you ain’t going to get her. What you’re going to get is a bullet in your head.”

“Neil, let go—you’re hurting me.”

“Neil,” Buddy said in a low, reasoning tone, the tone one adopts with frightened animals, “that girl is your sister. You’re talking like he stole your girl. She’s your
sister
.”

“She is not.”

“What in hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean I don’t care!”

“You filth.”

“Orville, was that you? Why don’t you come here, Orville? I ain’t going to let Blossom go. You’re going to have to come and rescue her. Orville?”

He jerked Blossom’s arms behind her back and circled the slender wrists with his left hand. When she struggled, he twisted her arms up painfully or cuffed her with his free hand. When she seemed pacified, he unsnapped the leather flap of the holster and took out his Python, as one removes jewelry for a giftbox, lovingly. “Come here, Orville, and git what I got for you.”

“Be careful. He does have a gun,” Buddy said. “He has father’s.”

Buddy’s voice came more from the right than Neil had expected. He shifted his weight, but he wasn’t really worried, because he had a gun and they didn’t.

“I know,” Orville said.

A little to the left. The space inside this tuber was long and narrow, too narrow for them to circle around to either side of him.

“I got something for you too, Buddy, if you think you’re going to move in when your buddy’s brains are blown out. I got me an axe.” He chirruped an ugly laugh. “Hey! that’s a joke: Buddy … buddy, get it?”

“Your jokes stink, Neil. If you want to improve your personality, you shouldn’t make jokes.”

“This is just between me and Orville, Buddy. You go away, or … or I’ll chop your head off, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Yeah? With what, with your big front teeth?”

“Buddy,” Orville cautioned, “he may have the axe. I brought it down here with me.” Fortunately no one thought to ask why.

“Neil, let go now. Let go or—or I’ll never speak to you again. If you stop acting this way, we can all go right up and forget this happened.”

“No, you don’t understand, Blossom. You’re not safe yet.” His body leaned forward until his lips were touching her shoulders. They rested there a moment, uncertain what to do. Then his tongue began to lick away the fruit pulp with which her whole body was slimed. She managed not to scream:

“When you’re safe, I’ll let you go, I promise. Then you can be my queen. There’ll be just the two of us and the whole world. We’ll go to Florida, where it never snows, the two of us.” He spoke with unnatural eloquence, for he had stopped thinking too closely about what he said, and the words left his lips uncensored by the faulty mechanisms of consciousness. It was another triumph for the primordial. “We’ll lay on the beach, and you can sing songs while I whistle. But not yet, little lady. Not until you’re safe. Soon.”

Buddy and Orville seemed to have stopped moving forward. All was quiet except for the plops of the ripe fruit. Neil’s blood surged with the raw delight that comes from inducing fear in another animal.
They’re afraid of me!
he thought.
Afraid of my gun!
The weight of the pistol in his hand, the way his fingers curved around it, the way one of them pressed against the trigger, afforded him pleasure more richly gratifying than his lips had known touching his sister’s body.

They
were
afraid of him. They could hear his hard breathing and Blossom’s theatrical whimpering (which she maintained, like a foghorn, just so that they might hear it and gauge their distance), and they hung back. They had too much contempt for Neil to be ready to risk their lives desperately against his. Surely there was some way to trick him—to make
him
take the gamble.

Perhaps, Buddy reasoned, if he became angry enough, he would do something foolish—squander his single bullet on a noise in the dark or at least loose his grip on Blossom, which must by now be wearying. “Neil,” he whispered, “everybody knows about you. Alice told everyone what you did.”

“Alice is dead,” Neil scoffed.

“
Her ghost
,” Buddy hissed. “Her ghost is down here looking for you. On account of what you did to her.”

“Ah, that’s a lot of hooey. I don’t believe in no ghosts.”

“And on account of what you did to Father. That was a terrible thing to do, Neil. He must be awful angry with you. He must be looking for you, too. And he won’t need a lamp to find you with.”

“I didn’t do
nothing!”

“Father knows better than that. Alice knows better, doesn’t she? We all do. That’s how you got the pistol, Neil. You killed him to get it. Killed your own father. How does it feel to do something like that? Tell us. What did he say at the very last moment?”