The Outcasts (7 page)

“Good.”

They were silent for a time. Tall Boy was noticing Morrison: the flabby belly and the pale freckled skin.

“Boss,” he said.

“What?”

“How come Philips is not boss?”

“You don't like me?”

“Oh nothing like that. But Philips did all this job with Mister Van. A good road.” Tall Boy pouted and cocked his head like a black pigeon.

“I'm older,” Morrison said. “I've done much more of this work.”

“Many bridges?”

“No. No bridges.”

“Well then.”

“There are many men in the company,” Morrison said, “and millions of dollars to spend. There is more to a bridge than just the building. So Philips is your boss if you want. But I have to be Philips's boss. In ten years Philips can be top man. You understand. Your own prime minister wants me here.” He was not sure of that but it sounded imposing.

“All right.” Tall Boy squatted, huge and black and worried.

“No. Tell me: do you understand?” Morrison was suddenly gloomy with the importance of this.

“Yes. You are the boss of the company. Philips is the boss of the work and Ramesh is the boss of the men. I boss the machines.”

“Good. And don't talk about this. You shouldn't have talked to me about it. You make me think that Philips is unhappy and wants to be boss.”

“Well,” he said.

“Don't talk about it again, you hear?”

“I hear.”

Other voices: the men returning.

“Philips is a good man. The best. Only young. Everything in time.”

“All right.”

“And the important thing is the bridge.”

“Yes.”

Philips was ambling toward them. Ramesh too. “Tall Boy,” Ramesh called.

“Ho,” he said.

“Back to the road.”

Philips watched him go. “That is a good man.”

“Yes.” Morrison plunged ahead, not sure that he should, but helpless. “He wishes you were boss here.”

“He is a simple fellow,” Philips said.

“Do you wish it too?”

Ramesh stood wide-eyed, avid.

“No,” Philips said easily. “When Van Alstyne died, the men assumed that I was crown prince. I am sorry if Tall Boy has made you nervous. That is the truth.”

“Good. What's his real name?”

“I have no idea. Ramesh?”

Ramesh shook his head. “Just Tall Boy. Only Tall Boy. His friends call him Tallie.”

Morrison grunted.

Philips showed puzzlement.

Morrison sighed. “In my country, you see, it would be disrespectful.”

“Oh yes.” Philips had it now. “As with waiters and porters and such. Well, that way we do not care for it either. But when it is a man's name. You worry too much.”

“Senecas and redwoods.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He rose, and tossed the fan into the trailer. “I'm going up to the gorge.”

“Good.” Philips beamed. “I will show you the way.”

“No. Not the first time. I want to see it alone. Just tell me.”

Philips shrugged, turning away. “Follow the roadbed.”

He was offended. Ramesh was still wide-eyed. To hell with both of them. And Tall Boy too. It's my bridge.

He slithered and crunched over the shiny, fist-sized rock. Soon the grass at the road's edge invited easier walking. It was coarse and tough. After a mile or so it became denser and deeper, and he heard an echo of Philips, “here and there a viper,” and moved back onto the roadbed. Which then became a simple track, rising with the land. Still the trees were sparse, still the sun merciless, but before him was a new terrain, purple and gold and black, with hills and hollows, and far off to his left—he was marching south, so that would be east—a range of real mountains. And still the road rose.

On that hour's journey he never looked back.

In the end he followed the track through a last grove of stunted upland broadleafs, and paused once, weary, grateful for the shade. In the silence he heard a woodpecker—never saw it—and the rattle took him back thirty years. He was a boy again, and a country boy too, and the sweat on his round face matted a fine down. He was lost in the woods, and happy. Jacknife in his pocket and all things still to come.

The canopy of leaves was tightly woven, passing no blue and no sun. He stood on the musty forest floor in a cave of feeble greens and grays among black roots and trunks. Behind him a light crackle; he turned to peer, as if stalking beasts padded in shadow. Nothing. The spirit of the place. The souls of lions and vipers, but no bodies; only yellow eyes, lidded, winking behind tree-trunks.

A small boy, and all things still to come. Chirr. Kee-kee-kee. A flash of yellow, high in the leaves.

All sad things. He moved along, through school and war and wives and work, and his round face grew long, and the fine down thickened and bristled, and the clear eyes veined slowly red. He came out of the grove through a forlorn hope of gallant red blossoms. They were low to the ground and huddled against the sunlight.

He stood small in a great bowl of yellowed grasses, dwarfed by the dappled hills and the raw blue sky. It was a cracked bowl, and the crack was his gorge, a hundred steps on. The gorge emerged from steep hills to the east, dirty yellow hills with a blush of reddish brown, and black rocks nippling up; beyond those hills were the mountains he could no longer see. But to the west the hills sloped away, and were a rich green, and stopped his breath: a million miles of rolling green, hill and forest, palm and broadleaf forever and a hair of blue, a river, another; the sun westering now but still sovereign, blinding, and the green beneath endless, flashing bright, shadowed dim.

Alone. Oh, he was alone.

His saucer was a small flat circle, a resting-place in the colossal east-west fall. Across the gorge a low hill rose like a barrier, a hogback furred by scrubby brush and dwarf trees; what lay beyond it he could not see.

With the sun hot on his cheek he stepped meticulously to the lip of the gorge. The gorge was deep and dark; far below a black stream swirled and eddied, white rills foaming off black boulders. He stepped back and imagined his bridge, gleaming white.

He was streaming sweat and frightened.

He found the bridge of vines, off to the west. The vines were brown-black, three inches thick, wrapped about with tough grasses and layers of leaf, and anchored to a spur of rock. The bridge hung limp against his wall of the gorge. From a gnarled tree on the far lip hung a single vine, down in a slack bow and across to his own side many feet below. The bridge itself, or what he could see of it, looked skimpy, and not a bridge that any man would want to cross every day. He knelt. Far below the water leapt and boiled and beckoned. That was a long way down, and cool and dark. Down there in the spume and the glistening rock. Devils seethed there. If he were a savage he would call it the home of the devils. Unless the cool and the dark were much prized. Heaven might here be cool and moist and dark.

He stood up to dust his knees, and saw a man.

The man stood beside a dense tangle of brush halfway up the hogback across from Morrison. He was lean, and very black, naked and erect. He held a spear, and stared foolishly.

Morrison too stared foolishly.

For many seconds they stood staring. Morrison raised his right hand.

The man raised his spear.

Morrison held forth both hands, empty. The man only stared. Morrison pointed down at the bridge then, and made a lifting motion.

The man stood changeless.

Morrison looked down at the bridge of vines, and beyond to the home of the devils. He felt fear, and stepped back from the lip of the gorge. When he looked up, the man was gone.

4

Some days a wayward wind from the east coasted down off the high land, and a mist of pink dust floated west as the men dug and crushed and tamped. Those days were cooler. The temperature at noon was one hundred and five and not one hundred and ten. Morrison was never bored. The sun was new every morning, and reliable, and not the sun he had known all his life. On his second morning he said to Philips, “I need a hammock.” The hot beef and tomatoes were juicy and even the dry biscuit seemed full of flavor. The coffee was thick, bitter mess-hall coffee. All the tastes were like summer and youth, before tobacco and alcohol and sour love.

“We have a couple. The caravan was no good?”

“I got no sleep at all and I almost drowned.”

“We will fix you up.” He made it sound slangy. In the evening he rigged a hammock close to his own and Ramesh's. “No,” he said. “That way you will be stiff in the morning, if you do not fall out. This way. Diagoally.” Morrison rocked at peace. Each day the morning light pricked through his roof of leaves and woke him gently, dappling the glade. They walked slowly and talked low. The road inched forward.

Philips had his hands full, his own fault: he was permanently nervous about measurements, contours, coordinates, as if he could not trust numbers, and he uncased his transit at least twice a day, sending Small John or Jacob out with the rod. “Be a sport,” Morrison said. “Be a meter off. Nobody will ever know.”

“You will know, when you start your bridge.”

“Right. Don't be a meter off.” That was his own permanent nervousness, and he was uneasy joking about it. After all. It even crossed his mind that the government might fall and a new one order him to cease and desist.

Mornings they all had a plunge before breakfast. Then they repaired to the buffet. Jacob served deftly and Ramesh poured from a huge pot of hot coffee. Small John made a joke. Every morning. The men were various, gloomy or cheery or uncaring, and Morrison was full of the morning: the sun just up, and the river chuckling past, and himself soaking and cool. Crickets and birdsong. There was no mist on the water, but the morning was dank and cool with a green smell, and a coffee smell, and a beef smell; and a man smell and a sun smell. In his youth three smells were summer: sun, hot wood, crushed grass. Here all smells were summer.

He turned brown. Two or three times a week visitors arrived. Their names were Samuel Atlas and Sonny, and they drove two trucks charged with rock. They were stocky, well-bellied, with thick forearms, and they stopped for lunch and went back in other trucks, empty. The men unloaded what they had left.

Tall Boy did the showy work. The others spread rock and then stood back while he rolled it, jouncing and cursing, sweating and singing and shouting like a cowboy in sunglasses and a red fez. Morrison learned names and faces. Tall Boy and Jacob, Big John and Small John and just plain Johnny or Yanni, one called simply Dog, another Villem. Villem was the man with one eye, and close up he looked like a murderer, with a front tooth missing and a complicated scar on one cheek and temple, and a sullen droop to his good eyelid. And Shorty and Frenchy. They had other names on the books, but the books were of no importance or interest. The men said “Good morning boss” and little else. Jacob said nothing, merely nodded. When there was something to be said to or by Morrison, the message came or went by Ramesh.

“I begin to think that you like it here,” Philips said after three weeks.

“I do.”

“Van Alstyne did not,” Philips said with a sly smile, a pimp's grin, grotesque on his strong face. “He liked the women, also beer by the gallon. He was always escaping to the city.”

“Not me.” Morrison escaped to the gorge. Philips did not know that. Morrison looked for savages.

“There is not much for you to do here. The road is uninteresting.”

“The bridge will be interesting. The bridge will be a bitch. How did you get the rope bridge up?”

“The bridge of vines? We never did. We never tried.”

“Then how did you map the other approach? From this side? That's not as accurate as I want.”

“No,” Philips said. “A helicopter came.”

Morrison was stunned.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no. It just hadn't occurred to me.”

“We never thought of using the bridge. That is not much of a bridge.”

“It took work. They”—whoever they were, and his heart beat stronger—“had to cross the river to the west, there, and come up the mountain. Then somehow they got a line across, and pulled the whole bridge to this side and anchored it. That was a hell of a good breakfast today.”

“Tell Ramesh.”

“When will the road be finished?”

“Two or three weeks. When does the crane come?”

“Two or three weeks. That's a machine,” Morrison said. “By God it is. A most satisfactory machine.”

Ramesh had a radio and liked to tell them that France was making trouble “for your country” or that the Vietnamese were rioting, or that China had blown up a hydrogen bomb. They found it hard to dare. But when he told Philips that General Ros had marched out of a Cabinet meeting, they cared. Morrison had never heard of General Ros and was not sure what the Cabinet consisted of or what powers it had. But he wanted the government steady and strong. He wanted Goray to be where he was. When the bridge was finished and some ascotted politician had snipped the ribbon, then they could explode, erupt, dismember their fair land; but not before. He was ashamed of that thought but could not deny it. He considered himself with distaste. At least he never said those things aloud. He wondered if all men received vile notions.

He never mentioned the native he had seen. Or that he had dreamed of him one night, he on Morrison's side of the gorge and Morrison on his, frightened, abandoned, night coming on, and Morrison lay flat staring down at the rocks while the native jeered obscenely, and then the walls of the gorge crumbled and Morrison awoke, staring through the leaves at a dead white moon. Saturdays and Sundays, when he was alone, he drove to the gorge and sat waiting, and mimed to an invisible audience. If any. At first it was simple curiosity, the timid fascination of the popeyed tourist; then poetry won out, notions, irrationalities, territorial claims—it was his bridgehead, after all; and then something more, an unease, a necessity, as if what lay on the far side was a destiny. A doom or a glory, a goal. More than just the bridge. As if he were meant to build the bridge only because he was meant to cross this gorge, as if a cave or a cairn or a woman or a wooden chest or a shrine awaited him, marked
MORRISON.
Or even
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN;
but it was for him. That was more nonsense, like the monkeys and snakes and jungle cats he never saw. But the urgency grew: he must cross on their bridge, and not on his own. When he was there with Philips or the others, he ignored the far side; he wanted something to happen for himself alone.