The Perfect Host (5 page)

Her second encounter was just over the crest of the mountain. There was a well-beaten trail following the ridge, and near the point at which she encountered it was a shelter made of logs, and roofed startlingly with asphalt shingle. There were neat piles of wood stacked beside it, and from it came the rhythmic sound of a voice—a light, full voice, chanting in a near-monotone. Quietly drew closer, stopped near the open window with one hand on the logs, and listened:

The “OH!” emerged as an explosive squeak. Quietly started and pursed her lips. What
was
this?

(and here the voice rang with something between a toll and a tinkle)

Slowly, Quietly leaned to the window and with one eye peered inside.

A thin young man with a pot-belly, dressed in shorts which emphasized his bony knees, strode back and forth within the shelter, holding in front of him a battered book with a rococo cover done in gray and tarnished gold. His face was pink, his nose was peeling, and the backs of his legs were fish-belly white.

On the earthen floor by the far wall crouched a girl of about Quietly’s age, with coarse hair, spectacles, bad teeth and an adoring expression. “Oh, Carstairs,” she cooed, as the young man stopped to blow his nose on a khaki handkerchief, “You read gorgeously—just
gorgeously!
Anyone can tell—” and here her voice became a whisper—“that you’ve really
lived!
”

Quietly fled.

Three hours and ten miles later, Quietly walked the timberline tiredly, wondering whether to keep to the woods and kill something for her supper, or to go on until she found some suitable crevice between the scales of civilization into which she might crawl. She was hungry and she had come a long way. She skirted cornfields now, and buckwheat, and for a while she followed a fence which enclosed grazing land, though she saw no cattle. She judged that she had another two hours of light and an hour of dusk. If she were going to a make a snare, she would have to do it very soon.

Suddenly she stopped, head up, nostrils dilating. From the woods to the right she heard faint sounds of splashing and calling. A pleasant vision of cool water crossed her mind. She had found a spring about noon, and had been able to wet her face and arms in it and drink, but that had been hours ago. She turned toward the sounds.

She reached a creek about a quarter of a mile north, and followed it upstream a few hundred yards to its source, a small spring-fed lake surrounded by trees. Across the water was a shelving bank, on which were scattered towels and robes and clothing. Splashing about in the water were five girls, screaming and giggling and quite as naked as she. She sat down in the shadows between the trees to watch them.
She noticed with some surprise that their bodies were tanned except for patches of white around their breasts and hips. She nodded to herself. She had learned of the clothing convention, and was quite aware that it was of major importance among people “outside.” This piebald tanning was a strong reminder to her of the fact that she must circumscribe her own behavior to this and many another taboo if she were to win acceptance among people.

She tried to remember if this taboo applied in a group of the same sex, and could not remember immediately. It obviously did not apply to the girls in the lake. Yet if she, an outsider, appeared among them, it might be regarded as a violation.

There was a violent spasm of coughing from the water. One of the girls was floundering near the middle of the pond, her breath coming raggedly. Immediately there was a commotion among the others.

“Bee! Bee-
triss!
Clara—look! Bee’s drownding!”

There was a chorus of frightened exclamations. One of the girls said, “I’m going after her!”

“No!” cried another. “You can’t swim well enough! You’ll drown too!” and she laid restraining hands on the would-be rescuer, who half-heartedly fought her off. The other two climbed out of the water as if it were suddenly hot, and stood on the bank, where they could see better, wringing their hands.

“Oh-h!” moaned the one called Clara. “Miss O’Laughlin will kill us for this. We’re not allowed to swim without suits!”

“She’ll never know if we don’t tell her,” chattered one of the girls on the bank.

“She will too when they find Bee’s body,” said the other ghoulishly.

“We could say that only Bee—”

“Help! Help!” screamed the would-be savior.

“Help!” all the girls screamed, including the one who was drowning.

There are certain zones of indecency, Quietly was thinking, peculiar to certain lands and certain times. In certain tribes in Africa virgins must go naked until they marry, when custom demands that
they don a narrow belt. In the Far East it has long been the custom to cover the faces of the women. In Bali the only woman who covers her breasts is the courtesan. The question is, would the effect of my saving this girl be cancelled by my indecency in their eyes?

It was a very complicated matter. She wished—Complicated? Unimportant, then. What was important? That she, Quietly, be accepted sooner or later. Was there anything more important here?

Yes, there was. A life was being lost uselessly. If saving it meant the disapproval of these people, she could get away from them and try again.

She slipped into the water, took a deep breath, found a rock under her feet and pushed off strongly. She swam fifty feet under water, with the breath trickling deliciously from her nostrils and tickling the dusty sides of her neck. She broke surface and trod water, getting her bearings. The drowning girl was not in sight. She glanced at the bank. The four girls were all out of the water now, clutching at each other in a noisy, hysterical ecstasy. She heard one of them say, “All this yelling … have the whole countryside here in a minute … where’s my sunsuit?” Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw a disturbance in the water. She swung to it and sounded. She found bottom at about fourteen feet, according to the pain in her ears. She beat her way along it, until something thumped her on the shoulder. She rolled over and looked up, and in the dimness saw the doubled-up body of the girl Beatrice, with weakly flailing hands and round, terrified eyes.

Quietly got her feet under her and sprang upward, winding her hand in the girl’s long hair as she shot past. They came to the surface together, the last of Quietly’s wind whooshing out of her. She slipped her arm around the girl’s neck, and with a thrust of her knee turned the half-unconscious creature over on her back. With Bee’s chin in the crook of her arm, her shoulder holding Bee’s head up, Quietly swam for shore with a powerful side-stroke.

“Look!” squeaked one of the girls.

“It’s a
man!
” gasped Clara, and dived for her clothes.

“It is
not
,” said another, already in a brief sunsuit.

The four stood open-mouthed as Quietly found footing and
stepped up the bank, carrying Beatrice in her arms. Two of them splashed into the water to clutch and grab and weep. “Speak to me, Bee darling!” Quietly shouldered her way through them with such directness that the girl in the sunsuit sat forcibly in the water.

“Who’s
she?
”

“She
pushed
me!”

Quietly swung her burden to the ground, turned the limp body over with her foot so that it was face-down, and knelt with one of her knees between the girl’s lower thighs. She turned Bee’s head to the right, separated the clenched teeth, pulled the tongue out, and then began a steady pressure and release on her floating ribs.

“Get a towel!”

“Chafe her wrists!”

“Where did
she
come from?”

“Is she dead?” asked Clara of Quietly. Quietly said nothing. She was counting to herself, to get the rhythm right.

“Miss O’Laughlin’ll
murder
us!”

“Will you
look
at the callouses on her
feet!
”

“Bee’s dead! Oh, oh, oh-h-h!”

“No she’s not. She’s upchucking.”

Quietly slacked off until the weak spasm had paused, and then went on. A minute later Bee moaned and coughed. Quietly sat back on her haunches and waited. The breathing was irregular, but stronger. She rose and turned the girl over on her back. The four immediately clustered around, weeping, lifting Bee’s head, rubbing her wrists, begging her to say something. Quietly could have walked off at that moment and it would never have been noticed. Instead she stood by, her face impassive, concealing a mingled amazement and amusement at this stupendous misdirection of nervous energy.

Bee was helped to a sitting position now, supported by the affectionate arms of her friends. She began to cry softly. Clara, for the moment deprived of anything to embrace by the importunities of the other three, rose and came to Quietly.

“Say,” she said, “That was wonderful of you. I just don’t know what we would’ve done without you, really I don’t.”

Quietly smiled. Clara asked, “Where did you come from? You seemed to come right up out of the bottom of the lake!”

Quietly hesitated. There was something she had been taught once about this kind of situation … She remembered it now. Her father had been reading aloud; it was one of the eighteenth-century picaresque novels. At its involved climax, he put the book down and said,

“You see the amount of trouble a man can get into by talking too much, Quietly? Among men, the less you say, the better. Human beings have, among their other diseases, a crazy desire to explain things, each in his own way. If a man knows little about you, he will fill in the details to suit himself. If you tell him all the details, the chances are that he will not believe you. Let him, and all his brethren, draw his own conclusions about you, and neither confirm nor deny anything. Then he may compliment himself on his insight, and you may be assured of your privacy. The most fortunate humans are those who, by preoccupation or through illness, find themselves deaf and dumb.”

All language has its labeling nuances, its idiom, its little signposts of accent and emphasis. Quietly knew that her progress among people would be faster if she could start at the level of her first associates. If to say little was good, to say nothing would be even better. So, in answer to Clara’s questions, she simply smiled.

“What’s the matter; can’t you talk?”

Quietly shook her head.

“You can hear me all right, though.”

Quietly nodded.

Clara left her standing there and went to the group around Beatrice. There was a rapid and exclamatory conference and some pointing and gaping.

H
OSPITAL
 …

They wouldn’t let me go, even when the clatter of dishes and the meaningless talk and complaining annoyed me. They knew it annoyed me; they must have. Starch and boredom and the flat-white dead smell. They knew it. They knew I hated it, so every night was the same.

I could go out. Not really; not all the way out, to the places where people were not dressed in gray robes and long itchy flannel. But I could go outside where I could see the sky and smell the river smell and smoke a cigarette. If I closed the door tight and moved all the way over to the rail, and watched and smelled very carefully, sometimes I could forget the things inside the building and those inside me, too.

I liked the night. I lit my cigarette and I looked at the sky. Clotted, it was, and clean between clouds. The air was cold and warmed me, and down on the river a long golden ribbon was tied to a light on the other side, and lay across the water. My music came to me again, faintly, tuning up. I was very proud of my music because it was mine. It was a thing that belonged to me, and not to the hospital like the itchy flannel and the gray robe. The hospital had old red buildings and fences and a great many nurses who knew briskly of bedpans, but it had no music about it, anywhere, anywhere.

A light mist lay just above the ground because there were garbage cans in a battered row, and the mist was very clean and would not go among them. Entrance music played gently for the cat.

It was a black and white mangy cat. It padded out of the shadow into the clearing before the cans and stood with its head on one side, waving its tail. It was lean and moved like a beautiful thing.

Then there was the rat, the fat little brown bundle with its long
worm of a tail. The rat glided out from between the cans, froze, and dropped on its belly. The music fell in pitch to meet the rise in volume, and the cat tensed. There was a pain about me somewhere and I realized distantly that my fingernails were biting into my tongue.
My
rat,
my
cat,
my
music. The cat sprang, and the rat drew first blood and squealed and died out there in the open where it could see its own blood. The cat licked its wound and yowled and tore at the quivering thing. There was blood on the rat and on the cat and on my tongue.

I turned away, shaken and exultant, as the music repeated its death-motif in echo. She was coming out of the building. Inside she was Miss Starchy but now she was a brown bundle—a little fat brown bundle. I was lean and moved like a beautiful thing … she smiled at me and turned to the steps. I was very happy and I moved along beside her, looking down at her soft throat. We went out into the mist together. In front of the cans she stopped and looked at me with her eyes very wide.

The cat watched curiously and then went on eating. We went on eating and listening to the music.

T
HEY WERE DIGGING
this drainage canal, and the timekeeper drove out to the end, where the big crane-dragline was working, and called the operator down to ask a lot of questions about a half-hour of overtime. Next thing you know, they were going round and round on the fill. The young superintendent saw that fight and yelled for them to cut it out. They ignored him. Not wanting to dirty his new breeches, the super swung up into the machine, loaded three yards of sand into bucket, hoisted it high, swung, and dumped it on the scrambling pair. The operator and the timekeeper floundered out from under, palmed sand out of their eyes and mouths, and with a concerted roar converged on the cab of the machine. They had the super out on the ground and were happily taking turns punching his head when a labor foreman happened by, and he and his men stopped the fuss.