Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 13

"Callie," I said.

"She's gone to see if there's a way out."

"Wha..." I broke off and spat dirt.

"The entrance is blocked. Must be a ton of rock come down over it."

"s.h.i.t!" I said, touching the back of my head; there was a lump coming. Patches of shiny blackness swam before my eyes. "The horses awright?"

"Just scared."

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

I sat up cautiously, groped for Brad, found his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I couldn't think; I was so numb that I only felt the first trickles of fear. It was as if the explosion was still taking place in my skull, a dark cloud of smoke and splintered rock boiling up and whirling away the last of my good sense.

Seconds later Callie's voice called from a distance, telling us to come ahead, she'd found something.

Still dizzy, I let Brad take the lead, going in a crouch deeper into the hill, and after a minute I saw stars and a ragged oval of blue-dark sky.

Callie's voice came again, issuing from beyond the opening. "See it?"

"Almost there!" I told her.

The opening was set about six feet up in the wall, not too high and easily wide enough for a man to pa.s.s through, but no horse was ever going to leave the cave that way. Without the horses, I thought, we might as well have died in the explosion. However, when I pulled myself out into the chill air beside Callie and saw what she had found, I forgot all about our plight.

On this side of the hill, too, the hardpan flowed off toward the horizon. But there was one distinct difference. Below us, its rim no more than a few hundred yards from the base of the hill, lay a large crater, roughly circular and perhaps a mile in diameter, like a bowl brimful of golden light. Light so brilliant it obscured all but the deepest cuts and bulges in the crater's rock walls. It resembled a glowing golden sore on a cracked, stretched-tight hide. The three flying machines were flitting back and forth above it with the agitation of mites swarming above a dead squirrel, and as we watched they descended into the crater, vanishing beneath the rim. After they had gone out of view, none of us moved or said a thing. I can't speak for Brad or Callie, but for my part, though I'd already had my basic notion of how the world worked shaken considerably, the sight of the crater completely shattered all my old conceptions. Maybe it was simply the size of the thing that affected me... The size and the upward pour of light. Maybe all the little wrong bits that had come before had had the irritating effect of putting a few sand grains in my boots, and now this, this immense wrongness, had sc.r.a.ped the skin off my soles and left me unable to walk or do anything other than reckon with shock and bewilderment. Even a half-hour earlier, I might -- if asked -- have given a fair approximation of where I stood. With my son and my lover, six days out on the flats from Edgeville, I would have said. In the heart of the wasteland where once the old world flourished, countless centuries after the disaster that ended it. I would have thought this a fine answer, and I would have been certain of my place and purpose. Now I felt I was in the company of strangers, in the midst of a great darkness with light below, a barren place of unrelieved abstraction that offered no clue as to its nature. Perhaps the depth of my reaction seems unreasonable.After all, we had long supposed that the Captains must have flying machines, and though I had never seen one, I shouldn't have been so thoroughly disconcerted by the sight. And I had seen craters before, albeit never one this big. But it was as if all the tidy structures of my life had been abolished, all rules of logic broken, and I could not come up with a new picture of the world that would fit inside my head. I realize now that this breakdown had been a long time coming, that what had provoked it had been working on me for days; but at the time it seemed sudden, catastrophic, totally disorienting.

It was Callie who broke the silence, saying we had to go down to the crater, we had no other choice.

I am not clear how I responded; I recall saying something about the horses, about how even if we went down, we'd have to come back and shoot them, we couldn't leave them to die of thirst. There was a little more conversation, but I cannot recall it. Eventually we began picking our way down the slope, glancing up now and again to see that the crater had swelled and grown brighter, a vast golden pit into which we were preparing to descend.

We were, I'd estimate, about fifty feet from the base of the hill when a woman's voice hailed us from the darkness and ordered us to drop our rifles. I was so bewildered and startled, I obeyed without hesitation. I guess it seemed right given the circ.u.mstance that voices should issue from the dark and command us. I heard footsteps crunching nearby, caught sight of shadowy figures moving toward us through the rocks. Lots of them. Maybe thirty, maybe more. They a.s.sembled about us, some gaining detail against the nimbus of light shining up from the crater behind them, yet most of them remaining shadows, looking evil as crows in their slouch hats and long coats.

"Just who are you people?" asked another voice, this one a man's, deeper than the woman's, but softer and oddly familiar.

We gave our names, said we were from Edgeville.

"Bob Hillyard," said the voice musingly. "I'll be d.a.m.ned."

"That's his boy with him," said someone else. "And that girl there works for ol' Fornoff."

"Just who in creation are you?" I asked, not wanting to let on how intimidated I was -- I knew we had fallen in with Bad Men. I should have felt more afraid than I did, but I was still so confused, so daunted by the overall situation, the threat these men presented did not seem of moment.

"You know some of us," said still another voice. "Leastways, I bet you know me."

A match flared, caught on a twist of something in one of the figure's hands, and as he moved nearer, holding a torch so that it shone up onto his face, making ghoulish shadows under the eyes, I saw it was Clay Fornoff. Heavier; chin covered with pale stubble; wearier-looking. But still with that petulant sneer stamped onto his face.

"Wasn't for this man here, I'd never have taken the ride," he said.

"'Spect you owe him one, don'tcha, Clay?" said somebody.

"You know I didn't have no choice," I told him.

"Don't matter," he said. "Turns out you did me a favor. But you didn't have that in mind, didja now?

You was just runnin' me off to die."

A huge shadow moved up beside Clay and nudged him aside.

"You got a score to settle," he said to Clay in that soft voice, "deal with it later." He moved full into the light of the torch, and I saw what I'd begun to suspect seconds before: It was Wall. A monstrous slab of a man with owl-tufted brows, a s.h.a.ggy graying beard, thick lips, and a bulging forehead, his face as expressionless as an idol's. A waterfall of dark hair spilled from under his hat to his shoulders.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n, Bob," he said to me. "Man shoots as poorly as you got no business this far out on the flats."

I'd always admired Wall, and that his most salient memory of me was my poor shooting eye made me feel stupid and childlike. Kind of like being dressed down by your boyhood hero.

"Ain't like I wanna be here," I said. "Just had somethin' needed doin'."

Wall studied Callie and Brad, who were gawping at him, apparently overwhelmed by the sight of this enormous man.

"Feelin' confused, are ye?" he said with mild good humor, as if he were talking to children. "Seem likeeven simple things like right and left ain't what they used to be?"

That struck me as odd, that he would offer such an accurate a.n.a.lysis of my mental condition and do it so casually, as if how I felt was something usual, something any fool could have predicted.

"What the h.e.l.l you know about it?" I asked him.

"Hits ever'body the same," he said. "The conditionin' starts breakin' down 'bout five days out. Time a man gets this far, he's usually got more questions in him than answers. Y'see" -- he coughed, spat up a hocker, and aimed it off to his right -- "it ain't only doctorin' you get at the hospitals. The Captains condition you to be happy with your lot. It's sorta like hypnotizin' ye. Takes a mighty strong reason for a man to break down the conditionin'. Seems powerful emotion's 'bout the only cure." He c.o.c.ked his head, gave me a searching look. "What brings ye here?"

"My wife, Kiri," I said, still trying to absorb what he had told us. "She lost a duel and come out here to die."

"Kiri," said Wall. "I remember her. She was a good fighter."

Bradley piped up. "We figger she's down in that hole."

Wall's eyes flicked toward him. "She might be at that."

From the cautious flatness of his tone, I had the impression that if Kiri was down in the crater, it wasn't likely we were going to see her again.

"I don't get it," I said, and began talking fast to blot out the pictures I was conjuring of Kiri's fate.

"What the h.e.l.l's goin' on? What're the Captains doin' by givin' us this here conditionin'?' How come..."

"Slow down there, man," Wall said, and put a hand on my shoulder; I was shocked into silence by the weight and solidity of it. "I ain't got time just now to be givin' a history lesson. Truth is, I don't know if I got much to teach ye, anyway. Far as we can prove, things're 'bout the way the Captains say they was. Though I got a suspicion that the folks who survived the bad time wasn't given a choice 'bout how they wanted to live, they was just put where the Captains wanted 'em and conditioned to accept it. But there's a coupla things different for certain sure. One is, they ain't our friends, they just playin' with us, tormentin' us. h.e.l.l, might be they could kill us all in a flash, they had a mind. But even if that's so, it'd ruin their game. So our job is to be dangerous for 'em, kill a few here and there, give 'em trouble. They enjoy that kinda trouble. Our aim is to get strong without 'em realizin' it, so the day'll come when we're strong enough to finish 'em. And that day ain't far off. But you got time to learn all 'bout that. What you need to unnerstan' is" -- he spat again -- "you're Bad Men now. You may not unnerstan' it this minute, but ye can't go back now your conditionin's broke. Ain't nothin' for ye back there. Your life is here now, and you gotta make the best of it. That means you're with us in ever'thing we do. We make a raid for supplies on Edgeville, you're part of it. There ain't no middle ground."

"If things is like you say," Callie asked, "whyn't you just tell it to the people back in Edgeville or Windbroken... or wherever?"

"Someday maybe we will. But the way things is now, buncha Bad Men waltz into town and start goin'

on 'bout how the Captains is enemies of mankind... s.h.i.t! How do you think that'd set? Think they'd believe us? Naw, you gotta ride out way past gone onto the flats 'fore you can hear the truth when it's told ye. But after you take that ride, you don't need to hear it more'n once." He sucked on a tooth, making a smacking noise. "Anyways, there's plenty of Bad Men ain't been brought into the fold. That's somepin' we need to take care of first, 'fore we go bringin' the word to Edgeville."

We stood there wrapped in the weighty stuff of all he had said. The desolation his words implied had slotted into a readymade place inside my brain -- it seemed something I had always known. But the fact that I was now a Bad Man, that was almost impossible to believe. The longer I had to digest what Wall had told us, the less like a Bad Man I felt. I had the sense we were stranded at the bottom of an empty well, and far above, invisible against the black circle of sky, strange, cruel faces were peering down at us, deciding which ones to pluck up and gut. I felt more abandoned than afraid: I could not have felt more so had I woken up to find myself naked and alone in the middle of nowhere. If it had been left to me I would have sat down there on a rock and stayed sitting until I had gotten a better handle on how things were, but Bradley grabbed my arm and said, "We gotta go down there. We gotta find Mama." "Not tonight, boy," Wall said. "You try goin' down there tonight, you'd last 'bout as long as spit on a griddle. We'll be goin' down tomorrow night. We'll have a look 'round for her."

"I'm goin' with you," said Bradley.

"Listen, little man," Wall told him; despite its softness, his voice was so resonant, it might have issued from a cave. "You do what you told from now on. This ain't no fine time we're havin' here. This is desperate business. I admire you stickin' by your mama, I swear I do. And maybe we can help her. But ain't n.o.body gettin' in the way of what's gotta be done tomorrow night, so you might as well get used to it."

Bradley stood his ground but said nothing. After a second Clay Fornoff handed his torch to another man and came up beside Brad and slung an arm around his shoulder. "C'mon, kid," he said. "We'll getcha somethin' to eat."

I didn't much like Clay taking him under his wing, but I knew Brad didn't want to be with me, so I let them go off into the darkness without a squawk.

Wall moved a couple of steps closer; despite the cold, I smelled his gamy odor. Beneath those owlish brows, his eyes were aglow with fierce red light from the torch. Generally I've found that people you haven't seen in a while shrink some from the image you hold of them in your mind. But not Wall. With that golden glare streaming up from the crater behind him, he still looked more monument than man.

"Where'd you stake your horses at?" he asked.

I told him.

"s.h.i.tfire!" He slapped his hand against his thigh. Then he spoke to another man, instructing him to take a party up to the cave and see what could be done. When he turned back to me he let out a chuckle; he was missing a front tooth, and the gap was about the same size as the first joint of my thumb.

"Perk up there, Bob," he said. "You look like you 'spectin' the Devil to fly down your chimney. Believe me, you a d.a.m.n sight better off'n you was 'fore you run into us."

I had no doubt this was the truth, but it didn't much gladden me to hear it.

"This your woman?" Wall asked me, jerking a thumb toward Callie.

Callie's eyes met mine, then ducked away, locking on the ground. I got something more than fear from that exchange, but I was too weary to want to understand what.

"Yeah," she said, beating me to it by a hair.

"We'll fix ya up with some blankets directly." Wall heaved a sigh and stared off toward the crater.

"I'm mighty glad to see you out here, Bob. We been needin' more people to work in the gardens."

"Gardens?" I said dully.

"That's right. As I recall you had yourself some fine-looking tomatoes back in Edgeville."

"You growin' things out here?" I asked. "Where?"

"Somebody'll fill you in 'bout all that. Maybe in the mornin'." Wall took off his hat and did some reshaping of the brim, then jammed it back on. "Meantime you get some food in ye and try to sleep.

Gonna be a big night tomorrow. Big night for ever'body in the whole d.a.m.n world."

After we had been fed on jerky and dried fruit, Callie and I settled down in a nest made by three boulders a ways apart from the others. We spread a couple of blankets and pulled the rest up to our chins, sitting with our backs against one of the boulders, our hips and legs touching. Once I glanced over at her. Light from the crater outlined her profile and showed something of her grave expression. I had the idea she felt my eyes on her, but she gave no sign of noticing, so I tried to do as Wall suggested and sleep. Sleep would not come, however. I couldn't stop wondering what we had fallen into. Seeing so many Bad Men this far out, Wall's talk of gardens, the fact they planned a raid or something like againstthe Captains -- all that spoke to a complexity of life out here on the flats that I couldn't fathom. And I thought, too, about what Wall had told us about "conditioning." Strange as the idea seemed, it made sense. How else could you explain why people would be so stupid and docile as to swallow such swill as we had about our ancestors choosing a pitiful, hardscrabble existence over a life of ease?

There was no use in studying on any of this, I realized; sooner or later I'd learn whatever there was to learn. But my mind kept on worrying at this or that item, and I knew I wasn't going to get any sleep.

Then Callie said, "I thought it had all gone, y'know. I thought all the bad times had wiped it away. But that ain't so. Everything's still there."

Her face was turned toward me, too shadowed to read.

When she had spoken I hadn't understood what she meant, but now I knew she had been talking about the two of us.

"I guess I wanna hear how it is with you," she said.

"I ain't been thinkin' about it," I told her. "I ain't had the time."

"Well, you got the time right now."

I didn't feel much like exercising my brain, but when I tried to think how I felt, it all came clear with hardly an effort. It was as if I were looking down a tunnel that ran through time from the crater to Edgeville, and I saw Kiri riding the flats alone, I saw the hurt on Brad's face, I saw myself, and I saw Callie with rime on her hat brim and a stony expression, and then those images faded, and what I was looking at, it seemed, wasn't memory but truth, not the truth I believed, because that was just like everything else in my life, a kind of accommodation. No, this truth I was seeing was the truth behind that, the underpinnings of my existence, and I realized that the things I'd thought I felt for Callie were only things I'd wanted to feel, things I'd talked myself into feeling, but that was the way the brain worked, you bought into something and more often than not it came true without your noticing, and so, while I hadn't loved Callie -- not like I thought I had, anyhow -- sometime between all the trouble with Kiri and the end of our ride I had come to love her exactly like that, and I was always going to be ahead of myself in that fashion, I was always going to be wanting and hoping for and believing in things because they were what I thought I should want or hope for or believe... except now, because some trick of conditioning the Captains had played on me had worn off, and right this minute, maybe for the first time ever, I had caught up with myself and could see exactly what I had become and what I believed in and what I loved. And there was Brad. And here was Callie. Beneath the flirty, pretty package, she was strong and flawed and sweet and needy, just like us all. But strong was most important. Strong was what I hadn't known about her. The strength it had taken for her, a girl from Windbroken who would dread the flats worse by far than any Edger, who had grown up fat and sa.s.sy in a softer world. The strength she'd had to summon to ride out into that world of less-than-death, and the reasons she had done it, for honor, for love of me, and for the thing she didn't understand that made strength possible.

And Kiri was there, too, but different.

Like a picture hung in an old cobwebby room both of us had vacated years ago. Whatever lie we had believed into truth had been dead a long time, and Kiri had done what she had because of how she was, not because of how I was or how she was to me. Recognizing that didn't make me feel any better, but at least all that old fire and smoke didn't prevent me from seeing what was of consequence now. I had known all this for months, but I felt stupid for not having been able to accept any of it before, and I couldn't think of what to say, and all I managed was to repeat what Callie had said, telling her that everything was still here for me, too.

She moved into me a bit, and I put an arm around her, and then she let her head rest on my shoulder, and we sat that way for a few minutes -- we were both, I suspect, feeling a little awkward, a little new to one another. Callie stretched herself end snuggled into me. Despite everything, despite fear and hard riding and all that had happened, having her there under my blanket gave me some confidence.

"You all right?" I asked her.

She said, "Just fine," then let out a dusty laugh.

"What's so funny?" I asked. "I was goin' to say I wished we was home, but then I thought twice about it. Edgeville don't seem like home no more."

"Just a little of it would be all right," I said. "Maybe a wood stove and some kindling."

She made a noise of agreement and then fell silent. Big cold stars were dancing in the faraway black wild of the sky, so bright they looked to be shifting around like the ships the Captains flew, but I saw no fearful thing in them, only their glitter and the great ident.i.ties they sketched in fire, the lady on the throne, the old hunter with his gemmy belt. What was it like, I wondered, to live among them, to be small and secretive with purple eyes. To be daunted by life and play with men and women as if they were dolls full of blood. Wall would probably understand them, I thought. For all his homespun ways, I had the notion he was as different from me as any Captain.

"And a bed," Callie said out of the blue.

"Huh?"

"I was thinkin' a bed would be nice, too."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Yeah, that'd be good." Then thinking she might have been hinting at something, I added, "I gotta tell ya, I ain't feelin' much like doin' anything tonight."

She picked herself up, gave me a look and laughed. "I swear you must think you're the greatest d.a.m.n thing since vanilla ice cream. I'm so wore down, I doubt I could sit up straight let alone" -- she sniffed -- "do anything."

"I was only saying it in case you were..."

"Just shut up, Bob!"

She settled back down next to me. I couldn't tell for certain, but I didn't believe she was really angry.

After a couple of minutes she laid her head on my shoulder again, and a few seconds after that she took my hand beneath the blankets and put it up under her shirt. The warmth of her breast seemed to spread from my palm all through me, and its softness nearly caused me to faint. The feeling that held in my mind then had just a shade of l.u.s.tfulness; most of what I felt was tender, trusted, loved. A feeling like that couldn't last for too long, not in that place, not at that moment, but for the time it did, it made the golden light spilling upward from the crater a fine place to rest my eyes, and pulled the starry void close around me like a good blanket, and spoke to me of something I could catch on my tongue and cradle in my hand and crush against my skin, but that I could have never put a name to.