The beast v1 0, p.10
The Beast (v1.0), page 10
They walked out of the courtroom at different times, as if each had separated from the other and taken up with a lawyer instead. Bo and Bud went out to have a beer while Mr. Morrisey and Mary Louise retired to his office to plan more strategy. The next court date was in thirty days, much to Bo’s amazement. He had thought things would simply be got through with and he could go back to Boston. In the little bar on Broadway, he had a ginger ale while Bud had a beer.
“She’s going to skin you, Bo,” the lawyer said.
“If that’s what she wants, let her have it.” The ginger ale didn’t taste like much, either.
“Bo, I don’t know what’s got into you, but you act like you don’t care if she gets everything—house, car, bank account. How about your tools down at the store? She can have them, too?”
“Aw, Bud, look,” he said. “She’s had a hard time, and I’ve gone and made it worse. I don’t care if she gets everything. I’m leaving here, anyway.”
The lawyer whistled through his teeth. “I’m going to see you got enough left for my fee, old friend, and anything over that is all yours.”
January 6, 1938
Dearest Lilly,
This is terrible business going on here. The courts are going to be slow, with no chance of settling things until the end of this month. Old Kneipe down at the store wants me to train a new man, and he isn’t too keen on giving me great references because he said I left him in the lurch. You see, sweetheart, they all think I was shamming about being sick, and now they are all down on me for doing that. Well, that’s what you said would happen, I guess.
But I’m not down, not really, sweetheart. I’m thinking about how I’ll be able to leave right after the court thing is over and I’ll come out there again and we’ll have such a good time and find a nice place where we can set up housekeeping and be real people. I want you to get ready for that, Lilly, because I’m so happy about loving you I am really a changed man. There’s nothing these people can do to me that will change anything between us. You can bet on that. Please write me soon, and remember, I love you more than anything in the world.
All my love, Bo
January 4, 1938
Dear Bo,
I was hoping for a letter again today, but don’t think I’m nagging you. It’s just that I want to tell you some of the things I’ve been doing here to get ready for your return. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, even if that is only a short while—you know what I mean. “She” is restless, and says we may not stay here much longer. I don’t understand why she would have to leave, where we would go, but I do catch an ominous note that perhaps I will not be going with her—and, there again, you know what that means for us.
Well, anyway, I’m looking for apartments closer to Boston, and I’ve already found a couple of beauties. Each of them is rather expensive, but with both of us working we’ll have plenty. I like the one that has a view of the river and the bay from a big double window with a window seat. I just love window seats in cozy little apartments where two people can sit and sip tea. I have also bought some supplies already, Bo. There’s a set of cups and saucers to drink the tea out of and a little throw rug that will go anywhere. I just had to buy it because it was your favorite color: deep indigo blue, just tl^ color of the night sky. You’ll love it. I hope there’s a letter today, but I know things are no doubt in a terrible mess back there. I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through something like that, and I’m so sad for you now, Bo. I love you very much, and I want you to get back as soon as you can. Think about me, Bo.
I love you.
Lilly
January 12, 1938
Dearest Lilly,
I got your letter right after I mailed mine the other day. It was so great hearing from you, sweetheart. I know I’ll like whatever setup you decide on, so you go ahead. But remember, I can’t get there until around the first of Feb., so don’t count on me until then. Wow, a view of the river and the bay. That must be a swell place you picked out. You know, sweetheart, I am really different now. I don’t get mad at people anymore, not even at Mary Louise’s dopey lawyer. I tried to tell her he was just playing up to her, but she won’t listen to me anymore, and I guess I don’t blame her for that.
Well, there’s not much to tell, Lilly. Things are just dragging on here with me sleeping in the back bedroom and taking my meals out and trying to train a young cluck at Kneipe’s who can’t tell the diff between a graver and a bar of silver solder. Just remember, sweetheart, I love you more than anything. It won’t be long now.
All my love, Bo
I run along the rocky beach every night now since the change began in late December. The wind is always cold and full of icy spray, the rocks covered with a glaze frozen into pinnacles and streamers that glitter in the moonlight. Each night as the moon approaches full, I feel more strongly the call from The Other. What it may be, or from where, I have no more notion than I used to have of my reason for being on earth at all. That, at least, I know now. The change, or, as I feel it inside myself, the awakening, revealed answers to questions I did not know how to ask. Lilly’s favorite poet returns to my mind as I wander, abstracted in almost a human way. My joy used to be only that of the birds in the poem that says,
I am content when wakened birds
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;…
I questioned by no more than my own existence, by the joy of supple muscles, the leap into still water, the fury of the chase and the kill. But now, I feel; as in later lines, like those maidens
who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass relinquished to their feet….
The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
The poetry speaks to something deeper than my joyous senses and love of movement. It is like the call that comes each night now and makes my fur erect, my head turn to find the source of that sensation, as if something were always just out of range, just on the edge of my spatial sense, so that sometimes I leap wildly across the fields after it. It is far away in space and I am not yet sure where.
The surf crashes. Spray hits the rocks and streams away into the cold little salt pools. It is freezing, and yet I want to swim, to feel the grasp of the water around me. The moon moves across, visible only at rare times in the spaces between the racks of low-flying scud off the ocean. Each night as it passes into the west I feel the pull more strongly.
Now. It is almost a voice, almost a name. The image comes of a creature like myself, but as yet unawakened. It sends messages without being aware. It is still unformed, still in love with the sensations of life. I listen. It is the one I must find. There are others who send to me from the bright mirror of the moon, others I might find more easily. The night is filled with cries now. They echo and reverberate in a chamber of my mind I did not know I had. It is like a noisy crowd clamoring for my attention. But there is only one who is right, the one who calls from great distance, calls unconsciously, and I listen to him, his voice alone like the song of some night bird singing in the darkness, his eyes not yet opened. I listen. Soon I will know which way, and then we will go. This is why I am here, the learning and joy are steps to this necessity and the knowledge of where we will go afterward. I listen, the freezing wind ruffling my fur; the voice sings, sings in its own darkness.
January 13, 1938
Dear Bo,
I have to hurry. She’s wild to leave and hardly lets me hold the pen. She got a message last night. We have to leave, or she said she will go without me. Oh, dear, Bo, I don’t know what to do. She said take all the money I had and get a ticket to St. Louis. But maybe further than that. She won’t let me finish. I love you. I love you.
Lilly
21 Jan ‘38
Dear Bo,
In answer to your letter concerning Lilly, we have to just say that we don’t know much more than you do. One morning she got out of bed, packed a suitcase no bigger than a hatbox and went out the door crying like she was fit to die. She couldn’t more than kiss us each goodbye before she ran out the door. She used the word “compulsion,” and Polly and I think she must have something psychologically wrong. Not that we think she’s off her head or anything. Certainly she is the sweetest girl in the whole world, and we love her like a daughter. But she was being dragged away, and that’s no exaggeration.
We have talked about it and decided she is of age and we can’t call the police to drag her off the train like a criminal. She mentioned St. Louis, but we don’t know any more than that. You know, when she showed up at our place more than a year ago, she said she was a drifter with no family and a lot of sad things in her life. But she never told us anything specific that a person could use to find her, no names or addresses. We feel pretty dam helpless, too, Bo. You can believe that if we hear anything, well send you a telegram. And we’d appreciate you doing the same. Our sorrow we share with you.
God keep you,
Dan and Polly
The train rattled slowly through more suburbs, the snow-covered backyards and fences repeating endlessly as the train rumbled over crossings, past the dinging bells and flashing lights, the crossbars like poison signs drifting past, cars stopped at the crossings with plumes of white exhaust and impatient faces in the frosty windshields. Lilly was too warm in the overheated coach, but she could not rouse herself to take off her coat. She had been on the train for three hours now and had eaten nothing, not even breakfast. She wondered at the numbness she felt inside. Something had tightened up and would not let go.
We have not been in conflict before, Lilly.
Lilly answered by thinking out the words rather than whispering, as she sometimes did. There were people sitting all around her.
You are taking me from the people I love, all of them.
My own necessities must come first.
Why do we have to leave?
It is time, my time to … I cannot say the word. It is my time to find another of my kind and to join with him.
You are going to mate?
It is nearly the same as your mating, but we must have achieved a particular stage in our growth. It comes on suddenly, and must be done.
Can’t you do it in Boston?
There is only a particular one with whom I can join. We must journey to find him.
Well, how do you know he is in St. Louis?
I do not. But I received a communication last night from that direction.
Oh, God, this is funny. You might put an ad in the paper.
Lilly could not hold back the tears now, and she was laughing at the same time. She fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief, found it and, as soon as the tears began she let go with sobs that she could not hold in. The woman next to her looked on with a kindly expression.
“Are you all right?” the woman said. “Shall I call the conductor?”
“No, please. I’m all right,” Lilly said. “I’m leaving home is all.”
“Yes, that’s such a sad thing,” the woman said, smiling “But then you have the homecoming to look forward you know.”
Lilly tried not to think at all, concentrating on one the ritual chants the Beast used sometimes to make innner peace. She said the words in her mind, aware that the Beast was close to the surface and listening but unable help her.
Why are you so kind to other people and so cruel me? I’m the closest one to you.
There was a long silence from inside, as if the Be could not find an answer.
I have been kind.
You have healed other people, saved people from getting hurt, and now you take me from the only people have ever loved.
I have been kindest to you.
I don’t know what you mean. Lilly almost said the words aloud in her growing anger.
I have given you a year of life.
I want to know if I’m a real person. She asked the question suddenly, although it was the biggest question the one she had never dared to ask. And yet, if this was to be the end of her, if the Beast was on its way to so unthinkable coupling with another of its kind, then I might never return to life, never have the chance if I did not ask now.
I did not know until recently myself.
Please tell me. I have to know about that.
When my change occurred … it is like the beginning of estrus for you … I knew about my Persons, but I had not known before.
Tell me!
I would rather not.
Am I just part of your mind?
When I called you up, you were not what is called real
You mean when the first thing I can remember happened, when I was suddenly standing there outside Dan and Polly’s?
Yes. When I spoke your name for the first time.
If I was not a real person, how did you know, how did you … make me real? Lilly felt coldness come over her in the hot train coach. If she was not real, if she was only a fabrication of this creature, then there was no use to even think about Bo, about a life, or about love.
I called you up from the … from what is available in the adjoining space.
I don’t understand what that means!
Lilly was ready to speak aloud at this point, feeling that coldness inside her and wanting to know, wanting the terrible truth, as maybe Bo wanted to hear from that doctor that he had cancer, just to know it at last.
It is hard for me to explain to you because you have no concepts for this space except in religious language, which is prejudicial. But I will try because I understand your anguish and I share it, as I share all of your life, and because I am very sorry that you must return to that place when you do not wish to.
You mean I will just stop, just go out like a candle?
No, of course not. You are a Person, an Entity.
Please explain, please tell me about this space.
It is necessary that you understand that when I tell you, you must accept. You must not attempt foolish actions. You know that I will enforce my control to save myself, that I will call up another Person if necessary?
I know. I’ll listen. She felt cold in her bones now, seeing with one last desperate memory Bo*s sweet, wondering face as they made love.
I called you up from the newly dead.
“Oh, God!” Lilly screamed. “Oh, God!” She tried to stand up in the coach, hitting her head on the baggage rack and unaware of the pain, her eyes wild.. “Oh, God!” She dropped her open purse and her hands clutched at the woman beside her, who thought she was going to be sick and was scrambling out of the seat to make room.
Lilly clawed her way out of the seat and staggered down the aisle, her eyes unseeing, the words sounding in her head now with a warning from the Beast inside, a warning that was emotional rather than in words. Take care, it was saying. Take care, or I will replace you. She bumped into the small, frightened-looking conductor, who held her by the elbows and tried to look into her stricken face.
“Here now, Miss, here now, what’s the matter? Are you sick?”
The message got through to Lilly’s mind, and, unable to do more than stand and look at the little man in front of her, she got enough control to say some words: yes, she was sick, and would he just help her to the ladies’ room, and yes, he said, of course, and he would stand outside and she should just call out if she needed anything, and yes she said, just help me there.
Inside the hot little cabinet, she sat on the stool and breathed deeply, not thinking, breathing in the three-phase movement of the Yoga complete breathing exercise, and then she did the tranquilizing breath through each nostril for three times. At the end of that, her mind came back.
You tell me I was dead?
You were.
And I’m going to be dead again?
You will continue in that place from which you were called. And l think now, although l am not sure, that you will wait in that place until Ihave completed my transition here.
Iwill stay with you somehow, is that what you are saying? Will l be aware while I am … while l am dead again?
I do not know that, but I know that when I shift, you return to that place and wait to be recalled while my hold on you continues. I mean that you do not have memory of your former life until my need of you is finished.
I don’t understand that. I just want to know if when you “call up” someone else for whatever strange purpose you can have, will Ibe dead again?
You will be in that space adjoining, as I said, until my transition is complete.
“Goddamn you,” Lilly hissed between her teeth. “Tell me a straight answer, you filthy monster, you terrible thing that has torn me from death itself, you rotten beast —tell me if I will be dead!” She found herself tearing the handkerchief to shreds.
It is my belief that you will return to that state. Yes, you will be dead.
Chapter Five
As they slogged through sand toward the camp, Barry could see none of the usual hogans, only a large brushy pile that looked like a close-woven set of bushes such as one might find in a forest. Alongside this pile of brush a woman in a long green skirt and dark maroon blouse was chopping at some tough pieces of pinon branch. Johnny called a greeting in Navajo and she dropped the axe and turned, her hands on her hips, looking, Barry thought, like any poor mother watching her son approach, except that this was probably not really Johnny’s mother but one of her sisters. She put her arms around Johnny, then took his face in her hands, shaking his head until his hat fell off. Johnny laughed and squirmed like a five-year-old, and Barry stood, suitcase and hamper in hand, grinning, wondering what to say or if it made any difference.
Johnny turned, his eyes sparkling, held out his hand for Barry to come closer. The young Indian said a few words in Navajo and the woman nodded, although she did not smile. Her face was almost round, high forehead, clear eyes in nests of wrinkles and with a wide, strong mouth. She looked, Barry thought, like she could handle things.
