The beast v1 0, p.13
The Beast (v1.0), page 13
The individual singing and drumming went on, and Old Fisherman sang with his head thrown back and the tears running down his cheeks through the wrinkles and furrows of age. Barry felt intense empathy with him, could almost understand his song, the words becoming images and emotional symbols rather than language sounds. Fire Man tended the sticks that burned, and the Incense Chief threw shavings on the fire at intervals. Road Man sang and moved around the circle, and at Barry’s side sat his friend, Johnny Strong Horse, who was now singing in his language, a low-toned, repetitive song that again Barry thought he could understand, a sadness and a strength, a call for help. As Barry looked back at the fire, he saw without surprise the figures of the spirits emerging from the flame tips like uncertain and wavering fingers extended from another world below this one, reaching up slender gray fingers to touch this world.
He watched, fascinated, as the fingers formed on the flames and reached upward until they were as large as the song, until they said the song, were the song made visible and wavering up toward the dark smoke hole, making visible the young Indian’s song, and Barry sat as one turned to stone watching the spirits undulate in their dark colors as the song seemed to go on forever—or was it someone else singing now? He could not have said, for his eyes were fixed on the spirits who swarmed inside the hogan, expanding its walls to great distances. And now the people on the other side of the circle diminished to insect size, to grasshoppers who sat and sang with their brown, glittering wings rubbing together, the spirits’ song a visible thread of scarlet running out from each of their throats, forming a burning skein that circled the hogan while the eyes of the people opened wider. The eyes of the woman whose name was Sarah became larger than the smoke hole above him, larger than the hogan, opening to him a visible darkness into which he entered, leaning forward, falling horizontally across the earth as it passed away from under him, flashing into and through the dark portals so that he looked down, gasping as he fled out across the night land, fleeing with his clothes streaming behind him in smoke swirls that he beard with his ears and sensed with his skin in purple vibrations swelling around him like a net, a crossweaving of threads in impossible colors singing to his ears, and a low-voiced thrumming that he watched as it swelled and fell under him while he sped through the dark of the woman’s eyes.
If she held them open he would fail forever around the dark swell of the earth, the bright horizon receding behind him, the sharp-edged clouds whispering backwards, each one a precipitous ledge over which he flew without wings, being held only by her eyes, which narrowed, pressed in upon him until he could feel the tunnel through which he traveled, its veins and muscles touching his skin, its great throbbing music in his ears, the deep scarlet tunnel turning to the azure of evening sky at great heights, and the purples wavering in long curtains like the Northern Lights. He closed his eyes.
And was there, in the other world, the rounded land under him turning with music, an extension of himself. He was two, a blessed double being, the larger one and himself, the larger one crying out a song of blessing while they separated from each other like stereo images coming apart in the eye: tenuous, distinct, wavering as a wolf’s cry becoming two separate cries, a chord heard singing across the rounded world, across the sudden bands of color that rose in place of suns, brilliant, more colors than existed in the world. The colors throbbed with sounds, vibrations that shifted around the two figures, a multitudinous network centered on each of them, interlocking, meshing so that they understood each other and, while they moved apart, remained a single chord of music, harmony as positive and unbreakable as a major and its dominant, moving apart until the interlocking nets began to break, the colors to separate from the banded spectra, and one of them had to open his eyes to fix on the world before it was too late, and Barry did.
The hogan flickered with the light of the small fire. The eyes of the woman across from him were fixed on his, staring as if looking past him, and Barry thought she had been there, too, and he dared not close his eyes again for a time. The vision began to break through, and he felt sudden vertigo as the earth tipped under him, the colors broke through reality, and around the moon altar and Father Peyote, small and brown in the center of the moon, came the flaming colors announcing their presence to his ears as magnificent chords and arpeggios that he saw, that he knew with more than senses. The vibrations made the world spacious, coming from all living things and fighting the things of space with the time-fixing vibrations of life. He opened his eyes wide and watched the moon altar shift its shape to a high and beautiful mountain range, snow cresting its top, and along the sides of the mountain, people. No, not people, creatures that moved in graceful couples, more slender than earthly cats or bears, now running on all fours, now dancing upright along the rock ledges, light as vapor, unafraid of the unscalable falls beneath them, the drifting long veils of vapor pouring like smoke into the valleys. As he watched, the figures changed to birds, wheeling over the moon mountain in great, paired circles, held fast in the streaming nets of vibration that interlocked and made of them all one flock, one herd, an organism shaped with joy. The birds flew to the rim of the moon peaks, became sylphs, streaming upward in slender flames, transforming their bodies at will as they sang the song of their beings, now larger, now small and graceful, stretching to impossible, nebulous thinness of tissue that rose and wavered in the upthrusting thermals. They touched, harmonizing waves of purple and deep green, fast approaching waves of yellow surging against them, lifting them, the following and deeper reds slowing as the songs died away.
The altar shrank back into a crescent, the beings diminished and went out like sparks, the fire faded back to a few sticks, the flames flickering shadows on the sand floor of a hogan at midnight. Across from him, Barry saw the eyes of the woman were closed. He felt light and heavy at the same time, tired and rested and very, very thirsty. The image of thirst built arroyos and dead skulls in his mind. His throat parched shut on itself, tube now clogged, shriveling away, breaking into rusty particles that fell into the echoing cavity of his body space where he wandered, mouth sealed with dust.
Something touched his arm.
“Drink,” said a voice, very low, but it reverberated as if they were in a huge cavern.
He lifted the dipper, a gourd, and the smell of water overcame him, ravished his senses like the love of a woman. He drank.
The gourd passed away.
The night lay at his feet, stretching miles of empty sand to the fire that was dying down, miles of sand turning blue again and transparent, blue and a wavery floor like water rising around him; he could not breathe if he could not separate again. He must separate again, but from that enormous distance he saw the dark eyes of the woman named Sarah, who looked at him and said “No” in a song he could not understand, sang “No” to him again, to both of him, so they stopped dreaming as if they were truly two because the woman had spoken to both of them at once. “No,” she had said, and they must be content for the time to be one.
Time flowed away like mist before a wind. The fire drew his eyes until they felt dry and delicate in their sockets, feathery and light, as if they might drift away from his head. His eyeless face was left behind as they drifted like thistle silk across the dark, bobbing in the light breeze from the doorway, looking upward through the smoke hole while the upward burst of heat from the flames whirled them upward, out and away into the universe, where Barry still gazed from their disembodied pupils that dilated to cavernous size, seeing the drifting shoals that were galaxies, the clouds of illumined gas, the depth of the horse’s head and the coal sack, the nebulae, a nova striking lines of light like humming wires between the stars, holding all together in one vast net, an interstellar spider’s web. He closed his eyes.
The burst of color came with sound again, and a feeling of cool garnet color on his skin, as from a church window struck through by a shaft of moonlight, a tone made up of three semitones that he could not separate formed upon the insistent throbbing of his heart—or was it the drum? He looked inside his eyes and saw the world through a tube like a microscope, dark and glittering. He walked among the vast, buzzing hulks of the paramecia, the speeding bullets of the bacteria, the knobby whorls of molecules and the sparkling motes that were electrons appearing and disappearing, sweeping past him as he shrank through them and out again into the fields of stars, the bright banners and scarves of the universe, and a great, rust-colored moon expanding toward him. He opened his eyes.
The drum was in his hands. It felt human. The skin top was soft, sensitive, as if it would sigh when scratched. He tapped it very softly, feeling the stones around which the rawhide thongs were wrapped, like pieces of viscera under his hands, the knuckles and knobs of the living drum. He tapped with his fingers, a rhythm came from his hands and passed into the drum, and it began to speak with a whisper.
Then more confidently it spoke as the fingers told the drum and the drum said the words. barry heard his voice singing words he could not understand. Was he chanting in Navajo? He heard his fingers telling the drum what to say, listened as the living skin spoke to the circle of listening people words that came by themselves and made a song. He sang.
And then it was wrong, uneasy, and his fingers no longer knew what to tell the drum. The drum sighed and stopped. A pair of hands took the drum, and a new song began.
While no time passed in the world, Barry and the Other One felt for a way to walk in singleness, a Blessed Way, somewhere to put one’s feet to walk in singleness so that the Two might walk as one in another world and all be healed that was sundered and split and in pain since before time began. Barry felt the Other One beside him, traveling with him, looking at him like a brother as they circled each other with tired steps. Their eyes met, and Barry felt the ice of fear come up through his feet, up the backs of his legs as if he stood on a high place and made ready to jump. The cold ran up through his veins, icy water drowning muscles and nerves, stomach, heart, and lungs going under so be could not breathe. He began to freeze inside, seeing the Other One in agony also. He forced a long and shuddering breath.
He almost moved his elbow to tell the Indian at his side that he needed help, that he wanted out, that he could no longer breathe in this closed space where two tried to be one and that the Other One was dying also. He opened his eyes to find the dawn like white mist glowing in the doorway of the hogan.
An Indian woman he had met yesterday came stooping through the doorway with a bucket of water. She started around the circle, moving to the left, each person drinking from the gourd. When Barry drank, he felt whole again, and his dream shrank away to a tiny point of light, and vanished.
Chapter Six
“George!” She shook his arm, made him look around at her. “You’re not even listening to me. I’m asking you now if this is what you want, this right here on the paper?” . “Yeah, it’s all right, Mary Louise.”
The tall woman with the bright blonde hair found tears welling in her eyes again. She always seemed to be crying these days, even though she was determined he would not get away with doing this to her. And now he was so wrapped up thinking about that floozie in Boston he couldn’t even answer her about the house. My God, she could take it all away from him and he wouldn’t even care. And that thought so moved her rage against him, so tightened her growing hatred of what he had done, of his happiness away from her, that she decided she would do it She would take it all.
“I am going to tell Mr. Morrisey that I will fight for all of it,” she said, wiping away the two tears with a quick motion. “All of it, you hear, George?”
“I never said you couldn’t have it all,” he said, still looking at the wall of the little paneled office. “I did you dirt, and that’s little enough to pay for it.”
His agreement made her even more angry, and for a minute she wanted so badly to hit him. She could imagine herself rising from the chair and hitting him with something, with one of the books on the desk beside her, with the iron bookend. Her rage made her dizzy.
“You go ahead, Mary Louise,” he said, his voice still abstracted.
“You’ll never find anybody that loved you like I did,” she said with her face tight “It’s all you trying to be young again. The men from Rawlings told me she was just a kid,
no more than nineteen or twenty. George, you are being a fool.”
“I am sorry to hurt you,” he said quietly in that infuriating way he had now of not getting angry. He had used to fight with her over the littlest trifles, and now he wouldn’t even get mad. It was like he was still away, talking to that woman over a thousand miles’ distance.
He looked at her with a sadness that made her catch her breath and turn away. “Whether there was anybody else or not, I’d have to get away.”
She felt a great breath in her chest that would not come up. She would not cry again in front of him. She managed to say, “But why, George, why don’t you love me anymore?” And the breath tried to come up again and almost strangled her.
“I’ve been close to death,” he said. “I know that for a while these last couple of years I’ve wanted to die, and I think maybe that’s why I was dying. I think I was killing myself over Charles’s accident And it wasn’t really you, but the way we were … the way we lived was part of the whole thing. And I just got to change now.”
“I could—” She started to say that she could change, but it was too much for her. She would not beg this man anymore. She was a Cahill, of the Virginia Cahills, and she was finished begging. She would not be pitied. She turned her head sharply, feeling the great sigh of breath lodged in her chest recede, allowing her to breathe again. She would not, never again, plead with this man.
“I thought you would be stubborn,” she said, her voice cold now. “And Mr. Morrissey said you would, too. Do you know what he said about what you are doing, George?” She stood in the little office, ready for the parting shot, ready to see her lawyer and say she would agree to those terribly harsh conditions of divorce and alimony that he had suggested. “He said you were acting like a moonstruck adolescent.”
Bo looked at his wife and nodded. He watched her face, hard and with a set frown around the mouth that she never used to have. She turned and went out the door into the next office.
The conditions were harsh, modified somewhat by Bud Hopps’s indignation and the insertion of a saving clause or two modifying the payments for future support of the injured wife. Bo listened as his lawyer read through the clauses one after another, each charge against him, each punitive and cutting phrase turning harmless as it hit against the screen of his abstraction from this foregone event. He kept thinking: Where was Lilly now?
Bud was reading. “Did you get that, Bo?*’
“I’m sorry, what?”
“She also gets the contents of the savings accounts, and that’s near two thousand dollars.”
“Yeah, I thought it was about that.”
“Well, Bo, I never thought I’d see you back down from ft fight, but Mary, Louise has knocked you out of the ring, and you’re just lying there in the five-dollar seats.” The lawyer slapped the long legal forms down on the table. “You’re going to be paying this woman the rest of your life. You know that?”
“Yeah, sure, Bud. It’s all right.” Bo was thinking, it’s been two weeks now since I heard. I got to do something.
“Well, I guess we’re ready,” Bud said, lighting a cigarette and sitting down again. “Ready to go in there and come out wearin’ barrels.”
After the legal proceedings had been got through, Bo saw his former wife only to get his clothes out of the house. He would not take any of the furniture or any necessities like bedding or towels. He took a couple of little things Charles had owned and loved when be was alive, and he stopped one last time in the boy’s old room, as he used to do almost every night before he went to sleep. He remembered fixing it up when Charles was no more than a wiggly bundle, spitting up and squawling all night. The pictures of animals on the walls, the bed with its bright lndian-pattern spread, the Robin Hood outfit they bought for him to wear in the school play. He had been a big hit. Bo remembered, thinking of the husky, blonde-haired kid with the peaked cap and the jerkin of forest green, his bow slung across his shoulders. What a man he would have made, Bo thought. He did not feel the tears coming up now as he had so often in the past. It was now as if all the tears were gone from him, as if they had all flowed away into some quiet pool, so that now he could think back about his son with a pleasant sense of memory, just as if he were older now and his son had grown up and gone away, like any other kid, as if the accident had never happened. He had been such a good swimmer, and if he hadn’t been trying to save that other kid, it wouldn’t have happened, or if they hadn’t sent him to camp. He was so proud of that, and of being a scout, too. Jeez, Bo thought, and he smiled. What a bell of a good kid he had been. He thought, too, of that dream he’d had in Boston, of seeing Charles again out in the meadow where they used to play ball. That was real, he thought. I know you’re there, Charles, he thought. I know we’ll meet again. He walked back to his room, finished packing and left the house for the last time.
The following Wednesday, the first of February, as he was getting ready to leave for St Louis, Bo received a picture postcard, forwarded to him at his new address. The picture showed a man floating high in the water of a lake while a caption under it said, “Swimming in the Great Salt Lake is easier than lying in bed.” On the back was his name and address and the scrawled words:
