The Captive (11 page)

I am thirsty. I extend my perception around the farm yard and house. No one outside, not even a guard. I am about to try reaching into the house with my will when the back door creaks open and the old woman in the print dress comes hobbling out. She has two cans of dog food in her hands and she is going around to the side of the house to get the end of the garden hose. She puts the dog food in the large flat pan and pushes it through the slot in the bottom of the cage, standing at the tail board of the truck. I remain at the far end of the cage so as not to frighten her. I feel her old eyes staring at me. She gives the pan a hard push so it comes sliding across the floor toward me with the two disgusting mounds of dog food like horse manure on a plate. In her other hand is the hose squirting a weak stream.

"Filthy damn beast," the old woman says softly, glaring at me. "You killed my boy."

I keep my head averted from her, but my perception shows her clearly, each detail of her hanging, moss-like gray hair, the toothless mouth, the hate-filled, sunken eyes, light blue and full of age and pain.

"I told him you'd turn on us as soon as you got well." I sense her crooked hands on the back of the truck, the hose squirting up, the water falling onto the ground in loud splats, making my mouth burn for water. I keep my face under my arm, trying not to exert my will on her, being patient.

"Oh, you rotten filthy beast. 'F I had a gun I'd shoot you myself. But I spose Bee and the boy needs you for the money now."

Listening to her, and being so thirsty, my mind on the water, I am caught unaware when she says the next thing. I act without thinking.

"Turn over that damn water pail so I can fill it."

I turn the pail over, and in the same instant, caught out, look up straight into her astonished face. She holds the look for a second before I hide my face again. Then, with a scream, the old woman drops the hose and goes stumbling and hobbling back toward the house, uttering short little shrieks as if someone were poking her with a hot iron. I consider stopping her, bringing her back to fill the pail, but decide against it. Perhaps someone is watching, and that would be a most uncharacteristic move for a frightened woman to make. Well, I have made a bad mistake.

"Shift, and I'll get us out." Barry again.

I am beginning to think you are a fool.

"Shift. They don't keep a man in a cage, not a hurt man."

And how did you get into the cage, Barry?
I say patiently, although I am getting angry.

"What does it matter? I'll think of something."

You're not thinking very well right now.
I am thirsty and mad now.

"Shift."

Barry
, I say, holding back my anger with difficulty.
Get back or I will destroy you.

"You can't do that," he says, and he is angry too.

Then watch.
I press his personality against the nothingness,  and I feel his agony as his features begin to blur in my mind. Then he reaches out to me in some incomprehensible way and touches some spot inside me that is so sensitive that I scream audibly with the pain. I have to stop pressing against him. His features become clear again. The pain stops. He retreats.

I am panting. The pain was terrible, more than physical, and it has left me weak and shivering, even though the sun has heated the cage to a point where it is too hot to touch the ceiling. I feel drained, and my thirst is so great that I feel my tongue swelling. My mind breaks into pieces for a moment, and then it reassembles as I hear people coming out the back door of the house. The old woman and the young man. They come to the back of the truck, she talking hysterically, he trying to calm her in what he supposes is her senile aberration.

"No! No! I tell you it understands you. I tole it to turn the water pail over, you know, like you do with animals, just feedin' and waterin' them, and it reaches out and turns it over as neat as you please."

"Now Gra'ma," the young man says patiently. "It's a beast, a bear. It can't understand. What it did was just a coincidence." He looks into the cage, sees the bucket sitting up. If Barry had not disturbed me, I could have turned it back over, perhaps confused them both. But the old woman will not be put down.

"I know you don't believe me, but it's true. It's true. And it looked at me. It knew it'd give itself away." She shook her twisted old fist at me.

"All right, Gra'ma, it's true." The young man stands, hands on hips, head cocked to one side, looking at me where I crouch with my arm over my face. He picks up the hose and presses his thumb over the end so it squirts a hard stream. Some of it hits my head, and I have the impulse very strongly to raise my face and get some of the water, but this time I am prepared, and I keep my head down. He squirts the water around, over the top of the cage to cool it off, finally into the bucket with a spanging sound.

"Have to pull the truck up farther. Sun's gettin' on it," the young man says.

His grandmother looks at him with hard eyes. She doesn't say more, just turns away and hobbies to the house,  disappearing through the back door.

***

The next day the people come again. This time I am in the open and can see them, perceive them with my spatial sense all around the truck, feel their eyes from the raised platform of the haywagon where they are allowed to stand after they pay their money, listen to their gabble as they say the same things over and over, passing through my perceptions  with an infinite boredom. I try amusing myself by classifying  their perceivable characteristics without raising my head to actually see them: here is a couple, smell of pancakes  and grease and cow manure, children with voices an octave higher than the adults, slurred language usual among these people, the usual curses, contractions, exclamations, wearing overalls, print dresses, work shoes on both man and wife; local farmers taking an hour off. Class I.

Class II is the city folk who smell of cigarettes and  sometimes of beer or liquor, have cleaner clothes and shoes, speak a harder, flatter dialect with fewer contractions and more abundant imagery. Often the woman will be wearing some perfume that smells metallic.

Class III is evidently a higher economic class, smells of soap and cologne, sometimes of leather, speaks a more  elevated and precise language. But it is a bore, and I allow myself to drift away into a haze where I can rest, daydream, and keep only the barest minimum of sense available for the most dangerous emergencies.

Once a child gets hold of some rocks and hurls them at the cage, calling me to wake up. The loud clangs startle me half awake so that I raise my head briefly and the people on the wagon say, "Ooh," and "Ahh," to see me start awake. But I disappoint them by covering my head again. Not more than two or three seconds later, however, I wake fully. Someone has screamed. And beyond that, the voice arouses something in me. I know the voice.

"It's him," the voice is screaming. "It's him!" The voice screams over and over again from somewhere beyond the haywagon. I stretch my perception, but only make out the confusing outline of a mass of people waiting at the bottom of the stairway that leads to the wagon. I try to refine on it, not raising my head. The voice cries out to something in me far back, something small but powerful, deep down. I reach for it and the memory comes up with a tall angular shadow, warm arms. Aunt Cat.

***

Night again. Life is becoming difficult in a way I would never have imagined if it had not happened. I am apparently to be plagued from within and without until I am well enough to get out of this situation. Barry will not stay silent,  knowing that I cannot, perhaps, destroy him without hurting  myself terribly. The ghost, if that is the way to put it, of Little Robert annoys me with his emotional outcries and ridiculous feeling of loss over Aunt Cat, who would probably kill him if he could reappear in her world, and the old woman, mother of Big Belly, irritates me constantly by being always somewhere in my perceptual field, watching me for signs of intelligence, waiting for something she can point to. I think she must never sleep, never eat. She is at the back door, just inside the screen, or she is at an upstairs window, or she is at the door of the tool shed beneath the elm trees, always somewhere, waiting. I find it difficult to concentrate, hard to draw in any food without her seeing the unbelievable sight of a rabbit trying to climb up into the truck so I can eat him. I have eaten half of the dog food, fly blown and hard, out of necessity. I am about willing to go along with Barry and do anything to get out of here.

I am almost asleep, the full moon making its pattern of bars on the floor of the iron cage and across my pelt. I am stiff with keeping curled up all day to hide my face, and now to relax in the darkness, I roll over on my back and stretch out, letting my head fall back so my chin is pointing at the sky, or rather at the ceiling of the cage, and the moon is settling quietly on my closed eyelids like the feeling of close and tiny wings. The sound of a car in the lane disturbs me. It is so late there should not be a car. The engine turns off and I hear a car door being opened and not closed. Then for a long time there is nothing. I doze off. I come back and search for the old woman. She is back in the upstairs  window. I cannot tell if she is asleep. I begin to sweep the area and am startled to find a person under the trees near the garden fence. I raise my head to fix the figure in my perception.  A tall, angular figure in a woman's hat that is pulled down across the right side of the face. Then a chill fixes me to the spot. She is carrying a shotgun at the ready like a hunter with the quarry in sight. Is it Aunt Cat? Of course. What else. That demented woman is going to kill me. I leap to my feet, fixing her figure in my perception and now seeing her begin the final stalk across the moonlit grass, emerging in a slow and determined walk into the bright moonlight. No mistake. I begin to scream. Scream! Wake everyone. Get them out here. Hey! Hey! Someone is trying to kill your prize bear. Scream! Scream! Where is the goddam guard? From the dark upstairs window the ancient hag calls out encouragement. "Kill it! Kill it!"

She raises the gun. I fix on her and exert my will. The gun wavers, but not far. It blasts fire into the night, seemingly right at me. The charge of buckshot whangs and whistles off the cage bars to my right and into the window of the truck. She raises the gun again. Why can't I put more force into my will to divert her aim? I feel weak. I press against her will with all my will, and her gun wavers again just as she pulls the trigger. Wham! Again the pellets sing around me. I feel a hot pain in my unbroken leg. One pellet has lodged in my ankle. I concentrate all my force on the woman so that her body is wavering, but she is reloading the double barrels, snapping the barrels up again and raising the shotgun to her shoulder, as if from long practice she is capable of doing this deed in a howling storm, under water, when asleep, after death itself. I push against her will again,  forcing every ounce of my will against hers, but there is  something there that prevents my changing her will to my own, something I feel like a shield, so that I can only just touch her oddly, make her waver but not change her act. Just as her finger tightens on the trigger, I fall to the floor of the cage, realizing I have not shifted her aim enough.

Wham! Again the pellets go singing into and around the cage like hornets, and this time I feel two hard hits in my back. Not deep, for they are ricochets, but this mad woman is going to kill me, for I cannot change her aim with any certainty, and I am a bear in a shooting gallery, going back and forth, up and down in my confined space, trying to keep away from the full charge which will inevitably kill me.

Wham!

For the love of God, where is everybody?

And above it all and through my own terror is the voice of the hag in the high window, "Kill it! Kill it!" she sings like a chant, while the murdering woman standing in full moonlight has snapped the barrels open again and is putting more shells in. I touch her hard with my will and she drops one shell, staggering as if in a strong wind. I can deflect her actions a little. I wait until she tries to load the barrel again, hit her again, she wavers and goes down to one knee, picking up the shell and jamming it in before I can gather my  concentration. Behind me I hear the back door open and slam shut. Thank God, someone is coming out. The woman remains  on one knee, propping the shotgun up for two careful shots. I hurl all my will at her, seeing the barrels waver, but not enough.

Wham! I have thrown myself to the end of the cage, hoping  the gun will not waver back that way, and the iron spangs and sings with the pellets. I am not hit. I turn to face the gun to concentrate, but too late.

Wham!

I open my eyes, not hit again, wondering what has happened.  The young man has tackled the woman with the gun, and they are rolling on the ground. Now he has the gun away from her, has thrown it to one side, is trying to hold her. The back door opens and bangs shut again, and the fat boy, son of the dead man, comes out.

"Hey, Orv, get a piece of rope or something to tie up this crazy woman," the young man hollers, wrestling with the tall woman who is apparently almost as strong as he is. The fat boy runs for the barn. I hear the hag in the window cackling now, screeching and crying out to her grandson to let the woman finish the job. Then the woman puts a foot behind the young man's leg and pushes him down. Trying to break his fall, he loses hold of her and she picks up the shotgun again. As he gets up and reaches for her, she swings it like a baseball bat and the barrels clang dully as they connect with the man's, head. He goes down flat, stunned. I hear the fat boy running back and shouting, and now the hag is screeching for someone else. The tall woman, who has lost her hat, stands uncertainly in the moonlight for a moment, then runs off into the shadows, carrying the gun with her. In seconds I hear the car in the lane start up and roar away with spinning wheels. Another man who has just arrived and the fat boy are helping the nephew get up. It is over, for a time anyway. I sit back in the cage and feel about for my wounds. The pellets in my back are nothing, like bee stings, but the one in my ankle is against bone and is painful. But there are no others that I can feel. The most terrifying thing about the incident is that I could not move the woman's will. It was as if she were behind some kind of shield through which I could only touch tentatively rather than simply taking charge of the mind as I am usually able to do.