The Captive (14 page)

She looks up at me, trying to see through the furry muzzle, the scarred face with the torn ear, the heavy shoulders and powerful arms, to see where that little boy could have been in all of this hateful beast.

"How could you do that?"

I don't know what you mean.

"Become a lovable little boy, take a place in our home, our lives, pretend to be something you weren't just to have a soft place to sleep?"

Everything alive pretends
, I say.
Perhaps I pretend better than most. But I don't lie. Little Robert was real, a person in the world.

"You put him on like a costume," she says, becoming more awake again as her mind begins to work on the strangeness  of the situation. "You use us for whatever your purposes,  and maybe that's why I can't forgive you either."

You pretend to be a good woman, but you would be a murderer.

"I would avenge...." She stops.

Just as you do, I do what I can to survive
, I say, wondering  how much of my reality she can believe.
Long ago we - I - learned to survive in this world, very much alone. When I became Little Robert I did so because I felt what you call love here, in this place. It is something I am curious about. And it is here.

"What do you mean, it
is
here," she screams, half rising at the little enamel table. "You killed it. Your took care of that."

No. It is still here.

"You shared our house, our food, our lives, and all the time you were nothing but an animal putting on a disguise. You don't need love. Why do you put on the disguise and run after love?"

I am not simply a beast. I live in this world because I have no other, and ...
I stop, confused in my own mind. It is not a question I can ask, the "why" of existence.

She looks at me again in that careful way, as if really trying to figure me out. "And because this nightmare beast is curious, he comes to our house, and my husband is killed. Is it all really of so little matter, so little consequence, that a man's life can be lost just for no reason?"

For just as little reason you would shoot me to avenge your husband's death, and I only tried to prevent your family from being injured. I could not know the big man would shoot at the first sound.

She seems to be thinking back to that day, and for a moment  I also feel the aura of tension and terror as the gun goes off and then goes off again, and I know someone is dying, feel the terror in my own young and inept retaliation that springs from a vicious anger I have not learned to  control, so that I kill one man and permanently maim another. I do not like to think about that either, nor about the old man's face looking up into the rain while his eyes go blank.

You know that, don't you?
I say softly to her mind.

She nods.

You have tried to think of me as a demon so there would be a reason?

She nods again, and now she is crying, the tears dropping onto the white enamel table with hardly audible sounds, like the aftermath of a summer rain when the leaves open again and the water falls slowly on their surfaces as the sky gets lighter and the rain sounds die in the distance. I realize I can say nothing more to her that will do any good.

Outside a rooster crows, a long, perfect cry that trails off into the freshening dawn and is followed by half a dozen others, some of them from the young cockerels who have not yet perfected their voices. The windows are lightening.

Will you let me live?
I ask.

"No use," she says. "Martin is gone. My life is cut in two. Whether there is a reason or not. If you are a devil or something else. What does it matter?" She puts her head down on the table, and I feel radiating from her such a  poignant grief that it makes me stand up and look at her. I open my feelings to her own, and the flood of sadness makes my fur priclde as if an icy breath has touched my whole skin. I want suddenly to do something good for her. Inside and far back I feel Little Robert reaching out, calling in an  inarticulate wave of feeling that reaches out of his limbo and makes my eyes sting. Perhaps, I concentrate on the woman's feeling, reach for everything that is in her grief, wanting to help, pull it all under the concentrated focus of will. It draws together into a fusing white light. I shift.

My body felt heavy, dragged toward earth, aging, tired. I could not have leaped for joy, nor could I have flipped a hard ball against the target as I had done when I was young. But that was past my wanting. What I wanted was sitting at the old kitchen table in the lamp light. Outside the early dawn is beginning, time to milk and get the chores done. And I can smell the hay getting ready out there, the roosters crowing again, maybe soon a meadowlark whistling up across the fields. But sitting at the table with her head down on her arms, so tired she is almost asleep even now as I stand here looking down at her, is what I have always wanted. My wife, my love, my partner. I wanted to say something to her, but thought I'd better not just yet. I wanted to look at her for a while, and then too maybe I'd just scare the hell out of her. I'm a ghost, I suppose, alive again for a bit just to do something, one last thing for the family, maybe the best thing I could do. And it would be such an indulgence to reach down and touch the back of her neck. She's cut her hair. Like the old custom. And she said she would, come to think of it. I recall the time. We were in the cabin the time we got to take the vacation when -  what was his name - and his wife came and took the place for a while - up in the Wisconsin Dells. It was so pretty there in the mornings. She said one morning in bed - I remember her hair used to be so long and lovely black, and she would hold it over her arm - I remember how lovely her breasts were, and she would let it run down like black mist over her breasts, and we would just be so excited by the touching that sometimes we spent hours. But she said one morning that if I died first she would cut her hair off. And I said I would too, if she died first, and she laughed at that and said men didn't do that, but it was a woman's world in her man, and that when her man was gone, her world was turned to ashes, and she quoted some verse from the Bible.

I surely would like to touch her, but I don't think I dare. Cat, I want to say that I loved you up to and past the minute I died, and that it's not something that's gone at all. That we created our girls, your babies that you had upstairs in this very house, and we created this farm, and we have something between us that isn't gone just because one of us is dead. It's going on right now. I feel right now how it was all the years we were married, and the years before that when I was chasing you until you caught me. And I was so glad when that happened, so proud, Cat. I know that we didn't really know how to love each other at first, that it took so many years of being together and being happy and unhappy and mad at each other and glad and sometimes, so angry we could have killed each other and sometimes so happy that heaven wouldn't have us - that it took all that for us to know what it was all about. We know now, Cat, and it's not something that just stops. And my being dead is not a matter you can do anything about, Cat. You have to do what you been doing, get the farm together, with John helping,  and keep it running. And if our own people don't want it, why, sell it for what it's worth. But you can't stop living, you know that. You could go to visit Claire. She's getting lonely, and there's so many things you could do. You could get a lot out of the farm, being's it's kept up like you've been doing. My darling Cat, I'm so proud of you. Don't get carried off with that worrying about demons and such. It's just something that happened, and you're really doing the right thing. But this devil stuff is just gettin' in your way, sweetheart.

"I hear you, Martin," the woman said from the nest of her arms where her face rested. She looked asleep, but she was listening, hearing what I was thinking, even though I wasn't really sayin' it out loud.

It's just the way things are, you know. I never could  understand it either, life being such that you just find out all about it about the time you got to leave. But we live in the world, and that's the way it is. I would rather be here with you, but you're still here, and that means really that both of us are still here. That's what love does, Cat, sweetheart. It doesn't stop, not at all.

I reached down and put my hand on her neck, rubbed it just down inside the collar of her dress where the skin was soft and white. And she raised her face to look at me, not surprised at all, her eyes glazed with sleep.

"Even though it's just a dream, Martin," she said, standing  up beside me, "would you kiss me one last time?"

I took her in my arms, feeling her hands up under my shoulders, kissed her as we had kissed so many times in our lives, a long, sweet kiss with tears in it, and then she put her head on my shoulder, and I nuzzled her neck and we made those love sounds that weren't words but just sounds we used to make so it made me grin with happiness, and I thought, how long has it been since we made those little sounds we made so long ago. And then she raised her face with tears in the eyes but a smile on her face.

"Good night, Martin," she said. "I love you." She pulled away then and walked to the stairs, paused at the bottom, but she didn't look back.

Good night, Cat
, I said.
I love you.

I leaned down and blew out the lamp and then walked out the back door. I felt the heaviness of my years now. The freshness of the morning raised my eyes to that bright spot on the horizon where the sun is going to spill out in a melting run of hot gold in just a minute. Well, I think I'd best go now. One more long look at the corn, up to my waist if I wanted to walk through it again. The hay getting ready to get golden pretty soon. The smell of the cows out in the barn, and the dogs still asleep under the crib. Well, we've done all that, and it's all part of our lives now.

As Martin looks back at the house, I rise, concentrate. I shift.

The morning is fresh and new to my released senses. I feel like running through the corn, galloping along to feel the blades snicking aside, feel the morning wind in my throat. But there is the weighty feeling of the old man in me now also, the length of time that formed his life all seems gathered about me, gathered up in the farm around me, in the sleeping woman upstairs in the house. It is a powerful thing to love another person, to make a double life so that even after death something endures that is not a singleness but a  duality. For some reason I feel this is important to me,  something I have to know, even though I cannot ask why because I cannot understand the question. I would think about it further, but Barry clamors inside me now that we are free. He is not thinking about the Indian amulet now, but about his woman, Renee, and the life he must now enter upon in his own reality. I do not oppose him as he rises into my conscioisness, knowing that his course can only assist my own - and still the reasons are not to be asked. I step aside as the young man comes impetuously into existence.

I shift.

At the end of the lane Barry stopped to look back at the farm, a silhouette in the just risen sun, a perfect cutout of house, barn, silo, outbuildings, trees on the north - and  suddenly into his youthful mind came a burst of memory from that old man of planting the lombardies, from what must be forty years ago. Perfect, and finished. The memory faded to a point and vanished.

Barry Golden walked along the highway in a rapidly, warming July morning. He had a limp, but seemed quite happy. Before long a rattling old farm truck stopped and offered him a lift and he was gone, heading north.

I have grown fat and slow, I think, between the turns and rushes as the jack skids tight around a prickly pear and I scrabble to keep up. Going too fast, I put one front foot into the patch of stickers, feeling them jab into the soft parts of the pad, but that I can ignore as the jack is leaping from a clay bank into the arroyo, and I can't let a damned rabbit get away from me. It is a matter of pride. I sense him moving to the right down in the arroyo, although even the half moon would not show his stealth if I were close enough to see him. I pace him with my spatial sense, moving belly to the ground just out of his sight. These creatures have little sense of smell, but their ears are almost as sharp as my own. He stops. I feel his vibrations, distorted by their being echoed from the far bank of the arroyo. He has stopped under some piled up tumble weeds. I hold for a moment longer, listening to the creature's close, rapid breathing, holding my own breath for the last rush. When his ears drop over his back, I make the arroyo bank in one leap and the jack's hiding place in the next. He is fast, leaping at the same time as I leave the bank, but I spread my arms wide, claws extended, confusing him as a cat does a mouse. He responds by doubling  back as I thought he would, and I land on him solidly. A brief flurry and he is mine, crunched and limp although his heart continues to beat as I take my first bites into the liver and belly.

Afterwards, sitting on the moon-gleaming sand of the east mesa, I clean myself and look down the long slope toward the town in the Rio Grande Valley. The moon is well clear of South Peak now, lighting the mesa with a soft brilliance that I had never seen in the Midwest. If it were not for the stickers, I think, pulling at prickly pear spines and goatheads between my hind toes, I would be quite satisfied here. I lie back, giving my chops a last automatic lick, looking at the moon that hangs like a half-round window over the lighted earth. Well, it is pleasant to lie at my ease, gut nicely  satisfied with a large stringy jack rabbit, the air light and easy in my nostrils as I scent and feel around me the living night world of the New Mexico desert. Off toward the "U" mountain I sense a coyote trotting, nose and tail down as if he were being dragged by the snout, on the track of some tiny creature. Beastly little coyotes with their snivelling ways and cowardly gait, like poor dogs but more vicious. And behind my head I feel with my spatial sense a fat sidewinder making tread marks in the sand as he tracks with his  heat-finding nose a long-tailed kangaroo rat that he probably will not catch tonight, for the rat is near his hole and wary. Except for an occasional owl, the birds are quiet at night. All else in this wide waste is alive and stalking or being stalked, eating and trying not to be eaten. Down the slope of the mesa scored with dry washes I see the lights clustered around the square in Old Town, dim trails of lights extending north and south along the Rio and up the highway, the U.S. 66 they call it, east and west out of the far, sunken valley. Away on the opposite slope the dark nipples of the volcanoes  and five mile hill, dark except for one late automobile whose headlights I can just make out at what must be a twenty mile distance. Barely visible in the clear dark is the pale pyramid of Mount Taylor, a hundred miles west in the Indian country. Behind me are the upthrust Sandias with their split off shards of rock large enough to be mountains by themselves. Far above where I cannot see it from my resting place in the foothills, the new aircraft beacon will be flashing all night in the rarified air two miles high. It is a vast and extended land, one of a strange, empty beauty, the enormous skies filled with sun or, as now, with the moon riding in clear radiance without a cloud in the universe. The dry land makes me feel like a resurrected Pharaoh in a new Egypt, my people waiting somewhere in an ages old, desiccated  shrine, on their knees before an empty stone waiting for me, and I am here. Save that for the fantasies Barry is writing for the pulp magazines.