The Einstein Intersection (6 page)

The head of the boar weighed fifty pounds. Lo Hawk lugged it on his back. We’d cut off all four hams, knotted them together, and I carried two on each shoulder, which was another two hundred and seventy pounds. The only way we could have gotten the whole thing back was to have had Easy along. We’d nearly reached the village when he said, “La Dire noticed that business with Friza and the animals. She’s seen other things about you and others in the village.”

“Huh? Me?” I asked. “What about me?”

“About you, Friza, and Dorik the kage-keeper.”

“But that’s silly.” I’d been walking behind him. Now I drew abreast. He glanced across the tusk. “You were all born the same year.”

“But we’re all-different.”

Lo Hawk squinted ahead,
then
looked down. Then he looked at the river. He didn’t look at me.

“I can’t do anything like the animals or the pebble.” “You can do other things. Le Dorik can do still others.” He still wasn’t looking at me. The sun was lowering behind copper crested hills. The river was brown. He was silent. As clouds ran the sky, I dropped behind again, placed the meat beside me, and fell on my knees to wash in the silted water.

Back at the village I told Carol if she’d dress the hams she could have half my share. “Sure,” but she was dawdling over a bird’s nest she’d found.
“In a minute.”
“And hurry up, huh?”

“All right.
All right.
Where are you in such a rush to?” “Look, I will polish the tusks for you and make a spearhead for the kid or something if you will just keep off my back!”

“Well, I-look, it’s not your kid anyway. It’s-
“ But
I was sprinting towards the trees. I guess I must have still been upset. My legs sprint pretty fast.

It was dark when I reached the kage. There was no sound from behind the fence.
Once something blundered against the wire, whined.
Sparks
and a quick shadow.
I don’t know which side it came from. No movement from Le Dorik’s shack. Maybe Dorik was staying inside the kage on some project. Sometimes they mated in there, even gave birth. Sometimes the offspring were functional. The
Bloi
triplets had been born in the kage. They didn’t have too much neck and their arms were long, but they were quick, bright ten-year-olds now. And 2-Bloi and 3-Bloi are almost as dexterous with their feet as I am. I’d even given Lo 3-Bloi a couple of lessons on my blade, but being a child he preferred to pick fruit with his brothers.

After an hour in the dark, thinking about what went into the kage, what came
out,
I went back to the village, curled up on the haystack behind the smithy and listened to the hum from the power-shack until it put me to sleep.

At dawn I unraveled, rubbed night’s grit out of my eyes, and went to the corral. Easy and Little Jon got there a few minutes after. “Need any help with the goats this morning?”

Little Jon put his tongue in his cheek. “Just a second,” he said and went off into the corner.

Easy shuffled uncomfortably.

Little Jon came back. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure we need help.” Then he grinned. And Easy, seeing his grin, grinned too.

Surprise! Surprise, little ball of fear inside me! They’re smiling! Easy hoisted up the first bar of the wooden
gate,
and the goats bleated forward and put their chins over the second rung. Surprise!

“Sure,” Easy said. “Of course we need you. Glad to have you back!” He cuffed the back of my head and I swiped at his hip and missed. Little Jon pulled out the other rung, and we chased the goats across the square, out along the road, and then up the meadow. Just like before. No, not just.

Easy said it first, when the first warmth pried under the dawn chill. “It’s not just like before, Lobey. You’ve lost something.”

I struck a dew shower from low willow fronds and wet my face and shoulders. “My appetite,” I said.
“And maybe a couple of pounds.”

“It isn’t your appetite,” Little Jon said, coming back from a tree stump. “It’s something different.”

“Different?” I repeated. “Say, Easy, Little
Jon,
how am I different?”

“Huh?” Little Jon asked. He flung a stick at a goat to get its attention.
Missed.
I picked up a small stone that happened underfoot. Hit it. The goat turned blue eyes on me and galumphed over to see why, got interested in something else halfway over and tried to eat it. “You got big feet,” Little Jon said.

“
Naw
.
Not that,” I said. “La Dire had noticed something different about me
that’s
important; something different about me the same way there was about...
Friza.”

“You make music,” Easy said.

I looked at the perforated blade. “
Naw
,”’ I said. “I don’t think it’s that. I could teach you to play. That’s another sort of being different than she’s looking for. I think.”

Late that afternoon we brought the goats back. Easy invited
me
to eat and I got some of my ham and we attacked Little Jon’s cache of fruit. “You want to cook?”

“
Naw
,” I said.

So Easy walked down to the corner of the power-shack and called towards the square, “Hey, who wants to cook dinner for three hard-working gentlemen who can supply food, entertainment, bright conversation- No, you cooked dinner for me once before. Now don’t push, girls! Not you either. Whoever taught you how to season? Uh-uh, I remember you, Strychnine
Lizzy
.
O.K. Yeah, you.
Come on.”

He came back with a cute, bald girl. I’d seen her around but she’d just come to the village. I’d never talked to her and I didn’t know her name. “This is Little Jon, Lobey, and I’m Easy. What’s your name again?”

“Call me Nativia.”

No, I’d never talked to her before. A shame that situation had gone on for twenty-three years. Her voice didn’t come from her larynx. I don’t think she had one. The sound began a whole lot further down and whispered as out from a cave with bells.

“You can call me anything you like,” I said, “as much as you want.”

She laughed, and it sounded among the bells. “Where’s the food and let’s find a fireplace.”

We found a circle of rocks down by the stream. We were going to get cookery from the compound but Nativia had a large skillet of her own so all we had to borrow were cinnamon and salt.

“Come on,” Little Jon said when he came back from the water’s edge. “Lobey, you
gotta
be entertaining. We’ll converse.”

“Now, hey-
“ Then
I said to myself “aw, so what,” lay down on my back and began to play my machete. She liked that because she kept smiling at me as she worked.

“Don’t you
got
no children?”
Easy asked.

Nativia was greasing the skillet with a lump of ham fat.

“One in the kage down at Live Briar.
Two with a man in
Ko
.”

“You travel a lot, yeah?” Little Jon asked.

I played a slower tune that came far away, and she smiled at me as she dumped diced meat from a palm frond into the pan. Fat danced on the hot metal.

“I travel.” The smile and the wind and the mockery in her voice were delightful.

“You should find a man who travels too,” Easy suggested.

He has a lot of homey type advice for everybody.
Gets on my nerves sometimes.

Nativia shrugged.
“Did once.
We could never agree on what direction to go in. It’s his kid in the kage. Guy’s name was Lo Angel.
A beautiful man.
He could just never make up his mind where he wanted to go. And when he did, it was never where I wanted. No . . .” She pushed the browning meat across the crackling bottom. “I like good, stable, settled men who’ll be there when I get back.”

I began to play an old hymn-Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home. I’d learned it from a 45 when I was a kid. Nativia knew it too because she laughed in the middle of slicing a peach.

“That’s me,” she said.
“Bill La Bailey.
That’s the nickname Lo Angel gave me.”

She formed the meat into a ring around the edge of the pan. The nuts and vegetables went in now with a little salt water and the cover clanked on.

“How far have you traveled?” I asked, laying my knife on my stomach and stretching. Overhead, behind maple leaves, the sky was injured in the west with sunset, shadowed by east and night. “I’m going to travel soon. I want to know where there is to go.”

She pushed the fruit on to one end of the frond. “I once went as far as the City. And I’ve even been underground to explore the source-cave.”

Easy and Little Jon got very quiet.

“That’s some traveling,” I said. “La Dire says I have to travel because I’m different.”

Nativia nodded. “That’s why Lo Angel was traveling,” she said, pushing back the lid again. Pungent steam ballooned and dispersed. My mouth got wet. “Most of the ones moving were different. He always said I was different too, but he would never tell me how.” She pushed the vegetables into a ring against the meat and filled the center with cut fruit.
Cinnamon now over the whole thing.
Some of the powdered spice caught the flame that tongued the pan’s rim and sparks bloomed. On went the cover.

“Yeah,” I said. “La Dire won’t tell me either.”

Nativia looked surprised. “You mean you don’t know?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, but you can-
“ She
stopped. “La Dire is one of this town’s elders, isn’t she?”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe she’s got a reason not to tell you. I talked to her just a little while the other day; she’s a woman of great wisdom.”

“Yeah,” I said, rolling on my side. “Come on,
if you know, tell me
.”

Nativia looked confused. “Well, first you tell me. I mean what did La Dire say?”

“She said I would have to go on a journey, to kill whatever killed Friza.”

“Friza?”

“Friza was different, too.” I began to tell her the story. A minute into it,
Easy
burped, pounded his chest and complained about being hungry. He obviously didn’t like the subject. Little Jon had to get up and when he wandered off into the bushes, Easy went after him, grunting, “Call me when it’s finished. Dinner, I mean.”

But Nativia listened closely and then asked some questions about Friza’s death. When I told her about having to take a trip with Le Dorik, she nodded. “Well, it makes a lot more sense now.”

“It does?”

She nodded again. “Hey, you guys, dinner’s... ready?”

“Then can’t you tell me...?”

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand. I’ve done a lot more traveling than you. It’s just that a lot of different people have died recently, like Friza died.
Two down at Live Briar.
And I’ve heard of three more in the past year. Something is going to have to be done. It might as well get started here.” She pushed the cover off the pan again: more steam.

Easy and little Jon, who had been walking back up the stream, began to run.

“Elvis Presley!” Little Jon breathed. “Does that smell good! “ He hunkered down by the fire, dribbling.

Easy’s
adenoids began to rattle. When a cat does it, it’s purring.

I wanted to ask more
, but I didn’t want to annoy Easy and Little Jon; I guess I had acted
bad
with them, and they were pretty nice about it as long as I let it lie.

A frond full of ham, vegetables, and spiced fruit made me stop thinking about anything except what wasn’t in my belly, and I learned that a good deal of my metaphysical melancholia was hunger. Always is.

More conversation, more food, more entertainment.
We went to sleep right there by the stream, stretched on the ferns. Towards
midnight
when it got chilly we rolled into a pile. About an hour before dawn I woke.

I pulled my head from
Easy’s
armpit (and
Nativia’s
bald head moved immediately to take its place) and stood up in the star dark. Little Jon’s head gleamed at my feet. So did my blade. He was using it for a pillow. I slipped it gently from under his cheek. He snorted, scratched himself,
was
still. I started back through the trees in the direction of the kage.

Once I looked up at the branches, at the wires that ran from the power-shack to the fence. The black lines
overhead,
or the sound of the stream, or memory took me. Halfway, I started playing. Someone began to whistle along with me. I stopped. The whistle didn’t.

Where is he then?
In a song?

Jean Genet/
The
Screens

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.” Abe said, “God, you must be
puttin
’ me on!”

Bob Dylan/Highway 61 Revisited

Love is something which dies and when dead it rots and becomes soil for a new love . . . Thus in reality there is no death in love.

Par
Lagerkvist
/The Dwarf

“Le Dorik?” I said.
“Dorik?”

“In,”
came
a voice from the dark. “Lobey?”

“Lo Lobey,” I said. “Where are you?”

“Just inside the kage.”

“Oh. What’s the smell?”

“Whitey,” Dorik said. “
Easy’s
brother. He died. I’m digging a grave. You remember
Easy’s
brother-“

“I remember,” I said. “I saw him by the fence yesterday. He looked pretty sick.”

“That kind never last long.
Come in and help me dig.”

“The fence ...”

“It’s off. Climb over.”

“I don’t like to go in the kage,” I said.

“You never used to mind sneaking in here when we were kids. Come on, I’ve got to move this rock. Lend a foot.”

“That was when we were kids,” I said. “We did a lot of things when we were kids we don’t have to do now. It’s your job. You dig.”

“Friza used to come in here and help me, tell me all about you.”