Psyche (17 page)

She was no more than half-way along the length of the trough when she stumbled. She scarcely felt the sharp impact of her knees on the rough ground. Struggling to her feet, she tried to run again while she muttered incoherently. “They ain't gonna touch me—ain't gonna touch—they ain't”

The strong jerk of cruel fingers bit into her shoulder, almost lifting her off her feet. Swung round on her own momentum, she sensed rather than saw a hulking figure which seemed to tower over her, blotting out the grey ugliness of the slag with its own far uglier intent. Beyond thought or reason, for the moment scarcely sane, she kicked out with all the strength she had, while scream after scream, shrill and inhuman, tore from her restricted throat.

The youth who had caught her doubled up and dropped to the ground, writhing in agony. The other lunged too fast for her to kick again, and she was borne down, fighting like a wildcat, under a weight almost twice as great as her own. Clawing and spitting, primitive in her savage resistence, she heard neither the groans of one, nor the grating voice of the other, saying, “Shut up, you little bitch, or, by Jesus, I'll kill you!” All she heard was the high, piercing rhythm of her own screams, vibrating through her skull, drowning out everything but their own soul-shattering echoes.

Butch, a leviathan forging steadily toward its home port on a course where no other craft ever challenged its right of way, came to a sudden ponderous anchorage in a spot where he had never previously found cause to halt before. All around him rose dark ramparts, lifeless and cold, but from close at hand there came to his ears a sound so anguished in its pain and terror that the sweat sprang out on his low forehead, and his great barrel of a chest swelled with the furious intake of his breath. Turning in his tracks, he plunged forward with a wordless roar in the direction from which the sound came.

To the two youths—one in the act of pulling himself groggily upright, murder in his small eyes; the other tearing Psyche's skirt from her while he brought an open hand down over her mouth with brutal force—the big man was an appalling sight as he appeared over the ridge above them. A giant resurrected from the past, his huge arms already reaching out to crush them, his deep voice thundering his terrible wrath, he bore down upon them as if his sole thought was their utter annihilation.

The first of the attackers, forgetful of pain which was still excruciating, turned and fled. The second, scrambling to his feet, tripping clumsily over the girl in his awful haste, was too slow to escape. Even as he started to run, he was picked up bodily and hurled through the air, landing more than ten feet away with a sickening thud, to lie where he fell until nightfall when, one arm dangling from a smashed shoulder, he staggered away after the companion who had deserted him.

That he did not die, trampled to death under the enormous boots of an avenger who had no mercy, was a debt he owed to Psyche.

Butch, rage a red mist before his eyes, swayed for a full minute between finishing the job he had begun, and going to Psyche who, screaming no longer, crouched on the ground, twitching convulsively. His anxiety overcoming his fury, he went to her, and, dropping to his knees beside her, put an immense arm around her shaking shoulders.

“You're all right, kid. Butch is here. They won't try to hurt you no more. You hear me, kid? Butch got to you in time. You're all right. You don't need to worry no more.”

Over and over again he repeated his inarticulate reassurances until, at last, Psyche raised her white, bruised face from her hands, and looked up at him.

Butch, telling Mag about it later, made no effort to keep the pride and wonder out of his voice when he reached this point in his recital. “An' you know what the kid did then, Mag? She smiled, an honest-to-God smile, an' she says, ‘Butch,' she says, ‘you don't need to worry none over me. I'm okay now.' An'
comin' home she wouldn't let me carry her nor nothin'. I'm tellin' you, Mag, that's the best an' bravest kid I ever seen.”

“You're right about that. But it wouldn't have done her no good if you hadn't of come along,” Mag said soberly.

“Why do you reckon they picked on our kid? She ain't even growed proper.”

The wisdom of the ages was in Mag's slow reply. “She may be kinda skinny-like, but the kid's got somethin'—somethin' that ain't gonna bring her all joy.”

Mag sat up that night by Psyche's bedside.

“She won't sleep the night out,” she told Butch. “She'll wake an' mebbeneed somebody.”

Wrapped in an old cotton quilt, her untidy masses of red hair pushed up into a torn hairnet, she established herself in a derelict wicker chair, lifted her feet onto an unopened case of beer, and settled down to her vigil in darkness broken only by the glimmer of the one star hung in the corner of the window.

An hour passed, and then another. Psyche turned over again and again, and twice cried out, unintelligible sounds which died down to troubled mutterings which, in their turn, gave way to abnormally heavy breathing. It was after two oclock when she woke up.

“Mag——!”

“I'm right here, kid,” the big woman said softly.

Reaching out a hot hand, Psyche searched for, and found, the comfort of a firm, large clasp.

“Are you hungry, kid?”

“No.”

“You didn't have no dinner. I could fix you some soup.”

“No, I ain't hungry. Mag—I don't want to go back to school no more. I don't want to go never again.”

Mag had been ready for this. “You don't need to,” she said quietly. “Butch an' me, we don't want that you should, an' if any busybody comes around lookin' for you we'll say you're sixteen. Nobody can prove no different. You can read real good, an' you can write some. I reckon you got enough leamin'. From now on you can just stay to home where you won't have no troubles.”

“No troubles——” Psyche murmured, and, relieved not only of

immediate physical fear, but also of all the secret burdens of the past two years, fell into a deep, quiet sleep.

On an evening a few days later, Butch hitched his chair closer to the stove, cleared his throat noisily, and said, “I been thinkin'.”

Mag, easing her unruly curves into a more comfortable juxtaposition with the lumpy surface of the couch, sniffed derisively. “You're kiddin'.”

Unmoved, Butch repeated weightily, “I been thinkin'—suppos-in' them two bastards was to come here while I was away to the mines.”

Mag spared a glance toward the motionless curtain of the storeroom. Then, looking at Butch with more respect than she was in the habit of granting him, she said, “Yeah? You reckon it wouldn't be so good?”

“They're the meanest two bastards I ever come across,” Butch told her simply. “I seen ‘em, an' I knows. They was bloody scairt, but—I dunno. I been thinkin' it ain't awful safe for you an' the kid out here all alone like. Well, you knows that gun I bought when I left the force——”

“I ain't totin' no gun!” Mag interrupted flatly.

“I wasn't thinkin' of you,” Butch said. “I was wonderin' if mebbe the kid could get so's she could use it some.”

In the yellow lamplight Mag's broad, perpetually flushed face was a study in conflicting emotions. “You aim to teach shootin' to the kid?”

There was regret but no uncertainty in Butch's heavy voice. “I reckon I gotta. Things ain't the way they used to be. Seems as if there ain't no law an' order no more.”

A rough target was chalked on a plank which Butch set up at a little distance from the shack, and after that, on Sunday mornings while the garbage was being burnt, Psyche learned how to handle a heavy-duty Colt revolver. It was to be a long time before she made practical and, in some ways, disastrous use of the art of self-defense as taught to her, and both she and Butch, enjoying these sessions, almost forgot that there was any purpose in them
other than amusement. She proved an apt pupil, and was soon winning a fair proportion of the small bets they made between them.

“She's a natural for it,” Butch told Mag with great satisfaction.

“I can see that. She's gonna be better'n you afore long if you don't look out. But I don't see no need for her to be carryin' that thing week-days as well's Sundays.”

“Leave her be. She's just playin', an' she ain't got much to amuse her.”

This last was a truth which could not be very well denied, and from time to time it worried Mag that Psyche should be so much alone.

“It's a lousy shame there's no kids close for you to see,” she said to Psyche one day.

“I don't want none.”

“How's about that Polack kid a piece back from here? You musta knowed him at school.”

Psyche had known him. He was a boy with a liberally indulged penchant for lifting the girls' skirts, and a congenital dislike of the truth in any form. “I'd sooner be seen with a dead rat.”

Mag shrugged. She had done her duty. “Well, just as you say, kid. His folks don't speak English so good, so mebbe it's just as well. I don't want you for to get no furrin' way of talkin'.”

“I'd get me more'n that with that two-bit bastard,” Psyche remarked absently, and, lifting the gun holster down from a nail on the wall, buckled it firmly around her slender hips. “Think I'll go an' practice shootin' for a time. Butch an' me's havin' a competition come Sunday.”

“Mind you don't go out of the valley with that thing!”

“I won't.”

The slamming of the door, as Psyche went out, was not unlike a pistol shot. The sound still ringing in her ears, Mag looked at Feather Duster, lying forgotten on a shelf behind the stove, and sighed heavily without quite knowing why she should do so.

6

T
HE
next three years of psyche's life, cradled between her unhappy schooldays and the stormy night when she was to leave the slag for good, were peaceful and relatively contented.

The seasons flowed over the tarpaper shack in an orderly progression, effecting remarkably few visible changes in it. Late autumn winds scraped fresh rents in its vulnerable sides; wounds which Butch, in due course, transmuted into patches very soon indistinguishable from the scores of others that had preceded them. The deep, bitter frosts of winter heaved the unproductive, slate-hued ground, altering the slope of the shack's uneven floor, changing rather than sharpening the angle at which the shabby furniture leaned. Spring, when the snow melted from the sides of the slag hills to form transient lakes and waterways on the floor of the little valley, was, on the whole, kind to it; bringing nothing in the way of renewal, it yet took nothing away. And the molten disc of the summer sun no longer noticeably affected window-frames and a door bleached to the colour and texture of dried driftwood.

Butch and Mag suffered some change during this period, but they had reached a middle age where the mere passing of time simply served to make them more truly and wholly themselves. Small habits became more deeply ingrained, physical attributes more marked.

Butch's stubble field of hair was touched with grey, and he scratched it oftener. His round, brown eyes retreated further into
caves of friendly wrinkles, and his great shoulders strained more obviously at the seams of shirts which were never quite large enough for him.

Mag simply grew fatter, a state of affairs which led her into discarding any pretense at dressing properly. Equipping herself with an assortment of initially bright-coloured garments which she referred to as ‘wrappers', she was rarely seen in anything else. This concession to her vast size resulted in an almost complete cessation of the sporadic trips to town in which she had indulged in former years. A four-mile walk in, and consequently a four-mile walk back, was now too high a price to pay for what invariably turned out to be a poor movie, and a bottle of beer which she could drink more cheaply and comfortably at home. Although the supply was years in excess of the demand, she still knitted enormous vari-coloured socks for Butch; her only real occupation of any kind, she liked it for itself rather than for the dubious results achieved.

Psyche changed greatly, although it would have been difficult to assess that change in so many words, to notice any particular difference at any given time. She put on a little more weight, but not much. Her hair turned a darker gold, but she was still strikingly fair. The clean planes of her face grew firmer, less childish, but, except when she smiled, there was an innocence in her expression that was extraordinarily appealing. Her smile, amused, tolerant, and faintly challenging, was entirely adult.

The chief difference in her was that whereas formerly she had acted first and thought afterwards, now she had a considered purpose in nearly everything she did. However much she had disliked the school, it had nevertheless given her some idea of her potentialities, had made it impossible to return to the aimless existence she had led before she went there. On her own initiative she discovered three new fields to conquer in a place where previously she had thought she had explored every possibility.

They were an odd combination. Psyche's major interests between fifteen and eighteen. She read anything and everything she could lay her hands on, from the bloodied fragments of newsprint in which meat had been delivered, to the Bible. She found
she had a real flair for cooking, and developed it to the full. And, quietly and unobtrusively, she learned to play first-class poker.

When she first started hovering behind Butch on Saturday nights while he was playing cards with his three cronies, he did not like it. “Go away, kid,” he would rumble, “you give me the jumps.”

Later, because she never withdrew very far or for very long, he got used to her being there, and she would sit beside him on the scarred wooden bench, silent, but alert and observant. Eventually he would not play without her, and, if she were not there when he sat down to the table, would bellow, “Where's my little rabbit's foot?”