The Beyonders (10 page)

"Where do you want me to stand?" she asked.

He pointed with his pencil. "Right over there, and face to the side wall. Your figure will be opposite Gander Eye's in the painting. Here, let me take that robe. Now stand tall—wait, let your hair down. Shake it down on your shoulders. That's right. And you have your face lifted, as if you're looking at the man who will baptize you. Your hands will be held low, about at your waist, and join the fingers. Clasp them."

"Like this, Mr. Jim?" she asked.

"Yes, that's fine. Straighten your back." He sat down and began to sketch with orderly swiftness. "Slowly," he said, "you're magnificent. You're classically beautiful."

She seemed to flinch. Her bare breasts nodded, her cheeks flushed.

"No, Slowly, understand me when I talk. I'm speaking as an artist. Just now I spoke of what a fine physical specimen Gander Eye is."

"That's different," she said, almost in a whisper. "But me, standing here like this—I don't know why you said such a thing to me."

"I said it because it's true," said Crispin, sketching away. "I believe in speaking the truth."

"We should ought to speak the truth all the time," she said. "It would be a right much better world if we did that."

"Could we speak the truth?" he asked, smiling faintly in his beard. "I'm afraid nobody on earth could live the day out unless he told a lie or two. That's how life is. But I say the truth when I say you're classically beautiful, that you should be sculptured, too."

"Well," said Slowly, her clasped hands stirring together. "Well, thank you, Mr. Jim."

"Don't thank me," said Crispin, shaking his head. "I haven't had a single thing to do with making you beautiful. I only hope I can picture it decently."

"Decently," she repeated, and fell silent.

Crispin worked fast but not hurriedly, now and then smudging in shadows with the eraser or his fingers. At last he said, "Do you want to rest now? You can put on the robe. I've got a pot of coffee on the burner there. I always have some when I work indoors. Let me pour you a cup."

He took the pot and filled two cups. They stood and drank.

"I meant what I said, Slowly," Crispin assured her with quiet emphasis. "And I meant it in the right way. I was speaking like an artist about your beauty."

"Yes, sir," she said. "I reckon so. I believe you. I never took you any wrong way about it."

"There's no point in saying you ought to be a queen. Queens aren't really very much these days, except for presiding at elaborate parades and ceremonies." He gazed at her. "Though I don't doubt that you could perform well on occasions like those. But what I mean is, you deserve appreciation by the world. What is it you like to do best?"

Slowly held her cup thoughtfully, staring into it. "Why, about that, I reckon it's picking the guitar." She smiled at him. "Gander Eye declares I'm as good on the guitar as anybody there is anywhere in these parts."

"I've heard you, and I like the way you play. How would you like to play your guitar before great audiences, have rich pay and applause?" He looked at her searchingly. Then, when she only waited in silence, he added, "With Gander Eye on the banjo?"

"Why, yes, sir," she replied promptly. "I'd sure enough like that."

Crispin smiled in turn, rather sadly. "Here, Slowly, do you want to see my sketches? These are only the preliminaries—the first work, something to help me think out the painting problem." He handed her the drawing block. "And here," he said, "is another sketch I made of Gander Eye."

He held the sketch beside the block, so that the two figures seemed to stand face to face.

"You sure enough can draw things, Mr. Jim," Slowly declared.

"Thank you. Maybe I'm not so bad. I didn't even square the paper to guide my proportions. Squaring is something I stopped doing pretty early in my studying. Squaring the paper, I mean."

"What you a-going to get at next?"

"I'll work a little more on these pencil studies, and then work in oils on the background of the picture itself."

He pointed to the canvas on the easel.

"That's the ground work," he explained. "You see, it's going to be night. I'll work in the water and the bank of the pool, and the moon up here in the sky, and the people standing with their lanterns. All those things are mainly background. They'll take time, so I'll just give you and Gander Eye a day or two of rest before I work with you again, with oils."

"Night," said Slowly. "Is that color black enough for night?"

Crispin smiled. "The night is never really black. Shadows aren't completely black. It took Rembrandt to get that across to the world of painters."

"Rem-brandt," she said the name. "Who's he?"

"He was an extremely clear-eyed Dutchman long ago. Well I'll work to get it right, the sky and the people watching and so on, and that's going to take a while. So, as I say, you and Gander Eye can both have some rest from standing up so motionlessly. When I work with you again, I'll use oils."

"All right, Mr. Jim."

"And I'm grateful to both of you."

Slowly went to put on her blouse, came out, and left the cabin. Crispin stared fixedly at the door as it closed behind her. His eyes had trouble in them, tenderness in them.

But he continued his work on the pencilled drawings and then on the canvas until it was time to go to Doc's for supper. Doc gave him the promised signal flag. It was a square of grubby dark cloth, slung to a pole made of a cherry sapling. When Crispin returned to his cabin, Struve was there, making himself a sandwich while he studied the canvas.

"I see you're back at your painting," he greeted Crispin. "Do you figure that will fit in with your real job here?"

"I have two of the best and most interesting people in Sky Notch posing for me."

"One of them's interesting, all right," said Struve, picking up the drawing block to smirk at the drawing of Slowly. "Well, I've been doing some fairly profitable business myself. I had a conversation with Mayor Ballinger."

"Should you be talking to these people?" asked Crispin.

Struve helped himself to wine from a bottle. "Oh," he said, "I know what I'm doing. I strolled from upslope into his back yard, where he was weeding his vegetable garden. I complimented him on his onions and his potatoes. We became quite friendly, and when he introduced himself I said that I'd heard some good things about him, from his party bosses in Asheville."

Crispin sat in the chair in front of the easel. "And what did he say to that?"

"He acted becomingly flattered and said that he tried to be cooperative. Then I got around to asking him, what if a bunch of scientific development people came here and made a fine town of Sky Notch, with building operations and all sorts of improvements? I wouldn't give him the full information just yet, I said, but he could call them the Beyonders, Incorporated."

"Is that all you told him?" Crispin asked.

"It was quite enough for the time being. He smiled happily and said he could be depended on to work with such a group, to help any way he could. I gather that he thinks Beyonders, Incorporated, really plans to achieve something here sort of Las Vegas style. He hinted that he could be highly useful. It was more or less a good, profitable little preliminary talk."

"And so you think he's as good as enlisted," said Crispin.

"I do. He's the typical cog in a complex machine. But he's not necessarily the only cog. He could easily be pulled out and replaced.

"Why, as to that," said Struve, "I've told you about my talk with Gander Eye Gentry. He wasn't as instantly receptive as Ballinger, but maybe that can be worked out. I value his potential abilities."

"You respect him," said Crispin. "You admire him. So do I."

"No," and Struve shook his broad head. "I didn't say I respected or admired him. I said I valued what he might be. That doesn't have to be the same thing at all."

X

The weekly meeting of the Sky Notch town board took place on Monday night after supper, at Longcohr's store. Mayor Ballinger presided with something of heavy-faced mystery as Doc, Bo, and Longcohr discussed problems of garbage pickup, the digging of a new well for the water supply, the repainting of the street signs. Slowly sat at the checkout counter, silently keeping the minutes of the meeting. Several citizens were there, as usual, Gander Eye among them, lounging to listen as though to the latest episode of a soap opera on television. At last Ballinger leaned back in his old chair and addressed the whole assembly.

"Neighbors, I've got a little something that has to be discussed in private," he said. "Could I ask you to just let us have a few minutes of a closed meeting? All I can say in public is that there may be good news coming to Sky Notch, for everybody to hear in future."

"Why sure, we'll leave," said Gander Eye, rising and leading the way out of the building. Slowly and the board members looked at their mayor in expectant wonder.

"All right, gentlemen," began Ballinger when they had the store to themselves. "Yes, you too, Slowly. What I've got to talk about is what they call privileged communication—classified information. I reckon I can depend on each and all to keep it to ourselves for the time being. Right?"

"Right," agreed Doc for all of them.

"If it's secret stuff, why don't we all go into the storeroom back behind yonder?" suggested Longcohr. "There won't be nobody a-walking in on us then."

"A good idea," approved Ballinger, and they rose and walked to the rear of the store, where a separate room contained tools, a dented filing cabinet, and jumbles of unpacked goods. There were also chairs and a scarred old table. Longcohr closed and latched the door behind them, and Ballinger drew out a chair next to the storeroom's single window. He sat down with even more ceremony than usual.

"There's folks got their eye on this little town of ours," he announced. "One of them come round to talk to me a couple of days ago. Slowly, you don't have to make this part of the record."

He proceeded to rise to a true height of mingled eloquence and equivocation as he described his interview with a stranger named Struve, apparently from New York, who said that an organization called Beyonders, Incorporated, had in mind a project to develop and enrich Sky Notch. "He says it's scientific," said Ballinger, and winked at Bo. "He would not say more about what that project was, or in what development it dealt, though he assumed the air of one who might say a great deal. He summed up by saying that there was a high promise of prosperity, for the town as a whole and for its residents as individuals.

"And I'm a-hoping to hear more in the very near future," he said happily. "I've asked you members of the town board to receive this information as confidential, because we've got to get more details and perhaps some kind of signed agreement before we make anything public. But it sounded to me like something profitable all around, and I want to ask you to go along with me on it, give me the power to negotiate."

"Why doesn't your friend Mr. Struve come here and talk to all of us?" asked Doc. "That would be the businesslike thing, if it's going to be businesslike."

"I gathered the notion that he was only sounding me out in advance," replied Ballinger, "I'll be a-getting him here to a meeting, you can count on that. But I want your cooperation, want to know I've got it the very next time he comes a-visting me."

"If it means better business of any kind, you can count me in," said Bo Fletcher.

"Better business for all of us, you said," reminded Longcohr. "Right now, I'm a-scratching a living with this store, because folks come trade with me for old time's sake. But if there'll be a growth to Sky Notch, that's liable to mean a supermarket or so, and lots of new people moving in, and they'll be a-trading with them supermarkets for new time's sake. I ain't a-being selfish, but I got to look out for number one. Nobody else ever got anywhere a-looking out for anybody but their own number one."

"I'll mention your case to Mr. Struve," Ballinger promised him. "What about you, Doc? Both Bo and Bill seem to want to go along."

Doc rumpled his white mane. "My first impulse was to cast my vote against it," he confessed. "Where I'm concerned, I'm right well pleased with Sky Notch the way things are. But then I reflect that I'm an old man, with no more family than a rogue elephant, and that I shouldn't stand in the way of development just because I'm more or less agrarian and antediluvean in my personal tastes."

"Which I take to mean, you're with the idea, too," said Ballinger with deep satisfaction.

"I'm with it if it's legitimate," said Doc. "If it's a good, practical sort of development plan for us, with respectable people back of it. What I suggest here—I won't make it in the form of a motion, this is more or less just a conference, not a meeting—is that we try to find out what this Beyonders, Incorporated, might be. You say your new friend comes from New York. Perhaps I can ask a couple of New Yorkers I know to check up on him for us."

"Do that thing, Doc," urged Bo. "Doc's right, we should ought to find out a little something for ourself about this. Find out if these newcome folks want their hair cut, for instance. I sure enough can do that for them."

On that agreement, the meeting broke up and filed out of the store. Behind it, Gander Eye rose from where he had knelt to eavesdrop at the window and moved cautiously among trees in Bo Fletcher's yard and the yard beyond.

He came out into Main Street under the light of the half-moon and fell into step beside Slowly as she walked toward her little shelter beside the old schoolhouse.

"What you a-doing out, Gander Eye?" she asked him.

"I just seen you and I thought I'd walk you home," he said diffidently. "All right?"

"It's all right with me."

They walked in silence for a score of paces. Gander Eye spoke at last.

"That was funny to have that there closed meeting," he said. "I've sort of got it in my mind, that ain't the law. Town meetings should ought to be open."

"Oh, it quit being a town meeting," said Slowly. "I never even wrote down the minutes. It was just something Mr. Ballinger wanted to talk over with the others."

That sounded like an invitation to change the subject, and Gander Eye changed it. "I've been a-standing up at Jim Crispin's for him to paint me."

"I'm a-doing that," said Slowly. "Mr. Jim's a gentleman."

"You sound like as if you like him, " said Gander Eye.

"Don't all the folks in this whole town like him? He was a-talking about how you and me might could play music for big town audiences."

"He said that?" Gander Eye half snapped out. "Hark at me, Slowly, you ever meet up with a fellow round near named Struve?"

"Struve?" she echoed, and paused. "Nobody of that name, no. Is he somebody you know?"

"Ain't a fellow I want to know any better than I do," said Gander Eye with complete honesty. "He's big built, he's a sure enough hairy somebody— looks to need a shave all over, each day of the week."

She lifted her shapely shoulders. "That sounds scary."

"No, ma'am," said Gander Eye. "He ain't scary, he just thinks he is."

He knew he could say no more than that without confessing that he had eavesdropped on the town meeting. Not that he felt ashamed, but he had no wish to confess it to Slowly. They walked across the yard of the old school. She stood with her hand on the door of the lean-to shed.

"Is there anything else, Gander Eye?" she asked him, her eyes aslant, touched by the moonlight.

"Nothing else, I reckon," was all he could let himself say. "Except, it's been good a-talking with you, Slowly." He summoned his courage. "Are you all right?" Again he summoned it. "I mean, are you a-feeling happy just now?"

She smiled, and he quivered at the smile. "Yes," she said, "I'm happy just now." She waited, but he said no more. "Good night, Gander Eye."

She went inside and closed the door. Gander Eye turned and walked off alone, cursing himself for not saying more, for not saying less. How Bo Fletcher and Doc Hannum would devil him if they knew how he was always lost for the right word when he was talking to Slowly Kimber. Hell, even Duffy Parr must have been better talking to her than he was.

Under his breath he sang himself lines from his song, the one he never sang except to himself:

"I'm a man in this world of men,

A many bold deed I've dared,

But when I meet Slowly face to face,

I stand there a-feeling scared."

God damn it, that was true. But Slowly was all that scared him. Not Struve. Not whatever it was that went slinking around Sky Notch. Gander Eye entered his house and made a promise to himself. He'd go up yonder again, the fourth time in these last few days. He'd try to find out more, right in the heart of the Kimber territory.

He made himself wake up long before the sun rose. Quickly he gobbled cold corn bread and drank coffee, then put on his leaf-patterned clothes and his cleated boots. Into his pocket he shoved his pistol, but again he did not take a rifle. Instead he picked up a favorite stick from where it leaned in a comer. It was a length of hickory, tough and springy, whittled to a point at one end and furnished with a leather loop for his wrist at the other. He also took a bottle of soda with a twist-off cap.

Out he went into the darkness. The moon was down. He told himself it was lucky that the houses on either side of him stood empty and that no more houses were below him on the street toward Bull Creek. He was all that moved on Main Street. He wondered if Struve was stirring, somewhere or other. Well, Gander Eye wouldn't go up the Kimber road this time. If anybody was up there today, looking for him, they'd be disappointed.

He came to the corner at the end of Main Street between Longcohr's store and Duffy's station and turned to walk along the road on the Dogged Mountain side. He passed a house, set back in a scooped-out niche in the rock. A dog barked, but did not run out to threaten him. He tramped along to a place where the mountain rose steeply above the way out for the road. The dawn was coming up by then, enough to let him see to climb.

Vigorously he assaulted the upward way. He had to climb on all fours, searching for rough holds for hands and feet, but he made it up to where things weren't quite so perpendicular. On he swarmed, higher and higher. He found brushy trees to take hold of and help him. Finally he rose erect and climbed upward at a crouch.

These mountains weren't as tall as the Rockies, he'd heard over and over, but they were plenty for anybody to dare, even somebody who was used to climbing them. He remembered Doc Hannum saying that once these Appalachians had been as high as the Rockies, but they were worn down because they were so old. Gander Eye wondered if once they had been roamed by monsters now extinct, giant lizards or big, shaggy bears and lions.

He took an hour to reach a place where the going was something near to a level. The climb had made him breathe hard. He pulled out his bottle of drink, twisted the cap off, and took a mouthful of the sweetly tangy liquid. He did not swallow it, but swished it all around the inside of his mouth until it seeped away inside him. He recapped the bottle and fared onward toward where Dogged Mountain would come to one of its various tops.

That particular top was a bald, with tufts of grass among the slabs of rock that lay on it like a sort of pavement. A crow flew overhead, cawing about Gander Eye being there. It hadn't cawed as he approached; it could hardly have seen anything else to caw about. Gander Eye did not come out from among the trees to go over the bald, but skirted it all the way around to the far side. A gentler slope went down there. He thought he could make out where the Kimber road ran in the distance. He ventured in that direction.

He listened and looked about him at every step, though it was hard, even for Gander Eye Gentry, to listen and look everywhere at once. So quietly he moved that when he slid under a tall pine with a squirrel in its top branches, the squirrel was not excited into scolding at him. Pretty good for me, he thought; if I can fool a squirrel, I can fool Struve.

He moved downward upon another, gentler slope. It was nearly ten o'clock by his watch when he came upon a disquieting and familiar splotch of brown on low-growing leaves. That was the scorch mark he had come to know, the trace left here and there where he had rambled. Beyond the shrivelled leaves appeared another brownness on the trunk of a pine, as though a heated something had leaned there. Gander Eye stooped low and darted glances all around. But he seemed to be alone in the woods.

This was more or less Kimber hunting grounds, he told himself. Maybe the Kimbers knew what else roamed there. Gander Eye would almost welcome a challenge from a Kimber, one of the reasonable sort who might listen to questions and give helpful answers.

With even more gingerly care than ever, he advanced down the wooded mountain side. He felt that he knew what he would find, and after some minutes he found it. He peered through trees into the open space with that great cluttered mass of jagged boulders, set to dominate the road below. He surveyed it for the space of half a dozen breaths. That was an ugly arrangement, and no mistake. Yet again he gazed all around him before he moved to the right among the trees, clear of the upper line of those rocks. He gained a point well beyond them, opposite the place where the road dipped downward toward the Kimber settlement, and he stopped to drink more of his soda and make new plans.

He had no intention of descending to the road itself. Some of the Kimbers might be there to turn him back; just possibly Struve might be afoot on that rough travelway, or even one of those beings he couldn't guess about. His sense of direction set him toward another high comb of the mountain, and when he had climbed that, he planted his staff on the rocks and looked along a plunging declivity where trees grew in thick belts. Above their tops he made out a distant clearing, green with grass and centered by an oval pond, bright in the morning sun.