The Outcasts (17 page)

They were in Tall Boy's hands. Morrison had been his first passenger, riding high across the gorge in an improvised sling, debarking on the south rim and marking spots for the diamond drills. The drillers rode across later on a wooden platform, trailing cables, and Morrison followed, still later, with dynamite. He lit a long fuse and repaired to his sling, and Tall Boy reeled him in, and trundled the crane to safety, and the men took cover, and in time there came a great roar, earth- and soul-shattering, echoing off a dozen slopes, dying with a hollow, rumbling, syncopated coda as tons of rock thundered into the gorge. “Very satisfactory,” Philips murmured. Dust billowed like ground fog. Morrison wondered what Bawi was thinking. Then he blew the near lip, and where there had been two sheer walls there were two deep, roomy hollows, like recessed thrones from which two stony, hostile gods might glower; and when those had been leveled and cleared, the bridge was begun.

From the hollows grew a tangle of scaffolding, and on that scaffolding grew a strong, graceful arch of wooden forms. Jacob thought that the forms were the bridge, and they all laughed, and Philips explained: they were called falsework, and when they had met at the center, concrete would be poured into them, and when the concrete had set, which would take many days in this heat, that would be the bottom of the bridge. Then they would bolt supports in place and throw a road across. What road? Jacob asked, and Philips pointed to the slabs that Serpa's men had brought: those, he said, and eight more like them still to come, and he explained that concrete could be poured and set anywhere and then moved, placed in position and bolted just like planks. Jacob nodded wisely. It was apparent that he would soon be explaining this to others. Ramesh cuffed him affectionately.

There were forty of them, and they drove up every morning on trucks, hoods, running-boards, and went back to camp at noon and into the stream like lemmings. The north rim of the gorge was a depot, a bustling park of trucks, piles of rock, stacks of lumber, pyramids of bagged cement, mazes of steel wire and electric cable, barrels of nails and heavy bolts, cases of tools and blades and spare bits, nests of canvas, coils of rope, drums of oil, mounds of sand. Dust rose everywhere, pink dust off tires, white dust off stone and cement, yellow-gray dust where the jackhammers bored, sawdust from the power saws. And the men swam in heat. The pestilential sun drew endless scorching ripples off overworked motors; the jackhammers at noon were too hot to touch. Men snarled and choked and sweated, and the dust matted on their sweat. The noise was constant: hammers bucking and stuttering, saws singing, compressors drumming, engines barking and whining, rock rattling and the earth itself growling. The Land-Rover buzzed in and out like a hornet. The men sweated through skins of dust and took the name of God in many tongues. Faces cracked and peeled, eyes reddened, throats closed, skins gleamed. Long lines of sullen men besieged the tank-truck. A heap of hard hats lay unworn. “No one can blame them,” Philips said. “It is too damned hot, and the hats are heavy.” So Morrison tossed his own on the heap, and reverted to the jockey cap. Eminent haberdasher assumes purple.

What matter? He was not really working. He sat in the shade and admired Philips, who instructed carpenters, wire lathers, Tall Boy and the oilers. Even Ramesh, and naturally Jacob, went to Philips for orders. Between Philips and Tall Boy a new language sprang up, all verbs, yet all gestures. Without Tall Boy and his toy there was no bridge. Until the arch was completed, the carpenters worked from a platform, and the platform hung from Tall Boy's boom. Tall Boy sat higher than any man, grim and omnipotent, and rarely smiled before sunset. Is there a God? There is now. It weighs fifty tons and Tall Boy is its prophet.

Then in momentary disquiet Morrison busied himself. He stood with the men who were screening stones. Shake and rattle: abrasive dust. He played briefly in the sandpiles. He read labels on bags of cement. He went to Philips and grumbled. “Hey boss. You got work for me?”

“Grab a broom,” Philips said. They contemplated the growing wooden arch, carpenters clinging and hammering, the sun fierce, the mystery of the gorge dwindling, defeated. “It will do,” Philips said. “They really care, have you noticed that?”

“Yes. So do I. So do you.”

“Oh yes. We will need more burlap. We should pour next week.”

“You want me to go get it?”

“No. We can pick it up on the weekend.”

“All right. It would only break up my day. Anyway I just dropped by to say hello.”

Philips smiled demurely. “Nice to see you again.”

“Yes,” Morrison said. “Isn't it. Good luck with your bridge.”

“Thank you,” Philips said. “Were you planning to be here long?”

“Just passing through,” Morrison said politely. “Good day.”

Ramesh drooped, sighed, fanned himself. “Damn and blahst. I am played out. I have worked too hard. To the detriment of my serenity and detachment.” It was Friday night, and even Philips sat subdued.

“Get another man.”

Ramesh brightened: “Truly? But where?”

“One of the men will have a brother or a son,” Philips said. “Ask them tonight. You will have a man by Monday.”

“I will, I will. How simple. But the expense.” Moths embraced his lamp. Philips was smoking a rare cigarette; smoke rose like a string in the still night.

“Hang the expense,” Morrison said. “Devoe, Sims and Wheeler looks after its own. What would it be? Ten dollars a week? You know, something has happened to my tongue. The beer is marvelous. Everything I taste is rich and spicy.”

“It is the gourmet food,” Ramesh said primly.

“It is the hard work,” Philips said. “Sitting about all day.”

“Don't make fun of me.” Morrison yawned. “I'm the last representative of a dying imperialism. We've saved a lot of money on the bridge. Left-over stone and local products.”

“Cheap labor,” Philips said.

“Cheap labor,” Morrison agreed. “Underpaid engineers. We can afford an extra bus boy. If Philips would give up women we could afford two.”

“Crazy man! Give up women,” Philips said. “Come and get drunk tomorrow night. Use up some of that excess energy.”

“All right. Try anything once.”

“I will stop here,” Ramesh said. “I am very tired.”

“I think Moe should be your bus boy,” Philips said. “It would solve all the problems in one stroke.”

“Can't do that,” Morrison said promptly. “Lose face with the natives. Open the floodgates. Revolution.”

“Natives,” Philips said in disgust. “You are a bloody wog yourself. All brown and half dressed and lying about while decent people work.”

“A wog.” Morrison was delighted. “Marvelous. Then I am part of the revolution of rising expectations.”

“The next step is wog bint,” Philips jeered.

“What?” Morrison sat straighter. “Bint. Tell me about that. What is bint?”

“You do not know?”

“No.”

“What do they teach you—”

“You said that before. What is it?”

“It is British soldiers' slang for native women. Not very complimentary, by the way.”

Morrison lay on the hard earth and laughed. Stars spun above him; he howled.

“What is so funny?”

“Nothing,” he gasped. “Nothing. You can beat it out of me after the revolution.”

“It is nice to see you,” Martha said warmly as they shook hands in the soft light of late afternoon.

“It's nice to be back.”

“Try not to bust up my steady customers.”

“I am the most peaceful of men.” Morrison smiled. “Let's sit down. Will you take a drink?” Almost he had said tek ah dreenk.

“No. But I will have coffee with you.” She led him to a table. “It is early in the day for drinking. Where did Philips run off to?”

“Burlap. He went to town to pick up some burlap.”

She gestured to Emanuel. “What will you have, and what is the use of burlap?”

“Coffee,” he said, and she said, “Two,” and Emanuel went away, and then Morrison said, “Concrete must not be allowed to dry too quickly. In heat like this above all. It is made of stones and sand and cement and water, with steel rods inside, and if it dries too quickly it shrinks away from the stones and steel and becomes brittle and weak. So after we pour it we cover it with burlap, and we keep the burlap wet for several days. We also use chemicals in the concrete to slow the drying.”

“My, my,” she said.

“Yes. Very complicated. That the success of a fine bridge should depend on burlap. And how is business?”

“Steady,” she said.

“It will be unsteady tonight,” he said.

They laughed together like friends, and Emanuel came with coffee.

“You are not the same,” she said. “You are younger. There is something new inside you. Tell me what has happened.”

“I can't,” he said after a moment. “I really can't. I don't know. But in the last little while I've been telling myself that I don't want to go back. When I came here I thought I might die here, an accident, disease, whatever, and I remember wondering if I'd ever get back. Now I don't want to. It's like starting again. As if all the old sins were canceled.”

“But that is not how you start again,” she said. “You start again from inside, and not by going to a new place. Though it is not for me to say.”

“You may be wrong. In French they say a new place changes the ideas. But you may be right, too, because you are a nice old Martha, with a good head on you,” he said, and then, “there: you see? That's the kind of thing I wouldn't have said three months ago. Couldn't have. But I like telling you now.”

“And why not? So you are different. And where are you going?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I really don't know. But getting there is half the fun, as they say.”

“Fun,” she said. “If it is real it will not be fun always. Sooner or later you arrive, and sometimes it is not the place you set out for.”

Which subdued him momentarily, but did not avert a long and happy night of rum, lies, and music. Not to mention an impromptu beauty contest at about three, won by Lollie with Morrison a close second.

Time itself altered. Days were measured in falsework, in steel rods anchored like bones, in the clank and belch of concrete mixers. Time seemed to drown in the timeless forest and eternal sun; seemed to replace distance as a measure, so that Morrison was not so many miles from Devoe, or from New York or Colorado or the war, but so many sunrises, so much carpentry, so many friends, so much concrete, so many desires, so much fulfillment. And time moved only the one way: no round trips. Every morning meal, every eddy of dust, every carrion crow and every lion fly and every hairy spider, every half ton of concrete and every bottle of rum or beer, every grin from Bawi and every snarl from Philips, all took him beyond recall and beyond appeal. Those were frontiers that closed behind the traveler. Not with a clang like gates, but with a rustle like grass.

He crossed another of those frontiers on a morning in August, when Tall Boy poured the last section, the hinge, the center. Tall Boy scooped up half a ton of wet concrete and dropped it like whipped cream. Again. And again. The fourth time Morrison called to him. “I'm going up. Let me get aboard.”

“The cables may be hot,” Philips said.

“I want to see it from above.”

Tall Boy dangled the bucket; Morrison stepped out onto it. The cables were only warm. Then he was rising into the sunlight, with no signal, Tall Boy obliging. The men stopped work to watch, and shaded their eyes. He saw the bridge as he would never see it again; as in his drawings, yet not his own. It lay sprawled beneath him, almost ugly with the forms still in place; but it was a bright white, and its line was an austere melody, and it was all of Bernard Morrison that would survive. He knew that there would never again be one like this, as there was never again a first love.

The bucket hovered; it opened suddenly, vomiting wet concrete. Morrison drew the garnet quickly from his pocket, kissed it for luck, and tossed it into the creamy flow. With a kind of prayer; but to whom, or for what, he could not have said. It flashed purple in the sunlight, and was drowned.

Morrison's arm dipped, and Tall Boy swung him out and down, down, below the level of the bridge, far below, into deep shade. His sweat dried; he was cold; the sky vanished. The walls of the gorge were moist; below him black rocks stood blacker and sharper, black water boomed white. He saw a stranded plank, remembered a dropped hammer, and gave thanks that no man had been lost. The bridge of vines lay limp against the wall, clinging like a nest of vipers. Below, he saw no birds; heard only the boom and rush of the river.

From there his arch was ugly, only wooden forms and scaffolding. Far, far beyond, the sky again, and a solitary carrion crow.

He too was solitary now. The sun ennobled solitude; in this dank shadow solitude was a fearful loneliness. His hand was clammy on the cable, and melancholy nipped him like a moist breeze. He shivered, conscious once more of his flesh and its sad vulnerability; he dangled joyless. When he saw Philips peering down from the lip, he peered back, and their eyes locked for long seconds. Morrison felt rue, need, the desolate chill of exile; and pleaded silently that Philips lift the ban.

Philips raised a clenched fist, and Morrison rose.

They stood at sunset inspecting twenty meters of wet burlap. Sunsets were pure in the dry, cloudless air; at dawn the sky was shot with pinks and purples, but at dusk a bright orange penny settled into its slot, tugging night after it.

“Not bad,” Philips said.

“I hope it dries white,” Morrison said.

“It will.”

After another moment Morrison said, “And no one killed or hurt.”

“No. Not yet.”

“Did you know,” Morrison said slowly, “that in the old days when a bridge was finished the builders sacrificed a virgin and threw her into the stream?”