The Outcasts (5 page)

“No, no,” Morrison said, when he could talk. “I was remembering my mother. ‘Bernard,' she said, ‘there are some things we do not discuss at the table.'”

The guitarist drifted off and came back with a full glass. He was not bothering to smile.

“So they bought tractors,” Goray said. They were drinking brandy. The room was hot and full of smoke and music. So was Morrison; also too much food and too much drink. Possibly too much Goray. “All very modern. A revolution in agriculture. Of course they were spending money, which we do not have, for the equivalent of labor, which we have too much of. And then the tractors were used only a few weeks a year.” Equivlint of laybah, he said. Few wiks a yah. “And then petrol and oil are expensive. And mechanics are scarce. So the tractors rusted and died. But in isolated spots the harvest went up that year, so the other farmers believed that they could not be better farmers without expensive equipment.”

The Portuguese was softly blurred. He was reading a newspaper and smoking a black cigar. The guitarist had tilted his chair against a post and was sitting on the back of his neck.

“Some of them—it goes back a long, long way, before the migrations—knock out two front teeth, upper or lower. Not just a barbaric custom; no. Lockjaw. In case of lockjaw they can still be fed. You must not make the mistake of thinking us primitive.”

Morrison looked to Philips for help; Philips avoided his glance. “Developing,” Morrison said.

“Ah yes.”

It was banana brandy. Goray loved it. Morrison tried to resist but now Philips's eyes warned him.

“You people are afraid of life because you think that happiness demands punishment. So you forestall the fates by taking on the miseries of other people. People that you do not honestly care a fig for. You become crusaders, and annoy everybody.”

“Well, I don't know.” Morrison was very uncomfortable. His own country, after all. Did he talk about Goray's country that way? No. By God. No. “Anyway that sounds out of date.”

“Ah, no. There is a missionary here, one Montgomery …”

The Portuguese was gone but the room was still quite smoky. The guitarist was sitting on the floor, and now all his tunes were sad tunes. His woman had run off to Rio. There were no women in the restaurant. Waiters yawned.

“You have been asked to love your neighbor as yourself, which is plainly impossible. All your religions and philosophies ask the impossible. So you feel terrible in public about everything and make speeches about saving other countries from fates worse than death. That way you need not admit that you do not love them at all. Frankly I can think of no fate worse than death.”

“I'm just an engineer.” Philips would not help him. God damn Philips.

Plink plink. The guitarist lay flat, plinking.

“All right. Just one more. We leave in the morning, you know.”

Goray poured.

“You are évolué. You are beyond death. Instead of death you have hospitals and flowers and heaven. Here we still have death. That is why you cannot win your small wars. Because you are fighting people who know death. You refuse to know it.”

“I know death,” Morrison said. “I have been up to my ass in death.” The room had tilted slightly, or perhaps it was his chair. He seemed to be smoking, or at any rate holding, a very bad cigar. “Covered with blood. Amputated arms and legs stacked in a corner.”

“Not the same,” Goray interrupted.

“I would bloody well like to know why not,” Morrison bellowed.

On the bare white ceiling a green lizard flicked his green tail. Plink.

“I don't know what the hell to say to you. Except that you're wrong. A lot of us do care. You seem to know a hell of a lot about a place you've never been to.” Morrison knocked over his glass: tinkle, ooze.

The room was almost empty. At one table a waiter slept, gray head pillowed on his crossed arms. Goray was huge. He puffed smoke. The lizard was gone. The horizontal guitarist stared dully toward them; with his thumb he plinkplinkplinked. Morrison rubbed his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Just one more.” Philips! Philips!

“Unless you admit that you are not more than momentarily perturbed by distant cruelties, you will always be capable of committing them. Until you admit that you do not really weep for Hiroshima, you will make no start on preventing another.”

“God-damn right I don't weep for Hiroshima. It saved ham a mill—half a million lives.”

“Nagasaki, then.”

“That too.”

“They were ready to surrender.”

“They why didn't they?”

“You had to forestall the Russians.”

“Not me. I was in a hospital in France. And what's wrong with sore—with forestalling the Russians? I don't want to kill people!” Morrison was suddenly shouting; the old waiter stirred. “I hate killing! I never killed anybody and I don't want to kill anybody!”

The guitarist was flat on the floor and apparently unconscious. The room heaved and buckled. Goray swam toward him and away. Morrison was covered with sweat and his own hot fat.

“Well, I know that you would not hesitate to drop one on a colored country. I suppose you might even drop one on a white country. And then enjoy an orgy of self-recrimination.”

“You must hate us,” Morrison said. Tears rose to his eyes; they brimmed. Ridiculous. “We
did
hesitate. We
do
hesitate. Who's we?
I
hesitate. There.
I
sure God hesitate.”

“But who are you?”

Morrison brightened. “Now that's a question I can answer. I am Bernard Morrison, master of civil engineering and acknowledged worrier. Full of banana brandy, and sure of only one thing in life: it is time to go home. I
know
that. In my blood and my bones I know it. And my belly.”

Goray was gone and the night was starry; stars swooped and swam. Morrison's arm was around Philips's shoulders, and when he looked down there was the billygoat, sneering and yellow-eyed.

“The devil,” he said. “That was it. When I was a boy, they told me what the devil looked like, and there he is.”

“Just a little he-goat,” Philips said soothingly.

“You're a great help. Where were you when I needed you? You let that fat bastard tromp all over me.”

“This way,” Philips said. “Easy now.”

Outside the hotel Morrison shook him off.

“Forty years ago,” Philips said, “they hanged his father for political reasons.”

3

Then was his head puffed up and his heart minished, an ague upon him and his very corpuscles reeking banana. Philips woke him at five; he thrashed his way reluctantly to the surface of his shame, and masked the shame in groans and grumbles, and sat on the bed rocking and keening like a crone bereaved.
“This
is primitive. Barbarous. Undeveloped. Waking a sick man at five in the morning.”

“Take a shower,” Philips said. “I will order breakfast.”

“Coffee. Just coffee. Forgive me. This is terrible.”

“New lands, new drinks,” Philips said. “A shower. Brush your teeth.”

“Yes.”

“It was that brandy,” Philips said. “We drank two bottles.”

“And you drank almost none.”

Philips smiled faintly. “And I drank almost none. I rarely drink much. When I do, you will know it. I fight and shout, and the next day I lie dying all day long. No one has a monopoly on mistakes, as I believe you stated last night.”

Morrison noticed, squinting and blinking, that the whites of Philips's eyes were clear, and seemed to remember that they had been clear after that first morning. “Had you been drinking the night before I got here?”

“Yes. And then up at three to do my duty.”

“God.” Morrison shuddered, truly: his body quivered. “Sorry. If you felt anything like this you must have hated me.”

Philips made no answer.

“Did I insult Goray?”

“No,” Philips said shortly. “Goray likes you.”

“Then he is a man of great tolerance and easy affections. I was shouting at one point.”

“You were shouting at several points. Shouting is normal and natural, and better than brawling.”

“Brawling.” Morrison winced. Worse than a tourist. “All right. Ready in a minute. But drive carefully, please. I am not a well man.”

“You will be well. As soon as we are out of the city.”

He meant more than that: it was an incantation, a prophecy, and his low voice and grave face were the voice and face of a pagan priest, who had talked with the sun and the river.

He had built a good road, poor dead Van Alstyne: left that much behind him, not the ordinary tropical rut, and it would endure. His immortality, as the bridge might be Morrison's. Beneath them was hard rolled rock, and broken stone, and a layer of crushed rock and stone, and then red earth, clayey and cohesive so that the dust behind them was a thin pink plume and not a gassy billow. Every fifty meters a narrow slash ran obliquely from the gutter to a sump in the brush. That seemed a nicety, and Morrison questioned it. “The rains are of an extraordinary violence,” Philips insisted.

The jungle, close on either hand, skimmed by at fifty miles an hour. Morrison searched and peered, for what mysteries he could not have said: snakes perhaps, or savages, a sign of flesh or habitation. But there was nothing, only the green that so close was not even lush: beneath the canopy of palm and broadleaf were no tangled lianas or profusion of fronds, only some dry and dusty vines and stunted shrubs, and great hollows of shade. He had expected underbrush, thick and wild and steaming, wild pigs, lizards, monkeys. Later there were slashes in the jungle and he did see a hut, but no smoke, no motion. Only the shadowed green, and the brass-bright sun in a dazzling blue sky, and the road Roman-red, and nothing alive but themselves and the carrion crows. The colors pulsed, and he shut his eyes against them.

“Nothing,” Philips said. “But later there will be farms here. Timbering. Stores. Taverns.”

“Taverns. Faugh.”

“Feeling better?”

“A little.”

“We need those farms,” Philips said. “Goray was saying last night that it was impossible to starve to death here, with the mangoes and cassava and coconuts and so forth. But it is possible to be undernourished with a full belly. We need cattle, and along here will be ranches too. We want to bring in zebus from the Portagee side.”

“Must we talk about food?”

“Yes,” Philips said amiably. “When I was in mission school the white children laughed and played all day long; but even before the noonday meal the black children were played out. Exhausted. When you see the men working very slowly, remember that they have had little protein in all their lives.”

“I will. How did you get to mission school?”

“I was an orphan, from God knows where, and was arrested at seven for pilferage. I was stealing eggs from the father's chickens. He took pity on me and let me stay, and taught me letters. He was unctuous and I hated him. It took me twenty years to learn gratitude.”

“Where was that?”

“On the coast, where there is a breeze and where the Europeans live.”

“Oh. What are zebus?”

“Brahman cattle, you call them. All we have now are scrub cattle.”

They were quiet then, as the sun climbed higher. In the solitude Morrison grew anxious—not quite fear, yet not much different—but then the disquiet was laid by the heat, by a lazy abandon, by the shifting colors and the rush of the road. This desolation was at worst neutral. The spirits, if any, would emerge by night, and by then he would have company and a lamp and—the thought was just tolerable now—a drink. And there was beauty here. Nature in masses was always beautiful: seas and forests, glaciers, fields of snow, deserts, cloud-bursts, hurricanes. Man in masses was never beautiful, and he remembered for a moment, but only for a moment, the shrill, writhing northern city he had left, and the gray winter he had survived, with snow that was slush even before it touched the asphalt. Remote now; more remote with every mile. Time and space annihilated. What no longer exists has never existed. Here and now only. He slumped lower and shut his eyes again, and sniffed at the warm wind. Soon he was asleep.

He awoke parched and sweating and saw that the road was no longer flat. They were rising slowly, and the jungle had thinned. Far ahead were patches of treeless upland dotted with white. To the east, the blue flash of a stream. He found the canteen and drank, and offered it to Philips, who also drank. “How long did I sleep?”

“Half an hour.”

Morrison concentrated on the white dots. They were probably boulders. There was a good warmth in his chest and along his shoulders, and he could feel the strength in his arms. Philips had good arms. They were black and hairless. Morrison's were fair and freckled with a curly crop of fine reddish hair.

“Put on a hat now,” Philips said. “We make our own wind and it is deceptive. The sun is dangerous.”

Morrison fished the jockey cap from his hip pocket. Bright purple, silky in the sun. Of all colors he liked best purples and oranges. A newspaper had once told him that a preference for orange indicated a cheerful personality. A preference for purple indicated a melancholy personality. On the same page were astrological revelations, and he learned that this was a good time to take the wife on a voyage of pleasure. It was the day of his first divorce. Final decree. Joanne. Eminent lover recalls early transports. God!

He wondered again what life this country bred, and when he would see it. This upland was not a plateau but a range of low hills, not even hills, gentle scallops one after another so that the road had no need to curve but rose gently with them. The palms and broadleaf had thinned at the road's edge, and wild patches of tawny grass, short and bristly, grew there like sideburns. The sky was lighter but still dazzling, a painter's yellow sky. In one clearing he saw a white dot much closer, and it was not a boulder but a termites' hill, pale gray, papery, like a wasps' nest four feet high and crested. There were hundreds of them.