The Outcasts (8 page)

One night Philips said, “Only sun-worship makes sense. The sun is the source of all life.”

“On this planet,” Morrison said. It was after supper and they were sitting like widows in their little courtyard among the trailers, and gossiping. Ramesh always lit his lamp and sat on a folding chair. Philips sat on the doorstep of a trailer, and on moonless nights the yellow bulb threw shiny planes across his face as he squinted, pursed his lips, arched his brows. Or hunched forward, arms on his thighs, head low. From the woods, night-laughter.

“Other planets are of no interest,” Philips said. “I leave the other planets to the Americans and the Russians, who have solved all their problems on this one.”

The dark was warm and comforting, and the stars were friendly. There seemed no reason not to enjoy a third bottle of beer.

“You pig,” Philips said. “We are talking theology and you think only of your pint.” The five weeks had passed like lazy months, and the days and nights of dust and heat were like so many miles between them and the world. The world. Meaning anyone anywhere who was not working on this road and this bridge. So he uncapped a third bottle for Philips too. Ramesh declined. Ramesh had his pipe. And a small stylet, and every night he toasted a small pellet and smoked it up. At first Morrison had no idea what it was. Then he was shocked. “Let it go,” Philips said. But Ramesh came to him the next day, cheerful and innocent and supple as ever. “I hope you will not mind,” he said. “It is only a few grains and I find it pleasant. My health is good, you see. The legends are much exaggerated.”

“Well, no, I don't mind,” Morrison said, sheepish immediately. None of his business really. Was it. “As long as your health is good. It seems to leave no effects.”

“None a-tall,” Ramesh said gratefully, and that was that. He smoked it up happily. He belonged to the night as he drowsed, to the land, to the heat. “I am not a slave to it, you see. I could refrain if I wished to. But I do not wish to. Oh no.”

Philips smiled faintly hearing that.

Five weeks. Morrison spent Mondays and Tuesdays at the capital with Manoel Serpa and his men. Those were uneasy days. Serpa made him uneasy. The drawings had been rendered with the finest pen-points and the purest ink on the smoothest paper, and the letters and numbers were the pristine work of a master hand, and where Morrison had said one meter twelve he meant one meter twelve and not one meter eleven ninety-nine. Serpa fluttered and placated; absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. The forms were perfect, as if cut and joined by Jesus himself. Morrison had only to look. Here. Our Lord was a carpenter. Morrison knew that, did he not. A failed carpenter, Morrison said drily, and Serpa's nose twitched in alarm: a joke? an atheist? He brightened: there. The cement. Of purest white. The best his country could offer. And the little rocks. For the—say that once for me? Ag-gre-gett. And here the retardant, and even so everything covered with wet burlap and sprinkled two-hourly all through the hot night. Feel! Measure!

Serpa was building most of the bridge right there. The killing work, though, would be at the site: they would have to throw one great arch of wooden forms across the gorge and fill it full of concrete and keep the concrete moist while it set. Then Serpa's components, poured, set, and long dry, would be trucked out. And they with their magical crane would swing them out and drop, sidle, edge them into place, slotting and bolting and plating, like tots with a kiddie konstruction kit except that someone, or more, would doubtless die. On a high bridge someone, or more, always did.

And the office claimed him. The office and Isaacson, Utu and Vieira-Souza. And cost sheets (God spare me cost sheets!) and letters from Devoe (“longer reports, please, and considerably more detail. I have not asked before because I know how busy you must be,” and so on and so forth). And that bloody hotel. Bloody modern and bloody cool and bloody comfortable. But he could not wait to be out of it. Tuesday evenings he learned that a Land-Rover will do seventy quite nicely, thank you. So skidded into camp with the last light as if fleeing the law; which in a way he was. Ramesh would shout for Jacob then, who served his dinner. He brought back a case of bottled beer, always, on the house, and soon they had built up a good reserve.

Oh he liked those nights. Soft earth and warm air and stars shivering like cold fire. Some nights a monstrous platinum moon, and nothing between you and it. “Of course, an untouchable,” Ramesh said. “Outcaste. Bombay was one great sore, what I remember of it. Oh my God yes. I remember no home. No parent. Only hiding on a dhow, and I did not know where it would go. England perhaps. Well. It went to Aden. If I had been older they would simply have thrown me in. But they laughed, and kept me, and”—he sighed here and nodded, aging suddenly, his rich lips drooping as though memory or wisdom had driven him slack—“and abused me somewhat. After that there was nothing more to learn, so at Aden I ran away and looked for a larger ship. I found one. I have seen all the continents now, except the South Pole.”

“Nothing more to learn?”

“Not really.”

Morrison was impressed. Imagine having nothing more to learn.

One night he talked too. What do men talk of but themselves? Tossing in a memory, a fact, a small lie. Weaving knots of circumstance to hold lives together: in this place, on this night, there were this Hindu and this Negro and this Irishman, and the Irishman said … is that possible? That life is a series of music-hall stories? There were these ten millon Russians and they all got killed. There were these two cities in Japan and then there were not. Once upon a time there was this naked man and woman in a garden. Savages. And if those knots were not tied, was a memory real? If a tree fell and there was no one to hear it fall, would it fall on Morrison? Yes! “A man told me once that I would never know what was real because I was white and had never starved. But I bet neither of you has ever been horsewhipped. I have.” Philips and Ramesh stirred at this reversal, this disorder of nature. “In nineteen-forty,” Morrison said. “I got caught with a girl, in a barn, and her father whipped us. Both of us. Not a horsewhip really. Just a little buggy whip. But it hurt like hell. Finally”—and once more he swallowed down the bitter memory—“I just ran,” swallowed it down for the thousandth time, the same ache, the same shame, the same dumb, blind rage at himself, at her, at the old man, at a universe that rewarded love with lashes. “Small towns,” he said. “Everybody knew about it. My father thought it was very funny. He was a housepainter who got drunk every Saturday night. Peaceful man. My mother didn't think it was so funny. She died the next year. Just got tired of things and died. By then I was gone. Not exactly whipped out of town, but I didn't seem to have much to say to anybody.”

“Foolish people,” Philips said. “Whipping children for that.”

“Yes. I wonder sometimes if the whip made scars on her,” with rage and shame again like rot in his mouth. “I tried to cover her up, and I remember her breasts shivering. It was in the afternoon. Then I just ran.”

“You should not dwell on it,” Philips said.

“No. With a fine war in between, and so forth, you'd think I'd have forgotten by now. But I wake up sometimes,” he burst out, “and the shame is awful. Not that I got caught with a girl and not that I was whipped; but that I ran and left her. I never saw her again. My God,” he groaned, “we never even
finished.”

“That was more than a quarter of a century ago,” Ramesh said. “We all hurt people. We all hate to remember hurting. But if you are clever enough to be an engineer, you are clever enough to survive such a silly thing.”

“Oh no,” Morrison said. “I'm not clever. I'm not really smart at all. Except with numbers, maybe, shapes, spaces. I'm slow. I like being slow but I don't know enough. About myself even.” Many brilliant men skittered across the surface of his century and he could not say that he understood them, their intensity, their nervousness, the stuttering light they shed. Nor could he say that he had tried very hard to understand them. When he wrestled ponderously with a new idea, he was always disappointed to find that it was an old idea. Or nonsense. Brilliant men seemed proud and defensive and so could not be trusted. “I'm not even making sense, I suppose.” He had built a highway in the northern autumn, riding a grader sleepily and happily among elms and maples, brown in the V of his shirt, and it was a time of great crisis, or so said the newspapers, and he rode his grader aware that the earth might gape to engulf him but taking it on faith that a road was worth building. “Faith. I don't know what that is. Everybody has to die but nobody has to break his word.” He stopped short. After an embarrassed and burbling swig he went on: “Don't laugh at me. I was a faithful husband. Twice.”

“Now you are bragging.” Philips smiled. “But I know what you are getting at, I think. You are wondering how long until the next catastrophe.”

“Yes. Yes. You remember King Midas? I feel like a new kind of Midas, a twentieth-century Midas: except when I'm working, everything I touch turns to carrion. Senecas and redwoods and wives.”

“What are Senecas?” Ramesh asked.

“Senecas are people who believe promises.”

“And what are wives?” Philips asked.

Morrison was silent.

“They were unfaithful?”

“Both of them,” he cried in sudden outrage. “Nobody cares any more. Even about that. They were upset that I minded.”

“Here we do not worry so much about that,” Philips said. “Maybe you were not so good with women.”

“I guess not,” Morrison mumbled, knowing that for the truth. “Both times it lasted two years.” His heart quailed then and he went on: “All right: the second one was only a repeat. Desperation. My fault. But I loved my first wife. The way,” he stumbled, “the way they tell you you ought to love truth and justice and things like that.”

“Truth and justice are not things,” Philips said. “What happened?”

“I wish I knew. It was wild for about a year and then—oh, hell!” He wrenched the words out: “There was somebody else all the time. And we kept on trying for another year and finally I hated her.” He sat back empty. “She was all flesh. Nothing but flesh.” And I am growing old and not worth much these days. Not for a year now. He heard the words but knew that he had not said them aloud.

“So are you,” Philips said. “What is wrong with that?”

“The flesh is nothing,” Ramesh said.

“The flesh is everything,” Philips said. “You should have beaten her.” He was half joking.

“That is the advantage of arranged marriages,” Ramesh said sweetly. “The man has not agreed to be agreeable. He has only agreed to be married.”

“We tried,” Morrison said. “She was very beautiful. Not too bright. She wore sunglasses with rhinestones in the frames. By the end of the second year she was only lumpy flesh. Mornings were horrible. I suppose I'm not altogether normal about this.” If you only knew!

“Well, I am,” Philips said grimly. “Along about Thursday I become very lonesome.”

And Ramesh said, “None of it matters. We live for a tick of the watch only.”

“No preaching,” Philips said. “I have no wish to be reborn a locust.”

“You will be reborn a baboon,” Ramesh said, “spilling yourself every three minutes with a different female.”

Philips said dolefully, “If only I could be sure of that.”

Morrison grieved. Could they see his face? “The most flesh I ever saw was in the war. I told you I was an orderly, a medic. We were using the downstairs of a farmhouse, and after a while there was only the doctor and me and the wounded. We never knew what happened to everybody else, but later we found dead men outside. It was as if the whole war had swept by and not touched us but left us all this work to do. All of them lying there moaning and yelling. We shot them full of morphine and hauled them up on a big table and the doctor did what he could. We were already a long time without sleep and I think we lasted forty-eight hours or so.” He groaned. Ramesh nodded sadly. “Arms and legs. Heads torn open. Eyes hanging down. There was one man—” He shuddered. “He was hit in the belly. When we cut his pants away there was nothing between his legs. Only blood. And he was still breathing. Christ!”

“What did you do?” Philips's voice was surly.

“Killed him. Put him down and let him die. Pretty soon the doctor passed out, just fell forward into somebody's insides and then slid down to the floor. So I went out looking for people and found them and told them, and then I collapsed. They sent me back to Paris and then home. I told them I would rather spend my life in jail than go back. So they decided I was a psycho and let me out.”

“Good,” Philips said. “You were lucky.”

“I saw a man beheaded once,” Ramesh said. “In China. Before the war. With a sword. Oh, that was something. Damn and blahst, that was something.”

“I never saw anything like that,” Morrison said. “Except for the war. My life was very dull for a long time.”

“When did you see your first corpse?” Philips asked.

“In the war.”

“Very late. You were not prepared.”

“No,” Morrison said. “I grew up in a little town where nothing happened.”

“Only horsewhipping,” Philips said.

“Where was that?” asked Ramesh the world-traveler.

“Upstate New York.”

“Ah, New York,” Ramesh said.

“No,” Morrison said. “You're thinking of the city. Everybody thinks of the city. But there's a whole state too, full of cattle and apple trees and small towns with Dutch names.”

“Dutch names!” Ramesh was delighted. “Like here.”

“The names are sometimes like here,” Morrison said, “but not the rest of it.” He smiled, feeling lighter, rested. “I'm making myself homesick. Let's talk about something else.”