Whipple's Castle (29 page)

 

ANSWER

B. In spite of evidence to the contrary, the Japs belong to the human race and the gestation period is 280 days.

 

What
evidence to the contrary? he had immediately asked himself. Just because they enjoyed rapine and, say, burying people alive, or placing a pistol to the back of a bound prisoner's head, as he'd seen in the newsreels, and touching off a round?

Beady had asked him the other day “What is mung?” and explained: “You take an eight-month-pregnant Jap, tie its legs together and get four husky buck niggers to beat it on the belly with baseball bats for five hours. Untie the rope and what comes out is mung.”

Yet there were those prints of Sally's, by Hiroshige, and by others whose names he had forgotten, but had known so well in childhood. Those misty landscapes had taken him in, and even now they reminded him of childhood, order and nostalgia. Would he march across those graceful, moonlike bridges, through that mist? Dreamlike, he would fight in Sally's parlor, fading through mossy green and the deep veiled blues of air and delicate mountains. Then would come the sudden bite of gunfire. Planes would roar across that air, smelling of cordite and gasoline. He could hardly believe it—as though Eddie Kusacs, who occasionally buzzed Leah in his Marine F4U Corsair, roared through Sally's parlor and set the china and silver rattling in their shelves, and the
kakemono
shaking on the walls.

 

First was the terror, as if he had been led into a trap, and awaited ambush. Horace didn't move; not even a finger. He looked out of his head through slits, his eyelashes down upon his hiding eyes like brush. No, he was in Wood's room, which was illegal, but a safe place. A scrape and a creak—what was that noise?

Then Wood's back obscured the fire as he bent to poke it. Wood was there, and he was safe. Someone had put a warm coat over him, and it must have been Wood. Wood had taken his storm coat and put it over him to keep him warm, and now his muscles fell loose, and he relaxed all over. His skin tingled with a great lazy feeling near to pain. He almost didn't have to pretend to be asleep, because he had no need at all to move. Even to open his eyes further—a fraction of a millimeter further—would have been an effort of delicious pain. He lay warm, descending not into sleep but into utter safety. The fire pressed gently against his face, and his legs seemed to glow in it below the storm coat. His hands lay wide apart down somewhere toward the floor, but he didn't care because no matter how extreme their positions, even with palms open, they were safe now.

He would not think, he would just feel, as though he were a baby again. He was a baby that was warm and could not fall—the center of gravity where there was no gravity, the center of the world where there was no weather, the center of all of the world's love and attention where there was no fear. He could not afford to waste such time in sleep.

 

Wood was aware that Horace was not asleep. Because he seemed to be resting, he let him hide his consciousness for a long time. But it was getting late, and Horace had to go to school tomorrow. “Horace?” he said.

“Yes?” Horace said immediately.

“It's getting pretty late.”

“You're not mad at me for being here?”

“No.”

Then an expression of anguish flashed across Horace's face and was gone. His face regained its usual guarded, almost beaten look, as if he were about to duck.

“You're going away tomorrow,” Horace said, his voice thick.

“I'll write you letters,” Wood said. “Would you like that?”

Horace shrugged off the letters. “Sure,” he said.

“You know I've got to go,” Wood said. “The war won't last forever, Horace. I'll be back. Besides, I'll be home on furlough after basic training.” That's what he had told Lois, and his mother. It hadn't seemed to reassure anyone very much, but it was all he could think of to say. The reason he was being drafted was, presumably, to have him shoot enemy soldiers—who could shoot back—and somebody was bound to get killed.

Horace began to tremble, and his forehead was wet. That was fear; Wood knew he was looking at fear, at the pallor of it. The boy's face had turned leaden, as though he were suffering from shock. “Oh, oh,” Horace said. “I'm shivering.”

“Are you all right, Horace?”

“You can't go,” Horace said. “You'll have to tell them.”

“Horace?”

“You can tell them,” Horace said in the higher register of his changing voice. “It's out of the question.”

“I'm afraid it isn't out of the question, Horace.” Wood smiled, but he was worried by the certainty he heard in that childish voice. Horace's blond bristles were so thick, his starved skin so tough yet defenseless. A victim, Wood thought; that skin was meant to be hurt. There was the long scar above his ear, that had taken fourteen stitches. A bicycle accident. That was the time he'd come down Pike Hill and his coaster brake burned out. He'd dislocated or cracked his shoulder then too and had to walk around for weeks with a wooden flying buttress coming from his waist to hold his arm out at the right angle. He'd crossed the Jenkins' lawn, hit their decorative windmill and demolished it. Scars upon scars. He would never, never understand why Horace was so foolhardy about what was real, and so frightened of what was not.

“Don't be silly, now, Horace. You know I've got to go. I've been drafted. We've been through all this before.”

“I've tried everything,” Horace said desperately. “Wood, I've
tried.
Everything you told me. But nothing works. I can't stand it!” Crying sounds came through his words.

“Come on, now,” Wood said.

“I don't care any more because why should I care? I'm going to die anyway. I know it. I almost died already.”

“Horace, for God's sake,” he said, trying to sound calm.

Horace seemed to be in a state of rebellion now; prideless, with no dignity, what had he left to lose?

“I don't care!” Horace cried. “I can't help myself any more! I can't even remember all their rules!”

“Whose rules?”

“Their rules! Them!” Horace looked ravaged. His big lips were gummy, and a patch of watery snot shone below his nostrils. “You've never laughed at me before!”

“I'm not now. I'm not laughing at you, Horace.”

“I'm dead.”

“No, you're not.”

“I'm as good as dead! They aren't kidding!” Horace stuttered and hiccuped. A thin whine underlay his breath.

“You've got Mother and Father to take care of you.”

“They threw me away! They couldn't stand to look at me!”

“That's not true. You know very well that Mother and Father love you.”

“You don't know! I'm just a
bother!

Wood thought of the little boy he'd known once, whose escapades were sometimes serious, sometimes funny. Now, in this new growth, with Horace nearly as big as he was, there was no possible lightness at all. A man agonized in that chair, and the ghosts of childhood were still in control.

Madness, of course. It was madness, yet Horace had always been reasonable. Wood had always been able to speak to reason in Horace, no matter how upset he was. Reason was there, and intelligence, no matter how small a flicker of it his fear allowed him to show.

With the word he felt anger toward Horace's monsters. If only they were real, he would smash them. If they were flesh and blood, like Gordon Ward and his satellites, he would take care of them, just as he had effectively ended that sort of torment by dealing with Junior Stevens. If only he could comer them as he had cornered Junior in the basement of the Community Building. There, in his wrath, he'd made Junior afraid for his life—an emotion Junior had never experienced before. If only he could exorcise these monsters as easily…

Horace's red hand had moved, quick as a boxer's, and closed on Wood's wrist.
“Please
don't go, Wood!”

“Horace!”

“If you go I can't stand it! It's only you that keeps me!”

“Come on, Horace. Be reasonable.”

“
Please!”

“Horace. You know I have to go tomorrow. If I don't go they'll come and get me. I'm not a civilian any more. I can't go where I please and do what I please. You know that, don't you?”

“
Please!”

The big hand had locked on. Wood felt the tingle of constriction in his fingers. He put his other hand on Horace's, first as a calming gesture, then to try to peel those thick fingers from his painful wrist.

“Horace, let go of my arm,” he said. Then he looked at Horace's face and found no sign of reason. There was the flesh in the shape of a face—pores, mucous membrane, eyes that now seemed opaque. Now, for any gleam of recognition, it might have been the face of a horse, or a pig.

“Let go!” he said to that dense flesh. “Let go of my arm!”

No response, not even a tightening of the hand to show defiance of the order. He tried to pry Horace's fingers from his wrist, and though he was strong enough to do it, Horace's strength was unnatural. He was afraid he might break the fingers. They struggled silently. Horace's other hand came over and locked on too, and for an unreal moment it seemed to Wood that he was a spectator at this vicious contest between the wrestling hands.

The hands would not let him go, and suddenly they were every grasping needful human mess that wanted to, and somehow invariably did, lock onto him when he wanted to be free.

“Let go!” he said. When he pried two fingers loose, eight others locked on harder. He could break, disjoint them—and he realized desperately that the only way to get loose was either to immobilize them one by one or to strike at the source of their strength.

“Let go,” he said coldly. But the fingers wrapped him with insane strength. He began not to see clearly. The thing that had him would not let go. That force was too strong, and that was the end of it. The last choice had to come, came and was simultaneously acted upon. He hit the face and head of that other, unreasonable force, and each time it was like hammering nailed lumber apart. Little by little the strength ebbed, not in proportion to the force of the blows but, like nails coming out, bending into what held them, holding by their submerged friction until suddenly they let go and he was free. He raised his arms, looking at them free. The blood came back into his hand as it should, so that quickly he felt no more of the constriction or its effects, and he could move his fingers without that consciousness, with no unnatural feeling.

Then he had to turn toward the object he had disarmed, and Horace came back. His face was lumpy and discolored already. A thin line of blood rimmed his lower lip, and his tongue came out and licked it off.

“Horace!” Wood said. Yet he had known it was Horace. He tried to believe he hadn't known in his madness that it was Horace.

Horace stared at him with, it now seemed, the return of comprehension.
So that's how you really feel,
Wood read in that stare. You
too.
Horace got to his feet, and the storm coat fell to the floor. He turned and went out of the room. He'd forgotten his glasses, but he seemed to see all right.

He had the greatest power of anyone in the world to hurt Horace, and he had used it. No crime could be more monstrous than what he'd just done, and now Horace went back to those other monsters, somehow encompassing that betrayal.

But now, below his horror at himself, he felt the shameful symptoms of exultation. He was evil, as evil as any of the rest. Tomorrow he would leave them all to their needs, and from tomorrow on he would never reveal anything to anyone. Susie Davis, Horace, Lois, Beady, Al, Peggy Mudd, his mother, all the rest. They would all be gone out of his regard, and he out of theirs. He would hide now until Leah was gone behind, and from then on he would hide within the business of the war.

One end of a small room called the teachers' lounge—a place where Kate had never seen a teacher lounge—had been set aside as
The Quill
office, with an old desk, a typewriter, a tall green filing cabinet and a cork bulletin board. Wayne Facieux had placed the filing cabinet out from the wall so that it formed a room divider. This, he explained, would give the editors of
The
Quill
some smattering of privacy in case any teacher ever did have time to come in and lounge. One reason no teacher ever came there, Kate supposed, was that Mr. Skelton's office was right across the hall, and all doors were left open. Two Morris chairs and a maple table surrounded by straight chairs, and several metal ashtrays that stood on their own pedestals, were all the furniture in the lounge part. Long ago, by the looks of them, someone had hung some white faille curtains across the big institutional window at the end, and these looked out of place there, almost like filmy women's clothes. Everything was dusty in this room, and she wondered if it wasn't the pupils themselves, constantly sitting and rubbing and handling all the other furniture and objects in the school, that kept it reasonably dusted. Certainly Mr. Grand, the janitor, could be seen doing little except distributing chalk and erasers and emptying wastebaskets as he walked about with a flickering, hazy sort of smile on his face—this generally attributed to drink. David had shown her an actual revolver he'd bought from Mr. Grand for two dollars and fifty cents when Mr. Grand needed money for his liquor. That's what David had said, anyway. The revolver was David's secret, and she'd really felt complimented when he confided in her about it.

Mr. Grand never came into the lounge at all, so the editors emptied their wastebasket into Mr. Skelton's secretary's waste-basket. His secretary was Mrs. Jarvis, a great big old lady who was supposed to have been there much longer than Mr. Skelton. When she went home they had to go home too. She would appear in the doorway—mountains and valleys of pleated, tucked and belted cloth, her hair like icy snow way up on top of her head, smile down at them and tell them that their labors in the vineyards of literature must cease for that day. Then, as they put things straight, she locked the principal's office and ushered them out the front door. This always happened about five o'clock, so they had about an hour and a half after school to work on
The Quill.