The Hunger and Other Stories

by Charles Beaumont

  She shook her head. We were on the road that goes by the Lindamood farm, six miles from town and a mile from the river. Across the farm you could see the brush that went all the way to the bank, thick wild raspberry bushes and stingweeds and grass as high as your waist. Amy was smiling and looking that way.

  “It’s late,” I said.

  “No it isn’t,” she said, and shook her head again. “Josh, listen!”

  I did, but there wasn’t anything to listen to. The cows were frozen solid, it seemed like, and there was no wind to speak of.

  “Do you hear it?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Hear what?”

  But I knew. One time up in the attic of my folks’ place when it was raining and she’d been sitting at the window for I can’t remember how long—hours—she pulled the same trick. I asked her then what she thought she heard and she said she heard the grass drinking!

  I squeezed the horn on my bike, hard, and said, “Amy, come on, let’s go home.” But she didn’t answer or make a move to tell she knew who I was.

  “It’s the river,” she said finally, in a whisper.

  I got turned around fast and pedaled a few feet and stopped. “Amy, listen, it’s all soaking wet and muddy down there and you’ve got on a good dress.”

  She moved her head and looked at me. Sometimes she gave me this look. “I want to see Beckman,” she said.

  I wasn’t surprised. It had been in her mind all day and that was why we were here, on this road.

  “What makes you think he’s home? He could be anywhere.”

  “He’s there,” she said, “and you don’t want to go because you’re afraid of him.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said, but it wasn’t, exactly. Beckman always had made me a little afraid. Like the way you’d be afraid of a wild animal that’s behind bars and can’t get at you only sometimes its eyes turn your way. But I wasn’t the only one. Whether they’d admit it or not, most of the people in town were at least nervous of him. He was Indian-old and almost helpless, but there was something about him that wasn’t right. Not just the ragged clothes he wore, or the smell of him, or the way he had of following you around, watching, even; it was just something.

  Amy said, “It isn’t for Beckman, anyway. I want to go down to the river.”

  “Goddamn it, Amy. I’m not going.”

  Her face relaxed. “Then you wait for me, Josh.” She didn’t look like a fourteen-year-old girl at all, but more like a woman who’d gotten her way in spite of everything. I didn’t know what to say. I only knew that it had all gone like she wanted. It didn’t give me much choice.

  “Fine,” I yelled. “But you go down there and I’ll let your pa know.”

  “Please wait for me.”

  I wondered what to do. There wasn’t anything actually wrong with going to the river, of course. Only, I was scared. I remembered seeing Beckman just that morning and the thought of it sent a little chill down my back. He’d been watching one of the railroad men root a pack of hoboes out of the jungle, standing there to himself on the other side of the track, dirtier than any of the bums, watching. Later on when I was coming back from the grocery store I saw him again. This time he had found one of those great big rocks of his and he was pulling it down the road. They all looked the same, ordinary rocks, so you could never tell unless you went down to the river which tower they were for. Now I guessed it was for Sin, because the railroad man had been sort of rough. I didn’t know, though: Beckman had his own ideas on the subject.

  That was about all he ever did, too—hang around town and study you. My Uncle Rand remarked to me, on Beckman’s two towers there on the sand, that the old man simply had a Jehovah complex, in addition to being nutty as a squirrel, and was to be pitied. But somehow that didn’t come so easy. Not to me, anyway. Or to anybody, for that matter, except Amy . . . And she pitied just about everything that wasn’t quite right. Dogs, cats, snakes, it didn’t matter.

  I liked her, though. All the people, up to and including her father, who was all she had, thought she was queer, and I did, too, a little—but I liked her. At least I did when she was what you could call normal and I was with her then and could listen to her voice. It was the softest voice a girl ever owned, and her eyes were the biggest.

  I guess I felt sorry for her because of her father. He was in politics or something, I don’t know exactly what, but they say he wasn’t strictly honest and it’s certain he was blood-mean. To Amy especially. I don’t care how queer she was, he didn’t have any business keeping her shut up for days at a time like he did. Everybody talked about it. Beckman must have dragged a hundred stones down to the river on that score alone—but that doesn’t prove anything. According to him, my bagging up a lot of kittens, like I did once, and throwing them in the slew was sinful. I got a regular boulder for that.

  But Amy wasn’t scared of Beckman at all. Even though he reeked something fierce, she’d run after him on the street and walked with him as far as Five Points; and sometimes she’d help him lug one of his damn rocks. That was a picture. It made me feel awful, just like I’d feel when she’d start on one of her peculiar talking sprees. We’d be riding along or coming back from school or something and all of a sudden she’d start. What did I suppose that dogs dreamed about when they were asleep? Did I think there were really people on the moon? How long did a tree live? I never knew what to say, but getting mad at Amy and not seeing her was even worse than putting up with her, so I invented answers. It didn’t make much difference, because she never listened to me, anyhow.

  I think it was the funny way she made me want to sort of look out for her that kept us going together. It’s what my Uncle Rand called “super-stupid” all right, since she had more courage than any two grown men; but at the same time you felt that if you let her go, she’d just blow away, or break.

  That’s why I was so mad when she went down to the river by herself. I watched her drop her bicycle and go into the bushes without even so much as a look back in my direction, and I sat there, scared and mad.

  Finally I decided I’d better go after her.

  I rode as far as I could on the bike and laid it next to hers. Then I went into the brush. The quiet got heavier, all soaked and heavy, now. Most of the wet was dew and leftover rain and there wasn’t a wind to start it dripping, so it just hung there. With some sun it would have been pretty. Amy and I had gone down to one of the sandbars a few weeks back and then it was sunshine and she compared the water drops on the brush to diamonds and the spider webs to strands of jewelry, which was all right, they did look like that a little; but then she got the idea we were surrounded by chandeliers and you couldn’t stop her after that.

  Now I was close enough to hear the river, but it was a soft kind of sound that you had to hang on to, and I know Amy couldn’t have heard it from all the way out to the road. I went the only way you could, trying not to make any noise, for about a hundred feet. The brush thinned out a bit and I could see the edge of the river below. Then, because I was nervous, I walked faster, right to the rim.

  The first thing I saw was Beckman’s houseboat. It was exactly like an old woodshed, without any windows or anything, and square as a box.

  I looked for Beckman. Why it was, I can’t say, but I began to despise him. He was the cause of a lot of what was wrong with Amy, after all. Every time she saw him she’d start in with the silly things, every time, right afterwards. Then it wouldn’t be the same: I’d be a stranger.

  They weren’t anywhere on the sand. Over to the right, almost directly down, were the towers. Side by side.

  They’d grown quite a lot since I’d seen them last, which was a long time ago when a bunch of us kids did it on a dare. Now they looked like regular fortresses or castles—or, at least, the one on the left did. That was Beckman’s Sin Tower. It went up for fifteen feet or more, and the weight of all those rocks had pushed the bottom foundation rocks clear into the sand until you could just barely see the tops of them. How he managed to
get anything up there is a question that I couldn’t begin to answer, because those were stones of all different sizes, not flat or anything, and they were just piled up, one on top of the other. I know he didn’t have a derrick or the right equipment, and I couldn’t see where he could lean a ladder against that stack because it looked like a deep breath would topple the whole thing over.

  The Sin Tower was leaning, I saw, to the left. Below it, about a third as big, was the other one, the Tower of Good. It was a scrubby-looking thing. Not even a tower, exactly. I thought: By God, it’s pretty clear what Beckman thinks of our town, all right.

  The wet soaked clear through to my chest and I got up. Just as I did, I heard a laugh, and I knew it was Amy. You couldn’t mistake a thing like Amy’s laugh.

  It was coming from inside the houseboat.

  I cussed and climbed down the side of the cutaway. When I jumped, I didn’t stop to think what I was going to say or do but walked catty corner around the towers, where I couldn’t be seen from the door, which was open, and walked until I heard good.

  Amy’s voice was going. It sounded sad. “I could get it from Daddy,” she was saying. “He carries an awful lot of money in his pockets and I could get it all.”

  The next voice was Beckman’s. All dry and squeezed, like kindling snapping across somebody’s knee a mile off. Nobody had ever heard him talk that I knew of; Uncle Rand had figured he was dumb. “It won’t do,” he said.

  “Why not?” Amy said.

  “Because, now, it wouldn’t. Just so.”

  “I don’t care,” Amy said. “We could go clear to wherever the river ends and then into the ocean and maybe India. I bet you didn’t know the Earth is practically all water!”

  Beckman did something, laugh I guess; I bit off a slice of finger skin. It was the kind of sound that people with no teeth make, a lot of air going in and out.

  I edged closer and scrunched down to see in without them seeing me.

  “Amy, now—”

  “You don’t want to go away.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Can, too. Beckman, we could sail all over, just us, and nobody to poke fun. Sleep all day and stay up nights, if we were of a mind, and catch flying fish for food.” Her voice got that well-it’s-all-settled tone. “I’ll get the money from Daddy and you’ll buy the boat and we’ll go.”

  I could see now. Beckman was sitting on the floor of the shack, cross-legged. There was dirt everywhere. His clothes seemed to have all melted from sweat and years and glued together; and looking at them, you couldn’t imagine that they had once been ordinary clothes in a store window. His beard was even whiter than usual, stubby white, like a fox terrier’s coat. It was clean-looking, and the only thing connected with him that was, too. His face was all grooved and rutted and streaked with grime, eyes night-dark and hard as marbles.

  “Got work to do,” he said, after a while. “You oughtn’t to of come here.”

  Amy was leaning against the wall, her hands behind her. The difference between them was something to see! Her frock had dried so it looked as fresh and clean as it had in the early morning, her hair fell over her shoulders like cornsilk, as fine and gold as that, and she was staring down at her feet.

  Beckman said he had to stay and build the towers because he had been commanded to by God Almighty, and when God Almighty commands you to do something, you can’t turn your back.

  Amy didn’t say a word. She was real disappointed, I could tell, and hurt.

  Beckman said, “Go on home, now. You oughtn’t to come here.”

  What Amy said then made me catch fire inside. She said, “I had to. No one else understands.” She said, “Just you, Beckman. We’re the same. They don’t have any use for us, and they laugh, but—I know. When the wind sings you hear it, I know you do.”

  He sat there.

  “And you know all the rest I do, too. I found out that the river is a woman, but that wasn’t news to you, and even if you can’t understand them, you hear the birds talking to each other. Don’t you?”

  He sighed. Then he said, “You’re crazy,” and stopped. “Get home,” he said.

  Amy’s voice trembled. “I don’t want to,” she said. “I’m scared, Beckman.”

  “What of?” Beckman said, looking at her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I get ideas.”

  “What kind?”

  “I’m not sure,” Amy said. “Nothing seems right to me now, though. Daddy says if I don’t improve he’s going to send me away to the city. He hardly even talks to me any more because I make him nervous, he says. When the sun goes red at night now, I want to cry.”

  Beckman was still.

  “Yesterday I slipped out,” Amy said, “and walked through Mr. Jackson’s garden, like I used to, but it wasn’t the same—it was so quiet. I laid down to watch the ladybugs. They didn’t come, and it was quiet, and I just wanted to stay there on the grass forever and never leave. I thought if I left I wouldn’t come back. Everything is so goodbye!” She dropped onto the floor, then, and grabbed Beckman’s hand and put her cheek against it. “Please,” she said, “let’s go away. Tonight. Please.”

  Beckman stroked her head a couple of times and then shook away from her. “I got work to do,” he said. Then he yelled it at her. “Goddamn it, now, I got work. We can’t go anywhere, you can’t and I can’t, there isn’t anywhere to go. I don’t know why. Just get on home, now, and don’t come back.”

  She wouldn’t move and he slapped her, and I could see that he was shaking, too. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. I felt like I was watching something that I wasn’t supposed to, and I could hear my heart balled up and knocking a hole in my chest. I tried to move. In my head there was just that picture of this filthy old man hitting Amy, and everything they said.

  I got up and stood in front of the doorway. “Amy!” I said, and maybe more, I don’t know. I stood there.

  Amy jumped and ran and threw her arms around me.

  I held on to her tight. Beckman was still sitting on the floor, but he was staring, too, and his mouth was open.

  “Come on, Amy,” I said.

  She didn’t move. She hung on there, crying. I don’t know what I wanted to do, then—kiss her, I think. Hold her and squeeze until she was broken and get her inside of me so I’d know she was safe. I thought stuff like that.

  Then she stopped crying. Except for one thing, the sound of birds back in the brush, it was dead quiet.

  Amy pulled away from me.

  I never saw anyone’s face like hers. It was white and wet, and her eyes were big as saucers.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  She took three steps backwards and started to run.

  I went after her, but she was faster than I was. She seemed to glide over the sand, her feet hardly even touching. She was running and looking back over her shoulder at me, and maybe it sounds funny, but I never knew anyone to look so afraid as she did.

  I stopped running when I saw where she was headed.

  I put out my hand. “Amy!” I called at her over and over, but she ran on.

  She ran right up on to the tall pile of rocks there by the cutaway.

  It all went very slow, but I saw every bit of it. I can see it now when I close my eyes. Her running and bumping the base of the Sin Tower and the stone at the top tipping and tipping and falling and the whole thing breaking loose.

  “Amy!”

  It didn’t bury her completely. But eight or nine of the big rocks came down over her.

  I must have gone crazy then because I didn’t do anything. I just stood there. Even when I saw the blood and saw that she wasn’t moving, even then I didn’t do anything.

  Beckman crossed the sand slowly.

  He went to the broken tower and lifted the rocks off of Amy and put his head on her chest for a while; then he looked back at me.

  I wished to God I could have cried. I wished a thousand things, and stood there.

  Beckman knelt dow
n more and got his arms under Amy. He was gentle. He picked her up and managed to pull himself to his feet, and started back. Amy’s head leaned back across his dirty sleeve, the wind caught her hair, and I noticed one thing, I noticed that the ribbon was still on.

  I watched them. It was like it made sense only I didn’t understand, like it was a sensible thing. Beckman walked straight. He walked past the rim of the cutaway, and didn’t look back at me any more.

  Everything got crowded in my head. Amy’s dead, I thought—but who killed her?

  “Who killed Amy?” I yelled at Beckman. “You goddamn old fool, you filthy old crazy fool!”

  The rocks did, was what came into my mind. And the town did. And I did. I was to blame, by God I was: she’d been running away from me, hadn’t she?

  I got dizzy, and I knew I was going to be sick. I wanted to stop Beckman and hit him, but instead I kept thinking about the tower. About how if it had been smaller, and the other one bigger, then Amy would be alive.

  “Did I do it?” I cried.

  He was almost to the river. There weren’t any bones in him or Amy, there wasn’t any weight in them. She was light in his arms and his arms were light. When they got a ways off I knew it had got dark because they turned into shadows, moving toward that river, getting smaller.

  I got panicky then. Even though I don’t remember doing any of it, I ran back to the cutaway—I must have—and got my bike and went home.

  Mom didn’t believe me, at first. But then she did and she called Amy’s father at his office and told him about it. He made her let me go back with him so he’d know where to go, but when we got to the rim, there wasn’t anything to see. Not Beckman or Amy, anyway. Just the tumbled-down tower of rocks and the little one next to it.

  And the river.

  They dragged it for a good month. They sent out bulletins and calls and organized search parties and had police all over the county, only it wasn’t any use, and finally they gave up. Things simmered down to normal after a while, and you hardly heard anybody talking much about the accident—that’s what they called it.

  I guess they’re right. My Uncle Rand says it was a simple case of two crazy people coming together, he says that whenever that happens there’s bound to be trouble, or worse, and that nobody is to blame. And I guess that’s right, too.