The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  XXV

  “I lay in the darkness on the floor beside Augusta’s berth—or Miranda’s, as I must call her now. I’d sealed the ports against the everlasting twilight. The ship wasn’t moving, stalled by a calm I’d never seen the likes of, unless it was the present stall of my brain, or the stillness of Miranda. She breathed without a sound—I could tell she was breathing only by placing my hand on her stomach. It was as if her whole being were listening for something—as if, like the sentient trees and flowers Mr. Knight used to speak of, all the functions of her mind had flowed together to one desperate channel, her absolute, terrible listening. Such was my impression, or faint intuition. I did not pursue it. I was not at my best, to say the least. I must think and plan, I told myself; but my mind was still crowded with nightmarish images—the cook’s axe rising, then slashing down, the twitching and jerking of the murdered men, the blood-steaming deck, the limp, bloody figures of Billy and Mr. Knight … But the image more terrible than all the rest was that of Miranda Flint as I’d found her, raped, ruined, in her cabin. I felt as one feels at the death of a child: stopped, unable to believe the thing. Again and again I reached up to touch her. She slept on, like an innocent—slept or went on listening, if my intuition was right. Listened, waited in the absolute dark of her unconsciousness, like an ancient, iron-jawed trap. Each time I touched that chilly flesh, my hand shrank back as my mind shrank back from the recognition that sooner or later I must face: She was no longer beautiful. The swelling might go down, the bruises fade, but the ugliness would stay—missing teeth, stooped shoulders, the beaten, cunning look of old beggar women. Inescapable. And I must face, too, the fact that what I’d deemed terrible and unholy in Miranda would also be gone forever now: her pleasure in deceit, her monstrous cold-bloodedness. Foul she might be, but never again evil. And that was, suddenly, a dreadful loss. A trickster’s virtue—nay, friend, his glory—is that he says what sounds true, says it ringingly, convincingly, believing he knows for the moment what’s false. But a man whose house has been burned to the ground in an electric storm can never again be an accurate judge of lightning. The murderer’s virtue is that he thinks himself God: perfect, indestructible. Pity his victims, but pity more the murderer converted to belief that his weight is a burden on the earth. I hoped, in short, that Miranda Flint would die.

  “I heard not a sound, for all my care—neither in the chartroom nor in the parlor nor where Miranda lay. I knew he was there only when he said, ‘It’s Wilkins. Be still.’

  “I obeyed. I did hear him then, or felt him, rather, coming through the darkness toward me as if he knew exactly where I was. ‘After Mr. Wolff, you and me,’ he whispered, just inches from my ear. He gave a voiceless laugh. I was so startled by his nearness—the stink of his breath was suddenly all around me—I could give him no answer.

  “With the subtle skill that marks all true masters of the confidence game, he quickly insinuated his way into my sympathy. He asked about ‘Augusta.’ I gave him no hint that I’d discovered the truth about all of them. He was careful not to mention that he himself was the man who’d raped and beaten her; and he did not pretend that he thought the thing shameful. But he observed, objective as a family doctor, that it would not be an easy thing for ‘Augusta’ to get over in her mind. He talked of her feeling of God-given superiority, the mistake in self-appraisal that would make that rape a catastrophe.

  “ ‘She’s proud, that’s true,’ I said, stalling against something.

  “He chuckled exactly as a snake would chuckle. ‘I used to go in there and tipple with the Captain,’ he said, ‘along with Mr. Knight, God rest his soul. Ah, how she’d put it to us, pious little whore! Swinging her hips out, bending down so her pretties would dangle. And any time she could find a way she’d put that together with her holiness trick. “God bless you, Mr. Wilkins!” says she, and claps her hands together like a lady at her prayers, and draws her thumbs back hard against her chest so you’ll get a good look at her pirate’s guns. “God bless yerself,” says I, and I gives her a wink, most fatherly. She lured me back into her bedroom one time—I’d known her a good long while, understand—and there I am standing erect as a bowsprit, and next thing I know I’ve got dog in my shoulder. Yet I wish her no harm, Mr. Upchurch—no more harm than she’s made other people suffer.’

  “If I hadn’t known the truth, nothing in his tone would have led me to suspect. But I did know, and so I heard more than he said. In dressing rooms from Indianapolis to Bangkok he’d pursued poor Miranda, and she’d teased him on, cool manipulator, image of her father. Not even by rape had he brought her down off her snowcapped mountain. Believe in us, she said with every swing of her hips—Believe in us!—cry of every fraudulent outfit from the first bullshit government to the last bullshit religion—Believe in us, Wilkins!—and the poor fierce idiot had believed.

  “He got around now to what he’d come to say. ‘Ye’ve answered not a word to Wolff’s theories, Mr. Upchurch.’

  “I said nothing.

  “ ‘Even when he spoke of his reason for wishing Miss Augusta well, you were quiet as a mouse.’

  “I still said nothing.

  “ ‘Very well,’ he said. He sounded calmer than I’d seen him before. He said, flat-voiced, just above a whisper. ‘I’ve watched you from the day we first hauled you aboard. Yer yer own man, Upchurch. Yer idea of a chat is to listen and smile, with one eye peeking out the window. Very good. Listen:—’

  “And now, all at once, I was hearing Wilkins’ version of the story Billy More had told me. I showed no sign that I’d heard it before or that I knew that, the night of the meeting, Mr. Wilkins wasn’t there. He told of the vows, a whisper full of anger, exactly as if he really had been there and felt he’d been betrayed.

  “ ‘Listen, listen well. Wilkins is a villain, says Jonathan Upchurch. He murders with a smile, plots mutiny, scoffs at God, scoffs at beauty. Well, howl and rage all you please against Wilkins, you can’t out-howl the howl in Wilkins’ own spirit, sir. But I’m past despair, though not out of it. Despair’s my foundation. The world’s what the mind of Wilkins makes it—my hand, my head, the ocean, that wretch on the bunk. Today I’m the Devil. Who knows, perhaps tomorrow God! You understand?’

  “I kept silent.

  “ ‘Do you understand me?’ The whisper was intense, forking out like flame.

  “ ‘No,’ I whispered. Miranda’s fingers moved a little, and alarm went through me. Wilkins, too, must’ve heard something. He held his breath, listening, but there was nothing to hear. The ship sat quiet as a boulder.

  “He said: ‘My acts add up to nothing. No Heaven, no Hell, mere chain of events neither guilty nor glorious. I may murder again, or I may give away all my goods to the poor. I vow nothing. Nothing. There are no stable principles a man can make vows by, and there are no predictable people, only men like myself. A whole world crammed with cringing half-breeds unfit for the woods or the gabled house. Take Mr. Knight. Once there was no man on all this ship more loyal to the Captain. So I vow nothing. I have come to warn you: Do the same.’ He fell silent, breathing heavily, waiting for my answer.

  “He wasn’t asking, I had a hunch, what he’d come to ask. He’d come to ask me to rebuild the universe, undo his murders, his attack on Miranda—understand him, and like a god, forgive him, confess that I too was a cosmic half-breed, connected to no one and nothing, despair my foundation and his similar despair my shred of hope. Upchurch the purifying whirlwind, all-equalizing Flood. The road to Paradise, no doubt. But a wise man settles for, say, Ithaca. Miranda was still as a corpse, listening, and he too was listening, hunched in the darkness, listening with all his soul. Wolff’s voice, far away; some Negro, singing. It was nothing like that that we listened for. We listened … It would not come clear to me.

  “ ‘I can make you no promises,’ I said.

  “After a moment, Wilkins laughed. Without another syllable, he rose and left us.

  “When he was gone, I got up, felt my way over to th
e ports and undid them to let in light, then went back to Miranda. The eye not swollen shut was opened a little, staring nowhere. A tear ran down the side of her face onto the bolster. I moved my hand to brush it away, and Miranda stiffened. ‘It’s Jonathan,’ I said. There was no response. I couldn’t tell whether she was in pain or not. I discovered, kneeling beside her in the dimness, looking at her mutilated face, that I couldn’t even talk, though talk might help. A ruin. My mind went back to that scene on the poopdeck, when Miranda tried by those queer half-truths and then by that kiss, with her father looking on, to secure me once and for all as her captive, make me accept her magic-lantern show as peasants accept theurgic tales of healing water, celestial visitations, the raising of the dead. I could understand. She was afraid. On this weird, mad ship, she needed a protector more keen than Alastor, Wonderdog, now buried in the ocean, his brains blown away by Wilkins’ musket. But how could I forgive her for the wreck of my hopeful fantasies—for going after me not from love but from faith, stupid faith, that her trickery, like her knife, could never fail? Wilkins’ boast again. I vow nothing. So with Miranda, but worse; because Wilkins at least could hate himself, mourn the ideals he’d turned against. Miranda was no idealist lapsed or otherwise: mere girl, mere woman, humanity’s showpiece, transformed by nineteen centuries of pampering to a stage creation, tinseled puppet painted, taught speech by troubadours—championed by knights who knew her lovely and probably unfaithful—philosophized by painters and jewelers and poets—and now the theater had collapsed on her, ground her to the staddle, revealed what she was. In the gray light I looked hard at her tear-streaked face. Not a woman’s now; a mutilated child’s, a monkey’s. I remembered the night on the wharf by the abandoned lumberyard, Pankey’s failure—remembered the betrayal of my friendly pirates, my ludicrous desire to pursue my dearly loved daddy to sea. I did love him, yes, old drunken howler, and however foolish my behavior with the pirates, I was good at that time, an innocent; they couldn’t have tricked me otherwise. And I remembered golden-haired Miranda-as-child, no doubt eager beyond words to please ferocious Daddy Flint. It was then, maybe, that she’d learned the smile, the trick of catching the sunlight in her hair and trilling it like moonlight reflected in a pail. So all things beautiful come crashing down: Comes mindless ebb tide, wind from the southwest, and the poor ridiculous smiling independent goes down, like all poor barques before him.… Alas, poor Miranda, poor Jonathan! Incredible, the clarity with which I remembered the pretty little fraud in that Boston theater, lisping out by rote the tragedies of man from the beginning of Time. How lovely we were then, the Flint girl and I—and how ignorant! All at once, without warning, my chest filled up like a drowning man’s and I began, despite all I could do, to bawl. The welling tears came driven by a power that I hadn’t realized I still possessed, a pressure as magical and baffling as the root pressure of the tomato plant, which can push a one-inch column of water—so my science book claims—nearly two hundred feet in the direction of, possibly, God. As if the earth had burst open, letting dinosaurs out, dark wall-eyed dragons, I whooped and gasped. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t check in the least the violence of my childish, humiliating woe. Miranda’s hand moved, closing on mine with a grip as firm as my dear, good mother’s, many years ago, when I awakened from a nightmare of my father’s being eaten by a whale. I sobbed harder and tried to pull my hand away. She turned her face, lips trembling, and looked at me, gripping my hand still more tightly, her whole soul silently bawling as mine was, bellowing for no more illusions, no more grand gestures, just humdrum love such as children and plants feel, and poor whining mothers, or angels treading air.

  XXVI

  “So Wolff fell in his turn.

  “I have no time to speak of Wilkins’ machinations. Before every successful mutiny there’s scheming and talk, an idea that seems true enough to universal law as the universe appears that moment to convince free-thinking men that the order of the moment is contrary to Nature and therefore certain, if given a nudge, to come toppling. So Billy brought the Captain down, though he had no intention, with all his talk, of unleashing a full-fledged mutiny. So Wilkins stood on the deck triumphant, the back of Mr. Wolff’s head blasted off, Wilkins shouting with what I took at the time to be rackety glee, but it wasn’t; I’d not yet begun to understand his sorrows: Shouting and laughing like a mad crow, the murderer again, beginning to suspect that his theory was nonsense, he was no more free than the ship becalmed in a smell of land where there was no land, the ship’s decks humming prime-evil with the shouts of his fellow worldmasters, comrade slaves, until sorrowfully, though he’d hated him, the black harpooner with the bone through his nose, Ngugi, gentleman, lifted Wolff’s body like a child’s and carried it gently to the starboard rail and let it fall. The Negroes and whites of the crew fell silent, bowing in spirit to the big black king of some universe built more enduring, more sensibly disciplined, than ours.

  “ ‘Come out, Jeremiah!’ cries Wilkins. ‘It’s safe now!’ And he laughs. If I hadn’t been persuaded before that he was crazy, that laugh would have done it. ‘Brothers, sisters, I did it all for you!’ cries Wilkins now, and laughs again. I took it for obsequious whining, at the time, but I believe now I was wrong again. He could prove he was human, one of us. There are no divisions, no dualities, only monstrous mirrors, the existence chain—even in the hour of our final dissolution: We hang in the balance ‘twixt the Bear and the Southern Cross, and follow on. He was, if imperfect, a thinking animal caught in awareness of his imperfection, and as tortured by it as he would have been if he’d had some god he could stand back-to-back with for measurement. It’s never required enduring forms to make the world Platonic; it requires only inescapable pain. So Newton teaches. Every atom, of every body, attracts every other atom, both of its own and of every other body, with a force which varies inversely as the squares of the distances of the attracting and attracted atom. If I venture to displace by even the billionth part of an inch the microscopic speck of dust which lies on the palp of my finger, I have done a deed which shakes the moon, and causes the sun to shudder in its path, and alters forever the destiny of the myriad stars and planets that roll and glow in the majestic presence of our insatiable desire. Like Gilgamesh of old, or like mad Achilles, Wilkins had decided he’d strike a blow for love.

  “And so Wilkins, in his turn, fell.

  “In the dimly lighted oil-stinking hold, talking with bound, gagged Captain Dirge as if the old man could answer him, or would if he could, black Ngugi and I looking on, saying nothing, never guessing how dark the farce would turn, Wilkins laughed, half-sob, half-rage. The Captain was like a deadman, inwardly struggling—or so I imagined—to hurl from his beaten soul some hint of his former animal magnetism, but no muscle in all his seated, tightly bound body stirred.

  “Wilkins drew his pistol, waved it at the Captain. Ngugi, unarmed, took one step closer.

  “ ‘What would it mean,’ Wilkins said, ‘if I blew yer mighty brains from here to Java?’ ‘Wilkins,’ I said. But he raved on. ‘If Creation is nothing but blind chance—mind this, milord—then the highest thing I can aspire to become is an impulse, a mindless whim, whether terrible or lovely.’ Wilkins laughed, wet-eyed. ‘So it is, milord. Seamen, engendering spirit, unite! Follow me, lads! Rise out of civilization, the cool marble halls of mere reason, convention, the sickness of orthodoxy.’ He bent closer to the Captain, still waving his pistol. ‘We’ve cut ourselves off. That’s the secret, Captain. Ye’ve said so yerself. Our skulls seal out the universe. Very shrewd, sir. Shrewd observation!’ He suddenly tensed, like a man struck by a whip. ‘Ye’d have liked to change that, if ye could—you and yer Society. Ye’re a fool, Captain. We’re all of us fools. Yer glorious project—would ye hear about that?’ He gave a crazy laugh, and Ngugi flinched back, afraid again that the gun would go off. Wilkins howled, ’ ‘Twas a hoax, yer lordship! A ridiculous hoax! ‘Twas a hoax put together by two antic devils by the names o’ Tobias Cook and James T. Horner—aye
! and a sailor who’d put in time with the Grampus, by name of Willie Burns, and a fourth man, fourth devil, the sly insider, a whimsical maniac known to the world as—Swami Havananda! Aye, sir. Himself! It’s him slipped the painting ashore for the copying—and as fine a copying as ever was seen to the west of the Paris forgeries. And no trouble, that, the forger being the same man as painted the original.’ He threw back his head, theatrical, and laughed. Ngugi moved. Wilkins swung the pistol at Ngugi, and he froze.

  “Now Wilkins looked at the Captain again—the Captain still as death. Wilkins hissed: ‘And why? ye may ask me. Why this monstrous, unfriendly hoax? I have asked the same question a thousand times, yer majesty. Asked it every time I set down my foot on a spider’s back, and every time the sun rose fiery and lovely. Aye! And given a thousand answers, all contradictions. Because ye were absurd with yer talk about God and yer Society—outrageous with yer praying in the dark of the sea, and yer Bible-reading and yer hymn-singing, and yer deigning to preach to us lesser men that was kindly invited t’ave brandy in yer cabin and be told of the undisciplined and ignorant rabble and the aristocracy “not closed to men of genius”—which was not us, sir, ye made that clear!—absurd with yer mumbles of ghosts and yer beautiful daughter’s “impressions,” and no wonder, half-dead already of yer pale theosophy. Ye set yerself up as our better and gave us no choice but to tumble you—and not just me, the very owners of the ship, milord.’ He laughed, gone pale. ‘So I says to myself, “That’s why we done it.” But no sir, not so. I’d fain have believed you. That’s why. Aye. But I lie again. It was only from whim, sir. Monumental whim! Artistic impulse, the urge of the Creator. Eight million years ago, humpbacks tell us, fish took a notion to depart from the sea. Fearfully, Captain, glancing in alarm over scaly shoulders; but on they walked, our slimy gill-flopping grandfathers, lords of whim. They learned the strange trick of breathing air, separating one from the elements four, in defiance of God (Thor he called himself, and willed his fins into mammoth’s legs, then called himself Woden, and willed his crisp fish-head to brain-packed skull)—by whim, Captain, by meaningless whim, because nothing in the universe was firm. No, I lie again. I hoped ye’d outsmart us, prove yerself a leader. There ’tis. The hell with us! Ye were only a man, and it ain’t sufficient. We’ve cut ourselves off, sir. There’s the secret.’ Suddenly he was shouting, bellowing like a bull. ‘Now hear this, me glorious ship and crew! This is Wilkins speakin’! We’ve sealed out the world with our thinking about it, our lies and philosophies and grandiose fictions. I’m determined, as a worshipful Christian, to leak it back in!’