That was why I insisted to the girl that we turn the lights off and pull down the shades. I wanted to take it off, you see—I was tense as it was, and I knew that if I couldn’t get that thing off it was just no good. I had expected she would go along with it because she had seemed—I think you know what I mean—unprofessional. But she said that it was hot, and it was true: it was very hot. The place should have been air-conditioned, but it wasn’t. She said the tenants had to furnish their own air-conditioners, and she had meant to save enough to buy one back when it was cooler, but there had been so many other things to buy, and I knew what that meant. A girl like that, that you meet in an amusement park, expects something. I don’t mean that she is a real professional, she probably looks everyone over very carefully, and maybe only goes with men who appeal to her in some way, but just the same she has learned that she can make a nice thing out of it. I asked if she had an electric fan, and she said she didn’t. “You can get a nice one,” I said, “for about ten dollars.”
“Twenty-five,” she said, but she was smiling and good humored. The lights went out, but with the shades up enough light came in from the street for me to see her smile in the dark. “I’ve priced them, and a nice one costs at least twenty-five.”
“Fifteen,” I said, and I told her the name of a discount store; she had been going to the regular appliance stores. “You’ve been going to the regular appliance stores,” I said. “They always charge twice as much.”
“Listen,” she said, “will you meet me there tomorrow about six? We’ll look at them, and if I can find one I like that cheap I’ll get it.”
I said that was all right, and I thought how strange it was, getting a girl like that for an electric fan, discounted, and besides I could always stand her up but she must know I wouldn’t, because I’d probably want to see her again before long, and besides, it would be kind of interesting, walking her through the store and thinking about what I’d come to buy for her and why, and looking, much lower down than they thought, through my shirt at all the people who wouldn’t know, and besides we might want to do something afterward, so I said it was all right. I still wanted to pull down that blind, but it was on the other side of the bed, and there was no way, right then, for me to get past her.
“Why do you want it so dark? At least with the blind up we get some breeze.”
“I guess I’m just not accustomed to undressing with someone watching.”
“I know, you haven’t got hair on your chest.” She giggled and thrust a hand into my shirt Fortunately she touched my eyebrow and drew her fingers back. “No, that isn’t it.”
“I suffer from a grotesque deformity.”
“I guess everybody does, one way or another. What is it? A birthmark?”
I was going to say no, but when I thought about it— you could say I was marked at birth, in a way of speaking. So I was going to say yes, and then suddenly it got much darker. I said, “Did you pull down the blind?”
“No, they turned off the lights in the drugstore. They close now, and most of the light was coming from there.” I heard a zipper, and for a minute I thought foolishly: Now where in the world did that come from? The back of her dress, of course, and I took off my shirt and tried to take off my head, but I couldn’t. The catch on the strap was jammed or something—but it didn’t bother me the way I’d thought it would. I just told myself it would save me trouble that way so I’d just keep it on and that way I’d know for sure I wasn’t putting it on backward when I got dressed again in the dark. My eyes were getting used to it now anyway and I could see her a little. I wondered if she could see me.
“Can you see me?” I said. I was taking my pants off. I might keep my head on, but no underwear, no shoes.
She said, “Not at all,” but she was laughing a little so I know she could.
“I guess I’m too sensitive.”
“You haven’t got anything to be sensitive about. You’re nice looking. Broad shoulders, big chest.”
“I have a wooden face,” I said.
“Well, you don’t smile very much. Where’s the mark? On your stomach?” I felt her hand in the dark, but she didn’t reach out for my face—my real face—the way I expected her to.
“Yes,” I said. “On my stomach.”
“Listen,” (I could see her white body now, but her head, in heavier shadow, seemed gone) “everybody worries about something like that. You know what I used to think when I was little? I used to think I had a face inside my belly-button.”
I laughed. It seemed so funny, so very humorous at the time, that I simply roared. No doubt I disturbed her neighbors. A belly-laugh—that’s what I have, I suppose, the only genuine belly-laugh on earth.
“Really, I did. Don’t laugh!” She was laughing too.
“I have to see it.”
“You can’t see anything, it’s too dark. It’s just a little black hole in the dark, and there’s not really a face in there anyway.”
“I have to see.” There had been matches, I remembered, beside the cigarettes on her night table. I found them.
She said, “There was this story I told myself, that I was supposed to be twins, but the other one never grew big and was just a tiny little face in my stomach. Hey, what are you doing?”
“I told you, I have to see.” I had lit a match, and was cupping the flame in my hand.
“Listen, you can’t!” She tried to turn over, giggling more than ever, but I held her down with my leg. “Don’t burn me!”
“I won’t.” I bent over her, looking at her navel in the buttery light of the match. At first I couldn’t see it, just the usual little whirls and folds; then just before the match went out I did.
“Here,” she said, “let me see yours,” and she tried to take the matches away from me.
But I kept them. “I’m going to look at mine myself.”
I lit another match. “You’ll set your hair on fire,” she said.
“No I won’t.” It was hard to see, but by bending at the waist I could do it. There was a face there too, and as soon as I saw it I blew out the match.
“Well,” she giggled, “find any lint?” Her body was a face too, but with bulging eyes. The mouth was where it folded because she was half sitting up on the piled pillows; the flat nose was between the ribs. We all look like that, I thought, and it went all through me: We all look like that.
The little faces in our navels kissed.
<
* * * *
* * * *
If you’ve read Edgar Pangborn’s novel DAVY, you’ll recognize the post-holocaust future that serves as background for the story below. Tiger Boy is in a sense a sequel to DAVY, set in the late 5th Century post-holocaust, 150 years after the time of DAVY. It’s a completely separate story in itself, though: about a good-hearted boy who has no voice, and his encounter with a wandering youth whose companion is a tiger who moves like a river of fire made flesh. It’s also about such semi-intangibles as freedom and love in a rigidly structured world. (Reality is the stuff of fantasy, after all.)
TIGER BOY
by Edgar Pangborn
Bruno perceived, but his vocal cords were missing or defective. He could not moan or murmur; as a baby he shed tears without vocalizing. The parish priest Father Clark had declared him to be not a mue but a natural human child, implying that anyone who put Bruno out of the way would face the disapproval of the Church.
Bruno could listen and was permitted to do so even among the Elders. If the old men lapsed into foolness, could Bruna tell? He would squat outside their circle, soft intelligent eyes wide awake; now and then he smiled.
Baron Ashoka, a few of the Elders, the monks of Mount Orlook, Father Clark, Town Clerk Jaspa, all possessed the art of writing, but never attempted teaching it to Bruno—how could a child without speech be taught? And did not his dumbness and illegitimacy mean that God intended him for ignorance and humble service? Once when Bruno was seven he broke away from Mam Sever, who was minding him, ran
up into the pulpit and made as if to grab the Book of Abraham from Father Clark. For that he had to be whipped. At Father Clark’s nod Mam Sever attended to it at once with the flat of her shoe.
Bruno’s mother had been the woman of Yan Topson. Yan put her away because the infant was none of his. When Bruno was born, March 10 of the Year of Abraham 472, Yan had been in the south country, believed lost, at least nine months. He returned scarred and gaunt, and entered the Karnteen Hut for the five days of ritual purification; when he emerged his fey woman Marget confronted him with the baby. Town Clerk Jaspa was present, Elder Jones, Marta the Cure-Woman, Hurley the Ironsmith. Yan took the baby—it was dark like Mar-get, and Yan a bright blond with cutting blue eyes—and gave it to Elder Jones. Then he struck Marget across the face, an official declaration that the child was not his but a public charge, and she no longer his woman.
Because the child’s hair was earth-dark, his skin tan as a sandy road, his eyes brown as a trout pool, Father Clark named him Bruno. He grew up living here and yonder, wherever there was food and a place near the hearth. Mam Sever, a bountiful woman whose newborn child had died, nursed Bruno after Marget drowned herself in Lake Ashoka—and they say, Father Clark begged a dispensation from the Holy City of Nuber itself to have her buried in consecrated ground, and was refused. Later Marta the Cure-Woman, Marget’s half-sister, often gave Bruno food and shelter during his growing up. He may have picked up fragments of her learning.
Thus it was that Bruno was allowed to listen—big and powerful at sixteen, apprenticed to Hurley the Iron-smith—when the Elders were discussing the rumored approach of Tiger Boy, whose music of the pipes was always sounding in the woods and meadows for many days and nights before his terrible appearance.
In time he would show himself (it was said) in some open region near the village he had chosen, and play his music, and sometimes sing, incomprehensibly—the words were true words, but no one had ever managed to write them down. A youth, according to the stories, with hair falling to his shoulders. Because of the huge brown tiger that walked with him and lay at his feet when he played or sang, no reasonable person dared approach him, and it was generally understood that he was a manifestation of the Devil.
No reasonable person would approach. But when he ended his music and walked away into the woods—this would always be early evening (they said) and the sunlight making long shadows on the grass—one or two foolish or miserable people might run after him; and not return. They’d be sick people, or very old, or strange in some manner and so thought to be suffering a malady of the mind. When the appearances began—a few years ago, ten, twenty, few agree—children ran after him before they could be prevented. These did return, full of totally incredible tales: the nice young man told them funny stories (which they couldn’t remember), and let them pet the tiger’s fur (but not pull it), and showed them where wild red raspberries were growing, and played music just for them, and then saw them safe to the edge of the woods where they could find their way home. Thereafter children were kept closely guarded indoors at the first hint of Tiger Boy’s presence.
* * * *
“There’s plenty whopmagullion into it,” said Elder Jones in the Store. Bruno was there. “Lies, lies, people got no conscience the things they tell. Like about him raping twelve women up to Abeltown.”
“If it was only six,” said Elder Bascom, “you’d still got to call him supernatural, I don’t care how young and peart he be.”
“Same and all,” said Elder Jones, “there’s something to it, something out there that ought not to be.”
“All mahooha,” said Elder Bascom. “Somebody dreamed it up out of the lonesome itch, and now it goes on and on.”
“No,” said Baron Ashoka, “I agree with Elder Jones. And the thing is against Nature.” He had ambled in, tethering his horse to the rail himself in his democratic way, wanting no fuss from servants as the storekeeper Jo Bodwin well knew. A fine old man in his yellow shirt of Penn silk and loin-rag showing his family colors of brown and orange, he stood with one well-shod foot planted on a chair-seat. Genial, this whitehaired squarefaced old gentleman who owned most of the valley land, the mill, the pottery, the flax fields. As President of the Maplestock Corporation he could -also have been said to own the sheep ranch and fulling mill; in the Corporation’s name he exercised the right to impress four days’ labor each month from every ablebodied villager. He represented the township of Maplestock at the Imperial Assembly in Kingstone, and spoke out there against slaveholding in the western provinces. His family dated back more than two hundred years to the reign of Emperor Brian I, who made the knight Ian Shore the first Baron Ashoka, for services rendered in the Penn War that established our southwest border from Binton Ruins down the Delaware to the Atlantic. The family had grown in wealth and importance also during the glorious War of 435-439, when we absorbed the old republic of Moha, so that now, except for a strip of land border with Penn from Binton Ruins north to the Ontara Sea, we are bounded altogether by water—the great Ontara, the Lorenta and Hudson Seas, and the measureless Atlantic where no one ventures, though men are said to have done so in Old Time. And here was Baron Ashoka chatting with the Elders like anybody. “If it comes on this village,” he said—”God forbid, but if it does we know how to deal with it, eh, Jo?”
“My lord,” said the storekeeper, agreeing heartily with no notion what the Baron might have in mind, “I’m sure we do.” Jo was a transmission line. The labor tax usually took the form of an order to Jo: I’ll have so-and-so many men on such-and-such a date; as one might say over the counter: I’ll have a pound of raisins.
“Standby posse, that’s the thing,” said the Baron. “That’s what I stopped by to talk to you about. No labor tax, boys—take off that worried look.” The company laughed as required, and Bruno smiled, perhaps at the resonance of laughter. “Special guard round the clock in four-hour shifts, Army style by God. You pass the word to Guide Lester, Jo. Five men, three shifts of ‘em, four hours on and eight off, ready to go out andtake him.” The Baron checked as if he had bumped into an obstruction. “Hm ... I want the first shift to start tonight, tell him that.”
Jo Bodwin nodded, tactfully silent. Elder Bascom in seventy years had never learned tact “My lord, what with the smallpox last year, fifteen able men took off their regular work is going to make one almighty hole in things.”
“I know, Elder. Yes—well, Jo, tell Guide Lester to get nine men, three to a shift, and I’ll send three archers of my household. He’s to have the first shift assemble outside the Store here, not later than eight by the church clock. And they’re not to go out for any silly rumor about somebody tweedling a pipe in the woods—only for the open appearance they say he always makes. We’re going to deal with it once for all, gentlemen.” Another slip: the Elders were not the King-stone Imperial Assembly, and they weren’t gentlemen. Gossip might mutter that the Baron was feeling his years. He nodded to all, mounted his mare stiffly and was gone.
* * * *
Bruno sometimes woke whispering. In early childhood when he tried to form words with no sound except breath, nothing good happened: the few who noticed were unaware of anything like words in the hissing noise, and it bothered them. Mam Sever, more kindly, was also rather deaf; she noticed the stir of Bruno’s lips but thought he was expressing hunger, and so stuffed him with food and frustration and patted him and went on with her perpetual busyness. By the time he was sixteen Bruno had learned to hold his mouth quiet—except for that rare smile, fleeting as the passage of wings, of which he was not conscious. But often, in the crumbling cabin adjoining the forge where he now lived alone—he was a useful watchman and could be trusted not to steal—Bruno woke whispering. And sometimes when wide awake, if certain that he was alone, he allowed himself the indulgence of it, the hurting half-pleasure.
For his head was alive with words. Magicked by words, their agile intensity, words that soared and swooped and darted about him until he felt himself among the swallows
or crossing the hills on hawk wings toward a forever. His words could rush together, go chiming in love together down a long golden rolling morning. And they responded to his wish—a little. He could urge, instruct, tease them until they leaped from thought to thought so clearly that between two pinnacles he could find the rainbow bridge. They would play games with him—ah, it was all a game, he supposed, only a game, something to be doing when not eating or sleeping or messing around or listening to talk-talk or working for goodnatured Hurley in the goodnatured sweat and clang of the forge. Only a game—
Woodthrush, woodthrush, I follow to your city
by the alone way
where you say the fountains are forever playing.
I’m hungry, I’m tired-
why do you cease calling when I was so near?
Universe 2 - [Anthology] Page 20
