by D Keith Mano
Below, through what had been the right-field bull-pen gate, men with green insect suits of the Ecological Guard began entering in ranks. Priest counted twenty—twice the routine shift. He pointed.
Walters followed the trajectory of his finger. “Yeah. I think it’s some announcement they’re gonna make.” Priest queried him, eyebrows lifted. “I don’t know, tell the truth. I heard a few rumors. Some big green hat probably had a brainstorm. Maybe its the old virus breathing thing.”
“What is that?”
“Bacteria. Viruses. Little animals like bugs that you can’t see.”
“I know the word.” Priest frowned. “What is virus breathing?”
“Oh. Just ordinary breathing.” Walters inhaled. “They found when we breathe in, see—well…a lot of bacteria in the air get killed. They’ve known about it for a long time. Doesn’t seem like much they can do. Maybe we’ll get a different filter for our masks.” Priest had lost interest. “You know, I came here with my father. When they used to play baseball. Right down there. This is forty-five years ago, mind you. Now people you talk to, they think those bats in the museum—you know, they think the players used to brain each other with them. Its not true. No, sir. Was kind of a gentle game. But you can t tell people that.” Walters held his ribs, watched the hand that held. He was in pain. Priest did not sympathize. He yawned again. “How’s the ankle?”
“I can walk.” Priest tried to flex the joint. His instep was lozenge-shaped, bloated; the toes appeared vestigial on it.
“I got a big kick out of watching you run. Up and down those steps. I watched you for a whole hour one day. It’s been years since I seen someone run like that.” Walters grinned; he bent toward Priest. “You don’t eat much E-diet, do you? Sometimes your eyes’re hardly yellow at all. I mean…you better watch out; they’ll start getting suspicious.”
“That’s my business.”
“Is it true what they say. Priest? Did you try to kill a guardsman?”
“That’s my business.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you. Ugly, like I say. Course, you’d get more than six months for attempted murder, wouldn’t you?” Priest did not answer. Walters supported the tumor with his right hand. The bulge gave reluctantly: under his rubberized suit shirt it seemed a bladder taut with liquids. “How can you stand it without the drug? God—just the bugs ‘re enough to drive me nuts. Never mind this little friend of mine. I couldn’t face things without the drug,”
“I want to face things. I’m alive.” Priest spat the stone into his hand. “People like you disgust me.”
“Have a heart. After all, we both know I’m dying. I’ll be dead before your term is up.” Walters shook his head. Priest was silent. “Not exactly sympathetic, are you?”
“I didn’t ask you to come up here. I have my own problems.”
“No. That’s true. You’re right. We all die alone.” Walters sat back. He smoothed the insect suit’s pseudo skin with his palm. “Is it the child?” he asked, but Priest hadn’t been watching his lips. He waited, repeated. “Is it the child?” Priest did not answer. “You want to see it, don’t you? How old would it be now, two months?”
“If it lived. If my wife is alive.”
“You were gonna escape. That’s my guess. Over the broken roof. That’s how you sprained your ankle.” Priest stared at him, eyes lidded. The nose root was flat, shiny. Stupid, Walters thought. “Look—I don’t care. But it’s not smart. Wait. It’ll take you three weeks t’ get back. They’ll stop you at the bridge. Then you’ll be stuck in here for another year.”
“No. One week. It’ll take me one week, six days. I’ve counted them.”
“Not with that ankle. Not without eating.” Priest slapped at his own head. The open hand struck across his scalp and forelock. Motes of dust rose into the sunlight. “Okay. Forget I said it. You know best. Let’s talk about something else. Did I ever say what I’m in for?” Priest did not acknowledge the question. “Are you watching my lips?”
“Yes. I’m watching your stupid lips. Why are you in here? What could you do?”
“Competition. My third offense. I was playing chess. Some crime. That’s what I hate about the rest of them down there. They think they’re guilty. They really think they’ve done something wrong.” Walters inhaled. “Worst thing about this life is the boredom. I don’t like reading, not that much. Antisocial activity, the judge said. Three-time offender. Degenerate.”
“What did you play?”
“Chess.”
“I don’t know that. How do you play chess?”
“Ah. It’s kind of hard to explain right off.” Priest accepted Walters’ statement; he lost interest. “I made the men out of wood. Dead wood it was; anybody could see that. But the District Officer said I’d cut down a tree. He didn’t say it, just sort of hinted. That didn’t help my case any. Besides, like I say, it was my third offense.”
“Who did you play with?”
“Are you serious?” Walters mimed laughing. “Myself. Who else would play? Signs of social alienation. Signs of unhealthy striving. Inability to accept, the judge said.”
“My father played cards. But not after the Day of Recall.”
“Yes.” Walters leaned closer. ”What did your father do? What was his work?”
“He owned a place for cars. Where they could get gasoline.” Instinctively the fingers of his hand were shaped, thumb up, middle and forefinger pointing, last fingers curled. Priest held the air as once he had held the triggered gasoline nozzle.
“Tough.” Walters pinched his lips. “Dead now?”
“He killed himself.” Priest raised one arm. He held it canted at the elbow, forearm parallel to the floor. “He had a machine for lifting cars. He got under it.” Deliberately Priest lowered the arm, watched it. “I found him there.”
“God—” But he could recognize no concern in Priest’s expression. Walters was disturbed. Priest raised the arm, lowered, then dropped it.
“It was after the road breakers came. After my brother died because there was no car to take him where the doctor was.”
“Lot of people died like that.”
“They said thousands had died in cars. It was better that one man should die because there were no cars.”
“Yes. They have all the answers.” Walters glanced down. He started. “Priest. Look.”
There was a quonset hut near the visitors’ bull pen. It had two rooms: left, the wardens’ quarters; right, larger, a dormitory where off-duty guardsmen slept. Prisoners were being formed up in two lines, one line at each door. They wore insect suits; some had shrugged on haversacks. The mosquitoes were vicious just after dawn; plastic filter masks had been snapped shut. The first prisoner in each file surrendered his identity card to a guardsman, then entered the hut. Priest turned to Walters: he was nervous. His eyes moved eccentrically; Walters thought they were unrelated in his head. Other guardsmen had begun to fan out over the lower grandstand.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” Walters said. “God knows. Let’s wait. Let’s not go down there just yet.”
“They’ll come for us. They’re looking now. See. See.” Priest appraised the broken left-field grandstand.
“You can’t escape, Priest, there’s too many of them. They’ve got stun cans. Just wait and see. Relax.”
Priest put his insect-suit shirt on; it squeaked over his tacky shoulders. Watching him, Walters thought he could identify Priest, dead, decayed, from his skeleton. The bone structure was unique; flesh did not embellish it. A long, fluted femur rose out of the seat bowl, higher at knee than at pelvis. A shallow mouth of sinew in the flat left buttock opened, closed. He leaned forward. Under the brow shelf, lids had begun to blink, clearing vision excitedly, though there was nothing to see. Priest’s ears worked on his scalp. Below, the prisoners waited, feet obediently still, careful of the thick weeds, living things. A cow lowed and, as though out of the sound, wind gusts came. They caught arms
in the centrifuge of the stadium walls, forming quick small vortices. Suddenly Priest stood. His hand hit Walters’ shoulder.
“Good God,” Walters said. A man had emerged from either door of the shack. The two men walked, unopposed, unescorted out along the bull-pen ramp. One waved back.
“Free, Free.” Priest said. He almost articulated the word. “They’re letting us free.” He began to kick on his insect-suit pants, ignorant of pain at the ankle joint.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Mary.” Priest mouthed.
“I don’t believe it.” But Priest was nearly to the tunnel and did not see his words.
***
Pigeons obliterated the sky; for more than an hour now they had flocked. The black, agitating current sprawled half a mile across. Priest could just suppose its tattered eastern fringe, sunlight beyond the Courts Building. The stadium was in rain-forest shadow. The pigeons flew complex and precise formations—six or eight layers that passed freely through each other, shuttling, weft thread under warp thread. The birds were voiceless but transmitted in their wings the sound of sails, at a distance, collapsed by wind. Priest wore white epaulets: fish-scale circles of creamy dung, each yolked with a black dot. His plastic mask was smeared. Glove tips wiped there. Priest had become frenzied with impatience. He was last man in the right-hand column, four positions from the dormitory entrance. The second line had been processed more efficiently. Walters had already left the prison.
Priest chiseled at the wire-mesh nosepiece of his mask. It was crusty with dung; his thwarted out-breathing had begun to fog the plastic. As the faceless guardsmen passed, Priest drew his shoulders back, seemed uncertainly to balance spine on pelvis. His head nodded cleverly, imitated the E-diet stupor. The line moved; now only two men were ahead of him. Priest remembered the terrible running dreams: moonlit scenery that jerked past him as he trotted over the same square foot of earth, sinking gradually, preparing an upright grave. He had cried out many times: fortunately the guardsmen had not traced his sounds. Priest hated the gauzy, dry night gags. Above now, the flocking had begun to dissipate; it ended in three pennanting wakes. The sum reappeared: hot again. Priest unsnapped his insect mask, left it an inch ajar.
A man and a boy waited ahead of him; they were embraced belly to back. Priest could hear the feeble, shrill friction of their insect-suit skins. From the rear it was a single epicene animal, black, four-footed; two puerile calves stood inside an omega arch of the man’s legs. One arm was draped over the boy’s right shoulder; it spoke into the curve of his left wrist. Red ants powdered Priest’s legs. There was a small rent beneath his left buttock; Priest patched the split with glove fingertips. It was nine o’clock, he guessed. There was just time to reach the Hudson River before nightfall. Near the quonset hut guardsmen loitered, conversing arm to arm. One throttled the E-diet spout off with a long wrench. Ahead, the man’s groin mounted the boy’s buttocks, subsided, mounted, thighs splaping slightly, closing. Priest was aroused; the reaction disgusted him. A guardsman appeared. The boy disengaged himself. His slim shins cuffed the dandelion heads, burst them, moving with gentle agility. He had Mary’s physique: wide, small shoulders; last spinal vertebrae curved, tenting out the fleshless buttocks. But his legs were bowed.
Mary’s legs were hardly bowed. Born eight months before the Decree, she had been breast-fed until the E-diet embittered, ruined her mother’s milk. She came from a stone house on State Route 206. Three hundred yards south, the same highway elbowed around Sebastian Priest’s filling station and dairy farm. Mary’s father had been a dancer/mime, one of the few men who had profited by the Decree. He became celebrated in an age that would not trust entertainment, touring thousands of miles by bicycle until his death six years before from tetanus. Priest had seen him perform once. And, under branch-linked pines, a proscenium arch, Mary re-enacted characters and images that she had stolen from his rehearsals in the oak-beamed study—a satire on the urban life that neither she nor Priest had ever known. In his turn Priest mimed applause. He was confused, disturbed by “The Roaring Subway,” “A Night of Television,” “Football Players,” “The Mayor,” “The Cop,” “The Rock Group”—more confused, more disturbed by “Tbe Lecher,” whose sensual gestures, muted by Mary’s nude, straight body, were implicit of things that excited them in a manner they could not understand, that, at last, had made them laugh.
Black crescents faded under Sebastian Priest’s fingernails. In those first years of the Decree his cuticles had fattened; calluses and fissures on the knuckles healed; the thumb pad became blue/white, soft, a doll’s bolster. He lay full days in his hammock, rocked slightly by winds netted in the tree heads, a book unopened beneath. Leisure without expectation tired Sebastian and Helga Priest. There was neither appetite nor satiety. His mother tidied, dusting the arid toilet bowl, the dishes that had been propped, exhibits from another age, in their tall glass cabinet. Winters were murderous; it was in winter that Dominick Priest had left home. Only twelve families remained near New Loch. Combustion was strictly forbidden except for the spherical bed warmers that produced a closed, continuous chemical reaction and small heat. In five winters the northern population had been decimated. Survivors trekked south toward the new capital, in Tallahassee. Priest’s mother and father went to bed during the second week of December, coupled only for metabolic warmth, a two-headed amorphous mass under the covers, five-gallon gasoline cans of E-diet beside them. But their son worked. He constructed a snow house on the slope of Bull’s Hump, lined on its floor with rugs and blankets scavenged from the empty town. Wlien he was sixteen, Mary just seven, she had begun to follow him there.
Priest had not known then that she was female. When he knew, it hardly mattered. She appeared soon after the death of his brother. Carlos had been within months of Mary’s age; in her. Priest had completed the education of his brother. Mary’s unspoiled admiration was pleasant; he could always read her lips easily. They wrestled, they boxed on the sloping blueberry fields, unaware that these games were pre-erotic. Two years later, during the census, they had eluded a squad of six guardsmen ordered into the woods to find them, leaving, as they did in play, a tantalizing, obvious trail around the three-mile circumference of Bull’s Hump. Together, arm over arm, prone on Rattler Hill, they had watched the weary and disgruntled squad. In the wide marsh, source of Rope Creek, the guardsmen had been enticed through a treacherous morass. They heard the fat one, Ogilvy, curse aloud, sunk to the hips in a vegetative ooze. Priest had laughed; he loved the hunting games. After a year, however, Mary’s spoor had become terse and unimaginative. Then, in a print of her large left toe. Priest discovered blood. He found it again two days later. Priest was puzzled when, bashfully, Mary showed him the wound. Her mother had died; the flow of blood terrified Mary. Priest packed cool mud carefully into her groin. And that winter, when Priest was twenty, Mary eleven, they had first made love.
His prints gashed the snow. They were shapeless; they suggested nothing of the walker but his fury. Mary was not surprised when the snow piston in its cylinder / tunnel did not slide out. She called again just once. Priest sat inside watching his own breath rise, condense, add fractionally to a veneer of ice on the walls. An hour later, when he was certain she had gone, Priest shouldered the door out. Mary stood there: arms, knees turned in on their opposites, a body’s instinctive economy. The angle of her nose was made more acute by ice. The snow had melted an inch beneath her heels. Priest had to wrestle Mary’s unresponsive body along the four-foot passage, jerking it behind him. He stripped himself; for several moments he jogged wildly. Then he undressed Mary’s extremities, vising her feet in his groin, hands in either armpit. But Mary was not so very severely frozen. When her toes began to move they wiggled in an intentful, arousing pulse under his scrotum. Mary had read the illustrated sex manual left on purpose at her house by Ogilvy, the man she most loathed. Mary educated Priest then: he remembered “The Lecher”; he uncovered the latent instructions of his biology. And, from their
radiant, spendthrift heat, the snow-house walls shone with melting.
The line had stepped ahead. Priest waited alone outside the hut door. Guardsmen exited from their dormitory, hauling duffel bags, footlockers. Six men dismantled a temporary observation tower. The decks of the huge stadium hung slack-jawed, astonished. Priest was weak with hunger, with a furious anticipation that wasted the small nourishment in his body. He needed to release energy: his throat buzzed. His hand dog-eared the edges of metal shingling on the hut wall. Lanky, orange garden spiders toiled under the eaves, chiefly concerned, in a surfeit of prey, with the sanitation of their webs. A guardsman emerged; he seemed impatient. Priest could not work the zipper of his identity pocket. It had rusted; it tore out, chewing the elastic material. Priest presented his card. The guardsman unsnapped Priest’s mask, corroborated the photograph. With cursory taps he spoke a short phrase into Priest’s wrist. The guardsman walked on, then glanced back, annoyed. He returned. He shoved Priest toward the door.
It was dim inside. A single window opened behind the doctor’s head. Priest saw red crosses on the green insect-suit shoulders. A warped plywood board, powdery with the detritus of termites busy in it, lay across two saw-horses, a makeshift table. In one comer there were six folding beds, bent in half, and a high bureau, its empty drawers tongued out. Racks of equipment lined one wall: manacles, cans of aerosol stun, chemical warmers. The doctor leaned over his table. He was a Negro. His hair expanded upward in a precisely round, air-filled crest. Priest thought of great puffball mushrooms, teeming with spores, that grew where cow pats had fallen. The doctor grasped Priest’s arm brusquely, began tapping there.
Priest said, “I can’t speak that way.” The doctor was reading from a thick dossier and did not see his lips. Priest subdued the grasping hand: made a diagonal slash with his thumbnail, “No.”
