by D Keith Mano
Priest ground his teeth. He did it impassively, lips drawn away. The sound was of ratchets, very loud. It revolted Ogilvy; gooseflesh rose along his nape. Enamel splinters broke off. Priest stared at the capsule.
“Swallow it. Now.” Priest ground his teeth: dowels work ing in wood. “Stun him, damn it. Stun him.”
The bullet split Mason’s chin. Its report clapped through trees, was echoed from Bull’s Hump. One woman fell, huddling. Mason swallowed, swallowed, prostrate now, kicked back ten feet. But the bullet had passed through his throat, out. He blew a spume of aerated blood up in laconic whooshes. He hadn’t seen the gun. Mason wondered what was killing him.
Ogilvy got his stun can out. Priest didn’t try to kill him. He was already expert, using finesse. He meant to hit the arm, but shot just high. Ogilvy said. No. The bullet jostled him sideways, imbedding near his armpit. Priest leaped from the grave, unnaturally low, no more than two feet above the earth; he ran on all fours. Ogilvy limped in a circle, hand over heart, swearing to God. Priest’s full weight hung on him, brought him down.
Ogilvy chatted aloud. He bared his throat when Priest touched it. He accepted death; he helped Priest’s hands. Priest straddled him. He felt Ogilvy’s rib cage swelling, sub siding deep in his groin. Blood welled to brim the armpit. Priest paused; he was thoughtful. He saw the white, freckly skin there, a fowl’s breast. Priest peeled Ogilvy’s biceps, working the green material down. Ogilvy did not resist. Mo mentarily, foolishly, he thought of first aid. Priest levered one palm under Ogilvy’s chin, settled belly to belly on him, comfortable. As the women watched, those who would be the ten Eves of Priest, he ate Ogilvy’s arm to the sweet flesh around its bone.
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Chapter 10
Great susurration: deerskin shuffled on stone. Oscar closed his eyes. The sound, repeated in ten thousand feet, was tidal, digestive. It elided broken phrases of the liturgy. A gully was worn along the center aisle; in mass and in persistence the deerskin had been a solvent of granite. The organist began again. Oscar heard chirps from the treadmill bellows outside, where three novice doms walked uphill, uphill. Oscar stared overhead. Peppery incense hazed the pillar capitals, triangles, each with flat surface enough for a dozen men to stand. All things—clerestory windows, pews, the font—were arrowheaded, recapitulating the cathedral’s form, points aimed at an abstract image of Priest behind the altar. Under his severed arm, the mouths of a feeding world crowded, flowers: tulips cupped, daffodils, tongue-out impertinence of calla lilies. It was twilight. Two men backed away from the communion rail. Oscar knelt beside Eleanor.
The mortars were silent now. A dom heaved his censer. Oscar’s eyes ran, but this was the third day, and a gamy stench had pervaded the cathedral apse. Blue flies breaded a chunk of meat; it quivered with their clung weight. Oscar reverenced himself: forefinger nail cut three times over the biceps of his left arm. He muttered the responses and heard Eleanor. She was too loud, self-conscious. She worried him. Her moccasin tips tattooed the floor. The mortar shot had been a disappointment. She was bitter; she blamed him. Eleanor nibbled around her mouth, gnawing the red lip grease permitted there only on feast days. Her teeth were carmined by it, cruel. She stared toward the altar. Seated opposite each other, two doms worked a treadle: it rotated the fat glass caldron of blood, swirling, inhibiting coagulation. Centrifugalization had crusted it red. Eleanor glanced left, elbowed Oscar. She meant to enjoy herself.
The first dom approached. He wore a sacramental mask: gilt plastic, wire mesh at eyes and nose and mouth. His head had been shaved; a black rubber skullcap fit over it. The left arm, red-sleeved, red-gloved, extended between the flaps of his robe. Eleanor cupped her palms. With thumb and fore finger, particular, the dom chose a sliver of meat from his bronze paten. Muted through the wire mesh, “Come and feed at my arm. I have given my flesh for you.” Eleanor re plied, “I accept this gift of grace and I am full of thanks.” Eleanor's face was muzzled in her palms. She appeared to linger there, snuffling, rooting. As Oscar’s hands went up to receive, he glimpsed the profile of Eleanor's throat, rippling down, a snake in motion. She shivered, perhaps with delight, perhaps with revulsion. Oscar felt the morsel between ring and middle fingers of his left hand. It seemed warm. Oscar saw that his share of the sacrifice was stringy. Glossed sinews, a fine paintbrush, daubed tinges of blood on his palm, Os car responded. He ate. Then, as ceremony required, he sucked the tips of all ten fingers.
Someone had begun to retch. Desperate barking reverberated from the high vaults. It was a woman’s noise, but Oscar could not see along the rail. Two guards hurried left, just be hind him. Oscar was sympathetic, yet embarrassed, disdainful: women did not belong at the altar. A second dom neared Eleanor. He agitated the cup gently; stirred it with a long spoon after each feeding. Oscar watched Eleanor’s tongue. It poked in recondite crevices of her mouth, under the upper lip, tasting man. Eleanor would not retch. Oscar faced away. He read the triangular apse windows: Priest rebuking the Ecologists; St. Mary and St. Xavier in prayer. HE MADE MAN LORD AGAIN OVER ALL THINGS OF THE EARTH. There was no historical authority for the windows. Priest, Oscar thought, had been a stupid man; stupidity had been the source of his power. Eleanor nudged him. Oscar held the cup’s stem. Its rim adhered to his lips. The sacrifice was in a degenerate state; the bowl had accumulated a gluey sediment. Oscar swallowed: the salt taste was not unpleasant, surprising him again. Oscar blotted his lips on the red armband embroidered seventeen years before by his mother, not washed in seven teen years. He stood.
They left together. Eleanor walked clumsily, arm under Oscar's arm; fingertips tested the mechanism of his biceps. She seemed drunk. She smiled; murmured a question, answered it herself. Unseen in a loft above, choirs began to sing the hymn of Priests triumph. “Rejoice, rejoice today./ We have shared the glorious feast./ Great Priest’s arm is safe within us;/ We are strong in his huge strength./ We are men again today./ We are men again today.” Eleanor hummed along. She was pensive, but cheerful, no longer downcast, Oscar wondered: she is intelligent, she must know the story can’t be true. And yet, he thought, it is true enough: man was meant to live and life will be celebrated. Life cannot be denied. Leo passed, entering with his two wives. He didn’t see Oscar. Hands were clapped, in an anticipation of reverence, across his heavy bosom. Oscar put coins on a plate near the door.
The sun set, bisected at crater’s rim. Diffuse rays seemed to erode the wall. Some birds had returned, cautious, edgy. An evening wind freshened: branches of tall oaks conducted the sky with great panache. Oscar paused on the cathedral steps. He felt fine. The smell of cordite had faded. Disposable earplugs were scattered over the stairway, spent cartridges. Eleanor jerked her braid: jaws came open as though tormented by a metal bit. Oscar admired her body. He belched, and the taste of man, not so very different, after all, from the taste of other animals, returned to his throat. “What are you thinking now?”
“Cannibals or suicides,” he said. “One or the other.”
“What?” Eleanor frowned. His soberness irritated her.
“Shakespeare was wrong: there are only two ages of man. Childhood and senility. Savage youth or a self-hating, self-destructive civilization. In between, a few moments—no more, a few—when the balance is held, when he is a god.”
“Shakespeare?” She didn’t ask; she didn’t want to know. “You read too much.”
“Perhaps.” He smiled. “Did you like it, Eleanor?”
“What?”
“The meat.”
“Yes. I did. I did.”
“Your teeth are so big, dear.” He leaned close to bite her earlobe. Eleanor evaded him. “It’s good, I guess. Good to Icnow how one tastes. Self-knowledge. Self-knowledge.” He started down the steps, aware that his voice had become shrill. Late communicants passed; some heads turned. “When we’re through eating others, then we’ll eat ourselves. Again. Like hoop snakes. That’s what you see here: the birth of d
eath. Another birth of death. What a sorry species.”
“Don’t spoil it for me.” Eleanor ran to catch up with him. “You always do this.”
“The reprisals will come. Not now. Not until we’re long dead. The soul of man has secret teeth—it’ll gnaw a way out. Cancer. Guilt.”
“Shut up. Stop talking so loud.”
Oscar didn’t see him. The young father was engrossed. He wore lederhosen; a long peacock feather bobbed above his deerskin cap. The family posed around a statue of St. Xavier; mother, small sons hugging each a knee. Their set smiles quivered with long exposure. The young father paced off distance, counting aloud, toe exactly behind heel. One eye was shut, one eye full against the box-camera lens, the feather curving down, advisory.
His heel pinched Oscar’s small toe against rough gravel. Oscar gasped. His elbow struck, shoving; the movement was immediate and honest, an answer to pain. Oscar heard the sigh. He felt shapes of bone under the rib cage. The young man turned, fist over kidney. He blinked. The feather was apologetic. And Oscar shoved again, elbow honed, point for ward, under the solar plexus. In a joined glance they under stood that this was inexcusable, no reflex. He held his camera up. He was afraid of Oscar.
“Stupid jackass. Why don’t you watch where you’re go ing?”
“Sorry.” The young father retreated. His camera framed Oscar. Eleanor watched the family: their smiles had been re furbished by concern, idiotic now, wide.
“I ought to break your head.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Oscar. We’re late. Leave him alone.” She drew her husband away. He acted reluctance. The young man signaled a prudent obscenity inside his hands. Oscar could not see, and the young man went, vindicated, to his family. Oscar and Eleanor walked along the rim, toward the colossal statue of Priest in Crater Plaza. Oscar’s arm had tautened: Eleanor’s thumb could make no impression on its muscle. They stood aside. One of the big tractors ascended a precipitous incline from the crater floor. Its twelve hooks had been retracted. They were caught in brackets on the chassis. The operator yelled conversation to his four hook men. They slugged from flasks, laughing, apparently tired. In Crater Plaza sweepers broomed the cobblestones. Double file, a primary-school tour waited. Two concessionaires secured a metal grating across their stand. Oscar sat on the fountain lip-
Eleanor watched him. Oscar’s midriff was smug, concave. Arms against his chest forced the pectorals out. He removed one moccasin, examined his instep, inventoried toes. There was no mark. Eleanor smiled. Water trickled out of the cop per vein in Priest’s half arm. She dabbled fingers. The statue’s face, patinaed, a yard broad, was inclined exactly toward her. Eleanor felt unease. She explored the face. Its structures—jaw and cheekbone and brow ridge—were fiercely planar, indomitable, male. But she had always known that. In twilight the eyes were not scrutable; shadows had clut tered under their bronze lids.
Eleanor stood. She wiped her hand. She walked left until she found it. In the profile: Priest’s austere mouth had parted, perhaps had only anticipated parting. But Eleanor saw compassion there and evidence of a smile. Priest had loved all men. Universal love: love for Eleanor. She was at peace and glad.
“Stupid jerk,” Oscar said. “Did you see the look on his face?”
“I saw. He was afraid of you.” She grinned. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“Afraid?” Oscar shrugged. “He was just stupid.”
“He was afraid of you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? You can be very tough. I’m even afraid of you sometimes.” She grinned again.
“All right. Don’t make fun, Eleanor. We’re all children. I have my little weaknesses. These are primitive times—”
“Oscar. Please. Not now/’
“What?”
“Don’t lecture. I’m hungry. Let’s go get something to eat.”
“Yes?” He smiled. He kissed her lips. “Priest, yes. Let’s go. I could eat a horse.”
