by Daniel Quinn
The touch alone told him the paper was Andrea’s personal stationery. Fifty percent rag bond isn’t something you can pick up at a K-Mart; even quality printers rarely stock it. The letterhead design—and of course the name—confirmed it. Having bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of design in the course of his career, he recognized it as first-class work. Enclosed in a double circle at the top was an evocative scene in miniature: beyond a series of light-brown, piñon-dotted hills, a red sun was emerging from the sea. Above and to the right, a pale morning star hung in the brilliant indigo sky. Above sun and star hovered a glowing fetish: a bone-carved deer and a stone arrowhead bound together with a thong. Below the picture, sandwiched between two hairline rules, was her name in widely letter-spaced Baskerville: ANDREA DE LA MARE. Below that was an address, simply Morningstar Path, Taos, and a phone number.
He smiled; it seemed a little too romantic for Andrea.
Looking up, he found Case studying him solemnly. David shook his head, uncapped the pen, and poised it uncertainly. Then, after a moment, he began to write:
Dear Tim:
How are you? I am fine.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.
Sincerely,
David
After signing it, he looked up and said, “Now what? I just toss it into the air?” To his consternation, Case held out his hand for the letter.
“Oh,” David said, glancing down at it uneasily. “It’s, uh, private.”
The hand didn’t waver.
David sighed, handed it over, and closed his eyes, feeling doomed and foolish. When he opened them a few moments later, Case was glaring at him with hatred.
“Well,” David began awkwardly.
With a snap of his wrist, the Indian flicked the letter across the space between them, and the edge of it sliced into David’s right cheek like a knife. Stunned, David put his fingertips to the wound and brought them away covered with bright blood. He stared at it dully, feeling shattered and profoundly confused.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, not really meaning anything, just filling up the space with words.
The Indian gravely held out another sheet of stationery, his eyes inky and unreadable, and David nodded in sudden comprehension. How could he have been so innocent, so blind? Of course this was Horse Killer.
He accepted the sheet of paper, and a drop of blood fell into his lap, just barely missing it. He wiped his cheek with the side of his hand and shakily uncapped the pen again. It was some moments before he was steady enough to begin. After a few sentences, his eyes clouded with tears and he had to brush them away before he could go on.
Dear Tim—
It’s a strange world out here. Strange things go on. Maybe it’s better to live without knowing. Maybe you wouldn’t have made as many mistakes as I have. I think you were right—I should have brought you with me. I wish I had you with me now, Tim.
If you come out here, you should be careful. But being careful may not be the answer. There’s a lot I’m not sure of anymore. Anyway, take care of yourself, and I love you.
David
When he was done, he sat for several minutes staring down at it. Then he looked up and for the first time met the Navajo’s eyes directly; he wasn’t sure what he saw there. Not anger. Pity, tinged with something else; perhaps disgust. Pity is always tinged with disgust.
At last Case jerked his head upward and pantomimed a toss into the air.
David nodded, glanced at the letter again, and sailed it into the air over Case’s head. The wind coming up over the hill caught it and blew it back. He turned and watched it fall to earth a few yards down the hill behind him. It tumbled once and lodged under a small cholla cactus.
He started to get up to release it, but Case said: “Leave it.”
To David’s surprise, the Navajo was shaking his head, his face softened in a smile of gentle exasperation: a reward for the sadly earnest effort of a retardate.
“Go back to the house now,” he told him.
But David was in no mood for the house; he needed time to recover himself, and so he turned and headed down the hill.
Case, still smiling, shook his head again.
CHAPTER 37
It was three hours before David began to feel like himself again. Even though nothing but a sheet of paper had touched him, he’d been more unnerved by the Navajo’s act of violence than by being shot at by Robbie—perhaps because it had been directed at him in a such an intensely personal way. He’d felt stripped and helpless, undone by his own everlasting cleverness.
Tell me, Muse, of that clever man … oh, yes.
As he stumbled through the hills, he thought about the cringing “letter” he’d written to Tim. Thankfully, he didn’t remember it all, but what he remembered mortified him. “I should have brought you with me, Tim”—so you could console me now. “I wish I had you with me, Tim”—so I’d have someone to hide behind.
He was grateful Tim would never actually see it.
Strange things go on out here.
What the hell did that mean?
It seemed to mean: If you go wandering around like a fool, you’re going to get trampled on.
Wasn’t that, in the end, the sum of what he’d learned in the course of this great voyage of discovery? Sighing, he touched his cheek and examined his fingers. Except at the very center, the wound seemed to have closed. He began to pick off the blood that had clotted down the side of his face and wondered what the hell he was doing here.
What was Dudley Case, anyway? Not a student of anthropology—a student of aggression, intimidation, domination. Getting even with the white man by bending David to his will and making a fool of him.
And what was Andrea de la Mare? That wasn’t so easily answered. An immensely self-confident person, certainly. And who wouldn’t be, within the impregnable fortress of her wealth? Wise in the ways of the world: perhaps. Beyond asserting her superior wisdom, what had she done or said that was wise? But she laid claim to much more than mere wisdom. According to her, she was uniquely enlightened: well qualified to dismiss the bulk of humanity as pitifully deluded.
Again he wondered what the hell he was doing here.
What he seemed to be doing was proving to himself that there were people in the world who could lord it over him, with or without justification.
He shook his head. Just three or four hours ago he’d been thinking of Troll House as an idyllic retreat set in these hills for the sole purpose of receiving him. Now, because he’d had an upsetting half-hour, he seemed to be talking himself into running away from it. Maybe he was taking things a little too seriously, especially Dudley Case. That had always been one of his flaws. He’d let the Navajo get under his skin (which had undoubtedly been the idea), but now that he knew what to be on guard against, he didn’t have to let it happen again.
With that resolution, his confidence returned and he made his way back to the house. Back in his room, he pulled off his ruined shirt and gently washed the blood off his cheek in front of the green and gold enameled mirror. The cut was closed but far from invisible. Swollen and red-rimmed, it sat just under his cheek bone, obscenely like a new mouth ready to open in speech. He hoped Andrea wouldn’t ask him about it.
He made a face at himself.
He hoped Case wouldn’t tell her about it.
To hell with it, he told himself. You held a man at gunpoint and would have killed him if the safety hadn’t been on. Stop being so goddamned sensitive.
He took a shower, got dressed, and went downstairs. The giant room was untenanted, except by the ancient god brooding in its jungle and the huge figures cavorting madly overhead in eerie silence.
Andrea, Dudley Case, and an oddly-dressed stranger in a wheelchair were at the far end of the upper living room, and they looked up from their conversation when David arrived. She rose and c
ame to meet him, and her eyes fastened at once on his cheek. With her hands on his arms, she frowned over it for a long moment, then looked up into his eyes.
“You mustn’t go off into the hills by yourself for hours at a time,” she told him gravely.
David smiled. “Why not, Andrea? Are they haunted?” Still holding him, she sighed. “David, David. You must try to stop being a fool.”
He flushed angrily, and she shook him. “Stop it!”
His anger drained away to be replaced by bewilderment, and he stared at her blankly.
“What you’re looking for isn’t there,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She closed her eyes in bleak disappointment and released his arms. Then, as if putting all this behind her, she smiled. “Come see what I found in Santa Fe this afternoon.”
He followed her obediently and soon saw that the man in the wheelchair wasn’t a man at all. It was a grotesque mannequin in Edwardian evening dress, which had been rolled up beside Dudley Case’s chair and now sat there staring at some distant horizon, solemnly bored, as if waiting for the conversation to resume.
David exchanged a neutral glance with Case and looked down at the mannequin.
“Go on, look at it,” Andrea commanded, her hand resting possessively on its shoulder.
David hunkered down beside the wheelchair and studied the figure’s face, which had been painted as if for the stage, with bright red lips, rouged cheeks, and eyelids accented with black. Though clearly artificial and inhuman in its perfection, it was a striking face, artfully framed by a mane of slicked-back black hair, with a long, aristocratic nose, elegant cheek bones, and delicate, almost feminine mouth. Its unmoving glass eyes were the least convincing feature; they should have been haughty but were merely empty.
David jerked back as the eyes swivelled in their sockets to meet his.
“Jesus,” he said.
Andrea laughed. “There’s a button on the shoulder that does that.” She pressed another button and the eyes returned to the front. Then the whole head turned to David with a distinct creak. “There’s a floor pedal for that. There are controls all over the thing.” As if in affirmation, the head nodded twice and turned again to the front.
David stood up. “What was it for?”
“Ah,” Andrea replied. “Tell David what you’re for, Samson.” There was a wheeze, a clank, and a long crackling hiss, like a needle on a scratchy record, and a hollow, squawky voice emerged from the thing’s chest:
“I am Samson. My eyes are blind, as you see, but my vision is clear. Ask, and I will answer. Samson sees all, tells all. Ask and you shall know.”
“Goodness,” David said. “A fortune-telling automaton? But how did it work? They can’t have recorded all the answers.”
“Watch this.”
Squeaking plaintively, the figure’s right arm jerked up, turned to the side, and dropped. After a moment its fingers closed with a snap. Then the forearm swivelled up into a vertical position. With another wheeze, clank, and hiss, the tinny voice resumed: “Don’t keep everyone waiting, Delilah. Read the answer.” David nodded, thinking it out. “So there was a box or something, and the answers were fed through on cards by a confederate below the stage.”
“So it would seem. Isn’t he lovely?”
Samson’s head turned eerily, as if to hear David’s reply. “Lovely indeed,” David said. “Where did it come from?”
“Apparently he was all nicely packed away in a crate that’s been sitting in a warehouse since the thirties. A lucky find.”
“May I ask what an object like that sells for?”
“Oh, not all that much. If it had been one of the famous French or German automata of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, it would be worth a fortune.”
“But how much?”
She shrugged indifferently. “Twelve thousand.” He understood her shrug. It would have meant no more to him if she’d said four thousand or forty thousand. Looking down, he saw that the Navajo was regarding him with somber amusement.
“Marianne!” Andrea called out. “Bring David a drink!” She moved around the automaton, picked up a delicate tulip glass of white wine from the table, and sat down on a long white sofa.
David sat down on a matching sofa at right angles to hers just as Marianne came in with his drink on a tray. She was wearing a simple white jersey shift that clingingly emphasized the skimpiness of the features under it. He gave her a nod and a smile as she approached, but she gazed back at him blandly, as if he were a cast iron doorstop.
As she bent over the table, he thought: We’ll have that skirt up now, my girl. A touch of the birch will warm you.
He crossed his legs over what was suddenly swelling between them and mentally shook his head. He didn’t know why the girl inspired him with such bizarre and uncharacteristic fantasies.
Case was saying something to Andrea, and after listening for a moment in confusion David realized it was in a foreign tongue—not one he recognized. Andrea pondered briefly and replied, presumably in the same language.
“You speak Navajo?” David asked in amazement.
Andrea smiled. “I speak many languages.”
“I don’t suppose I should ask what you were talking about.”
“Why not?” she asked, still smiling. “Dudley just thought of something wonderfully ingenious to do with those silly hooks in your room.”
“Such as what?”
She laughed. “It’s a project. You’ll like it.”
David looked at Case with a vague frown of suspicion. The Navajo nodded back benevolently, then stood up and stretched, his hands clasped over his head. “I think I’ll take a shower before dinner,” he said.
He and Andrea had another brief exchange in Navajo, and he left.
Andrea leaned over the table, drew one of her long cigarettes from a case, and lit it. Realizing he had nothing to say, David half wished he was a smoker so he could light one himself.
After a moment she gave him a sidelong look and said, “Dudley likes you, you know. He simply doesn’t have a friendly manner.”
David made a face. “I have to doubt that. I mean, about his liking me.”
“He does, really, and he could teach you a lot. If you’d ask him.”
“He doesn’t invite asking.”
Andrea shook her head, frowning and smiling at the same time. “You’re a strange man, David. You turn everything the wrong way round. You tremble at the easy things and sneer at the hard ones. I don’t know what to do with you.”
“Do you need to do something with me?”
“ ‘David asked with a sneer.’ ”
He blinked. “Was I sneering?”
“You were careful not to let it show.”
“Perhaps. What are the easy things and the hard things?”
“Keep watch on yourself and you’ll find out. Take note of the things you tremble at and the things you sneer at, and you’ll see.”
He felt his face stiffening under Andrea’s humorless character analysis. He turned with a smile to the mannequin in the wheelchair. “Does Samson know?”
Samson stared back at him glassily.
With a sigh, she got up to see about dinner.
David picked up his drink and went over to inspect Andrea’s library, which occupied most of one wall. Not surprisingly, it consisted entirely of outsize volumes on the arts, architecture, crafts, antiques, collectibles. There was not a single work of literature, history, philosophy, or science. He was leafing through The Art of Maurice Sendak when Dudley Case returned, his hair wet and slicked back, rather like Samson’s. They exchanged a nod, and David resumed his perusal of the macabre fantasy drawn to Mozart’s Quartet No. 19 in C.
It was after nine when they started dinner. The three of them served themselves, and David asked where Marianne was. Andrea said she was occupied elsewhere. Evidently Andrea’s bizarre and exquisite tastes didn’t extend to the culinary arts. The roast beef w
as rare and delicious but plainly served with potatoes, carrots, tossed salad, and French bread.
For the most part, it was a silent meal. Andrea seemed preoccupied and disinterested in her food. Case consumed his as if he were alone, looking up from his plate only to stare into a distance far beyond the walls.
David decided to ask Andrea to have dinner with him alone in Taos or Santa Fe tomorrow. Within her own environment she was too complacent, too much inclined to lecture and advise.
She visibly brightened once the meal was over and the dishes had been deposited in the kitchen. Returning to the living room, she linked her arm with David’s and asked if any of his youth had been misspent in pool halls.
“I played a little in college. There was a table in the dorm.”
“Then we must have a game.” A chuckle rumbled in Case’s throat and David glanced at him to see what was funny.
“Don’t let her talk you into playing for money,” the Navajo said. “She’s a shark.”
“Of course we’ll play for money,” Andrea said gaily. “It’s no fun otherwise. A hundred dollars a game is nothing.”
David asked Case if he played.
“Very, very badly. I can move the balls around, that’s all.” He grinned. “I’ll rack for you.”
As a matter of fact, David had a natural talent for the game. In the first few months he’d played, he’d fought an impulse to get down, sight quickly, and shoot; instead, he’d examined the angles mathematically, picked the exact spot to hit on the target ball to send it where he wanted—and did poorly. Then one night, so far behind against a good player that it didn’t matter, he let his instincts take over and just started shooting—and cleared the table.
He wasn’t up to that standard in his first game against Andrea. From long disuse, his instincts were sluggish, and she beat him easily. She won the second as well, by a narrower margin, and he left only a single ball behind at the end of the third. Finally relaxing completely, David took the next two.
“Ah,” Andrea said, studying the balls she’d left behind, “Minnesota Fats begins to sweat. He needs the stimulant of an incentive.” She looked up and gave David an arch smile. “Five hundred a game?”
