Otherwise

by John Crowley

  Belonging to him. No, that wasn’t so. She washed glasses angrily, slapping them into the gray water. She belonged to no one, not Hutt, and certainly not this monster. She had never been owned; one of her constant taunts to her mother, trying to bring Caddie up respectably in spite of exile and poverty, had been, “You don’t own me.” Maybe once she had been owned by her father, Sometimes she felt a long-ago adhesion, a bond in her far past, to that man who grew vaguer in memory every year. But he had freed her by dying.

  “Getting hot down in the N.A.,” said the older driver. “Getting real hot.”

  “I don’t get it,” Barlo said.

  “They’re trying to put it all back together. The Fed. The N.A.’s a holdout. Not for long, though. And if they join, where in hell will you be? They’ll squeeze you to death.”

  “Well, we don’t hear much up here,” Barlo said uneasily. A silence occurred, made louder by the rattle of a loose window pane. The leo motioned to Caddie.

  “I’d like some smokes.”

  The three at the bar turned to look at him, and then away again, as one. “We’re out,” Caddie said. “The truck won’t come again till next week.”

  “Then we’ll leave tomorrow,” Painter said.

  She put down the glass she had been wiping. She came and sat with Painter under the lantern, ignoring the alert silence at the bar. “Why me?” she said. “Why not a man? You could hire a man to do anything I can do, and more. And cheaper.”

  He reached over to her and raised her face to look at it. His palm was smooth, hard, and dry, and his touch was gentle. It was odd.

  “I like a woman to do for me,” he said. “I’m used to it. A man… it’d be hard. You wouldn’t know.”

  Close to him, touched by him, she had thought to feel disgust, revulsion. What she felt was something simpler, like wonder. She thought of the creatures of mythology, mixed beasts who talked with men. The Sphinx. Wasn’t the Sphinx part human, part lion? Her father had told her the story, how the Sphinx asked people a riddle, and killed everyone who couldn’t solve it. Caddie had forgotten the riddle, but she remembered the answer: the answer was Man.

  Hutt sat at a table near the door with the coffee, pretending to do his accounts. She passed him and repassed, bringing down Painter’s gear from his room, dumping it onto the barroom floor, kitting it up neatly, and taking it out to the pack ponies.

  “You’re lucky, really,” Hutt said. “These drivers said in a month, two months maybe, they’ll close the highway. There’ll be no more trucks. How would I pay you?” He looked at her as though for some forgiveness. “How the hell am I going to live?”

  She only shouldered the last pack, afraid that if she tried to speak she wouldn’t be able to, that the hatred she felt then for him would stifle her; she picked up Painter’s carbine, which had an odd-shaped stock, and went out.

  When Ruta and Bonnie were ready, Painter tried to take the lead rope, but Bonnie shied and tried to rear. Painter’s lip curled, and he made a sound, a shriek, a roar, and a sound that was all fierce impatience. He could have taken Bonnie’s neck in one arm, but he seemed to gain some control of himself, and gave Caddie the rope. “You do it,” he said. “You follow. I’ll stay ahead or we’ll never get there.”

  “Where?” she said, but he didn’t answer, only took the carbine under his arm and started off with short, solid strides; as he walked, his shaggy head turned from side to side, perhaps looking for something, perhaps only from some half-instinct.

  All that morning they went up the unfinished dirt truck road going north. The yellow earth-movers they passed were deserted, seemed to have been deserted for some time; apparently they had stopped trying to cut this road over the mountain…. From out of the constant forest sound there came a sound not quite of the forest, a dull, repeated sound, like a great quick watch. Ahead of her, Painter had stopped and was listening; he threw his head this way, then that. The sound grew more distinct, and suddenly he was running toward her, waving her off the road. “Why?” she said. “What’s the matter?” He only made that harsh sound in his throat for answer, and pushed her down a crumbling embankment and into a tangle of felled trees and brush there. When Ruta and Bonnie pulled at the rope, reluctant to go down, he spanked them with his hand. The sound grew louder. Painter fingered his carbine, looking out from where they hid. Then, ghostly through the treetops, hovering like a preying dragonfly, a pale helicopter appeared. It turned, graceful and ominous; it seemed to quarter the area in its glance, as a searcher does. Then without a shift in its ticking voice it withdrew southward.

  “Why did you hide?” she said. “Are they looking for you?”

  “No.” He smiled at her, something she hadn’t known he could do, a slow and crooked smile. “But I wouldn’t want them to find me. We’ll go on now.”

  Mid-afternoon he had her make camp in a sheltered glade well off the road. “Eat if you want to,” he said. “I won’t today.” He lay full-length on the heated ground pine, drawing up his muscled legs, resting his big head on his chin, and watching her work. She felt those lamplike eyes on her.

  “I brought you cigarettes,” she said. “I found a pack.”

  “Don’t need them.”

  “Why did you say we had to leave when they were gone?”

  “Men,” he said. “Can’t stand the smell. Not the men themselves, their places. The smell of, I don’t know, their lives.” His eyes began to close. “Nothing personal. The cigarettes block up the smell, is all.” His eyes were slits; they closed entirely, then opened again. She had eaten and packed, and still he lay slipping in and out of sleep. Wherever it was he was going, he seemed in no hurry to get there.

  “Lazy,” he said, opening his eyes. “That’s my trouble.”

  “You look comfortable,” she said.

  It would be many days before she understood that his direct, fierce stare more often than not looked at nothing; many days till in a fit of rage at being so intently regarded she stuck out her tongue at that gaze, and saw it drift closed without acknowledging the insult. He wasn’t a man; he meant nothing by it.

  Not a man. He was not a man. The men she had known, who had grasped and fumbled with her in a pleading, insistent way; the dark boy she had done the same with not long ago—they were men. Something leapt within her, at a thought she would not admit.

  In the late afternoon he grew restless, and they went on. Perhaps by now the ponies had gotten used to him; anyway, they no longer shied from him, so Caddie could walk by his side.

  “I don’t want to pry,” she said, even though she suspected irony would be lost on him, or perhaps because of that, “and you have the papers and all, but it’d be nice to know what’s going on.”

  “It wouldn’t,” he said.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Look,” he said. “That copter we saw was looking for somebody. I’m looking for the same somebody. I don’t know where he is, but I’ve got an idea, and a better idea”—pointing up—“than they have.” He looked at her, expressionless. “If they find him first, they’ll kill him. If I find him first, they might kill both of us.”

  “Both,” she said. “What about me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  What was it she felt for him? Hatred: a spark of that, a kind of molten core at the center of her feelings that warmed the rest, hatred that he had with so little thought snatched her from where she had been—well, comfortable anyway. Hatred of her own powerlessness was what it was, because he hadn’t been cruel. The uses he put her to were what she was for; it was in the papers; there was no appeal from that and he made no bones about it. He obviously couldn’t put a polite false face on the thing, even if it had occurred to him that it might make it easier for her.

  Which it wouldn’t have. She knew her own story.

  And yet in using her he wasn’t like Hutt had been. Not constantly suspicious, prying, attempting to snatch from her every shred of person she built for herself. No, he assumed her competence, asked fo
r nothing more than she could do, said only when they would stop and where they would go, and left the rest to her; deferred, always, to her judgment. If she failed at anything he never showed anger or contempt, only left her to patch up her mistakes without comment.

  So that slowly, without choosing to, resenting it, she became a partner in this enterprise that she couldn’t fathom. Had he consciously so drawn her into it? She supposed not. He probably hadn’t considered it that closely. I like a woman to do for me, he had said. You wouldn’t know.

  And touched her cheek with his hard, dry palm.

  “You cold?” he said. The fire had died to coals. Her own sleeping bag was an old one, a grudging parting gift from Hutt. She said nothing, trying not to shiver. “Damn, you must be. Come over here.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Come here.”

  It was a command. She lay coldly hating him for a while, but the command remained in the space between them, and at last she came, tiptoeing over the already rimy ground to where he lay large in his bag. He drew her down to him, tucked her efficiently within the cavity of his lean belly. She wanted to resist, but the warmth that came from him was irresistible. She thrust her damp cold nose into his furry chest, unable not to, and rested her head on his hard forearm.

  “Better,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Better with two.”

  “Yes.” Somehow, without her having sensed their approach, warm tears had come to her eyes, a glow of weeping was within her; she pressed herself harder against him to stifle the sudden sobs. He took no notice; his breathing, slow and with a burring undertone, didn’t alter.

  It was just light when she awoke. He had gone down to the quick stream they had camped by. She could see him, lightstruck, the fine blond hair of his limbs glistening in the sun as though he were on fire. He was washing, delicately, carefully; and from within her cave of warmth she spied on him. Her heart, whether from the invasion of his privacy or from some other reason, beat hard and slow. He bent, drew up silver strands of water, and swept his hands through his mane; he rubbed himself. He bent to drink, and when he arose, droplets fell from his beard. When he came back to the campsite, drying himself with an old plaid shirt, she saw that above his long lopsided testicles his penis was sheathed, like a dog’s, held against his belly by gold-furred skin.

  From somewhere to the south the copter’s drone could be heard briefly, like the first faint roll of a storm. He glanced up and hurried to dress.

  Through that day, walking by him or ahead of him (for she was the better walker, she knew that now, his strength wasn’t meant for endurance, or his legs not made for walking, yet he no longer stopped for long rests as he had before), she felt come and go a dense rush of feeling that made her face tingle and her breasts burn. She tried to turn from him when she felt it, sure that he could read it in her face; and she tried to turn away from it herself, not certain what it was—it felt like clarity, like resolve, yet darker. Once, though, when he called out to her and she was above him on a hard climb, she turned to face him, and felt it rush up uncontrollably within her, as though she glowed.

  “You’re fast,” he said, and then stood quiet, his wide chest moving quickly in and out. She said nothing, only stared at him, letting him see her, if he could; but then his unwavering gaze defeated her and she turned away, heart drumming.

  Late in the afternoon they came on the cabin.

  He had her tie up the ponies in the woods well away from the clearing the cabin stood in, and then for a long time watched the cabin from the cover of the trees?’; he seemed to taste, carefully, with all his senses, the gray, shuttered shack and its surroundings. Then he walked deliberately up to it and pushed open the door.

  “No one’s been here,” he said when she came into the shuttered dimness. “Not for weeks.”

  “How can you tell?”

  He laughed shortly—a strange, harsh sound, little like a laugh—and moved carefully through the two small rooms. In the afternoon light that filtered through the shutters she could see that the place was well furnished—no logger’s cabin, but something special, a hideout, though from the outside it looked like any shack. She went to open a shutter. “Leave that,” he said. “Light that fire. It’s cold in here.” He went from cupboard to cabinet, looking at things, looking for something that in the end he didn’t find. “What’s this?”

  “Brandy. Don’t you know?”

  He put it down without interest.

  “You were going to meet your somebody here.”

  “We’ll wait. He’ll come. If he can.” The decision made, he ceased his prowling. The fire, a bottled-gas thing, boomed when she touched a match to it, and glowed blue. Why, she wondered, bottled gas in the middle of the woods? And realized: for the same reason that this place looks like a shack. Bottled gas makes no smoke. No smoke, nobody home.

  “Where are we?”

  “A place.”

  “Tell me.”

  The heat of the fire had seemed to soften him. He sat on the small sofa before it, legs wide apart, arms thrown across its back. On a sudden impulse she knelt before him and began to unlace his boots: He moved his feet to aid her, but made no remark on this; accepted it, as he did everything she did for him. “Tell me,” she said again, almost coyly this time, looking up at his big head resting on his chest. She smiled at him and felt a dizzy sense of daring.

  “We are,” he said slowly, “where a certain counselor, a government counselor, comes, sometimes, when he wants to get away say from the office or town, and where he might come if he had to get away from the government. And we’ll meet him here. If we’re lucky.”

  It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make. Without hurry she took off his boot and rolled the sweat-damp sock from his long, neat foot.

  “What then?” she said, more to hear him talk than because she cared or understood; anyway, the blood sounding in her ears made it hard to think.

  “This counselor,” he said lazily, seeming not to care either, watching her unlace the stiff thongs of the other boot, “this counselor is a friend of ours. Of our kind. And his government wasn’t. And his government down there has just collapsed, which you may or may not know, partly because he”—she drew off the other boot—“undid it, you could say, and so he’s had to leave. In a hurry.”

  “Want some?” she said, showing him the brandy bottle.

  “I don’t know,” he said simply. He watched her as she went around the room, finding glasses, breaking the bottle’s seal; watched her, she knew, differently now. She felt a fierce elation, having embarked on this thing; felt the danger like the sear of the brandy. “Warm,” she said, putting the glass in his hands, touching his fingers lightly. He raised the glass to his face and withdrew it quickly, as though it had bitten him; his nostrils flared and he put it down.

  “How come—” she had not sat but walked now before him, holding her glass in two hands, past him and back again—“how come you don’t have a tail?”

  “Tails,” he said, watching her, “are for four-legs. I’m a two-legs.” His voice had darkened, thickened. “Couldn’t sit down, with a tail. A piece of luck.”

  “I’d like a tail,” she said. “A long, smooth tail to move…” She moved it. He moved. She moved away, a sudden voice urgent in her ears: you can’t do this you can’t do this you can’t do it you can’t.

  He rose. The way he did it made it seem as though he was doing it for the first time after aeons of repose, the way movement gathered in his muscles to lift his heavy weight, the way his hands took hold of the couch to help him up; it was like watching something inanimate come frighteningly, purposefully alive in a dream. As he stood, his eyes somehow caught the fire’s light and the pupils glowed brilliant red.

  She was in a corner, holding her glass before her breasts protectively, her daring gone. “Wait,” she said, or tried to say, but it was a sound only, and he had her: it was useless to struggle because he was helpless. She was swallowe
d up in his strength but he was helpless, taking her because he no longer had a choice: and she had done that to him. An enormous odor came from him, dense as an attar, mingling with the smell of spilled brandy; she could hear his quick breath close to her ear, and her trembling hand fumbled with his at her belt. Her heart was mad, and another voice, shrill, drowned out the first: you’re going to do it you’re going to do it you’re going to.

  “Yes,” she said. She yanked at her belt. A button tore. “Yes.”

  She had thought that a single act of surrender was all she needed to make, that having made it she would be deprived of all will, all consciousness by passion, and that whatever acts followed would follow automatically. Her heat hadn’t imagined difficulties; her heat had only imagined some swift, ineluctable coupling, like contrary winds mixing in a storm. It wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a man; they didn’t fit smoothly together. It was like labor; like battles.

  And yet she did find the ways, poised at times between repugnance and elation, to bare herself to him; drowned at times, suffocated at times in him as though he plunged her head under water; afraid at times that he might casually, thoughtlessly kill her; able to marvel, sometimes, as though she were another, at what they did, feeling, as though through another’s skin, the coarse hair of his arms and legs, thick enough almost to take handfuls of. For every conjunction they achieved, there were layers of shame to be fought through like the layers of their thick clothing: and only by shameless strategies, only by act after strenuous act of acquiescence, her voice hoarse from exertion and her body slick with sweat, did she conquer them: and entered new cities, panting, naked, amazed.

  She began to sob then, not knowing why; her legs, nerveless, folded under his careless weight. She lay against his thick thigh, which trembled as though he had run a mile. She coughed out sobs, sobs like the sobs of someone who has survived a great calamity: been shipwrecked, suffered, seen death, but against all odds, with no hope, has survived, has found a shore.