“Anselmo!” I call back over my shoulder.
“Yes?” He, imperturbably striding at the end of the parade, trots toward me, past my single-file rivals.
What can I ask him? “I, well, that is …” Walking at my back, he waits.
“Do you really think we’ll have clear skies by sundown?” He must know I am asinine, for not alone did he reassure me on this point in the morning. Captain York did, and afterward a call to the meteorological office in Ciudad Vizcaya. But he keeps his sang-froid. “Yes, we will, I am sure.”
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s … important to my plan.”
“Ees that what you weeshed to know?”
“Yes. Yes, thanks.”
He returns to his station. Does he suspect what I intend? (I may be courting a humiliating prohibition, but somehow I could not bring myself to discuss it beforehand.) He made no inquiry, merely nodded, when I recommended that, along with the drinking water he’s backpacking for us, he discreetly stow thick gloves and whatever he could find to serve as a face mask for himself.
Does he know what was in the package for Ellis Nordberg, which the plane delivered (from where?) shortly before we left today? (Actually flying in this weather! I’d have loved to be the pilot…. What does Nordberg have in mind? Beware of him. Cold devils are the worst kind. Well, the more pleasure in besting them.)
Matt Flagler says, in his hard-flat Chicago voice, “Okay, what is your plan, Shaddock? Wanna walk us into the ground? I don’t think that’d be allowed.”
“No,” Gayle Thayer whimpers. “It wouldn’t be fair. I’m not a long-distance hiker or mountain climber or, or anything.” I make myself stop and confront them. They stop likewise. The order of march has worked out to: Orestes, Matt, Ellis, Gayle, Larry, Julia. (Thank you, Julia, for your tact, or are you brooding on hatred of me?) Everyone has donned the outdoor garb that was thoughtfully brought to each room, in the proper size, on our first day. In chin-strapped solar helmets, light long-sleeved shirts, chino pants, stout shoes, sopping wet and smeared with clay in spite of the ponchos rolled up under their arms, they look strangely interchangeable. Or is it that, to me, all humans are interchangeable? I do my duty, but I am not a passionate man.
“Have no fears,” I tell them. “Not of being required to exceed your strength, anyhow. Your nerve will be tested. We’ll soon reach the first spot.” I turn about and resume my pace.
My feet squelch. The mud sucks at them. My garments are heavy too. Wind smites, blood-warm. On my left is a gloom of jungle, on my right, quite far down by now, dashes the sea. Somewhere a woodpecker drums, a flock of parrots make buzz-saw shrieks. It reminds me of Brazil, where I swam in the great brown river they warned me held piranhas. What a letdown to learn a year afterward, from that naturalist in New York, piranhas have never in provable fact been known to kill a man!
Vietnam was perhaps not unlike this Tanoa. I did want to serve, I did, unchic though it would be. Never mind the rights and wrongs; combat must be some kind of ultimate experience. But my draft number never came up (I can’t prove my suspicions as to precisely why; it could be chance) and, of course, given Father’s constituency, I couldn’t volunteer. I couldn’t do that to him.
Here we are!
I say this aloud. They cluster close. I must shift position a trifle to cut Julia out of my direct view. I point, “Look that way.” We are about at the commencement of what may correctly be designated the Iron Cliffs. The beach beneath has pinched out to a boulder-strewn striplet of sand over which the breakers crash. The descent is steep, cragged, cracked, here and there a talus slope, everything of a murky hue that deepens while the sky closes for another shower. Wind hoots.
“We climb down to the bottom and back,” I say.
Gayle utters a parrot-squawk. “Hey, wait,” Matt exclaims. “Wait a goddamn minute!” Ellis, cool and precise: “We are not experienced mountaineers like you. This is unfair.”
I shake my head. “No. I’ve been the route myself. It requires no special skill. A real climber would call it a Sunday stroll. I’ll lead, and you can follow my way if you choose, or take an alternate if that looks better to you. You needn’t hurry; find your own speed.”
“But if I slip!” Gayle wails. “I could be killed!”
“You could.” I regard her. A tingle goes through me.
“You’ll have to take care. The rocks are slippery from rain and some are loose. Down below, you can lose your footing and be swept out by an undertow. But any person in normal health, which we all are, can make it if he keeps his wits about him. And it’s not compulsory, remember. You can resign.”
She stares at Anselmo, finding no mercy, before she appeals: “Larry!” The big man thinks a few seconds, then says, “No, it’s a proper challenge.” It is as if he struck her in the face.
As I did Julia— Quickly, quickly: “I assume Anselmo will come along, ready to help whoever gets into difficulties. Am I right?”
“Yes,” the Indian says.
“Let’s go!” I toss my poncho aside, drop to hands and knees, feel for the initial solidity, and commence my descent.
Orestes comes after me. He uses those long awkward limbs of his to better effect than I would have imagined. Larry is right behind him. The spider and the bear. And the woman— Julia—do I see how she studies precisely what we forerunners do before she imitates? She would.
Matt, obscenely cursing, next picks his path. Ellis is slow and cautious but, stiffly, he comes. Gayle goes last, shivering, blubbering, sometimes yelling the name of Larry, who ignores her. No, the last one is Anselmo. Spider, bear, woman, ape, machine, sheep, wolfhound…. What is Byron Shaddock? Man?
Man, Byron Shaddock?
The world glides from beneath me. I barely recover. The dislodged rock clatters and bounds down through skirling wind to cannonading surf.
All right, Julia, damn you, I enjoyed your company as much as I’ve enjoyed any woman’s, till you shoved your genitalia at me. That’s when you wrecked the relationship. I do not propose to repeat those episodes in college and shortly after. (“Can’t get it up?” asked the first. “Fainting at the threshold,” giggled the second. The third—) Not that I mind staying celibate—it took me two otherwise useless psychiatrists to realize that I don’t really mind—but the fact is nobody else’s business. I have my sense of privacy. Hence I squire the young ladies whom I am expected to squire, and everybody says what a perfect gentleman I am. What is this ludicrous Hugh Heftier notion that incessant sexuality is as necessary to a man as it is to a buck rabbit?
It’s reverse Puritanism; that’s what it is. It sells a lot of magazines and other products; that’s what it does. And I pay it its tribute, I too, in sly hints and sniggers directed at the appropriate acquaintances, oh, yes, I have my women but I don’t choose to make a public display of them; frankly, I don’t care much for American (English, French, Italian, Yugoslav) girls after having been in Rio, Morocco, the South Seas….
Bad spot here. Breath comes heavy. Fingers strain. How hard and wet-cold the rock is, how beautiful. Bones of the planet. “The solid and enduring bone.” I am quick to read every fashionable book, but Housman I always return to when I am by myself. He staves off the silent screams.
Blue-blackness boils overhead. The rain comes galloping. Its million lances strike home; it halloos and laughs, under bugles of wind. Easy, easy. Festina lente. However great the temptation to play mountain goat, remember, you too can err, you (like Larry before you) can throw the game you called (he did). A broken leg could be used against you, day after tomorrow, and force you out of this evilly fascinating strife.
You’ve snapped enough bones in the past, Byron Shaddock, skiing, motorcycling, climbing; it’s more luck than skill that that Cape buffalo dropped dead of your bullets before he reached you; nobody doubts Byron Shaddock’s courage. But today, have a care.
Wind howls. No, that’s human terror! I cling to the ribs of the world and peer desperately upward. I don’t want to cause a
nyone’s death. Truly I don’t!
Gayle, of course. The poor little sloven put her feet on a loose rock that spun off from beneath her and left her sliding toward yonder sheer dropoff. She’s dead! … Unless—
Anselmo pounces. No wolfhound in this moment, he’s jaguar, how lovely to see! He snatches her ankle. I don’t myself comprehend how he braces his body where he is. But he hauls her back from the final quietness. I shout shaken thanks which are lost in the rain and wind.
It soon becomes clear she’s hysterical, in no shape to proceed. He assists her back to the trail. No doubt she pleads for her Larry. But Larry can’t come; that’d eliminate him too.
Probably the rest of them squint through the quicksilver torrent at me. I continue.
First down, five to go.
I wouldn’t mind having that million at my beck. It’s not an unmixed pleasure, being dependent on a trust established by one’s grandfather. I have sufficient intelligence and guts to admit that I have no special competence, and a lifetime of plodding through the nice secure executive suites of the family businesses holds no attraction. I made this quite plain to Father and Mother, immediately upon my graduation with gentlemanly grades. A million of my own, and I could break entirely free.
Anselmo reappears in a dwindling rain. I continue. It is good that strict concentration is required.
The descent is long.
I end on the tiny beach.
A breaker bursts around me, over me. Almost it takes me, out and out to the deeps beyond. I cut my hands, clinging to a pair of barnacled boulders while the green fury (sunlight overhead again) takes me in its teeth and shakes me.
O God, it’s like that time at Copacabana, I swam too far from shore without noticing and suddenly the waves had me, threw me about, helpless, down to scrape my cheek across the sand, up for the quickest gasp before I was hauled back under. … I knew I could easily die. I stayed cool (I always am in a crisis) and husbanded my strength, gained what yards I might toward the beach, until the lifeguards arrived…. But always, always was that thunderous green peace, and at the heart of it, shining like the sun which broke through those billows, Tommy Wilson waited.
I seize my chance, crawl back out of reach, start my return. Larry Rance passes me on his own way down. He grins and gives me a “thumbs up.” You’re a fine opponent, Larry, when the guilt isn’t yours. You ought to be a still finer one, now that that cheap cunt—
What guilt is mine? Suppose we had had a death today?
Suppose, as Julia said, I went on a peasant’s budget and divided my money—at any rate, that part of it I can spend on myself—among selected families. I could, but I don’t. Thus I am indirectly starving children. Or, if we assume the earth is overbloated with man, I am letting wildlife and wilderness perish that I could help save.
And likewise is every comfortable American, European, whoever has more than he needs for survival. Do they feel guilty? No. Then why should I?
I hurt nobody. I go my own way, and those who choose may play my game, but I don’t force it on them.
I proceed, inch by marvelously demanding inch, to the heights.
Gayle isn’t there. Doubtless she lay in the rain and mud awhile, weeping, then stumbled back to the house. I wonder why Haverner picked such a futile character. To be a tool for someone else? He’s a hypnotic figure. A demon? A natural force?
I sit down in the wet grass and regain air. Sunlight slants through thinning clouds. It’s from low above those hills that hump darkling, south of the Crag. Our expedition has taken hours.
Larry comes over the rim. For an instant, the light upon his bright hair under the face-shadowing solar topee … I thought he was Tommy, and eternity stood still.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
He joins me, puffs a prosaic minute, hauls out pipe and tobacco pouch. “Wow, you picked a mean one!” he says.
“We’re not done yet,” answers my throat.
(I know the theory. Schools on the English public model can breed certain traits. But nothing ever happened. Nothing except friendship, and his beauty like sun and stars, and his cruel death of meningitis at age sixteen. It’s common. See Kinsey and all the popularizers in his wake. If anything, the abnormality would lie in never having felt any such emotion. I needn’t cite, oh, Alexander and Hephaestion; I need merely go on with my life.
(Very well, let’s go on with it.)
We have a long wait until Ellis, the last, rounds the cliff edge, followed by guardian Anselmo. Meanwhile, though the wind continues strong, clouds mostly blow away. Those that remain, eastward oversea, are tinged golden against bottomless blue clarity. The Crag looms stark, deepening minute by minute toward black.
“Congratulations,” Ellis says. “On our first elimination, I mean. Now we’ve begun to get somewhere.” Businessman, confidant of bankers, he sits beside the half-liquid trail with the same glee, open or ill-concealed, as do the bear, the spider, the woman, the ape. Anselmo gives away no feelings, but stays on his feet above us.
“The rules better allow for middle-aged shortwindedness, however,” Ellis adds.
“Of course,” I reply in my diplomatic voice. “We can take a few more minutes here. Then we’ll go a couple of miles further, in no hurry, for my final challenge.”
“What’ll that be?” Matt demands. The ape, bred to a concrete forest, turns uneasy again, then sullen.
I smile and do not speak.
Larry laughs toward Orestes. “I hope you’ll pick something less strenuous.”
“I believe I will,” he replies, amiable and impassive.
Julia smiles very faintly toward those two. She has scarcely said a word this whole day.
“All right,” I tell them after a proper interval, and rise. “Shall we proceed?”
I have scouted the area and know my way. Climb further north, almost to the cedars where Julia and I had such a vivacious picnic. (Now night rises under them.) Here the ground surges inland toward the Crag; in that geological time wherein I am a drop of flung spume, this is a billow. A dimmer, narrower path which Anselmo has explained to me was made by free-browsing goats (will those animates de Castilla ruin this land as they ruined Greece and her isles, and will it then show forth the same skeletal comeliness?) leads from the human trail. That’s a steep walk. I hear them breathe hard behind me. We cross a ridge where the wind catches at us and go down into a glen. There the air is nearly still, but shadows are heavy and it’s hard to see, vines catch at feet, withes at eyes, while the sky above is burnished lapis lazuli to west, where clouds run molten gold.
What do I almost remember? I was here once before, long ago, this very place, this exact blue and ruddy hour, but somebody else was beside me…. This evening I remember, across many years, how when I was small I used to escape from my governesses into fantasies about the sister that Mother was always going to give me.
She never did, of course. It kept being postponed: inconvenient for the wife and social director of a bright young Navy commander, bright young partner in our century-old investment brokerage, bright young leader in worthy causes, bright young congressman, bright young senator. No doubt I owe my own existence to the fact that a child, just one, would be a substantial political asset.
I remember, I remember, I called my sister Maria. You slip among these shadows beside me, Maria, and I ache for the coolness of your hands I shall never kiss.
A second harsh ascent and: “Here we are,” I pant. “Take five. ” They straggle to me and look around, taut as if they awaited an ax blow.
We are on the highest hill in the immediate vicinity. Westward they break against bare Crag and here-discernible bronze-hazed Peak. Grass, bent by the noisy wind, ripples beneath a ceiba, easily a hundred and fifty feet tall and more than thick to match, whose foliage makes a cave around its roots. The lower leaves roar, the slimmer middle branches creak, the uppermost boughs are thin and toss insanely, silhouetted on ultramarine. The sun has gone behind the hills, to leave them black athwart that stream
ing furnace of clouds. The east is royal purple, and a planet stands not far above the seagleam.
“What next?” Julia says. I suppose even her nerves are tattered. “Don’t forget, it isn’t safe here this time of day.”
“Take five,” I repeat. “You’ll need them.” I turn my back on her appalled gaze. Evidently she masters herself, for I hear nothing further from her.
Matt swears, trying to light a cigarette. Larry finishes his pipe. They are the only smokers. Julia told me she quit to economize; Orestes and Ellis are moderate users who abstain at present. I wonder why tobacco has never tempted me. Well, I’m austere in all things except adventure. Not that I don’t appreciate good food, drink, clothing, music, art, literature. I simply don’t overindulge, and I leave the unrewarding vices alone.
“Time,” I decide, and say into their attention, “we’ll climb this tree to the top. I’ve tried, and it’s entirely possible, not even especially tiring when the limbs are so close together. I’ll take the lead. Anselmo should be able to judge from the ground whether or not we all eventually settle onto an equivalently hazardous roost.”
“Huh?” Matt yelps. “You crazy nut! In this wind? No!”
“I do not have a man’s strength for clinging,” Julia puts in.
“You don’t need that,” I tell them. “Settle into a fork. Make yourselves fast with your belts if you like. We’ll stay till dark.”
“And climb down blind?” Ellis protests. “No, I agree, this is madness.”
“You don’t have to play,” I answer. “I’m as likely to have my bough break under me, or misgauge and fall to my death creeping down by night, as anybody else.”
Shivers in my scrotum and out to the ends of my flesh! Anselmo recalls me a little by saying, surprisingly, “ ’Ave you forgotten, Meester Shaddock? The bats come out at dusk. Een thees weather, maybe not many, but some, and some of them, ’ave the ’ydrophobia.”
“That’s why I urged you to bring protection for yourself, Anselmo. The rest of us must take our chances.” My look is focused upward, to the flicker of blackness, green, gold, and orange, the beating heart of a lover.
The Devil's Game Page 14
