The next step seemed as natural to me. I asked Rafe if I could draw him for my book.
“Me? Bridge, sir, you have got to be sick.”
I played my ace. “Maybe you don’t know but the Angel Raphael is one of the archangels in Hebrew tradition. And he’s one that’s specially well intended toward mankind. He enjoys talking to human beings.”
Rafe laughed. “When did you cook that lie up, O Wise One?”
I told him it had been true, countless ages. Countless ages was one of his sayings.
He said he would check it in Chief’s encyclopedia. He waited a good while to say “O.K. You got a secret place?”
“What’s secret about it?”
Rafe waited. “I take all the guff I can handle, for dancing. Imagine if I was an angel too.”
So with no great forethought, I said “We could walk up the mountain this afternoon, up back of the cabins.”
”Your boys would follow us.”
I said “You just climb up on your own. I’ll meet you there by three o’clock.”
Rafe said “And we miss Indian lore?”
I doubted that missing one day would ruin us.
Rafe thought and then suddenly said “God damn!”
I thought some nocturnal bug had stung him. “What bit you?”
He said “Not a thing but finally seeing the point. You’re wanting me to pose for a live archangel?”
“That is the point.”
Rafe said “Not my body, right?”
I said “Absolutely, nothing but your head. To tell the truth, it’s your nose I’m after. You’re the only live man in America now with a Grecian nose.” He almost had one. His profile showed a perpendicular, barely curved line from the edge of the hair to the end of his nose. In the very rare cases when you see such a nose on anything but a classical sculpture, it can look unnerving.
Then Rafe stood up. “I got to get on.”
I followed suit.
His good laugh broke loose again. “No, Bridge, you go lay your tired head down in Cabin 16 with all your little biddies. I got my rounds to make before light.”
“Where you going, Rafe?”
“That’s classified, sir.”
“You do this every night?”
“Top secret, sir.”
“Any girls out here in the woods, waiting for you?”
“I’m too old for boys’ camp but not that old. Girls are a problem I’m saving for my next incarnation.” He laughed, took a few steps and then said “You ever read The Tibetan Book of the Dead?”
This was fifteen years before hippies put that endless hodgepodge on the list of indispensable texts. I’d heard of it though, and the news that Rafe had read it was the knockout punch for too full a night. I said “Don’t tell me another word, son. I’ll see you at breakfast.” I was pleasantly tired and thoughtless halfway to the cabin. Then I missed my footing for an instant and nearly tumbled. As soon as I was balanced again, it dawned on me I’d made a real mistake. I should never have shown Rafe my messengers and asked to draw him. This boy was too nearly special already. He burned too high on too little fuel. I’d correct myself quietly in art class at nine.
One thing I’d done right—going to the lake. Nearly blind, I’d managed to finish a good drawing. And I’d worn myself down so much that I slept through the bugle at seven. For the first and last time all summer, the boys woke me. When my eyes cracked open, seven boys were hopping in the cold at the head of my bunk, announcing at the top of their lungs that Bridge was lost in dreams of his sweetheart. I’d dreamed about her, more and more often, the longer I slept with these cool children. But the previous night she’d been as far from my dreams as her body was far. I quickly tried to recall who’d replaced her. Then I knew I’d slept past the reach of night visits. For all that I’d stayed up roaming till three, I was rested as a baby and honed for the day.
I was going to need every atom of strength. The morning went smoothly. Rafe didn’t turn up for art class. But when I asked if anyone had seen him, one of his cabin mates said “He came to breakfast.” I figured he was tucked in the woods somewhere or back in his cabin, sleeping off the night. I would just not show up for our meeting, and Rafe would get the point— Bridge’s new common-sense point.
When I checked by Kevin’s table at lunch, Rafe still wasn’t there. Kevin said he hadn’t been in his bunk at reveille, but that was fairly normal and Kev wasn’t worried. Late in the hour’s siesta though, one of my boys looked out the window by his lower bunk and said “Hey, Mr. B.” The younger boys were in even more awe of Rafe’s voice than his dancing. And they affectionately called him Mr. B after Billy Eckstein, the popular black baritone.
Rafe said “Hey yourself” and kept going.
I assumed he was making good on our arrangement, though he could have just been going to his cabin. For a while I considered going through with my plan not to show up. But a lifetime’s inability to miss an appointment or to be a minute late eventually won. And when I broke out ten minutes later into the clearing where the boys and I cooked most of our cabin suppers, Rafe was sitting on the big rock. He was wearing a white T-shirt and his usual faded jeans—somehow he didn’t like shorts. His right ankle was laid bare on his left knee, and he was studying the skin.
I could see at once that the ankle was badly swollen. I said “Tell me you haven’t stepped on a snake.”
He grinned and dropped his teeth. “Mr. Boatner, sir, I haven’t stepped on a snake.”
“What happened then?”
“Snake stepped on me, a timber rattler. Didn’t see him till I felt this hot weight hanging on me. He was four foot long.”
“God, Rafe. Where is he now?”
“I let him off easy. He’s back in the woods.”
I asked if he ever really saw him.
“Not only saw him. I was trying to pick him up.”
It was one of those minutes when the world seems stopped. There was no moving time, all clocks were dead. For once I knew not to start a lecture. I went straight to Rafe and inspected the ankle. There in nightmare perfection were two small puncture wounds. No sign of blood. In fact blood seemed to have left the whole ankle. For four or five inches around the punctures, the skin had flushed blue-white. And as I watched it, the swelling continued. Counselors were warned to carry rudimentary snakebite kits at all times. They looked useless but I always had mine—an alcohol wipe, a rubber tourniquet, a razor blade and a suction pump. I told myself He’s trapped in your plan, Bridge. Save this child.
But when Rafe saw the kit, he laughed and said “Whoa, doctor. I don’t want to bleed to death. Get me to Asheville soon as you can. If I pass out on you and don’t make it, you take my headband.” He was making a will in his head—that was plain.
I’d seen the headband. It was dark cowhide and Rafe had beaded it in white and blue, but that was the last thing I could think of now.
It turned out that, unlike many country boys, Rafe knew a lot about snakes. The general view, in rural America, is that you kill every snake you see on the off-chance it’s poisonous. Rafe had taught himself to identify the few dangerous snakes of the South—moccasins, copperheads, rattlers and coral snakes. And he was way ahead of me in knowing that the latest medical thinking advised against the old cut and drain method, unless your cutter was an expert anatomist. Few snakebite victims die of the poison, but a good many wind up bleeding to death. You keep your victim as still as possible, which was why Rafe knew not to limp back to camp. Then you apply a tourniquet and carry him fast to the nearest supply of antivenin. Rafe also knew the precise brand of snake, a young timber rattler, apparently male.
His well-informed calm began spreading to me. I even had a moment to notice his face. He was pale, to be sure, and looked as if he might have lost fifteen pounds in the last few minutes. I’d brought along my camera, meaning to take at least a few photographs of his face for later use in my drawings. But unreal as he now looked, a camera was out of the question—the human ques
tion, that is. Naturally I longed to use it.
But I didn’t. I laid my sketchbook and colored pencils under the shelving rock. Barring a hard rainstorm, they’d be safe. Then I said to Rafe “Stand on this rock. I’ll tie off your ankle. Then you climb on my back, and I’ll tote you downhill.”
Rafe met my eyes and laughed. “Hey doc, you’re doing all right.” And he managed the two steps up onto the rock, but by then his upper lip was sweating, and his color was alarming.
I hurried to cinch the tourniquet. Then I backed up to him and said “Climb on.” He put both arms around my neck and lay against me, surprisingly light. I hooked my arms beneath his knees and we started downhill.
I thought “I won’t say a word about alibis. This child is too sick to worry about lies to save my skin.”
But well before we hit civilization, Rafe said “Two things, Bridge. You heard me holler from up in the woods, so you came up to save me. And will you please ride to Asheville with me?”
I said I would if he needed me but that Kevin was the natural person to go.
He said “Kev’s a gentleman but—see—I need you. You’re my teacher and all.”
I thought I’d want to think that through later. But I said, in that case, I’d square it with Kev. Then my own mind shut down, cold and scared. Another sick man was clinging to me. I felt my father’s hot hand on my wrist. A human tourniquet, damming my blood. For a bad instant I thought I can’t. But I didn’t tell Rafe, and of course I obeyed him.
The rest of things fell out the right way from then on, that day anyhow. The first man I saw as we got into camp was Sam, the head counselor. As stern-faced and upright as MacArthur at Corregidor, he’d been checking the showers for mildew.
I lowered Rafe to a bench in the shade, then called Sam over and described the crisis.
He studied the bite and said ‘Thank God you didn’t try to drain it.” He told Rafe how lucky he was I’d found him so quick. Then he looked to me, “The nurse has gone into town for supplies. She won’t be back for an hour or so. You and I’ll need to drive Rafe on in.” He pulled out his keys and asked if I could bring Rafe a little farther?
Rafe got to his feet and looked around, entirely lost for his bearings.
I crouched to take him and we started the last few yards to Sam’s car.
On the way we met the dietitian. Sam gave her the news in a dozen words and said “Tell Chief and Kevin Hawser. Kev’s teaching his magic class in the lodge. Ask him to take care of Bridge’s boys. Say we’re fine so far and will phone from the hospital.”
She put out a long efficient hand and touched Rafe’s heel, just for five seconds but in tender slow motion. Then she met his eyes and said “Next week you won’t know this happened.”
My throat didn’t lock but I said “Thank you.” And that was the moment I understood how big a need any serious place has got for women. Women just always believe in a future.
But then Rafe tried to laugh again. It sounded old, that frail and high.
So from there on I was scared.
Sam drove like the old hero he was, fast and masterly with an unhysterical but steady line of courage for Rafe and for me. While he must have known that snake lore was another specialty of Rafe’s, Sam also gave us a lecture on the local varieties. How awful they looked but how seldom their bite really harmed a normal person.
I didn’t look at Rafe, but I knew how far from normal he felt.
And by the time we got to the outskirts of Asheville, Rafe was needing Sam’s courage even more than I. He was whiter still and beginning to shake, and his jokes had signed off miles ago.
For some invisible reason every car we met yielded right of way. We stopped only once, while Rafe leaned out to vomit in the weeds. And thirty-five minutes after leaving Juniper, we were in the emergency room, watching the boy be rolled away. He was all but transparent by then.
Not till he was out of sight did Sam ask me for details. I told him Rafe’s lie. I’d heard a boy calling and thought it was Rafe. So I climbed the two hundred yards uphill and found him calm but already bit. As the words came out, I found I believed them. They sounded truer than the actual facts. Now if Rafe just lived.
Sam nodded and squeezed my shoulder. “You did fine, Bridge. He’ll be all right.”
If the story had been any less watertight, I’d have despised his gullibility. But as it was, I also nodded.
And Sam went on “Of course Ray should have been resting in his cabin after lunch, but he’ll never march to any drum but his own. Not till life hits him harder than it has.” Sam looked in my eyes. Then when I was silent, he kept on looking, “Christ knows, life’s tried to down that boy—maybe you noticed. He’s a likable boy but he draws hard luck.”
I said I’d heard his mother died.
“Some years ago.”
Sam was watching me still, and that was stirring my guilt to the boil.
But at last he forestalled me. “Ray still hasn’t told you?”
“About what, Sam?”
“His mother, all that—”
I said “Just that she died when he was maybe ten. I’ve got the feeling he barely remembers.”
Sam said “He remembers every second, Bridge. She was murdered, in Ray’s presence.” He went on slowly to tell a story as awful as any I’d heard to that point. Back then only four or five years ago, the Norens lived in the family’s plantation house in south Georgia out in the open country. Ray was in the house one August day with his mother and a Negro maid. In the middle of everybody’s afternoon naps, two escaped convicts walked in. Both of them were white, and one was a man that Ray’s dad had fired some years before. They both arrived with homemade knives and at once tied Rafe up hand and foot, then his mother and the maid. They forced all three of them to huddle in a bathroom.
Then they ransacked the house for Mr. Noren’s safe. The one fired man thought he recalled that the boss kept a safe. Finally they found it in a closet upstairs, but they couldn’t break it open. By then they’d found a fine pair of pistols and tried to shoot the lock off—no luck either. Then they came back downstairs, yelling wild threats, and asked Mrs. Noren for the combination. She said she never had known nor had Ray. So they raped the mother and the maid right there, then cut their throats. They were starting on Ray when his father drove up with a truckload of fieldhands.
I must have turned pale myself by then.
Sam stopped and asked if I was all right.
I said maybe he’d better let up a minute; it had been quite a day. Then I stepped outside for some air. And hot as it was, with a few deep breaths, I pulled up short of passing out. But I thought of two questions and went back to ask them. Did Sam know the date of the day in August? Could yesterday have been the anniversary? He didn’t know and, even up to now, I’ve never found out. I also asked if Rafe really witnessed the rapes and murders, and was he wounded before help arrived?
Sam said he’d always heard that Ray really was there in the room through it all but that—despite some blows to the head, when he tried to help the women—no, he didn’t get hurt. Not his actual body.
Small mercy. I sat there this soon again in a hospital waiting room. It was the kind of place that had surrounded me through so many recent ordeals. Back then they all compounded the hardness of waiting with their milky green refusal of color and of all human sound but muffled grief or the slow unwrapping of one more cough drop. Even this late in a gangster century, a story like Rafe’s is hard to take. In the gentle fifties, it was hard as downing a cup of hot acid. But down it went. I said to myself over and over the one thing I seemed to know, I will not stay around for a life like this. Young as I was, I put God, Time and Fate on notice.
* * *
They seemed to relent. In another half hour a medical resident named Dr. Doak came out and said that Rafe was stable. It appeared he didn’t get a full bite, not a full slug of venom. Maybe he’d lucked on an old snake or one that had flushed its poison sacs, hunting earlier today.
<
br /> I felt it was important to say “No, Rafe specifically said it was young.”
The doctor surveyed me as if I’d just clamored for classification as a maniac. Then he smiled faintly and said “Maybe young Ray’s biological powers were diminished at the time.”
I lamely said “Not likely.”
Vindicated, he turned to Sam. Did Sam know of any past conditions—like rheumatic fever, asthma or seizures—that he should hear about?
Sam looked to me.
I said “No, nothing.”
And Sam agreed. Apparently witnessing your mother’s torture, rape and murder—and a family friend’s beside her—didn’t qualify. Sam added that Ray was strong as a bear.
Dr. Doak laughed. “A talking bear. That kid has told us more, and about more things, in less time than any three other patients. But he’s slowing down now.” Then the doctor said that he’d like to observe Rafe for at least twenty-four hours, maybe longer. If there were no complications overnight, he saw no reason why Rafe shouldn’t return to camp late tomorrow, provided we kept his activities light. But let’s wait and see.
I knew at once what I owed the boy. I should stay nearby. But I also had seven boys back at camp, so I didn’t speak up.
Sam read my mind. He looked to the doctor and said “Could Bridge stay here with Ray?”
Doak said sure, they were not too crowded and were putting the kid in a single room. They might even find a cot for me.
I wanted to say that kid was the last word Rafe deserved. But I looked to Sam and waited, as neutral as possible.
At once Sam said “If you’ll help me out here, I’ll personally sleep in your cabin tonight. You call me tomorrow if you need a ride back. Meanwhile I’ll give Ray’s dad a call.”
“You think he’ll fly up?” Rafe had mentioned that his father owned a plane.
“Most unlikely, no. He’s just remarried, for the second or third time. He’ll authorize me to spend big bucks, buying Ray a toy. Let’s go up now and see what he wants.”
The Tongues of Angels Page 10
