Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  After heated discussion, it was decided that Wall would take a group on ahead, and the rest of us would follow within the hour. But then they got to arguing about how many were to go with Wall and how many were to stay, and whether or not all the prisoners, who were sitting against boulders at the edge of the hardpan, should go with Wall’s party. It was hard to credit that people who had so recently fought together could now be all snarled up in these petty matters, and after a few minutes of hanging about the fringes of the argument, I gave up on them and went off and sat with Brad and Callie higher up among the boulders.

  From the way everything looked, with that golden light still streaming up from the crater, and the moonstruck hardpan running flat and fissured to the mountains on the horizon, and cold stars glinting through thin scudding clouds, it appeared that nothing much could have happened down below the world; I would have expected some sign of what had transpired, coloured smokes curling up, strange flickering radiances, a steam of dead souls rising from the deep, and there should have been scents of rot and corruption on the wind, not merely the cool, dry smell of desolation; but all was as peaceful and empty as before, and for some reason this lack of evidence that anything had occurred afflicted me and I began to remember the things I had witnessed and the things I had done. As each of them passed before my mind’s eye, a new weight settled in my chest, making a pressure that hurt my heart and caused the flow of my thoughts to stick and swell in my head as if something had damned them up. Brad asked me about Kiri, about Clay, and all I could do was shake my head and say I’d tell him later. Of course he must have known Clay was done for, seeing I had the man’s possessions. But I didn’t realize this at the time, because all my mind was turned inside.

  I have no idea how much time had passed, but Wall, Maddy and the rest were still arguing down on the edge of the hardpan when the last survivors crawled up over the rim of the crater and came toward us at a sluggish pace, black and tiny and featureless against the golden light, like sick ants wandering away from a poisoned hole. They were strung out over about a dozen yards or so. Twenty, twenty-five of them. And as they drew near, the group who’d been arguing broke up and some went out to meet them. A couple looked to be wounded and were being supported by their companions. Brad got to his feet and moved a little way downslope, staring out at them. I was so worn out, I couldn’t think what might have caught his interest, and even when he started out across the hardpan all I said to Callie was, ‘Where the hell’s he goin’?’ But Callie, too, had gotten to her feet by then and was peering hard in the direction of the stragglers.

  ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘I think…’ She broke off and moved closer to the edge of the hardpan. I saw her Adam’s apple working. ‘Bob, it’s her,’ she said.

  I stood and had a look for myself and saw a lean, dark woman stepping toward us; she was too far away for me to make out her features, but her quick stride and stiff posture, things I’d always taken for telltales of Kiri’s rage, were thoroughly familiar.

  What was passing through my mind as I walked out onto the hardpan toward Kiri was almost every emotion I’ve ever had, up to love and down to fear and all their lesser permutations. I’d like to believe that the main thing I felt was relief and happiness, and I’m pretty sure that’s the case, but I know that it was mixed in with a sizeable portion of worry about what would happen to all of us now. I had already given up on Kiri, you see; I had buried her and the past along with her, and it wasn’t easy to recalibrate my heart and mind to her presence.

  She had one of the Bad Men’s coats draped over her shoulders and was naked underneath it; she hardly seemed to see Brad, who was hanging on her when I came up; her eyes were fixed on some point beyond us both, and though her gaze wavered and cut toward me, the only other sign of acknowledgement she gave was to tousle Brad’s hair absently and say something in a croaky voice that might have been my name, but might also have been an involuntary noise. An old bruise was going yellow on one of her cheekbones, and when the wind feathered her hair, I saw the marks on her neck made by a collar; but otherwise she seemed fine, albeit distant…Though as it turned out, I mistook single-mindedness for abstraction.

  As we reached the group of Bad Men waiting at the bottom of the slope, Kiri gave me a hard shove, sending me staggering, and although I hadn’t felt her hand on my sheath, I saw my knife in her hand. Quick as a witch, before anybody could move, she was in among the Bad Men and had grabbed one of the seated Captains and dragged him upslope behind a boulder. Some made to go after her, but Wall blocked their way and said, ‘I were you, I wouldn’t try to stop her.’

  Coley—I recognized him by the red ribbon on his hat—said something by way of disagreement, but there was not much point in arguing about this particular trouble. A high-pitched scream issued from back of the boulder; it faltered, but then kept on going higher and higher, lasting an unreasonable length of time. It broke off suddenly, as if the voice had been permanently stilled; but soon it started up again. And so it went for a goodly while. Starting and stopping, growing weaker but no less agonized. It was plain Kiri had found a way of engaging the Captain’s interest in the matter of life and death.

  When at last she stood up from behind the boulder, she was wild-eyed, covered with blood, her face so strained it appeared her cheekbones might punch through the skin; I caught sight of Brad standing off to the side near Callie. He looked like he was about to cry, and I understood that he must understand what I had known for a while—that though we had found Kiri, she would never find us again. Whether it had been the lost duel or her troubles with me or everything since or a combination of all those things, she was gone into a distance where we could never travel, into the world that had bred her, a world whose laws would never again permit the enfeebling consolations of home and hearth.

  We all watched her, standing in ragged ranks like a congregation stunned and disoriented by some terrible revelation from the pulpit, waiting for her to give some sign of what she might do next, but she remained motionless—she might have been a machine that had been switched off. The silence was so deep, I could hear the wind skittering gravel across the hardpan, and I had the notion that the night was hardening around us, sealing us inside the moment—it felt more like resolution than anything that had happened down in the crater. Like a violent signature in the corner of a painting of blood and degradation and loss. Finally Wall moved up beside her. He outweighed her by a couple of hundred pounds, but even so he was extremely cautious in his approach. He was talking to her, but I couldn’t make out the words; from the sound of the fragments I was able to distinguish, however, I figured he was speaking in a northern tongue, one they shared. After a bit he took the knife from her hand and wiped it clean on his coat.

  ‘Well then,’ he said to us, without a trace of sarcasm and maybe with just a touch of regret. ‘I guess we can go now.’

  In the end it happened that Wall was proved both right and wrong. As he’d predicted, the Captains weren’t able to root us out of the deep places where we hid, but they came damn close and many lives were lost. Eventually that time passed, and things returned to normal…at least as normal as normal gets out here in the Big Nothing. We live in a strange subterranean labyrinth beneath a black mesa, a place of tunnels and storage chambers containing all manner of marvels, and machines whose purpose we may never determine, where once our ancestors slept and dreamed of a sweet untroubled world that would be born upon their waking. Bradley attends school, and though the subjects he studies are far removed from the rudimentary ones he studied back on the Edge, he remains nonetheless a schoolboy. I grow vegetables and fruits and wheat and such on the subsurface farms; Callie helps to administer stocks of food and weapons and so forth; Kiri trains our people in combat. So it would seem that very little has changed for us, but of course almost everything has.

  When I finished the main body of this story, I showed it to Callie and after she had read it she asked why I’d called it ‘Human History’, because it d
ealt with such a brief period of time and ignored what we had learned of the world of our ancestors. And that’s the truth, it does ignore all that. I’ve seen the paintings our ancestors created, I’ve read their books and listened to their music, I’ve experienced no end of their lofty thoughts and glorious expressions, and I admire them for the most part. But they don’t counterbalance the mass slaughters, the barbarities, the unending tortures and torments, the vilenesses, the sicknesses, the tribal idiocies, the trillion rapes and humiliations that comprise the history of that world up until its mysterious ending (I doubt we’ll ever learn what happened, unless the Captains decide to tell us). What the Captains did to us in the Black Garden pales by comparison to the nature of those ancient atrocities, even if you figure in seven hundred years of evil duplicity. And at any rate, to my mind the Captains are relics of that old world, and soon they’ll be gone, relegated to that distant past. As will, I believe, men and women such as Wall and Kiri. And there we’ll be, the whole human race freed from that tired old history, maybe not completely, but with a chance of doing something new, if we’ve got the heart to take it.

  Back when I was living in Edgeville, I never thought much about God or religion. The Captains, I suppose, took the place of Cod, and having Cod available to talk with any hour of the day or night caused me to think less than perhaps I should have about the system of life. But maybe that was a blessing in disguise, because when I look back at all the trouble caused by religion in the old world, I have to think that I’m better off the way I am. Once I found an ageworn Bible, and in the front was a picture of the God known as Jehovah, an old man with fierce eyes and cruel lips and a beard and tufted eyebrows. He looked a lot like Wall, and sometimes when I go outside and glance up into the stormy sky—the skies out here are rarely clear—I imagine I see that angry old bearded Jehovah face come boiling out of the snow clouds, and I wonder if Wall wasn’t standing in for him, if he wasn’t the kind of leader man once made in the image of their god—strong, blustery, bloody-minded men who knew only one way of achieving their goals. We need Wall and Kiri now, we need their violent hearts, their death-driven need to dominate; but it’s clear—at least so it seems—that there’ll soon come a time when we don’t need them any longer, and maybe that’s all we can hope for, that we’ll learn to choose our leaders differently, that we won’t end up apes or Captains.

  Old Hay forgot to tell me how to wind down a story, and I’m sure I’m going about it all wrong, trying to explain what I mean by ‘Human History’, and how limiting the definition of that term to a period of a few weeks of happiness and a betrayal and a ride out onto the flats and a battle still seems to incorporate all the essentials of the process, as well as to voice some faint hope that we can change. But it’s my story, the only one I’ve got worth telling, so I’ll just go ahead and do my worst and hope that having it finish wrong or awkwardly will suit the ungainly nature of the tale, its half-formed resolution, and the frayed endings and uncompleted gestures that make up most of the substance of our lives.

  In the days and weeks that followed the battle, Callie and I drifted apart. This was chiefly due to Kiri’s presence—we could not feel easy with her around, even though she did not display the least interest in either one of us. I had an affair with Maddy, more of a healing than a passion. No hearts were broken, no souls transformed, but it was a fine place to be for the time it lasted. Even in the midst of it I half hoped that Callie and I might get back together but after Maddy and I went our separate ways, Callie remained aloof from me and I could not find it in myself to go to her. As had happened that night when Kiri had caught us at it in the store, I came to have a sense that the love we’d made back then had been childish, that the people we’d been were characters, part of a dramatis personae, our desire a consummate fakery, emblematic of a need to be the centre of attention of those around us, like actors in a pleasurable yet somehow despicable farce. And so we continued to deny what now seems inevitable.

  I won’t try to make any great dramatic presentation of how we did get back together, because it wasn’t dramatic in the least. One night she walked into the little room I’d made for myself on one of the farms to sleep in when I didn’t want to return to my regular quarters, and after some dodging around and a bit of inconsequential talk, we became lovers again. But the grave tenderness we expressed, touching each other carefully, treasuringly, like a blind man would touch the face of a statue, it was a far cry from the way it had been back in Edgeville, from our sweaty, joyful, self-deluding first time, and I recognized that whatever good had existed in our beginning had grown and flourished, and that’s the wonder of it, that’s the amazing thing, that despite the betrayals and failures and all the confused principles that contend in us, seed will sprout in this barren soil we call the human spirit and sometimes grow into something straight and green and true. As I lay with Callie that night, maybe it was wrong of me, but I couldn’t feel sorry for anything that had happened, for any of us, not even for Kiri in the black wish of her sleep shaping herself into an arrow that one day would find an enemy’s heart. It occurred to me that we were all becoming what we needed to be, what our beginnings had charged us to become: Kiri a death; Brad a man; Callie and I ordinary lovers, something we might once have taken for granted, but that now we both understood was more than we’d ever had the right to hope that we could come to be. It was a pure and powerful feeling to tear away the shreds and tatters of our old compulsions, and steep ourselves in the peace that we gave to one another, and know who we were and why, that Bad Men were mostly only good men gone over the edge to freedom, and that the past was just about done with dying, and the future was at hand.

  SPORTS IN AMERICA

  While they waited for Milchuk to show, Carnes leafed through Sports Illustrated, the NFL Preview issue, and Penner checked out the baseball scores in The Globe. They were parked on Main Street in Hyannis, across from the Copper Kitchen, where Milchuk—so they had been told—liked to have his breakfast. It was a quarter to seven of a bitter September morning, a few raindrops spitting down and ridges of leaden cloud shouldering in off the harbour. Carnes, pinch-faced and wiry, with sprays of straw-coloured hair sticking out from beneath his Red Sox cap, betrayed no sign of anxiety. But Penner, who had never done this sort of work before, shifted restlessly about, flexing his neck muscles, reshaping the folds of his newspaper, and glancing this way and that.

  Christ, he thought, I don’t want this. He had been insane to go along with it. His mind had not been right. Too much pressure. Too much drink, too many sleepless nights. He would run, he decided, lose himself among the houses down by the ferry dock. His hand inched toward the door handle.

  Carnes coughed, noisily turned the pages of his magazine, and Penner, stiffening, gave up any idea of running. He touched the pistol stuck in his belt, the envelope stuffed with bills in his windbreaker, as if acknowledging the correspondence between his salvation and another man’s extinction.

  To strengthen his resolve, he pictured himself returning home, with Barbara warm and sweet in their bed, hair fanned out across the pillow, her cheekbone perfection evident even in sleep. Fifty grand, he’d say to her, tossing the money onto the sheet as if it were nothing. Fifty fucking grand. And that’s just for starters. Then he would show her the gun, tell her what he had done for her and how much he intended to do, maybe frighten her a little, make her understand that she might be at risk here, that the next affair might not be so readily forgiven, and that perhaps she had not chosen wrongly after all, perhaps this newly desperate, bloody-handed Penner was just the man to guarantee her summers in Newport and winters in Bermuda.

  He gazed out the window, searching for favourable signs, something to restore his sense of purpose. Overhead, a pair of laced-together sneakers looped over a telephone line heeled and kicked in a stiff breeze, bringing to mind a gallows dance. The deserted sidewalks and glass storefronts with their opaque wintry reflections had the look of a stage set waiting for lights, camer
a, action.

  ‘Y’see this article here ’bout the guy owns the ’Niners,’ Carnes said with sudden animation. ‘Y’know, that guy DiBartalo.’

  ‘Fuck the son of a bitch,’ said Penner glumly.

  Carnes folded his magazine into a tube and stared at him deadpan.

  ‘Lighten up, willya?’ he said. ‘Ain’t no reason you gettin’ nervous. The man shows…bing! We’re outta here.’

  ‘I’m not nervous,’ Penner said. ‘I just don’t feel like bullshitting seven o’clock in the morning ’bout some dumb-ass owns a football team.’

  ‘The guy’s okay, man! He ain’t nothin’ like the other schmucks own teams.’ And he explained how DiBartalo was in the habit of lavishing gifts upon his players. Ten-thousand-dollar rings, trips to Hawaii. How he sent their wives on shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus.

  ‘Just ’cause he treats ’em like prize poodles, that makes him into Albert Schweitzer?’ Penner said. ‘Get real!’

  ‘I’m tellin’ ya, man! Y’should read the article!’

  ‘I don’t hafta read the article, I know all ’bout the bastard. He’s a short little fucker, right? ’Bout five-five or something.’