Читать книгу Close to the Edge Down By the River - R.L. Sterup - Страница 5

Arch at that hour slipped away from the hunters long enough to briefly confab with his old friend. Covertly, of course.

Arch spied him concealed in a thicket behind a ridge as the posse disbursed to trap a cat. Invoking his huntmaster’s privilege, Arch directed the men of his crew away from the ridge for the moment. While the company fly-specked the terrain in the other direction, Arch limped to the edge of the stand of wind-whipped pines where he found the familiar face waiting.

They dispensed with the obligatory handshake. Arch laid his gun on the ground and leaned against a tree. The waiting man idly puffed a fag while scanning the horizon. Looking more than a little contemplative, or maybe just bored. He wore a midnight blue sports coat and trousers and white shirt and jet black tie and black oxfords, and of course the distinctive shades hooding his eyes. His usual costume. Arch sported levis and checked shirt and seed corn cap and muddied work boots. His usual get up.

The man tossed the ciggie to the ground after a time and crushed it into the dirt with a practiced heel. He lowered his shades slightly while casting a knowing nod Arch’s way.

“Should we be worried?” he asked.

Arch shook his head.

“No. She just thinks I’m crazy,” he replied.

The midnight-blue suited man grunted and sighed. Or perhaps sighed and grunted.

“I know everybody’s got their knickers in a twist,” he said after a time. “And, sorry for your loss, by the way. Presumed loss. Though, parenthetically, many’s the boy raised by wolves, successfully. Some a damn site better off than your average conventionally reared kid, by the way. It’s just that we got bigger fish to fry, my friend.”

Arch nodded and sighed. Or perhaps sighed and nodded.

“I know. I know,” he said.

The man fell to his haunches while peeling a twig thoughtfully.

“See there yonder?” he said, pointing to a plateau atop a sandstone bluff across several a pasture and associated bleating sheep. “Mighty fine land, as your kind might put it. Plumb fine. Fric, frac and flambé.”

He chortled.

Arch merely listened, nodding slightly.

“It can be yours, my friend,” the man continued after a moment. “You do get that, right?”

Arch nodded.

“I understand,” he said.

“It’s just that, well, we can’t wait forever,” the shade-wearing man continued. “The higher ups are more than a little impatient. Fit to be tied, in fact. A great cloud, fire flashing forth continuously, from its midst came a creature with the face of a lion. Which is to say, we need the frequency.”

Arch said nothing, merely watched the wind sifting through the scattered land.

“So … when?” the Agent inquired rather pointedly.

“Soon.”

“Ya, … but when?”

“I just need … a little more time.”

The Agency Man sighed heavily. He stood, dwarfing momentarily the hunched figure of Arch.

“Twenty-one days. I thought we had a deal.”

“We did, … do,” Arch replied.

The man harrumphed while turning his back to Arch somewhat dismissively.

“In that case take all the time you need. Which, by the way, now means nineteen and three quarter days. When the clock strikes midnight on the seventh anniversary …..”

He disappeared without finishing the thought. That is, slid quickly over the ridge and out of sight.

“Who you talkin’ to Arch?” Rufus Sutter asked while approaching from the rear, rifle in hand, to report the non-sighting of lion in the brush and scrub the company had only just reconnoitered.

“No one,” Arch replied quickly. “Just taking a piss is all.”

Rufus nodded.

“Ok then,” he said.

“Let’s go.”

Arch led the seed-corn-brand-hatted man away from the pine stand to join the others in a clearing, shaded and restful from the sun and wind.

Plowman the town, it should be mentioned, was then, and probably still is, home to some nine hundred odd wind-torn inhabitants, county seat of Cathar County, roughly equidistant between Atlantic and Pacific oceans, in the heart of the middle of the nation’s midsection, little noted nor long remembered, occupier of a fairly timeless dimension, in the sense of unchanging, whether 1988 or 2008 or 1998 or 1978 of little significance, mere numbers to these rusticated hicks and their curious illiberalities. A courthouse and jail and bank and two hardware stores and three grocery stores and two taverns and two gas stations and three implement dealerships and one drug store and one flower shop and one Old Folks Home and one cemetery and three churches -- one Lutheran one Catholic and one Methodist -- all huddled against the black dirt flatness in a patch of terra firm not far from the Platte River, some three days’ hard ride from Lincoln by horse and buggy, or about an hour-and-a-half by Chevy or Honda, nowadays. A prototypically small town of the type the nation’s midsection formerly vomited every dozen miles or so, when going to “the store” meant collecting eggs or lard from the cellar in which such essentials were “stored,” and getting anywhere meant throwing a saddle blanket over something with four legs, or hoofing it with one’s own two legs, before the most recent generation moved away to suffer in greater numbers in ever more densely congested hellholes of concrete and traffic snarls, and the generation before that, farms getting progressively bigger in time and in tempo with the tractors and trucks and harrows and planters and cultivators that too grew truly gigantic, outstandingly enormous, prolifically huge, bigger and bigger, not to mention the automated irrigation systems one man on crutches can operate at a button’s pushing, towering steel monoliths indifferently rotating their way in half circles spitting liquid, a task that not two generations earlier required the attention of at least one dusty broad-backed heavily-sweating man and three of his eight children “hauling pipe,” while the others of his offspring gathered eggs or fed the hogs or rogued the beans or sheared the sheep. Machines gradually replacing mere men and, as they did, the town shrank but stubbornly declined to disappear, or the people too, or at least those few who still resisted the tug of metropolitan gravity, or who flew back to its gap-toothed dust-mantled wind-torn embrace when commuting the two hours one way, and ducking the random shots fired by the neighbors, and tilling the ten-feet-by-twelve-feet patch of land that qualifies as a “backyard” in some apartment-pregnant complex, proved particularly unrewarding. Here Faith was born to Alice the daughter of Henry Leese, the son of Luther Leese, the son of Arch Leese, for whom Faith’s older and only brother Arch Q. Leese was named, the Arch the First having been led by divine destiny or preordained fate or omniscient design to the Platte River valley after emigrating from Denmark to escape Prussian enslavement. Faith’s Mother Alice married a man from Minnesota or Iowa or South Dakota who taught school and otherwise earned a scarcely living wage before she, Alice, Faith’s Mother, and Arch’s mother too, fled convention via swift-scudding schooner, or maybe jet boat. Faith’s father died in a traffic accident. Faith was, by the time the mountain lion unusually leapt, a veteran of both marriage and childbirth, with longish brunette tresses trailing to her shoulders, appealing blue-green eyes, full rich lips, and a not unpleasing feminine figure. Peter Thomas the twin sons of Faith and her husband rode bikes and delivered newspapers and played ball in the backyard and swung to dizzying heights on the swings behind the school and built forts made of snow in the winter and raked and then burned piles of leaves each fall and otherwise metabolized one self-replicating cell at a time while growing like weeds to boot.

Until, that is, the lion leapt.

South and east and west from the river swept the searching men, bits and pieces haphazardly strewn, a complete mash-up, a pig’s breakfast, this thing, or so the man idly contemplated while cat stalking. Agency Men sporadically posted here and there. Slogging through a field of ankle-high corn intended for ethanol, no lions in sight. Oddly catalogued snippets flooding his cranium all the while, annoyingly. Like the number of lifeboats on the Titanic, or phenotype variations that do not change the corresponding amino acid sequence of a gene yet may nonetheless change the frequency of guanine-cytosine base pairs, or the words of Churchill “not the lion but the lion’s voice.” Idi Amin and Mohammed Atef and Bush reading The Pet Goat, and the time the Cardinals came from six games back with twelve games to play to win the pennant, the same club falling to the Tigers in a memorable series some years later. Odd thoughts dashing through his head without warning. Even as he ruminated somewhat unwillingly the men of the company scrounging by the bluff scared up a covey of quail, a solitary fox, two raccoons, and three skunks, but no cougars, sadly. Six games back! Gene Mauch over-manages, or is it Gene Autry?, no, the latter merely crooned his way to respectability, and while Cyndi Lauper could have been a one-hit wonder, her timeless tune a haunting lyrical catechism for the ages, she eventually topped the Lion King for plaudits on the Broadway stage. He rounded a bend near the old railroad bridge where he practically collided with an Agency Man lying in wait under a trestle, carefully concealed, characteristically silent. Damn their prolixity! What might it take to escape the flood of thought? The undammed river threatened to overwhelm him, at times. Events undeterred by the failed recue of hostages held by Iranian Ayatollahs, failed due to a freak sandstorm, or was that Allah at the helm?, not to mention the winds that miraculously held Doolittle’s Raiders aloft just long enough to make landfall, and the cloud cover over Kokura that caused our boys to drop the second bomb on back-up target Nagasaki instead, and, right next door, his first kiss, a gal named Peggy, who too loved O’Toole and Hepburn in The Lion In Winter. Time after time. Twain and Melville and Hawthorne and Grant and Appomattox and Spotsylvania and Stonewall Jackson crossing the river to rest in the shade of the trees where The Lion Sleeps Tonight. He sank to the base of a cottonwood at the river’s edge, exhausted from scouring fruitlessly, fruitlessly scouring, his tendon aflame with pain. Or so those portions of his grey matter assigned the task of signaling pain informed him. Then again, those unfortunates deprived of a limb sometimes feel -- literally feel -- the dismembered member, phantom sensations no less real than a pin pick to the heel. Perhaps he lacked feeling of any kind? Throwing the ball against a wall in the spacious backyard for hours, until his arm ached, exuberantly awash in summer sweat, aching for a spot in the rotation with the four Orioles’ twenty-game winners, not that a fifth starter was even dreamt of in those halcyon days, and didn’t the Nittany Lions claim the crown that same year? Here a nest of paratroopers preparing to infiltrate the Third Reich’s ranks, immediately adjacent the boys at Valley Forge huddled for warmth, next to the black and white flickering images of some inconsequential conflict in Indonesia, hardly worth bothering about, some tinpot tyrant egging on Uncle Sam, a place no nearer than Mordor, seemingly, or any more a threat, Orcs and Gooks, always a faceless enemy to combat, easy to hate at a distance, and does not Wormtongue bear a more than passing resemblance to Rasputin?, the lion a striking symbol of the Romanovs. The nephew he could not rescue, apparently, the boy tossed over the edge by malicious wind while he, Arch, inexplicably failed to notice the man-eater poised on the sandstone outcrop, incredibly, and pondering again his inability to save the child ripped from his grip by wind, tragically, for one is but plaything of fate, in the final analysis. Clintonians run amuck just over there, waving their cigars, but then again the trains sure did run on time under Bill and his minions, didn’t they, and the first time a girl haltingly took him in her mouth, sputtering and gagging some, in the backseat of the Old Man’s Chevy while parked on a dusty country lane, but not the lion crouching unnoticed just outside the unlocked door. The kid he bunked with in basic training and his mother’s card-playing cronies and the man who served up ground beef at the Red and White on Main Street and the tough from a neighboring town who tried to cave in his windpipe while sliding into second and the prof who lectured endlessly about hidden meaning in the Iliad and the boss who came to work drunk most every day and the slutty parking lot attendant who seduced him in the stairwell when not seducing other men in the stairwell and the opening act at the concert in a midtown loft who sang and played guitar like eternity itself rivering through her music and others many too many to mention crowding a cavernous hall just past the room housing the dogs and cats and gerbils and parakeets and that one nasty hamster, and, of course, the lion never caged. At length he limped from the river’s edge across a neighbor’s pasture to the shaded farmyard where he collapsed, more or less, unable to take another step. Damn balky tendon. Journey and Alice Cooper and Seger and what possible organizing mechanism thrust that motley lot loudly together? oh yes, White Rock Gods From Detroit, and, while we’re in the neighborhood, the American accent convincingly pulled off by Minnie Driver in Grosse Point Blank, and the time it snowed thickly, pleasantly, as the Lions played on Thanksgiving Day, a dozen or more uncles and cousins smothering every chair in the smallish living room while drinking in the blissful aroma of a turkey preparing to convert, be converted, to primate. Australopithecus himself never more content, even if the Lauper song would not come along for another 1.5 million years, indeed humming, perhaps, the selfsame tune, or some rudimentary prototype thereof, a tune waiting to be hummed, presumably, poised for discovery through all eternity, until hunched under a baobab on the African savannah the tune, or should one say “frequency,” invades the smallish brain of the pre-historic man and spits out the windpipe of that man lost in reverie, at least until a passing lion pride opportunistically seizes on opportunity to convert that humming man into lion tissue enzyme by enzyme, everything but the bones.

Cats on the brain. Time after time.