“I’m pleased to meet you,” Tibor said. “I just took your picture. I hope that is all right with you.”
“Sure, son, sure. Glad to be of help. I’m going to have to get back to rest now, though, if your friend here will give me a hand. I’m ailing, you know.”
“Is there anything we could do?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got plenty of medicine laid by. You’re nice people. Have a good trip.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Tom flipped one hand at him, as Pete caught his arm and steered him back to the stall.
Home! Tibor thought, his eyes filling with tears. We can go home now. . . .
He waited for Pete to come and harness the cow.
That night they sat by a small fire Pete had kindled. The clouds had blown, over and the stars shone in the fresh-washed sky. They had eaten dry rations. Pete had found a half jar of instant coffee in an abandoned farmhouse. It was stale, but it was hot and black and steamed attractively under the breeze from the south.
“There were times,” Tibor said, “when I thought I would never make it.”
Pete nodded.
“Still mad I came along?” he asked.
Tibor chuckled.
“Go on, push your advantage,” he said. “. . . Hell of a way to get converts.”
“Are you still going Christian?”
“Still thinking about it. Let me finish this job first.”
“Sure.” Pete had tried to get through to Abernathy earlier, but the storm system had blanked him out. No hurry now though, he thought. It is all right. Over.
“Want to see his picture again?”
“Yes.”
Tibor’s extensor moved, withdrew the picture from its case, passed it down to him.
Pete studied Tom Gleason’s tired, old features. Poor guy, he thought. May be dead by now. Not a thing we could have done for him, though. What if –? Supposing it was no coincidence? Supposing it was something more than luck that gave him to us? The irony I saw in Lufteufel’s victim deified. . . Could it run deeper even than irony? He turned the picture, looking into the eyes, a bit brighter for the moment as the man had realized he was making someone happy, a touch of pain in the lowering, the tightening of the brows as he had recalled his nice Denver gone. . .
Pete drank his coffee, passed the picture back to Tibor.
“You don’t seem unhappy,” Tibor said, “that the competition is getting what it wants.”
Pete shrugged.
“It’s not that big a thing to me,” he said. “After all, it’s only a picture.”
Tibor replaced it in his case.
“Did he look the way you thought he would?” he asked.
Pete nodded, thinking back over faces he had known.
“Pretty much,” he said. “Have you decided how you will handle it?”
“I’ll give them a good job. I know that.”
“More coffee?”
“Thanks.”
Tibor extended his cup. Pete filled it, added some to his own. He looked up at the stars then, listened to the noises of the night, breathed the warm wind — how warm it had become! — and sipped the coffee. “Too bad I didn’t find some cigarettes, too.”
EIGHTEEN
At the side of the dust-run serving as a road, the cretin girl Alice remained in silence, and a thousand years passed as sun came and day held a time and finally fell into darkness. She knew he was dead, even before the lizzy approached her.
“Miss.” .
She did not look up.
“Miss, come along with us.”
“No!” she said, violently.
“The cadaver –”
“I no want!”
Seating itself beside her, the lizzy said in a patient voice, “By custom you’re supposed to claim it.” Time passed; she kept her eyes shut, so as not to see, and with her hands over her ears she could not be certain if it was speaking further or not. At last it touched her on the shoulder. “You’re a retard, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re too retarded to know what I’m saying. He’s dressed as a hunter, but he’s the old man you were shacking up with, the rat man. He is the rat man, isn’t he? Disguised. What was he doing disguised? Trying to get away from enemies, was he?” The lizzy laughed roughly, then, the scales of its body ambient in the noise of its voice. “Didn’t work. They bashed his face in. You should see it; nothing but pulp and –”
She leaped up and ran, then ran back for her forgotten doll. The lizzy had the doll, and the lizzy grinned at her, not giving the doll to her but pressing it against its scaly chest. Mockery of her.
“He good man!” she shouted frantically, as she scrabbled for the doll, her doll.
“No, he wasn’t a good man. He wasn’t even a good rat catcher. A lot of times, more than you know, he sold old gristly rats for the price supposed to be the going rate for young plump ones. What did he used to do, before he was a rat catcher?”
Alice said, “Bombs.”
“Your daddy.”
“Yes, my daddy.”
“Well, since he was your daddy we’ll bring you the corpse. You stay here.” The lizzy rose, dropped the doll before her, and ambulated off, after its fashion.
Seated by the doll, she watched the lizzy go, feeling the tears running silently down her cheeks. Knew it wouldn’t work, she thought. Knew they’d get him. Maybe for bad rats; tough old ones. . . like it just now said.
Why is it all like this? she wondered. He gave me this doll, a long time ago. Now he won’t give me nothing more again. Ever. Something is wrong, she realized. But why? People, they are here for a time and then even if you love them they are gone and it is for always, they are never back, not now.
Once more she shut her eyes and sat rocking back and forth.
When again she looked, a man who wasn’t a lizard was coming along the dust-rut road toward her. It was her daddy. As she leaped up joyfully she realized that something had happened to him, and she faltered, taken aback by the transformation in him. Now he stood straighter, and his face had a kindness glowing about it, a warm expression, without the twistedness she had become accustomed to.
Her daddy approached, step by step, in a certain measured fashion, as if in solemn dance toward her, and then he seated himself silently, indicating to her to be seated, too. It was odd, she thought, that he did not speak, that he only gestured. There was about him a peacefulness she had never witnessed before, as if time had rolled back for him, malting him both younger and — more gentle. She liked him better this way; the fear she had always felt toward him began to leave her, and she reached out, haltingly, to touch his arm.
Her fingers passed through his arm. And it came to her, then, in an instant, in a twinkling of an eye, a flash of insight, that this was only his spirit, that as the lizzy had said, her daddy was dead. His spirit had stopped on its way back to be with her, to spend a final moment resting by the side of the road with her. This was why he did not speak. Spirits could not be heard.
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
Smiling, her daddy nodded.
An unusual sense of understanding things began to course through her, a kind of alertness which she could not recall from any time ever. It was as if a. . . she struggled for the word. A membrane of some nature had been removed from her mind; she could see in the sense that she could comprehend now what she had never comprehended. Gazing around her, she saw in truth, in very truth, a different world, a world comprehensible at last, even if only for an interval.
“I love you,” she said.
Again he smiled.
“Will I see you again?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“But I have to –” She hesitated, because these were difficult thoughts. “Pass across first, before that time.”
Smiling, he nodded.
“You feel better, don’t you,” she said. It was evident beyond any doubt, from every aspect of him. “What is gone from you is something terrible,” she said. Until now, now that it had gone, she had never understood how dreadful it was. “It was an evil about you. Is that why you feel better? Because now the evil about you –”
Rising silently to his feet, her daddy began to move away, along the dim marks of the road.
“Wait,” she said.
But he could not or would not wait. He continued on away, now, his back to her, growing smaller, smaller, and then at last he disappeared; she watched him go and then she saw what remained of him travel through a clump of tangled rubbish and debris — through, not around, ghostly and pale as he had become; he did not step aside to avoid it. And he had become very small, now, only three or so feet high, fading and sinking, dwindling into bits of mere light which drifted suddenly away in swirls which the wind carried off, and were absorbed by the day.