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held considerable and deadly. Filling his right hand, in almost comic contrast to the blade, was a handful of blue and yellow and pink flowers of the sort that grew on the periphery of the forest.
“These are for you,” Robert said.
She smiled at him and put forth a frail hand. In her bony fingers, in the drab hut, the flowers were an explosion of bright summer colors.
“I’ll see you later,” the boy said. He stared at me as he spoke. He didn’t try to hide his displeasure with my being there.
“But Robert—why don’t I introduce you to Mr. Hammett?”
“No, thanks,” he said.
And was gone, out the flapping rag of a door, down the brown mud slope into the cold silver rain.
“Poor Robert,” she said after we heard the last of his flapping feet disappear in the thrum of rain.
“I’d say he’s got more than a small crush on you.”
“I feel so sorry for him. I was always falling in love with older men when I was his age. To adults it’s always a joke, but when you’re young—it’s very painful.”
“Who is he?”
She shrugged. “He lives with the woman they call the Witch of the Woods.”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“She’s no witch. Just a very dirty woman with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo she spouts to scare the children away.”
I lifted the arrow. “Maybe I’ll see her when I go into the woods. Maybe she can tell me something about this.” I smiled. “Being a witch and all, I mean.”
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Ed German
FOOL’S PARADISE
219
I stood up, careful of my head. Riverworld huts were not designed for people of the twentieth century.
“I guess I’ll start with O’Brien.”
“Be careful of him. He’s a very tricky man.”
I thought of my years in prison, there at the last when simply apologizing for being a Communist would have been sufficient to free me. I’d known a lot of tricky men in that time, both in prison and on the congressional committee that saw to it I was incarcerated. I thought of old Dick Nixon, actually not the wily man he seemed to be, but rather a sad frantic soul who’d been loved too much by his mother and not enough by his father. What was it Wilde said about parents—sometimes we even forgive them?
“I think I can handle him,” I said.
“This is very nice of you.”
I raised the cloth hanging down in the doorway. “Don’t take any unnecessary chances.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to worry now. Edgar gave me this.”
From beneath one of the fronds, a huge stone knife appeared in her slender hand. “And he also told me where to put it. Right between a man’s legs.”
She said it with such style and vigor that I almost grabbed my own sac out of pure protective response. The subject of castration does not set lightly on a man’s ears.
“I just hope I get a chance to test myself,” she said. “See if I’m really this helpless little girl or if I’m a really strong young woman.”
I laughed. “Somehow I think you’ll pass the test just fine.”
She laughed too. “So do I, actually. I just pity the man who tries anything.”
I nodded good-bye and went outside the tent. I started down the slope in the grass. The grass smelled strong and leafy. The sky was a shifting kaleidoscope of dark clouds and turbulence. As a child, I’d always been afraid of storms, the sudden chill and scent of rain overwhelming me. I suppose this dated back to the time my sister Reba had been lost for half an hour, my parents searching the neighborhood for her frantically as a storm gathered in the east. Storms would always mean that my sweet sister Reba was lost, even though I was now an adult and Reba had long ago been found safe at a neighbor’s house.
The campsite was as shabby as everything else on the Riverworld. We brought all our skills with us, true, but we lacked the materials we needed. The “suburbs” was a good example, being little more than a large circle of huts in a forest clearing. At the eastern edge of it a man stood holding a crude spear while behind him a group of four children appeared to be playing marbles as they squatted around a small circle of bald, muddy earth.