The man with the spear stepped forward and said, “You’re Mr. Hammett.”
“That I am.”
“Not to be unpleasant, Mr. Hammett, but we prefer to stay to ourselves. That’s why we have a sentry posted twenty-four hours a day.”
If he was supposed to be fierce, he wasn’t doing his job very well. He was big, yes, but he was deferential, and that’s never good in a would-be bully.
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“I’d like to see Mr. O’Brien.”
He grinned. He looked like an oversize kid. “Well, you saved us both some trouble there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“O’Brien isn’t here—” He angled the spear in the direction of the mud huts. At that moment, a boy ran between two of the huts, chased by a laughing young girl. “He’s down-river a ways.” He nodded toward the River. “And I can’t stop you from going there. All I have to do is guard the compound.”
“Exactly what do you find so offensive about us, anyway, living apart, I mean?”
“Oh, it’s nothing personal, Mr. Hammett. It’s just that we’re good fundamentalist Baltimore Christians and you’re from San Francisco. Worlds apart, I’m afraid. But we don’t hate you. Every day the parson leads us in a prayer •for your souls.”
“Well, that’s damned civilized of you.”
He winced at “damned” and then started considering the possibility that I was mocking him.
I left him that way and went down-river.
Before I emerged from the forest and found the narrow, winding path running parallel to the water, I heard a thwacking sound. I had no idea what it was.
I followed the path, by now long used to the rain dripping like plump crystals from the green overhanging leaves, and where the path arced wide around an imposing furry bush, I found O’Brien.
He was big and Irish and mean-looking in a somewhat studied and theatrical way.
He held a large bow from which he launched arrows into a rain-blackened tree trunk. The arrow penetrating the wood was the thwacking sound I’d heard. A sad-
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looking little woman who looked much older than she probably was fetched his arrows and brought them back to him. It looked as if it took all her strength to jerk them free of the tree. There was something arrogant about working a worn-out woman this way.
The woman saw me first. She was ferrying his last arrow back when she glanced up and nodded in my direction.
He turned, facing me fully this time. “Who the hell are you?”
“He’s Mr. Hammett,” the woman said. “He’s a famous writer about thirty years ahead of us.”
“Shut up, you stupid bitch,” he said, handing her his bow and then stepping over toward me. “You know how sick I am of you always butting in?”
The woman looked as if she’d been lashed.
I stopped about five feet from him. “You’re O’Brien?”
“What if lam?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About something personal.” I nodded to the woman. “Maybe your wife could use a little rest.”
“Since when is my wife your business?”
The woman, weary and dirty and nervous, came up to him as if he were a great stone god and she the eternal supplicant. “I’ll go back to the campsite and rest.”
“Yes, as if you don’t get enough rest already.”
I had the sense that he was about to slap her. I wasn’t tough and never had been tough, but I disliked him enough to take satisfaction in punching him, even if he later knocked me out.
He settled on shoving her. She started to pitch to the ground, but I grabbed her arm and kept her upright. She
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peered at me from eyes eternal with grief and fear. You saw women like this throughout the West of my day, their lives over well before they reached sixteen, little more than slaves to violent husbands and sad frantic children, living on hot black coffee and words unspoken and prayers unanswered.
I wanted to hold her, nothing sexual, just hold her for the sake of kindness, something she’d been so long denied.
And I then took a swing at him. I hadn’t planned it, I was barely aware of it in fact, but just as my fist started toward his face, she nudged me, so that the arc of my fist went past him.