Farmer, Philip Jose – Riverworld 06 – ( Shorts) Tales of Riverworld

Poe must have heard us coming. Before we reached the hut, he was in the doorway. Then, dramatic as always, he ran toward us with his arms outstretched.

He ran alongside me as I bore her to the hut.

He didn’t offer to share my burden, nor did he do much but coo little plaintive nonsense words in her direction.

Inside, we propped her up by the fire.

“Can you take the arrow out?” Poe asked, face yellow from flames. He was frantic.

“I thought maybe you’d want to do it. She’s your woman.”

“It would make me… sick. Feeling it slide out that way. I wouldn’t be any good at it.” There was pleading in both his voice and eyes.

I sighed. Excising the arrow wasn’t something I relished either.

I went over to her and knelt down. She was unconscious. I felt her forehead. She was feverish already from the poison. Her pulse was faint.

234

Ed German

FOOL’S PARADISE

235

I worked as quickly as I could.

When I was halfway through, I heard a noise in the doorway and looked up.

Robert, without his bow, stood there watching me. “How’s she doing, Mr. Hammett?”

He trembled with tears.

“Why the hell would you care, kid? After what you did to her?”

He started to say something else, but I said, “Shut the hell up. I’m trying to concentrate.”

In the firelight, his eyes glistened with tears. Then the doorway was empty. He was gone.

It took about twenty minutes, and twice she came awake and started crying pretty hard and looked up at Poe with a love so obvious it embarrassed me to see.

Why the hell did she want some gigolo like Poe?

He stayed on the other side of the hut. He hadn’t been kidding about not wanting to see. He wouldn’t even glance down at the wound.

I got the arrow out and the wound cleaned and the shoulder covered up.

I was just about to get to my feet when I saw her eyes flutter open. She pulled me gently to her and pressed her soft warm lips to my ear and told me then the whole story.

The rain hit the water like bullets. There was no moon. I found him down on the bank, just sitting there, not caring about being wet or cold or alone. I sat down next to him in the darkness. The rain was cold and ceaseless. I said, “She told me.” “I figured she would.” “She could have been killed.”

“I know.” He sighed. “The other times were easy. We didn’t have to do anything. She just told him that somebody tried to drown her and push her off a cliff and shot an arrow at her. She didn’t actually have to get hurt or anything.”

“But this time she asked you to really wound her.”

“Right,” he said.

She’d explained it all to me, back there in the hut she shared with Poe. She knew he was constantly unfaithful. She tried everything to stop him. Nothing worked.

She and her friend Robert concocted all the tales of somebody trying to kill her. She thought mat that would work for sure. Poe would be so worried about her, he’d give up running around. For a few weeks Poe was true to her, but then he went right back to slipping out at night and meeting other girls in the forest.

That’s when Arda came up with the idea of getting herself wounded. Robert would steal O’Brien’s bow and arrow—just as he’d stolen an arrow before to show to Poe—but this time he’d actually wound her.

Faced with Arda’s injury, surely not even Poe could be unfaithful any longer.

But then Robert got angry with her one night because he knew she didn’t love him the way she loved Poe. He wrote Poe a letter telling him about the plan Arda and he had concocted. O’Brien saw him writing this and snatched the paper away. He planned to use it as blackmail with Arda. She would sleep with him or he would turn Robert’s letter over to Poe. Robert felt terrible. He knew he should never have written the letter, knew he would never have actually given it to Poe.