The Night of Trees Page 19

  Maybe he was in love, he wanted her so badly. Opal, he thought, hurry up, I want you: an incantation in E.S.P.—Shim, go murder a deer. Go get yours on the mountain, because I want your wife. Time refused to pass; if he’d had voodoo paraphernalia he’d have used it.

  He picked out Saul’s letter and tore part of it along with the envelope. Saul was thinking of retiring. Yes, yes, he always did. Yes. With a shiver of impatience he tried to concentrate on the words Saul had typed himself:

  What a business! It makes us money, it is not too hard to keep going, but I never liked it. It never seemed to me a work to give a man a good feeling inside. We are so different, Richard. You are a good man and I love you for it, and I trust you with everything in the world, but I must go out all the time, an ugly old Jew with a terrific accent and try to change everybody before it is too late. A lot of good it does! Now all our bombers are on alert, I heard it on the radio. I don’t know what, but while I have the time some crazy thing makes me have to work on the whole world all the time. Do you understand? It is for me my duty.

  You know I haven’t any money? I gave it all away! How stupid. But I must retire, and we will make fair arrangements. My heart is not good. I am as you know overweight for perhaps fifty years.

  Sometimes I hate, Richard! Right now how I would like to shake your hand and reassure you. That does not make sense, but what I mean is I know you are worried and unhappy. But sometimes I as I say I hate the whole dirty human race for their filthy stains and sweat and deodorants in their armpits (business!) and why they always kill each other and enjoy so much hurting each other. I could yell I am not one of them! And then I smell my own stinks and find myself full of hate also. And then I remember such fine and loving people. Your son Murray, a pearl! Rachel, my daughter, something is wrong, she is a good girl. Will you wait a while and be patient? She does not see how you love her, I think….

  Yes, yes, Saul and his messiah complex! No. Of all the people he could not understand, Saul was by far the best, the kindest…. More words came to him, all of them strangely meaningless: compassion, humanity, mercy, love, justice—Saul’s favorite words, his favorite abstractions. Patience, Saul had said, but that word meant nothing either. What time was it now? Seven-thirty. It had been dark since four-thirty.

  And then there was a gentle tap at his door, a little, tentative, soft tap-tap-tap, as if by a fingernail, and to Richard it was as loud as guns, grenades, carbines. Swiftly, in his stockinged feet, he went to the door, ready to find her, looking down for her nervous, excited face. But he found there green chino, and jerked his head up to find Shim’s hideous grinning orange cat face straight in front of him. He lost his breath, but Shim spoke first.

  “Where’s Murray?”

  “Driving my car.” Quickly he was able to cope again; it had not been fear, but there had been plenty of adrenalin forced into his blood, and he had been ready for anything violent.

  “Shit. He never is around.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Had something I thought he might want to see, but it can wait,” Shim said. “I ’m always waitin’, it seems.” Shim grinned again, and left. He, too, was in his stockings, and made no noise at all except for a squeak and a click as he shut the bathroom door.

  Richard sat on the bed and tensed his muscles, then stretched the extra energy out of them. Shim didn’t understand Murray very well if he thought Murray would go jacking deer with him. Or did he? Who the hell understood anybody but himself? He didn’t understand Opal, for instance; he just understood something about her at the moment—that she would come to him, that he had to wait.

  But she didn’t come. Shim had finished in the bathroom and gone back downstairs long ago, and she didn’t come. Finally he put on his loafers and went down to the kitchen. Zach sat watching television, his rapt old head motionless, emotionless as laughter swarmed around the box like busy but invisible insects. He went into the living room to find Opal in the flickering semidark in front of a small fire, sitting ’way back in the corner of the big divan, her arms around her knees.

  The firelight gleamed palely on her face, and her black hair was like shadow. She knew he was there, but didn’t look up at him.

  “Where’s Shim?” he said.

  “Gone killing,” she said. “Why don’t you go, too?”

  He sat down at the other end of the divan and watched her. Something had gone wrong, all right.

  “Are you afraid of me?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Are you?”

  “I’m afraid you’re a liar,” she said.

  “So are you, but what difference does that make?”

  “I told you I wasn’t a cheating bitch.”

  “We aren’t responsible for those words.” He thought that was pretty good.

  “I am,” she said. “Oh, God, I don’t know!”

  “All I know is what I feel,” he said, thinking hard; but wasn’t that true?

  She turned her face toward him, and as the fire picked out the delicate line of her neck he had what he could only identify as a spasm in his lower back. God! She was lovely.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said. “Sometimes I think you are kind and gentle—such a loving person. I thought I saw it when you talked about your wife, and about Murray the other night, and I began to go all crazy and soft about you. Then you seem so selfish….”

  “I’m selfish about you,” he said, hardly listening, figuring out how long it would take, what he had to do. Kind and gentle, loving—how often those words were in the air. Cruel and hard?—those, too.

  Everyone wanted to make him what he knew he wasn’t. He was an animal, and a good one, and this, even as they looked out of their own animal eyes, was what they all seemed to resent. And wasn’t Opal an animal? Didn’t she really want only an excuse she could call irresistible before she had the animal pleasure she craved? She wanted to couple with him, to have him because he was a fine lean animal and was ready for her, but first she had to be a lawyer, and argue her moral case, and inevitably lose it in that kangaroo court where the judge and the jury were also humping, craving animals. Come on, he wanted to say to her, get it over with. If he lied to her it was not really a lie, because it was what she wanted, and what she would eventually convince herself of anyway. And if he lied to her it was because survival and desire were all that bothered animals.

  High on the dark walls of the room all the gray bucks’ eyes gleamed, and as the firelight flickered up by the wagon-wheel lights and moldings they seemed to nod their great heads, with dignity and strength, telling him yes, yes. If he were a buck and she a doe in her present heat, he would leap through the little trees, hook her with his forelegs, and mount…but she wasn’t a doe, and part of his natural equipment as a man was a clear masculine voice.

  He moved toward her, but not too close, and put a deliberately gentle hand on her cheek. Still clasping her knees, she let him turn her head toward him, and he could just see in her face desperation, mistrust, sadness. Her hair was soft over the back of his hand, and her earlobe, cool as a pearl, was at the tips of his fingers.

  “I do love you,” he said. “That’s why I seem so impatient—maybe even selfish. I love you so much I can’t stand it, Opal.” Her eyes grew soft, moist. “I want you so much,” he said, and let a certain amount of pathetic desire enter his voice; she should give him what he so pitifully needed. She put her hand on his cheek.

  “You do mean it,” she said. “I think you do mean it!” and impulsively jumped toward him, their heads nearly colliding, and kissed him quickly on the mouth.

  “I love you. I love you,” he said, keeping his hands off her.

  “Wait for me,” she whispered, getting to her feet. Then she added, with a great deal of embarrassment—a kind of confusion, he thought, of tone: why must such brutally definite arrangements have to be made in the name of true love?—“I’ll come to your room.” And she walked quickly to the front stairs.


  Now. He went carefully to the kitchen; Zach still watched television, and the volume was satisfactorily high. One last scouting trip before madness, madness! He was mad already. The Arnolt-Bristol was not back. Before he went upstairs he quietly opened Shim’s gun locker and saw that his automatic shotgun was not there. Then he went to his room and lay on his bed to wait. He heard her in the bathroom, heard her with fantastically perceptive ears go to her room, then after a long time come down the hall, step, step, step, cautiously to his door. He opened it for her and she slipped in and into his arms as he softly closed the door and they moved toward the bed.

  “Will you be gentle with me?” she asked in a small voice full of breath. “Please be easy and gentle with me at first. I’m scared.”

  He hadn’t been with any woman but his tall Rachel since the war. No other, and this one was so different, so small, this one.

  “Please don’t hurt me. Please be gentle,” she pleaded. He would be. While it was necessary he would be.

  “Shim never…” she began to say, but then she ran out of breath, and her need, ambivalent as it may have been, made all conditions unnecessary.

  For him the room did not exist, or any conditions either. Once she cried like a cat—not all pain. He heard his own voice, or a voice in his head, he couldn’t tell: Here’s one, you bitch, Rachel! Watch, see this animal! Ungh! Ungh!

  Once Opal moaned, “Oh, God! I love you!”

  Love, that funny syllable! There was only a triumphant pressure in his head, his back. His strength was hydraulic, cleaving, and there began to grow, to wax between his bones something sweet: yes, sweet, shameful, an egg, a rupture made of pain and inhuman pleasure that would invincibly burst and destroy itself deep in her, and it grew and did.

  Then it was over, and her brown eyes, wet, raped, full of love, ate him.

  She moaned, her eyes wide open, and pulled his head down to kiss his face and rub her cheeks on his mustache. She wouldn’t let him go, and he felt desperately that he could stand right up and walk, and this hot little homunculus would still be attached to his body; he would have to put his pants and shirt on over it. But he knew better than to struggle—he would have to talk his way out and away from her. Now his senses were so cold and practical, and the very touch of her was irritating, even, in places, painful.

  She watched him with her naked eyes, black hairs wet on her cheeks, and shook her head, sighing at the wonder of it.

  What’s so wonderful? he thought. The white porcelain bowl and pitcher gleamed antiseptically on the stand beside the bed. He felt himself shrinking within her, and it seemed a joint without meaning, like inept plumbing. Suddenly he was, not afraid, but coldly aware of his life. Shim: who knew where he was at this moment? And where was Murray? His life was that he had a son, and a character that he carefully presented to the world and to himself, and a wife, Rachel, née Weitzner, in whose thighs he could lie without embarrassment, legally, sanctioned by law and the world, and no one could shame him with undignified complications.

  “I love you,” she foolishly said. “Do you love me? Do you love me?”

  “Yes,” he said diplomatically; he couldn’t make himself repeat the words about love.

  “Then why do you want to get up?” she said, kissing his chest. “I don’t want you ever to get up.”

  He was not pleased by this recklessness in her. Now he might, possibly, be a little light in tone—puncture any high (low?) seriousness there was in this steaming bed. He might say that he had to go to the bathroom, using some silly euphemism; but that wouldn’t fit him, and he didn’t want to show weakness, age—and why lie when such weakness would be upon him like a bullet, anyway, before too many years passed? Clearly he saw his flesh beginning, in this refusal to use any excuse, to lose its sadness, and she began, slowly to become again a wonder, an appetite he must satisfy. Look at her: he rose up on his arms and saw her hard little breasts, the pink buds of the young and childless, the smooth round of her belly where he grew like a centaur out of her hips, and her shoulders that curved toward him. She was a wonder, and he would, he wanted again.

  And then they realized that they had heard the Arnolt-Bristol come into the parking area, and now someone was coming up the stairs. Now he was all strategy and worry, and she, too, had lost her recklessness. Whoever it was, probably Murray, went into the bathroom, and quickly she gathered her clothes and put on her robe, then fled back to her room.

  There was relief in him when she made her door unseen, but it was not over. Her odor was on him, and her moist heat was again exciting. Love or not, he wanted it again.

  But he was no longer mad. He didn’t enjoy the first twinges of returning responsibility, the guilty little shiver he had right now. He was safe again, at least, and he’d had Opal. What was he thinking of, his score? A kind of point system? Let’s see, if tomorrow he shot that eight-point buck he’d seen on the road, would that give him in all nine points altogether, here on the mountain? Or ten?

  He put on his pajamas and bathrobe to wait for the bathroom, lay back on the bed and watched the shadow of what must have been the last moth of the year. The moth flopped about on his lamp, and the shadow on the ceiling looked like a great book, opening and closing. There went Murray out of the bathroom, and he supposed Opal would be next. A knock on his door—Murray. He could only let him in.

  “I saw your light on, O.M.,” Murray said. (He would have to worry, perhaps, about that light, Richard thought.) “That’s some car you’ve got there.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did you keep the r.p.m.s up?”

  “I tried to keep it above two thousand,” Murray said.

  “How high did you go?”

  “I got it up around six thousand once, in third. That’s all.”

  “Would you like to have a car like it, Murray?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not now, anyway, O.M. I just want my old junk. It goes.” Then Murray tried to break away from talk of cars, and Richard could see his hesitancy. “I just want something rather anonymous at the moment, O.M. I just want to go—just want it to go.”

  “On your trip?”

  Murray smiled at him. “Weren’t we going to have a talk sometime? I mean about the trip?”

  To Richard, Murray looked like a grown man. He’s as big as I am, he thought, but why should that surprise me? “I’ve always been able to trust you, Murray,” he said, “but can you see why I was a little worried—with the army waiting and all that?”

  “Oh, I can see why you were worried. I don’t blame you, O.M., but I don’t know if I can explain why I want to go.” Now, in the boy’s face, he saw a kind of pity, and it was disconcerting to be the object of pity!

  “I couldn’t understand it?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Murray said, sadly, and that was even more disconcerting.

  “Is it something you’re ashamed of?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I ought to be ashamed of it, O.M.” Murray looked thoughtfully at the bed.

  Richard began to get a little irritated by the guessing game they seemed to be playing. For one thing, he wanted to get to the bathroom and wash up; he’d heard Opal leave it.

  “Well, what is it?” he said, then smiled, trying ineffectually, he knew, to take the edge of irritation off the question.

  “Do you have time to listen?” Murray said.

  “Yes, it’s only…” he looked for his wrist watch, and found it in the twisted blankets, “ten-thirty. Why shouldn’t I have time?”

  “I don’t know, O.M. You looked kind of impatient.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Murray was embarrassed, as if he needed help—questions to answer, perhaps—but Richard could not think of the questions.

  “Did you ever have the feeling that the world was going to end, O.M.?” Murray said, shamefaced for a second. When he saw that Richard was not going to smile, he became serious again. “Do you know what I mean? Tha
t we won’t be around much longer?”

  “Maybe I felt that way about myself once, in the war,” Richard said. “In fact more than once.”

  “Yes,” Murray said, becoming excited now, “but hell, I wouldn’t mind that so much. I’d just as soon take my own chance like that…. I don’t mean it wasn’t rough and all that—it must have been terrible—but didn’t you feel all the time that we would win? That whether or not you died, we were still going to have the world?”

  “What difference would it make to me if I were dead?”

  “But you see, you might not be,” Murray said, “but if the whole human race was dead you couldn’t gamble on yourself any longer. There wouldn’t be any odds at all.”

  Another of Saul’s abstractions, Richard thought: The Human Race. “And you think the human race is a goner?” he said, smiling, but Murray didn’t smile back.

  “Yes, I think it might kill itself.”

  “You poor kid!”

  “I don’t think it’s so funny, O.M.,” Murray said, looking at him with harsh and level judgment.

  “Well, all right,” he said, “maybe they might try. Maybe you’re right, there, but you know why they won’t succeed, Murray? Because the human race is too goddam tough to kill.” After making this statement he felt a little proud of the human race, and braced a bit, just to be worthy of such toughness.

  “You’re tough, all right, O.M.,” Murray said, and Richard could not quite find any irony in his son’s expression. But suddenly he did feel that he was being made a fool of, and he tried to control his anger; maybe the boy was right, and the vain anger he felt was the death-characteristic itself. Now he must think of something to say that was self-deprecating, because he must not be laughed at. Vanity, vanity, he thought, but that is the way we animals are. And then he thought, tough; the word had changed meanings since his time, and now didn’t it mean something else to a college kid? What was it? No longer strong and hard, but something like a mess, or something difficult in a less complimentary way. Was that what Murray had meant? He knew immediately, with a rather painful sense of loss, as though a long line had broken somewhere miles and miles out, and the break could never be found and fixed, that he could not ask.