Bright Segment (4 page)

I answered none of his questions, because at first I thought them foolish. I thought, it’s like asking why hair grows on a cat’s back but not on its nose—then gradually I began to yield, partly because it seemed after all that a cactus is indeed a stranger thing than a cat—or a human, for that matter; and partly because it was Grantham,
the
Grantham, who murmured these things.

“This will do,” he said suddenly, and stopped.

The trail had widened and then disappeared, to continue three hundred yards down the valley where again the yucca grew heavily. Flash floods had cut away the earth to leave an irregular sandy shelf on the north side, and Grantham swung up on this and squatted on his heels. I followed slowly and sat beside him.

He bowed his head and pressed his heavy eyebrow ridges against his knees, hugging his legs hard. He radiated tension, and, just as noticeably, the tension went away. He raised his head slowly and looked off down the valley. I followed his gaze. The bald hills were touched to gold by the dropping sun, and their convoluted shadows were a purple that was black, or a black that was purple. Grantham began to talk.

“Back there. That shack.”

He paused. I recalled it.

He said, “Used to be a family there. Mexican. Miguel, face as hard and bald as those hills, and a great fat wife like a suet pudding with a toupee. Inside Miguel was soft and useless and cruel the way only lazy people can be cruel. And the wife was hickory with thorns, inside, with another kind of cruelty. Miguel would never go out of his way to be kind. The woman would travel miles, work days on end, to be cruel.

“Kids.”

Somewhere a lizard scuffled, somewhere a gopher sent the letter B in rapid, expert Morse. I held two fingers together, and with one eye closed used the fingers to cover the sun limb to limb. When the lower limb peeped under my finger, Grantham’s breath hissed in and out quickly, once each, and he said, “They had kids. Two or three pigeon-breasted toddlers. One other. But I met her later.

“That was when I first came, when I was doing that collecting and reporting that impressed you all so much. I arranged with Miguel the same deal I had with others before: he was to keep his eyes open for this plant or that, or an unseasonal flower; and certain kinds he was to cut and save for me, and others he was to locate and lead me to. He’d get a copper or two for what I liked, and once in a while a dime just to keep ’em going. Quite a trick when no one speaks the other’s language and the signs you make mean different things all around. Still, the law of averages figures here, too, and I always got my money’s worth.

“I made my deal and he called in the family, all but one, and when all the heads were nodding and the jabbering stopped, I waved my hand and headed this way. Miguel shouted something at me a moment later, and I turned and saw them all clustered together looking at me bug-eyed, but I didn’t know what he meant, so I just waved and walked on. They didn’t wave back.

“I’d about reached where we’re sitting now when I heard a sort of growl up ahead. I’d been looking at the flora all the way up, and never noticed the things I’d smell or hear or just—just
feel
now. Anyway, I looked up and the first thing I saw was a little girl standing here in the cut. The second thing was a black roiling wall of water and cloud towering up and over me, coming down like a dynamited
wall. The third thing was a gout of white spray thirty feet tall squirting out of the landscape not a quarter of a mile away.

“How long does it take to figure things out at a time like that? It was like standing still for forty minutes, thinking it out laboriously, and at the same time being able to move only two feet a minute like a slow loris. Actually I suppose I looked up, then jumped, but a whole lot happened in that second.

“I shouted and was beside the girl in two steps. She didn’t move. She was looking at the sky and the spume with the largest, darkest eyes I have ever seen. She was a thin little thing like the rest of Miguel’s litter. She was by no means pretty; her face was badly pocked and either she’d lost a front tooth or so or the second set had never made up its mind to go on with the job.

“Thing is, she was a native and I wasn’t. To me the flash flood was a danger, but she was completely unafraid. It wasn’t a stupid calm. If ever there was a package of sensitivity, this was it. How can I describe it? Look, you know how a beloved house-cat watches you enter a room? The paws are turned under, the eyes are one-third open, and the purr goes on and on like a huge and sleepy bee. The cat can do that because it means no violence to you and you mean no violence to it.

“Now imagine coming suddenly on a wild deer—how would you feel if it looked up at you with just such fearlessness? It was as if violence couldn’t occur near this girl. It was unthinkable. Before her was this hellish wall of water and beside her a rather large bearded stranger shouting like a rag-peddler, and there she stood, awake, aware, not stunned, not afraid.

“I scooped her up and made for the bank. I—I had help. I thought at the time it was the vanguard of that tall press of wind. Later I thought—I don’t know what I thought, but anyway, the yuccas folded toward me, tangling their leathery swords together; even at their tips I had something thick as your arm and strong as an anchor-cable to take hold of. I swung up past one, two, three of them that way and then the williwaw came down shouting and knocked me flat as a domino.

“I twisted as I fell so I wouldn’t land on the child. I held her tight
to me with my right arm, and I threw up my left as some sort of guard over both of us. I distinctly saw a forty-foot Chaya cactus twist past overhead, and then I was hit. By what, I couldn’t say, but it hit my left forearm and my left fist came down on my chin, and that, for me, was the end of that part of the adventure.

“When I opened my eyes I thought first I’d gone blind, and then it came to me that it was night, a black, scudding night, cold the way only this crazy either-or-and-all-the-way country can get. I was shaking like a gravel-sorter. Something had hold of my arm, which hurt, and I tried to pull it away and couldn’t.

“It was the kid. She was crouched beside me, holding my left forearm in both her hands. She wasn’t shivering. Her hands were warm, too, though I suppose anything over forty degrees would feel warm just then. I stopped pulling and heaved up to see what I could see. The scud parted and let a sick flicker of moon show through, and that helped.

“I had a five-inch gash in my arm—up and down, fortunately, not across, so it had missed any major blood-vessel. I could see the two ends of the cut, but between those ends lay the girl’s hands. Their pressure was firm and unwavering, and clotted blood had cemented her to me nice as you please. And she’d been sitting there holding the edges of the cut together—how long? Three hours? Four, five? I didn’t know. I don’t know now.

“She tugged at me gently and we got our feet under us. We scrabbled down the bank until I could see the deep, strong creek that hadn’t been there that afternoon. We went downstream a piece until the bank shelved, squatted by the edge, and got her hands and my arm together into the water. In a few moments she worked a hand free, then the other. I bled a bit then, but not too much, and she helped me tie on my kerchief.

“I sat down, partly to rest, mostly to look at her. She looked right back, with that same fearlessness showing even in the scudding dark. I thanked her but she didn’t say anything. I grinned at her but she didn’t smile. She just looked at me, not appraising, not defiant, just liking what she saw, and unafraid.

“I took her back to Miguel’s. The old lady was raising particular
hell, shaking her fists at the sky. Their rotten corral-pole was down and they’d lost two head of their hairy, bony, bot-ridden scrub cattle. I got a vague impression of two of the little ones staring big-eyed and scared from the drafty corner. I propelled the girl forward to the doorway and the old sow put out a claw and snatched her inside. I thought she raised her fist but I wasn’t ready to believe anything like that. Not that night. Then the door was closed and I slogged off toward Kofa.

“About ten minutes later I saw her again, standing by the bank just out of the shadows of the yucca. If the moon hadn’t flashed I’d have missed her altogether. She faded back into the shadows and when I reached the place she was gone, though I yelled my head off. I do believe she had come to see for sure if I could navigate all right. How she got clear of the house and passed me in the dark is another thing I’ll never know.

“It was a couple of days before I could get around easily with that arm. It was badly bruised and it swelled like a goatskin bottle, but the cut healed faster than a cut like that ought to. Call it clean air and good constitution, if you like. Got any makings?”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“That’s right.” He sighed. “No matter.

“Well, a couple of days later I went back. Miguel had quite a pile of stuff for me. Good stuff, too, a lot of it. A colchicum, or what looked like one, but without the bulging ‘corm’ at the base; a gloriosa with, by God, pink petals; a Chaya only eight inches tall. Lot of junk, too, of course, and maybe more treasures—I wouldn’t know. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye—and there, just off Miguel’s reservation, the girl stood in the shadows.

“Herf!”
he snorted, “once in the West Indies I cut into a jungle glade and saw a wild magnolia as big as my head. It was so big, so pale in the dimness that I was actually scared; might just as well’ve been a lion for a second or so, the way I jumped. This kid, she gleamed out of the shadows the same way.

“Like the big brainless buffalo I am, I had to straighten up and wave and grin, and before I could blink the old lady flashed off and collared the kid. My God, you wouldn’t believe how that two-ton
carcass could
move!
She’d caught her and had cuffed her in the face, forward and back, three times before I could get the slack out of my jaw.

“I don’t know what sort of a noise I made but whatever it was it stopped her as if I’d thrown a brick. I got the girl away from her and then I went back and with my machete I chopped up the specimens into ensilage. Talk about substitution! I was wild!

“When the red fog went away I conveyed to Miguel that there was no
chapa
for him this day nor any other day when I saw them strike a child. Once he got the idea he turned and bitterly berated his wife, who screamed some things the gist of which was that I was an ungrateful scut because she had hit the child only for bringing no specimens. Miguel bellowed something to her and then turned to me all scrapes and smiles, and promised to arrange everything any way I wanted it.

“I growled like a grampus and charged off downstream. I was mad at everything and everybody. I’ve since gotten a cormless colchicum but I never saw another dwarf Chaya. Well … the things you do …

“I’d stamped along perhaps a hundred yards before I became aware that I still held the girl’s arm. I stopped at once and hunkered down and gave her a hug and told her how sorry I was.

“She had two angry welts on one side of her face and three on the other; and she had those eyes; and you know, those eyes were just the way they’d been when I first saw them, fearless and untouched and untouchable.

“I’d had a strange semi-dream the day before, when I was trying to sleep through the throbbing of my arm. It was a sort of visualization of what would have happened in the flood if I hadn’t been there, like a cinematograph, if you’ve ever seen one of the things. There she stood, and when the water reached her it turned and went around her, and the wind too, just as if she were under a bell-jar. Hm! But it wasn’t like that, and here were the bruises on her face to prove it. At the same time the vision was correct, for no matter what happened to her, it couldn’t really reach her. See what I mean?”

“Cowed,” I said. “Poor kid.”

He put his hands together and squeezed them for a moment. I think he was angry at me. Then he relaxed. “Not cowed, Chip. You have to be afraid for that. Fearless, don’t you understand? As much fear as a granite cliff looking at a hurricane, as much as a rose listening to garden shears.”

“Beyond me,” I said.

“Beyond me too,” he said immediately. He looked at me. “I’ll stop now?”

“Stop? No!”

“Very well. Don’t forget, I didn’t tell you to believe me. All I said was that it was the truth.” He looked up at the sky. “I must hurry …

“She didn’t answer my hug or my apologies, but somehow I knew they reached the places where fear could not. Then I remembered what was in my specimen bag. I’d managed to find a child’s dress in the trading post at Kofa. It was white with blue polka dots all over it, made of some heavy, hard-finish material that ought to wear a hole in sandpaper. I didn’t think too much of it myself—it was only the best I could do—but I can’t describe what happened when I handed it over.

“I mean just that, Chip—I can’t describe it. Look, she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. Whether she could hear or not I don’t know. And she might as well have been born without motor nerves in her face, or at least her cheeks, because not once did she ever smile.

“Yet she stood looking at the dress when I shook it out, and perhaps her eyes got rounder. She didn’t move, so I held it up against her. She put those eyes on me and slowly brought her hands together in front of her. I nodded my head and smiled and told her to go ahead, put it on, it’s for you. And then she—”

Grantham twisted his thick forefinger into and out of his beard, picked up a pebble, threw it, watching studiously.

“—began to glow,” he continued. “This Arizona moon, in the fall, when the brush-fires shroud the sky … the moon’s up, full, off the hills and you can’t see it, and gradually you know it’s there. It isn’t a thing, it’s a
place
in the sky, that’s all. Then it rises higher, and the smoke blows down, and it gets brighter and brighter and brighter until—you don’t know how or just when—you realize you could
read a man’s palm by it. The kid did that, somehow. When whatever she felt was at peak you—sort of—had to squinch up your eyes to see her.” He punched the sand. “I don’t know,” he muttered.