I Live With You (14 page)

If only I had a clue …. one little real clue as to which this old man is, us or you, and whether all that stuff is art or a weapon. If I should yell to that old man, Don’t shoot, I’m on your side—I want to know which side that would be.

My man (I’m thinking, My man, though I’m not sure if he is or isn’t) says, “Stay here,” but I’m not going to.

He starts up the slope, walking boldly in spite of the rifle across the old man’s knees. My man is fearless. I knew that before.

I scramble along behind him, lifting a little so as to save my sprained ankle.

The old man, looking right at us, yells, “Stop or I’ll shoot.” I don’t know if he means he’ll shoot me, clumping along behind, or my man. Neither of us stop.

My man doesn’t have any weapons. He just has his first aid kit and ropes and things for rescuing people. He wouldn’t care if you were us or you people or a skunk or a mountain lion, he’d rescue you anyway.

“Grab him,” the old man yells. “Push him. Let him fall over the cliff before he destroys my work.”

Now
I know which he is.

No I don’t, I just know which of us he wants to get rid of and why.

I yell out, too. “He rescues people! That’s all he does. He’ll rescue you if you need rescuing.”

“Not me. Never one like me.”

“He has no weapons.”

The cold or snow or something (maybe it’s the bowl shape of the mountainside) gives our words an odd hollow sharpness—an extra clarity. Words as if in silhouette. Even my big man’s gravely voice sounds out with purity.

I see my man’s breath as he shouts up the slope. “Don’t shoot. We’ll talk.”

“Push him. He wants to destroy my work.”

He’s right to worry. You always…
always
do that: throw art off cliffs, roll it into the sea, burn it, knock it to pieces, chop it up, smash it…. You people cut off marble penises and grind them up for aphrodisiacs. You people threw the Mayan statues down their long stairways. You scraped off the faces of kings you didn’t like. You burned codices. Makes me think it must be art for sure if somebody wants to destroy it.

Though on the other hand you people invented all these arts in the first place. We didn’t even invent ballet.

By lifting harder, I’m now up beside my man. He’s still clumping through the snow, but if he could stride, that’s what he’d be doing.

The man shoots, but my man doesn’t go down. Just keeps slogging along. I’m the one yelling, “Don’t shoot,” and everything else I can think to yell. “Stop. Please. Don’t.”

The old man stands up and starts down towards my man. My man walks up to him and then right on past, not paying him any attention. I think to attack the old man myself but I don’t want to leave my man. I get between the old man and my man. The old man points the gun at me but doesn’t shoot, just follows. So here we go, all of us and the dog, back to the shack. And there, just inside the door, my man squats down and takes off his gloves and takes out… is that his little camp stove? And then I see he’s set the place on fire. But he’s a fireman!

I say, “This is burning books. Isn’t this like burning books?”

“It isn’t art!”

He steps away and pulls me with him, to a safe distance. We watch. The old man, too. Everything goes up, poof, like an old Christmas tree. There’s no way to stop it. My man sure knows how to set a good fire.

But
now…
just like that, my man flops down and I see blood. It’s dripping… more than just dripping, out his sleeves. It’s all over his hands. The dog licks at them.

I lean over him. I can’t believe it. I lean close. I don’t see that mist of breath. I don’t feel it on my cheek. My big rescuing man is dead. How can this be? And his very last words were, “It isn’t art.”

I hear my “Nooooo!” echoing all over this snowy bowl. I turn. I don’t know how I find the strength but I grab that that wiry old man, and push and push and drag—him and his rifle—all the way down the slope and over the cliff. He yells the whole way, but I couldn’t tell you what or even in what language. I can’t hear or understand anything. I don’t care which he is, us or them.

After, I sit with my feet hanging over the edge. Sit and sit and sit, not thinking. Pretty soon I go back to sit by my man. I guess I can say he’s mine now. He can’t say he isn’t. By now the fire has burned itself out some and the sun has gone behind the mountain. I guess I sat there, on the edge of everything, longer than I thought. I’ll have to spend the night here just sitting, but it’s what I want to do.

I push the dog away. I take off my glove and hold my man’s cold, bare hand. How could such a warm furnace of a man? How could?

At first I just sit and don’t think at all and then I do, and hope. If what I hope is true, it’s already too late to keep our purity untainted by you people. But I don’t know what to think anymore. I’ve been
so
careful. I’ve even danced cautiously, all the time thinking: Stay down. I’m tired of it.

I’ll leave the ballet. Take the tailless dog and leave. I’ll join the circus. It’s good for us to be in the circus, we’re so much safer there. If we lift by mistake, everybody thinks it’s some trick or other. I’ll hang on by my teeth and get raised to the top of the tent. All of us can do that, no trouble at all. Tightrope walker might be nice. I could have a pink parasol.

Except, if I’m pregnant. It’ll be hard when I have to lift for two.

I can’t be sure for a while yet, but I want a little black haired boy with big feet and hands and long eyelashes. I don’t care whether he can lift or not. When he climbs a tree and falls, he’ll come straight down like everybody else does.

It never would have worked. I don’t think he liked art much, anyway.

Form follows function? Beauty? Truth? Those are old notions. Besides,
we’ve
never lived with much truth. We can’t. We don’t even try. But there’s all kinds of reasons for art.

His very last words were, “It isn’t art.” He never said, I love you. He never even said, Maybe. I wonder what he meant by not saying, Maybe.

THE ASSASSIN
OR
BEING THE LOVED ONE

I
HAD BEEN SENT
to assassinate the general of the opposition, but I didn’t do it. I had him in my sights, but instead I let him shoot me.

I had promised to do it or die trying. I was dying, but I hadn’t tried. I had looked into his eyes, then looked into the little black hole of his weapon, knowing he was looking into mine. I had even said, Sorry. Suddenly, I
was
sorry. Then I hadn’t done it. I had the thought there might be something lesser I could do, something appropriate like cut off his trigger finger. Or better yet, cut off his thumbs.

He had a big grey moustache and blue eyes. His face was brown and weathered. He looked exactly like my father even to the squinting eyes. In fact for a moment I thought it was my father, grown older and come back from death, and somehow switched over to the enemy’s side.

This general was walking in the very mountains where the battles had taken place. I knew these hills as though I’d grown up here, and I’m sure the general did, too.

The war was over—said to be. Treaties had been signed—a whole year ago, but what did that have to do with us? If
we
didn’t want it to be over, it wasn’t. And we weren’t the only ones. There were many pockets of holdouts. The war had gone on for ten years. We couldn’t figure out why we should stop now. What had changed? We promised each other we’d keep fighting one way or another until we were all dead. But there are few of us so we have to make our killing count. We didn’t want to kill just anybody. We went to the top.

Certainly this general thought it was over or he wouldn’t have been on the trail with his three grandsons. Nor would he have been in mufti. I knew who he was from the posters of victory, and I knew which cabin in the foothills was his summer home. I knew he had three grandsons and that his only son had been killed in the war. He looked so much a civilian, I was surprised he carried a pistol.

I had followed them all morning until the children and their terrier fell well behind and the general was already on the switchbacks. He was going fast. He obviously loved working himself hard. He obviously thought there was no danger to the boys.

I hoped not to kill in front of the children—though it might be a good lesson for them. I thought perhaps I could shock them with the shooting and then capture them for our side. There aren’t many of us left. They were young enough to be convinced to change sides. We were, after all, the side of the upright. (When had we not been? We’d have changed sides if we thought we were wrong.) But if we couldn’t convince them then their thumbs could go, too.

As the general climbed, switching back and forth, I took a shortcut. I ran straight up, turned around at the top and waited for him behind a boulder.

I had not realized he was a small man until he rounded the corner of the trail, came out from behind the cliff, and stood not more than six or eight yards from me. I had not seen his face close up until then.

The force of his bullet spun me to the side. I slid down a long bank of scree. I lay at the bottom knowing nobody would come to help me. I was done-for, way out here in the middle of nowhere.

I felt no pain. I stared up into a gnarled juniper. One doesn’t often look straight up, along the trunk of a tree. It’s a whole other view. I was charmed. It was a revelation. The branches hardly moved. It was a puzzle I could solve. A magpie sat in the puzzle for a moment. It gave a magpie kind of quack. I thought he was trying to tell me something. Perhaps announce my death to the rest of the forest. I thought how beautiful everything was. There was sun and shade, back and forth over my eyes, so now and then I couldn’t see for the brightness shining through.

And all the time I held my hand against my head, hoping to stop the blood, but I gave up. Then I began to die. I could feel my life flowing away. It seemed all right. I didn’t have the energy to live, anyway. I was glad I didn’t have to get up and do something. I had let my comrades down but I was glad nothing needed to worry me ever anymore. It was over.

But it wasn’t.

I wake in a small white room with bars on the window. I’m alone. My head is bandaged. My first thought is of escape. My second that they should have tied me up. Then I think I must hurry to take advantage of the fact that there’s no one here. I jump up and fall flat. The floor is cement. I hit my forehead but my bandage helps to shield me. I have to wait a moment to recover and then I crawl to the window, pull myself up by the bars, and hang on to keep myself standing.

What at first seemed like snow is apple blossoms. It’s a garden out there, lawns and flowerbeds, pathways. There’s a fountain with the statue of a naked girl in the middle of it. To one side, a naked boy looking up at her, makes it look unbalanced. It seems a place especially made to cheer those wounded in mind and body. I’m full of yearning. To be in the sunshine and the blossoms, that they should be blowing down on me—to look at the naked girl.

I shake the bars. Hard. And harder. I hear myself grunt. I sound like a bear. Or, rather, what an imaginary bear sounds like. I’ve seen them on the mountains but never heard more than a sort of cough of warning.

I turn to the door. There’s a little window in it. Perhaps I’ve been spied upon even as I fell and then went to rattle the bars. It’s locked. They locked me in. What is this place? I look out at a hallway. There doesn’t seem to be anybody around but I can’t see very far. There’s a painting on the wall, of wild flowers from the area, paintbrush and lupine, asters.

I sink to my knees with yearning for the garden.

When the door finally opens I’m in the way. She almost trips over me. A nurse. She calls for help, but calmly as though for help getting me back to bed. Even so I panic. I’m by her feet. I grab her ankles. She goes down—as hard as I did when I first got up. But she goes down on her chin and knocks herself out.

I start crawling down the hall. It’s lined with nature paintings. They’re trying to make everything nice—for prisoners? For crazies? I’m tempted to stop and look at them but I want to get out into the real thing. I get up, wobbling. I manage to walk, supporting myself with my hand on the wall. I’m not thinking escape, I’m thinking: Garden, apple blossoms, a fountain with a naked marble girl ….