Mockingbird (20 page)

The wait seemed to last forever.

And then it happened. There was the glitter of adamant steel and the sudden fanning. And the pain. And just before I screamed again I heard a sound like the sound of a dry stick breaking.

I opened my eyes and looked down. The bracelet was cut, but my hand was bent strangely and I knew instantly what had happened. I had broken my wrist.

Yet, realizing that, I felt no further pain. There was a ringing in my ears, and I could remember the pain of the impact; but now there was no more pain. And my mind was clear—as clear as it has ever been.

And then I thought of the robot and looked over to where I had knocked him.

He was still on the floor. Larsen and the old man with white hair were sitting on him. And Belasco was standing over him holding a heavy wrench in one hand and my cat, Biff, in his other.

I stared.

“Here,” Belasco said, grinning, “you forgot your cat.”

Using the hook, I got the other bracelet off and put it in my pocket. Then I walked over to Belasco, and took Biff in my good hand.

“Do you know what a sling is?” Belasco said. After I took Biff, he began taking off his shirt, transferring the wrench from hand to hand, and keeping his eye on the now still robot.

“A sling?” I said.

“Just wait.” He got the shirt off and then tore it in two. He tied a knot between sleeve and tail and put it around my neck, just above the backpack harness, and then showed me how to put my right arm in the broader part of the shirt. “After you get a little distance,” he said, “soak your wrist in ocean water. Do it every now and then.” He gripped my shoulder. “You’re a brave son of a bitch,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Haul ass, Bentley,” Belasco said.

And I did.

After I had run and walked for several miles north of the prison, keeping the ocean on my right, the pain began in earnest in my wrist. I stopped and put down Biff, who had clawed at me a few times and scratched, and meowed loudly, and finally gotten quiet. Then I lay down at the edge of the water, on my back, with my chest heaving painfully from the running, and from everything else, and I let my damaged wrist lie in the shallow and cold winter surf. Some of the water came up and lapped against my side. Biff began to meow plaintively. I said and did nothing and lay there as the tide came closer in and washed icily across me, making me finally get up and away from it. I had not lost the pain, although, the cold water muted it. And I had not lost my fear of the journey ahead of me. But despite that there was jubilation in my heart. I was a free man.

For the first time in my entire life, I was a free man.

I went to the water’s edge and, using my left hand, raised a handful of water to my mouth and drank it. And my throat constricted on it, gagged, and I spit the rest out. I did not know sea water was undrinkable. No one had ever told me.

Something in me suddenly gave way and I let myself fall to the beach and lie there, in pain and in thirst, crying. It was too much. It was all too much.

I lay there on the cold wet sand with a bitter wind blowing across me, with my whole right arm throbbing in pain and with my throat burning from the sea salt, not knowing where to find water. I did not know even where to begin looking for water, or how, really, to find clams, or any food, once the supply I had in my small backpack was eaten.

But then I sat up suddenly. There was something to drink. Belasco had given me three cans of liquid protein.

I took the backpack off, opened it where Larsen had sewn buttons on its top, and found a can and opened it carefully. And I drank only a few swallows of it, gave some to Biff, and then plugged the hole in the top of the can with my handkerchief. Some of my good feeling came back. I had enough to drink for a few days; I would find water somehow. I got up and began walking northward, with Biff keeping more or less at my side, or ahead of me or behind. The sand near the water’s edge was easy to walk on and I kept up a brisk pace, swinging my good arm at my side.

After a while the sun came out from behind clouds. And sandpipers appeared on the beach, and gulls began flying overhead, and there was the good, clean smell of the ocean in the air. My arm was not uncomfortable in the sling and, although it still hurt greatly when I allowed myself to think about it, I knew I could stand it. I had felt worse my first few days in prison, and I had survived that—had, in fact, become stronger for it. I would survive this.

That night I slept on the sand beside an old log that lay half buried at the place where the beach began to have grass growing on it. I built myself a fire with a few sticks of driftwood, lighting it with my prison lighter the way I had seen Belasco do it that time that seemed so long before. I sat by the fire, leaning against the log for a while, and held Biff in my lap, until the sky became dark and the stars came out, very brightly, above us. Then I lay down in the sand in my blue prison sweater, covering myself with my jacket, and fell soundly asleep.

I awoke at dawn. The fire was out and my body was cold and stiff and my wrist throbbed painfully. The other wrist was sore and stiff where the bracelet had been twisted on it. But I was deeply rested from the long sleep, despite the pain in my body. And I was not afraid.

Biff was curled against me. She woke when I did.

And I did find clams, for breakfast! I had no rake of the kind the book showed in its pictures, but I used a long stick and searched the beach for the little bubbles in the wet sand where their necks stick up. I lost seven or eight before I learned to be fast enough to flip one out of the hard-packed sand before it burrowed in deeper. But I got four of them—all big ones.

For a while it seemed as if opening them was impossible. I got the book out of my pocket—
Cooking Shore Dinners: Let’s Have a Party
!—and looked at the instructions, but they weren’t much help. They showed a special knife being used to “whisk the little fellow from his hiding place,” as the book put it. But I had no knife. There were no sharp knives in the prison. But then I thought of something. I had put the two pieces of the second bracelet into my pocket after I got it off. I reached into my pocket, got out the larger piece of the metal, and, while Biff watched with only slight interest, used the sharp end that had been cut by the blade to pry open my first clam. It took a while, and I almost cut myself several times, but I managed it!

I ate the clam raw. I had never tasted anything like that before. It was delicious. And it was food and drink also; there was a good deal of drinkable liquid in each clam.

That day I walked a great many miles up the coast, still a bit apprehensive about being pursued. But I saw and heard no sign of anyone following me. Nor did I see any sign of human habitation. The weather was cold, and for a while in the afternoon a light snow fell; but my prison clothes were warm enough and I was not seriously bothered by it. I found more clams for lunch, and ate half a soybar with them and drank some more of the liquid protein. Biff took easily to eating clams, lapping and biting them out of their shells with great enthusiasm. I soon became proficient at finding and opening them.

From time to time I would go inland for some distance and try to find some high ground and look around me for fresh water—a lake, river, or irrigation ditch—but I saw none. I knew I would eventually need more than the clams and the liquid protein.

It was like that for days; I lost count of them. Gradually my wrist became better, and one night by my fire I tried an experiment that worked and that made me feel much more confident about the future. There happened to be a sizable patch of ice and frozen snow trapped under a rocky ledge a short distance from the beach. I had a metal prison bowl in my backpack, brought along for cooking my shore dinners in; and I went to the patch of ice and, using my broken bracelet, chipped some into the bowl. Then I built a small fire, let it burn down, and set the bowl on the hot coals. When the ice melted I found that I could drink it! And I did, letting Biff have some of it. Then I added a few sticks to my fire, put more ice in the bowl to melt, and dug a double handful of clams while it did so. Then I added the clams to the now-boiling water and after a few minutes I had a delicious hot clam stew.

I survived that way for a month, finding what shelter I could to sleep by, and eating the food Belasco had given me a little at a time. But eventually Belasco’s food ran out, and I was forced to live on clams alone for days and days—I do not know how many, since I was not keeping this journal at the time—until I eventually found a frozen fish lying on the beach and cooked it. It gave me a change of diet for two days; but it was soon gone.

Biff caught herself several small shore birds, and I was able to get one of them away from her; but after that she would disappear up the beach to do her hunting. It would have been nice to make a hunting cat out of her, but I had no idea how to do that.

I knew, too, that the ocean was full of fish and crustaceans and other good things to eat; but I had no idea how to get any of them out of it.
Cooking Shore Dinners
spoke of berries and roots and potatoes, but there were none of these to be had. I kept making regular excursions inland in search of water and of fields like the one at the prison; I found nothing but wild, dead grass and weeds. There was no sense that the land had ever been cultivated, and no sign of any kind of life. I wondered if the Denver Incident had caused the land to be “stifled,” as my history books put it, back at that time, or during some later war after the death of literacy, unrecorded in books. When literacy died, so had history.

Toward the end of this time I must have gone twenty or more days with nothing to eat but clams, and sometimes even they were hard to find. I would wake up in the mornings with a metallic taste in my mouth and a cramping in my stomach, and I would find that after walking for only a short time I had to lie in the sand and rest. And my skin had become dry and itchy. I knew I needed something else in my diet, but there was nothing else to be had. I tried sneaking up on sleeping or resting gulls, but I was never able to get really close to one. Once, in a field of brown grass, I saw a snake and chased it, but it slithered away too fast for my tired legs to follow. I fell in the field exhausted; the snake would have made a meaty stew. Sometimes I would see a rabbit; but they were far too fast for me.

I began to get sick. My wrist was healed by then, although it was a bit crooked and stiff and would hurt when I picked up Biff with my right hand, but now my head began to ache furiously, and I would become terribly thirsty. I had to stop often to melt ice for water, and then sometimes I would throw it up. And one night I threw up my dinner and was too weak to cook anything more. I fell asleep, face down, by the remains of my fire, not really even sheltered from the weather.

When I awoke I was shivering terribly and my head was wet with perspiration. I was covered with a light blanket of snow; and the snow was still falling on me. The sky was a dark gray, and the sand around me had frozen. All of my joints ached.

I tried to get up, and could hardly stand. Eventually the best I could do was to sit up on the beach and look around me for wood to build a fire with. But there was none around; I had gathered up all of the sticks in the area the night before. I needed a fire desperately.

Biff rubbed herself against my hip, crying softly.

In a dormitory or in prison a robot would have given me a sin-gle Med Pill and I would have been all right. But I had no pills with me whatever.

I must have sat there for over an hour, waiting for the sky to become lighter and for the day to become warmer. But that did not happen. The sky remained very dark, and a cold wind began to blow, blowing snow into my face and stinging my cheeks and eyes.

I knew that if I continued to sit there, or lay down, I would become sicker. I kept thinking of a line from a poem by T. S. Eliot:

 My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

 Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Finally I said the line aloud, into the wind, as strongly as I could. And I knew that if I did not get up I would probably die, that my lean flesh would be picked by gulls and that my bones would eventually roll in the winds and the water on that beach. And I did not want that to happen.

Moaning slightly, I pushed myself upright, and then fell on one knee. “Up!” I said aloud, and stood up again. I staggered for a moment, my head hanging over, too weak to hold it erect. The pain and the vertigo were powerful. But I got my head up and began walking. Several times I veered into the surf and staggered out again.

But eventually I found some wood and, shaking terribly, managed to make a fire. And I reserved a sturdy, long stick of driftwood to use as a walking staff.

My backpack was empty now, except for my bowl. I was able to slide the denim material it was made of from the light metal tubes, take off my coat and sweater, and, shaking violently with the cold, button
the
fabric around me like a vest. Then I quickly put the sweater and coat back on and after I warmed my body up again at the fire I was even better sheltered from the cold. A scarf and a cap would have been very useful; but I had grown a beard and that helped keep my face and neck warm. I could have killed Biff and eaten her and used her skin for a hat; but I did not want to kill Biff. I was a changed person from what I had been trained to be; I no longer wished to be alone, private, or even self-reliant. I needed Biff. Self-reliance was not just a matter of drugs and silence.

I managed to tie the bowl with a string to the frame of my backpack. I put the frame back over my shoulders, took up my walking staff, and, still feverish and dizzy, but stronger now, continued northward along the empty beach.

It continued to snow, and as the day wore on I became colder. I stopped twice to attempt a fire, but I wasn’t able to get one lighted because of the wetness of what wood I could find and the way the wind kept blowing out my little lighter. When I became thirsty there was nothing to do but swallow handfuls of snow. The beach had become frozen too hard for me to be able to dig for clams. I kept moving ahead, slowly, and tried not to worry.