The Beetle Leg (12 page)

“What’s the matter,” the Finn hung to him, “what are they up to, Bohn?”

His mouth opened, a small and lipless zero. With a few short gasps he inhaled and then: “Watch out, Lampson,” he cried, “watch out for him!”

The capsized shell of an insect moved bluntly to the pull of oars, resisted the water like an oil drum pushed by pole. From time to time Camper scraped quickly with the can. Crouched on his knees he splashed and twisted his head sternward to catch the speckled fish when it jumped. He jerked fitfully the green thread which lay untouched on the surface.

“I have to reel in again,” he said, dropping the can. Furiously he wound the spool.

The little boat clove to the rock side of the dam, for long minutes becalmed in the darkness surrounding the base of the earth, sinking, while the three men sat in it, balanced on the palm of a sodden log. Luke shook himself, lay in the oars. He felt with his eyes into the darkness, searched the rocks, and the ratcheting of the reel stopped.

“There. Don’t call to her, she’ll scare.” Luke pointed. They watched until high above them the close wrapped figure with olive branch took two heavy strides, called, “Mulge,” and disappeared. The patched dinghy again trolled its circular way on the vulture’s birdbath.

“That’s not a rock!” cried Camper when they hit the housetop, and clutched the swaying rod to his chest. “My line’ll tangle.”

“Perched up here awhile won’t hurt you none.”

They lay on the flat of the roof. “There’s one to the right,” Luke swallowed the match flame, the sides of the skull glowed as he cupped his hands. “One out there in the gulch, and another beyond that.”
He did not look toward the sunken barns. The hummers, the anxious insects, returned jumping across the water to the house. A broken feather curled along the brim at the back of his head. The small haunches had grown tough, dug into a sandy hillside while his pony slept below.

Cap Leech swept the endless gloss of water, then quickly again to the little man in thong and dust, twisted with a human crick between the fanning oars. He could see nothing of the cowboy’s face, only the large oval of the hat like a Quaker’s crown.

“He died,” said Luke, “and she died and I ain’t too keen to remember.”

Cap Leech had lost the thermometer. He felt in his pockets, nothing, not a gelatin pill; and he was cold, seated in the bow of a leaky rowboat. Below him lay the empty house with windows uselessly slammed shut at the first warning of the cannon. From one tight sash there floated a wisp of curtain. Inside, a mattress hung in suspension a few inches from the second floor. Behind the house the orchard’s tree—transplanted it had never bloomed—remained preserved in the backyard of the lake and waved dimly in its branches the staves and wire of a corselet, the stock of a buffalo gun, a lidless cradle; all tied into the tree for safety, inconceivable that the water could climb that high.

“I been alone since then,” said Luke.

Cap Leech stared at the unfamiliar back of the young man drawn up comfortably atop the drowned farm. And he, who by the spoonful or on his handkerchief had shared the opiate slipped to his patients, felt a sudden unpleasant clearness of the head, faced with the foundling plainsman. The first man had died in Eden, they pronounced him dead. And now, with brightening eye, he found himself sitting in the middle of the washed-out garden’s open hearth.

“Boy.” Suddenly he leaned close.

He stared at the tufted head that never turned, at the nape of a soft formed skull the seams of which were not yet grown together, at the lump of ending nerves that was his neck. Man, boy, shard, Cap Leech thought of his eye dilating by its own design, a mean spring opening with surprise, thought of the red rash that would creep along his arms at night from now forward. Within the brainless cord of spinal fluid there was a murky solid, a floating clot of cheerless recognition.

Cap Leech took off his spectacles, wiped, then bent them. He cocked his head, favoring the swelled side of his temple, and in the darkness began to grin through sixty years of accumulated teeth, cut to the gums. Slowly and with the faintest whispering, Cap Leech laughed, his tongue by slight movements pushed and licked each sound, a grim airless ripple so soft as to be hardly heard.

“Watch out, Lampson,” hallooing across the water, “watch out for him!”

The boat bubbled at the sides, tipped and sank twenty feet from shore in front of the bystanders, with keel curled and disintegrated, left the men to step out of it under water. They waded to the landing. In single file all stooped and climbed to the top of the hill through the gray ash, the lagging Cap Leech walking with hands clasped behind his back.

“If you had kept quiet,” said Camper shortly, “I would have caught one.”

 

l
uke said: “We got a wagon already. A trough, a rick, and that ranch house there.” He nodded at the upright shadows slanting on One Hundred Acres Grassland and at the Mandan sitting with outstretched legs on the potato bag steps. “The team,” listening for a winded snort, “runs free at night.” And to the Indian: “Have you seen anybody, Maverick? Been any prowlers on my land?” The door hung open against the wooden, vermiculated wall.

Cap Leech heard the answering harsh sounds of a raven. He climbed down from his little red wagon, stood watching her. Those were abscesses beneath her cheeks, cysts in the Indian pap, which he saw above the hunching of her shoulders and the loose legs brown on top and on the undersides a frog-like white.

“She’s been here since a child,” said Luke.

Cap Leech walked once around his wagon, brushing the roman nose, and again looked at the Mandan through spectacles hammered tightly under his eyes. He turned, rattled the padlock, and slipped
inside, a small old man accused of carrying about the countryside a circus of skin suckers. He was a medical tinker and no longer wore his half face in the fishbowl light of an amphitheater. He put his hands to the hot stove. If there was one last operation to perform, he thought, what would it be, since he had spread anatomy across a table like a net and crumpled with disgust a pair of deflated lungs into a ball. There was none he knew. If a single body could bear all marks of his blade and if it carried only the organs of his dissection, his life work would seesaw across the floor under tresses of arms and ventricles hung from the shoulders, would turn the other emasculated cheek. Slowly he rolled his sleeves and reaching around the stove dropped celluloid cuffs on the bunk tumbled with newspapers and a khaki blanket.

“Come up here,” peering from the wagon as through the lifted slats of a pawnshop, and the Indian’s dusty hand crept to her shoe. “Here,” he repeated, pointing at a spot on the soapy planks between his feet. His eyes blinked as if in a moment’s pause he had been defied by a dog which, turned on its back in the shade, shook loose paws over a row of ugly dugs exposed like buttons. Cap Leech merely twisted about and began, knees rustling, to prepare.

He himself had never been hospitalized except in his own wagon and under his own wandering eye. No one had ever, behind a film-like screen, looked at the hairlined features of a body fixed without back or front after the last rheumatic seizure, nor watched, prying at the insides of a virgin relic, the passage of a bismuth cud down ducts that were peculiarly looped and unlike the intestines of either bird or man. It was his pleasure never to bathe at the side of the road.

He had reduced all medicine to a ringed wash basin and kept, for its good or harm, the tinkling world in a bundle under his rocking bed. In the stove he burned powders to kill disease; he lived in
useless fumigation. He bled strangers in a room they could not stand in or laid them on his own iodoform dampened quilt. Treatment was his secret and while breathing into a bearded face he remembered the startling slant of a physician’s eye through a hole in a steel reflector.

Once he had nearly died in the wagon, naked on a pile of clothing and an arm’s length from a bogus bottle of capsules lying on its side without cork or label. To die like a gypsy with a bit of pumice and mercury in a wicker basket—and the horse would have continued on the walk of its choice, craned its head for low apple branches across the road, dragged his body along the borders of unoccupied, lazy states. Not now, the horse stood still and Leech, despite one empty cavity in his abdomen, wiped his hands and with more vigor than ever mixed his scant tools with a hoot in the night.

Out came the tin can. The big eyes of the Indian lay on the sill, she sniffed the heady gas. “This is a xyster,” said Cap Leech climbing again to his feet. He had kindled wood with it. For a moment he turned it over, then facing her quickly, “xyster,” he repeated and dropped it, the clank of a museum piece, into the enamel pan. “No bone drill,” speaking clearly and with a faraway cut to his spectacles, “that’s gone.”

Back and forth went the can, its lid clapping with the niggardly puffs of a censer. Simultaneously, the Madan’s two hands rose a few inches from the arms of the chair, fat dark fingers spread into perfect, electrified starfish. And Cap Leech, with the sparsest gold in his teeth, slid along the wall, fixed the white sheet over the already bolted door.

There was a beginning, a middle, and finally a scrubbing down of the wagon. The mere steam of a croup kettle set him in mind to pay a visit and was enough to recall one by one his pictures of the
great troop of the afflicted. He was a midnight vivisectionist in a cat hospital. When the kettle sang there was no stopping until the point was put to flesh. The little ribs clicked along the backs of his hands, he looked at them and then at the Indian who would sit for him until he ended on his knees with a pail and lick of sponge.

“That’s bad. That feculence buries itself in the root and then one night it comes out in the brain. Even the black salve won’t stop it.”

The beginning was nothing but a look into his pockets, a tug on the vest, a pacing now and then interrupted with a quick, open mouthed inspection. It was a moment of osmotic consideration when, from the vantage of his long walk across broken backs, he could again with serious brows glance down upon the undecided paths of youth. Even when he was only thinking of what he would do to her, before the old deftness came into his warty fingers, he was a man apart, not to be disturbed. So cheerfully preoccupied that when the wagon shook he merely steadied himself with a violinist’s precious hand. And when they shouted, “Come on out of there. We’re going to steal your horse,” he simply put his ear to the wood and nodded.

From the darkness Bohn challenged the wagon, his mastiff voice close upon the back steps. “Ho, Doc, we’re going to kill the Finn.”

But Leech was already to the middle of the one last operation. Slippers padding, pushing the pan near with his toe, he gripped the Indian’s face to his hip. Smashes of greasy hair rubbed the smoking vest. “Black salve … won’t help.”

Bad breath, his whole failing system came through his open teeth, second only to the ether. It was the odor of a lopsided, glistening face, the smell of air tasted in advance before it leaves the bloodstream. Closer, that taint of breath, always absorbing, draining, smelling of a dozen others, it clicked short then commenced again
with spores and a squinting whistle. He breathed off the aroma of a poultice. The crook stayed in his arm until he was done.

Not once did the Indian with violet pudendum close her eyes. A shifting of the fat woman leg tops, a twitch of the jingling body and she was still, reaching upward mutely a dark spot on her forehead. The ether, tilted under her nose as if he would make her drink, slowed the rise and fall of the sweatered chest, brought no unconsciousness.

Leech staggered coldly with it himself, pulled her into a better light. The pitch of his bland probing, the ether jag height of diagnosis was upon him and he began, pressing the lip, to make out the selected crooked shell as with a red line.

Once more there was the squawk of wheels, a thudding against the wagon and Cap Leech’s hold was jarred. Sensing the cut of leather, the tramp of feet, he felt the shafts fall dead and knew that the wagon was no longer powered.

“Finn, can you climb up there alone?”

Only the far voice of falling animals, the inconsequential distraction of merry fleas. His mouth worked, he let the backs of his trousers fan to the stove a moment, bent down once more and with blank face looked into the Indian’s pulsing gullet. A few quick movements and he had passed over the crushed strawberries on her breasts.

The elbow remained contracted, unbreakable and hard, tensed as with some nerve disorder, hooked in the invisible sling. He felt no tiredness in that passive arm hypnotically closed on the Indian’s head. It waited while the lively fingers of the other hand fished as into the mouth of a bottle and massaged. Once, twice, he pushed at the tooth, curiously, a squatted child pushing his finger into the ribs of a drowsing dog. With mathematical patience he tried its give: nothing,
deep through the jaw. Then he stopped, cocked his ear toward her, suspicious, listening.

Emanations. With hovering hand this time interrupted, Leech became aware of the trick. The Indian, in a last bodily defense, slightly bulged some muscles, loosed others, and secreted from licentious scent spots and awakened nodes, a sensation of difference marvelous as anything he had ever seen. The captive, still watching him with unchanged eyes, generated like an octopus the ink of desire. He could see not even a garter, there were no words, not a gesture, but he knew his momentary pause was measured against some beating in her inward temples. A thorough discoloration, a pointed glowing of hidden skin for the old man, and it led him a few steps away, among the moistened ferns. She was waiting to see if he would strike.

“Ride for a fall, Finn,” outside there came a four footed whispering from the bronc stockade, “they’s burrs in that saddle!”

Cap Leech heard it. But he began.

He carried a face with the jaws clamped at his breast and against the weak spot, a freakish indentation, of his missing rib. The tooth crumbled. No bigger than the eye of a bird frozen to a twig, it splintered, broke apart, as he gauged with the tip of the instrument, worked with a strong twisting of the wrist. Leech applied a woodcarver’s rhythm to the crown and neck of the belated thirty-second tine. Now and then the metal, in its circular and steady thrust, touched her lip or knocked against her other teeth.

Often, out of earshot of lonely houses, he had picked miniature incisors from children with only the slightest bleeding, often he had lifted some powerless smooth stone from a senseless gum, but this was a tooth long since died crookedly, the snag shaped microscopic carrot nearly upside down. Behind him ash lumps rustled in the fire, amorphous gray flames walked with suction cups around the stove’s
inward belly. From beyond the wagon came a sudden soprano quailing, a meaningless “yip, yip, yip,” the singing scream. But now, faced with the incomplete incision, having taken the liberty of nursing a flower of tubes from pubescent flesh, he longed only for extraction and the cautious, painful closing of her mouth.

He pulled and the lower half of the Mandan’s face followed the swing of his arm, then back again, elastic, cross-eyed, an abnormal craning of the skull to the will of its tormentor, stretched sightless over the shoulder with each plaguing timeless yawl. Leech pulled in waltz-like slow arcs, now breaking the pressures of motion to apply a series of lesser, sharp tugs which caused the Indian’s head to nod obstinately up and down and one knee, wide and soft, to fold slowly backward into the privy bronze stomach.

He pried between the overlapping rows with a firebrand. Small, impersonal fingers dipped in foraminous jelly. The ether can spilled into the girl’s lap, rolled on the wood. And Cap Leech, after the pincers slipped and marked a blood blister on the inside of her cheek, danced a few gnome-like steps, shuffled quickly, and held the stubborn bedeviled fragment up to the light.

“Outside.”

He looked for a moment at the eyes which still unflickering pointed toward the low door. He looked at the raised skirt and, hardly believing, at the mouth from which he had just withdrawn and through which in a single word the girl had spoken. The little vertical creases came again into his face. He stooped, moved, and obeyed, helping her up and to the door, down the steps and into the darkness where she disappeared to some earthen nest or hole where she would recover, packing the wound with clay, or not.

Cap Leech drifted to the front of the wagon where the red tipped springy shafts lay bent to the left, wheels stopped dead in an unfinished
sudden turn, kicked the wood lightly and hunched off toward the out buildings. He stood still a moment in the black yard and, feet apart, hands in pockets, peered into the dizzy triangulated night. Between heaven and earth not a rattling cough as he moved and approached the barn.

Wood, sapless, creosoted, he smelled it briefly anchored to the leveled sand. Whatever grass there was grew like a fire at the edge of a ditch along the uneven beginning of the barn floor, a few blades trickling inward between cracks in the faintly urinated planks; a clump also at the bottom of one adjoining fence post. He looked up at, listened to, the open loft. A bundle of unused hay sat there across the brittle arms of a stored and dusty rocker.

Leech stepped toward the barn, away from it, knowing scarcely where to begin, but feeling all the while—there were cicadas under his feet, over to the rise a redolent horse face in the sand—as if he were treading a place of windgall. Back again, softly, he peered inside, craned. There were the bins and roosts, pigeon holes for the ghosts of an animal world under an unsafe roof, all the bitter windings of a fence to be restrung or left barbed in the corner; here he could listen to the twilight of newborn field mice or hide wrapped in a litter of old ropes.