The Outcasts (2 page)

“I'm seventy-three,” Devoe said. “I'd love to go.”

Apparently Morrison had giggled.

“What's funny?”

“Everything. Do you know that we are a hundred and seventy-five feet above the earth here and everything in this office is synthetic? We don't even use wooden pencils any more. Your suit's made of coal. Eye of nylon newt. Tongue of polyurethane bat. Styrofoam bosoms.” He pressed down on the arms of his chair. “This is naugahyde. What is naugahyde? Does anybody know? Today I shot two naugas. Skinned them out myself. And you want me to go where the hand of man has never set foot.”

“Easy now. It's only a job. You don't have to go.”

“Oh but I do, I do.”

“Easy now,” Devoe said again.

Carefully Morrison assembled what composure remained to him after one economic collapse (he was six), one large war (eighteen) and several small (now and then), fifty million dead by violence (here and there), and a marriage for love (on and off). “What is the job?”

“That's better,” Devoe said. His voice was even and pleasant, ageless. He had fine white hair and regular features, the smooth bronzed skin of one who had never in his life nicked himself shaving. He emanated clubs and squash, chilled martinis and warmed brandy, horses and small boats and shrill ladies in floppy hats. He was unassailable. In his presence Morrison's own defects were grotesquely exaggerated: lack of breeding, disorderly hair of a muddy reddish color above the mournful features of an aging basset, a fair skin marked by nicks, moles, here a pimple there a comedo. Morrison emanated solitude, divorce, tasteless liquor and fruitless love, floppy ladies in shrill hats. He was assailable.

Devoe droned on, telling Morrison what Morrison knew already. They had bought up a foreign firm and assumed responsibility for a hundred and twenty miles of road, some eighty through jungle and some forty through savanna. Schendel S.A. was the firm, Dutch-British and reputable, cheap labor, cheap materials, and old Schendel gobbling florins and pounds and dollars, pesos and crowns, rials and ticals and yen, regurgitating them into Amsterdam banks like the Dutch East India Company before him, and leaving a rash of roads, docks, skyscrapers, bridges, airports. The offices were in the East Indies and Africa and South America, and now that all those odd little countries were independent, or about to be, and profits were to dip accordingly, and Schendel was growing old, his company was being sold off region by region, job by job. Someone else—Devoe, Sims and Wheeler, for example—would now absorb convertible currencies and defer solemnly to experts in tax avoidance.

All that Morrison knew. “What happened to that other Dutchman? The one who did the work?”

“Van Alstyne. I'm sorry to say that he died last week of a heart attack.”

“Sorry.”

“I never knew him,” Devoe protested. “I know Schendel. A man of quirks. Homosexual, I believe, but in the classic manner of the aging pederast; a collector of butterflies and native art, and not of scruffy sailors. Benevolent and absent-minded. He owned a whole city in Surinam, with swimming pools for the workmen, and a movie and a soccer stadium, and the one time I talked to him he couldn't remember the name of it. He knew Gropius and Maillart. All that. I rather liked him. He's gone back to Europe.”

“Who's minding the store?”

“Van Alstyne was, on our job. His assistant is a man named Philips, colored, European education, competent but only thirty. We've half a hundred men working for us there, of assorted colors, religions, and political enthusiasms, and we've a local government to make happy, and we've fallen heir to a good deal of expensive equipment. We're moving in a heavy crane, by the way. I want you there. I want you to finish the job, clean up, maintain the machinery, keep the bureaucrats cheerful, reclaim the performance bonds, see how good Philips is, and keep an eye on the future.”

“Why me? All these younger men you have.”

Devoe sighed, glittered slightly in his silvery fashion, and smiled the faint crabby smile of the wise elder. “You insist on aging prematurely. That appals me.” He went on more gravely. “Much about you is disturbing. You seem to have assumed—well, cosmic burdens to which you have no right. All day long you fret. And I believe I am entitled to hope that truth and justice and the fruit-pickers of California will prevail without usurping the psychic energies of my best field man. You seem haunted by ghosts of your own creation. All right.” His elegant hand blessed Morrison and asked silence. “I won't mention that again. But we—the trinity—expect quite a bit of you, and we worry. However,” and he brightened, “this is our first job down there, in a land of, um, infinite possibilities. Would you trust Santini, who is so dominated by his senseless and unnecessary struggle to repudiate a background of lasagna and cobbling that he is obsequious to Anglo-Saxons,” with a look of wry distaste, “and overbearing to all others? Would you trust Whitman, who chases women and marches on Washington? No. I want you to go. Stable. Almost stodgy. A worrier.”

“This begins to sound like a promotion,” Morrison said. “I am being groomed.”

“As long as it doesn't sound like a raise,” Devoe grumbled.

“I'm not like you,” Morrison said. “I'm not like you, or Sims or Wheeler. I'm too big for period chairs, and my shirts bunch at the belt. I have no small talk. I went to school in Colorado. I never commanded a destroyer. I was a lousy medical orderly up to my ass in other people's giblets. I worry because they're cutting down all the redwoods to build motels so the contraceptive society will have someplace to go, and putting the Senecas in row housing, and thirty million people starve to death every year.”

“Your shirts wouldn't bunch if you wore galluses,” Devoe said mildly. “You read too much.”

Morrison slumped in his chair, his naugahyde chair. “I don't read at all. The last book I read was Little Women. What kind of road is this and where does it go to?”

“Crushed rock and earth. To the southern border, or almost.”

“To a city? a town?”

“No. Just near the border.”

“So where does it end? Up against a wall of trees? With a big sign, fluorescent paint, Now Leaving Our Tropical Paradise, Thank You For Driving Carefully We Love Our Children?”

Devoe sighed again. “Is that our business? We're engineers, builders, not politicians. The road ends at the far edge of an uninhabited plateau, where it slopes down sharply to more jungle. We're not interested in that piece of jungle because they're not sure just where the border lies. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, of course. I'm sorry. I wish the world would stop dead for one day. Nobody move. All this constant
doing
. I must be tired.”

“You are. As I say, I don't know what loads you force yourself to carry, other than Senecas and redwoods, but the strain shows. However, I can end this conversation on a cheery note.”

Morrison waited.

“I'm afraid you'll have to design and build a bridge.”

Morrison could only stare.

“Perhaps you could simply copy one of those you have on your wall in there. Sydney Harbor, or Stony Creek. I am correct, am I not, in believing that you have some small interest in bridges? That you worship them in your spare time? When not meditating truth and justice?”

“Is this a joke?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Devoe said almost angrily. “Wake up, man.”

Well, yes, it was true. Some people have trains, or dachshunds, or fancy paintings, or dirty books. Morrison had bridges. He had always had bridges. Probably he had become an engineer in order to build bridges, but he had never built a bridge, and in drunken moments he saw that as a symbol: his life was a tedious allegory of unbuilt bridges. On the walls of his office, and of his dreary apartment, were photographs and drawings of suspension bridges and arch-span bridges and grass-rope bridges and street bridges, single- double- triple- multiple-arch bridges, viaducts and rolling spans, bascules and swing spans, simple spans and cantilever spans and transporter spans. Steel bridges and iron bridges and concrete bridges and wooden bridges. Brooklyn and the Narrows and Tacoma (before, during, and after), Golden Gate and Stony Creek, Hell Gate and Rainbow, the Landwasser and the Ponte Vecchio and old Sydney Harbor and new Sydney Harbor, and Swiss bridges so slim, so perfect, so daring-young-engineer-on-the-flying-trapeze that their designer had been banished to the untrafficked heights; in their Alpine heaven they soared and floated. There were drawings, sketches, plans, sections of caissons and cofferdams, piers and abutments, roadways and railings. A covered bridge. A pontoon bridge. The Avon at Bath, 1770. Rennie's Waterloo, 1817. The Forth, 1890. Salginatobel, 1930, Rossgraben, 1932, Schwandbach, 1933.

“You told me fifteen years ago—you may not remember this but I do—that you wanted to build a bridge, any bridge, and now we've got one, and telling you about it gives me enormous pleasure. Here, now, have a drink.” From his desk Devoe drew a bottle of malt whisky and two shot-glasses. Attentively, he poured.

Morrison raised the glass with a timid smile. “You old fox. You old comedian.”

“Don't be impertinent.” Devoe grinned. “You'll have to hurry, you know. I have complete surveys and photographs for you. We'll give you all the help you need. Burger can help you with the scaffolding. You have about four months here. Then you go, and the bridge must be finished by October. You'll get heavy rains in October.”

“You're going too fast.” Morrison sipped at the whisky. “I still think you're joking. You want a Bailey bridge, is that it?”

“My dear Morrison,” Devoe said, pained, “you wrong me. You cannot throw a Bailey bridge across a gorge two hundred feet deep.”

“How wide is the gap?”

“About twenty-two meters. The bridge is to be about seven meters wide, and is to bear a hundred tons.”

“A hundred tons? What for? A million miles from nowhere.” But his mind was at work. An old drawing. Yes; twenty meters. Where? Bookcase. Notebook.

“That's what they want. Ours not to reason why. Trucks, I suppose. Tanks. God knows. Defense.”

“Defense? Defend what?”

“The border.” Devoe shrugged.

“But they don't even know where it is. You said nobody lives there.”

“Never mind all that. Just build them a bridge.”

“How are the approaches?”

“Flat.”

“Geology?”

“Diorite.”

“Good. Is there anything across it now?”

Devoe cackled and whooped. “Yes. A rope bridge. Vines. Some nekkid savages on the other side let it down and pull it up when they need it. Won't they be surprised.”

“Twenty-two meters,” he said. “A bridge.”

“A bridge,” Devoe said. “Designed and built by Bernard Morrison.”

“Designed and built by Bernard Morrison,” Bernard Morrison said.

They rocketed through the night; and yet they were ants, plodding the edge of a shadowy continent. “Help me,” he asked Philips. “Make a suggestion.”

Soon Philips said, “I suppose it was natural.”

“And why was it natural?”

Philips looked at him then, and did not speak.

“Wrong,” Morrison said. “At least I hope so. I make no claims for myself, you understand. But when I pictured Philips I saw a white linen suit, and a necktie, and a big smile. I had lunch in New York, you know. I've never been here before, or any place like it. Transplanted. Uprooted. Very suddenly. You could have been the prime minister and I wouldn't have known.”

“Yes. All right.”

“I hope so. Because I don't plan to spend the next six months apologizing.”

“Then let it be forgot,” Philips said.

Let it be forgot. Sweet and formal tones. Archaic spoken here.

“Where were you trained?”

“Amsterdam and London.”

They swooped past a shack; Morrison barely glimpsed advertisements for beer. Ahead, a point of light fluttered, drew nearer; an old man in shorts, on a bicycle, loomed out of the night and dropped behind them.

“I like London. I've never been to Amsterdam. I believe I crossed part of Holland during the war. In a truck, at night.”

“You were an engineer then?”

“No. A medical orderly. I wanted to be a doctor.”

“And what changed your mind?”

“Blood. They had to send me home because I could no longer look at blood. It isn't easy even now.” Beside the road stood many shacks, some on stilts. Before them, flagpoles. Red flags. White flags. “What are those flags? Local communists?”

“No.” In the one word was much amusement. “Those are Hindu homes. The flags are religious.”

“They keep to the old ways.”

“Some. Most are what we call chimár. Backsliders. Are you religious?”

“No. I could use a drink. Are you?”

“No more. You can drink at the hotel.”

“So early?”

“There are no rules. And help, as you have surely heard, is plentiful and cheap.”

“All right now,” Morrison said. “Let it be forgot.”

Philips smiled.

So they split the night, and shacks and taverns and crude billboards leapt out of the dark into the cone of light, like pop-ups in a giant travel folder. Roosters announced them. Goats and donkeys came to stare, wary, ruby-eyed. Half asleep in the dark wind, Morrison drooped against his door like a bundle of wash. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the land was afire. “What does it mean?”

“They burn it off to clear it.”

“Oh. I thought perhaps insect control. Mosquitoes.”

“No. It is merely unscientific agriculture. They will cultivate this land for five years or so and then burn off another patch.”

“Is there fighting around here? Or in town?”

“No. Last week, plenty. I think we will have quiet now for a while. Some children were killed. One little girl was decapitated. No one cared to be associated with that so the leaders went home and deplored loudly, and after some small looting the trouble was over. For a time.”