Riverworld Anthology - Tales of Riverworld Part 16

"Richard O'Brien. One of the Baltimore businessmen. He's married, but that doesn't seem to bother him."

"Has he ever threatened you?"

"Not exactly. But he waits till Edgar goes down to the River and then he sneaks up here. He's a real pest."

"Pests aren't usually violent."

"Oh, he's very violent. Very violent. He grabbed Edgar one night and tried to drown him. This was before you were here, I think."

"Anybody else I should talk to?"

She thought a moment. She was about to speak when a small birdlike cry filled the air.

We sat in the rain-smelling silence and looked at each other, Edgar's sweet-sad little girlfriend and I. The bird cry had been plaintive, so much so that I touched my arm and felt tiny cold pebbles of goose b.u.mps there.

"What kind of bird sound was that?" There were no birds on Riverworld.

She smiled. "That was Robert."

"Who's Robert?"

But I needn't have asked, because suddenly the long rag that served as a door was thrown back and there stood a boy of perhaps ten, brown as an American Indian, streaked with mud so fierce it looked like war paint. He had sandy blond hair and furtive blue eyes. His hips were wrapped in a towel held up by a magnetic clip. He managed to look both frightening and pathetic in the way of street urchins from time immemorial. Even given the soaking he'd taken in the rain, he smelled of sweat and faeces.

From his belt dangled a knife holster, the stone blade it217.held considerable and deadly. Filling his right hand, in almost comic contrast to the blade, was a handful of blue and yellow and pink flowers of the sort that grew on the periphery of the forest.

"These are for you," Robert said.

She smiled at him and put forth a frail hand. In her bony fingers, in the drab hut, the flowers were an explosion of bright summer colours.

"I'll see you later," the boy said. He stared at me as he spoke. He didn't try to hide his displeasure with my being there.

"But Robert-why don't I introduce you to Mr. Hammett?"

"No, thanks," he said.

And was gone, out the flapping rag of a door, down the brown mud slope into the cold silver rain.

"Poor Robert," she said after we heard the last of his flapping feet disappear in the thrum of rain.

"I'd say he's got more than a small crush on you."

"I feel so sorry for him. I was always falling in love with older men when I was his age. To adults it's always a joke, but when you're young-it's very painful."

"Who is he?"

She shrugged. "He lives with the woman they call the Witch of the Woods."

"I've heard of her."

"She's no witch. Just a very dirty woman with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo she spouts to scare the children away."

I lifted the arrow. "Maybe I'll see her when I go into the woods. Maybe she can tell me something about this." I smiled. "Being a witch and all, I mean."218.

219.I stood up, careful of my head. Riverworld huts were not designed for people of the twentieth century.

"I guess I'll start with O'Brien."

"Be careful of him. He's a very tricky man."

I thought of my years in prison, there at the last when simply apologising for being a Communist would have been sufficient to free me. I'd known a lot of tricky men in that time, both in prison and on the congressional committee that saw to it I was incarcerated. I thought of old d.i.c.k Nixon, actually not the wily man he seemed to be, but rather a sad frantic soul who'd been loved too much by his mother and not enough by his father. What was it Wilde said about parents-sometimes we even forgive them?

"I think I can handle him," I said.

"This is very nice of you."

I raised the cloth hanging down in the doorway. "Don't take any unnecessary chances."

She smiled. "You don't have to worry now. Edgar gave me this."

From beneath one of the fronds, a huge stone knife appeared in her slender hand. "And he also told me where to put it. Right between a man's legs."

She said it with such style and vigour that I almost grabbed my own sac out of pure protective response. The subject of castration does not set lightly on a man's ears.

"I just hope I get a chance to test myself," she said. "See if I'm really this helpless little girl or if I'm a really strong young woman."

I laughed. "Somehow I think you'll pa.s.s the test just fine."

She laughed too. "So do I, actually. I just pity the man who tries anything."

I nodded good-bye and went outside the tent. I started down the slope in the gra.s.s. The gra.s.s smelled strong and leafy. The sky was a s.h.i.+fting kaleidoscope of dark clouds and turbulence. As a child, I'd always been afraid of storms, the sudden chill and scent of rain overwhelming me. I suppose this dated back to the time my sister Reba had been lost for half an hour, my parents searching the neighbourhood for her frantically as a storm gathered in the east. Storms would always mean that my sweet sister Reba was lost, even though I was now an adult and Reba had long ago been found safe at a neighbour's house.

The campsite was as shabby as everything else on the Riverworld. We brought all our skills with us, true, but we lacked the materials we needed. The "suburbs" was a good example, being little more than a large circle of huts in a forest clearing. At the eastern edge of it a man stood holding a crude spear while behind him a group of four children appeared to be playing marbles as they squatted around a small circle of bald, muddy earth.

The man with the spear stepped forward and said, "You're Mr. Hammett."

"That I am."

"Not to be unpleasant, Mr. Hammett, but we prefer to stay to ourselves. That's why we have a sentry posted twenty-four hours a day."

If he was supposed to be fierce, he wasn't doing his job very well. He was big, yes, but he was deferential, and that's never good in a would-be bully.220."I'd like to see Mr. O'Brien."

He grinned. He looked like an oversize kid. "Well, you saved us both some trouble there."

"I don't understand."

"O'Brien isn't here-" He angled the spear in the direction of the mud huts. At that moment, a boy ran between two of the huts, chased by a laughing young girl. "He's down-river a ways." He nodded toward the River. "And I can't stop you from going there. All I have to do is guard the compound."

"Exactly what do you find so offensive about us, anyway, living apart, I mean?"

"Oh, it's nothing personal, Mr. Hammett. It's just that we're good fundamentalist Baltimore Christians and you're from San Francisco. Worlds apart, I'm afraid. But we don't hate you. Every day the parson leads us in a prayer for your souls."

"Well, that's d.a.m.ned civilised of you."

He winced at "d.a.m.ned" and then started considering the possibility that I was mocking him.

I left him that way and went down-river.

Before I emerged from the forest and found the narrow, winding path running parallel to the water, I heard a thwacking sound. I had no idea what it was.

I followed the path, by now long used to the rain dripping like plump crystals from the green overhanging leaves, and where the path arced wide around an imposing furry bush, I found O'Brien.

He was big and Irish and mean-looking in a somewhat studied and theatrical way.

He held a large bow from which he launched arrows into a rain-blackened tree trunk. The arrow penetrating the wood was the thwacking sound I'd heard. A sad-221.looking little woman who looked much older than she probably was fetched his arrows and brought them back to him. It looked as if it took all her strength to jerk them free of the tree. There was something arrogant about working a worn-out woman this way.

The woman saw me first. She was ferrying his last arrow back when she glanced up and nodded in my direction.

He turned, facing me fully this time. "Who the h.e.l.l are you?"

"He's Mr. Hammett," the woman said. "He's a famous writer about thirty years ahead of us."

"Shut up, you stupid b.i.t.c.h," he said, handing her his bow and then stepping over toward me. "You know how sick I am of you always b.u.t.ting in?"

The woman looked as if she'd been lashed.

I stopped about five feet from him. "You're O'Brien?"

"What if lam?"

"I need to talk to you."

"About what?"

"About something personal." I nodded to the woman. "Maybe your wife could use a little rest."

"Since when is my wife your business?"

The woman, weary and dirty and nervous, came up to him as if he were a great stone G.o.d and she the eternal supplicant. "I'll go back to the campsite and rest."

"Yes, as if you don't get enough rest already."

I had the sense that he was about to slap her. I wasn't tough and never had been tough, but I disliked him enough to take satisfaction in punching him, even if he later knocked me out.

He settled on shoving her. She started to pitch to the ground, but I grabbed her arm and kept her upright. She222.peered at me from eyes eternal with grief and fear. You saw women like this throughout the West of my day, their lives over well before they reached sixteen, little more than slaves to violent husbands and sad frantic children, living on hot black coffee and words unspoken and prayers unanswered.

I wanted to hold her, nothing s.e.xual, just hold her for the sake of kindness, something she'd been so long denied.

And I then took a swing at him. I hadn't planned it, I was barely aware of it in fact, but just as my fist started toward his face, she nudged me, so that the arc of my fist went past him.

"I don't want to see you get hurt, Mr. Hammett," she said, and went quickly around the big furry bush in the slanting silver rain, and was gone.

"You supposed to be a tough guy?" O'Brien laughed.

"You could always treat her a little better."

"You see what she looks like? She let's herself become an Old woman. It was the same back in Baltimore. h.e.l.l, she didn't look so bad when she was reborn on the River, but she started going to h.e.l.l all over again." He grinned. "I want some nice fresh nooky while my loins are still up to it."

"Meaning Arda?"

His eyes narrowed. His flat nose, which oddly enough lent him a brutal handsomeness, managed to look even fiercer. "What about Arda?"

"Somebody's trying to hurt her." I reached down on the ground and picked up one of the arrows he'd been shooting. It was identical to the one Arda had shown me in her hut. I raised my eyes to his. "Somebody shot an arrow at her recently."223."She needs a man."

"She's got a man."

"You mean Poe?" He made a face. "He's a nancy if I ever saw one."

"She doesn't seem to think so."

"What the h.e.l.l's your interest in all this, anyway?"

"She's under the impression that somebody is trying to take her from Poe." I held up the arrow. "This is the kind of arrow her a.s.sailant used."

"Are you saying I shot the arrow?"

"It's a possibility."

He grabbed at me then, but he was too paunchy to move quickly and so I was able to move right as he moved left.

"Arda wants you to leave her alone."

"That's my business."

"You've got a wife of your own. Why don't you try spending a little time with her?"

But I was getting sanctimonious again. I thought of my own wife, the one I'd left back there on Eddy Street along with my daughter, when I went off all liquored up to accept the accolades of Lillian and all her slick friends. I was in no position to give even a crud like O'Brien any moral preachments.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the arrow from my hand and said, "If I was you, I'd be getting out of here."

"Just remember what I said. Arda wants you to leave her alone."

"I'd say that's up to me."

He then turned around and picked up his bow and shot an arrow straight into the hard, s.h.i.+ny heart of the tree. It wasn't difficult to imagine him shooting an arrow into me.224.

225.The next twenty minutes, I followed a path that took me to the centre of the forest. Out of boredom more than anything, I'd started following various paths to see where they'd take me. Back in the real world, I'd studied a lot of maps, especially when I'd worked for Pinkerton on various railroads, and being a pathfinder held a real fascination for me. Anyway, as I said, Riverworld wasn't exactly overrun with spellbinding things to do.

I was taking a wide leg in the path, one that ran beneath a heavy canopy of trees, when I spotted the woman. She was lying on the ground, faceup.