Davy Read online

  They are usually laid out in a square, in some location where a stream crosses fairly level ground. The drinking water comes from the upstream end, and the rest of the stream is regarded as a sewer — saves digging. Main Street , running down the midline of the village, will be rather wide and ordinarily straight, so that when you enter by the front gate you look all the way to the one in the rear; the other streets will be narrow except for the area, not always called a street, formed by a cleared space just inside the stockade. Often a green occupies the center of the village facing Main Street , with the usual equipment — bandstand, whipping post, stocks, pillory and maybe a nice wading pool for the children. You’ll notice one block of houses better than the rest — bigger yards, maybe flower-beds along with the necessary vegetable patch, eveit a slave hut out back next the privy demonstrating that the family owns a servant or two instead of renting them out from the slave barracks on the downstream side of town. On that downstream side, beside the barracks, you can find what the people sometimes call the “factory,” really a warehouse, for the village industries — home weaving, baskets, cabinet-work or whatever. The policer station will be on that side, and the jail, the public stable, the legal whorehouse, blacksmith shop, probably the baitingpit if the village can afford to maintain one; and there will be several blocks on that side where the houses sag together in dejection, the drunks would rather sleep it off in their front yards than indoors, being independent freemen, and if any pigs from the prosperous neighborhood go hunting garbage on that side of town they prefer to travel in pairs.

  In between those extremes stand the middle-class blocks, where the ideal is a harking back to Old Time, with all the houses exactly alike, all yards and gardens exactly alike, all the privies exactly alike with small crescent windows of precisely the same size emitting the same flavor of socially significant togetherness.

  Now that I’d made Sam a Mister in my hasty way, he couldn’t get out of it, and figured he might as well r’ar back and enjoy it. He was still carrying himself like God’s favorite adviser when we blew in at the Black Prince. As a result, the weedy ancient in charge of the flea-bag fawned all over us, charging twice the normal rate for two of his best rooms which would have done credit to a hog fann anywhere; Sam wanted to bargain, but was afraid it might damage the picture of ourselves as slightly important nobs. He said later that this was a considerable grief to him, descended as he was from a long line of illustrious chicken-thieves. He caught up on the bargaining later, with Rumley’s Ramblers. I’ve heard Pa Rumley say that Sam could have bargained the beard off a prophet, and he meant Jeremiar himself, which was near-about the finest praise Pa Rumley could give any man. You know how attached prophets get to their beards, and Jeremiar was a vigorous type, who worked up such a thriving trade in woe and lamentations that the opposition finally crowded him into an ark and sent him down-river among the bull-rushers to get rid of him.

  A group of pilgrims from up north had already got the very best rooms at the Black Prince, overlooking Main Street; our two were second best, I guess, each with a slit of window looking north; I would have hated to see the worst. Beside the rickety cots they called beds the walls displayed dark smears telling of collisions between the human race and one of its closest, sincerest admirers. And over all things like a saintly benediction lay the smell of cabbage.

  In a bedbug, so far as I understand him, there is not a trace of mirth or loving-kindness. Even their admiration for humanity is based on deep-seated greed. They have intellect, to be sure — how else would they know the exact moment when you’re about to fall asleep, and select that moment for a stab? Dion says bugs go by instinct. I asked him: “What’s instinct?” He said: “Oh, you go to hell!” Then Nickie flung in the statement that when you do something p’ison clever without a notion of what it’s all about, that’s instinct. But I still think they have intellect, and they probably brood too much until it curdles their dispositions, for note this: I never met a bug who showed me a trace of liking or respect, no matter what I’d done for him. Contempt is what they show, contempt. I’ve known a bug to stare me in the eye with my gore dripping from his jaws, and anyone could tell from his vinegary face that he was comparing me with other meals in the past and finding fault with everything — too salt, too gamy, needing more sass, something. He wouldn’t have complimented me if I’d spiced my ass and put butter on it. So I contemptify ’em right back. I hate bugs. Damn a bug.

  The vital philosophic point I’m trying to ram home through the fog of your incomprehension is this: If the human race should perish completely, what would become of the bedbug? I’m sorry I cursed them. We must return good for evil, it says here.

  In the evolutionary sense, they must have grown up with us, and now they can’t get along without us. Fleas are all right. Fleas don’t need us. They’d eat anything, even a taxcollector. But the bedbug is our dependent, our responsibility. We made him what he is. He cries to us: “Strive on, lest we too perish!” Let us therefore—[19]

  * * *

  I was about to digress anyway, before I began to notice how the fermented essence of an attractive grape that grows wild here on the island Neonarcheos has a curious side-effect, namely intoxication. According to the best information I can get together, that was last night; this is the following morning, somewhat late — any time now I expect to begin thinking that I shall live.

  Captain Barr returned yesterday, which made it one of the days we celebrate, after sailing hither than he had intended. He was driven partly, he says, by a reluctance to believe what he was finding out.

  There’s no longer any doubt that this island where we have settled is the smallest and most westerly of the archipelago that in Old Times was named the Azores. The islands — smaller and differently shaped of course because of the rise in sea level — are all accounted for where the old map says they should be. And nowhere in all the group could Captain Barr discover any token of humanity. Goats, wild sheep, monkeys; on one island the men glimpsed a pack of what looked like wild brown dogs chasing a deer. Birds were everywhere, and in a bay where the Morning Star anchored, enormous sea snakes were playing in the shallow water, creatures I can’t find described in any of the old books. Never a human figure, never any smoke against the sky. In the night hours at anchor, never a light on land, nor any sound but insects and frogs and night birds, and the talk of breakers on the sand. In the best natural harbors, jungle grows to the water’s edge, hiding the debris of whatever men might have built there in Old Time.

  Our ancient map shows shipping and air lines converging at this obvious way-station between Europe and the Americas. We know there had to be developed harbors, airports, towns.

  No bomb would have fallen here in what John Barth calls the “one-day explosion.” Very few fell anywhere, he says, and those were later called “accidents” by the surviving governments — he adds that the obliteration of twenty-odd million New Yorkers and Muscovites could perhaps be considered a “fairly major accident.” Perhaps in these islands destruction came from the plagues that followed the war. John Barth wonders in his pages how many of the plagues were directly man-made and how many the result of viral or bacterial mutations, and comes to the reasonable conclusion that nobody can ever know. Or it may have been, here in the islands, the longer, quiet, almost orderly extinction of sterility, natural deaths exceeding the scanty births, in a population so long used to being taken care of by advanced technology that it could no longer look after itself, until eventually, somewhere, an old person died among the weeds with no one to scratch out a grave.

  After all, in our own homelands, many non-human species died out from one cause or another. I have never seen a bluebird.

  * * *

  Those pilgrims were a pleasant crowd, in the care of a gentle willowy priest, He had long yellow hair that would be ready for a bath any day, and a homely mild face. His nose appeared to taper in the wrong direction because the tip was small and the space between his milky blue eyes qui
te wide, so the total effect was mousy. I liked him. When a man’s wearing a floor-length shapeless priest’s robe it’s hard to tell whether he’s tiptoeing, but Father Fay did seem to be, anyway there was a tittupy up-anddownness in his walk, and a flowing lift of his pretty white hands at each step, and most of the time a bright mousy deliberating smile. The pilgrims all respected him, even including the ten-year-old boy Jerry, who gave Father Fay a bad time not from any disrespect but just because ten-year-olds are like that.

  I noticed Jerry even before we’d entered the Black Prince. The pilgrims were coming away from the church as we approached the inn, an orderly line with Father Fay doodle-diddling along at the head of it, and Jerry had somehow managed to get down at the tail without his Pa or Ma noticing. So what does he do but fall further back and cut monkeyshines in his pretty white Pilgrim’s robe, a wavy warplume sticking up at the back of his head that the angels themselves couldn’t comb flat. First he sticks out his rear and goes humping along imitating a poor old lady who’s one of the pilgrims; then he straightens, and hikes his robe all the way to his navel, and proceeds bare-ass in a fine rendering of Father Fay’s tiptoe, with a heavenly smile gleaming among the freckles and his little pecker flipping up at every step like a tiny flag in the wind. Terrible sacrilege, but I remember even Jed couldn’t help chuckling.

  They were bound for Nuber the Holy City, like almost every pilgrim group you were likely to meet west of the Hudson Sea; their all-white garments along with Father Fay’s black would identify them as far off as you could see them, and no soldiers of either side would dare trouble them.

  After Sam and I turned in and tried to settle ourselves for sleeping, as Jed and Vilet were doing in their room, I heard Jerry getting a bath. His Ma had evidently insisted on the inn help’s bringing up a tin tub and water, just for that purpose. He was enjoying it, and raising all kinds of hell, roaring and splashing and making damn-fool remarks — you’d have thought the poor lady was trying to wash a bandit king. Then Pa came up from downstairs; there was a moment’s fearful quiet, a fine solid whack on a wet backside, and from there on Jerry was being an awful good boy.

  But as for Sam and me, after the first few attempts at sleep the cots were simply too war-torn and bloody for any use. We gave up and spread well-shaken blankets on the floor, hoping the hostile forces would lose enough time searching to give us a little rest.

  The scent of tiger must have been thick in the air that night before we heard him roar. The heavy midsummer dark was trilling and jangling with the noise of insects and frogs, but I heard few other voices — no fox or wildcat was sending any messages abroad. At the inn, with other thick smells around me, I could not pick out the tiger’s reek, but I felt his presence. I saw him repeatedly as he had looked on his rock in the late sunlight, and I knew he was out there in the dark, perhaps not far away.

  When he did speak at last, even the insect noises briefly hushed, as if each witless clamoring thing had winced in the shell of a tiny body feeling a What-was-that?

  His roar is blunt, short, harsh. It does not seem very loud, but has intense carrying power. It is never prolonged and he does not soon repeat it. Maybe he roars in order to frighten the game into a betraying shudder. The roar is too all-penetrating, too deep in the bass, too much a pain and quivering in your own marrow, to give you a true knowledge of his location. When I heard him that night he could have been half a mile away, or in the village itself strolling down one of the black streets in massive calm and readiness to destroy. I stole to the window, silently as though even inside this building a noise of my own could endanger me. Sam’s voice came out of the dark: “Sounds like the old sumbitch a’n’t too far off.” I heard him shift and brace up on his elbow, listening to the night as I was.

  The tiger did not speak again, but in the next room beyond the closed door I heard Vilet suddenly say: “Oh, Jed! Oh — oh—” and there was the rhythmic squeak of a cot, and a thumping as a wooden frame beat against the wail; for a moment or two I also heard Jed groan like a slave under the lash, and Sam said under his breath: “I’ll be damned.”

  It was soon quiet again in there, at least no sound penetrated the doorway. Sam came over to the window and presently murmured: “Cur’ous — I didn’t think he could.”

  “Just once, Vilet told me. Just once, with that Kingstone whore he talks about so often.”

  “Ayah, told me the same.” I felt him watching me kindly and speculatively through the dark. Then he was leaning out the window, his dimly starlit face gazing down at the lightless village. “Little cunt been taking care of you, Jackson?”

  “Ayah.” I suppose my dull embarrassment was a result of orphanage training, a mixture of sour prudery and piety, that sticky mess with which the human race so often tars and feathers its children.

  Sam and I could hear a child crying, away off somewhere in the village, probably frightened by the tiger’s roar; it was a persistent helpless whimpering that a woman’s tired and kindly voice was trying to soothe. I heard her say — somewhere, bodiless, as if the words hung m the dark — “Ai-yah, now, he can’t get you, baby…”

  Getting dressed in the morning, it occurred to me, as I had suspected during dinner the night before — fast-breaking Friday dinner after sundown — that it wasn’t all fluff and candy, being advanced from a bond-servant yard-boy, the lowest object above a slave, to the nephew of a longlegged Mister. I’d achieved this wonder myself, sure, but remembering that was small comfort. There are heavy penalties for impersonating an aristocrat, as heavy as the penalties on a bond-servant for wearing a freeman’s white loin-rag. I had to burble to Sam about the remarkable powers of a plain white rag, but he was more interested in the practical side than in the dad-gandered almighty philosophy of it. “It comes to me, Jackson, you got to watch some of the God-damn little things, like not picking your nose nor wiping it so loud on the back of your hand, at least not whiles you be eating. Occurred to me last night at supper, but I didn’t want to say anything with them pilgrims chomping away right at our elbows.”

  “Well,” I said, “I had a snuffle and besides, I’ve seen gentlemen do that, at the Bull-and-Iron.”

  “There’s an old saying, rank got its privileges, but a Mister’s nephew a’n’t all that important, Jackson. And another thing — language. Frinstance, when they brang in that God-forgotten smoked codfish last night, which smelt as if a whole pile of moldy ancestors had sudden-like gone illegitimate, why, an aristocrat would’ve told ’em to take it away, sure, and he’d’ve said something real brisk that they’d long remember, but — with a gang of holy pilgrims at the next table, Jackson, he wouldn’t r’ar back and holler: ‘Who shit all over my plate?’ He just wouldn’t, Jackson.”

  “Sorry,” I said, sulky — I hadn’t slept much. “I didn’t know pilgrims didn’t have to.”

  “It a’n’t that, Jackson . In fact I b’lieve they do, in a manner of speaking. But the dad-gandered almighty thing of it is, you got to consider your influence on the young, the plague-take-it young. You take that ’ere young Jerry. Next time his Ma tells him to eat something he don’t fancy, ask yourself what he’s going to do and say — if his Da a’n’t within hearing. Just ask yourself.”

  “See what you mean. A’n’t he a pisser, though!”

  “Ayah.” But I couldn’t sidetrack Sam when he was feeling educational. “And you take farting, Jackson . Common people like what you and me really be, we don’t pay it no mind, or we laugh or something, but if you’re going to be the nephew of a Mister you got to do a little different. If you let a noisy one go, you don’t say: ‘Hoy, how about that?’ No, sir, you’re supposed to get a sadful-dreamy look onto y’ face, and study the others present as if you’d just never imagined they could do such a rude thing.”

  Vilet and Jed came into our room then, and Sam let up on me. Jed looked all wrong, dark under the eyes as if he hadn’t slept, with a tremor in his big cluthsy hands, and so Vilet of course was troubled about him. Sam was inquiring pol
itely about the bugs on their side of the wall when Jed, not listening, crashed into it saying: “I prayed all night, but the word of God is withheld.”

  Vilet said: “Now, Jed—” fondling his arm while he just stood there, two hundred pounds of gloom, a great harmless bull somehow beat-out, no fight in him.

  “I’d ought to leave y’ company,” Jed said — “a hopeless sinner like I be.” He sat on my cot heavily and wearily; I remember seeing him look down and appear dimly surprised to find his hand resting on my sack, on the bulge of the golden horn, and he lifted the hand away as if it weren’t right for him to touch a thing that had come from a holy hermit. “And the Lord said: I will spew thee out of my mouth — ’s what he said, it’s somewhere in the book. And that a’n’t all—”

  “Now, Jed, honey thing—”

  “Nay, hesh, woman. I got to call to y’ mind what the disciple Simon said: The Lord spoke but I turned aside. Remember? It’s what he said after he’d denied Abraham and the Spokesman a-dyin’, a-hangin’ on the wheel in the Nuber marketplace. ‘And they brought Simon to the marketplace—’ that’s how it goes, remember? — ‘to the marketplace, and Simon said: I do not know this man. And they questioned him again, but he said: I do not know this man.’ And then you remember, afterward, when Simon was put to the rack in the Nuber prison, he said them other words I mentioned: The Lord spoke but I turned aside. I’m like that, friends. The Lord spoke but I turned aside. The lighning’ll find you too if I’m with you when it strikes. I don’t wish to leave you, the way you been good to me and us real friends right along, but it’s what I ought to do, and—”

  “Well, you a’n’t about to,” said Vilet, crying — “you a’n’t about to account we won’t let you, not me or Sam or Davy neither.”

  “I a’n’t fit,” Jed mourned. “Wallowing in sin.”