John Updike: The Centaurus

“Ronnie, could you get me a soaking wet rag?” Hummel explained to Caldwell, “I don’t want to pull it through hot.”

“You’re a damn good workman,” Caldwell said. His voice was fainter than he had expected, his praise empty of blood. He watched Ronnie, a one-eyed boy with shoulders like tummocks, take an oily rag and plunge it into a small bucket of black water standing under a far electric bulb. Reflected light bobbed and leaped in the violated water as if to be free. Ronnie handed the rag to Hummel and Hummel squatted and applied it. Cold wet dribbled into Caldwell ’s shoe and a faint aromatic hissing rose to his nostrils. “We’ll wait now a minute,” Hummel said, and remained squatting, carefully holding Caldwell ’s pants leg up from the wound. Caldwell met the stares of the three workmen-the third had come out from under the car-and smiled self-deprecatingly. Now that relief was at hand he had a margin in which to feel embarrassed. His smile made the helpers frown. To them it was as if an automobile had tried to speak. Caldwell let his eyes go out of focus and thought of far-off things, of green fields, of Chariclo as a lithe young woman, of Peter as a baby, of how he had pushed him on his Kiddy Kar with a long forked stick along the pavements under the horsechestnut trees. They had been too poor to afford a baby carriage; the kid had learned to steer, too early? He worried about the kid when he had the time.

“Now George: hold tight,” Hummel said. The arrow slid out backwards with a slick spurt of pain. Hummel stood up, his face pink, scorched by fire or flushed in satisfaction. His three moronic helpers clustered around jostling to see the silver shaft, painted at its unfeathered end with blood. Caldwell ’s ankle, at last free, felt soft, unbraced; his shoe seemed to be filling with warm slow liquid. The pain had changed color, had shifted into the healing spectrum. The body knew. The ache came now to his heart rhythmically: Nature’s breathing.

Hummel bent down and picked something up. He held it to his nose and sniffed. Then he set it in Caldwell ’s palm still piping hot. It was an arrowhead. Three-sided, so sharply pointed its edges were concave, it seemed too dainty a thing to have caused such a huge dislocation. Caldwell noticed that his palms were mottled with shock and exertion; a film of sweat broke out on his brow. He asked Hummel, “Why did you smell it?”

“Wondering if it was poisoned.”

“It wouldn’t be, would it?”

“I don’t know. These kids today.” He added, “I didn’t smell anything.”

“I don’t think they’d do anything like that,” Caldwell insisted, thinking of Achilles and Hercules, Jason and Asclepios, those attentive respectful faces.

“Where do the kids get their money? is what I’d like to know,” Hummel said, as if kindly trying to draw Caldwell ’s mind away from a hopeless matter. He held up the headless shaft and wiped the blood off on his glove. “This is good steel,” he said. “This is an expensive arrow.”

“Their fathers give it to the bastards,” Caldwell said, feeling stronger, clearer-headed. His class, he must get back.

“There’s too much money around,” the old mechanic said with wan spite. “They’ll buy any junk Detroit puts out.” His face had regained its gray color, its acetylene tan; crinkled and delicate like an often-folded sheet of foil, his face became almost womanly with quiet woe and Caldwell became nervous.

“Al, how much do I owe you? I got to get back. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

“Nothing, George. Forget it. I’m glad I was able to do it.” He laughed. “It isn’t every day I burn an arrow out of a man’s leg.”

“I wouldn’t feel right. I asked a craftsman to give me the benefit of his craft-” He groped toward his wallet pocket insincerely.

“Forget it, George. It took a minute. Be big enough to accept a favor. Vera says you’re one of the few over there who doesn’t try to make her life more difficult.”

Caldwell felt his face go wooden; he wondered how much Hummel knew of why Vera’s life was difficult. He must get back. “Al, I’m much obliged to you. Believe me.” There was never a way, somehow, of really getting gratitude across. You went through life in a town and sometimes loved the people in it and never told them, you were ashamed.

“Here,” Hummel said. “Don’t you want this?” He held out the arrow’s bright shaft. Caldwell had absent-mindedly slipped the point into his side coat pocket.

“No, hell. You keep it.”

“No, now what would I do with it? The shop’s full of junk as it is. You show it to Zimmerman. A teacher in our public school system shouldn’t have to put up with crap like this.”

“O.K., Al, you win. Thanks. Thank you very much.” The rod of silver was too long; it stuck up out of his side coat pocket like a car aerial.

“A teacher ought to be protected from kids like that. Tell Zimmerman.”

“You tell him. Maybe he’ll take it from you.”

“Well, he might. That’s no joke. He just might.”

“I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

“I was on the board, you know, that hired him.”

“I know you were, Al.”

“I’ve often regretted it.”

“Hell, don’t.”

“No?”

“He’s an intelligent man.”

“Yes-yes, but there’s something missing.”

“Zimmerman understands power; but he doesn’t keep discipline.” Fresh pain flooded Caldwell ’s shin and knee. It seemed to him that he had never seen Zimmerman so clearly or expressed himself so well on the subject, but Hummel, annoyingly obtuse, merely repeated his own observation. “There’s something missing.”

His sense of passing time was working on Caldwell’s bowels, making them bind. “I got to get back,” he said.

“Good luck. Tell Cassie the town misses her.”

“Jesus, she’s happy as a lark out there. It’s what she’s always wanted.”

“And Pop Kramer, how’s he?”

“Pop’s tops. He’ll live to be a hundred.”

“Do you mind the driving back and forth?”

“No, to tell you the truth I enjoy it. It gives me a chance to talk to the kid. The kid and I hardly ever saw each other when we lived in town.”

“You have a bright boy there. Vera tells me.”

“It’s his mother’s brains. I just pray to God he doesn’t inherit my ugly body.”

“George, may I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“For your own good.”

“Say anything you want, Al. You’re my friend.”

“You know what your trouble is?”

“I’m stubborn and ignorant.”

“Seriously.”

My trouble is , Caldwell thought, my leg is killing me.

“What?”

“You’re too modest.”

“Al, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Caldwell said, and moved to turn away.

But Hummel kept pinning him. “Your car’s holding up all right?” Until they had moved ten miles out of town, the Caldwells had done without a car. They could walk everywhere in Olinger and take the trolley to Alton. But when they bought back the old Kramer place they needed a car. Hummel had put them on to a ‘36 Buick for only $375.

“Just wonderful. It’s a wonderful car. I kick myself every day for smashing up that grille.”

“That can’t be welded, George. But the car runs all right?”

“Like a dream. I’m grateful to you, Al, don’t think I’m not.”

“That engine should be all right; the man never drove it over forty. He was an undertaker.”

If Hummel had said that once, he had said it a thousand times. The fact seemed to fascinate him. “I’m not scared,” Caldwell said, guessing that in Hummel’s mind the car was full of ghosts. Actually, it was just an ordinary four-door sedan; there was no room to carry corpses. True, though, it was the blackest car Caldwell had ever seen. They really put the shellac on those old Buicks.