John Crowley: Beasts

“Why did you hide?” she said. “Are they looking for you?”

“No.” He smiled at her, something she hadn’t known he could do, a slow and crooked smile. “But I wouldn’t want them to find me. We’ll go on now.”

Mid-afternoon he had her make camp in a sheltered glade well off the road. “Eat if you want to,” he said. “I won’t today.” He lay full-length on the heated ground pine, drawing up his muscled legs, resting his big head on his chin, and watching her work. She felt those lamplike eyes on her.

“I brought you cigarettes,” she said. “I found a pack.”

“Don’t need them.”

“Why did you say we had to leave when they were gone?”

“Men,” he said. “Can’t stand the smell. Not the men themselves, their places. The smell of, I don’t know, their lives.” His eyes began to close.

“Nothing personal. The cigarettes block up the smell, is all.” His eyes were slits; they closed entirely, then opened again. She had eaten and packed, and still he lay slipping in and out of sleep. Wherever it was he was going, he seemed in no hurry to get there.

“Lazy,” he said, opening his eyes. “That’s my trouble.”

“You look comfortable,” she said.

It would be many days before she understood that his direct, fierce stare more often than not looked at nothing; many days till in a fit of rage at being so intently regarded she stuck out her tongue at that gaze, and saw it drift closed without acknowledging the insult. He wasn’t a man; he meant nothing by it.

Not a man . He was not a man. The men she had known, who had grasped and fumbled with her in a pleading, insistent way; the dark boy she had done the same with not long ago — they were men. Something leapt within her, at a thought she would not admit.

In the late afternoon he grew restless, and they went on. Perhaps by now the ponies had gotten used to him; anyway, they no longer shied from him, so Caddie could walk by his side.

“I don’t want to pry,” she said, even though she suspected irony would be lost on him, or perhaps because of that, “and you have the papers and all, but it’d be nice to know what’s going on.”

“It wouldn’t,” he said.

“Well,” she said.

“Look,” he said. “That copter we saw was looking for somebody. I’m looking for the same somebody. I don’t know where he is, but I’ve got an idea, and a better idea” — pointing up — “than they have.” He looked at her, expressionless. “If they find him first, they’ll kill him. If I find him first, they might kill both of us.”

“Both,” she said. “What about me?”

He didn’t answer.

What was it she felt for him? Hatred: a spark of that, a kind of molten core at the center of her feelings that warmed the rest, hatred that he had with so little thought snatched her from where she had been — well, comfortable anyway. Hatred of her own powerlessness was what it was, because he hadn’t been cruel. The uses he put her to were what she was for; it was in the papers; there was no appeal from that and he made no bones about it. He obviously couldn’t put a polite false face on the thing, even if it had occurred to him that it might make it easier for her.

Which it wouldn’t have. She knew her own story.

And yet in using her he wasn’t like Hutt had been. Not constantly suspicious, prying, attempting to snatch from her every shred of person she built for herself. No, he assumed her competence, asked for nothing more than she could do, said only when they would stop and where they would go, and left the rest to her; deferred, always, to her judgment. If she failed at anything he never showed anger or contempt, only left her to patch up her mistakes without comment.

So that slowly, without choosing to, resenting it, she became a partner in this enterprise that she couldn’t fathom. Had he consciously so drawn her into it? She supposed not. He probably hadn’t considered it that closely. I like a woman to do for me , he had said. You wouldn’t know .

And touched her cheek with his hard, dry palm.

“You cold?” he said, The fire had died to coals. Her own sleeping bag was an old one, a grudging parting gift from Hutt, She said nothing, trying not to shiver. “Damn, you must be. Come over here.”

“I’m fine.”

“Come here.”

It was a command. She lay coldly hating him for a while, but the command remained in the space between them, and at last she came, tiptoeing over the already rimy ground to where he lay large in his bag. He drew her down to him, tucked her efficiently within the cavity of his lean belly. She wanted to resist, but the warmth that came from him was irresistible. She thrust her damp cold nose into his furry chest, unable not to, and rested her head on his hard forearm.

“Better,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Better with two.”

“Yes.” Somehow, without her having sensed their approach, warm tears had come to her eyes, a glow of weeping was within her; she pressed herself harder against him to stifle the sudden sobs. He took no notice; his breathing, slow and with a burning undertone, didn’t alter.

It was just light when she awoke. He had gone down to the quick stream they had camped by. She could see him, lightstruck, the fine blond hair of his limbs glistening in the sun as though he were on fire. He was washing, delicately, carefully; and from within her cave of warmth she spied on him.

Her heart, whether from the invasion of his privacy or from some other reason, beat hard and slow. He bent, drew up silver strands of water, and swept his hands through his mane; he rubbed himself. He bent to drink, and when he arose, droplets fell from his beard. When he came back to the campsite, drying himself with an old plaid shirt, she saw that above his long lopsided testicles his penis was sheathed, like a dog’s, held against his belly by gold-furred skin.

From somewhere to the south the copter’s drone could be heard briefly, bike the first faint roll of a storm. He glanced up and hurried to dress.

Through that day, walking by him or ahead of him (for she was the better walker, she knew that now, his strength wasn’t meant for endurance, or his legs not made for walking, yet he no longer stopped for long rests as he had before), she felt come and go a dense rush of feeling that made her face tingle and her breasts burn. She tried to turn from him when she felt it, sure that he could read it in her face; and she tried to turn away from it herself, not certain what it was — it felt like clarity, like resolve, yet darker. Once, though, when he called out to her and she was above him on a hard climb, she turned to face him, and felt it rush up uncontrollably within her, as though she glowed.

“You’re fast,” he said, and then stood quiet, his wide chest moving quickly in and out. She said nothing, only stared at him, betting him see hen, if he could; but then his unwavering gaze defeated her and she turned away, heart drumming.

Late in the afternoon they came on the cabin.

He had her tie up the ponies in the woods webb away from the clearing the cabin stood in, and then for a long time watched the cabin from the cover of the trees; he seemed to taste, carefully, with all his senses, the gray, shuttered shack and its surroundings. Then he walked deliberately up to it and pushed open the door.

“No one’s been here,” he said when she came into the shuttered dimness.

“Not for weeks.”

“How can you tell?”

He laughed shortly — a strange, harsh sound, little like a laugh — and moved carefully through the two small rooms. In the afternoon light that filtered through the shutters she could see that the place was well furnished — no logger’s cabin, but something special, a hideout, though from the outside it booked like any shack. She went to open a shutter. “Leave that,” he said. “Light that fire. It’s cold in here.” He went from cupboard to cabinet, looking at things, looking for something that in the end he didn’t find. “What’s this?”