Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

The farmhouse itself was another ruined, rotted structure, but it was a human ruination, if it is clear what I am saying; Eldridge lived in dishevelment obviously because he was comfortable that way, and the farmhouse in its noisome deterioration was probably contrived as carefully for that effect as the ragged clothes of rich young people.

Eldridge, a calm, sturdy man in his sixties, another pipe smoker, nodded at us as if he had been expecting a visit for a long time, almost as if we were there to give him approval and assistance, and took us around the house, showing the system of shallow ditches in which pipe had been laid, probably by Clete. He had been digging a ditch farther out when we found him. Eldridge pointed from the pipes to a large oil tank behind the house, and his face was suffused with pleasure. He did not seem to mind the ants; he took them as a challenge. “This here,” he said, “this is what we’re doing.

We’re running lines from the fuel tank, you understand, and if those ants get over the water trap, why then we’re going to set fire to this ditch and watch them all die.” He smiled. “I’m looking forward to that,” he said.

“The filthy little buggers aren’t going to take my land from me. The fact is,” he went on, “I’m almost enjoying this. I’m going to survive and be the better for it,” Leaning on a hoe he looked like something out of American Gothic, although, perhaps, less pessimistic. “Don’t you think I’ve done a good job?” he said.

“I think you’ve done very well indeed,” Hubbs said, and a look passed between them, call it communion or mutual respect, but it was apparent that Eldridge was doing exactly what Hubbs imagined he would do in this circumstance; he was Taking A Stand, he was Not Being Intimidated. It affected me to see Hubbs responding in this way, and I realized that he was glad to see that Eldridge had held out. The abandoned Paradise City must have affected him as deeply as me in a different way. Suddenly I liked Hubbs much more.

Eldridge suggested that we might as well sit and stay for a while, and that seemed all right to me, all right to Hubbs as well. Clete went and got some chairs and we all went to the porch a-setting and a-rocking, meeting Eldridge’s wife, Mildred, a grim, determined woman with the same hardness that Eldridge had, but with something softer behind the eyes that indicated that she could both participate in defiance with him and not take it that seriously. And we met Eldridge’s granddaughter, Kendra.

Well, music and bells for the others, please; I am not a sentimental man. I will admit that Kendra has already had a great affect on me, but I try not to take this kind of thing too seriously. She is an attractive girl in her late teens; all right, she is more than attractive, a softness and grace is there that lifts her entirely out of the context of mere prettiness and touches me deeply.

My relationships with women, fragmentary at best, have not been so good since I got into whale research (something that this journal already has made clear, I suspect); but I do not think, never thought, that this was so much my fault as the fault of the women themselves. There are very few I have met through the years who struck me as being worth the effort… and for me at least a below-standard woman simply poses no interest at all. Perhaps this makes me a very strange man, but I have never been overly concerned with the fact that most of the time my sexual drive seems to flicker away at a subliminal level, only making its presence known at rare occasions and then always with women like Kendra to whom sexual interest is merely a confirmation of feelings they have already aroused. I realize that I am becoming somewhat confused about this and giving more attention to my feelings than they are really worth, but I want to get this absolutely straight, and if this journal is going to stand up as being of any scientific validity—which I trust it will—then it is not a negligible part of the scientific method that the prejudices and nature of the writer be themselves revealed, integrated as it were into the core of the work. She is a beautiful girl; at another time, in another way, something might have happened here, but I am too preoccupied with the ants. And as Hubbs has made clear over and again this is no pleasure trip. I have been with my whales too long. Kendra has long hair that takes all the colors of the sun, a gentle voice, deep penetrating eyes, to say nothing of fine breasts and hips.

I know that I will be thinking of her out of all relation to the actual role she will play in my life here. Eldridge, I think, might understand this; he showed an amused consciousness of my disturbance as I was introduced to her, and kept giving her sidelong glances as she played with her horse in the backyard, paused to help Mrs. Eldridge bring us drinks now and then, but he is a man of great reserve and said nothing. Why should he?

Eldridge, in answer to Hubbs’s queries, pointed out that they had started pulling out of Paradise City about three or four weeks past, first just a few, then almost all of the residents together. The lemming effect. It was the ants that had discouraged them, of course, but the actual damage inflicted by them, Eldridge went on, most of it anyway, had occurred after the project had been abandoned, which meant that if they had resolved to stay and fight as Eldridge had, the ants would have posed little problem.

He did not seem bitter, however. “People hate ants,” he said. “There’s something about them that just disgusts most of us, but Clete and I we aren’t too bothered. I don’t think of them as animals, but as a kind of vegetation, and what the hell can you do with vegetation except to control it and clear it away? No,” he said, “I don’t think that we’re going to have any trouble now,” just a-setting and a-rocking. Kendra’s horse whickered, Clete begged pardon and went back to do some more ditch-digging.

“Maybe,” Eldridge said, “it was just too much heat for them, these people I mean. Most of them aren’t really desert types, you know; they’re city dwellers with sinus problems who got conned into paying a few thousand for some property they’d never seen. They were looking for any excuse to go. I don’t hold nothing against them,” he said again. “But what I don’t like is that when we get the ants cleared away I’m going to have to do the rebuilding practically single-handed. Most of them are never going to be back.”

“We’re from the National Science Foundation,” Hubbs said. “We’ll give you plenty of assistance, you can be sure of that. And afterward there should be a grant for rebuilding.”

“Maybe,” Eldridge said with the air of a man who had seen both too much and too little government in his time, his suspicion not personal—he liked Hubbs, after all—but radiating as a kind of absent contempt. “And then again maybe not. Only thing that brings people into the Arizona desert is they think they can get something out of it easy; project developers, scientists looking for giant ants, but who’s going to stay? I’m going to stay.”

“There are a lot of collapsed houses around here,” I pointed out, perhaps irrelevantly, but trying to establish some part in the conversation.

Somehow my potential connection to Kendra, I decided, could only be established through Eldridge; I would have to establish a relationship with him in order to reach her… juvenile thinking perhaps, but I had a strange feeling of hesitancy about the girl. “Maybe they had their reasons to run.”

“I really wouldn’t know about that,” Eldridge said. “Like I said, I didn’t pay much attention to any of them. They came from the city mainly and they’re heading right back there. I’ve got to hold my ground. This is my place.”