Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

The good leg buckled under him—though Farrell saw nothing that could have made him slip—and he crashed to his knees before Sia at the foot of the stair. Sia neither moved nor spoke. Farrell smelled wet earth, wet crushed grass, something like coffee, something like the fur of a dead animal. He heard a whimpering, took it first for Briseis, and then understood that the sound was happening in his own throat. He could not make it stop.

This was nothing like the reflected image he had seen of the huge woman with the dog’s head. Sia herself was hardly there at all; she seemed to thin and dwindle almost to transparency, even in Farrell’s mind. But for one truly unbearable moment—one instant in which names for things had not yet been invented—he was more aware of her presence than he ever had been of his own. He felt her breathing in the stairs and in the old floor under his feet; she surrounded him with her walls and her rooms, moving in the stones of the fireplace, looking at him from the pieces of the broken lamp, speaking in the sunlight’s darting scrawl across the living room rug. Beyond the house, there was only more of her, no least refuge inside himself, for she was that place, too, laughing in his bones, teasing his atoms to make them rattle in the dark like dice. However he turned, he fell toward her, terribly content.

Beside him, McManus crouched lower and lower, his limbs spraddling as if a great foot were crushing him to earth. As Farrell watched, the weight seemed to release him, and he rose slowly and half hopped, half hobbled toward the front door, drawing in his breath with every step. Suzy started to follow, but the woman on the stair looked at her, and she put her hands to her mouth and went into the kitchen. Farrell heard McManus stumbling and cursing wearily under a window, and then the sound of the Pontiac’s engine.

“I couldn’t see what happened,” he said. “With the gun.” Sia smiled at him in mild puzzlement. Farrell said, “She called you mother .”

Sia plucked at the front of her dress, the nervous habit of a heavy woman. “I must go up to poor Robert,” she said. “He will spend half our time now apologizing for coming in without knocking. Such a strange arrogance they have, the timid ones; how they peep at themselves.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose, having had a cold for two days.

Farrell watched her hoisting herself up the steps one at a time, pausing on the landing to sigh angrily, as she always did. Briseis came to shove her muzzle into his hand, and Farrell petted her, saying absently, “It’s all right, don’t be scared.” But Briseis smelled the gunshot and the blood, and she simply lay down flat, too overcome by human confusions even to whine. Farrell said, “Don’t think about it, that’s all. Just be a dog, that’s what I’m doing.” He took her outside to sit on the front steps, where she found her favorite ragged beach towel and killed it several times, while he played some of Henry VIII’s songs for her.

Julie and Farrell’s record for mutual toleration was slightly less than five consecutive days, set almost eight years before on Nantucket. They celebrated their sixth day together by going again to the Moroccan restaurant, where they had couscous and warm, bitter champagne. Farrell spent the first half of the dinner in playing happily with Julie’s fingers and grinning at her; and the second half in telling her, headlong and in no order at all, everything he could put into words about Sia and Ben and Suzy’s visitor. Julie listened silently, attentive but expressionless, until he ran out of champagne, fingers, and phrases to describe Sia barefoot on the stair in her flowery dress.

“She just took up all the room,” he said. “All of it, everywhere.”

Julie said slowly, “So after that, you went and washed up, you put on a clean shirt, and you met me here for dinner. And you talked about us. You talked about Barney Miller , for God’s sake, about running into my sister’s ex-husband—”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me,” Farrell said. “Do you? Tell me you really believe one word of all that UFO craziness I just dumped on you. Come on, one word.”

He had let go of her fingers, the better to wave his own hands. Julie reclaimed them now, dipped his fingertips in the couscous gravy, and then licked them daintily, one by one, looking at him. She said, “I don’t believe words. I believe you. There’s a difference.”

“Meaning I hallucinate, but I don’t lie. Right. Bless you, Jewel.”

“Meaning you’re scared,” she said. “I’ve never seen you scared before, not even in Lima. Not that you’re so wildly heroic—it’s more that you’re too curious about whatever’s going on really to notice the fear. But this one has all your attention. You saw what you saw.”

Farrell sighed and shrugged. “Maybe, but I’m losing it. There’s something I know, but it keeps slipping and scrabbling further away from my mind, trying to get back to her. Now I can’t remember the way it was—just what happened, and that’s different, too. I don’t know what I saw.”

“What about Suzy?” Julie asked.

Farrell rolled his eyes in exasperation. “She was stunned, she was terrified, she was hysterical, and besides she was looking somewhere else at all the interesting moments. That’s what she says, anyway, and by now I’m sure it’s perfectly true. People are watching you doing that, Jewel.”

Julie nodded complacently, smiling against his fingers. A turbaned waiter swept their dishes off the table like frisbees and swept back a moment later with little cups of coffee as hot and slow as lava. Farrell said, “The gun turned in his hand. He didn’t drop it, and he wasn’t holding it carelessly, God knows. Suzy called, ‘ Mother ,’ and the gun wriggled and pointed at him and shot him. I keep waiting to forget that part.”

“What happened to the gun?” Farrell shrugged again. Impatiently she demaned, “Well, what happened afterward? I mean, it’s been five days, do they talk about it at all, at breakfast? Did the neighbors hear anything, did anybody call the police? I can’t believe it’s all just going along.”

“That’s what it’s doing, all right,” Farrell said. “No cops, no neighbors, nothing’s changed. Ben just says he wasn’t there, and Suzy pretends she wasn’t there, and old Sia, she don’t say nuttin‘. Believe me, the matter does not come up at mealtimes.” Julie let go of his hands. Farrell went on, “The one I’d really like to talk to is Briseis. She saw it all and she believes her eyes. She won’t go near Sia.”

Julie said, “Tell me about her. Not the dog. Sia.”

Farrell was silent, matching stares with the waiter, who had already greeted two newcomers at the door and was pointing to their table. He said finally, “There’s a grizzly bear up in the zoo. It’s amazing how small and slumpy that animal can look, until it moves.”

“Does she attract you?” Farrell’s mouth sagged open. “Leaving me out of it—and Ben, and anything else. Would you go to bed with her?”

“Jesus, Jewel,” he said. Julie kicked his foot lightly under the table. She said, “When you start talking about bears.”

Farrell said very slowly, “The thing about the grizzly, there’s no limit to it. You look at it for a while, you think about it, and you can’t possibly imagine where its strength begins or ends. And it’s fat and swagbellied and sort of pigfaced and it’s attractive too.” He had not tried to tell her about the night when Sia’s pleasure in another room had forced his body to connive in its own solitary ransacking. “It’s attractive,” he said again. “That kind of power always is, especially when it’s got a beautiful silvery-brown coat, and it moves just a little like a human being. But it’s a bear.”