Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“Maud! Please, Maud!” He was trying to shout down the violence of her attack.

Then she raised her head and wailed, shaking it from side to side, and she looked so piteous and stricken that out of lost love or mercy Brookman stepped out and took hold of her with both hands. The margins of the surrounding crowd withdrew; no one made a move toward them. Suddenly it seemed he and Maud were alone in the street, and a full rising scream rose from the crowd, getting louder and louder.

“Maud.” He had lost his voice and could not raise it above the cry of the crowd around him. He was holding Maud and she was fighting him, both of them sliding on the sleety crust whitening the surface of the street. He could feel her bracing to run as the noise of the crowd grew louder. For a second he had a good hold on her, but she struggled free as if to run, and he grabbed her again.

People in the screaming crowd were shouting, “Watch out! Watch!” He heard Ellie shouting too. He looked over his shoulder and saw his wife come toward him, screaming too: “Watch out!”

Then Maud broke clean and turned, and as she did, an approaching car, like a black airplane, a thing out of empty space, tossed her in front of it. He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block. She was gone for a moment. There was a hush, almost a moment of silence from the frenzied crowd. Then girls screaming. Boys screaming, and that was a strange sound you never heard on a baseball diamond or a soccer pitch.

His face was angled so that he took in, nearly saw, the blurred fishtailing of a dark automobile driven on, and on and off, the sidewalk at the speed of a night’s winter light in snow. So fast, everyone said. Incredibly fast. One thing he was sure he saw: a very fat young woman in a ski jacket had made a move — maybe thinking to block the car — and then stopped like a cartoon creature arresting itself in midair and effecting a headlong dive away from the car’s path, or what had been the car’s path a fraction of a second before.

Maud landed partly against two brownstone steps and partly against the spear tips of the railing that guarded a house three doors down. The sound had the quality of a shattering and an element like brass resonating, a ring in it, a strange gong and a crack. Brass on bone, and blood, and screaming that echoed in the street. He was holding a mitten. Of all things he would think: A mitten, how utterly un-Maud-like a thing a mitten was.

Someone struck him hard and Ellie ran past him. She was running toward the bloodied child-figure that lay, wrapped tightly in bloody blue plastic, on the sidewalk.

JO WAS TRYING TO KEEP children’s voices from ascending through the cloud cover that eternally shadowed the rain forest. It seemed impossible. She had forgotten all the sorcery of the place. To gather up the silver voices was like trying to gather the tiny fish at the edge of the river when your fingers would not close, like trying to gather tree and bird spirits in your mind. The effort made her whimper in her sleep. The glittering voices were above her as she rose out over the jungle’s brown cloud and saw that they were drawing her to the base of the cliffs. She had always felt a thrill of fear encountering the cliffs on a trail.

The gorges loomed high and deep beyond measuring. Their rainbowed waterfalls and vast green shadows stifled effort or your pleas, reduced them to birdcalls. Never yielding, the gorges had the eagle’s mercy, crushed and ripped your tiny beating heart. Voices drew her, and when they came against the rock they never broke but were changed and became a living cloud of harmonies, so sweet, so delicate, but so terribly queer, so alien. The cloud of voices then drew her up, not gently — violently, as in a fall, stopping breath again, up into canyons, past the last of thick-fleshed leaves and over the wall. The fear of it!

And there to her horror were the black lava meadows and the cruel blue sky and the thin clouds on the edge of the world. The disk of the sun, having risen to light silver fountains in the canyons below, to command a blazing moon, was disappearing now. The enormous thing the voices had become raced to the blackness overhead and the flash of the stars.

She thought it woke her but it was still the past, always the past. He was there. Around him only for a moment stood a ring of bronze children whose wary gemstone eyes were fixed on him. They sang to him and then were gone. She knew she was in her room and he was there. He sat on the edge of her bed and spoke to her in a mixture of Spanish, the languages of the montaña, luscious Portuguese, Papiamentu.

“What do you want?”

“To mourn.”

Finally awake, she thought. But when she looked across the room she thought she could see him in the darkness. His face was drawn and bearded, as in the conventions of cheap religious art. His eyes seemed teary and dull but wetly reflected a wall lamp near the door.

“I’m the Mourner. I hear the silent screams.”

El Doliente.

Her first and only experience of him had come at the beginning of her time in the montaña, when she was still in a state of revolutionary exaltation. By now she had come to understand the situation well enough to be very frightened of him.

“Call me Father Walter,” he had used to say. He had been the pastor of a Devotionist missionary parish in a province under siege by the True Revolution. Little by little he had gone over to them. Nor was it out of fear, although there would have been reason for that. For a while, during his moderate-radical phase, some in the English-speaking press, usually in North America, referred to him as the People’s Padre. Father Walter had found that description congenial.

She remembered that he was once obsessed with sacrifices, blood on the thorns, the power of the Infant of Prague, El Niño himself. The Milky Way. No one could expound on the ideology of the True Revolution more effectively. Even those who failed to comprehend dreaded him. “Let them,” he said, “who are afraid of me be afraid for themselves.” The People’s Padre. Now El Doliente, the Mourner, who heard the silent screams.

Her own trembling truly woke her. She cursed and went to turn on the bathroom light and wash away her tears. In the mirror her youthful face. In the waking world outside she heard sirens not far away. By now they were to her an almost reassuring sound.

ON A MILD DECEMBER DAY — so soft that on his rounds he thought he could smell new grass and budding trees in the park — Eddie Stack had just returned from his walk when a New York police captain came to his door. The sight of the senior man frightened Stack for a minute. He was no more at ease when the officer took his cap off.

“Mr. Stack?”

Stack’s daughter was dead, the victim of a nighttime hit-and-run driver right off her college campus. Stack heard himself ask the officer in, but the captain declined. Hit-and-run driver at night. There would be information and assistance. The captain gave him a folder with advice and instructions, a police chaplain’s card clipped to it, and said something about Mrs. Stack and prayers and it being personal to everyone in the job.

When the captain was gone, Stack walked to an armchair with his blood roaring in his ears. His legs were failing under him. He realized that things, his life and identity, had become more different than he had thought the wildest compass of possibility could have afforded.