Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I shrugged. I didn’t care whether he came around or not.

Back in the building I shivered again under the cool rush of air, and I went looking for Amanda. This time I noticed a heavy brown door across from the dining room, and when I leaned on it it slid back smoothly into the wall. It was the library, dark and huge, with shelves rising two stories to the ceiling, and ladders here and there. There was a thick carpet underneath, and when I went in the backs of books glinted gold all around. I stood for a while, my hand on the back of a soft upholstered chair, and when I turned back to the door I saw Amanda, lying curled on a long couch, looking very small. I squatted down beside her and touched her cheek, and then I whispered, “Amanda, Amanda.” But she slept on, and when I leaned closer her breath was sour with alcohol, and her hands were holding each other in front of her face. I put a hand on her shoulder and shook her, but her head moved loosely on the couch and after a while I left her alone.

Outside, as I was shutting the door to the library, I saw William James, and Candy behind him. He had changed into a dark blazer, and as he strode over to me the brass buttons shone in the light from the chandeliers. He reached forward and took my hand.

“Good game, young fellow.” He was smiling, but his hand was tight on mine, and I could swear I heard a bone crack. When he let go the back of my hand was throbbing, and I put it behind and held on to my shirt to keep from rubbing it.

“Yes,” I said. “Very.”

“We’re going home.”

“Amanda and I were planning to meet some friends for dinner.”

“I see.” He gave me a long look and then he walked away. Candy waved good-bye from across the room, and I raised my good hand and waved back. I said good-bye then to Swaminathan and the others, and after a while I went outside, where it was getting dark, and I walked out to the pitch. My right arm was aching from the shoulder to the fingertips. It wasn’t that, though, that made my heart afraid, and I stayed outside because there was a breeze and it was soothing.

“Hallo.”

It was Ballard. He walked out to me and we stood together for a while. Then he held out something to me, and said, “Do you smoke?”

“No,” I said, but I reached out anyway and took the cigar. He passed me a lighter, and after a while I got the thing lit and we watched the glow on each other’s faces.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Pleasure. Glad you played.”

“Yes.”

“You know,” he said, “I was born in India.”

“Really? Where?”

“Lucknow. We left when I was very young, maybe five or six. I don’t remember very much.”

“Yes.”

“But I remember a little.”

So we stood out there for a long time and smoked, and our cigars kept going out so we passed each other the lighter, it was very quiet but for the crickets and far away, the birds, the wind smelled sweetly of some flower I didn’t know, and the moon came up suddenly and covered the field in a silver light.

Later that night Amanda and I drove into the city and we found Tom and Kyrie, and with them White Eagle, they were sitting side by side on lawn chairs in front of the Hokaido, in the rock garden, drinking beer out of cans. Amanda had been quiet and dazed, she had shuddered at the darkness when we had come out of the clubhouse, saying, “But it was just light!” but now she sat cross-legged on the rocks and popped open a beer and started to look less dislocated.

“We were going to go to NASA,” Tom said. “We were thinking about it.”

“Why NASA?” I said.

“Shuttle takeoff tonight,” Kyrie said. “We wanted to see it.”

“There are no takeoffs from Houston,” Amanda said.

“It’s a party,” Kyrie said. “They’re launching tonight from Cape Canaveral, and so there’s a party out near NASA.” She held up an orange piece of paper with a hand-drawn map on it. “When they launch the real shuttle, everyone at the party will shoot off their own rockets. Sort of in sync, see?”

I didn’t really see. I shrugged.

“You don’t want to go see the rockets?” Amanda said. Her hair was tousled from the couch, and she looked about ten years old.

“It’s something everybody should see once,” White Eagle said.

“Really?” I was sick at having to think of him as White Eagle, I mean his name was really Bob or Ted or something like that. “You think so?”

“Really,” he said, sipping from his can and quite unaffected by my sarcasm.

Finally I had to go, they all seemed intent on it and my other choice was to sit at the Hokaido alone, and I wasn’t interested in the damn shuttle or rockets but I couldn’t face that, so we got into the car, five of us, and we went to NASA. After we got off the freeway we circled around in the dark, stopping at all-night convenience stores, until finally we found a field with other cars scattered about and a lot of people gathered in little circles. They were all working on rockets. There were kegs of beer here and there, but basically everyone had a rocket. Some of them had the little fizzy kind, firecrackers, others had actual working models with decals and everything, there was one group that had a big shiny shuttle that looked about six feet long. We got out, and I walked out into the field to a fence, and Tom followed me, and we stood side by side and pissed, and he said, “How are you?”

“Feeling pretty weird. And you?” I said.

“Good.”

“Good? What’s going on?”

“With Kyrie?” He smiled. “Nothing. I mean I don’t know. I mean it’s good.”

“Are you ready to go back?”

“To school? No. Are you?”

“I think so.”

“Too bad we didn’t find heaven.”

“Maybe we did.”

“Yeah? Where?”

I shook my head and we walked back to the car. I couldn’t have explained it to him but I felt like something was over. We sat on the hood of the car and after a while Kyrie and Tom and Amanda wandered off into the darkness, holding hands all of them, they said they were going to look around. As they walked away I called, “Amanda, we won.”

“Won what?”

“The game.”

“Oh,” she said over her shoulder. “That’s good.”

There was a radio somewhere, a news-reader’s voice in the distance. The whole day was in my bones now, and my arm was aching in sweeps from the collarbone, and I waved them away and lay back on the hood. I knew it was too late to sleep but it felt nice to be looking up at the sky, which was sheets of cloud spilling across the moon.

“What kind of game was it?”

I started, and nearly slid off the car. It was White Eagle, and he was sitting in the driver’s seat, his head out of the window.

“Cricket,” I said.

“Ah.”

“Listen, what is your name really?” He just looked at me, his hands on the steering wheel. “I’m going to call you Ed,” I said finally, and I lay back and wriggled around until I found comfort. The metal felt good on my back. After a while he began to talk, and I didn’t really want to listen but I was too settled to move, and it was sort of nice, to hear a voice telling a story above my head.

“Listen,” he said. “I tell the story of Coyote and Wolf, who lived a long time ago in a valley. The valley was full of game, and Wolf lived happily, and Coyote too, around the edges. Then one day Coyote saw a wagon coming into the valley, drawn by huge horses, and he hid and watched them. There was a family of humans in the wagon, and they camped in the bottom of the valley, near a stream, and the next day they began to cut trees. They cleared a meadow and they built a house. Wolf came down from the ridges right to the edge of the meadow, and he stood watching them, and one of the men raised a rifle, and Wolf faced him, unafraid, and then the man laughed and dropped his barrel. Wolf turned and went back to the timberline, and as he went he saw Coyote hiding behind a rock, and he sneered, showing his fearsome curved teeth. So Wolf and Coyote lived in the valley, and Wolf hunted everywhere except down at the bottom of the valley, but then it seemed that the game became scarce, and Wolf had to go hungry for long weeks. Sometimes he saw people in the forest, and seeing him they would stop, and then slowly they would retreat. Meanwhile Coyote stole chickens from the settlement, and he rooted around in their garbage, and they came out of the houses and shouted at him, often they fired at him with shotguns, once a bullet cut open his left flank in a long thin line, but he scrambled away and lived. Now one day Wolf chased a deer, it was an old, scrawny buck, and Wolf chased him down from the side of the mountain, and the deer fled into the town, a town it was now, with roads and poles and lights, and Wolf went right after him, and the deer was running down the middle of a street when he was hit by a machine, a fast-moving machine, and the deer tumbled over and came down dead. Some people got out of the machine, and Wolf looked at them, and they looked at him, but he was hungry, and he was angry, so he ran forward for his deer, he had been stalking it all afternoon, and there was a bang, and the first shot took off his right foot, and he howled and kept going, smearing the street with his blood, and the second shot dropped him short. The people gathered about the body, and poked it with the gun, and Coyote saw all this, because he was inside a dumpster down the street with his nose barely out of the trash. So he sneaked away, and somebody skinned Wolf, and somebody else got the deer, and the next night Coyote took a little of the deer, he broke into a shed and tore off a leg, and the dogs chased him but he got away. Coyote lived long and grew old, he survived poison, and bullets, and gas, and disease, and one winter he was down in the town again, and he saw something that made him laugh, he rolled over and over in the snow and laughed, because at the middle of the town, near the river, the people had put up a statue of Wolf, and it showed him snarling, with one leg raised, very proud and wild and free.”