Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Sheriff Grice crouched down in front of the hole. “Deighton, you in there?”

There was no reply.

“Mr. Deighton, come out. We need to talk to you.”

Munro made another sign to his NCO, who barked an order. The soldiers unslung their rifles and pointed them in the general direction of the hole.

Grice looked around testily. “Take it easy,” he muttered. “He’s just an old man. He’s probably deaf.”

He shouted louder, and still got no response.

“Deighton, come out!”

The swing music stopped. A man’s voice rose up out of the cave, weak and cracked, hard to hear.

“What do you want?”

“We need to talk to you.”

“Go away. This is private property.”

“It’s the police, Deighton. Come on up here.”

“Go away.”

“Don’t play games. Come on out. We’ll have a talk and then we’ll be on our way.”

There was some banging and scraping and a ladder was propped up against the lip of the hole. A grizzled head poked out and took a look around. As soon as he saw the soldiers, he ducked back down again.

“Deighton. It’s all right. We just want to talk.”

Grice was trying to sound soothing. The old man hollered up from his pit, his voice hard to hear over the wind.

“The hell you do!”

Grice walked back to Munro, tying a handkerchief over his mouth against the dust. He pointed up at the antenna, dimly visible in the haze. “You can see. It’s just a crystal set or something. He’s no threat.”

“We’ll still need to search the place.”

The old man shouted on, calling them devils, saying that if they were trying to take away his knowledge (whatever that was), they’d have a fight on their hands. Then he broke out in a terrible, racking cough. Ike listened to him suffering down there, wondering what kind of den he’d made, in what filth he chose to live.

Munro sauntered forward, peered in, then stepped smartly back again.

“Jesus, he’s got a gun.”

As if to confirm it, there was a sharp crack, which sounded to Ike like a.30–06 rifle round.

“There’s no need for that!” shouted Grice. “You’re being a fool.”

Munro conferred with his NCO and called one of his men forward.

“We’ll gas him out.”

There was only one thing Ike’s mother ever told him about the man she’d been married to. One thing that stuck in his mind. As a kid in the orphanage, Ike daydreamed he’d meet and fight the burned-face man. Even now that he was grown, twenty-one and in uniform, it still went around in his head. His monster was down in that hole. The thing couldn’t be put off forever.

“Wait,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.”

The others turned, frankly amazed to hear him speak.

“Let me go down there. I’ll bring him out.”

“Hell you will!” said Grice.

Munro was amused. “No, let him. Go on, boy, be my guest. You flush him for us.”

Grice barred Ike’s way. “You ain’t going down there like some hunting dog. Feller’s got a squad of his own men to take his orders.”

“I don’t mind, Sheriff,” Ike reassured him. “I want to do it.”

You either went after your monsters, or they came after you.

As he walked to the lip of the hole, he could sense the depth of the place, hear the silent thunder booming. He called out Deighton’s name, then crouched down and called again, this time in the People’s Language.

“Skin Peeled Open,” he called. “Can you hear me?”

There were many things he knew.

At that moment the wind died down. The man replied, “Who is that? Who’s speaking to me?” He said some other words in the People’s Language, but, to his shame, Ike could not understand.

“I’m Ike Prince,” he said in English. “My father was Mockingbird Runner and my mother was Salt-Face Woman.”

There was a silence. Then the ladder was pushed up again to the lip of the pit. Ike climbed down.

It was not a filthy den, but a cluttered little parlor, lit by a gas lamp. There was a chair and a table and an Army cot. The floor was swept, the walls smooth as plaster. The man himself looked ratlike, wizened. His face was not terrifying to look upon. One side was smooth scar tissue, the other scored with deep lines. A two-sided man. A man facing both worlds. He was clutching an ancient Springfield service rifle. When he spoke, his voice was a strangled rasp. Ike found he was not afraid. How could he be, of such a husk? He knew then there would be no fight, no glorious taking of revenge. All he could feel was contempt.

“Why did you say that name to me?” Deighton wheezed.

“You didn’t expect to hear it again.” It was a statement, not a question.

“You’re Eliza’s son?”

Ike nodded. He surveyed the room. The aerial wire led to a radio set, an ordinary device in a big walnut cabinet, the kind of thing designed for a rich man’s house. Deighton had it mummified in cloths to protect it from dust and wired up to some device with a coil and a crank handle, which he supposed was a generator. There was paper everywhere, sheaves of it on every surface, bulging files stacked against a wall.

“What’s all that?”

“Knowledge.”

“What do you mean, ‘knowledge’? What is it you think you know?”

“I’m its keeper. I’m rescuing it from the dark.”

“You live in the dark, old man. Put that rifle down.”

Deighton lowered his gun. “I’ll kill you if you touch it,” he said plaintively.

Sheriff Grice’s voice boomed into the space.

“What’s going on down there?”

“All fine, Sheriff. I’m just persuading him to come out.”

“I won’t. I’ll die first.”

“Look at yourself. You’re already dead.”

The local kids swapped legends about Methuselah’s cave. Treasure, a maze of tunnels. There wasn’t anything of the kind, just that little room, like a burrow. A rat’s nest of paper. There was every kind of junk down there. Mining tools, spools of copper wire. The old fool had crates stenciled DUPONT EXPLOSIVES: SPECIAL GELATIN shoved under his bed and tin boxes of number-six blasting caps jumbled among the coffee and canned food.

“Eliza had a son,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I mistreated her.”

Ike shrugged. “Kind of late to be saying sorry.”

“But you’re her son. She had a son.”

Ike wondered why he had ever been scared to face an old fool who lived in a cave. That’s all this feller was. Now he’d seen him and it was done. He could climb back up into the world and get on with life.

“I just felt like taking a look at you and I did. They want you to come out. You better do it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ike Prince. Not that you need to know.”

“Ike Prince. Just that? Don’t you have another?”

Ike understood what he meant and it made him angry. He had only the one white name.

“You better come out or they’re going to throw tear gas down in here, force you.”

“Only if you’ll take care of this.” Deighton gestured at his stack of files. “If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to you. My life’s work. I studied the People, Ike Prince. That’s why your mother was there. To study.”

“Are you stupid? I don’t want your old papers. I don’t want anything from you. You know you were tricked? You been down here in a hole all these years. Where you wanted to put my father, down in a hole. But he tricked you. You took his place. He’s alive and you’re dead.”

There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He hurried over to his stack of files. “Please,” he begged. “What I said about your father. Saying his name to those men. I never meant for it to happen. I was jealous. A jealous husband. Please, the knowledge belongs to you. If you don’t take it, it will all go into the dark.”