Freddie Owens - Then Like the Blind Man - Orbie's Story

A whistle jumped through the quiet. It came from in back of me — sharp — like a jungle bird I heard once under the big glass dome at the zoo. “Moses!” I shouted. “That you? Moses!” The trees sucked away the sound of my voice. Thunder tumbled overhead. Why won’t you wait for me? I went back the way I came; back down the ditch, over the stream and up the other side toward the whistle. I walked fast. I walked straight along the hill, till I got back to the giant pine. The huge bottom limb was there just like before, but the path was gone. I looked for the field of finger shaped boulders but saw only the slope of the hill and endless trees.

Trick you boy. Make you crazy.

The whistle sounded again — this time from down the hill. Then it commenced to rain. One drop. Two. Then a bunch. I half walked, half ran down the hill toward where I thought I had heard the whistle. A gray hump of rocks began to rise over the trees, small at first, then big, then bigger than big. My Davy Crockett tee shirt was soaked through with rain. I came to a place steep enough I had to dig my heels in sideways to go down. I picked my way over rocks and little ledges, all the way to the bottom of the hill. The hump went up in front of me, so big now it blocked out half the sky. It seemed to bulge and shrink back behind the sheets of rain, a great breathing creature — a dragon asleep on the ground. And that’s exactly what it looked like. On one side a long tail trailed off into the woods; on the other sat a head, big as a house at the end of a long neck. It even had horns, two dead trees bowing to each other atop the head — the head red with gooseberry bushes. The rain died to a sprinkle, but the sky was still dark, full of flashing lights and thunder.

“Moses!” I yelled.

My voice echoed back. MOSES! Moses! moses!

“Don’t do me this a way! Moses!”

WAY! Way! way! MOSES! Moses! moses!

Again it started to rain. Smoking sheets of it blew from one end of the dragon to the other. I saw a place where the dragon’s belly had given way; a low gap big enough a person might be able to walk through. Thunder boomed overhead. I wanted to run for the gap but I was scared it might be the home of some bear or a lion. Then out of the dark of the gap stepped Moses. “Come boy!” he shouted and went back in.

“Goddamn it, Moses! Wait up!” I ran across the wet rocky ground to the opening, cold rainwater splashing up my legs. Beards of cobweb hung in white shreds from the entranceway ceiling. A log laid split and rotting on the stone floor. I walked in a ways. Dripping sounds echoed in a pitch-black space that loomed to my left, a space I imagined to be huge, though I had no way of judging it. To my right was a wall of moss and sweating rock that seemed to go down along a stone passageway toward a greenish light, glowing dimly in the distance.

“Moses!” I yelled and began to feel along the wall — the dark airy space looming behind me, the greenish light growing little by little as I went — until I came to a green-lit room, a cave-room that was round with a rounded hulled-out ceiling, everything stone solid and sweating with the damp. On the other side of the room two bumpy openings, like portholes, looked out on the rain. Through them I could see white-blue flashes of lightning, hear the sound of thunder.

In the middle of the room in front of a little pool of water sat Moses, smoking a long stemmed corncob pipe. The water was lit green. The smoke from Moses’ pipe was green. “Come boy. Sit you DOWN!”

“Why’d you run off from me?” I said. “I got lost.”

“First go through the world! Then CHANGE come.” His voice reminded me of Mr. Slabodnik’s accordion back home, wheezing up loud, then dragging bottom. “COME BOY! Sit.”

“I ain’t no puppy dog Moses!” I kicked a rock. The rock rolled a little bit in front of me and stopped.

Moses took a puff off his pipe and looked into the pool. He started to sing. It was the same sweet song Willis had sung to the chickens. With Moses though it came out like a cat, yowling on a backyard fence. He stretched his mouth every crazy way.

At the end his mouth was stretched out so crazy I had to laugh. Moses watched me from under his hat and grinned. “YOU! think dis be FUNNY?” The way he said this made me laugh even more. Moses laughed too. “Come boy. Sit you down!” He reached around in back of him and brought up a dingy gray towel. “Dry you off BOY! Keep you warm!”

I wasn’t cold, but I took the towel anyway and wiped myself off. I sat down and looked at the pool, a shiny green pool if you looked at it one way, a clear pool, not deep, with little pebbles on the bottom if you looked at it another. The green smoke was all over the place. It smelled like matches. I could hear rain slapping against the rocks outside the two bumpy portholes. Moses reached down to where I had the knife and tapped it with his fingers. Looking at me, he said, “put it IN BOY!” He motioned toward the pool of water.

“It’s Granny’s knife,” I said. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

“Put it in! See!”

“See what?”

“Go through the world! SEE!”

Going through the world made no sense to me, but I got hold of the knife handle anyway and pulled it out. The blade looked gray in the shadowy cave light, its end still bent from where I’d used it to dig for crawfish. Lightning flashed outside the portholes. It made a shadow-picture of me with the knife and Moses against the opposite wall. There was another sound of thunder. The bottom of the blade started to glow. My hand began to shake.

“Good,” Moses said.

I watched the glow climb up to the top of the blade. Blue neon, like at the swimming hole.

“Good,” Moses said. “NOW! Put it in.”

I looked at the pool of water. It was clear now, not deep at all. I could see the pebbles on the bottom, pink and blue and gray. I put my hand in with the knife just under the surface and let go. The water was ice cold.

The blade fanned this way and that till it reached the stony bottom. The whole thing glowed now, even the handle part. Then it was like the glow streamed out and away from the knife, mixing in with the green glow of the water, turned over and out like a fan or a flower until all the water was glowing, not green anymore but silvery blue. Moses swirled it with a stick. Little pearls of silver light splashed out onto the floor where they stayed a while — like beads of mercury — before slithering back in. “Look!” Moses said and took away the stick. Right away the water went like a mirror.

In it I saw myself — a wet, tired, scrawny boy. I saw Moses too, smoky black eye sockets and no eyebrows under a cowboy hat. Behind us though were things that weren’t there before. Beams ran under the dome ceiling of the cave-room. Dried plants and thick knuckled roots hung from the beams along with rusted lantern bottoms, loops of rope and bunches of chicken claws tied together with string. I looked away from the mirror up at the real ceiling. There were the beams and things just like in the mirror. “Where’d all that come from Moses?” I asked, but got no answer.

More lightning flashed. Again I could see our shadows on the wall. There was something else too, next to the wall, a table and chairs, boxes stacked up next to the table. Flat boxes like the ones Moses used to carry his snakes in, screens over the ends, something bumping, hissing inside. I looked at Moses. He jerked his chin back toward the room. When I looked, the table, the chairs, the boxes, the beams, everything that had been there a second ago was gone.