John Gardner - October Light

Looking around her bedroom now, the only light still on for miles, she had a sudden sense of how it must have been for him that final night, drinking in his kitchen, the Flynn girl married to another man, his Uncle Horace dead, Richard utterly alone in the only lighted room (or so it must have seemed) on the mountain. And now, abruptly, she saw in her mind’s eye James’ twelve gauge shotgun aimed at her door, and her heart, for a moment, beat more fiercely. “You’ll pay for this, James,” she said aloud. “All of it.”

She closed her eyes to see if she was sleepy, felt fear shoot through her, a sensation like falling. Though she’d lost all faith in it, she decided again on her novel.

9

CHAINS

The east was pink.

It was only as Mr. Nit turned the crank that he realized he had perhaps made a slight miscalculation. He had wired the eels to the starter box, not to some solid metal bulkhead. It was too late now: the stage was set; the thump had come, his cue. The wooden paddle banged the eels on the nose and with a terrible hiss the charge went up the wire, burning it away like a lightning-fast fuse, and into the angle of starter wires — they went up like tissue-paper Chinese fireworks, though only the Indian was in the engine room to see it, standing in bilgewater nearly to his knees, so that if he saw it he never got to think about it. Mr. Nit scrambled down from his wooden stool quickly and ran to the engine room to see what his work had done. The Indian was floating, head down. There was nothing left in the starter box but melted plastic and ashes. On some odd impulse, an inclination toward neatness, he pulled the Indian up out of the water and draped him over the engine frame, then started up the ladder and met Peter Wagner coming down, face white as snow.

“Did we get them?” he said at the same time Peter Wagner said, “Where’s the Indian?” They started over, and again both spoke at once, like clowns in some old-as-the-dinosaurs routine, so Peter Wagner jumped past him and looked through the engine room door. “He’s dead all right,” he said, a sort of croak. He would come to see later that he’d judged too quickly, they’d all judged too quickly; but

Sally Abbott widened her eyes in disbelief, and read the lines again:

“He’s dead all right,” he said, a sort of croak. He would come to see later that he’d judged too quickly, they’d all judged too quickly; but he believed it for the moment and started back away from the door, then stopped. He had seen the remains of the starter box. His whole face twitched. Mr. Nit, on the chance that Peter Wagner had gone mad, clambered through the hatch.

In the Captain’s cabin the black called Dancer was motionless on his knees, like a Muslim praying. His toes pointed inward, his heels outward, his arms were flung out, and the right side of his face lay flat on the floor, one earring glittering. Santisillia sat where he’d fallen, in the Captain’s chair, the machine gun on the floor beside him. His eyes were open, just slits.

“Whooey!” Mr. Nit said excitedly. He squatted down and gingerly picked the still burning cigarette from between Dancer’s fingers.

Captain Fist stood over Santisillia, watching him as men of experience watch dead snakes. “Get ’em out of here,” Captain Fist said hoarsely. “Throw ’em overboard, and then get those engines running.”

Mr. Nit paid no attention, marveling at his work, walking slowly around and around it, so the old man waved at Jane and Mr. Goodman, sitting as if in suspended animation on the bunk.

“You hear me?” Captain Fist bellowed.

“Let them be,” Peter Wagner said, leaning on the doorframe. “It’s impossible to get the engines running. The wires are burned out.”

Captain Fist twisted up his horrible face to look at Peter Wagner. “Then we’re ruined?” he said.

“There’s still the Militant,” Peter Wagner said.

Captain Fist nodded, stroking his chin, then smiled, showing his tooth-cracks. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. He beckoned Mr. Goodman and Jane. They stared through him. He bent down, waved his hands in front of their faces. “What’s the matter with you people?” he said. He glanced at Peter Wagner, full of holy indignation. “What’s the matter with these people?”

Peter Wagner sighed. He was limp, drained of feeling.

The Captain’s fingers began clawing the air and he felt around him for his cane. It lay on the floor. He saw it at last and stooped for it. Then he felt better. “Stupidity,” he said. “Stupid sentimentality. It was us or them.”

“They know that,” Peter Wagner said.

“But they don’t accept it. Hah!” He was so outraged his voice became a hiss. “They defy nature. They deny reality. It’s stupidity! I won’t have it!” He raised his cane as if to hit them.

Peter Wagner shrugged. He wanted to sit down, but the chair was occupied and he was very tired, too tired to cross to the bunk. “They’re unhappy,” he said. “They don’t want to live. Why should they?”

The Captain was angrier than ever, red as a volcano-top. “They should try to be more philosophical. Did I make the world? Did I create injustice? Did I ask these people to come steal my ship and get their fat black asses electrified?” He raised one arm and shook his finger, like a preacher. “‘For we are here as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarums of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.’ Matthew Arnold. You see? I know about these things.” He spit as he spoke, and Peter Wagner wiped his hand across his cheek indifferently. “Now let’s get out of here,” Captain Fist said. “The sooner we’re rid of these dead people the better.” He snatched up Santisillia’s machine gun and pushed past Peter Wagner and out onto the bridge. “To the Militant!” he said, and pointed, like Washington in the boat, but hunched over. He limped to the rail, climbed over it, and dropped awkwardly to the Militant’s deck. He landed loud as a box of bolts, and swore. Mr. Nit followed. “What about my eels?” he said. Fist ignored him. “Dusky,” Fist called. “Come on out! I know you’re here! You haven’t got a chance!”

No answer.

Peter Wagner strained to take some action, but it was as if his mind had lost contact with his muscles. I’m sorry, he thought, too tired to speak. He had meant to be no one’s enemy. But that was the structure of the universe: waves, particles in random collision, Platonists and Bergsonians, alphas and omegas. The lesson of what’s-his-name’s guppies. “All life is struggle,” someone had told him so many suicides ago that it seemed by now some earlier incarnation. He had not fully understood it at the time; even in his misery he’d taken the mildly optimistic view. But he knew now about Time and Space; understood now the hideous implications of the fact that matter is motion, and God just an atom with a question. Stasis is nothingness; refuse an atom the time to establish its atomic rhythm, its molecule, and the universe would vanish, click, like that. But on the other hand all motion is pain, the ball striking out at the violent bat, and all rhythmical motion is tedium. (There were certain women to whom he had made certain promises, not in so many words; there were certain bills he had allowed to mount up, and certain violent mechanisms …) At the Captain’s party, Jane had put her hand very gently on his leg. He’d been stoned. So was she. Two brute mechanisms, yes yes, yes.

He was startled awake by a clicking sound, and when he looked around the cabin in alarm he discovered he was snapping his fingers. Jane sat as before, hugging herself, staring. Mr. Goodman, beside her, had his hands up, covering his face. The dead — or rather what he thought were the dead — were as before. And then the engine of the Militant started up.