AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You stay right here and watch your mother. I’ll be right back,” she said. “That’s my son, Ishmael. You have to watch him for me. Can you do that?”
He looked at her, uncertain. He started to speak, then stopped, as though he couldn’t remember what he should say. His face started to crumble. “Is she going to die?”
Ruby bent over, eye-level with him. “No, we’re not going to let that happen. Don’t be afraid. Never be afraid and never be sad. Not for any reason. That’s how we win. We never give up and we’re never sad.”
“I heard the doctor tell the nurse she might die. He was talking about moving her body. Why would the doctor say that if she’s going to be all right?”
Ruby hugged the boy’s head against her stomach, then worked her way to the rear of the building and out the back door, where she discovered what had happened to the water supply. The water line to the neighborhood had been cut in the train accident, and because the clinic had a cistern, everyone in the neighborhood had come to draw water from it. The only light in the backyard came from a metal barrel filled with burning scrap wood. A long line of people with buckets and tin cans and glass jars was strung from the faucet through the dirt yard into the alley, the firelight and shadows dancing on their faces.
She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris wheel and children raised their hands joyfully to a hot-air balloon that rained down candy on their heads.
She bought a syrup can for a dime from an old man and waited her turn at the spigot. Between the buildings, she saw the headlights of two black four-door motorcars going up the street and circling back. The cars were too big, the paint too shiny and new, for the neighborhood. One of the cars had a bell with a clapper attached to
the driver’s door, the kind of bell police vehicles carried.
Five minutes later, she filled the syrup can and went back into the building. She almost collided with the little boy who thought his mother might die. “The doctor gave her some medicine,” he said. “They’re moving her to a bed.” He reached out to take the syrup can from her hands.
“How’s my son?” she asked.
The boy’s face went blank. “They took him away. They must have found him a bed.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Two men. They picked him up from the floor and carried him out.”
“Out where?”
“I don’t know. They said everything was all right. I told them I was supposed to watch him. They said I did a good job. They work here, don’t they?”
He caught the syrup can before it could hit the ground.
IN ISHMAEL’S DREAM, he revisited a scene that had less to do with war than with the aberrations it produced, images that were literally unimaginable because they had no precedent and their probability was nil and a witness had no way of possessing the empirical information or scientific knowledge that would allow him to understand what his eyes told him.
Ishmael had heard of experiments with phosphorous artillery shells but had never seen one fired. A rumor spread that the Brits on their flank were throwing a new type of grenade into Fritz’s wire, with devastating effect. But what could be worse than a flamethrower or mustard gas or a direct hit on a field hospital by Big Bertha, a mortar that could blow a barn-size hole in the earth?
He saw an event that proved to him once and for all man’s limitless ingenuity in manufacturing weaponry that canceled the laws of physics and created situations for which no one, particularly the victim, could have prepared himself.
The Germans had attacked before dawn, dressed in their green-gray uniforms that blended with the fog and the ruined landscape, wearing their bucket helmets and goggled gas masks, like space aliens, the wands on their flamethrowers flaring alight in two-second bursts.
The Brits began heaving grenades in their midst, throwing them like baseballs. The explosions took on the shape of giant furry spiders, the legs white and puffy and broken, thick as a man’s thigh in one moment, spindly in the next, arching up and trailing down, all in an incandescent second.
Ishmael expected the screams to follow, as they always did when they were trapped inside a burning tank or when flames roared from the gun slits in a concrete pillbox. That wasn’t what happened. The Germans who survived the initial explosion dropped their rifles and kept moving toward the British wire, their uniforms rent with pockets of the most intense, purest white light Ishmael had ever seen. The Germans made no sound, as though the trauma were of such magnitude that the human voice could not do it justice. The phosphorous burned its way through their bodies, punching holes that seemed to open on to infinity. And still no sound came from their throats. Only after someone began spraying them with a Lewis did they crumple and disappear inside the ground fog.
Later, Ishmael always referred to them as “the light bearers,” and not in an ironic or cynical fashion. He saw them in his dreams with regularity and had come to think of them as friends who had seen the reality of war and knew the limits of human endurance, with whom he would never have to argue about the insanity of the modern era.
As he lay on the floor of the clinic, he felt someone lifting him to his feet and placing a blanket over his shoulders. His eyes were leaden, his head on his chest, but he was sure he was once again in the hands of friends, and they would take him to a safe place where he would never have to worry about anything.
HACKBERRY AND HIS fellow deputy, Darl Pickins, could not find Ruby or Ishmael anywhere in San Antonio. Maggie Bassett’s house was dark and locked and the motorcar gone. The clerk at Ruby’s hotel said she had put her key in the box earlier in the evening, and he had not seen her since. Hackberry left a note.
“There’s one other place,” Darl said. “Across the river. A shantytown. The clinic there is sort of a dumping ground.”
“For what?”
“Whatever the county won’t treat.” Darl put a piece of gum in his mouth and chewed while he drove and gazed out the side window at a cervecería hung with lights, the girls leaning against the wall outside, smoking cigarillos. One of the front tires slammed down hard in a rocky hole.
“I’m not in a good mood, Darl.”
“They handle just about anything except dogs with rabies. Most of the wets go there. The hookers go there because the county would report them to the state health department, and they wouldn’t be able to work. Can I ask you a question, Mr. Holland?”
