Bear and His Daughter (6 page)

Mackay saw the unnatural brightness of his eyes and the starvation gauntness of his bony face. It was frightening to imagine what kind of life had to be endured behind such eyes. They were without order or justice or reason. For a moment, the two men stood motionless on the platform, facing each other. Mackay listened to the older man’s shrill dreamlike laughter.

“You are an English queer,” the man said to Mackay and attacked him.

When Mackay raised his fists the man slipped easily around his guard. Like an inexperienced fighter Mackay had raised his chin contentiously. The man punched him in the throat and for a moment he could not draw breath. He stepped back in confusion, then quickly decided he was unhurt. The man came at him again.

Grappling hand to hand, Mackay realized with horror his opponent’s strength. His first impression of the older man’s age and fragility had been mistaken altogether As they wrestled, he heard the local train approaching in the tunnel behind him. It was the train for which he had been waiting. Mackay felt himself sliding toward the edge of the platform. Braced against an advertising poster, the gray-haired man was kicking at his legs, trying to hook and trip him. Mackay fought for his life.

As the local pulled into the station, the man tried to shove Mackay against it. When the doors opened, people hurried past them, getting on the train or off it. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the old woman he had thought to protect. She was inside the train now, watching through the window with a disapproving frown. Then he had to turn his head away to keep the madman’s fingers out of his eyes.

Aware of the unheeding crowd, Mackay felt bound all the deeper in his dreaming state. In one of his recurring dreams, he would always find himself alone in a crowd, a foreign unregarded presence, the representative of Otherness. At the height of the nightmare some guilty secret or possession of his would be exposed to the crowd and draw their pitiless alien laughter.

The local gathered speed and pulled away. Mackay began to feel his strength ebbing, subverted by guilt, by weakness, by fear and indecision and lack of confidence. Somewhere in the darkness the next express was on its way. With his back to the tracks, Mackay held on.

They fell together to the filthy platform and rolled over, struggling in the half-light. The platform was deserted now. Distant voices echoed in tiled corridors. Mackay’s assailant struggled to his feet and began to kick him. Mackay tried to dodge away; he was caught and kicked. Unable to escape, he dove at the man’s legs and brought him down.

Again they rolled across the platform. Mackay took hold of the other man’s hair and tried to ram his head against a steel pillar. The man butted him, breaking teeth, bloodying his mouth. Struggling to his feet, Mackay turned to run, but feeling the man’s grip, turned to face him. He knew that was better than turning his back. The tunnel rang with the screech and roar of another train, bearing down on the express track.

Mackay took hold of his assailant’s jacket and tried to bind him in the cloth. The man broke free and got an arm around Mackay’s neck. The man’s body had an evil smell. Driven by terror, Mackay somehow broke the hold and they were face to face again and literally hand to hand. The lunatic was pushing forward. He seized Mackay’s arms at the biceps, trying to gather strength for the shove that would impel him off the platform.

Freeing his right arm, Mackay landed a lucky punch that brought his knuckles hard against the older man’s collarbone. The man raised both hands to protect his throat. Explosively, an empty darkened train roared out of the tunnel and along the express track, passing through the station without stopping.

With his arms free, Mackay hurled punch after punch in panic and desperation. He heard, or thought that he heard, bone crack and felt the contours of his opponent’s face yield to his fists. Sensing indecision in the older man’s movements, he was driven to a blind fury, swinging hard and wild until his arms hung useless at his sides. Many hours later; when both his hands seemed to have swollen to the size of outfielders’ gloves, he would discover that he had sustained multiple fractures in both hands.

Pale-faced and vacant-eyed, the strange German sat down on the platform and shouted. It took Mackay several seconds to realize that the man was shouting for help.

“Help!” the man called at the top of his voice. “Help me someone please!”

Mackay leaned against a signboard, breathing with difficulty. He was so tired that he was afraid of losing consciousness. His vision seemed peculiar; it was as if he saw the dim empty station around him in spasms of perception, framed in separated fragments of time. The disconnectedness of things, he saw, was fundamental. Years later, photographing a civil war in Nigeria, he would find the scenes of combat strangely familiar. The mode of perception discovered in the course of his absurd subway battle would serve him well. He would go where the wars and mobs were, photographing bad history in fragmented time. He had the eye.

At his feet, a bleeding man sat shouting for help. Mackay moved panting toward the subway stairs. There was blood on his hands. When he reached the foot of the stairs, he saw for the first time that the stairway was crowded with people and that many of the people were shouting as well. At first he could make no sense of it.

Then it came to him that the people on the stairs had come down and seen him beating a well-dressed older man. Mackay was wearing his navy peacoat, which was too warm for the weather and his painting clothes. It was March 1965, and his hair hung down halfway to his shoulders. He had grown a beard from the first of the year. The people had been afraid to come down to the platform.

“Police!” someone shouted. “Call the police!”

Mackay remembered the mounted policeman bearing down on him in the park years before. His impulse was toward flight. He imagined a summoned policeman coming down the stairs. He imagined his own panic-stricken flight to the dead end of the platform. He saw himself shot down.

Burning with fear and outrage, Mackay hurled himself up the stairway and shoved his way, bloody-handed, through the crowd. The people nearest him snarled in terror as he passed.

“Police!” someone else shouted. Mackay shook off a hand on his arm. Someone punched him from behind. The crowd seemed monstrous, like the mob in a Brueghel crucifixion. A driven creature, with fists and elbows, he cut his way up to the light.

Headlong into the intersection Mackay ran. Cars swerved and skidded to a halt around him. Scattering pensioners and pigeons in Verdi Square, he kept on, faster and faster; increasing speed with every block. For neither the first nor the last time then, he wondered just how far he would run and where it was that he thought to go.

La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha,
Ya no puede caminar
Porque no tiene, porque le falta
Marijuana par’ fumar.

—A song of the revolution

T
HE WORDS
came on the wind, an old woman’s voice.

“
Ayeee! Es-cor-pee-o-nays!
”

He was lying in a smelly hammock under the concrete veranda with a thermos jug of Coke and alcohol balanced on his bare belly; when he understood the words he raised his head and pushed back the brim of his baseball cap.

“
Escorpiónes!
”

His children were running through the dry brush between his house and the beach. In the fiery sunlight their speeding forms were brown blurs topped with the flax of sun-bleached hair He saw at once that they had not been bitten.

Doña Laura, the landlady, was calling to them from the roof of her house, where she had been hanging out black and white washing, warning them of the dangers of the brush. Doña Laura lived in fear of scorpions. She had lived among scorpions all her life and never been stung. Twice an hour she warned Richard and Jane away from them.

“No, no, no, no,” Doña Laura shouted. “
Escorpiónes!
”

He could picture the word in her mouth, shaped on the dry lips, shrilled from strained corded muscles in a brown throat.

Escorpiónes.

The day was clear and the mountains at all points of the bay glowed bright green, but far out to sea dark low clouds approached, discoloring the surface of the distant ocean. Before long there would be heat lightning and rain. He took a drink from the thermos, closed his eyes and shuddered. Swallowing made the sweat on his chest run cold.

His children shouted, safe on the dry white sand.

The changing color of the sea made him uneasy. In the past months he had developed an odd passion for constancy; he liked things to stay as they were. When it was light he did not want it to grow dark, in spite of the beauty of the ocean sunset, and when it was dark he did not care for dawn to come and reveal his existence and position. But the time of year for constancy had passed and he was learning to live with the rains.

As he watched the clouds darken the reefs beyond the bay, a blue shape rose furiously from the clear unclouded shallows and slapped over the surface like a flung slate toward the darker waters. He could see the winged shadow it cast.

He sat up, straddling the hammock, and squinted after it.

“Marge,” he called out.

After a moment his wife came out and stood beside him. She had pinned her light hair back behind her ears; the strands of hair on her neck were wet with perspiration. The white bikini she had made from a sheet was pasted to the curves of her body. There was tortilla dough on her hands.

“There’s a manta off Guardia rock.”

It seemed to take her a moment to understand. She turned slowly toward the bay with a faint polite smile and leaned forward over the patio wall, resting her elbows on the tile.

He watched her while she watched the water: she was alert from the shoulders forward; the rest of her body was lazily distributed in a balanced sprawl as though she had tossed it behind her. He had taken to observing her dynamics since she had caught the plague, in the course of which disorder her belly had become swollen and her long limbs wasted and spare. She and both of the children had suffered from the same disease—it was a variety of the local dysentery—and in its grip Marge and Jane and Richard had each commenced to dwindle away. Upon recovery, their flesh returned, and he had watched his wife regain the natural opulence of her body with dispassionate satisfaction. It was a visual diversion.

“Sure as shit,” Marge said.

She had seen the creature rise.

Fletch considered Marge’s response with distaste. It was a drag the way everyone had come to talk like a cowboy. Everyone called each other “hoss” and chuckled “haw haw,” country style. Goldang. It was Fencer’s influence. Fencer was a cowboy number.

“Fencer saw a manta ray while he was out swimming,” Marge said. “He was out by the rocks when he saw this big mother coming at him about twenty yards away. Started swimming for it with the wingspread bearing down on him. He says it was like the manta was trying to embrace him. A love trip, you know? Like this big slime thing was consumed with affection for Fencer and wanted to wrap him up and take him home. Fencer had his air gun. He says that would have been sad to have gut shot the thing and watch its poor fish face wrinkle up all disillusioned and die.”

“Fencer can’t possibly swim faster than a ray,” Fletch told her.

“What would it do if it caught you?” Marge asked. “Flap you to death? Butt you? Eat you?”

“We’ll find out when one catches Fencer;” Fletch said.

“Hey now, where are they?” She meant the children. She had caught their voices and cocked an ear to the wind.

“They’re on the beach. Doña Laura’s watching them.”

The bay had gone dark; the clouds came overhead, heavy with rain. Heat lightning flashed out to sea. On the north headland, Fletch could see the villa where Sinister Pancho Pillow lived etched in the sky’s sickly light; the hillside against which it stood had turned dark green.

Fletch became unhappy. He reached under the hammock, took his makings from a cedar box and began to roll a joint. Marge sat down beside him and for a few minutes they turned on and watched the storm gather. Marge drummed on her thighs, leaving a film of flour on the tanned skin.

“Fencer’s coming, you know,” Marge said.

Fletch extinguished the joint and lay sidewise on the hammock with his head beside the swell of Marge’s hip.

“Why?”

Marge looked down at him, blank-eyed.

“Well, to take you up to the volcano. You said you wanted to see it. He wants to take you.”

“I never said I wanted to see the volcano. I mean, I can see it from here.” The volcano was behind them, rising from the sierra. Fletch did not turn toward it.

“Fencer asked you just the other day. You said you wanted to go very much.”

“No such conversation took place,” Fletch told her.

The rain seemed to hang back. They sat in silence watching the clouds until they heard a car turn off the coast road. Fletch waited motionless until Fencer’s ‘49 Buick rolled up before the house.

Fencer was in the front seat beside Willie Wings; he was smiling happily at them, dangling one bare arm along the dusty surface of the car door. Fencer’s Buick was painted with thick blue and gold loops like the stylized waves of a Hokusai seascape.