The Bleeding Man (5 page)

As self-sufficient
as he prided himself on being, he could not quell the feelings that come to a lonely man, to a
man who looks in the mirror one morning, realiz­ing somewhere deep inside that he doesn't want to
grow old alone.

In his heart,
watching her move along the edge of the spring, he felt the meaning of the word freedom slipping
away. He felt things stirring within him he had long since thought dead, buried. His pride had
cut him off from family, from settling down, but now he felt a stealing tide of emotion slipping
over his being, and in that instant, he knew he was lost.

He rose slowly and
approached an old man who had not entered the water. He was the leader, an old man with one eye
gone, a thick strip of lizard hide wrapped around his head, covering the old wound.

"Do you speak
English?" asked Gantry.

The old man,
watching the young ones at their play, did not turn to look at him. He grunted once,
affir­matively.

Gantry stared at
the young girl. She was unmarried. The married Riyall woman wore a leather strip dyed blue around
one ankle. Her ankles were bare. Gantry figured her to be somewhere around sixteen or seven­teen.
He kept his eyes on her, the words he knew he would speak damming up in his throat in a tumbled
stream.

The old man turned
to look at Gantry, fixing him with his expressionless Riyall stare.

And in that
moment, as he turned to look at the old man, turned and looked, he was almost able to stop
himself. He remembered the times he had sworn to the buyers who came to buy his stefel harvest,
sworn to them that he'd never touch a Riyall woman. Call it racial prejudice, or simply racial
fear, he'd sworn he'd never degrade himself with a Riyall woman. He'd always told himself the
colony company would get white women moved in some day, always told himself he could wait until
then. He was about to make a liar out of himself.

Five years he'd
waited, five years while the colony company had promised women were coming. They were a long time
coming and there were a lot of men, men like Droble who lived fifty miles from Gantry,

Droble with two
Riyall women, who couldn't wait.

"I want her," said
Gantry, the words finally coming out.

"She—daughter—oldest—of mine," said the old man, in broken English.

"How much?" asked
Gantry, committed to it now.

Not knowing the
word, the old one pointed at Gan­try's chest. "Bkaksi!" said the old man, and he turned his head
and motioned at the girl. She came up to his side and he said several words to her in his own
lan­guage. She took the news calmly, standing silently by the old man, gazing at Gantry with that
dead, expres­sionless Riyall look on her face.

Gantry did not
understand.

"How much?"
repeated Gantry, and he tried to in­dicate by gestures that he wanted her.

The old man nodded
and touched his own chest. He fingered his snowfur lizard shirt and pointed at Gan­try's
chest.

"That," said the
old man, and he made smoothing motions along his shoulders and arms.

"The shirt?" asked
Gantry, fingering the heavy work shirt. He made a gesture as if taking it off and offering it to
him.

The old man nodded
and pushed her toward him. She walked toward him and stood beside him, turning to face her
father.

Gantry pulled the
shirt off over his head and handed it over. The old man took it, folded it several times, laid it
upon the ground, arranging it carefully, and then sat down on it. He then turned away from them,
the matter dismissed from his mind.

Gantry stood there
for a little while, the enormity of what he had just done finally sinking in. He turned to look
at the young Riyall girl beside him. She did not seem upset or nervous. It seemed to be of little
im­portance to her, taking the fact of her having to go with him as a matter over which she had
no control.

Gantry turned and
began walking away, the Riyall girl moving along behind him, following five paces behind as was
customary in her culture. The walk back to the cabin seemed to last an eternity to Gantry, who
seemed to be in a kind of shock, filled with an irrational fear. He had no idea what to expect
from her. No idea then, but he soon found out.

She was more than
he had ever expected. At first, he told himself, it was sex that had prompted him to buy her,
that he was not lonely, but even that lie fell away. He was lonely, and she filled that void. She
wasn't human. He could never quite think of her that way, never get involved with her, he told
himself, but there were times when the difference seemed small, insignificant.

Although she
seemed to show no emotions of her own, she was quick to perceive his. She seemed in some strange
way related to the stefel dogs, having that kind of sensitivity, a turning outward with little
directed at herself. She seemed to accept things pas­sively—her personality suited to fit him and
not her. She seemed to honor him and respect him in ways he himself could not quite understand.
Her body seemed to exist to please him, her hands so soft and yielding in his, at times playful,
coy almost when she sensed he needed some kind of resistance, when she sensed he needed something
to oppose him.

But she had a will
of her own in matters that did not directly affect him. He had discovered with a kind of shock
that the trade, that the ceremony of giving a shirt for her was as binding as any marriage
ceremony on any of the planets. And one day, why he never knew, after six months of their being
together, after six months of sharing the same bed, he loaded her in the all-terrain vehicle and
took her the 420 kilometers to the nearest hospital, and there, he had her placed in surgery, so
that she might have his children. What drove him to that, he could never quite say. It was not
something he was sure he wanted for himself. In fact, the idea filled him with a kind of quiet
terror. As if a child would be proof of his crime, a crime that was no crime on Kingane, but an
act that still disturbed his spirit, that troubled his sleep as she lay beside him.

In a way, he
supposed, in some sort of meaningfully twisted way, he was doing it for her, as if he was
ful­filling some sort of obligation to her.

He remembered how
she had touched him as the doctors wheeled her away to surgery and he had been reminded of a dog
that one sends to a vet to have put to sleep. In that blank stare of hers, so guileless, so
direct, he saw the pet dog, unsuspecting, trusting per­fectly in your love even up until that
moment when the needle breaks the skin and the long sleep begins.

In spite of his
toughness he found tears in his eyes. The wrongness of his actions sat very heavily upon him, and
deep inside, trapped within as deeply as he was trapped without, he knew he had as much power to
stop it as he had to stop the clouds overhead.

The trip back to
the cabin was a silent one, an un­easy trip, with Gantry sitting as far away from her as
possible. He knew she was in pain, but he could not bring himself to touch her, to offer her any
comfort. He was not so sure, now that she was fertile, now that he had made it possible for them
to have children, if he did not hate her. He had long since stopped thinking of her as a
possession. At times, it seemed as if he belonged to her.

Things went on as
before, his life a flow of conflict­ing feelings, a flow of emotions he could no longer control.
It seemed to him, like the stefel dogs that he fed, that he could never really own her. Her
alienness was always between them. Her customs were strange, her manner unlike that of his race.
And she was guided by this alien quality, this traditional way so unlike his own, to live in a
way he could not hope to touch or change. There were certain things between them. She would not
eat at the table, eating instead on the floor, after the manner of her people. Then too, like a
raccoon on earth, she washed every morsel of food she ate. There was something very animal, very
alien about her as she swished a slice of bread in a saucer of water before eating it. He had
beaten her for that once, but it made him uncomfortable to see her sitting across the table from
him, not eating, staring in the Riyallian way. In a way, it was how she expressed her anger, if
indeed she ever experienced it. He sensed her displeasure and once, when he had been particularly
cruel, he thought he heard a trilling sound, a throaty vocalization like the death rattle of the
stefel dogs. He thought perhaps it was her way of crying. But he could never be sure.

And they had a
child, a boy.

Often when the
pebble storms of winter kept him inside, he sat before the heating unit watching the boy-child
crawling across the floor. She sat motionlessly on the other side of the room like some
ill-conceived statue, lost in streams of thought he could never touch, moving with memories he
never could share.

He talked her
tongue so poorly, he could not make her understand, and she spoke no English, seemingly would not
allow herself to learn it. There were times, holding his young son, staring into the child's
eyes, blue and single-pupiled like his own, when he wanted to talk to her, to tell her the things
and dreams within him. It was never to be.

The days passed
silently for them while all around them, like silt deposited by a flooding stream, the
im­migrants to the planet continued to come. Women, children, entire families moving to Kingane,
now safely settled by those who went before them. And as the years rolled by, towns were born,
and with them came the civilization that had brought them. Gantry noticed it gradually, the weeks
when the trail beyond the end of his land became full of travelers, whereas before he rarely saw
more than one or two people a month. One day he stood on the hill behind his cabin and he could
see houses going up, maybe two or three miles away, and it was then that he knew a moment of
unease, of dread. His own people had caught up with him.

A week later,
finding himself dissatisfied, unac­countably restless, he took her into the new town that had
sprung up almost overnight just ten miles from his cabin. In a way, his taking her there was a
part of the blindness that had grown around him. He'd been with her so long, got so familiar and
comfortable around her in their quietly spent years together, it had faded from his mind that she
was an alien, that she might not be welcome.

He'd dressed her
in a bright dress, purchased from the harvest buyers who stopped three times a year to buy his
harvest of stefel tissue. But he had forgotten her customs, as unchangeable as the blue-green sky
above. When they walked across the sidewalks, she fol­lowed him, moving behind him at her
customary five paces. And in the eyes of those he met, in the eyes of those townspeople, he knew
how she would look to them. He felt an anger rising in him. He heard com­ments from the people on
the street, nothing direct, nothing he heard quite clearly, but he knew what they were saying
about him, knew what they were thinking about her.

She saw the
darkness in his eyes when he turned to look at her, and without a word she turned and walked back
to their landcar and got in to wait for him. She took it as she took all things, silently,
matter-of-factly. But there was no way she could change who she was. He followed her and got into
the landcar, driving away from the town, looking neither to the left nor right but aware that
people had moved out of buildings to look at her, to look at them, and it burned into him with a
bitterness and a loss that he knew would never stop. And he was never to take her into town
again.

He knew then how
it would be. When the stefel buyers decided they could no longer afford to visit each stefel
rancher individually, when the buyers decided to open up an office in town where the ranchers
could bring in their harvest, he knew his life, his aloneness, was lost to him.

At harvest time,
when he took his tank, now fitted with wheels, into town to sell his crop of tissue, he could
sense the barrier between himself and the others of his kind. As he waited in the outer offices,
waiting until his wagon was weighed and unloaded, the others sat apart from him as if he was a
man of their race who was somehow not of their race. And the way women of his own kind passed
their eyes over him as if he were something unclean filled him with a chill that seized him by
the heart.

One day he met
Droble at the weighing office, Droble who had two Riyall women. And as Gantry sat there, he
listened to the talk around him. The men were talk­ing about the changes around them, about the
men who had pioneered this land. The pioneers were send­ing their Riyall women back into the wild
lands from which they had come, sending away their half-breed children, sending them back to
their own kind; at least, the ones with any brains were, was what the men said. Droble turned
pale as he heard their conversa­tion, the idle chatter of men who had come to this world long
after others had made it soft and easy for them. Droble stood up and stalked out of the office
with a kind of hurtful violence. Droble still had his two Riyall women. Droble was the kind of
man who needed people, a loner who still must be a part of society. Later, as Gantry was picking
up his check for his crop, a man ran into the office shouting that Droble had just blown his head
off in the middle of the street. The men in the office all dashed out to see it for them­selves.
Gantry felt all the weight, the hopelessness of his mistakes come crashing down on him. It might
have been him out there on the street instead of Droble.