Slow Sculpture (24 page)

From belly-down, Hal bounced up on all fours, maybe ready to go after Pam. Not to get her, not to save her, just to be where she was. He was immediately surrounded by Fatty, arms, legs, hands, feet. Tommy was a little slower but much more effective. He pulled them both back from the edge. He was crying. Fatty was crying too, but what else? Tommy crying the way he did, it was awful.

We got the crate into Cap Sidney. I don’t know how. I do know how. It was Fatty. Well, it was really Miss Morin. Here’s what I mean. That Miss Morin, she knew us all, and what she cared the most about was that whatever was weakest in each of us would have a prop under it when the load got big. The only one it didn’t work on was Flip, well hell, little kids, they forget. Hal told us what her private word was to him. She told him “Hold out for the biggest reward—the one you’ll live with.” Fatty explained that to him all the way. Fatty told him going after Pam, now or later, wasn’t anything he could live with. He didn’t know what he wanted to live with after Pam went, but Miss Morin said to live with something—to live.

It was Fatty, too, who said to Tommy that Miss Morin wanted that crate to get to Cap Sidney. He only had to be told that once.

It worked, and seeing it work made it all come crashing through to Fatty. What Miss Morin had said to Fatty was, “When it all comes apart, you put it together.” Seeing it work changed Fatty from a kid to a girl. She was only twelve. Later on it would change her to a woman.

It took eight days to get down the mountain and across the river and to Cap Sidney, and it took eight hours for the Preceptor to convince
us that what was in the crate was nothing—nothing but triangular insulating boards for a geodesic dome, and they had plenty of them already and could get the rest from the boat now they knew it was there. We were pretty mad at first. It almost came all apart again, we were so mad. And then Fatty put it together again for us. She said the one thing that made all the difference to us, because you got to remember who we were, the overflow, the can’t-fit, the unwanted.

She said, “How many times would we have fell apart without that crate to carry? How far would we have got without we stuck by it and taken care of each other? The treasure she promised us if we got it through was just what she said it was—the greatest treasure known to man—to be alive. The treasure wasn’t in the box, it was bringin’ the box.” Then she said it, Fatty did, she said what made the big difference to all of us forever and ever afterward; she said:

“That Miss Morin, she loved us. She really and truly loved us.”

Boyle … jumped. He did it. He really and truly did it.

They say that when the end comes, no matter how swiftly, there’s time enough for your whole life to pass before your eyes. That’s not strictly true; it would take a real lifetime to do that, but there is time enough for a hell of a lot. However, Boyle discovered, as others had before him, that you get a lot of pictures, all out of order—yes, and sounds, too, voices speaking a word or two, laughing, a shout that reaches you at last from years away and means what the shouter meant instead of what you’ve always thought it meant. In such a moment everything makes sense. Some of the images and noises are apparently trivial: Aunt Edith saying “Please pass the salt” and how Hank always used to have one sock up and one down while they were little kids, and things like that.

Then there are the replays of things you know aren’t trivial and never were, like the time you had to go to Scranton and Kay said suddenly “Don’t go. Please don’t go,” and you knew damn well she was going to sleep with somebody that night and wanted you out of the way and yet she said that, and you—you went to Scranton anyway. And Kreiger saying, “Boyle, you know you’d be happier in some other line,” which meant Out, never mind those years and all that sweat and loyalty and the pipedreams of the big desk with the opaline letters on a chock facing the door.

He jumped.

He jumped, and sure there was terror, there always is when you’re falling, there often is when it’s dark. And sure there was regret, and if-only-I-had-it-all-to-do-over-again. He had expected, and he got, a couple of brand new ideas to cure it all. Just walk up to him and say … just show her once and for all that he … take a loan on … a lot of stuff like that; and under and around it all, a deep glee: I
made it. Boyle did not fail. I said I would do it and I did. That ought to prove something to the whole sonabitchin bunch of them.

That’s about as far as he got before something in the dark took his foot and turned him. The wind was different as it whirled past his face and he found himself looking incredulously past his feet at the stars, with the great bulk of the cliff face blotting out a third of the sky. Then the lights (ten thousand lights in the valley below over his head, a million lights in the sky under his feet) were eclipsed by ten million more inside his head as he got a shower of cruel thumps and a hundred long numb scrapes that would be agony if he lived long enough for the shock to wear off, but he wouldn’t.

And the lights went out.

“Don’t go. Please don’t go.” The voice was soft and quite clear and close. He opened his eyes and could see the silhouette of her head as she bent close. He could even feel the stirring of the hairs over his temple stir to her breath. He blinked once and it wasn’t her head or anyone’s head, it was the bulk of the mountain against the sky. For a foolish flash he thought he might still be in midair, falling, but a single twitch of his cheek told him he was not. Falling through the unresisting air you do not feel pebbles and dirt ground into your flayed check. He shook his head to clear it and his whole body moved, slid. It was only a few inches, but it was enough to pack dirt and rubble into his collar and send a shocking stab of pain from somewhere low on his right leg right up through his body. Or maybe it was down. Up was still down for him. Cautiously he looked over his head and saw lights … stars? No, for they were in rows and patterns. They were the same as the lights on the valley floor. They were the lights of the valley floor.

He was lying on a spur of the mountain, on his back and head down, and the ground under him was tilted like a pitched roof. He looked quickly past his feet and there were the stars—and again he slid an inch or two. He suddenly and appallingly realized that if he twitched like that once or twice more, if he slid just far enough, fast enough so he did not stop, he was going to go right over that ragged edge down there.

Slowly and very carefully he studied out where his hands were. One was on the ground at his side, the other across his stomach. He raised this one and put it to the ground too. The left hand could find only loose pebbles and earth which slipped up (down) past him hopping and hissing when he moved his fingers, and bounded away into black space somewhere past his head. Not very far either. The right hand rested on what seemed like a more solid piece of rock. Carefully, not daring to turn his head to look, knowing it was too dark to see anyway, he explored it with his fingertips.

There was an edge there … more—it was a crack an inch wide. He could not discover how long it was nor how deep. He curled his fingers into it and it felt wonderful. He stopped moving for a time and indulged himself in the joy of feeling it. He had known this feeling once before when he had bought his first new car. This is mine, this belongs to me. He let his fingertips creep in and slide out again, very much the way he had let his proud hands stray over the new-smelling upholstery and dashboard. How wonderful to own a crack in a rock.

He tried to hook his heels into something and edge himself uphill a bit, but there was nothing but loose dirt and pebbles up there and an explosion of pain from his right leg. And his whole body told him it was about to slip again toward that edge, down (up) there past his head.

He got his right fingers as deep as they would go into the crack, and stopped to think. The fear began then, and it wouldn’t let him think. It rose and flooded over him and left him weak, with puddles of it here and there over his whole soul like tidal pools. He knew there would be other waves of it, too. Fear numbs your brain, fear can weaken, can paralyze your fingers, can draw them out of that precious crack in the rocks which is the only possession left to you in the head-down, lumpy, sliding universe.

He bit his teeth together until they hurt. It was a pain different from the other pains which vised and racked and skewered him, because it was a pain he did himself and could shut off himself. That may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t. When a helpless man finds he
can do anything—anything at all—he isn’t helpless any more, even if the thing he does is useless. It was a strange thing he began to do. He began clenching and unclenching his jaw, and he found it was like a pump, emptying him of fear. He knew he could never get it all down to the last drop, but he didn’t need that; he just wanted to get rid of enough of it so he could think again.

Slowly he brought his left hand across his body and as far as he could toward the right. The one hand found the other and the straining fingertips explored the ground next to it. The crack was full of dry dirt, and he dug clumsily to remove it. The effort increased the pressure of his whole body to slide, and the rock under his right hand began to press back. He realized suddenly that the right hand would tire, would simply wear out and quit, if that pressure grew much larger or lasted too long. He sank his left fingers in the crack as deep as they would go. He had to rotate his body slightly for this, and all his plans to move slowly and carefully evaporated in another great wash of terror as his body started to slide. He half sat up and whipped over to get his hands side by side into the crack. His body slid around the two hands as a pivot point and all around him, loose rocks moved in a small cascade, rustling and whispering and ending in a terrible silence just downslope from him as they leaped out into black space. When at last all movement ended he was lying belly-down, with both hands deep in the crack, and he couldn’t see anything any more. But at least his head was upslope, and that seemed to do something for him.

He wheezed for breath and spit out dirt. He lay there panting until it hurt a little less to breathe, and he was immediately sorry for that, because the relative relaxation made him able to inventory other sensations. The one which rose over all others like a shout above a murmur was his right leg. He could feel nothing with it but a great constant blare of agony. Something very awful had happened to that leg.

His other one seemed all right. He shifted it a little. He could feel the knee grinding into the mountain, and the shin, but nothing below that. He waggled his foot. He felt nothing with it, and then realized with dreadful clarity that his two feet were projecting over the edge of the precipice.

The realization brought another great towering surf of fear.

He used what he had learned about that: when terror comes you dig in and hold hard and let it roar past and slither back. Don’t drown, don’t let go. In a second or a minute or perhaps in an age or so, fear will subside. Even if it leaves pieces of itself through and through you, you will, sooner or later, get to where you can think again.

He resettled the grip of his two hands and pulled. His body slid painfully a fraction of an inch and he heard the beginnings of that whispering rustle as pebbles and dirt began to slide all around him. Well slide if you want to, he told them madly, I’m not going to. He went the other way—he went up. Not much, not quickly, and certainly, not easily.

When he drew his feet up over the edge, he was penalized bitterly—and richly rewarded. The pain in his right leg, when the foot touched the slope and turned, was far past anything he had ever known in all his life, and he cowered down under it and begged it not to make him faint and loosen his grip. But the left toe, seeking like some blind animal, found a little purchase and sent help like a regiment of cavalry in a cowboy-and-Indian picture ta-taaa! and helped his crackling fingers to move him uphill.

It was one of the most glorious moments he had ever known when he drew himself up so his lips were even with his hands. Driven by some impulse he could never have explained, he laughed a short hoarse laugh and put his tongue into the crack of the rocks between his hands. Then he lay there quietly, half-dozing, half-smiling, until it was time to move again.

Now the pulling was a pushing, as he pressed the crack down his body, past his chest, past his stomach. When his hands were fully extended downward he rested again, and then began to draw his left leg. He didn’t dare raise himself to his knees yet, and had to bring the leg out and sidewise until his hip-joint all but whimpered for him to stop, but he would not.

Most grudgingly the left leg began to take the burden, and the more it straightened out the more able it became. He slid upward.
He dared to reach forward and found a few shreds of grass—no help in themselves but their roots were a tight hummock. He felt it shift when he pulled, so he took it very easy. He got both hands on it and let his left foot say a heartfelt thank-you and good-bye to the crack in the rock, and drew it upward again.

The slope was a little less here and he found it possible to draw his knee straight upward instead of to the side as before—a luxury, an elegance, to be able to do that. His right leg was molten torture. He gritted his teeth against that; he said to himself, now I’ve just got to switch that off. You do not, of course, switch off the pain of a broken leg. You act as if you could, as if you had. Then somehow you can keep moving.

The slope now was still easier. He stopped to look up. This must have been about where he struck and slid after he jumped. He could not see very well—there was only starlight and the dimmest possible glow from the valley lights—but the cliff above him rose up impossibly sheer, and the nearby level spur on which he lay was not very wide—perhaps fifteen or twenty feet.

He crawled up to the base of the cliff and turned gingerly over, lifting his broken leg with both hands, and let himself down with his back to the rock.