Naked native women
Harry, I aint never even see’d no colonel, much less n talk to one, Jed said, and I reckon I jest as soon not, if’n you don’t mind.” Ma, Jed thought, you busy?” Chews on them, you mean. Say . . . No, no, damn it, said Tom with irritation. You dont understand. It works at random. It can writeanything. That’s the trouble—most of its output is useless to me. It has done a completeJulius Caesar, for example—and thirty of the Sonnets. It has produced several letters of application for the job of school-bus driver in Wyandotte, Ohio, in 1933. It has made dozens of dirty limericks, and has actually invented a new vice by describing it in a story. It has written the diary of a sixteen-year-old moron named Artie Messer for the year 1967. The truth, then, is that the satellite fading here is Phobos, that those footprints are your own, that there is no sea here, that you have crashed and are killed and will in a moment be dead. The cold hand ready to squeeze and still your heart is not anoxia at even fear, it is death. Now, if there is something more important than this, now is the time for it to show itself. Suddenly I thought of the woman with the baby in the park. If Frenchy couldnt help the Leader, perhaps hed go. Perhaps they'd lead a better life. Around Leonora the guests were congratulating her on the performance. She was looking up at her portrait as it began to break up over the lake, seeing it for the first time. The veins held the blood in her face. The questions, whatever their sinister undertones (had he detected them, Mangon would have been deeply shocked) were purely rhetorical, and all their conversations for that matter entirely one-sided. For Mangon was a mute. From the age of three, when his mother had savagely punched him in the throat to stop him crying, he had been stone dumb, his vocal cords irreparably damaged. In all their endless exchanges of midnight confidences, Mangon had contributed not a single spoken word. I said,No, again, and then I happened to think of a newspaper picture Id seen and qualified my answer by saying that I had once seen a blurred picture of my mother in an old newspaper. The paper, I believe, was wrapped around some dill pickles in the garage, but I’m not absolutely sure about that. The sick man numbly watches this toy destroy itself: what will they think of next?—and with a gelid horror prays at the doll lying in the raging rubble of the atomic pile: dont stay there, man—get away! get away! that’s hot, you know? But it seems like a night and a day and half another night before the doll staggers to its feet and, clumsy in its pressure-suit, runs away up the valleyside, climbs a sand-topped outcrop, slips, falls, lies under a slow cascade of cold ancient sand until, but for an arm and the helmet, it is buried. Amity shook her head twice, three times, as if trying to clear jumbled thoughts.But why didnt Kamiko tell us then what she’d done? She must have realized Prudence Egan could have been the assailant, the danger in continuing to keep silent. Nodding, Penrose said,Oh, thats right. I’m missing a day. All of a sudden I wanted to get out of the house in the evening, and do something else for a change. Vera was astonished-wanted to know what was the matter with me, which is typical of a woman. If you dont react precisely the same way day after day after endless day, they think something must be wrong with you. They’ll even insist on it. I didn’t want any black-cherry ice cream for desert, I told Vera one night at dinner. Why not, she wanted to know- which is idiotic if you stop to think about it. I didn’t want any because I didn’t want any, that’s all! But being a woman she had to have a reason; so I said, Because I don’t like it. Sounds carried far in the delta, particularly on days such as this one; even before he reached the ferry landing he could hear, strangely enough, loud music rolling out over the swampland from Kennetts Crossing — a rusty-piped calliope playing an off-key rendition of The Girl I Left Behind Me..
