THE INCUBUS
EVERY DAY THE rains came later and lasted for a shorter period of time.
One morning we saw no rain clouds at all gathering on the western horizon. The sun shone with special brilliance. Through the day only a few small, puffy clouds floated by as though they were lost sailing ships abandoned by the fleet. In the garden, in response to the extra warmth and light, roses of every color bloomed.
Adam proposed that we sleep in the orchard again, under the apple trees, that we weave new mats to sleep on and others for grassy roofs just over the beds. I proposed to gather roses—there was such an abundance of them—to wreath our beds. I think we all longed to situate ourselves in the center of the great openness that spread out around our orchard.
The change in the weather changed Riley’s mood, too; feeling optimistic, he announced he would unbind his ankle. “I’ll still use the crutch,” he said. “At least at first.”
“Don’t waste the bindings,” I instructed, but added whimsically, “You can tie them on the branches of your apple tree for decoration.”
“You all know we could build ourselves something more substantial, dontcha?” Riley said, but neither Adam nor I answered.
Finally I said, “When your ankle is strong enough, we should leave.”
“Why?” Adam asked. His head swiveled quickly to give me a piercing glance.
“I want to find the French horn case. People are waiting for me to deliver it. Help me find it, will you? Both of you.” And I wanted the world to know of Thom’s discovery.
“Do you know what’s in it?” Riley asked of the French horn case.
“Yes. I think so.”
“What?” Adam asked sharply.
“Something about the book of Genesis—an alternate version.”
That night, after we cooked fish and roasted apples out in the open and let the small campfire burn on, not rain but warm breezes blew over us. In our new camp in the orchard, close to the gardens and the plains, I smelled the aroma of distant desert, dry and slightly dusty, but with the scent of roses. Having harvested their blooms, I had inscribed our three pallets with borders of red, white, and yellow.
I dreamed again that I was in an airplane, but this time it was a big one. It was night, and we—a huge planeful of people—were drifting down for a landing. When I glanced back at the rows of seats, I saw the Stimson sisters drinking tomato juice, pouring it from the spout of a small silver teapot, their wedding present when Thom and I had married. On both sides of the plane, out the windows, was New York; a vast number of lights twinkled and glimmered at the bottom of a dark transparent ocean. I knew I would see Thom when I landed, and there was Thom waiting for me behind the security gate. “Igtiyal,” he said, and goosed me in the ribs.
I woke up to the sound of struggle, fighting, with Riley cursing and yelling, “You devil.”
Adam sprang from his pallet and ran toward the struggle, calling to me to bring a light. Without hesitation, I pushed the end of a dry pine stick into the embers, waited a moment for it to flare up, and then hurried toward them.
Holding the light above my head, I saw in its glow a silhouette, a dark blob with three parts moving together and then away to become individuals. Riley rolled away, and Adam held a third something, person? He forced the animal or person—someone small—against the trunk of an apple tree. Reaching up, Adam jerked down one of the streamers from the tree above Riley’s bed. Quickly Riley secured whatever man or beast it was to the trunk. Still the person or baboon kicked his feet, but Adam stood out of reach of his thrashing, and Riley knelt at one side.
When I got closer, my taper illumined dark splotches on Riley’s shirt and dark smears around his mouth. His eyes were wide, terrified and outraged.
“He tried to make me eat something!” Riley exclaimed. “It’s still in his hand.”
Adam continued to kneel beside the boy—for the beast was a boy with a long and shaggy head of hair—who kicked to no avail all the harder. As I approached, and my firebrand brightened the scene, I could see color. Riley’s face was smeared with blood.
Quickly Adam took the light and held it close to the boy’s face. His bowed head was a shock of straight black hair that curtained his features.
“Sit on his legs, Riley,” Adam said, and Riley moved over—careful of his incompletely healed ankle, I noticed. His weight was enough to quiet the struggling legs of the boy, who was small. I thought him about twelve or thirteen. His chest was bare and hairless, but hair straggled from his armpits. Like Adam, he wore no clothing. The boy’s pubis was shockingly dark with hairy growth.
Holding the lighted stick well back, with his other hand, Adam gently gathered the hair from around the boy’s face. Suddenly Adam sprang back.
“I know him.”
I was stunned.
Adam handed the torch to me, and I moved closer as he knelt down beside the boy.
“Hello,” Adam said, carefully and quietly.
The boy glared at him.
“I remember you,” Adam said gently. “You took care of me. When they threw me out of the truck, you fed me.” He stopped and touched Riley’s shoulder. “My friend was trying to take care of you. He was trying to feed you.”
“Not goddamn likely,” Riley said, as I stared at the blood smeared on his face.
“He doesn’t understand us, of course,” Adam said. He held out both his hands in front of the boy. Slowly he opened one of his hands and brought it to his own mouth to mimic eating, then pointed at the boy and then at himself. “You fed me,” he said, pointing again at the boy and then himself, and then making the gesture of eating. “You fed me,” he said again. “Thank you.”
Adam stood up. “Lucy, do we have anything left we could offer him to eat?”
“No,” I answered.
“We have to untie him,” Adam said, “and let him go.”
“What in God’s name was he trying to stuff down my gullet?” Riley asked. He rolled off the boy’s legs.
Slowly the boy flexed his knobby knees. Like a frightened animal, he began to pant. Adam went behind him and untied his hands. The boy jumped up, his chest heaving. With his fists still clenched, he parted his own unruly hair with a finger from each hand and looked first at Riley, defiantly, and then at Adam, sullenly. He only stood as high as their shoulders, about my height. To him, the two men must have looked like giants. One of the boy’s clenched fists was oozing blood.
Adam opened his own hand and pointed to the boy’s hand.
Slowly the boy opened his hand.
“What the devil is that?” Riley said.
At first, I thought the boy held a mouse, skinned, bloody, and raw. When I looked at Adam, I thought he might be about to vomit. He averted his eyes, gagged, then made himself look again.
“It’s the heart of a lamb,” Adam said softly.
The boy started to move away, but he looked back at Adam and moved his head in a gesture that surely meant we, at least Adam, were to follow him. The boy was slight, but his body looked wiry and agile. Though he moved quickly, like a purposeful animal, the boy was not running away. Adam followed closely behind him. I followed slowly, realizing Riley had picked up his crutch and was trying to join us.
The wild boy led us into the garden, past the vegetables and the iris, to the roses, the garden in the heart of the garden. On the ground, a woolly lamb lay on its back. The white woolly arms and legs were stretched out and pegged to the ground with sticks. Its bloody chest, slit open, was an empty cavity.
Adam sank down before the lamb, covered his face with his large hand, and wept.
The boy slid back into the darkness, as though it had been opened for him, and disappeared into its black pocket.
I knelt beside Adam and put my arm across his broad shoulders. He seemed felled by grief.
“It’s all right, Adam,” I said. “We’re all right.”
On the other side, Riley knocked against Adam’s arm with the side of his crutch. “Hey, man,” Riley said, “what kind of damn craziness is this, huh?”
I could feel Adam gathering himself together. Still kneeling, he reached over for a moment and rested his hand on my thigh. I placed my hand on top of his and pressed his hand firmly against my leg.
“How’d you know that—that damn heart come from a lamb?” Riley asked.
“I recognized it.” Adam rose from his knees. “We raised sheep in Idaho.” He put his hand on my shoulder to steady himself. All the way back, he kept his hand on my shoulder, as though I were a trusted crutch, though the weight on me was only that of his hand.
When we returned to the orchard, Adam said that he and Riley would move their mats to sleep next to me.
“You don’t think he’s dangerous, do you?” Riley asked.
“I don’t know,” Adam said. “He saved my life.”
“I guess he was trying to help me, too? Like a bat out of hell, he just swoops down on me trying to stuff a goddamn heart in my mouth.” Riley clutched his throat and spat. “Makes me want to puke.”
Adam said nothing.
In the morning, I heard Riley asking Adam if he thought the boy had any kind of weapon.
“I wouldn’t think so,” Adam answered.
“Then how’d he get the heart out of the lamb?”
“He crushed the breastbone with a large rock. Then he used another rock to drive a broken stick into the chest. Then he pulled the heart out with his fingers.” Adam shifted his gaze from Riley to me. “It was a little lamb. Not even half grown.”
Adam took a strip of orange fabric nearly two feet wide and wrapped it around his waist and hips to make a short sarong. With another strip, he made a belt for himself and tied the handle of Riley’s military knife in a knot of the belt.
We buried the lamb among the yellow rosebushes. Lacking a shovel, we found digging hard work, a matter of finding flat stones to scrape aside the soil.
Because of that grotesque night, we stood within sight of one another on the banks of the river while we fished, and we moved together as a group to gather wood to replenish the fire. “I want a lot of wood,” Adam said. “Enough for a bonfire.”
All the following day we stayed close together and kept an eye out for what I thought of as the feral boy, but no one saw anything of him. It was a sad day, though the powerful sun brightened every gesture and move we made. With not a single cloud to shield us, the unremitting sun almost made me nauseous. All day I hoped to see the French horn case. Yet when I mistook a black, humped rock beside the river for the bell curve of the case, it seemed a malignant thing. I wondered where the boy had taken shelter during the torrential rains. Had he found a cave? Or visited ours? I remembered my dream of someone like him hovering over me.
That night, after we lay down under the still-full moon, a sound came from the distance that made the air shake and creak. The return of thunder, I surmised, or the shudder of a volcano, but soon I realized it was only lions roaring from the grassland. Because the moon was so bright, perhaps the male lions were urging the females to hunt by its light. I had never seen them hunt by any light, or even found a carcass from a kill. Then I heard a new sound from the plain, a persistent, drumming thunder.
“The zebras are running,” Adam said, “hunted by the lions.” As the frenzied drumming grew nearer, he rose and built up the fire, till the flames were almost as tall as he. “Come stand behind the fire,” Adam told us.
“Did you know they would panic?” I asked. “Is that why you wanted lots of firewood?”
“I didn’t know. Something just told me to stock up. To provide.”
“Like your rock pile, huh?” Riley commented.
Before Riley came, Adam would have said God had told him what to do. Now he was less extravagant. There is a grammar of vividness, I thought, a persuasive rhetoric. What we can see or imagine, we can convince ourselves to believe.
With increasing volume, the running of the hooves came closer. The herd was veering toward us. The zebras were crossing the grassland, now through the garden, and now toward the apple orchard. Our wall of darkness was shattered by white stripes on their emerging faces, then the black-and-white necks and running shoulders of the zebras. They wouldn’t plunge through the bonfire, I felt sure, but Adam reached out both arms and drew Riley and me close against him so that we were all squarely behind the protective flames.
The striped flanks of zebras rushed past us on both sides. In their springing and leaping, the black and white moved in a zigzagging design, disorienting and frightening. The undulating pattern confused our eyes, while the thunder of their running baffled our ears. I wondered if the lions, too, would run past. I thought I saw tawny sides of lionesses streaking fast and low past the straight rows of palm trees. Finally only the stragglers of the zebra herd, their sides heaving, were passing the bonfire. I turned around to watch their striped hindquarters disappearing into the darkness, and finally the tassels on the ends of their ropy tails.
“Before tomorrow night we’ll move back to the cave,” Adam said.
Gradually the din of hoofbeats diminished, and Adam laid no more wood on the flames. Gradually, I let go of the tension in my body. When any of the three of us glanced at another, there was a faint smiling in the fire glow. We were survivors. Then, from far away, there was a sound like growling, a faint recapitulation, and I thought of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6, how after the intensity of the storm has passed, the composer lets a few diminuendo growls from the kettledrums precede the return of harmony. When I sat beside Thom in the concert hall, I had imaged a gathering of villagers coming out to make merry when safety replaced the receding storm. Maybe we would hear the sound of piping, even in Mesopotamia, with a village congregating for a country dance. Had Adam said he would fashion a flute? Such a small village were we—only three. Four if I counted the feral boy.
As soon as dawn came, the air filled with birds and insects on the move. First the green parrots burst out of the tops of the palm trees as though the leaves themselves had taken sudden flight. Clusters of monarch butterflies and then their imitators, the viceroys, rose up out of milkweed and joe-pye weed at the edge of the garden, and then the majestic tiger swallowtails lifted themselves from the garden phlox and the modest little gray hairstreaks from the low red clover. Locusts began to whir around, and a flock of crows swooped down to feed on them.
When the three of us visited the garden, we saw that the beds were pockmarked by the curved hooves of the zebras and the cloven hooves of ungulates. The rosebushes were battered to the ground. The flower garden was devastated, and the stems of the tomato and squash plants were also broken and mangled. Occasionally a pomegranate, like a broken jewel box, had been smashed and lay on the ground with its glistening seeds exposed. Cardinals came to peck at them.
I thought of how medieval gardens were often enclosed by wooden fences to protect them from the surrounding animals. Now, since the zebra stampede, I saw the necessity of dividing garden from wilderness, something that previously had seemed unnecessarily exclusive to me. I thought that someday I would like to make a medieval garden, if I moved from New York to some more peaceful place, the South perhaps, or back to Iowa and the Midwest.
The men regarded the ruined garden with less distress than I. There was Adam, newly clothed for the new day, with his short sarong around his waist and thighs, but I knew his body so well, it was as though he still stood open and nude before me. I noted his knife belt and his headband. The orange referenced by way of contrast his black wavy hair. There was Riley, with his lengthening red hair, who had never taken off his camouflage uniform of sage and sand, already moving with his crutch toward the rock shelter.
Would the garden recover? Not during our tenure, I thought.
When we were resettled at the shelter in the cliff, I felt disinclined to go down at all. I left it to Adam and Riley to fish and to gather fallen vegetables, fruit, and nuts, firewood and ferns for our beds. They used squares of parachute fabric to carry home the harvest, like sheets tied for bundling laundry.
After a few days in the cave, still not wanting to go down, I decided to entertain myself by sewing. Because Riley’s foot gave him some trouble, even walking with the crutch, I asked Adam to visit the beach and to bring back the yarn and needles Riley had found in the dash compartment of the Cub.
Sitting on a benchlike slab of rock near the wide mouth of the overhang, I set about stitching up clothes I had envisioned—a full skirt with its drawstring waistband, and a more proper blouse, it, too, with a drawstring neck and full sleeves gathered just above the elbow into soft puffs. The days grew warmer as I sewed, and really the bandeau was a more suitable top, but I wanted to be making something congruent with our changing circumstances.
I think I knew even then that we must prepare to leave our Eden. With the sacrifice of the little lamb and the presence of the feral boy, violence had entered our haven. It was time to go, with or without the sacred codex. At least I had Thom’s flash drive. The boundary between our peaceful paradise and the violent world had turned out to be imaginary. I knew these things, and yet the thought occurred to me that I might teach the boy to talk, to communicate, to express himself, and in that ability—if we only understood each other better—a measure of safety for all might be redeemed.
Often as I glanced out from the overhang at the surrounding forest, I imagined where Adam might be—under what tree, stooping to gather pecans or walnuts, fishing with a line. In my mind I made pictures of paradise to take with me when we left. Sometimes I merely stared at the beautiful world, unenhanced by any artifice save the vague boundaries implied by the periphery of my vision; I memorized the vast, wild landscape all the way to the straight-line horizon of ocean stretching across the gap between hills. I rarely imagined that the two men were together, but sometimes because of the heat I imagined the three of us, naked, refreshing ourselves by splashing in the stream. At odd, startling moments, sharp as a sudden thorn, involuntary memory presented the splayed lamb and its bloody, vacant chest. I thought of Rembrandt’s painting of a splayed ox, and I thought of Adam’s desire to draw and paint. I hoped he would find other subjects for art.
One night around the dinner campfire, Adam told us he had met the feral boy in the woods. “He watches us,” Adam said. “He noticed Riley’s knife and how I use it to peel sugarcane. He came to me and put his hand on the knife. He wanted me to give it to him.”
“I hope you didn’t,” Riley remarked as he glanced to see if the knife still hung from Adam’s sash.
“No. But I showed him how to chip away at a likely piece of stone. How to flake the chert with another rock.”
“He’ll make a stone knife,” Riley said.
“I expect so.”
Before they left the overhang the next day, Adam tried to give the knife back to Riley, but he refused. “It’s better off in your hands,” Riley said as though Adam were his revered older brother. With a quick grin, Riley added, “I’m going to rob a beehive today. I’ll take one of your pottery jars, if you don’t mind, to collect honey.”
Neither of the men urged me to come down with them.
I was surprised when sunset had pinked the sky, and neither Riley nor Adam had returned. I didn’t mind because I had only the hemming of the skirt left to finish to complete my outfit. I had decided on a balloon hem for the skirt, to echo the puffs of the sleeves. A regular hem with its definite edge would be too stark. It made me smile to think I would somewhat resemble a pumpkin—probably the vegetable look was not haute couture this year in Paris. Nor the color orange. It seems strange now, looking back, that an interest in the aesthetics of clothing began in the wilderness for me, a woman who had always been rather indifferent to fashion.
It had been a sweltering day, even in the shade of the overhang. I could almost taste the sweetness of the honey Riley intended to bring home, and I lined up halves of pecans and walnuts on a stone for later honey-dipping. Little pieces of candy, they’d be. I set the stone closer to the fire to warm and returned to my sewing, enjoying the slick feel of the needle in my fingers. If only we had chocolate to add to nutmeats and honey—
Suddenly I realized I couldn’t see well. I brought the fabric up closer to my eyes and then glanced into the distance. Only the last blush of sunset hung in the sky. A wave of worry washed over me, and I set aside my sewing. I built up the fire to be a welcoming beacon and moved the heavy stone with its array of nutmeats closer to the fire. On one of the shallow clay bowls Adam had fashioned, I arranged a pyramid of various fruits.
Finally, after I put on my new outfit, there was nothing else to do. I sat still and studied the darkening landscape before me—how the loss of light shaded the vastness and melded the varieties of trees and spaces. Eventually I began to eat the warmed nuts and selected a yellow-green pear to bite into; I let myself idly wish for a good Stilton cheese as a complement. I thought of Thom, how on the airplane flying to Amsterdam we had been surprised when the flight attendant served Stilton and pears in a basket and a small carafe of sauvignon blanc. I saw Thom’s face again, his springy graying curls, his thick glasses. His restless leg syndrome had set in, and he had been shifting uncomfortably in his seat until the little picnic basket of cheese, fruit, and wine was presented. Such a large man, and, I realized, he had just been beginning to put on weight.
How difficult would it be to make cheese?
Probably Adam had some idea about how to do it. Odd, how he never suggested projects for other people, though he had an endless supply of ideas for himself. I enjoyed thinking of the perfection of Adam’s body and of Riley’s freckled grin. The more he stayed in the sun, the more freckled Riley became. And boyish, too. This so-called Eden was a place where we could revert to something we hadn’t finished being.
In high school, with Janet Stimson, I had sewn a lot, though Janet was the better seamstress. I remembered a plaid jumper I’d made with six gores—in rich fall browns and golds, a touch of red stripe—with suspenders. I had sewn the whole thing together on my grandmother’s ancient treadle sewing machine before I showed it to Janet, who then pointed out, or rather asked, why I hadn’t matched the plaids. My homemade jumper was all higgledy-piggledy. Still the colors were nice, and I sometimes wore it. Autumn leaves, I had thought; fall is a jumble of color, not lined up in neat stacks and rows.
There was Adam.
In one hand, he carried a pair of neatly folded men’s trousers, and he was wearing a shirt, unbuttoned like a jacket with the tail hanging loosely over his short orange sarong. It was Riley’s shirt, and when Adam came nearer, I read the label above the pocket: “F. Riley.” As Adam came to me he held out his arms, his face a mask of misery. Automatically, I rose and walked into his arms. With one hand he held my cheek against his bare chest. The pad of folded trousers pressed like a flat cushion against my back, against the burn scar.
“Lucy,” he said. I heard him swallow. “Lucy, I had to bury Riley today.”
“My God,” I said. I swayed and would have fallen but Adam supported me, led me to sit down. “What do you mean?” I was engulfed with horror. It couldn’t be true. This moment wasn’t real. I had never imagined this.
“The boy killed him,” Adam said.
“Why! Why would he?”
Adam shrugged and shook his head. “The boy must have dropped down, out of an acacia tree. He must have waited till Riley hobbled along under the tree, and then dropped down like a panther onto his shoulders.”
“But Riley was strong. The boy was just a boy.”
“His weight would have taken Riley down—his weak ankle—and … And I think he cut Riley’s throat before they hit the ground.”
“I want to see Riley.”
“I buried him. That wasn’t all the boy did. He … he defaced him.” Adam began to weep. “And … and he cut out—”
“Stop,” I cried out. “Stop.”
My God! I thought of the Aztec sacrifices.
Adam took his arm away from me, covered his eyes with both hands, and sobbed into the folded trousers. As he gasped and wept, he said he shouldn’t have let Riley go alone. He said he shouldn’t have shown the boy how to make a knife. He asked what did it mean to save Riley, if he hadn’t been able to save him, finally. Incoherently, he said these things many times, that Riley was like his younger brother Fred. That Fred had saved him once … that Riley was innocent. That the war, the war, the war, the war—and here he began to slide into incoherence. Finally he stood up and said that we must leave.
“The cliff?”
“The whole garden. Everything here. We have to leave.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We’ll go in the morning.” I thought about the French horn case, but I said nothing.
Nothing—certainly no message hidden in a bottle—was worth staying here. The peace was broken. It was violence, murder—igtiyal—not knowledge, that blighted Eden. The Bible story was rotten at the core, truly wrong on that score. Knowledge, creativity, were two keys to salvation; killing was the hermaphroditic mother and father of all sins. I pictured the slender savage boy dropping down, a chipped stone blade in his teeth, onto freckle-faced Riley’s shoulders and back—Cain slaying his brother Abel.
“I’ll give it to you now,” Adam said, but I couldn’t think what he might mean. Riley’s heart?
Adam turned to the pile of stones. He picked up one and hurled it as hard as he could into the trees below. We heard it strike among the leaves and fall. Because Riley is murdered, I thought, he wants to stone the world. It was dark, and he was exhausted, but one after another, Adam hard-hurled rocks. They thunked and bounced and crashed with distinctive impacts into leaves and grass, against boulders and tree trunks. With a degree of awe, I watched Adam’s fluid power in the cocking and release of his body as he hurled stones from his arsenal till the pile was diminished, and I saw what they had concealed. He heaved a sigh and turned toward me. There was the hard black case of what might have housed a French horn.
Panting, he sighed again.
“You hid it,” I said slowly. I made my voice explanatory, not accusing. “Because you didn’t want me to leave.”
With averted eyes, Adam slightly nodded.
“I understand.”
When he raised his eyes, I saw shame, sorrow, repentance, trust—and hope. That sweet sincere mingling of trust and hope—where had I seen it before? In the tawny eyes of Pierre Saad, when, seated in the whitewashed room, he had lifted his eyes from the Bible, read the opening verses of Genesis, looked at me, and asked for my help.
And so, now, because Adam repented of his theft, I was to have another chance to deliver the sacred texts. I was to have another chance to salvage failure. I would be able to bring back something valuable to Pierre Saad, should Adam and I find a path back to the world.
“Come sit by the fire,” I said, in a voice that seemed unreal. “You’ve had nothing to eat. I ate up all the nuts, but we have fruit, many kinds of fruit you can eat.”
Like a child, he did as he was told. I handed him the earthy clay bowl he had made filled with the medley of fruit—apples, pears, bananas, oranges, quince, pomegranate. We were both very tired.
“Why is there no blood on Riley’s shirt?” I suddenly asked. “What about the trousers?”
“Riley had taken off his clothes before the attack. The trousers were folded, just as they are now.” Adam’s sentences moved by fits and starts. “He had hung the shirt on a thornbush. He was wearing only his underwear.”
For a long time the words hung in the rock room.
“Why?” I finally asked.
“Maybe he wanted to wash his clothes.”
Was I thinking or speaking? Lull, lull, lullaby. It was a place for lulling that I wanted to create. For myself. For Adam. How to relieve his anguish? Could peace be fashioned like a bowl from river mud?
Put your head in my lap, Adam. Cry. Sob. Curse. Try to rest. You’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. Riley’s gone. We’ll leave here. We’ll leave here in the morning.
Before he slept, Adam asked me if I did not want to open the French horn case. I explained it was not only locked but sealed, the better to protect its contents. I thought of the ancient words cradled within. Words describing how it all began, Pierre Saad had said, how people came into being on Earth.
That night I dreamed I was walking among the redwoods when the wild boy dropped down on my shoulder. His hair was flaming, and he blazed like a cherubim, his mouth full of dagger teeth. I woke up and stifled my scream with my own hand.
Before our flight from Eden the next day, we put on clothing. I dressed in my new skirt and blouse, and Adam wore Riley’s shirt and pants. All day we walked: past the ruined garden, beyond the magnolias and redwoods, and over the grassy plains into the rough wilderness. Riley’s pants were a little short on Adam and left his white ankles exposed.
Before we passed the boundaries, we encountered the feral boy once more. He leaped from above, as he had done to Riley, as in my prophetic dream. All his weight and force hit my chest, and I fell backward and down. His member was erect, he gripped a chipped stone blade in his hand, and he was wild with passion. He straddled me and tried to enter me in the single desperate moment he had before Adam pulled him away. He succeeded only in tearing open the seam where the sleeve joined the bodice of my new orange blouse.
Adam took the stone knife from the boy and tossed it aside; he placed the boy on his feet and shoved him roughly away from us. Adam did not try to hurt the boy; he just shoved him, each time farther and farther away. I sat on the ground, legs spread, tears streaking my cheeks, my face set in appalled and furious defiance. I bared my teeth, ready to bite.
The boy would not be shoved away. He snapped his jaws and pointed at me and at himself. With contorted face, he strained to speak but only made strangled noises, none of which were necessary to express what was evident: that he believed I should belong to him.
Because the boy fought to come back after each rough shove, Adam began to strike his shoulders and arms with his fists. Each time Adam hit the boy a more forceful blow—sometimes a slap across the face, sometimes a kick on the backside, finally a hard blow to the side of his belly.
The boy retreated a little, but he found his stone knife and returned. The gray knife resembled a dirty icicle. With complete coolness, Adam easily leaped away from the boy’s frantic assaults and made no attempt to wield his own steel knife. Tears of frustration dashed from the boy’s eyes, and when he could not land any slash or stab, he began to spit at Adam. To stop him, Adam caught the boy’s wrist, wrenched the knife from his hand, and threw the knife on the ground behind himself. Then Adam slapped first one cheek, then the other, very hard. The boy cried out, and tears gushed from his eyes. Suddenly, he turned and ran.
Still sitting on the ground, I watched the boy cross a field of large rocks, picking his way around the big ones and leaping over the smaller ones when he could. Without speaking, Adam picked up the primitive knife from the ground, stowed it behind Riley’s khaki belt, and then held out his hand to me. His face was chiseled and set hard as stone.
For a long time, we walked quickly and silently toward the boundary. The terrain became rocky and barren, the soil a packed and baked red clay. Occasionally a single large red rock stood up like a jagged tooth or flame. Though tinged everywhere with red, the place seemed a moonscape, a wasteland of broken rock, gravel, and soil dry as powder—sometimes gray, sometimes a grainy red. Finally I saw in the distance two smooth gray boulders, rising over the jumble of red sandstone like granite shoulders. “The Gates,” Adam said. Beyond them a few clusters of pampas grass waved in a slight breeze, and beyond that we saw scrubby specimens of Russian olive and just the shaggy tops of tall royal palms. Perhaps there was a ravine or a river out there. Just before we passed between the boulders, we looked back.
Behind us, the boy was standing on a red-streaked rock, his naked, hairy body erect and yelling, trying to speak.
“I don’t know what he’s trying to say,” Adam said sadly.
The boy’s face contorted; the shaking of his skinny chest, his clenched hands, bespoke his snarling fury.
I knew what he was saying. He was saying that he would make another knife.