Turning Back the Sun(38)

These days the town”s anger and helplessness were palpable in the humid streets. Men shouldered their way to work as if the community”s survival depended on it. Police and passing soldiers were routinely harangued. And the mood infected both the vigorous and the passive, depending on their fear.

From a long way away, as he returned from his rounds, Rayner glimpsed the elegant head of Felicie approaching along the mall. He expected her to flutter a hand at him and pass on, but instead her fists landed on his chest in a childish tattoo, and she drove him into a shop entrance. How could he have done that to Ivar, she demanded? Didn”t he owe loyalty? Or else what was the point of old friends? With the town in the state it was, why couldn”t he cooperate? He must take pleasure in sabotage, she concluded. He must want them all to go under. Otherwise, why?

Rayner said, “The man had been murdered.”

“Ivar said he hadn”t,” Felicie panted. “And Ivar should know. Don”t you trust him?” “Not always.”

Her fists resumed their infantile thudding. “You”re his oldest friend!”

Rayner took her wrists and held her irritably away. “It doesn”t matter if I signed that death notice or not. The army would falsify it anyway.”

“Then why didn”t you do it?” Her head shook on its neck like a flower. “You”re just stubborn.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why?”

He pointed whimsically to his maimed foot. “Because I can”t run away.”

But Felicie refused to smile. She half screamed, “Don”t expect any loyalty from him!”

“I don”t.” But Rayner wondered if Ivar were planning some reprisal.

“Because he has every right to grind you into the earth!”

“He hasn”t any right to do anything. He just asked me to lie about a man”s death.”

Felicie was close to tears. Her bouffant hair sagged like sodden corn. “It”s all right for you. You get paid by the state. But we”re trying to run a business in this place, and everything was fine until now, just fine … until …”—her springing tears made her furious—”until these savages had to start this killing…. And you condone it. If this goes on the club will shut down. And what would happen to your precious Zo? then?”

But Felicie wasn”t looking into Zo?”s future, Rayner knew: she was looking into her own, and she saw nothing. He said curtly, “Zo?”s clever enough to get a job anywhere. She might start a new career.” Yet he could not imagine Zo? without her dancing. Her natural expression would be lost. So she was in the power of these people. “Are things really so bad?”

Felicie crumpled. “It”s empty half the evening, Zo? must have told you. People come in early and leave their guns against the walls like it was an armory, and go away by nine.” She shuddered. “The farmers only make it worse. They don”t even buy drinks, they just sit.”

She looked so abject, Rayner said, “It will come right again.” He glanced at the suffocating sky. “With the October rains.”

But as he went home, their conversation lingered uncomfortably with him. He wandered in the garden, breathing the faint, perpetual stench of bush fires, and at last came and sat beside the two natives. They were leaning forward a little, side by side, with their heartbreaking look of perplexity, saying nothing. They had perhaps been sitting like that all afternoon. The girl shot Rayner her confusing smile, then went indoors. The old man said, “Nothing changed, eh?”

“You”ll be well enough to go before anything changes.”

“I feel better than a long time now.”

They sat silent for a minute in the stifling shade of the trees. Then Rayner asked, “The people here say the armed bands upriver are fifty or sixty strong now. You think that”s true? What are they planning?”

“Maybe is true. Those fellows join together if they get scared. But those aren”t my people and I don”t know. That”s hard territory up there, water holes all empty in a bad year. That country dry out people in the head, and then they go killing.”

“Could they attack the town?”

“Those big groups not for fighting, I reckon. There”s too many older fellows with them. Those bands just running scared. It”s the lone ones do the killing.” He lifted his finger. “Some of those blokes upriver gone bad singly, maybe, but they only kill a few folks.”

“They”ve killed eleven.”

The old man considered this in silence. His screwed-up eyes and forehead had retracted into a charred immobility. All his life seemed concentrated in the fleshy mouth, which moved in its beard like an independent oracle. “Eleven not so many. Whitefellers”ll come back and get those farms again.”

“The farms will be the same,” Rayner said. “But you can”t bring the dead people back.”

“People change,” the old man said. “In twenty, forty years people all dead anyway, and lying in separate graves. Me too.” He laughed. “My life done now.”

Rayner revolted against his words, but could find nothing to say. As he stared into the native”s cinder-colored face, this acceptance of death no longer seemed the superstition which the whites claimed, but the knowledge of a people coeval with all this violent, ancient land—a people to whom death was only the flow of time and of the clan. That, perhaps, accounted for their stasis, their sometime indifference to killing. It made Rayner feel na?ve. He could not share in it. He could only share the townspeople”s outrage.