She had to repeat herself three times before they could hear her: “Well, all right then, why don’t you just run and get ‘old Ernest’!”
The youngest one sat up, suddenly. There on the ground. He looked at her. She was serious. Why the hell shouldn’t I be serious? Selena thought, interpreting his look in an instant. The young one looked over at the old one. The old one nodded with a barely perceptible movement of his head. The young one leaped to his feet and, cackling uproariously, dashed off through the town and was gone in an instant. Selena stood beside the Packard, tapping her foot. Every few seconds, the middle-aged one, now back in his chair on the porch, beside the old man, would chuckle deep in his throat, and build it till he was roaring with laughter. Fuck you! thought Selena.
…Ah, He is a special God. He loves his gears and his pumps, his springs and his transistors, his printed circuits and his boilers. He is not a jealous God, like some, but he is an attentive God. He tends to business, and keeps his world of machines functioning. But every now and then, every once in a while, every few centuries in a mind that is Machine and not Man, the Machine God finds one He can care about more than the others. A special machine, or a special man, and they become the beloved of the Machine God. Saint Joan had the power of moving masses of men to religious fervor. Ahmad, who was Mohammed, was able to die of his own volition when he was presented with the keys of eternal life on earth, and those of Paradise. Gandhi saw the sheep being led to the slaughter and worship of Kali, and rejected her tenets, turning to the wisdom of the Gautama Buddha, drawing unto himself the powers of peace. Christ was able to heal the lepers, to walk on water. Samson brought down the temple, and David slew Goliath, and Jonah lived in the belly of the whale. And for the Machine God, the beloved child was…
Loping down the street, the gum-chewing fool leaped high in the air, like a lovesick schoolboy who has grabbed his first thigh in the schoolyard at recess. He came tumbling, gibbering, capering, laughing up to the station, and pointed back in the direction he had come. He broke up completely, slumping down against the porch-post. The other two men laughed with him. Selena looked in the direction their laughter was fleeing.
He was perhaps six feet tall, incredibly thin, with arms that might have been figs. 87 & 88 in a medical text on rickets. He was the compleat Ichabod Crane. His hands hung six inches below the cuffs of his no-color jacket, his knobbed ankles were exposed between the tattered legs of his pants and his highly-polished cordovan shoes. He moved in a long, disjointed manner, more like some whisper-articulated insect, a mantis or a spider, than a man. His hair was lank and as colorless as his clothing: the color of sand, the color of bricks, the color of rain, the color of teak, but none of these: all of them, with the highlights leached out. Mudpie hair. His face was all angles and planes, eyes big and a little vacant. Mouth as wide as a dog’s. He stumbled and stepped, a coordinated spastic, a colt learning its legs.
Selena stared at the apparition, and realized what the joke was. Ernest was the joke. His totality…his look, his manner, his walk, his presence…was a joke. The three men on the porch had extended the scope of their sport. They had brought her a halfwit to repair the car. The viciousness of it did not escape her.
Ernest came to her, and stopped.
She looked up into his eyes.
He was by no means a halfwit.
There was something living behind those eyes, and from silt-deep in her memory came a quote from Gerald Kersh that fit precisely:…there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.
He stared at her, and she was beautiful. More beautiful than she had ever been before. For the first time in her life, Selena was uncomplicated. Light bathed her. She felt her flow and her pulse. The boy stared at her. He was no more than sixteen years old, possibly seventeen, but he saw her as she was, reduced to her essentials.
“Can you fix my car?”
He did not reply.
“There’s something wrong with it. Can you repair it?”
Shyly, he nodded yes. And the three fools fell down laughing at him.
Then, oh so strange…
Ernest started at the rear of the Packard. His long, delicate, pale fingers barely touched the metal. They grazed the green rusted hide of the ailing creature, and traced four thin lines from the rear fender forward, as he walked to the front of the machine. The light touch of someone getting to know someone. He stood in front of the car for a minute (while the fools roared and beat each other on the back), head cocked to one side, the hair hanging down over his right eye; listening. Then he touched the grille.
When Selena had angrily opened the hood for the gum chewer, it had sprung up just as angrily on its counterbalanced springs, clanging fully open and quivering.
The grille opened smoothly now. Smoothly, slowly, as though exposing its interior to the gentle ministrations of a physician with the power of mist and cool.
Then Ernest laid his hands on the engine.
He touched it.
He touched it all over.
He pressed it. Sensuously. Charmingly.
As they watched, his hands caressed the engine.
Lightly.
He leaned in, and listened to the machine silently.
He talked to the machine. Silently.
Then he reached far up under the engine, where there was only darkness, and he moved his fingers delicately.
Selena watched, amazed. It was lunacy, of course, but the way he moved, the sureness and coordination in his hands. It was the joy of watching a good shoemaker at his last, the pleasure of watching a skilled cabinetmaker rabbet-joining two perfectly planed surfaces, the exquisite wonder of a sculptor forming grandeur from base rock; he talked to the machine.
After a while, he brought his hands back up into sight, and they held a twisted twig of metal, brightly-smeared down one side where its surface had been scored and abraded.
“Fell down into the engine,” he said.
His voice was a small child’s voice; the voice of a boy not yet a man, who seldom spoke.
“Can you repair it?” Selena demanded…gently.
He nodded.
The three fools were giggling now, holding their sides from the pain. Ernest went past them into the gas station. In a moment he came out with a plain black wire coat hanger. He took a pair of wire snips from a heavily laden workbench just inside the door of the garage and snipped off a straight piece nine inches long. He laid the wire snips where he had found them, returned the useless coat hanger to the station, and came back to the car.
He took the nine-inch piece of coat hanger in his left hand, and with his right he began to bend it.
He should not have been able to bend it so intricately, over such a short span, but Selena watched with growing wonder as he did precisely that. The final shape was something unlike a helix, and something unlike a moebius, and something unlike a buttonhook. It was something else.
Then he reached down, back into nowhere, where he had been, and he did things inside the engine. When his hands emerged, the metal had been left inside. There was no grease on his hands, and none on his jacket.
“Well?” Selena demanded. Gently.
Ernest nodded toward the car, and she knew he wanted her to start it up. She got in, turned the key, and listened to the instant surge of thrumming power that coursed through the Packard. It sounded strong, potent, impressive. The sound not even a new car makes.
She turned it off, and got out. She had two dollars in change in her purse. She offered it to him, but he shyly smiled, a childlike grin of embarrassment, and thanked her no ma’am thank you very much.
Then he bobbled back down the street, and was gone.
Selena stood there with the silver in her hand; she wore an empty, startled expression of what happened.
The three fools were now prostrate, clutching one another for support even on the ground.
“All right, you three incompetents!” she snapped.
They stopped laughing instantly.
“Ernest fix y’up real good, ma’am?” the youngest asked, snickering.
“He did a hell of a lot more than any of you idiots!”
The old man stared at her smoothly. He wasn’t laughing now. “Guess you’ll be movin’ on now, that right?”
Selena was not moving on.
“Where can I stay overnight in this cemetery? There’s a storm brewing and I’m not going on till I find someone in this idiot town who can give me a straight answer how to get back on the main road. If I take directions from any one of you, I’m liable to wind up in Nome, Alaska.”
The old one looked at her.
The other two looked at each other.
One of them bit his lip.
One of them coughed into his sleeve.
One of them licked his lips, hoping.
She went to the boardinghouse. Her room was on the first floor, in the rear. It was cold, and it smelled of mildew. She undressed in the dark and used the bath down the hall. Then she came back and started to get into bed. As she pulled back the thin blanket, she felt him staring at her. She turned toward the window, and for a moment she thought it might be the youngest of the three fools, and she made an instinctive movement to cover herself with the blanket. But the feeling passed, and she knew it was him: Ernest.
Dark in the night, wrapped in rain, silent staring, tensed and trembling, molded into shadow, as the storm broke in fragments of sound and light that formed a pattern of violence only hinted at by the earlier holocaust. Jagged scythes of lightning ripped away the darkness and blasted the earth, a tongue of flame from a thunder dragon crushed, seared and vaporized a tree stump. In the darkness he did not move. Flame lived beside him as the stump returned to its component parts. Rain made a second face on him, filling his eyes and draining down through his hair into his waiting mouth. Wide-eyed and wondrous, he saw her there in the window, only faintly seen through the deepest shadow.
Selena lived to manipulate.
Nowhere is the desolate countryside of the amoralist soul. The twisted, blasted, blackened wreckage littering a landscape of lava pits and brine holes and quicklime pools. Selena, naked, pulse throbbing in her wrist, muscle quivering on the fleshy inner surface of her thigh, smelling sweetly of sudden woman sweat, found her great gambit.
Out there, she thought. This child who has never been with a woman, who has never sunk himself hard into the body of a woman like me. Whatever he is, magician, maniac, wild psi talent, elf gnome troll leprechaun, whatever he is, there’s one thing he’s not. Yet. Gambit. Point counterpoint. What would it be like to do it with someone like him? I thought at first he was an idiot, a retarded thing. But he isn’t. He has a power. And I have a power. Let him feed me that power through the soft place.
In the darkness, Ernest watched her come to the window, her white flesh shining out at him, as she opened the window, raising it, cutting off the vision at the breasts. Then she stepped over the sill, into the thundering rain, and down in the running Carolina mud, and she came to him, standing beside the smoking burning stump that had been blasted by a God.
He could not move. He held animal still as she moved up to him and the rain washed her body with streaks of line blue and yellow ocher. Her body, a naked woman’s body, a miracle in brightness. His belly heaved as he fought for air. Electricity surged and pulsed in the night.
Then she undressed him, carefully, slowly, with subterfuge and stealth, and laid his naked white smooth body down in the mud, and she became more a woman as he became a man for the first time.
She led him the way, guiding him, her own special way, the way only special certain women have that way; it was not the way he could have found with a local town girl; but then, like everyone in the town, they laughed at him.
She did not laugh at him.
Not at first.
No God is sane. How could it be? To be a Man is so much less taxing, and most men are mad. Consider the God. How much more deranged the Gods must be, merely to exist. There can be no doubt: consider the Universe and the patterns without reason upon which it is run. God is mad. The God of Music is mad. The Timegod is punctual, but he is mad. And the Machine God is mad. He has made the bomb and the pill and the missile and the acid and the electric chair and the laser and the embalming fluid and the thalidomide baby in his own image. For the lunatic Gods there are minuscule pleasures. The beloved of the Gods are the best, the most highly treasured, the most zealously guarded. God is brutal, God is mad, God is vengeful. But all Gods revere innocence. The lamb, the child, the song. To steal these is to steal from the mad Gods…
Daylight came like a drunk climbing down off a week’s binge. Colorless, nervous, tremblingly, wan and wasted.
In front of the gas station, the old one sat silently, flaking out the grime from beneath his fingernails with the plastic edge of a gas credit card someone had driven off and left behind.
Water ran in gullies through the center of Petrie, North Carolina, and returned somewhere to the land to rise and wait to fall again another time.
When the old man saw Ernest walking through town, he sat forward on his chair, his mouth a little open, and he could not believe. The boy walked like you or me. Gone was the loose-jointedness at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the slack mouth at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the wild look in the eye at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the adolescent silliness at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the power.
Later that day, when she did not answer the furious pounding on the door of the boardinghouse, they sent the youngest of the three who hung out at the gas station around by the window. He found it open. He stared inside, and started to run back inside to tell them, but he licked his lips, knowing he had lost his chance, and climbed up into the room, and touched her body for a few moments before unbolting the door.
Dried Carolina mud covered her body, as though she had been rolling sensuously in it when it had been soft and wet. There was blood on the inside of her thighs, but that wasn’t what had killed her.
They could not tell what had killed her.
She did not look peaceful, as if she had died in her sleep; Selena had died reluctantly, fighting every squeeze of the way. She did not look peaceful.
There was not a mark on her.
But one of the crowd lounging in and out of the room said it; he didn’t know he’d said it, but he did: he said, “Looks like somethin’ stopped her pump.”
The Packard ran so well, so beautifully, they could not bear to junk it. So they kept it, and for years thereafter it ran without the slightest difficulty. It ran and ran, and gave generous gas mileage.
And some gods are so tenacious even Tishman or Zeckendorf can’t de-fang them.
Rock God
Moist shadow men sang there. A strange song of dark colors. “Ah-wegh thogha!” Two pure white bulls were brought, and ritual purification was achieved by cutting their throats. Then the white goat, whose blood was sipped from its severed, dripping heart. Then the immense manlike figures of tree limbs and branches were set on fire, the bound human sacrifices in their depths shrieking as they burned. Then the moist shadow men, whom history would call the last Bronze Age people, the Wessex People, drew their animal-hide cloaks about them, cloaks of an animal that existed in dreams only, and they moved within the circle of standing cyclopean posts and lintels. Moved within the dark circle of Stonehenge, and swayed back and forth, murmuring their prayers.
Naked, cold so cold in the winter wind, the great priest stood on the altar stone, and hung down his arms, and let his head droop forward, and invoked the loftiest, the lowliest prayer. To Dis.
/> On the slaughter stone, the head of the virgin was turned toward the altar, and her shadowed eyes seemed suddenly afire with love of something unnameable. The lesser priests held their ritual knives ready.
Away on the altar stone the great priest called Dis. Begged him to come. And there was sound in the earth. And there was sound in the stones. In the great stones. And there was sound in the rocks.
And the priests kneeled to the girl who smiled and whose moist mouth silently begged for climax, and they did things to her, and then carried the meat to the altar stone, laying it at the feet of the great priest. While the worshippers swayed and invoked their god.
Darkness flowed as the sounds of great heavings in the rocks grew louder. Then Dis came. Great, dark Dis came.
They stared through the massive archway toward the heel stone. The first faint glimmer of sunrise splashed its polished dome with the unclean water of the blood sea. And the heel stone began to change.
Dis came from the earth that was his flesh. The rock that was his bone. The stone that was his home that was his essence.
The sunrise ceased. Night came again. Washing up out of the earth, darkness flowed and roiled and the world went dark as Dis came from the rock.
The heel stone shifted shape and grew, and rising from the inanimate stone Dis took form. Hairless flesh as solid as mountains. The great corded legs ran like lava, flowing toward the sinister circle of Stonehenge. Flowed, and touched archway, trilothons, sarsen stone, slaughter stone, lintels, bluestone horseshoe…and they fed the body of Dis with their substance, and he grew. Massive, enormous, rising into the night that oozed up from the earth, as darkness covered the world. Greater than the stones, taller than the huge branch-figures wherein had burned the human sacrifices. Two hundred, three hundred feet, towering over the awed and supplicating Wessex People.
Dis, rock god, had come again as he had come one hundred years before, and one hundred years before that.