With Shuddering Fall

  Karen sobbed aloud. A siren began to wail and people shouted, individually now—behind her, beside her. At the wreck masses of flame licked up against the glowing concrete. Across the track fuel ran to the infield grass, already burning; clouds of dark smoke had begun to rise. Max had hold of Karen’s arm. “An accident, an accident,” he murmured. “An unfortunate happening.”

  Unless wreckage interfered with the race the other cars would not be flagged down; so far as they were concerned nothing had happened. Karen had witnessed this before but still could not understand it. She watched the untouched cars reel in their frantic order, glad to be alive. Shar was in the lead now, and dust roared up behind him grandly. The cars rushed, one by one, through the screen of black smoke and fire. “Look at that,” Jerry said, laughing. “Going right through. Like driving through the poor bastard’s blood.” Karen put her hands to her face. They were cold, shocking. “My God, my God, Shar,” she whispered, “don’t let it be yet . . . not yet. . . .”

  The line of cars passed through the boiling smoke unharmed. Sunlight touched them, illuminating their colors in spite of the dust that had covered them. At the wreck men moved about slowly; the ambulance had been backed up to the wall. The fire burned with gusto. It looked as if the car had stopped tilted on end, its top in the air. Men battled the flames energetically, with the air of people who are being watched.

  Yet the horror of what had happened did not really dawn on Karen until she heard, a moment later, Max’s murmuring voice. His forefinger was upraised. “What keeps them on it?” he said philosophically. “By common sense you would expect them all to fly off like that—drawn off—so!” He made a deadly flicking motion with his wrist and looked at Karen. She stared at him. Her eyes burned in her head. “It’s the law of the circle, the one pressure on the outside and the other on the inside, they push together—the little car, it is caught in the middle. The two pressures keep him there. And the speed he makes, the little engine, and the pressure up in front of it, weight he has to push into—” He looked down at Karen, his mouth about to expand into a smile. “Amazing thing! Amazing, the two pressures, one pushing in, the other pushing out. That is how our lives are!” He stood, his face twitching with the discovery and the delight his words were leading him into. “Yes—see—the pressures are opposed, they fight each other. The law of the circle, that keeps the planets, you know, on the circumference, the other wants to draw them out and off somewhere—off somewhere, lost—Two forces, one to live and one to die—An amazing thing! A most wonderful thing! You see today how it works, like lines drawn to show you—Our Shar is full of life, he cannot be killed. He is filled with life.”

  The cars were finishing now. Shar won by a considerable distance. The crowd applauded dutifully; some of their attention was drawn to the burning car, some of it to Shar and his triumph—for, though death fascinated them, victory was an admirable thing and they wanted to share in it. Karen said clearly, “Shar is a killer.”

  Max turned to her. They were still standing, like everyone else. He put his hand to his wet chest; he pretended he had not heard her. Karen knew that he, too, was a killer, and that his past consisted of brutalities he never had to watch or to account for. “And you disgust me,” she said, staring at his little astonished eyes.

  “Why, Karen—I can’t hear you—what did you say?”

  “I said you disgust me,” Karen whispered.

  Max’s face was wet with perspiration. It had gathered like dew on his forehead and hung in little salty drips on his broad nose. Behind his expensive sunglasses his eyes protruded a little, blinking against the unbelievable crudity of Karen’s words; as if for her sake, for her own good, he seemed reluctant to have heard her. “You disgust me!” Karen cried, so loudly that people around them turned to stare in amusement. “All of you! Disgusting—dirty—you don’t even clap to see men die, or pant for it—like the others—you’re beyond that—It’s a theory to you, it’s nothing to you—Shar kills a man and it’s nothing to you! Shar is filled with life!—Shar is filled with death! Shar is filled with death!”

  Max took her arm. “My dear child, my child,” he said. “This was an accident.”

  Karen snatched her arm away from him. “Not all things are accidents,” she said coldly, staring at Max’s bewildered face. She understood, beyond his polite bewilderment, her own fate—she saw him dismissing her with a flick of his wrist, then turning fatly to open a book, sitting propped up with pillows in the sunlight; but she did not care. Even the child growing within her—a speck of life, a ghostly image, a mockery of life—would not escape his wrath; but she did not care.

  11

  That night Max sat with his back to the wall so that he could see everything that went on in the crowded place. He ate melons luxuriously: pale green melons, smooth as skin, that the waiter—a boy of about seventeen—kept bringing him. Seeds had spilled out onto the table and on the front of his shirt, though he did not seem to notice. He waved the big glistening knife at them as he spoke. “This child was frightened by the race—her hands were cold, ice cold.” He made a move to embrace Karen, a symbolic gesture. “She cannot get used to it. Every race is new to her. She cannot believe you will survive the race!”

  Shar was leaning back in his chair. He had been drinking for some time and, as usual, the liquor worked to quiet him in preparation for later outbursts of rage. He smiled tautly. “A woman’s love is a beautiful thing to see,” Max went on, licking at a sudden rivulet of juice that ran down his chin. “She is transformed by it, absolutely transformed. That has never been part of my experience—I know you will survive the race, I have no doubt in you. My mentality is masculine and objective, but hers—hers is possessive. She fears she will lose you.”

  Max’s bright, merry words evoked a painful smile on Karen’s face. She avoided Shar’s eyes. With a flourish Max finished his melon and took a deep breath and called for the waiter. “Another one of these,” he said, sighing helplessly. The table was wet with juice and scattered seeds that the boy—a rushed, alarmed-looking country boy with long hair—did not offer to wipe up. “You must tell me how the race was for you,” Max said, laying a damp hand on Shar’s arm.

  The place was already crowded, yet more people came in continuously. At the bar a child had been lifted up so he could look around, squinting through the drifting clouds of smoke. His mother, whispering something to him, evidently meant him to see Shar. Along the bar and at the other tables, and milling about at the door, eyes would be directed toward Shar with great wonder and pride, as if he were somehow a credit to them. From time to time men ambled over to congratulate him and, for some reason, to congratulate Karen too. She would stare at them with cold astonishment.

  Music from the jukebox exploded into the room. Mosquitoes and flies scattered to the ceiling. The sense of well-being that pervaded the place showed itself most explicitly on Max’s face as he bent forward to listen to Shar’s words. Shar talked of the race in his low, hypnotic voice. These recitals had always alarmed Karen, for she felt there was something unhealthy about them; excluded from them, her isolation pointed out as if Shar and Max were staring hard at her, Karen sat in a flurry of smoke and music and insects, pretending to be interested in something across the floor.

  At the bar Jerry stood talking with some women. He had a neat, smooth head, smooth skin that looked ageless; his eyes were small and bright, like buttons. Whatever he said made the women laugh—they turned to each other helplessly, sighing in their laughter. From time to time Jerry glanced over at Karen and, as if stimulated by her blank, weary expression, was inspired to charm the women even more. One was fairly old—perhaps forty, with fantastic red-blond hair that lifted away from her head as if electricity were coursing through it. The other, quieter, her expression sly and pleased, had long black hair curled at its tips. Her face was large and amiable, teased into prettiness by minute plucking of her eyebrows and intricate work about her eyes, and a violent, exotic outlining of her lips. Whe
never anyone fended his way over to see Shar, to attempt to shake hands with him, Jerry would straighten quickly, ignore the women, and watch to see if he was needed: this would be indicated by a flapping of Max’s big hand. So far there had been no trouble. The men connected with the garage whose car had crashed were not around—they were believed to have left right after the race. When Jerry saw that everything was all right he would relax and his grin would come back, bright and mischievous. One of the women leaned to him and asked him to light her cigarette.

  In one corner a few couples tried to dance. They seemed to gallop together, violently; feet kicked the floor, kicked the air, tangled together and left the dancers hugging each other and gasping in ecstasy. The jukebox glowed grimy colors: red, yellow, green. Karen, who had been forcing herself to drink, felt the hot pulsations of the music lull and soothe her, easing her gently away from herself. Max and Shar talked together, heads conspiring. Shar had a hard, handsome face. His eyes were dark, shadowed by the strange light, and his lips, twitching up into a grin from time to time, looked hard, as if chiseled out of stone. He blew smoke luxuriously about him. “Did you hear the people much?” Karen heard Max ask. “Did you hear them applaud you? They were mad for you—they were in ecstasy for you!”

  The boy returned with another melon. He carried it balanced up beside his head in one hand, without ceremony, as if it were a rock. Karen saw Max’s tongue skim his lips as the melon was presented to him.

  Max picked up the wet knife, brandishing it aloft for a moment as if he were pleased by its look of competence. With a sigh that reached every part of his vast body he bent to the melon and sliced it carefully; juice ran out onto the table as if shocked. Max cut a slice out of the melon and offered it to Shar, who shook his head; then he offered it to Karen, who did not understand for a moment. Then she too shook her head. Her fingers tightened around her glass. Max lifted the slice to his mouth and bit into it: for a moment his expression hesitated, judging, tasting; then it was found to be good. A good melon. His eyes swam with the pleasure of its taste and with the delight of such company—such beautiful young people. “What he tells me is fascinating—it is as if I had been there myself,” he assured Karen. “He makes me relive it. Perhaps at night I will dream about it—who knows? I will be stuffed in the little car, my stomach pushed up into my face!—driving and winning a race to make people cheer!” He laughed at his humor, Shar grinned mockingly. Karen waited until their dialogue began again and looked away.

  Sitting alone at the table next to them was Max’s doctor. His black bag beside him, ready for use, he sat gazing vaguely toward Max; he drank with perfunctory regularity, as if he were taking medicine. Something had happened to make his frizzy hair stand up, for it framed his bald spot like a tiny halo, glistening with perspiration. His face was slack; he was silent. In the months Karen had been associated with him, in company with him, she had never heard him speak to anyone but Max, and then only when he was addressed. He seemed to live in a trance: even tonight, when women or even the girls still dressed in their satin outfits approached him, merry and teasing, he stared at them with silent fury until their smiles faded and they backed awkwardly away. Never did he act outside of his role except to follow Max around with his black bag and to pour out liquor for himself, which he did fondly yet without emotion. Once, in his role as a doctor, he had examined Karen herself; he had seemed a different person then. But it was long ago, before she knew who he was, and at a time when she had almost lost her capacity for memory. . . .

  A fat man in a maroon uniform, unbuttoned on his chest, pushed his way through the crowd to get to Shar. His face was red and shiny, as if polished. “Did they glue it on? Eh? Did they glue it back on?” he cried, winking at Shar. “Glue what?” said Shar. “That guy’s head! I heard the top of his head was sheared off!” the man exclaimed. “Oh, but he ast for it! He ast for it! Listen, mister—” Shar stared up at him. “Listen, I think you done right—in a race like that was—I—” “What the hell are you talking about?” Shar said. “I know what I know,” the man said. He winked at them all again but his enthusiasm had begun to ebb; he turned to go. “’Course couldn’t nobody be sure of it—that’s smart that way,” he said. “I’ll come to see you any time you’re here.”

  He disappeared. Shar shrugged his shoulders. “There is something about you that appeals to them,” Max said. “I’m not sure what it is—perhaps they sense you are like them, I mean originally—from the country, like them. They distrust people from our civilization!”

  “Nobody could judge if that was on purpose or not,” Shar said thoughtfully. “Nobody could tell, least of all me. They think they would have done it out there, if it had been them; but they can’t speak for me.”

  “Did you hear that?” Max said to Karen. He was impressed by Shar’s words, which were indeed thoughtful for Shar; the liquor had taken hold of him. “Very well put! I thought that myself.”

  “Nobody in the world could do that on purpose,” Shar said. “Not going around a turn like that. The car acted by itself—by itself. I might have been thinking of it, just thinking—and then it acted by itself!”

  Karen looked at him in disgust. He met her gaze with a mocking grin. “I had power out there,” he said, leaning forward, “I felt that car moving with me, me moving with it, all the same thing! The same soul! A good way to die, that would be—to turn the car toward the stand, slam it into all those fat faces, shovel it into them! Not a driver but that he thinks of that—wants that. A good way to die when it comes time.”

  “You are no one to speak of dying,” Max said, eating his melon. “You have a long life before you—many lives before you. You will live many times.”

  Shar looked at Karen. His face was hard and empty. “But what good is that,” he broke out, “if all of them are different—all those lives—if you can’t put them together! One good car after another, one car better than another, and every time I take them out I’m better than before—But a race is no sooner started than it’s over, another one over. There isn’t enough time for it all!”

  Max wondered at him. “There is time for everything,” he said sententiously.

  Shar finished his drink. “I never had any trouble finding the right car,” he said to Max. They looked at each other seriously. “Some guys spend their lives looking for that—I found it right off. I found it with you. I took it to the limit, the first one—until the rear hub wanted to come off, goddam threads cut the wrong way! I wasn’t seventeen when I begun it and I’m still alive now—still alive now, and how many of them are dead! Poor goddam bastards! I force them—force them—Cars or people or myself, all the way out, to the limit, as far as it can go without killing me. I force it! What the hell is it any other way? Are you alive any other way? I know how much the car can take, but not what I can take. I never yet found my limit!” he cried.

  This was taken up by Max with great admiration. He turned, nodding, to Karen. In a voice meant to be confidential he murmured, “You hear him? He is a fine man, he is filled with life. You must not try to pull him off—you know—I spoke of that before to you—You must cherish him.”

  “I cherish him,” Karen said.

  “She sucks me to death!” Shar said. He got up and went to the bar. Max and Karen watched him; Karen had begun to tremble.

  “He is angry with you, he doesn’t know why,” Max said, licking his lips, pretending to be sorry. “You must tell him soon about the child—if there is a child—I’ll help you with it, I’m good with him, he will listen to me. He won’t be angry if I tell him. I’ll tell him—it would be like a grandchild to me, a child related by blood to me! Related by the soul! He is filled with life and will understand what it is like to spread life—to give birth, to reproduce himself—”

  “You’re insane,” Karen said.

  Max wiped seeds off his chin. “You are hard on me,” he complained. “Do you think I’m insane? What is insane about me? I am given to reading too much; I sit too much in
one place; I eat too much—a shameful glutton, a vice inherited from my great-grandmother, who weighed three hundred pounds! Will you blame me for her? Did she know you, would she be judged by you? A fine, respectable woman with her own bed built especially for her! —You are my delight, Karen, my puzzle, my mystery, I could dream of you at night! We must know each other better; you must tell me of yourself. You must tell me what you dream—like Shar does; some of the most fascinating hours of my life have been spent listening to that man talk, allowing him to lead me through his mind, reveal himself to me! You look away—you seem ashamed—what are you ashamed of? That Shar reveals himself to me? That we are close, that two human beings are close? That we love each other? Do you think all Shar’s passion is for you? He tells me of you—he describes his feelings with you, his—”

  Shar was coming back, so Max fell silent. Karen stared at his averted eyes and at the hungry gleam of his big teeth. What he had said alarmed her. She was struck by a sense of terror greater than any disgust. “Tells you of me!” she wanted to cry. She wanted to seize him, shake him, shout into his face. “What does he tell you of me? What does he say?”