Outer Banks by Russell Banks
He jumped up and started to crank out deep knee bends, his tight double-knit pants bulging hugely at the calf and thigh as he descended and ascended, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four! He was able to finish fifty quick ones before either of his brothers could answer him.
10.
Dread responded with a cynical, weary laugh. Then he said,—Aren’t you really worried about how political the old man is?
Crown Prince Orgone leaped to the carpeted floor and snapped off a hundred perfect pushups.—One trouble with being in my kind of perfect condition, he said as he finished,—you have to work harder and harder just to get a little exercise. I mean, look at me! I’m not even breathing hard!
11.
—What the old man should do, Egress said, facing the wall,—is turn all three of us over to the guy. Then the question would be whether he had given us to him or him to us. Now that’s what you call “political,” he said pointedly.—He won’t, though. The old man’s not able to think abstractly, never mind act abstractly, for Christ’s sake, he snorted.
Orgone grabbed his sneakers from the closet and made for the door.—I’m going down to shoot a few baskets, maybe run some laps. Is that ballboy on duty today, the crippled one?
—You mean Twit? Dread asked.
—Yeah, the slimy one.
—You like that humpbacked, slimy stuff, eh? Dread teased good-naturedly.
—Try dope, Egress mumbled.
—Fuck you guys, Orgone said, slamming the door.
12.
On his way to the gymnasium, Orgone passed through his mother’s knot garden and, glancing up, saw his father staring down at him from the tower adjacent to his private office. To the left of his father, Orgone saw two black rooks fly into the sun. As he entered the gymnasium, a black cat scurried across his path. He shot, and missed, fourteen easy set-shots in a row, and then, ominously, made the fifteenth. After missing seven more, he gave up and ran a dozen laps on the track with Twit, who, later, in the shower, ejaculated prematurely and burst into tears, running from the room when Orgone began to curse. All the towels in Orgone’s locker had large rust-stains on them, and he dropped a bottle of body cologne on the tile floor and cut his left foot on a piece of the broken glass. These were omens, and Orgone knew it.
5
1.
Feeling, in an odd way, hurt by the goings-on at the court, wounded somehow, and certainly feeling needlessly distracted by it all (for, really, what of it concerned him?), Dread decided to pack in his gear and head for Blue Job, where, in recent weeks, there had been three cougar-sightings of the same, steel-gray, male cat.
It would be good to kill that beast, he thought, for he had not killed anything in almost a month, and he felt the hunger and the deprivation snarling in his belly like tangled ropes. Besides, the cougar was a big one. It was a fast one and it was strong, and a very wise and very dangerous one, he thought.
2.
He knew the tough, high country around Blue Job as well as any white man did and better than most Indians. He had hunted up there along the wind-shattered sides of the blue, nose-shaped rock for seven summers, night and day, from his thirteenth year to his twentieth. For the first five summers he had hunted with the guides, Abenakis, most of them, and then he had spent a couple of summers up there alone. For five years now—though he had traveled to, and hunted on, every continent in the world—he had not been back to Blue Job. It was almost as if he had become afraid of the mountain, he thought, lacing up his L.L. Bean hunting boots.
3.
He took no more gear than what he could carry on his own back: a one-man Greenland mountain tent, his down-filled sleeping bag, one pot, one skillet, a Svea gas stove, his Norm Thompson fold-away flycasting outfit, one change of clothes, and the Ten Essentials: maps (Geological Survey maps of the Blue Job quadrangle), a compass, a flashlight, sunglasses, emergency rations (raisins, chickpeas, and powdered eggs), waterproofed matches, a candle for starting fires in dampness, a U.S. Army blanket, a Swiss Army pocketknife, and a small first aid kit. Also, a skinning knife, which he wore on his belt, one hundred rounds of ammunition, and his trusted Remington 30.06 rifle with the special Howard Hughes scope and sight that he had used to such miraculous advantage in Tanzania.—This one helps you kill the big ones, he had written to Hughes.
4.
Egress rolled over in his bunk and watched his brother finish packing.—Where you going? he asked idly.
—Goin’ to the high country, the far outback, headin’ for the deep piny woods, lightin’ out for the territory.
—Alone, I suppose.
—Alone, Dread said.
—Coming back soon?
—Cain’t say, Dread opined. Seated cross-legged on the floor, shoving his gear into the Kelty, he looked like a young, raw-boned lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry, a noble fool preparing to leave on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines, a secret mission that he, and no one else, had volunteered for. He had covered his pale, freckled face with lampblack and his long, blond hair with a watch cap.
—Why’re you done up like that?
—So no one will see me, Dread told him.
—Right, Egress said.
5.
By dawn he had reached the shadow of Blue Job. Standing in a clearing, he watched the sun inch heavily over the mountain’s knobby profile, and he guessed he was now inside the cougar’s territory, about eight miles in a line from the top of the mountain.
He began looking for signs, cougar shit, tracks, or a fresh kill, as he walked headlong toward Blue Job. The sun rose higher, and he began to sweat. He could smell his woolen clothing, and he knew the cougar could, too, and it excited him. He shoved three bullets into his rifle and took off the safety and kept on walking, his head facing the mountain, his eyes darting from side to side and down, searching for signs. This was how the Abenaki had taught him, but he did not remember that, for he’d learned it truly.
6.
Suddenly he knew he was being watched. Turning around, slowly, like a sleepy cat, he saw the steel-gray cougar crouched about twenty yards away in a short, shallow crevasse between two high, moss-covered rocks. He and the animal stared at each other for nearly a full minute, when, in a single move, the cougar sprang to the top of one of the large rocks and disappeared into the dense underbrush behind it.
Dread felt a chill wipe his entire body. Next time I’ll get closer before I look at him, he decided. Then he sat down on the sun-warmed ground for a moment; his legs felt watery, and he was afraid he would fall.
7.
Walking on, he unaccountably remembered watching an Indian woman have her baby in a pine grove, mingling the blood and afterbirth with the warm, sweet-smelling pine needles on the ground. But then he couldn’t remember if he’d actually seen that or had only dreamed it and was remembering a dream. He finally decided that it didn’t matter: whichever, he had been mightily impressed.
8.
He stopped for lunch—tea and beef jerky—on the side of a large, granite outcropping. This time the cougar walked out of an aspen grove at the far end of the outcropping, and, leaping onto the rock, sat there and waited, watching him while he chewed on the dried beef and sipped his tea. They seemed to be studying each other’s eyes. Finally, the cougar turned and loped back into the forest, headed east, toward Blue Job.
Dread started to feel a little crazy.—My god, he thought,—who needs to race automobiles at 160 miles an hour, when you can have this! He named the cougar Merlin, after his favorite car, a Merlin Lotus Rue.
9.
As he got to his feet, moving slightly off-balance and too quickly, he reached for his rifle, which he had leaned against the chunk of rock he had been sitting on, and he knocked the gun off the rock to the grassy ground about ten or twelve feet below, where it fired, sending a bullet into the young man’s right ear and out the top of his head, hurling him off the rock into the blackberry brambles on the other side, where he had three quick visions, and died.
DREAD’S FIRST VISION
A hot wind roaring, a tilt to the landscape, which is quickly righted, and then he is flying through the air a few feet above the ground, when suddenly the flight ceases, and he seems to hover, bodiless; looking down, he sees gray paws and legs, and he lets his tongue loll, and he pants, and for a second realizes that he is becoming the cougar; and then he forgets this, for he has in fact become the cougar, which immediately pisses on a blackberry bush and commences hunting.
11.
DREAD’S SECOND VISION
His battered, hurt body is washed and anointed with oils and laid out in a white gown and left on a redwood bier in a dimly lit room heavy with the smell of burning incense; he is conscious, sort of, but is unable to speak or move, until a man enters the room, a man wearing an exotically cut, glistening green suit with flowers, daisies, apple blossoms, black-eyed Susans, in his curly hair; and when the man takes Dread’s hand, Dread is able to speak and move, as if by magic; sitting up, he steps lightly from the bier and, his hand still held by the green man, says,—Am I the one?—Yes, is the answer, uttered in a melodic voice full of sweetness and light and delicate caring.—The others? Dread asks.—The others are where they have always been. You were chosen to leave because you alone were thought to be the angelic one, the green man informs him; and together, holding hands, they leave the darkening room for the sun-drenched meadows outside.
12.
THE VISION OF TOO BAD: DREAD’S THIRD VISION
The first two visions are categorically denied.
6
1.
Meanwhile, back at the palace, Prince Egress, alone in the Bunkhouse (the name given to the apartment years ago by the press, when the boys’ rooms had been redecorated with plastic, simulated-log walls, false fireplaces, electrified kerosene lanterns, stuffed heads of mountain sheep, elk, and bear, and for each prince, his own bunk bed), was “getting in touch with his anger.”
He strolled through the five rooms of the apartment, tipping over all the furniture, pitching lamps and wall hangings and draperies onto the floor, smashing every piece of glass he could see—windows, mirrors, dishes, liquor bottles. Then, finally, emptying the contents of the closets and dresser drawers onto the floors, he splashed kerosene from one of the lanterns that had not been converted across the heaps of cloth and flipped lit matches into each room, one after the other, and worked his way toward the hall exit. With the rooms blazing behind him, he ran out, passing the just-arriving bucket brigade in the hallway.
2.
He rapped on the door of his mother’s chamber and, without waiting for an answer, walked in. She quickly covered her breasts with a satin sheet; she had been brushing her soft, ebony-colored hair. Smiling easily, she said,—Egress, how nice to see you. Will you wait outside for a second, honey, while I dress?
He coughed, wiping his mouth with a lace cuff, smearing it with sputum and blood.—I want to talk with you about something important, Mother, he announced. He could hear the shouts and cries of the firemen and the volunteer bucket brigade in the distance as they doused the flames in the Bunkhouse.
—What’s all that sound and fury? asked Naomi Ruth.
Egress coughed again.—It’s coming from the Bunkhouse. I just wrecked the place and set it on fire. Vandalized it, sort of.
—Oh-h-h, Egress, not again! she said in a low voice, pulling him to her, pressing his cheek against her soft, white, plum-shaped breasts.
—I’m sorry, Mamma, he said.
—I know, dear, she replied.
3.
Feeling superficially refreshed, young Egress left his mother’s chamber. But the old heaviness swiftly returned.
—Good god! he exclaimed to himself.—Is there no outrage outrageous enough to lift these dead spirits of mine? Am I doomed, he soliloquized, to an existence of dull eeks and melancholic squeals with naught but long intervals of sodden thought between? Oh, daily, daily diminishes the possibility for suddenness; hourly shrinks the spontaneous! The hot squirts and jacks of ecstatic youth are in manhood mere dribbles, and what ere remains of that rough ecstasy now flatly lies upon the frozen turf before me. I can but prod and poke the memories as if they were the drained entrails of a goat! Would a future could be divined there as sharply as a past! He kicked the loam of his mother’s knot garden with a booted toe.—Shit! he decided.—Guess I’ll snort some coke and go to London and jam. This crap with the Green Man will blow over in a few days anyhow. It won’t amount to shit. Nothing ever does.
4.
He smoked hash and snorted some coke in the library and, rubbing a couple of drops of hash oil into each ear, went up to the east-facing parapet to watch the landscape darken before him while the sun set behind him. Pretending he was the sun setting was a favorite fantasy.
This time, however, just as he was getting off, he heard a ghost.—Eee-gress! the voice called. It was not an unpleasant voice.—Eee-gress! He looked all around him but could see no one. The guards were in the watchtowers. He was alone on the parapet.—Eee-gress!
Well, he’d had bad trips before and had learned the hard way to “go with it,” so he sat down well out of the bitterly snapping wind and said,—Okay, I’m listening. Go ahead. There was a pause; then he said,—I suppose this has to do with the green man. He’s been on my mind a lot today.
—Righto, said the ghost.
—Before we go on, said Egress,—do you mind telling me who you are?
—You can call me Bob or Jack, whichever you prefer. It doesn’t matter, because I’m only a messenger. We’ve never met before and I rather doubt if we’ll ever meet again.
—Okay, Bob or Jack, shoot, Egress said.
5.
After Bob or Jack had given Egress the message, which, he told him, was a “plan” from a “source” whose identity he “could not reveal,” Egress went down from the parapet, caught a car for the airport, and flew to London, where it was morning. The sun shone and birds sang. For the first time in months, young Egress was elated.
Inside the cab from the airport, he snorted more coke and went straight to where his friends lived, in an elegant, brick townhouse near Grosvenor Square. They were all members of a world-famous rock band from California called The Sons of the Pioneers. In the last few years their most popular songs had been written by Egress.
—Hey, man! they all cried when they saw him.—What’s happening? they sang.
—Hey, man! he answered.
—Far out! they exclaimed. Then they all sat down on the floor in the middle of the classically proportioned drawing room designed by Sir Christopher Wren and snorted some coke together.
—Good dope, they agreed.
6.
Egress showed them the lyrics to the song that he wanted The Sons to record and release as a single as soon as possible. He told them it was part of a “plan” he had. Then he hummed the melody.—What do you think? he asked.
—Far out, said Mick. He was the spokesman for the group. The others nodded enthusiastic approval.
Together, they went upstairs to the recording studio and prepared their instruments. Egress stood in a corner and coughed on his sleeve, which by now was covered with a thick crust of dried phlegm and blood.
—Hey, man, you gotta do somethin’ about that cough, Mick called to him.
—I guess so, Egress said.—Anybody got a clean shirt I can borrow? he yelled. Then he laughed long and loud, which made The Sons of the Pioneers very nervous.
7.
BALLAD OF THE GREEN MAN
(to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”)
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loos’d the fateful lightning
of His terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watchfires
of a hundred circl
They have builded Him an altar
in the ev’ning dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence
by the dim and flaring lamps,
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel
writ in burnish’d rows of steel;
‘As ye deal with my contemners,
so with you My grace shall deal’;
Let the Hero, born of woman,
crush the serpent with his heel,
since God is marching on.
Chorus:
Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
8.
The group sang and performed the song well, but the experience left them shaken, Egress included. It was an aggressively antisocial song, and they knew it.
One by one, they put down their instruments and drifted down the stairs and left the house. As Egress went out the door to the crowded street, he called back to Mick,—Be sure the record gets distributed worldwide by nightfall. I’ll take care of any extra expenses.
—Righto, man! Mick replied. Then, to the drummer, Hadley,—Oh, wow, man, that cat is into some heavy shit. Can you dig it? he said.
—Good dope? Hadley asked.
9.
Egress immediately caught a cab for the airport and flew home, where it was morning. As he entered the courtyard, he noticed ahead of him a group of Indians in breechcloths, moccasins, and war paint. They carried their Stone Age weapons. He could tell from their facial tattoos and scars that they were Abenakis, “Friendlies.”
—What’s up? Why the war paint? Egress asked one of the savages, a rotund man whom, because of his slightly arrogant manner, Egress took to be the leader. The others seemed slightly intimidated by the palace and all, which was natural, considering what the wretches were used to.