Read Online The Outcasts by Stephen Becker - Free Book Online

redwoods.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.” He rose, and tossed the fan into the trailer. “I’m going up to the gorge.”
    â€œGood.” Philips beamed. “I will show you the way.”
    â€œNo. Not the first time. I want to see it alone. Just tell me.”
    Philips shrugged, turning away. “Follow the roadbed.”
    He was offended. Ramesh was still wide-eyed. To hell with both of them. And Tall Boy too. It’s my bridge.
    He slithered and crunched over the shiny, fist-sized rock. Soon the grass at the road’s edge invited easier walking. It was coarse and tough. After a mile or so it became denser and deeper, and he heard an echo of Philips, “here and there a viper,” and moved back onto the roadbed. Which then became a simple track, rising with the land. Still the trees were sparse, still the sun merciless, but before him was a new terrain, purple and gold and black, with hills and hollows, and far off to his left—he was marching south, so that would be east—a range of real mountains. And still the road rose.
    On that hour’s journey he never looked back.
    In the end he followed the track through a last grove of stunted upland broadleafs, and paused once, weary, grateful for the shade. In the silence he heard a woodpecker—never saw it—and the rattle took him back thirty years. He was a boy again, and a country boy too, and the sweat on his round face matted a fine down. He was lost in the woods, and happy. Jacknife in his pocket and all things still to come.
    The canopy of leaves was tightly woven, passing no blue and no sun. He stood on the musty forest floor in a cave of feeble greens and grays among black roots and trunks. Behind him a light crackle; he turned to peer, as if stalking beasts padded in shadow. Nothing. The spirit of the place. The souls of lions and vipers, but no bodies; only yellow eyes, lidded, winking behind tree-trunks.
    A small boy, and all things still to come. Chirr. Kee-kee-kee. A flash of yellow, high in the leaves.
    All sad things. He moved along, through school and war and wives and work, and his round face grew long, and the fine down thickened and bristled, and the clear eyes veined slowly red. He came out of the grove through a forlorn hope of gallant red blossoms. They were low to the ground and huddled against the sunlight.
    He stood small in a great bowl of yellowed grasses, dwarfed by the dappled hills and the raw blue sky. It was a cracked bowl, and the crack was his gorge, a hundred steps on. The gorge emerged from steep hills to the east, dirty yellow hills with a blush of reddish brown, and black rocks nippling up; beyond those hills were the mountains he could no longer see. But to the west the hills sloped away, and were a rich green, and stopped his breath: a million miles of rolling green, hill and forest, palm and broadleaf forever and a hair of blue, a river, another; the sun westering now but still sovereign, blinding, and the green beneath endless, flashing bright, shadowed dim.
    Alone. Oh, he was alone.
    His saucer was a small flat circle, a resting-place in the colossal east-west fall. Across the gorge a low hill rose like a barrier, a hogback furred by scrubby brush and dwarf trees; what lay beyond it he could not see.
    With the sun hot on his cheek he stepped meticulously to the lip of the gorge. The gorge was deep and dark; far below a black stream swirled and eddied, white rills foaming off black boulders. He stepped back and imagined his bridge, gleaming white.
    He was streaming sweat and frightened.
    He found the bridge of vines, off to the west. The vines were brown-black, three inches thick, wrapped about with tough grasses and layers of leaf, and anchored to a spur of rock. The bridge hung limp against his wall of the gorge. From a gnarled tree on the far lip hung a single vine, down in a slack bow and across to his own side many feet below. The bridge itself, or what he could see of