Read Online The Outcasts by Stephen Becker - Free Book Online Page A

it, looked skimpy, and not a bridge that any man would want to cross every day. He knelt. Far below the water leapt and boiled and beckoned. That was a long way down, and cool and dark. Down there in the spume and the glistening rock. Devils seethed there. If he were a savage he would call it the home of the devils. Unless the cool and the dark were much prized. Heaven might here be cool and moist and dark.
    He stood up to dust his knees, and saw a man.
    The man stood beside a dense tangle of brush halfway up the hogback across from Morrison. He was lean, and very black, naked and erect. He held a spear, and stared foolishly.
    Morrison too stared foolishly.
    For many seconds they stood staring. Morrison raised his right hand.
    The man raised his spear.
    Morrison held forth both hands, empty. The man only stared. Morrison pointed down at the bridge then, and made a lifting motion.
    The man stood changeless.
    Morrison looked down at the bridge of vines, and beyond to the home of the devils. He felt fear, and stepped back from the lip of the gorge. When he looked up, the man was gone.

4
    Some days a wayward wind from the east coasted down off the high land, and a mist of pink dust floated west as the men dug and crushed and tamped. Those days were cooler. The temperature at noon was one hundred and five and not one hundred and ten. Morrison was never bored. The sun was new every morning, and reliable, and not the sun he had known all his life. On his second morning he said to Philips, “I need a hammock.” The hot beef and tomatoes were juicy and even the dry biscuit seemed full of flavor. The coffee was thick, bitter mess-hall coffee. All the tastes were like summer and youth, before tobacco and alcohol and sour love.
    â€œWe have a couple. The caravan was no good?”
    â€œI got no sleep at all and I almost drowned.”
    â€œWe will fix you up.” He made it sound slangy. In the evening he rigged a hammock close to his own and Ramesh’s. “No,” he said. “That way you will be stiff in the morning, if you do not fall out. This way. Diagoally.” Morrison rocked at peace. Each day the morning light pricked through his roof of leaves and woke him gently, dappling the glade. They walked slowly and talked low. The road inched forward.
    Philips had his hands full, his own fault: he was permanently nervous about measurements, contours, coordinates, as if he could not trust numbers, and he uncased his transit at least twice a day, sending Small John or Jacob out with the rod. “Be a sport,” Morrison said. “Be a meter off. Nobody will ever know.”
    â€œYou will know, when you start your bridge.”
    â€œRight. Don’t be a meter off.” That was his own permanent nervousness, and he was uneasy joking about it. After all. It even crossed his mind that the government might fall and a new one order him to cease and desist.
    Mornings they all had a plunge before breakfast. Then they repaired to the buffet. Jacob served deftly and Ramesh poured from a huge pot of hot coffee. Small John made a joke. Every morning. The men were various, gloomy or cheery or uncaring, and Morrison was full of the morning: the sun just up, and the river chuckling past, and himself soaking and cool. Crickets and birdsong. There was no mist on the water, but the morning was dank and cool with a green smell, and a coffee smell, and a beef smell; and a man smell and a sun smell. In his youth three smells were summer: sun, hot wood, crushed grass. Here all smells were summer.
    He turned brown. Two or three times a week visitors arrived. Their names were Samuel Atlas and Sonny, and they drove two trucks charged with rock. They were stocky, well-bellied, with thick forearms, and they stopped for lunch and went back in other trucks, empty. The men unloaded what they had left.
    Tall Boy did the showy work. The others spread rock and then stood back while he rolled it, jouncing and cursing, sweating