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

and singing and shouting like a cowboy in sunglasses and a red fez. Morrison learned names and faces. Tall Boy and Jacob, Big John and Small John and just plain Johnny or Yanni, one called simply Dog, another Villem. Villem was the man with one eye, and close up he looked like a murderer, with a front tooth missing and a complicated scar on one cheek and temple, and a sullen droop to his good eyelid. And Shorty and Frenchy. They had other names on the books, but the books were of no importance or interest. The men said “Good morning boss” and little else. Jacob said nothing, merely nodded. When there was something to be said to or by Morrison, the message came or went by Ramesh.
    â€œI begin to think that you like it here,” Philips said after three weeks.
    â€œI do.”
    â€œVan Alstyne did not,” Philips said with a sly smile, a pimp’s grin, grotesque on his strong face. “He liked the women, also beer by the gallon. He was always escaping to the city.”
    â€œNot me.” Morrison escaped to the gorge. Philips did not know that. Morrison looked for savages.
    â€œThere is not much for you to do here. The road is uninteresting.”
    â€œThe bridge will be interesting. The bridge will be a bitch. How did you get the rope bridge up?”
    â€œThe bridge of vines? We never did. We never tried.”
    â€œThen how did you map the other approach? From this side? That’s not as accurate as I want.”
    â€œNo,” Philips said. “A helicopter came.”
    Morrison was stunned.
    â€œIs something wrong?”
    â€œNo, no. It just hadn’t occurred to me.”
    â€œWe never thought of using the bridge. That is not much of a bridge.”
    â€œIt took work. They”—whoever they were, and his heart beat stronger—“had to cross the river to the west, there, and come up the mountain. Then somehow they got a line across, and pulled the whole bridge to this side and anchored it. That was a hell of a good breakfast today.”
    â€œTell Ramesh.”
    â€œWhen will the road be finished?”
    â€œTwo or three weeks. When does the crane come?”
    â€œTwo or three weeks. That’s a machine,” Morrison said. “By God it is. A most satisfactory machine.”
    Ramesh had a radio and liked to tell them that France was making trouble “for your country” or that the Vietnamese were rioting, or that China had blown up a hydrogen bomb. They found it hard to dare. But when he told Philips that General Ros had marched out of a Cabinet meeting, they cared. Morrison had never heard of General Ros and was not sure what the Cabinet consisted of or what powers it had. But he wanted the government steady and strong. He wanted Goray to be where he was. When the bridge was finished and some ascotted politician had snipped the ribbon, then they could explode, erupt, dismember their fair land; but not before. He was ashamed of that thought but could not deny it. He considered himself with distaste. At least he never said those things aloud. He wondered if all men received vile notions.
    He never mentioned the native he had seen. Or that he had dreamed of him one night, he on Morrison’s side of the gorge and Morrison on his, frightened, abandoned, night coming on, and Morrison lay flat staring down at the rocks while the native jeered obscenely, and then the walls of the gorge crumbled and Morrison awoke, staring through the leaves at a dead white moon. Saturdays and Sundays, when he was alone, he drove to the gorge and sat waiting, and mimed to an invisible audience. If any. At first it was simple curiosity, the timid fascination of the popeyed tourist; then poetry won out, notions, irrationalities, territorial claims—it was his bridgehead, after all; and then something more, an unease, a necessity, as if what lay on the far side was a destiny. A doom or a glory, a goal. More than just the bridge. As if he were meant to build