Read Online You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause - Free Book Online

felt nothing but the hard cot beneath him, heard nothing but the mystery of the tiny hum, looked at the perforations, little holes in the ceiling, clean as if made by tiny bullets, and the efficient gamma rays burned into his bowels, warmed his kidneys, all unfeeling. The curved machine thukked exactly on time, the red light went out, the nurse forced open the heavy door and came in smiling, wheeled him from under.
    In somber quiet, as usual now on this, the eighteenth trip to and from radiation, they shot the thirty-four miles back to Charleston, needed nothing in the little town, saw Gavin Terrell camped strategically in the police car at the edge of town, waved to him. Gavin waved back, smiled.
    “They haven’t got him yet,” Leonard said, the first words in all that way.
    “How do you know?” his wife asked.
    “Gavin wouldn’t be sitting there if they had.”
    They went the two and a half miles to the farm and down the long lane from the gravel road.
    “Oh, the cattle are down this way!” the wife said, delighted, and it was true, the large herd spread on both sides of the creek, near the farmstead. “We’ve got to take some pictures.”
    “That will be nice,” he said, the sullenness still on him.
    The brother, Melvin, and the old hired man who came whenever Melvin needed him worked on the seeder; there were soybeans to be replanted and the seeder was pulled in the middle of the yard.
    “The cattle are down this way,” the wife said to them. “Is it all right if I take some pictures of them?”
    “Take as many as you want,” Melvin said, getting up from under the machine and looking himself. The pasture was a mile long, and narrow, for it flanked the creek on both sides. The cattle were young and tended toward wildness, newly brought from the Nebraska range. The first thing they’d done after the 160 head had been unloaded was to go to the far end of the pasture, the mile away, and herd up there. Melvin had explained it to them when they went out to count the cattle one time. “The only experience they’ve had with barns and buildings is with things that hurt, vaccination, castration, branding, and so naturally they want to stay away from anything that looks like buildings.”
    And they had until now.
    “Well maybe the grass is getting short up at the other end,” Melvin said, although he knew and Leonard knew that could not be.
    The wife was excited and pleased. She got the camera and went out by the fence and the beautiful Hereford calves lifted their heads and sniffed, and she took the picture, with at least a hundred heads, white-faced and white ears, pointing at her.
    “I thought I’d never get a picture of them,” she said, back at the yard, pleased with everything.
    Leonard sat on the porch and slipped the oiled cloth along the spine of the Marlin rifle. Sullenly he cleaned the gun, although he had cleaned it the day before after shooting the six pigeons up at the other place that Melvin farmed. He knew that he was sullen, and told himself he could not help it, could not. The bandage on his neck bothered him, the bandage covering the latest biopsy only three days old. He cranked his head and touched the wad on his neck.
    “Don’t pull at that, please, Len,” his wife said.
    “Aaah,” he muttered, slipped the cloth the length of the rifle, noted appreciatively the steel gleam, the hard steel bolt reflecting neither figure nor shadow, only light.
    “Aah,” he muttered again, touching the lump of bandage with his fingertips. The cold lumps of frozen things in himself, those lumps of growing cancers, and the hot unhealthy burn of the radiation, neither good, he thought, both or either would kill him, frozen and burning all at once, and if he thought of it he could feel them both, he believed, truly feel them crawl in his tissues, in his marrow, that dark cold cancer in him and the glow of the radiation; condemned to death quite surely, and he did not know how or why. Nor did