The man took hold of the bars of the cage, but she quickly hardened them into steel-like strength, and he could not budge them. He felt all around it, but it was tight, having been adapted from one piece of ribbon. He was fairly caught. She had won.
He took it philosophically. "I would really have liked to breed with you," he said. "Not only are you a real human creature, you are beautiful. But the magic that makes you so wonderful also makes you unconquerable."
"So now we are free," she said, satisfied. "All of us have won our duels."
"Until tomorrow," he agreed.
"Tomorrow?"
"When your next duels begin. You have won only the right not to breed with us whom you have defeated; the remainder of your thousand have not yet been decided."
Nona was appalled, but the confirmation was coming in from the others. The man spoke the truth. Indeed, this had been clear throughout, and others had remarked on it. She just had not let it register for her own situation.
They had always said that the requirement was a thousand breedings for each of them. That meant that they were still trapped here for a long time. They could fight it every day against new opponents, or submit to it without resistance, but they would not be able to leave the nether world to complete their mission. The only way they could have the freedom to leave their duel-daises for parts of the day was to breed early, so that no further contests were necessary. In short, to capitulate.
What were they to do?
CHAPTER 13
ESTA
THEY were just in time; school was letting out, and the students were surging forth in waves. Slick let Colene off on the sidewalk where Esta normally walked alone toward her home.
"I'll be near if you need me," he said.
Colene watched the car pull away. She turned to look at the surroundings. This was a typical suburban neighborhood. It reminded her of her own—and of how she, hardly more than a month ago, had spied a man in a gully, and helped him, and that was Darius. How her life had changed, because of that one encounter! Of course nothing like that was in the offing now, but it did give her a certain perspective.
The girl appeared, crossing the street at the intersection. She was small and thin, her hair reddish and somewhat frizzed. Slick had said she was thirteen; she looked eleven. Youth was supposed to be the time of carefree innocence; Colene knew better than that, and the sight of this approaching girl was further evidence. Esta's head was bowed, her body slumped, and her clothing was careless. A rumpled dark green skirt, an olive-green shirt—a bad combination. This was a nothing girl; It showed all over. She surely had no friends.
Slick thought she was suicidal. He could be right. What reason would such a person have for living? Colene herself had been popular, yet possessed of a deathwish. How much easier it must be to fade away if one's prospects really were blah.
The girl passed without pausing. Colene, surprised, hurried to catch up. "I must talk to you."
"No." Esta walked on.
"Look, I know you don't know me, but I really need to—" Colene broke off, because the girl was ignoring her.
This was a problem Colene hadn't quite anticipated. But she regrouped. "I'm not exactly a stranger. I know your name. Esta. Just wait a moment."
"Anybody could have told you," the girl said, not breaking her stride. "Leave me alone."
"Just listen a moment. Are you okay? I mean—"
"Not supposed to talk to anyone. Go away."
This wasn't working. Colene was starting to feel desperate. So she took a chance. "Slick," she said. "Slick sent me."
Now Esta reacted. "Uncle Slick," she breathed.
"Oops," Colene said, with partially feigned chagrin. "I wasn't supposed to say that. He's under court order not to see you."
The girl abruptly halted. "Court order?"
"You didn't know? You thought he didn't care?"
Esta stared at her, and Colene realized that this was exactly it: the girl had not been told. So she rushed on. "He loves you, Esta, but he'll be arrested if he's caught close to you. So he just sort of watches from afar. But none of your folk know me, so I can be with you, if they don't catch on. Talk to me, Esta; I can be awful good company when I try."
The slight humor of her phrasing was lost on the girl. "Why can't Uncle Slick visit me?"
This was definitely not the time for the whole truth. "Your mother thinks he would be a bad influence."
Esta made a sound. It was, Colene realized, a laugh, but it was so forced and pained that it sounded more like a cross between a bark and a whine. Colene had never heard such an utterance before, but she recognized it instantly: it was sheer misery. This was indeed a lost soul, and there was absolutely nothing funny about it.
"Esta, we really have to talk," Colene said.
But the girl had recovered her isolation. "No. You're just more trouble. Go away."
Time for another desperation ploy. Colene kept pace, unwrapping the band of cloth around her left arm. She held it up before the girl's face. "See what I am," she said.
For there were the scars of her nature: many thin white welts across her wrist, and one great long one on her inside forearm. The average person might mistake their significance, but Esta should recognize it.
The girl's eyes widened. "But you're pretty!" she exclaimed.
Now it was Colene's turn to laugh. "Do you think that matters?"
Esta shook her head. "I guess not." But she kept walking.
Colene followed up her opening. "Okay, so you're not supposed to talk to anyone. I don't want to get you in trouble. But your uncle really wants to know how you're doing, and now I know he has reason to be concerned. Look, I don't have to go in your house or anything; we can talk outside—no, I guess not, because people would see. I know: your bike! I can maybe fix it. I know about bikes."
"Flat tire," Esta said. "Keeps leaking air. Overnight, or in the day."
"I know something that'll stop that," Colene said eagerly. "Tire sealant. I can get it at a hardware store. Is there one near here?"
"No."
So much for that. But Colene refused to be balked, now that she was making progress. She looked around.
Sure enough, there was Slick's car parked around the corner. He was watching.
She beckoned to him. Meanwhile, to Esta: "Pretend you don't see anything."
The car glided up. The window rolled down halfway. "Bike tire sealant," Colene said. "One package. We'll wait."
The car glided away. Esta's eyes were round. "That was—"
"Remember, court order," Colene said. "You didn't see anyone."
The girl was impressed. "You really are from—"
"A friend," Colene finished. "Let's just walk slowly. No one'll care if you have company one day." She realized that this was a good break; it verified her authority.
"Oh, God, I wish—" Esta started, but didn't continue.
"I don't know if I can help," Colene said. "But tell me. I've got a notion what it's all about." For surely Slick's worry had substance, and this girl wanted to die.
But Esta was silent. Colene saw the fear in her. She didn't dare talk to any stranger about it, however well connected that stranger might be. This was understandable.
"Let's do this," Colene said. "Let's just walk around this block, waiting for that tire sealant to get here, and I'll talk and you listen. Okay?"
Esta didn't answer, but she did turn the corner when Colene did, walking down the block instead of crossing the street. She was listening.
"I'll tell you about Vincent," Colene said. "He's one of my favorites, for all the wrong reasons. He was the son of a pastor, and he was sort of restless and moody, so he didn't succeed in anything. He was a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners. All he did was get more depressed. So at age twenty-seven he tried painting. He figured he wouldn't live many more years, so he might as well do what he could while he could.
'The truth is, he wasn
't much. His first paintings were dark and somber and maybe son of crude. He was trying to express the misery of the poor miners he had seen. But he kept plugging away, though no one cared, and he turned out a lot of stuff, something like sixteen hundred sketches and paintings in ten years. But he seemed pretty crazy to the neighbors, and nobody much wanted the paintings. He talked another painter, Paul, into joining him for a while, but then he got mad at Paul and threatened him with a razor. Then he cut off his own ear. No question about it: he was mad, and they put him in a madhouse for a year. When he got out, he painted seventy paintings in seventy days, standing out in the hot sun.
"But he was having hallucinations, and he couldn't stand it any longer, so one day he took a gun out to the field. He went behind a pile of manure and shot himself in the chest, maybe figuring that manure was all he was worth. But he messed up again, and didn't make a clean job of it. He staggered back to the house. He smoked his pipe through the night, then got a bad fever, and the next night he said, There is no end to sorrow,' and died. He was thirty-seven."
"There is no end to sorrow," Esta repeated.
Colene glanced at her. The girl was listening, but her expression was inscrutable. Girls were good at hiding their feelings, when they had reason, even from other tormented girls. Colene realized why her own parents hadn't understood her; she had been too good at hiding. She continued with her story.
"But that wasn't the end of it, quite. Later they figured out that maybe he wasn't mad, he just had a bad ear infection. The pain was so bad he cut off part of his ear trying to get at it. And his paintings really weren't bad. In fact some were pretty good. In fact he was later credited with being the 'Archetype of Impressionism,' which was the idea of being emotionally spontaneous in painting. His paintings made it into the best museums, and finally one sold for about eighty million dollars. So maybe poor Vincent Van Gogh should have hung on a little longer. He wasn't the failure he thought he was.
"I came to know him sort of by accident. There was this print on the wall, titled Van Gogh in Aries, and it was like the dabbling of a child. I mean, I'm no painter, but I could do as well as that. I saw the guy had just spread bands of color sideways across the canvas, and then dabbed splotches of color on to represent flowers. He didn't even try to shape them; they were just blobs. He had part of a house to the side, and a tree. I figured he spent maybe ten minutes on the whole thing. But here it was on the wall, so somebody must have liked it. So, well, I'm sort of ornery, and I wanted to know what was in this painting that would make anybody want to hang it on a wall. It's like not getting the joke when everybody else is laughing; maybe the joke's not worth getting, but still your nose is out of joint because you don't like feeling stupid."
"Yes," Esta breathed. She was coming to life.
"So I looked at that painting a lot. And you know, it changed. When I caught a glimpse of it from afar, those splotches really did look like flowers; my imagination filled them in the way I thought they should be, and it was better than meticulous detail would have been. And I saw that what I had figured was a supernatural red ocean beyond a white beach with a blanket on it was really the roof of a house, and the beach was the wall with windows. What had looked like a sailboat was a vent in the roof. But I also saw that the tree looked sort of like a monster with a trunk, maybe an extinct elephant. And some of those carelessly scraped lines formed tulips. It was really a very nice garden, and I'd have loved to be there, instead of in my own dingy little life."
"Yes!"
"So I knew I'd misjudged Vincent, and he was a good artist. He just wasn't wasting energy on unnecessary frills; he was going for the essence. Maybe a critic would see only the quickly clumsy brush strokes and the places where bare canvas showed through, but a real person can see the garden and just about smell the flowers. That's the difference between critics and real folk: the critic sees only the hole, while the real person sees the donut.
"But the point is, it was a tragedy that Vincent killed himself. He was a genius in his own peculiar fashion, and no one knew it then, but now they do. I wanted to kill myself, but I hung on just a little longer, and then I got into such a wonderful adventure you wouldn't believe. It would have been a real shame if I hadn't lived for that. And I know your life may not stem like much now, but—"
"I'm not suicidal," Esta said.
"Because you just never can tell what's around the corner, and—" Colene paused. "What?"
"Well, I've thought of it, but I don't want to die, really. I just wish—" She shrugged.
They had completed their circuit of the block, and now the car was gliding up. A hand extended from the window, holding a package. Colene took the package, and the car went on without stopping.
"Let's go fix your bike," Colene said. She realized that she had blundered, going on an assumption. Esta showed all the signs of being severely troubled, but there were other ways to be troubled.
"But maybe the way Vincent thought he was mad, when it was in his ear, I'm like that," Esta said. "I guess it really hurt in there."
"I guess it did," Colene agreed. "I had a pinched nerve once, and it laid me up for three days. If he had something like that in his head, maybe he was hearing things and hurting and getting dizzy, and it was all just that bum nerve in his ear. If it could have been treated, he would have been all right. But they didn't know about that sort of thing, so they just called him mad. Maybe he wasn't suicidal either, but there just wasn't any other way to get away from it."
"Yes. There is no end to sorrow." It was evident that she related well to that thought.
At least she was responsive now. The story about Van Gogh might have been misplaced, but it had evoked several reactions and seemed to have broken the ice. Colene chatted about inconsequential things as they completed the distance to the house. It turned out to be an ill-kept place with an un-mowed lawn and peeling paint. Colene knew how it was; her folks both worked, and when they were home they had other—not better, but other—things to do than keep the grounds in order. So they did the minimum to keep up appearances.
The bicycle was in the garage. It was a standard ten-speed model, with a fiat rear tire. That was always a mess, because the derailteur got in the way and it was hard to take off, and the adjustments were always out of whack in little invisible but critical ways when it got put back together.
Colene turned it over and spun the wheel. There was no visible damage. "This will fix it," she said. "I just have to take out the valve core, here. Do you have a tool?"
"A what?"
Evidently not. "Then tweezers will do it." The girl found tweezers, and Colene used them to twist the core out of the valve. Then she shook the bottle of sealant, and opened it, and squeezed its thick yellow juice into the tube via the valve. She screwed the core back into the valve and spun the wheel around. "See, this gunk clogs up the pinprick hole, and presto, no leak. It's like magic. Got a tire pump?"
Esta didn't answer. Colene looked at her, and caught a look of horror on her face. What was there about fixing a tire that bothered her? "Got a tire pump?" she repeated.
Esta found one. It was inefficient, but they took turns pumping until the tire was firm. It did hold air now. "And it shouldn't go flat overnight," Colene said. "Mine didn't. It's the easiest leak to fix, and it won't puncture again soon, unless it's really bad."
"It went down in half an hour," Esta said. "I barely made it home from school." She seemed to have recovered from her horror of the tire repair.
"Well, then, you can try it now, and if it's still solid after half an hour, you'll know. You have time?"
"He doesn't get home until five-thirty," Esta said. There was a tightness about her that Colene picked up on. That would be the stepfather, and it was evident that the girl didn't like him.
"Okay, let's try it," Colene said. She wanted the girl to see that the bike really was fixed, because that would indicate that Colene knew how to fix things. Then maybe Esta would tell her what was going on with that stepf
ather. Maybe it was just firm discipline, which nobody liked. But Colene feared that it was more than that, because of the girl's repressed state and weird reactions. Slick wouldn't have been concerned otherwise. Slick thought that maybe someone needed killing, and he just might know, because that was his business. So the job wasn't done yet.
They wheeled the bike out to the street, and Esta got on and rode. For the first time the girl seemed other than hangdog; the breeze of motion tugged her reddish hair out a little and her green dress too. She almost had a little sex appeal as her thighs showed. A couple years' development and competent makeup might do a lot for her. But first she would need a sizable attitude transplant. The way a girl acted, the way she felt about herself had a lot to do with how she looked. A homely face wasn't necessarily a liability.
"It's holding," Esta called, pleased.
"Well, it's too soon to tell. But it should be okay."
They took the bike back to the garage. "Look," Colene said. "Your Uncle Slick is worried about you. He thinks you're suicidal, and since I'm suicidal, he figured I might be able to talk to you. I guess we missed on that. But I can tell that something's bothering you, and I'd sure like to know what."
Esta remained guarded. "Why are you suicidal?"
Would candor bring forth candor? It was worth a try. "I think I'm just a depressive type. But it got worse once I hit puberty. Maybe the hormones—I don't know. But what happened to me didn't help."
"What happened to you?" This was good; the girl was showing interest.
"I got raped," Colene said flatly. "It was supposed to be a party, but I was the only girl there, and these four guys—I had some of their drinks, and I didn't know how to handle it, so I was pretty dizzy drunk, and they just did it, all four of them. I thought I'd never get the filth-feeling out of me, and I still feel like such a fool. My folks never knew. After that, well, things just sort of progressed."
Now they were sitting on the step leading to the house from the garage, out of sight of the front. It was reasonably cozy. "I heard four men talking, once, about it," Esta said. "I was lying on my bunk in the corner of the room and I guess they thought I was sleeping, but I wasn't. They were friends of him." She didn't identify the last, but it had to be her stepfather. It was as if she couldn't say the man's name.