The Centaur by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

effortful concentration. But the marvellous bubble collapsed, coating her chin with a strip of pink scum.
    “Insects appeared and diversified; some dragonflies had thirty-inch wings. The world grew cold again. Some amphibians went back to the sea; others began to lay their eggs on land. These were reptiles, and for two hours, from nine o’clock to eleven o’clock, as the earth grew warm again, they dominated life. Fifty-foot plesiosaurs roamed the sea, pterosaurs flapped through the air like broken umbrellas. On land, gigantic morons made the earth shake.” By prearranged signal all of the boys in the room began to hum. No one’s mouth moved; their eyes shifted here and there innocently; but the air was filled with a hovering honey of insolence. Caldwell could only swim on. “The brontosaurus had a thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of frilled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything—dead meat, living meat, old bones—”
    The first bell rang. The monitors stampeded out of the class; one of them stepped on the anemone in the aisle and the flower shrilly whimpered. Two boys bumped in the doorway and, thrashing, stabbed each other with pencils. Their teeth gnashed; phlegm poured through their nostrils. Somehow Zimmerman had slipped Iris Osgood’s blouse and bra off and her breasts showed above her desk like two calm edible moons rising side by side.
    “Two minutes left,” Caldwell shouted. His voice had grown higher in pitch, as if a peg in his head were being turned. “Keep your seats. We’ll have to take up the extinct mammalsand the ice ages next period. To make a long story short, one hour ago, spreading in the wake of the flowering plants and the grasses, our faithful friends the mammals took over the Earth, and one minute ago,
one minute ago—
”
    Deifendorf had pulled the Davis girl out into the aisle and she was giggling and struggling in his long hair-speckled arms.
    “—one minute ago,” Caldwell called the third time, and a handful of BBs was flung into his face. He winced and put up his right hand as a shield and thanked God his eyes hadn’t been hit. You won’t be given another pair.. His stomach griped sympathetically with his leg. “—evolved from a tiny tree shrew, his depth-perceptive binocular vision, thumb-opposed grasping hands, and highly elaborated cerebral cortex developed in response to the special conditions of arboreal existence, evolved from a tiny tree shrew such as are presently found in Java—”
    The girl’s mussed skirt was up around her waist. She was bent face down over the desk and Deifendorf’s hooves shuffled in agitation in the narrow aisle. From his sleepy careful grin he was covering her; the whole room smelled like a stable: Caldwell saw red. He picked the shining arrow-shaft from the top of his desk, strode forward through the sickening confusion of books being slammed shut, and once, twice, whipped,
whipped
the bastard beast’s bare back.
You broke my grille
. Two white stripes glowed across the meat of Deifendorf’s shoulders. As Caldwell in horror watched, these stripes slowly blushed. There would be welts. The couple fell apart like a broken blossom. Deifendorf looked up with small brown eyes shelled in tears; the girl with pointed composure refluffed her hair. Zimmerman’s hand scribbled furiously in the corner of Caldwell’s eye.
    The teacher, stunned, returned to the front of the class. Jesus, he hadn’t meant to hit the kid so hard. He placed the steel shaft in the chalk trough. He turned, and closed his eyes, and the pain unfolded its wet wings in the red darkness. He opened his mouth; his very blood loathed the story he had told. “One minute ago, flint-chipping, fire-kindling, death-foreseeing, a tragic animal appeared—” The buzzer rasped; halls rumbled throughout the vast building;