The Outcasts by Stephen Becker Read Free Book Online

brawling.”
    â€œBrawling.” Morrison winced. Worse than a tourist. “All right. Ready in a minute. But drive carefully, please. I am not a well man.”
    â€œYou will be well. As soon as we are out of the city.”
    He meant more than that: it was an incantation, a prophecy, and his low voice and grave face were the voice and face of a pagan priest, who had talked with the sun and the river.
    He had built a good road, poor dead Van Alstyne: left that much behind him, not the ordinary tropical rut, and it would endure. His immortality, as the bridge might be Morrison’s. Beneath them was hard rolled rock, and broken stone, and a layer of crushed rock and stone, and then red earth, clayey and cohesive so that the dust behind them was a thin pink plume and not a gassy billow. Every fifty meters a narrow slash ran obliquely from the gutter to a sump in the brush. That seemed a nicety, and Morrison questioned it. “The rains are of an extraordinary violence,” Philips insisted.
    The jungle, close on either hand, skimmed by at fifty miles an hour. Morrison searched and peered, for what mysteries he could not have said: snakes perhaps, or savages, a sign of flesh or habitation. But there was nothing, only the green that so close was not even lush: beneath the canopy of palm and broadleaf were no tangled lianas or profusion of fronds, only some dry and dusty vines and stunted shrubs, and great hollows of shade. He had expected underbrush, thick and wild and steaming, wild pigs, lizards, monkeys. Later there were slashes in the jungle and he did see a hut, but no smoke, no motion. Only the shadowed green, and the brass-bright sun in a dazzling blue sky, and the road Roman-red, and nothing alive but themselves and the carrion crows. The colors pulsed, and he shut his eyes against them.
    â€œNothing,” Philips said. “But later there will be farms here. Timbering. Stores. Taverns.”
    â€œTaverns. Faugh.”
    â€œFeeling better?”
    â€œA little.”
    â€œWe need those farms,” Philips said. “Goray was saying last night that it was impossible to starve to death here, with the mangoes and cassava and coconuts and so forth. But it is possible to be undernourished with a full belly. We need cattle, and along here will be ranches too. We want to bring in zebus from the Portagee side.”
    â€œMust we talk about food?”
    â€œYes,” Philips said amiably. “When I was in mission school the white children laughed and played all day long; but even before the noonday meal the black children were played out. Exhausted. When you see the men working very slowly, remember that they have had little protein in all their lives.”
    â€œI will. How did you get to mission school?”
    â€œI was an orphan, from God knows where, and was arrested at seven for pilferage. I was stealing eggs from the father’s chickens. He took pity on me and let me stay, and taught me letters. He was unctuous and I hated him. It took me twenty years to learn gratitude.”
    â€œWhere was that?”
    â€œOn the coast, where there is a breeze and where the Europeans live.”
    â€œOh. What are zebus?”
    â€œBrahman cattle, you call them. All we have now are scrub cattle.”
    They were quiet then, as the sun climbed higher. In the solitude Morrison grew anxious—not quite fear, yet not much different—but then the disquiet was laid by the heat, by a lazy abandon, by the shifting colors and the rush of the road. This desolation was at worst neutral. The spirits, if any, would emerge by night, and by then he would have company and a lamp and—the thought was just tolerable now—a drink. And there was beauty here. Nature in masses was always beautiful: seas and forests, glaciers, fields of snow, deserts, cloud-bursts, hurricanes. Man in masses was never beautiful, and he remembered for a moment, but only for a moment, the shrill, writhing northern