The Outcasts by Stephen Becker Read Free Book Online Page A

city he had left, and the gray winter he had survived, with snow that was slush even before it touched the asphalt. Remote now; more remote with every mile. Time and space annihilated. What no longer exists has never existed. Here and now only. He slumped lower and shut his eyes again, and sniffed at the warm wind. Soon he was asleep.
    He awoke parched and sweating and saw that the road was no longer flat. They were rising slowly, and the jungle had thinned. Far ahead were patches of treeless upland dotted with white. To the east, the blue flash of a stream. He found the canteen and drank, and offered it to Philips, who also drank. “How long did I sleep?”
    â€œHalf an hour.”
    Morrison concentrated on the white dots. They were probably boulders. There was a good warmth in his chest and along his shoulders, and he could feel the strength in his arms. Philips had good arms. They were black and hairless. Morrison’s were fair and freckled with a curly crop of fine reddish hair.
    â€œPut on a hat now,” Philips said. “We make our own wind and it is deceptive. The sun is dangerous.”
    Morrison fished the jockey cap from his hip pocket. Bright purple, silky in the sun. Of all colors he liked best purples and oranges. A newspaper had once told him that a preference for orange indicated a cheerful personality. A preference for purple indicated a melancholy personality. On the same page were astrological revelations, and he learned that this was a good time to take the wife on a voyage of pleasure. It was the day of his first divorce. Final decree. Joanne. Eminent lover recalls early transports. God!
    He wondered again what life this country bred, and when he would see it. This upland was not a plateau but a range of low hills, not even hills, gentle scallops one after another so that the road had no need to curve but rose gently with them. The palms and broadleaf had thinned at the road’s edge, and wild patches of tawny grass, short and bristly, grew there like sideburns. The sky was lighter but still dazzling, a painter’s yellow sky. In one clearing he saw a white dot much closer, and it was not a boulder but a termites’ hill, pale gray, papery, like a wasps’ nest four feet high and crested. There were hundreds of them.
    Still they rose, and soon the road curved gently, and curved again, and again and again in a soothing alternation. Before them were green hills, with nests of purple shade, and reddish outcroppings, and soon they were rising again. Then he saw the carrion crows, fifteen or twenty of them, high and circling, remote and patient. He had missed them. They were good company.
    At first he saw only one man, just this side of a bend. For three hours he had seen no human being: this was the first. The man was still, leaning on a tamp. He was tall, black, thin, barefoot, in a pair of tattered pants, and weary; he raised the tamp in salute, as if witnessing man’s bondage to tools and to work, as if he ate nor slept nor loved, lived nor died, but only tamped. As they rumbled by, Philips waved, and the man waved back, and Morrison saw that he had lost one eye.
    Then Philips pressed the horn, one long blast, and they were home, sweeping around the last bend. The crew was startled into a Greek immobility, and stood like a frieze in the spanking sunlight: the digger, the chopper, the sifter, the tamper, the pounder, the roller, shovel and basket, pick and barrow, tall men and round, clothed men and naked, hats and caps and one beret and one scarlet fez.
    Then they moved, downed tools and swarmed toward the car, and Morrison saw the roadbed beyond them, the wide swath through trees and grass, still rising pale and dusty, steeper here; and closer he saw three small trailers and a steamshovel and a steamroller and a back-hoe, all off the road and in the shade, and three ancient trucks powdered and gray. And a donkey and chickens and a grinning brown dog. And a blue butterfly