The Genocides

“We won’t be doing away with him. We’ll be leaving him in almost exactly the same place we found him— caught in the trap he meant for you. Besides, we can leave Alice’s body in his way, and he can figure out for himself that the way back is up the shaft he threw her down.”

“Not my half-brother. Not Neil. He’d only get scared if he found her body. As for figuring his way back, you might as well expect him to discover the Pythagorean theorem all by himself. Hell, I’ll bet if you tried to explain that to him, he wouldn’t believe it.”

Blossom, who had been listening to all this rather dazedly, began to shiver, as the tension which her body had sustained so long began to drain away. It was like the time she’d gone swimming in the lake in April; her flesh trembled, yet at the same time she felt strangely rigid. Then her body, naked and taut, was suddenly pressed against Orville’s, and she did not know if he had come to her or she to him. “Oh darling, we’ll go back! We will—after all! Oh, my very own!”

Neil’s voice shrilled in the darkness: “I heard that!”

Though she could hear Neil gallumphing forward, Blossom sustained the kiss desperately. Her fingers tightened into Orville’s arms, grappled in the wiry muscles. Her body strained forward as his tried to pull away. Then a hand closed around her mouth and another around her shoulder and pulled her roughly away from Orville, but she didn’t care. She was still giddy with the high, maenad happiness of those who are reckless in their love.

“I suppose you were giving him some more artificial respiration?” Neil sneered. It was, perhaps, his first authentic joke.

“I was kissing him,” Blossom replied proudly. “We’re in love.”

“I forbid you to kiss him!” Neil screamed. “I forbid you to be in love. I forbid you!”

“Neil, let go of me.” But his hands only shifted to secure a better grip and closed tighter.

“You, you—Jeremiah Orville! I’m going to git you. Yeah, I’ve been on to you right along. You fooled a lot of people, but you never fooled me. I knew what you was up to. I saw the way you looked at Blossom. Well, you ain’t going to get her. What you’re going to get is a bullet in your head.”

“Neil, let go—you’re hurting me.”

“Neil,” Buddy said in a low, reasoning tone, the tone one adopts with frightened animals, “that girl is your sister. You’re talking like he stole your girl. She’s your sister.”

“She is not.”

“What in hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean I don’t care!”

“You filth.”

“Orville, was that you? Why don’t you come here, Orville? I ain’t going to let Blossom go. You’re going to have to come and rescue her. Orville?”

He jerked Blossom’s arms behind her back and circled the slender wrists with his left hand. When she struggled, he twisted her arms up painfully or cuffed her with his free hand. When she seemed pacified, he unsnapped the leather flap of the holster and took out his Python, as one removes jewelry for a giftbox, lovingly. “Come here, Orville, and git what I got for you.”

“Be careful. He does have a gun,” Buddy said. “He has father’s.”

Buddy’s voice came more from the right than Neil had expected. He shifted his weight, but he wasn’t really worried, because he had a gun and they didn’t.

“I know,” Orville said.

A little to the left. The space inside this tuber was long and narrow, too narrow for them to circle around to either side of him.

“I got something for you too, Buddy, if you think you’re going to move in when your buddy’s brains are blown out. I got me an axe.” He chirruped an ugly laugh. “Hey! that’s a joke: Buddy… buddy, get it?”

“Your jokes stink, Neil. If you want to improve your personality, you shouldn’t make jokes.”

“This is just between me and Orville, Buddy. You go away, or… or I’ll chop your head off, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Yeah? With what, with your big front teeth?”

“Buddy,” Orville cautioned, “he may have the axe. I brought it down here with me.” Fortunately no one thought to ask why.

“Neil, let go now. Let go or—or I’ll never speak to you again. If you stop acting this way, we can all go right up and forget this happened.”

“No, you don’t understand, Blossom. You’re not safe yet.” His body leaned forward until his lips were touching her shoulders. They rested there a moment, uncertain what to do. Then his tongue began to lick away the fruit pulp with which her whole body was slimed. She managed not to scream:

“When you’re safe, I’ll let you go, I promise. Then you can be my queen. There’ll be just the two of us and the whole world. We’ll go to Florida, where it never snows, the two of us.” He spoke with unnatural eloquence, for he had stopped thinking too closely about what he said, and the words left his lips uncensored by the faulty mechanisms of consciousness. It was another triumph for the primordial. “We’ll lay on the beach, and you can sing songs while I whistle. But not yet, little lady. Not until you’re safe. Soon.”

Buddy and Orville seemed to have stopped moving forward. All was quiet except for the plops of the ripe fruit. Neil’s blood surged with the raw delight that comes from inducing fear in another animal. They’re afraid of me! he thought. Afraid of my gun! The weight of the pistol in his hand, the way his fingers curved around it, the way one of them pressed against the trigger, afforded him pleasure more richly gratifying than his lips had known touching his sister’s body.

They were afraid of him. They could hear his hard breathing and Blossom’s theatrical whimpering (which she maintained, like a foghorn, just so that they might hear it and gauge their distance), and they hung back. They had too much contempt for Neil to be ready to risk their lives desperately against his. Surely there was some way to trick him—to make him take the gamble.

Perhaps, Buddy reasoned, if he became angry enough, he would do something foolish—squander his single bullet on a noise in the dark or at least loose his grip on Blossom, which must by now be wearying. “Neil,” he whispered, “everybody knows about you. Alice told everyone what you did.”

“Alice is dead,” Neil scoffed.

“Her ghost,” Buddy hissed. “Her ghost is down here looking for you. On account of what you did to her.”

“Ah, that’s a lot of hooey. I don’t believe in no ghosts.”

“And on account of what you did to Father. That was a terrible thing to do, Neil. He must be awful angry with you. He must be looking for you, too. And he won’t need a lamp to find you with.”

“I didn’t do nothing!”

“Father knows better than that. Alice knows better, doesn’t she? We all do. That’s how you got the pistol, Neil. You killed him to get it. Killed your own father. How does it feel to do something like that? Tell us. What did he say at the very last moment?”

“Shut up! shut up! shut up!” When he heard Buddy begin to talk again, he set up the same shrill chant, backing away meanwhile from the voice that seemed to be drawing nearer to him.

Then it was quiet again, and that was worse. Neil began to fill the quiet with his own words: “I didn’t kill him. Why would I want to do that? He loved me more than he loved anybody else, cause I was the one that always stuck by him. I never ran away, no matter how much I wanted to. We were pals, Dad and me. When he died—”

“When you murdered him—”

“That’s right—when I murdered him, he said, ‘Now you’re the leader, Neil.’ And he gave me his gun. ‘That bullet’s for Orville,’ he says. ‘Yes, Dad,’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything you say.’ We were always pals, Dad and me. I had to kill him, you can see that, can’t you? Why, he would have married off Blossom to Orville. He said so. ‘Dad,’ says I, ‘you gotta understand—Orville ain’t one of us!’ Oh, I explained it very careful, but he just lay there and wouldn’t say a thing. He was dead. But nobody else cared. Everybody hated him except me. We were pals, Dad and me. Pals.”

It was evident, to Orville, that Buddy’s strategem was failing of its desired effect. Neil was past the point where he could be shaken. He was over the edge.