In the end Malenfant was left alone with Blanche.
She skewered him with her gaze. “You wish you were anywhere but here, don’t you?”
“Either that or I had another beer.”
She laughed, clambered stiffly out of her chair, and, somewhat to his surprise, brought him a fresh can.
“I know you try,” she said. “But you never really had much time for religion, did you? To you we’re all just ants on a log, aren’t we? I heard you say that on some “cast or other.”
He winced at the over-familiar words. “I think my wisdom has been spread a little thin recently.”
She leaned forward. “Why are you going to the Red Moon? Is it really to find my daughter — or just vainglory? To prove you’re not too old? I know what you flyboys are like. I know what really drives you. You have nobody here, do you? Nobody but Emma. So it’s easy for you to leave.”
“That’s what the Vice-President thinks.”
“Don’t name-drop with me. What do you say?”
“Blanche, I’m going up there for Emma. I really and truly am.”
With sudden, savage intensity, she leaned forward and grabbed his hand. “Why?”
“Blanche, I don’t—”
“You destroyed her. You started doing that from the moment you set your sights on her. I remember what you used to say. You bake the cakes, I’ll fly the planes. From the moment she met you, she had to start making sacrifices. It was the whole logic of your relationship. And in the end, you fulfilled that logic. You killed her. And now you want to kill yourself to get away from the guilt. Look me in the eyes, damn it, and deny that’s true.”
For about the first time since it happened, he thought back to those final moments in the T-38, the clamour in that sun-drenched sky. He remembered the instant when he might have regained control, his sense of exhilaration as that huge disastrous Wheel approached.
He couldn’t find words. Her rheumy eyes were like searchlights.
“I don’t know, Blanche,” he said honestly. “Maybe it’s for me. Without her, I’m lonely. That’s all.”
She snorted contempt. “Every human being I know is lonely. I don’t know why, but it’s so. Children are consolation. You never let Emma have children, did you?”
“It was more complicated than that.”
“Religion is comfort for the loneliness. But you rejected that too, because we’re just ants on a log.”
“Blanche — I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said more softly. Then she rested her hand on his head, and he bowed. “Don’t say you’re sorry. Just bring her back,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Where do you think she is now? What do you think she is going through?”
“I don’t know,” he said, honestly.
Shadow:
Relations among the men worsened. Every day there were increasingly savage and unpredictable fights, and many of the women and infants, not just Shadow, suffered punches and kicks and bites as a consequence.
One day it all came to a head.
Big Boss was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his back to a small clearing, working assiduously at a cluster of nut-palm fruit. Shadow was in shade at the edge of the clearing, half-hidden as had become her custom.
Without warning Squat stalked into the clearing. All his hair stood on end, doubling his apparent bulk. He leaped up and grabbed branches, ripping them off the trees, shaking them and throwing them down before him. He picked up rocks and hurled them this way and that. His silence was eerie, but his lips were pursed tightly together, pulling his face into a harsh frown, his eyes fixed on Big Boss.
Big Boss ignored him. He kept on plucking at the fruit in his lap. Squat, and the other men, had made such displays before, and nothing had resulted.
But now Little Boss suddenly broke from the cover of the trees. Without warning or apparent provocation, he hurled himself on Big Boss.
Big Boss roared and faced his attacker, hair bristling. But Squat screeched and joined in. The three of them dissolved into a blur of nailing fists and thrashing limbs.
All around the clearing, other men ran to see what was happening. They circled the battlers, hooting and crying — but not one of them rushed to the aid of Big Boss.
Big Boss broke away. His eyes were round and white, and blood leaked over the side of his head, where one ear had been bitten so savagely it dangled by a thread of gristle. He ran towards the nearest tree, and tried to clamber into it. But he was limping, and Squat and Little Boss easily caught him. They pulled him back and hurled him to the ground, and punched and kicked and bit him. Squat began to jump on Big Boss’s back, slamming his heels again and again into ribs and spine.
Now more of the men joined in, screaming and yelling. Though they concentrated their attentions on Big Boss, they squabbled and fought amongst themselves, vying for their places in the new order.
At last Little Boss climbed up on Big Boss’s back. He stood straight and roared. His mouth was bloody. He grabbed one of Big Boss’s arms, as if Big Boss were no more than a monkey he had caught in the forest. Little Boss twisted the arm this way and that, and Shadow heard bones snap, muscle tear.
The women and children huddled together beneath the trees, clutching each other or grooming tensely, shrinking from the aggression.
The men ran off into the forest, tense and excited, hair bristling. Big Boss lay where he had fallen, a bloody heap on the ground.
Slowly the women emerged from their sheltered places. Cautiously they fed and groomed each other and their children. None of them went near the fallen Big Boss — none save an over-inquisitive child, who was hastily retrieved by his mother.
Only Shadow stayed in her pool of shade.
The day wore away. The shadows lengthened.
Big Boss raised his head, then let it fall flat again.
Then he got one arm under his body, and pushed himself upright. The other arm dangled. His flesh was ripped open, by teeth or chipped cobbles, so that flaps hung down from patches of gleaming gristle, and his skin was split by great gouges, crusted with dirt and half-dried blood. He had lost one ear completely, and one eye was a pit of blood from which a pale fluid leaked.
He opened his mouth. Spittle and blood looped between smashed teeth, and he moaned loudly.
The women and children ignored him.
Big Boss pulled his legs beneath him. He began to crawl towards the trees, one leg dragging, one arm dangling. Twice he fell flat. Twice he got himself up again, and continued to drag himself forward. Where he had been lying, the blood had soaked into the ground, leaving the dirt purple. And where he passed, he left a trail of sticky blood and spit and snot, like some huge snail.
When he got to the base of the tree, he twisted so he got his back against the bark of the trunk, and slumped back.
He was still for a long time. The sun, intermittently obscured by cloud, slid across the sky. Shadow thought Big Boss was dead.
But then he began to move again. Using the tree as a support, he pushed himself upright. He reached up with his less damaged arm to grab a low branch. He growled with pain. He got his chest over the branch, and felt forward, gasping. For a long time he was still once more, clinging to the branch. Then he carried on, hauling himself grimly from branch to branch, higher into the tree.
At last he reached a high point. Clinging to the tapering trunk with his legs, he pulled down branches with grim determination. Surrounded by clusters of yellow fruit, he slumped flat in this nest, the last he would ever make.
The women on the ground called, their panting hoots summoning each other and their children. The women climbed into the trees, infants clinging to their mothers” backs or chests. Shadow followed, keeping her distance. Soon she could see the women in their nests, clumpy shadows high in the trees, silhouetted against the deepening pink of the sky; here and there a limb stretched out, fingers working at a pelt or stroking a face.