A madman is curiously deadly. When the strictures and restraints of civilization and conscience are wiped away, the animal can move with ancient shrewdness. Man is a predator.
He stood downhill from me, slowly swinging the stone ball from side to side at the end of the stick planning what to do next. Stocky little storekeeper in blue beret and new goatee, and just as calmly intent on killing me as a Bengal tiger would have been.
I squatted by my wall and picked up a rock the size of my head and held it in both hands and arched it at him, like taking a shot from the foul line. He squinted up at it and stepped to his right. It hit, bounced and rolled down through coarse grass and brush toward the temple level below. All the ruins were silent. For perhaps the first time in my life I desperately wanted to see a chattering flock of tourists, festooned with Instamatics, leaving a spoor of yellow boxes.
I knew that if I didn’t come up with something workable, fat Wally would, and I wouldn’t like it. Misdirection is the name of the game. I couldn’t point behind him and yell, “Hey! Tourist!” and hope to bounce a rock off his skull as he turned and stared.
But he had looked up at the big rock, hadn’t he? Indeed he had. So I palmed a couple of good small ones, holding them in place against my palm with ring fingers and little fingers, and picked up another big melon of a rock and gave it as much height and distance as I could, and as he looked up at it, I let fly with the first small stone. He glimpsed my movement and looked at me, moving swiftly to his left along the slope. He ducked away from the first small one, had to check the one in the air again to be sure he was out from under it, and moved forward, taking the second small rock high on the forehead and going ass over teacup into a backward somersault as I came bounding down the slope. He peered up at me, on hands and knees, a bright rush of blood on his face. He had lost the ancient fake weapon and the blue beret and his glasses. But he reached and grabbed the weapon and took a blind full-arm swing and got me on the outside of the left thigh, just below the hip bone. It felt to me as if he had smashed the hip. I fell and rolled and got up, surprised to be able to get up. He wiped blood out of his eye and started toward me and I made ready for him, telling myself I would catch that damned rock, catch it in my teeth if I had to, and take it away from him and feed it to him. He hesitated and ran down the slope. I saw him fall and roll and get up and disappear into the maze of walls behind the temple faCade. I was trembling with reaction. I picked up the sweaty beret and the eyeglasses with the tilt-shades attached, and saw that one lens was shattered.
I went hobbling on my broken, ground-glass hip to the opened tombs and heard myself saying, “Sorry Sorry, Meyer. Sorry.”
I got him by the belt and pulled him out of the tomb. He seemed very heavy. I rolled him onto his back. He was very loose and sloppy. He had a lump over his ear the size of half an apple. His cheeks and forehead were scratched and torn from rolling down the slope. I put my ear against his chest, and the mighty old heart of Meyer said, reassuringly, “Whup tump, whup tump, whup tump.”
So I thumbed an eyelid up, and a blank sightless, and bright blue eye stared out, stared through and beyond me.
The other one opened, unaided, and slowly the focus came back from ten thousand miles in space, down through all the layers with fancy names, and stared at me. Tongue came out and licked dusty lips. Rusty voice said, “So? So hello.”
“Are you dying?”
“The point is debatable. What happened? I saw McLeen way up on the hill. We started up. Here I am. I fell?”
“You got hit on the head with a rock.”
A slow hand came up and the fingers touched the lump. “This is part of my head? Way out there?”
“Do you want to sit up?”
“I would like to think about it. We economists have very thick skulls. It is a characteristic. Everybody knows that. But we are happy people with a great sense of rhythm.”
“You are talking a lot.”
“It keeps my mind off my head. So let’s try this sitting up part.”
He sat up and spent a little time moaning. And then he stood up, and we started down the slope, very slowly.
“Why are you limping?” he asked.
“I, too, got hit with a rock.”
“What do you have there in your hand?”
“A blue beret and a pair of broken glasses. Shut up, Meyer.”
“Ask a stupid question and you get…”
“Shut up, Meyer.”
“Sit up, Meyer. Stand up, Meyer. Walk, Meyer. Shut up, Meyer.”
I had been listening for the snoring sound of the Honda heading down the hill, and I hadn’t heard it yet. It made me thoughtful. So I made Meyer sit on a short, wide, restored wall, and hold the beret and glasses. I went over to the side and climbed up onto a high wall. I could see a portion of the parking lot. I could see the Falcon and the cycle. I looked around. I could see the pattern of the maze, but not down into the rooms and corridors.
I dropped down from the wall, and managed not to scream out loud. Just silently, in the brain. I listened for a long time. I moved a few feet and listened again.
With an explosive grunt of effort he came scuttling out of a doorway, blinking and swinging, forgetting that part about the wrist action, and forgetting how tall I am. I stepped inside the arc, so well inside it that the lethal rock which I had expected might wrap around me and splinter a rib, smacked the wall behind me instead. I got one paw on the stick and the flat of my other hand against his chest, pushed and yanked and took away the toy. He ran backward, kept his balance, turned, and kept running. I went after him with no hope of catching him-not on a leg that felt as if I were wearing it backwards-but to see where he was headed, and if there was anyone interested in stopping him.
He came out onto the wide stone plaza that ran along the front of the temple faqade. By the time I got to the end of the unroofed corridor and made the turn, he was scooting along toward the nearest set of big steep stone stairs leading down to the lower courtyard level, to the same level as the ball court a hundred yards away.
As I came hitching and galumphing along, I saw him make his turn and slow to go down the stone steps. He tried to take the steps in stride, but he had not slowed quite enough, probably because perceptions of depth and distance were flawed without the thick lenses. So momentum carried him to the outside edge of the stairs. There was no railing. And he flailed his arms to recover balance but momentum took him over, leaning further and further, his feet trying to stay on the edge of the steep stone.
He dropped out of my sight. I heard a single cry which could have been “Oh!” and which could have been “No!” The sound ended with a whacking, dusty thud. I went down the steps and around and back to where he lay, half in white sunlight, half in black shadow. He lay on his right side in white dust, using a rock for a pillow, left arm curled around the pillow.
I went down onto one knee with some difficulty, and as I placed the pads of three fingers against the big artery in the side of his throat, I could see into his half-open mouth, see the neat gleam of a reasonably new filling. The dentist probably belonged to the same luncheon clubs and called him Wally, told him jokes and told him when to spit. The artery throbbed once, and in about three seconds throbbed again with half the vigor, and then did not ever move again. Escaping air rattled in his throat. All my life I had heard about the death rattle. Thought it was a myth. Now it was confirmed. A classic sample. A collector’s item.