“No, I’ve tried that, it’s no good. The pine needles are too slippery and we’d be hours late getting back.” Couts shrugged his great shoulders and we went on by the path, tediously pushing against the increasing heat. Gnats circled our heads and the dim clonk of cowbells came to us, sometimes ahead and sometimes from below.
“I don’t know about you,” I said after a while, “but I’m bloody thirsty. There’s a waterfall.”
“All right, lead the way.”
We clambered through stunted saplings and orange tiger-lilies, our movements impeded by the difficult footing. Ahead was the impoverished splashing of a little water dropping a great distance. Behind me Couts’s heavy breathing came suddenly close; his hand gripped on my shoulder. I whirled.
“You were right about the pine-needles,” Couts said. “Even this is... the change of tempo... I’m too heavy, I expect.”
Yes, I thought, but quick, quick as a Kodiak bear.
We came to the waterfall almost at the top of its uneven and headlong staircase. Under our feet the ground sloped, soapy with pine-needles and rotted toadstools. Flecks of dead leaves paused at the brink of the fall before swooping out of sight.
We squatted exactly and carefully side by side a yard apart, neither looking at the other.
“We may as well drink,” I said. “Put our cupped hands in the water, you know.”
His weight, his speed, his strength, I thought. I must find a way of countering them... At every instant I knew that he was aware of me, of our surroundings, and of our mutual intention.
As I reached out with my two hands to the water I tightened my foothold. At the undetailed fringe of my vision I saw where he would have to stand when he came forward. But Couts merely stooped and plucked at the ground. As I turned, he held out a boulder, brown and damp on one side with earth. His face was pink, perhaps with the exertion.
“Let’s throw this down, it’ll make a capital rattle!” I stepped quickly to one side as he hurled it at the rock-shelf over which the water folded. The stone split in two and was lost in the froth. “I think I won’t drink any water now,” Couts said. “I think fat men drink too much water, anyway. I’ll wait till we get to the last spring up the path.”
I looked at myself in an imaginary mirror; not as big, not as strong and as fast as Couts. But I was less afraid. I had my plan.
The noise of gnats became louder as we left the water sounds behind us. We came out into the hard bright path.
“Twelve o’clock. We’d better shove on,” Couts said.
The path at last spread itself out and was lost in short harsh grass. Here behind the rounded crest — for one must approach from the rear or be stopped by a precipitous wall of rock — the way was clear.
Toward us was coming a figure, hard to make out at first.
“Forestry man, isn’t he?” said Couts.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Wonder what he’s lugging.”
He came striding downhill toward us, a lumpy dark man in the foresters’ uniform, carrying a metal case. He nodded to us as he passed.
We continued to climb. In the broad air I found I could hear every scrape of grit under our feet now, every twist of cloth as Couts struggled up behind me... (No one can see us. Does he imagine he can kill me here? Is it possible he doesn’t know that I can hear his every movement, that I can run downhill faster... faster... until he falls, tripped by his own strength and weight?)
We reached the top of the mountain, a small plateau, less than a dance-floor. We smiled at each other, not falsely.
“We must touch the tripod,” said Couts ceremoniously, “to show we got to the top.”
We walked over to the iron tripod which marks the summit of most Swiss mountains. I touched it and felt wet paint.
“That forester. He must have just painted it.” I glanced foolishly at the black paint on my hands and tried to wipe it off on the grass.
“Aren’t you thirsty?” I said.
“I am, rather, but I must try and get rid of some of this.” He pointed to his fat. “I’ll walk about.”
I went over to the sharp edge, where our dance-floor dropped away into sudden overwhelming air. I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the miniscule quilt of fields crossed by the accident of roads and the strong line of the river. A dot was our village, and a piece of white confetti beyond was our hotel.
Behind me I suddenly heard nothing.
I counted my own heartbeats, knowing his terrible speed, and then I ducked. Rather I fell, collapsed on my side, and Couts blurted over me with frog eyes and his huge hands outstretched. There was no sound of his falling. I only saw for one dreadful moment, his back with the handprints I had made the night before. I looked at my paint-stained hands, the newly painted tripod, and I knew that he had won after all.
Mom Sheds a Tear
by James Yaffe
“The pitter-putter of little feet,” Mom said, managing to sigh sentimentally and point her finger at me accusingly, both at the same time. “It’s one of the chief pleasures in life. I don’t know what’s the matter with you and Shirley, that you’re not interested in this pleasure.”
I smiled a little sheepishly, as I always do when Mom, in her sharp disconcerting way, brings up this subject. “Shirley and I are very anxious to have kids,” I said. “As soon as I get my raise, and we can afford the down payment on a house in the suburbs —”
“Down payments! Raises!” Mom gave an angry toss of her head. “Young people nowadays, sometimes I think they got check books where their feelings should be. Believe me, Davie, if your Papa and me worried our heads over down payments when we was your age, believe me you wouldn’t be sitting here eating this pot roast right now.”
It was Friday night. The next day was my day off from the Homicide Squad, so of course I was having my weekly dinner up in the Bronx with Mom. My wife Shirley wasn’t with me tonight, though. She was out in Chicago for a week, visiting her folks. And as usual, Mom felt that Shirley’s absence entitled her to get terribly personal — downright embarrassing, in fact — about my married life.
“Besides, Mom,” I said, trying to turn the conversation into a joke, “aren’t you the one who’s always telling me that children are more trouble than they’re worth? You know your favorite saying — ‘They break your furniture when they’re babies, and they break your heart when they grow up.’ ”
“Who’s denying it?” Mom snapped back at me. “And without such heartbreaks what would life be?”
“I wonder if you’d feel like that,” I said, “if you were Agnes Fisher.”
“Agnes Fisher? I don’t know her. There’s a Sadie Fishbaum on the third floor—”
“Agnes Fisher is involved in a case I started on yesterday. She’s a widow, and she has a little boy five years old named Kenneth.”
“And what’s the matter with him, this little Kenny Fisher?”
“Nothing that we’ll ever be able to prove. But all the indications are that little five-year-old Kenneth Fisher is a murderer.”
Mom lowered her fork and glared at me. For a long time she glared, so hard that I had to turn my eyes away guiltily, even though I had no idea what I was feeling guilty about. Finally she gave a long sarcastic sigh: “It’s finally happened. Haven’t I been predicting it for years? Associating all the time with dope fiends and homopathic maniacs and drunk drivers, it finally went to your head. It only goes to show, when you had a chance to go into the shirt business with your Uncle Simon, why didn’t you listen to your mother?”