Free The Outcasts by Stephen Becker Page A

poured, set, and long dry, would be trucked out. And they with their magical crane would swing them out and drop, sidle, edge them into place, slotting and bolting and plating, like tots with a kiddie konstruction kit except that someone, or more, would doubtless die. On a high bridge someone, or more, always did.
    And the office claimed him. The office and Isaacson, Utu and Vieira-Souza. And cost sheets (God spare me cost sheets!) and letters from Devoe (“longer reports, please, and considerably more detail. I have not asked before because I know how busy you must be,” and so on and so forth). And that bloody hotel. Bloody modern and bloody cool and bloody comfortable. But he could not wait to be out of it. Tuesday evenings he learned that a Land-Rover will do seventy quite nicely, thank you. So skidded into camp with the last light as if fleeing the law; which in a way he was. Ramesh would shout for Jacob then, who served his dinner. He brought back a case of bottled beer, always, on the house, and soon they had built up a good reserve.
    Oh he liked those nights. Soft earth and warm air and stars shivering like cold fire. Some nights a monstrous platinum moon, and nothing between you and it. “Of course, an untouchable,” Ramesh said. “Outcaste. Bombay was one great sore, what I remember of it. Oh my God yes. I remember no home. No parent. Only hiding on a dhow, and I did not know where it would go. England perhaps. Well. It went to Aden. If I had been older they would simply have thrown me in. But they laughed, and kept me, and”—he sighed here and nodded, aging suddenly, his rich lips drooping as though memory or wisdom had driven him slack—“and abused me somewhat. After that there was nothing more to learn, so at Aden I ran away and looked for a larger ship. I found one. I have seen all the continents now, except the South Pole.”
    â€œNothing more to learn?”
    â€œNot really.”
    Morrison was impressed. Imagine having nothing more to learn.
    One night he talked too. What do men talk of but themselves? Tossing in a memory, a fact, a small lie. Weaving knots of circumstance to hold lives together: in this place, on this night, there were this Hindu and this Negro and this Irishman, and the Irishman said … is that possible? That life is a series of music-hall stories? There were these ten millon Russians and they all got killed. There were these two cities in Japan and then there were not. Once upon a time there was this naked man and woman in a garden. Savages. And if those knots were not tied, was a memory real? If a tree fell and there was no one to hear it fall, would it fall on Morrison? Yes! “A man told me once that I would never know what was real because I was white and had never starved. But I bet neither of you has ever been horsewhipped. I have.” Philips and Ramesh stirred at this reversal, this disorder of nature. “In nineteen-forty,” Morrison said. “I got caught with a girl, in a barn, and her father whipped us. Both of us. Not a horsewhip really. Just a little buggy whip. But it hurt like hell. Finally”—and once more he swallowed down the bitter memory—“I just ran,” swallowed it down for the thousandth time, the same ache, the same shame, the same dumb, blind rage at himself, at her, at the old man, at a universe that rewarded love with lashes. “Small towns,” he said. “Everybody knew about it. My father thought it was very funny. He was a housepainter who got drunk every Saturday night. Peaceful man. My mother didn’t think it was so funny. She died the next year. Just got tired of things and died. By then I was gone. Not exactly whipped out of town, but I didn’t seem to have much to say to anybody.”
    â€œFoolish people,” Philips said. “Whipping children for that.”
    â€œYes. I wonder sometimes if the whip made scars on her,” with rage and shame