The Centaurus

“No, hell,” Caldwell says. “What can you do, Peter? The damage is done. Don’t worry about this old heap of junk. Stay here where it’s warm and you have friends.”

So Peter’s first piece of work in carrying out his mother’s injunction to take care of his father is to watch the suffering man, his coat unbuttoned and too short and his knit bullet cap pulled down over his ears, head out the dark door alone into one more doom.

Joh

“He’s taller,” Peter says curtly. Dedman as a sincere good boy doesn’t interest him. He feels in himself with the coming of night great sweet stores of wickedness ripen. He turns, pivoting on the weight of the five dollars at his hip, and tells Minor triumphantly, “Two hamburgers. No ketchup. And a glass of your watered milk and five nickels for your rigged pinball machine.” He goes back to his booth and relights the Kool he had stubbed out half-smoked. Polar ice thrills his proud throat; he preens on the empty stage of Minor’s place positive that all the eyes in the world are watching. The stretch of necessarily idle time ahead of him, a child’s dream of freedom, so exalts his heart it beats twice as fast and threatens to burst, tinting the dim air rose. Forgive me.

“Darling. Wait?”

“Mm?”

“Isn’t there some better place than your office?”

“No. Not in winter.”

“But we’ve been seen.”

“You’ve been seen.”

“But he knew. I could tell by his face that he knew. He looked as frightened as I felt.”

“Caldwell knows and yet he doesn’t know.”

“But do you trust him?”

“The matter of trust has never come up between us.”

“But now?”

“I trust him.”

“I don’t think you should. Couldn’t we fire him?”

He laughs richly, disconcerting her. She is customarily slow to see her own humor. He says, “You overestimate my omnipotence. This man has been teaching for fifteen years. He has friends. He has tenure.”

“But he really is incompetent, isn’t he?”

It disagrees with him, makes an uncongenial texture, when she turns argumentative and inquisitive in his embrace. The stupidity of women has a wonderfully fresh power to disappoint him.

“Is he? Competence is not so easy to define. He stays in the room with them, which is the most important thing. Furthermore, he’s faithful to me. He’s faithful.”

“Why are you sticking up for him? He could destroy us both now.”

He laughs again. “Come, come, my little bird. Human beings are harder to destroy than that.” Though her turns of anxiety are sometimes disagreeable, her physical presence profoundly relaxes him, and in his condition of i

She becomes vehement and angular in his arms. “I don’t like that man. I don’t like his smirky childish look.”

“His face makes you feel guilty.”

This surprising remark turns her inquisitiveness tender. “Should we feel guilty?” The question is actually shy.

“Absolutely. Afterwards.”

This makes her smile, and her smiling makes her mouth soft, and in kissing her he feels he is coming at last to a small sip after an interminable thirst. That the kissing does not quench the thirst, but quickens it, so that each kiss demands a more intense successor and involves him thereby in a vortex of mounting and widening appetite-that such is the case does not seem to him a cruel but, rather, a typically generous and compelling providence of Nature.

A tree of pain takes root in his jaw. Wait, wait! Ke

“There.” Ke

“Spit,” the dentist says.

Obediently Caldwell bends his face to the yellow basin, and a gush of blood joins the filmy swirl of clear water spi

“It’s a shame,” Ke

“That’s the story of my life,” Caldwell says. “Big feet, weak head.” His tongue in enunciating encounters a bubbly softness. He spits again. Strange to say, he finds the sight of his blood cheering.

With a steel tool Ke

“Only when I noticed it.”

On the radio, the a

Doc: “We gotta get out of here! The Princess is waiting!”

Cheepy cheep. Birrup, birrrooo.

Ke