Eleven Page 7

  “Are you all right?” the man on the horse next to her asked, and realizing she’d been staring in his direction with what was probably a pretty funny expression, Geraldine said with a quick smile:

  “Oh, perfectly all right, thank you.”

  She put her head up then, her eyes darting to look at this and that as if she’d never been so gay in her life. A young man in a grey suit was waving at her from the other side of the merry-go-round, and she almost waved back, thinking she must know him, but she didn’t. Or maybe he wasn’t even waving at her, but she saw now he was, and she did know him, too. He was a boy she’d known in high school in Montgomery! His name was Franky McSomething, she remembered.

  Now he waved at her again, and she gave a little wave back, timid as if she were merely brushing something out of the air in front of her, and when he smiled wider, she saw the two creases down his lean cheeks and the bright brown eyes not slipping away shyly as they used to do, but looking right back at her. Hadn’t Franky grown up! He clearly wanted to talk to her, and maybe they’d have a soda in the ice-cream parlor and get re-acquainted and maybe like a fairy tale Franky would fall in love with her again. He’d had a crush on her one term, but he’d been such a bashful, watching-from-a-distance sort of boy, nothing had happened. Well, she knew how to put men at their ease now.

  She watched Franky dismount as the horses slowed, and noticed how tall he’d grown and how clean-cut he looked with his collar and tie. She slipped down from her own horse. The platform was making the hollow sound of the roller-skating rink, but slower and slower, and there was a strange moment when she felt suddenly as sad and melancholy as autumn, really as sad as she’d ever felt in her life, so she had to force herself to smile as she stepped down to meet Franky who was holding his hand out for hers.

  “Is your name Ger—Geraldine?” he asked, making her laugh, because he was still as bashful as ever after, all.

  “Yes, and you’re—Franky?”

  He nodded with a smile and led her gently away. “Yes.”

  “Well, how are things back in Montgomery?” she asked.

  “Oh, they’re all right. What’ve you been doing?”

  “Well, I had a job in Mobile for a while. I was in Mobile the time the fleet was in, we always said, but it wasn’t the fleet, just a couple of cruisers and a destroyer stopping for repairs, but it was mighty gay!” She tipped her head back and swung her hand that Franky was holding. Franky had a little scar now on the bridge of his nose, and she thought of the scar on the back of her hand and decided not to ask him about his. Life had left its marks on both of them, she supposed, though they were still so young.

  “Cigarette?”

  “Still as shy as ever, Franky?” she blurted, because she thought his hand shook as he lighted it for her, though her hand was shaking, too.

  Franky smiled. “How about a cold drink, Geraldine?”

  “Why, I’d love one!”

  They stepped up on the open porch of the ice-cream parlor and sat down at one of the tables. Franky stared shyly past her, and she thought he nodded to someone and looked behind her, but it was only the waiter coming. They ordered black and white sodas.

  “Are you living here now?” Franky asked her.

  “No-o, just passing through. But I like it so here,” she hurried to add, “I just might live here. Do you know I realized after I’d come here tonight that I’d been to this park before when I was a little girl? Oh, long before I even knew you!” She laughed. “Are you living here now?”

  “Um-hm,” he replied, still looking so pained and stiff that Geraldine had to smile.

  She said nothing, letting her eyes roll up at the honeysuckle that grew along the porch eaves.

  “You were in—”

  “What?” Geraldine prompted.

  “You were in a little town above New Orleans, weren’t you, Geraldine?”

  He’d even taken the trouble to ask her mother about her! “Why, yes,” she said. She glanced up at a man in a dark suit standing by her elbow. There was another man on her right, between her and the porch rail. She looked at Franky with a bewildered smile.

  Franky said, “These are my friends, Geraldine. You’ll come with us, won’t you?” He stood up.

  “But I didn’t finish my—” The man on her left took her arm. She looked at Franky and saw his mouth close in a straight line she didn’t know at all. The other man took her other arm. Franky wasn’t making a move to help her, wasn’t even looking! “You’re not—you’re not Franky!”

  Franky pulled something from his inside coat pocket and held it toward her.

  LOUISIANA STATE POLICE, Geraldine read on a card in the billfold. She wanted to scream, but her mouth only hung open, limp.

  The man who looked like Franky stood there staring at her, pocketing his billfold. “It’s all right,” he said so softly she could hardly hear. “Your husband isn’t dead. He just asked us to find you.”

  Then her scream came as if it had been waiting just for that. She heard it reach the farthest corners of the park, and though they yanked her with them around the table, she took another breath and let it go again, let it shatter all the leaves and shatter her body, while she stared at the man in the grey suit simply because he wasn’t Franky. Then his face and the lights and the park went out, though she knew as well as she knew she still screamed that her eyes were open under her hands.

  THE QUEST FOR Blank Claveringi

  Avery Clavering, a professor of zoology at a California university, heard of the giant snails of Kuwa in a footnote of a book on molluscs. His sabbatical had been coming up in three months when he read the few lines:

  It is said by Matusas Islands natives that snails even larger than this exist on the uninhabited island of Kuwa, twenty-five miles distant from the Matusas. The Matusans claim that these snails have a shell diameter of twenty feet and that they are man-eating. Dr. Wm J. Stead, now living in the Matusas, visited Kuwa in 1949 without finding any snails at all, but the legend persists.

  The item aroused Professor Clavering’s interest, because he very much wanted to discover some animal, bird, reptile or even mollusc to which he could give his name. Something-or-other Claveringi. The professor was forty-eight. His time, perhaps, was not growing short, but he had achieved no particular renown. The discovery of a new species would win him immortality in his field.

  The Matusas, the professor saw on a map, were three small islands arranged like the points of an isosceles triangle not far from Hawaii. He wrote a letter to Dr. Stead and received the following reply, written on an abominable typewriter, so many words pale, he could scarcely read it:

  April 8th, 19—

  Dear Professor Clavering:

  I have long heard of the giant snails of Kuwa, but before you make a trip of such length, I must tell you that the natives here assure me a group of them went about twenty years ago to Kuwa to exterminate these so-called man-eating snails which they imagined could swim the ocean between Kuwa and the Matusas and do some damage to the latter islands. They claim to have killed off the whole community of them except for one old fellow they could not kill. This is typical of native stories—there’s always one that got away. I haven’t much doubt the snails were no bigger than three feet across and that they were not **** (here a word was illegible, due both to the pale ribbon and a squashed insect). You say you read of my effort in 1949 to find the giant snails. What the footnote did not say is that I have made several trips since to find them. I retired to the Matusas, in fact, for that purpose. I now believe the snails to be mere folklore, a figment of the natives’ imagination. If I were you, I would not waste time or money on an expedition.

  Yours sincerely,

  Wm J. Stead, M.D.

  Professor Clavering had the money and the time. He detected a sourness in Dr. Stead’s letter. Maybe Dr. Stead had just had bad luck. By post, Professor Clavering hired a thirty-foot sail-boat with an auxiliary motor from Hawaii. He wanted to make the trip alone from the Matusas
. Blank Claveringi. Regardless of the size, the snail was apt to be different from any known snail, because of its isolation—if it existed. He planned to go one month ahead of his wife and to join her and their twenty-year-old daughter Wanda in Hawaii for a more orthodox holiday after he had visited Kuwa. A month would give him plenty of time to find the snail, even if there were only one, to take photographs, and make notes.

  It was late June when Professor Clavering, equipped with water tanks, tinned beef, soup and milk, biscuits, writing materials, camera, knife, hatchet and a Winchester .22 which he hardly knew how to use, set forth from one of the Matusas bound for Kuwa. Dr. Stead, who had been his host for a few days, saw him off. Dr. Stead was seventy-five, he said, but he looked older, due perhaps to the ravages of drink and the apparently aimless life he led now. He had not looked for the giant snail in two years, he said.

  “I’ve given the last third of my life to looking for this snail, you might say,” Dr. Stead added. “But that’s man’s fate, I suppose, the pursuit of the non-existent. Well—good luck to you, Professor Clavering!” He waved his old American straw hat as the Samantha left the dock under motor power.

  Professor Clavering had made out to Stead that if he did find snails, he would come back at once, get some natives to accompany him, and return to Kuwa with materials to make crates for the snails. Stead had expressed doubt whether he could persuade any natives to accompany him, if the snail or snails were really large. But then, Dr. Stead had been negative about everything pertaining to Professor Clavering’s quest. Professor Clavering was glad to get away from him.

  After about an hour, Professor Clavering cut the motor and tentatively hoisted some sail. The wind was favourable, but he knew little about sails, and he paid close attention to his compass. At last, Kuwa came into view, a tan hump on a sea of blue. He was quite close before he saw any greenery, and this was only the tops of some trees. Already, he was looking for anything resembling a giant snail, and regretting he had not brought binoculars, but the island was only three miles long and one mile broad. He decided to aim for a small beach. He dropped anchor, two of them, in water so clear he could see the sand under it. He stood for a few minutes on the deck.

  The only life he saw was a few birds in the tops of trees, brightly colored, crested birds, making cries he had never heard before. There was no low-lying vegetation whatsoever, none of the grass and reeds that might have been expected on an island such as this—much like the Matusas in soil color—and this augured well of the presence of snails that might have devoured everything green within their reach. It was only a quarter to two. Professor Clavering ate part of a papaya, two boiled eggs, and brewed coffee on his alcohol burner, as he had had nothing to eat since 6 a.m. Then with his hunting knife and hatchet in the belt of his khaki shorts, and his camera around his neck, he lowered himself into the water. The Samantha carried no rowboat.

  He sank up to his neck, but he could walk on the bottom. He held the camera high. He emerged panting, as he was some twenty pounds overweight. Professor Clavering was to regret every one of those pounds before the day was over, but as he got his breath and looked around him, and felt himself drying off in the warm sunlight, he was happy. He wiped his hatchet and knife with dry sand, then walked inland, alert for the rounded form of a snail’s shell, moving or stationary, anywhere. But as snails were more or less nocturnal, he thought any snails might well be sleeping in some cave or crevice with no idea of emerging until nightfall.

  He decided to cross the island first, then follow the coast to right or left and circle the island. He had not gone a quarter of a mile, when his heart gave a leap. Ten yards before him, he saw three bent saplings with their top leaves chewed off. The young trees were four inches in diameter at their bases. It would have taken a considerable weight to bend them down, something like a hundred pounds. The professor looked on the trees and the ground for the glaze left by snails, but found none. But rain could have washed it away. A snail whose shell was three feet in diameter would not weigh enough to bend such a tree, so Professor Clavering now hoped for something bigger. He pushed on.

  He arrived at the other side of the island. The sea had eaten a notch into the shore, forming a mostly dry gulley of a hundred yards’ length and a depth of thirty feet. The land here was sandy but moist, and there was, he saw, a little vegetation in the form of patchy grass. But here, the lower branches of all the trees had been divested of their leaves, and so long ago that the branches had dried and fallen off. All this bespoke the presence of land snails. Professor Clavering stooped and looked down into the gulley. He saw, just over the edge of his side of the crevice, the pink-tan curve of something that was neither rock nor sand. If it was a snail, it was monstrous. Involuntarily, he took a step backward, scattering pebbles down the gulley.

  The professor ran round the gulley to have a better look. It was a snail, and its shell was about fifteen feet high. He had a view of its left side, the side without the spiral. It resembled a peach-colored sail filled with wind, and the sunlight made nacreous, silvery patches gleam and twinkle as the great thing stirred. The little rain of pebbles had aroused it, the professor realized. If the shell was fifteen or eighteen feet in diameter, he reckoned that the snail’s body or foot would be something like six yards long when extended. Rooted to the spot, the professor stood, thrilled as much by the (as yet) empty phrase Blank Claveringi which throbbed in his head as by the fact he was looking upon something no man had seen before, or at least no scientist. The crate would have to be bigger than he had thought, but the Samantha would be capable of taking it on her forward deck.

  The snail was backing to pull its head from the narrow part of the gulley. The moist body, the color of tea with milk, came into view with the slowness of an enormous snake awakening from slumber. All was silent, except for pebbles dropping from the snail’s underside as it lifted its head, except for the professor’s constrained breathing. The snail’s head, facing inland, rose higher and higher, and its antennae, with which it saw, began to extend. Professor Clavering realized he had disturbed it from its diurnal sleep, and a brief terror caused him to retreat again, sending more pebbles down the slope.

  The snail heard this, and slowly turned its enormous head toward him.

  The professor felt paralysed. A gigantic face regarded him, a face with drooping, scalloped cheeks or lips, with antennae six feet long now, the eyes on the ends of them scrutinizing him at his own level and scarcely ten feet away, with the disdain of a Herculean lorgnette, with the unknown potency of a pair of oversized telescopes. The snail reared so high, it had to arch its antennae to keep him in view. Six yards long? It would be more like eight or ten yards. The snail turned itself to move toward him.

  Still, the professor did not budge. He knew about snails’ teeth, the twenty-odd thousand pairs of them even in a small garden snail, set in comblike structures, the upper front teeth visible, moving up and down constantly just under transparent flesh. A snail of this size, with proportionate teeth, could chew through a tree as quickly as a woodsman’s axe, the professor thought. The snail was advancing up the bank with monumental confidence. He had to stand still for a few seconds simply to admire it. His snail! The professor opened his camera and took a picture, just as the snail was hauling its shell over the edge of the quarry.

  “You are magnificent!” Professor Clavering said in a soft and awestruck voice. Then he took a few steps backward.

  It was pleasant to think he could skip nimbly about, comparatively speaking, observing the snail from all angles, while the snail could only creep toward him at what seemed the rate of one yard in ten seconds. The professor thought to watch the snail for an hour or so, then go back to the Samantha and write some notes. He would sleep aboard the boat, take some more photographs tomorrow morning, then start under engine power back to the Matusas. He trotted for twenty yards, then turned to watch the snail approach.

  The snail travelled with its head lifted three feet above the ground, keepin
g the professor in the focus of its eyes. It was moving faster. Professor Clavering retreated sooner than he intended, and before he could get another picture.

  Now Professor Clavering looked around for a mate of the snail. He was rather glad not to see another snail, but he cautioned himself not to rule out the possibility of a mate. It wouldn’t be pleasant to be cornered by two snails, yet the idea excited him. Impossible to think of a situation in which he could not escape from two slow, lumbering creatures like the—the what? Amygdalus Persica (his mind stuck on peaches, because of the beautiful color of the shell) Carnivora (perhaps) Claveringi. That could be improved upon, the professor thought as he walked backward, watching.

  A little grove of trees gave him an idea. If he stood in the grove, the snail could not reach him, and he would also have a close view. The professor took a stand amid twelve or fifteen trees, all about twenty feet high. The snail did not slacken its speed, but began to circle the grove, still watching the professor. Finding no opening big enough between two trees, the snail raised its head higher, fifteen feet high, and began to creep up on the trees. Branches cracked, and one tree snapped.