hog-and-potato background, forced him to classify the arriving visual information as a delusion—some pathetic personal breakdown in perception and courage. But the more he gasped openmouthed at them, the more foreboding his surmise became: he was confronting something—or, rather, things—that really were there. The shock waves of this realization shot him to his feet.
Appearing on the emerging hillcrest was a spiral chain of figures arranged in a kind of military formation, he presumed—but what kind he could not say. A severely worrying kind. There were Indians—Sioux and other tribes he could identify. There were also Negroes, but not dressed as any he had ever seen. They wore bones … and bright colors … and … there seemed to be some women, too. Various colors and races. He had never seen females arrayed for battle—if that was what this was.
But there were others … people like he had never seen … hairy and dressed in animal skins. They held implements in their hands that he did not want to know about. He wanted to know less than nothing about those who were beside them. These could not be said to be standing, because they seemed still to be forming, as if out of mist. They had a human form, but it did not hold steady. There was an ungodly transparency to them … and a profound blackness, too, like empty portions of the night sky called coal sacks. While he could make out individual outlines, these seemed to oscillate and blend, so that there was a forbidding aura of compositeness about them—like a crowd made of fog and glass that became something else. Something whole.
What stood grouped beyond them—this was more than his mind could take. They were not human and never would be or had been human. Some he might have said were creatures from the past—beasts that he at least could imagine having roamed the land long ago. Others he could only think were creatures from a dream. Or a nightmare.
The one fragment of Army-trained thinking that remained was the slack-jawed, goggle-eyed question “What kind of troops could march against this?”
He felt his being sag with the energy drain of it, and when he was able to blink again and hold his trembling head up, the forces across the water had receded and he was once more faced with the man from out of time, or mind, whoever or whatever he was, and his more familiar and comprehensible menagerie.
This sparked a sudden renewal of will and boldness in young Todd. Perhaps what he had seen come forth had been mere illusion. “Buck up,” he said to himself—or tried to say. Yet what he heard in his mind but not in his own usual inner voice were the words Real enough, Lieutenant. Real enough.
The man on the donkey then produced what looked like an Indian blanket, white with a zigzag lightning pattern. This he tossed into the air, but it did not fall back to the ground. It rose and seemed to dissipate, becoming larger but diffuse. Seeing it against the sky made Todd aware again of how blue the sky was. Not a cloud on the horizon.
Now there was a cloud, for that is what appeared—and appeared to drift toward him. The blanket that had seemed to vaporize had re-formed thick and puffy, like those first little cumulus masses that are the harbingers of big thunderstorms. This sculpted single white cloud wafted over the creek until it was overhead. Over his head. Then, like a door opening, it let out a river of its own. Drenching, sopping, unstopping rain.
Todd, in spite of himself, tried to step away. He tried to run away. He did not mean to run, it just happened. He soon realized that he was weaving and darting like an idiot—trying to escape the damn targeted rain! It was appalling and reminded him of trying to avoid the missiles of rotten apples that a bully back in Turnip had smacked him with. He had not thought of that incident in years.
This was humiliation of another magnitude altogether. No matter where and how he dodged, the cloud remained immediately overhead, the pillar of single-minded precipitation sluicing down. Against all his ambitions as a soldier and his deepest aspirations as a man, at last a cloud of another kind burst inside him and he began to cry, tears streaming down the length of his face, mingling with the raindrops. He finally stopped stone still and let the crying possess