Grimus - By Salman Rushdie Page 0,52

to stand between the door and window.

For the first time in her life, Mrs Gribb was deliberately eavesdropping.

XXXIV

THE SILENCE SPREAD with them as they walked through the long, narrow room. It was as though they exuded some invisible, deadening substance to kill words on people’s lips and stifle movements at their source. It was also a magnetic substance, since the eyes of the numbed were capable only of following the two walking men. Quiet was an alien condition here; the entry of Virgil and Flapping Eagle had somehow altered the element in which these late revellers habitually had their being. Under the shock, too, Flapping Eagle sensed the presence of something more slippery, more dangerous, less predictable in its effects: the emotion of the prison guard whose escaped charge has just returned to his captors of his own free will, or that of the lion faced with a suicidal Christian. Puzzlingly, this emotion seemed to be directed at both of them. Not for the first or last time, Flapping Eagle was consumed with curiosity about his companion’s past. Moreover, though, he was shocked by the looks, almost of recognition, he was receiving himself. And subsequently he found himself—equally confusingly—utterly ignored. As though he shouldn’t have been there, and all present wished he weren’t.

Once they know me, he reassured himself, they will not be hostile. In the face of the blank hush of the Elba-room, it was perhaps an overly optimistic thought.

Noise returned to the bar as abruptly as it had left; and with it, every eye snapped away from the two newcomers. It was an unnerving reversal; they might not have existed as the denizens of the drinking-house exploded into an effusion of speech.

Hunter was gazing at One-Track Peckenpaw with a desperate interest.

—Tell me, he said, a shade too earnestly, about your hunting techniques.

Peckenpaw burst into a voluble speech about trap-laying, stalking, shooting and survival in the wild. All trace of boredom was gone from the Two-Time Kid’s features, replaced by a new-found passion for the hunt. One-Track himself had rarely been so passionate; he spoke of his past as though his life depended on it.

Meanwhile Flann O’Toole seemed to have collapsed completely. He stood, eyes squeezed shut, fists drumming on the bar-top, repeating monotonously: —Holy Mary Mother of God I swear I’ll never drink again. Holy Mary Mother of God I swear I’ll never…

He broke off to be sick into a bucket under the bar.

—Jesu Maria, he groaned.

It was at this point that O’Toole’s Alsatian did an unexpected thing. Worming her way past her vomiting master and under the bar, she launched herself at Virgil Jones, tail wagging, tongue licking, to give the returning man his first taste of welcome. O’Toole looked up, grey-faced; his eyes widened.

—Certainly I don’t believe it, he said. But then the dog always liked him; being closer to animals than human beings he always had a way with ’em. ’Tis Virgil Jones himself an no miasma. Jones the Dig. The grave fool is returned.

Eyes slowly drifted back across the room to Virgil and Flapping Eagle and the big friendly animal leaping about them as they stood stock-still halfway along the bar, next to Peckenpaw and the Two-Time Kid. Flapping Eagle watched the eyes and saw them run through a fast series of expressions. Disbelief first, to echo O’Toole; then wonderment; and finally relief.

—Wal, said Peckenpaw. Jones and a stranger. He gave the word a heavy emphasis.

—Well, well, said Two-Time, two times. Jones and a stranger.

And there were other similar exclamations along the length of the room. Gradually, joviality returned to the night.

Flann O’Toole came out from behind the bar, recovering fast, his ebullience already restored. There was a smile on his face that looked friendly. Looked friendly, Flapping Eagle warned himself. Looking isn’t being.

—His friend, bellowed One-Track Peckenpaw obviously, got a feather in his hair. Reminds me when I scalped an Indian chief. (Laughs, cheers, boos.)

And that sparked a memory in Flapping Eagle. Not of an experience, but of a history. He knew what their arrival reminded him of: old films in the fleapit at Phoenix, illicitly visited. The Redskin enters the Saloon. The boys make fun of him before shooting him. We don’t dig Redskins in this town. We dig holes.

—Dog, said Flann O’Toole to the bitch, be in order. The rebuke heightened Flapping Eagle’s growing qualms, but there was still that pleasant-looking smile carving its way across O’Toole’s face. The Alsatian skulked away behind the bar.

Flann O’Toole’s hands: great hams hanging at