Red Prophet Page 0,41
was destroying the delicate thing that he had done. The insects that had bitten him were metal pins that his sisters had poked into his nightshirt. Now he could hear them laughing behind their wall. Because he had been very frightened, now he was very angry. Get even, get back at them; Lolla-Wossiky could feel his childish rage. He only did one little thing to tease them, and they pay him back by scaring him, poking him a hundred times and making him bleed. Get even, give them such a scare - Alvin Junior sat on the edge of the bed, angrily taking the pins out of his nightshirt, saving them - White men were so careful with all their useless metal tools, even such tiny ones as those. As he sat there he saw the roaches scurrying along the walls, running in and out of cracks in the floor, and he saw his vengeance.
Lolla-Wossiky felt him making the plan in his mind. Then Alvin knelt on the floor and explained it soffly to the roaches. Because he was a child, and a White boy with no one to teach him, Alvin thought he had to say the words aloud, that the roaches somehow understood his language. But no - it was the order of things, the way he arranged the world in his mind.
And in his mind he lied to them. Hunger, he told them. And in the other room, food. He showed them food if they went under the wall into the sisters' room and climbed on the beds and the bodies there. Food if they hurried, food for all of them. It was a lie, and Lolla-Wossiky wanted to shout at him not to do this.
If a Red man knelt and called to prey that he didn't need, the prey would know his lie and wouldn't come. The lie itself would cut the Red man from the land, make him walk alone awhile. But this White boy could lie with such force and strength that the tiny minds of the roaches believed him. They scurried, a hundred, a thousand of them under the walls, into the other room.
Alvin Junior heard something, and he was delighted. But Lolla-Wossiky was angry. He opened his eye, so he didn't have to see Alvin Junior's glee at his revenge. Instead now he heard the sisters screaming as the roaches climbed all over them. And then the parents and brothers rushing into their room. And the stomping. The stomping, the smashing, the murders of the roaches. Lolla-Wossiky closed his eye and felt the deaths, each one a pinprick. It had been so long with the black noise masking all the deaths behind one vast memory of murder that Lolla-Wossiky had forgotten what the small pains felt like.
Like the death of bees.
Roaches, useless animals, eating up garbage, making filthy rustling noises in their dens, loathsome when they crawled on the skin; but part of the land, part of the life, part of the green silence, and their death was an evil noise, their useless murder because they believed in a lie.
This is why I came, Lolla-Wossiky realized. The land brought me here, knowing that this boy had such power, knowing that there was no one to teach him how to use it, no one to teach him to wait to feel the need of the land before changing it. No one to teach him how to be Red instead of White.
I didn't come for my own dream beast, but to be the dream beast for this boy.
The noise settled. The sisters, the brothers, the parents went back to sleep. Lolla-Wossiky pressed his fingers into the cracks between the logs, climbed carefully, his eye closed so that the land would guide him instead of trusting in himself, The boy's shutters were open, and Lolla-Wossiky thrust his elbows over the sill and hung there, looking in.
First with his eye open. He saw a bed, a stool with clothes neatly folded, and at the foot of the bed, a cradle. The window opened onto the space between the bed and the cradle. In the bed, a shape, boy-sized, unidentifiable.
Lolla-Wossiky closed his eye again. Alvin lay in the bed. Lolla-Wossiky felt the heat of the boy's excitement like a fever. He had been so afraid of being caught, so exhilarated at his victory, and now lay trembling, trying to breathe calmly, trying to stifle laughter.
His eye open again, Lolla-Wossiky scrambled up onto the sill