AEgypt Read Free Page B

in this line, and negative wishes had always seemed to him mean.
    It had occurred to him (as it occurred to the Fisherman's Wife in the story) that it might be nice to be Pope. He happened to have a number of ideas about natural law, liturgy, and hermeneutics, and he thought a lot of good, in small ways, might be able to be done by a man of large historical sensibilities in such a job, able to enunciate God's will and impose it by fiat, no long-drawn-out contest of wills interposed between Sanctissimus and the carrying out of His pronouncements. But those gratifications could never make up for the awful tedium of official position; and in any case the hierarchy was probably not so responsive now to bulls and encyclicals as they ought to be, or had once been. Who the hell knew.
    Love. Pierce Moffett had been both lucky and unlucky in love, his luck good and bad was among the causes of his being on this bus now through the Faraway Hills, love took up the greater part of his daydreaming one way or another; and no more than any man was he able not to toy with thoughts of hypnotic powers, unrefusable charms, the world his harem—or, conversely, of a single perfect being shaped exactly to his wants, of the kind that lonely academics described at such self-revealing length in the Personals columns of certain journals Pierce subscribed to. But no: it was no good using his third wish to compel the heart. It was wrong. Worse, it wouldn't work. There was no joy Pierce knew like the joy of finding himself freely chosen by the object of his desire, no joy even remotely like it. The astonished gratification of it, the sudden certainty, as though a hawk had chosen to fall out of the sky and settle on his wrist, still wild, still free, but his. Who would, who could compel that? The closed hearts of call-girls, the glum faces of last-chance pickups: Pierce drunk or coked enough could pretend for an hour or a night, as they could. But.
    And if hawks flew then, choosing to fly as they had chosen to alight, and if he failed to understand why—well, he hadn't understood why they alighted in the first place, had he? And that was, that must be, all right, if one were going to love hawks in the first place. Gentle hawks, kind-unkind.
    Chalkokrotos.
    I wish, he thought, I wish, I wish...
    Chalkokrotos, “bronze-rustling,” where had he come up with that epithet, some goddess's: chalkokrotos for her bronze-colored hair and the rustle of her bangles on a certain night; chalkokrotos for her weapons and her wings.
    Good lord, he thought, and fumbled with his book, crossing his legs. He tossed his cigarette to the floor amid the sordid litter there of other butts, and counseled himself that perhaps daydreaming was not a thing he should indulge himself in just now, this week, this summer. He looked out the window, but the day had ceased to flow in toward him, or rather he outward toward it. For the first time since he had decided on this jaunt, he felt that he was fleeing and not journeying, and what he fled took up all his attention.
* * * *
    When he was a boy, traveling from the fastness of his Kentucky home east and northward to New York City where his father lived, he had seen signs directing people to these very Faraway Hills he now rode through, though the immense Nash crowded with his kinfolk never followed the arrows that pointed that way.
    It was Uncle Sam at the wheel (Uncle Sam looked a lot like the Uncle Sam who wears red white and blue, except for the goat's beard, and his suit, which was brown or gray, or wrinkled seersucker on these summer trips) and Pierce's mother beside him with the map, to navigate; and next to her, in strict rotation, one or another of the kids: Pierce, or one of Sam's four. The rest contested for space along the wide sofa of the back seat.
    The Nash held them all, though just barely, the swollen sides and fat rear end of its prehistoric-monster shape bellied out (it seemed) with their numbers and their luggage. Sam