The Centaur Read Free

minute,” Hummel said, and remained squatting, carefully holding Caldwell’s pants leg up from the wound. Caldwell met the stares of the three workmen—the third had come out from under the car—and smiled self-deprecatingly. Now that relief was at hand he had a margin in which to feel embarrassed. His smile made the helpers frown. To them it was as if an automobile had tried to speak. Caldwell let his eyes go out of focus and thought of far-off things, of green fields, of Chariclo as a lithe young woman, of Peter as a baby, of how he had pushed him on his Kiddy Kar with a long forked stick along the pavements under the horsechestnut trees. They had been too poor to afford a baby carriage; the kid had learned to steer, too early? He worried about the kid when he had the time.
    “Now George: hold tight,” Hummel said. The arrow slid out backwards with a slick spurt of pain. Hummel stood up, his face pink, scorched by fire or flushed in satisfaction. His three moronic helpers clustered around jostling to see the silver shaft, painted at its unfeathered end with blood. Caldwell’s ankle, at last free, felt soft, unbraced; his shoe seemed to be filling with warm slow liquid. The pain had changed color, had shifted into the healing spectrum. The body knew. The ache came now to his heart rhythmically: Nature’s breathing.
    Hummel bent down and picked something up. He held it to his nose and sniffed. Then he set it in Caldwell’s palm still piping hot. It was an arrowhead. Three-sided, so sharply pointed its edges were concave, it seemed too dainty a thing to have caused such a huge dislocation. Caldwell noticed that his palms were mottled with shock and exertion; a film of sweat broke out on his brow. He asked Hummel, “Why did you smell it?”
    “Wondering if it was poisoned.”
    “It wouldn’t be, would it?”
    “I don’t know. These kids today.” He added, “I didn’t smell anything.”
    “I don’t think they’d do anything like that,” Caldwell insisted, thinking of Achilles and Hercules, Jason and Asclepios, those attentive respectful faces.
    “Where do the kids get their money? is what I’d like to know,” Hummel said, as if kindly trying to draw Caldwell’s mind away from a hopeless matter. He held up the headless shaft and wiped the blood off on his glove. “This is good steel,” he said. “This is an expensive arrow.”
    “Their fathers give it to the bastards,” Caldwell said, feeling stronger, clearer-headed. His class, he must get back.
    “There’s too much money around,” the old mechanic said with wan spite. “They’ll buy any junk Detroit puts out.” His face had regained its gray color, its acetylene tan; crinkled and delicate like an often-folded sheet of foil, his face became almost womanly with quiet woe and Caldwell became nervous.
    “Al, how much do I owe you? I got to get back. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”
    “Nothing, George. Forget it. I’m glad I was able to do it.” He laughed. “It isn’t every day I burn an arrow out of a man’s leg.”
    “I wouldn’t feel right. I asked a craftsman to give me the benefit of his craft—” He groped toward his wallet pocket insincerely.
    “Forget it, George. It took a minute. Be big enough to accept a favor. Vera says you’re one of the few over there who doesn’t try to make her life more difficult.”
    Caldwell felt his face go wooden; he wondered how much Hummel knew of why Vera’s life was difficult. He must getback. “Al, I’m much obliged to you. Believe me.” There was never a way, somehow, of really getting gratitude across. You went through life in a town and sometimes loved the people in it and never told them, you were ashamed.
    “Here,” Hummel said. “Don’t you want this?” He held out the arrow’s bright shaft. Caldwell had absent-mindedly slipped the point into his side coat pocket.
    “No, hell. You keep it.”
    “No, now what would I do with it? The shop’s full of junk as it is. You show it