Rose Eagle Read Online Free PDF Page B

thinking.
No,
another part was thinking just as strongly.
Not . . .
    â€œPhil Tall Bear,” Aunt Mary said.

CHAPTER NINE
    T he thought of having to spend days — maybe weeks — with Phil Tall Bear by my side was too much for me to bear. Him with his gentle, smiling face. His kind words and all.
    I was sure he would be kind to me and be helpful all the time we were together. Like I said earlier, I had never heard him say anything unpleasant to anyone. Not that he was wimpy. He would stand up for himself if someone tried to push him around.
    I remember three years ago when Charley Horse Catcher went from teasing him about how good-looking he was to actually saying he was going to rearrange his face. Then one day Charley actually took a punch at him.
    This was back before the Cloud, back when men and women worn out from a ten-day shift underground could spend their credits on the booze sold at the company store, where our Overlords overcharged for everything except alcohol. The idea was that alcohol being cheap meant people could buy more of it. In fact, they could do so to the point where their money disappeared faster than water boiling out of a pot you forgot and left on the stove till it melted.
    And Charley, who weighed a good three hundred pounds and not all of it fat, was as drunk as you could get and still be able to throw a hard, accurate punch. Charley was thirty years old then, and Phil was only fifteen. Charley had been an athlete with a shot at being a ball player, leaving the Ridge, and being one of those guys you’d see playing in the big stadiums on viddy screens. Until he blew out a knee. And since he was only an Indian, he didn’t have the access to the replacement tech that could have made him better than new.
    So when that sucker punch was thrown with all of Charley’s weight behind it, it could have knocked down a horse — if it weren’t for the fact that all the horses had died out six or seven years before that.
    Maybe horses were another reason Charley was so filled with the sort of anger that bubbled up when he was drunk. His last name was a legacy from two centuries ago when his family had been great horse catchers. Even though they had access to self-drives and the mag-lines, those Horse Catchers preferred to ride. They grew up riding bareback, and you never saw one of them without a horse somewhere nearby unless they were down in the Deeps. Like all of us, they took comfort from those horses. Horses made us all feel more human, more real, and not just proles who were like game pieces on a board owned by our Overlords.
    When all their horses started to die, they didn’t bury them. They left them where they lay. The plains air is so dry up there on the hills where they had their ranch that their horses’ bodies lay for years looking like they were just asleep. The members of the family would go and sit by those dead horses. Tears would roll down their faces as they prayed and spoke their horses’ names.
    Anyhow, that hard punch Charley threw at Phil never made contact. Phil just leaned back a little and then wrapped himself around Charley from behind, brought him down to the ground with one arm around Charley’s neck, and held him there. He didn’t squeeze hard enough to choke him out. Just controlled him until he felt Charley stop struggling. Then he rolled off and patted Charley on the back while the big drunk man lay there and started to cry.
    â€œWhy’d they all have to die? Why, why?” Charley was sobbing.
    And Phil didn’t say anything like “It’ll be all right,” which would not have been true. All of us knew back then that it would never be all right again. We were proles whose only future was one of working until we died from overwork or were killed by some accident like the one that took my dad. All the while, those near-immortals who used us lived like kings and queens.
    No, the only