You Will Never See Any God: Stories Read Online Free PDF

gasping breath, he pulled the ugly lump through the ugly sun-bright water and his boots made heavy sodden squirching sounds. He stumbled near the tree and fell and the weight ofthe old man and the water-soaked clothing all came down onto his back and he fell into the water and he had the taste of foulness and that mud-slime. He could not stand up and he struggled to his knees through an eternity of trying to lift his head and it was as if all the weight of the old man had fallen upon his neck. He reached forward clutching at the horizontal-laying trunk of the tree and fingernailed the roughness of the old and rotting bark and finally his head reached air against the old man’s weight. He snarled a curse but it was lost in the bubbles in the water as his head disappeared and reappeared again, rat-like, like Gerber’s ashen head, and he clawed his way up the back of the tree trunk trying to stand and finally he did stand. The mud was in his eyes and nose and ears and he could not really see or hear and he jerked angrily the ungiving weight of Gerber higher and the unbalance shoved him over. He clutched the tree for support again and he felt the cold and writhing foreign desperate aliveness, as if he had touched something always foul and evil, like the living, writhing guts of a sow, and there was a flash and the stab into his upper arm and the roiling angry cluster fighting him and the stab again lower down. His hand unclutched the snake and he heard the snapping whirr then, tiny, like a child’s toy, and the elongated flash like the snap of a rubber band or the cracking jump of a mousetrap, so quick and hitting him again. Every moment had stretched itself and time suspended as he watched with cold uncomprehension, and his first thought was, unbelievingly, the snake is so small. The snake, slender, less than two feet long, slid backward along the tree trunk top, coiling and retreating along the bark where it had been as long as it had found refuge there, the snake afraid and infuriated too at that violation, dreading the water and rolling with the floating tree trunk to the middle of the farmer’s field, there to be gripped by the hard mud hand. Dahlman was frozen there, his hand still stretched out and he looked at the snake inunblinking concentration. It was a timber rattler, he thought clinically, detachedly, a snake which never grows big and which frequents the low and weedy spots of ground, a rattler a couple of years old, dark and mottled and mad with hatred and disturbance and vengeance. He watched the snake retreat up to the bark-bare broken stub of limb where it could retreat no farther, and it coiled, still trying to retreat but not able to.
    Dahlman felt the fire in his arm, a kind of quickening needle warmth, the first charge being the worst, burning up to his shoulder so quickly, and he waited there, the burden of old Gerber on his other arm. He tried to calm himself and tried to think, and he thought, he was a peaceable farmer, a good quiet man, and he had done most things rightly and fairly, and every goddamn thing went wrong at once, and he wished for a moment that he had someone there to complain to, to tell exactly as it happened that he had wanted none of it and deserved none. He thought, too, of why he had ever left the yard or the house, if he had just stayed in the house old Gerber would have peacefully died and he, Dahlman, would not have been there, nor would he have heard the dog or touched the snake. And at the next moment he was enraged, and he had a sudden urge to leap upon that snake and to crush it in his fists, grind it into a writhing and rubbery powder beneath his grip, beat it into mangled shreds, beat it and beat it, and he thought that really he would have, but the weight of Gerber was too heavy on him. He stood holding his breath, feeling that burden of old Gerber on his arm and shoulder as if lodged there forever, and the building fire in his other arm from the snake stabs and both were