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

strengthening at once, the weight and the poison fire.
    “If I should leave Gerber here,” he said, thinking aloud to himself, “perhaps I could make it . . .” It was now no more than thirty yards. He remembered from his school days that exertion after asnake bite was bad and that it would spread the poison quickly through him, and if he carried Gerber on there would only be exertion. If he let Gerber fall . . . released himself from that weight . . . for all he knew the old man was dead anyway. He remembered the old animosity, the bafflement and irritation of three generations of Dahlmans. Let him drop there, the water would accept old Gerber as readily as it had always reached out for him down there at his swamp shack.
    From the edge of the water came the barking of the dog and whining, and the dog’s high sound merged with a ringing in his ears.
    Dahlman did not even look at the dog, did not look at anything for the sun was far too bright on that dark water and there was growing a terrible hotness in his head. He shoved the weight of the old man ahead of him along the tree, and he remembered vaguely that the snake had retreated the other way and they were all right. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, grinding his teeth in his fury. A little froth appeared on the corners of Dahlman’s mouth and his jaw was working as his legs and arms worked. He was very hot and the dizziness crept along his spine to the back of his head and he had to blink to see at all.
    “Come on.” He hefted the old man, pulled him nearly upright, and then he plunged past the tree into the thigh-deep water, dragging Gerber by the arms and the coat. Dahlman stumbled on the tough and tangled cornstalks submerged in mud and he fell, flailing backward, and struggled up to swallow mud and then the air and he grabbed the slipping Gerber again and pulled him on with an outraged rush, dragging him on ferociously, as a mad and bedraggled dog would drag some black, offal-stuffed rat, the legs of Gerber slithering behind, leaving a little wake of bubbles and mud.
    “Come on, you old bastard, come on.” Dahlman looked ahead,but the sun was swimming in the film of muddy water and he was dizzy and he could not see and he started to vomit, but the tightness in his chest was too intense and all that he coughed was a little saliva. He closed his eyes tightly so that he could not see at all and he went on. He felt the old rows of corn in the mud and he counted them, and he lost count for the ringing in his ears and yet he went on, until the blood thundered in his skull and twisted his brain so that his eyes seemed to leave their very sockets, were wrenched aside too, distorted as his whole body was rent and distorted. The dog barked nearer, farther, nearer, louder and louder, the dog going mad in its panic, and Dahlman clenched his face and tried to run, dragging the slithering Gerber like a turtle through the mud and he fell and felt the water splash and the water did not even cover his knees. He clutched ahead and found the barking dog. His hands caught the dog and he pulled himself ahead and he and Gerber and the sprawling, yelping dog were rolling together, and Dahlman swore over and over with the blood choking him, “Damn you, Gerber. Damn you.”
    There was the high cry of the woman, and Dahlman saw the convulsive sun vibrate and the earth yawned and opened and the world burned him in its jerking convulsive motion.

The Right Hand
     
    The boy stood tense, holding the post steady and straight in the post hole his father had dug to fill the broken line in the fence. He was a young boy, twelve or so, with light blond hair, like his father’s where it had not turned gray, and with eyes the color of smoke, holding the even cool color in his eyes as he looked across the hill into the valley where the neighbor lived. The boy watched the neighbor come slowly up the hill, across the cornstalk-littered ground, turning now deeply but sparsely green