The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Author:Bernard Malamud [Malamud, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-04-09T15:50:11+00:00

He beat it up the back stairs with Max on his tail. Though the columnist carried a camera and a pocketful of flashbulbs he ran faster than Roy had expected, so to ditch him he shot through the second-floor door and sped down the corridor. Seeing over his shoulder that Max was still after him he ducked through a pair of open glass doors into an enormous black ballroom, strewn with chairs, potted palms, and music stands from a dance last night. The lingering odor of perfume mixed with cigarette smoke reminded him of the smell of Memo’s hair and haunted him even now. He thought of hiding behind something but that would make him a ridiculous sitting duck for a chance shot of Max’s, so since his good eye had become accustomed to the dark he nimbly picked his way among the obstacles, hoping the four-eyed monstrosity behind him would break his camera or maybe a leg. But Max seemed to smell his way around in the dark and hung tight. Reaching the glass doors at the other end of the ballroom, Roy sidestepped out just as a bulb lit in a wavering flash that would leave Max with a snapshot of nothing but a deserted ballroom. The columnist stuck like glue to Roy’s shadow, spiraling after him up the stairs and through the long empty ninth-floor corridor (broad and soft-carpeted so that their footsteps were silent) which stretched ahead, it seemed to Roy, like an endless highway.

He felt he had been running for ages, then this blurred black forest slid past him, and as he slowed down, each black tree followed a white, and then all the trees were lit in somber light till the moon burst forth through the leaves and the woods glowed. Out of it appeared this boy and his dog, and Roy in his heart whispered him a confidential message: watch out when you cross the road, kid, but he had spoken too late, for the boy lay brokenboned and bleeding in a puddle of light, with no one to care for him or whisper a benediction upon his lost youth. A groan rose in Roy’s throat (he holding a flashlight over the remains) for not having forced Memo to stop and go back to undo some of the harm. A sudden dark glare flashed over his head, eerily catapulting his shadow forward, and erasing in its incandescence the boy in the road, Roy felt a burning pain in his gut, yet simultaneously remembered there had been no sign of blood on the bumper or fender, and Memo said she had screamed because she saw in the mirror that they were being chased by cops. The black sedan that trailed them had not stopped either, which it would have done if there were cops in it and somebody was dying in the road. So Memo must’ve been right — either it was a rock, or maybe the kid’s hound, probably not even that, for it did not appear there ever was any kid in those woods, except in his mind.

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