The Cannibal by John Hawkes Page B

history running thickly in her veins, caught her breath and flung
     herself at the feet of her horned and helmeted kinsmen, while the Bavarians schnitzled back
     and forth in a drunken trio.
    In an alley behind the hall timbered with consecrated ash, the darkness and
     odor of wet stone rose in spirals of steam as from below a horse on a winter’s day. The
     sound of the violin, jumping dangerously along the length of the alley walls, merged with
     the basso wheezing of a lascivious merchant and swept overhead into the heat of the
     garden.
    Ernie, the
Brauhaus
owner’s son, shuffled his feet to two dry
     spots, leaned his shoulder against the slippery rock, and steadied his face covered with
     dueling scars, down into the green darkness. Stella’s unknown, unnamed voice, beginning to
     reach the crown of her triumph, leaped straight from the small bright window behind his back
     and fell about the heads of those in the garden, dumb with love. Ernie wiped his hands on
     his trousers, leaned back and looked up into the sweltering night, his pockets stuffed with
     hundred mark notes, his eyes blind to the flickering sky. He saw only emptiness in theday’s returns, felt the scratches from a skillful bout burn on his cheek.
     His tongue was thick and numb with beer. The Merchant, barely afloat in the humid
     atmosphere, still cradling jade and ivory blocks in his arms and girded with a Turkish robe,
     made a perfect soft target in the darkness. Ernie breathed in and out on the same air, the
     pig’s tail lay heavily on his stomach, and he gave no thought to steel blades or the
     Merchant’s fat bulk. Howls of laughter were muffled inside the hall, low voices floated over
     the garden wall in tones that said there was something to hide, and the heady smell of
     tulips, roses, German-valor-petals, hydrangeas and cannon flowers sank into the pea-green
     pit of stench at his feet. The flowers turned their pistils out to catch the rain if it
     should come, the Merchant’s breath drew closer, and the moon shone once in the heavens,
     loaded like a sac with water.
    Ernie squeezed his left hand, the hand with the last two fingers gone from a
     hatchet stroke, into his pocket tight with bills, and turned back towards the light, towards
     the free men of the hall. He would sit on a worshipped pile of granite, a small duelist in
     the hall of kings. The Merchant tried to follow but, like a laboring hind, slipped and fell,
     his fat body dragging along over the stones. He could not call out and each time he moved he
     slid deeper. Ernie heard his thudding fall and walked faster, trying to find again a place
     for light and song. He measured his steps and seemed to tread upon the whole world of
     Germany as he walked, half-consciously, back near the aurora of tabled clans, disciplined
     faces, and all the irony and fellowship of his men-at-arms. A man in grey staggered past,
     ready with malice or with a bow at the waist, and far in the back of thealley Ernie heard him trip against the fallen Merchant, heard a muffled word against
     the background of summer nightbirds.
    Ernie, because of the fingers gone from his hand and the ugly sight of three
     remaining claws, could never ride a black mare into the din of volleying balls, or crawl
     hand over hand through the wet fields of Belgium. He touched the middle and forefinger with
     the thumb and heard the woman’s voice crying out to the men young in soul. Inside he sat at
     his father’s table under the shadows and far to the rear, and melting into the crowd became
     nondescript, feigned to strike out with ignored curt expressions.
    Stella, like her father, held them at bay; and, losing one by one those
     traits that were hers, absorbed more and more the tradition that belonged to all. She did
     not lisp when she sang, but boomed the words in an unnatural voice. And the gestures she
     developed came with ease. She walked from the archway of her father’s house to the audience
     of