Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [345]
Captain Guizot gained confidence enough to poke the cayman’s snout with his sword point. The cayman snapped. The width of its jaws and the rows of its teeth sent a gasp around the group of onlookers, all their party who’d ridden up that day from Gonaives. The cayman gathered itself and lunged with a startling alacrity at Guizot, who staggered backward, tripped over his own boot heel, and fell. The doctor felt the weight of his pistol in his hand, and yet he hesitated. He wanted to observe the cayman alive for longer. For weeks or months if it were possible. Never before had he seen such a specimen. But he also felt a certain interest in Captain Guizot, whose left arm he had saved from gangrene—it would be a waste to see him eaten by the cayman.
Guizot kicked at the probing snout, then scrambled backward in the dirt; he didn’t seem to have room to get his feet under him. The cayman whipped forward, jaws slicing toward the knee above the boot leather. The doctor braced his pistol and shot it through the left eye. The cayman convulsed, and Maillart raised his own gun for a second shot, but the doctor stopped him, hand on his wrist.
“The skin,” he said, and Maillart lowered his pistol. For a minute or more the cayman went on thrashing, clawing the dirt. The heavy ridged tail thumped spasmodically. At last it lay still. A black dribble from the penetrated eye caked the dust beside its head.
“What shooting!” Guizot had scrambled to his feet, was dusting himself off with slightly quavering hands. He stooped and recovered the sword he’d dropped, his eyes always fixed on the doctor, who felt a little self-conscious under this regard. Since he had succeeded in treating Guizot’s infected arrow wound, the young captain always looked at him rather too worshipfully. Probably he was also embarrassed by how near he’d come to dispatching the doctor along with all the wounded men Rochambeau had ordered slain in the debris of La Crête à Pierrot.
“Indeed,” said Maillart. “It is very well placed.”
The doctor nodded absently. “We’ll have the whole hide off him.” A sadness settled over him as the rush of action faded. The hot yellow diamond of the cayman’s unhurt eye was beginning to cool and glaze. Descourtilz would have loved to see such an animal in action, the doctor thought, he who had made such a study of the cayman. He wondered if Descourtilz were still alive.
A small crowd had materialized out of nowhere, as always when anything of interest took place—women and children smiling, giggling, nudging each other as they looked at the long, scaly carcass of the cayman.Now the doctor found Merbillay in the group and near her Caco, Yoyo . . . what was the name of her youngest child? The little girl came slowly forward. Then with sudden daring she touched her fingertip to the cayman’s hide, shrieked, and ran back to her mother’s skirts.
And where was Paul? The doctor was about to put that question to Caco, who would be likely to know something, but before he could speak he saw Riau come striding down from the coffee terraces. When Riau noticed Maillart, he looked for a moment as if he would veer off in another direction, but instead he came on and embraced the doctor.
“You have lost flesh,” Riau said as they held each other at arm’s length. Maillart was inspecting him with a certain curiosity from where he stood.
“Oh, it is only from a few days of shoe leather at La Crête à Pierrot,” the doctor said. Though he was no longer so skeletal as he and the other survivors had been when they left the fort, he knew his eyes were hollow still, and his clothes hung slackly on him. “I’ll soon recover.”
“Fok’w pran sang.” Riau shook his head. “You need to take some blood—Merbillay!”
And Merbillay quickly went off to wring the necks of a dozen pigeons