The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [221]
and as Caligula put his foot on the monster it opened its angular mouth with strange snake rage and struck the eagle in the neck. Jacinto cried, and Thea even shriller, at this sight. Powerfully Caligula shook, but only to get free. The iguana dropped and fled, glittering its blood on the rocks. Thea yelled, "After him! Get him! There he goes!" But the eagle didn't pursue down the slope; he landed and stood beating his wings. When the thrashing of the lizard couldn't be heard any more he folded them. He didn't fly to me. Thea shrieked at him, "You stinking coward! You crow!" She picked up a stone and flung it at him. Her aim was wide; Caligula only raised his head when it struck above him. "Stop that, Thea! For the love of God, stop! He'll tear out your eyes!" "Let him try to come at me, I'll kill him with my hands. Let him just come near!" She left her mind with fury, and there was no sense in her eyes. I felt my arms weak, seeing her like this. I tried to keep her from throwing another stone, and when I couldn't I ran to unstrap the shotgun for use, and also to keep it from her. Again she missed, but this time came close, and Caligula took off. As he rose I thought. Goodby bird! There he goes to Canada or to Brazil. She pulled at the breast of my shirt and with great pain and tears she cried, "We wasted our time with him, Augie. Oh, Augie. He's no good. He's chicken!" "Maybe the thing hurt him." "No, he was the same with the little one. He's scared." "Well, he's gone. He beat it." "Where?" She tried to look, but I reckon couldn't see well for the tears. And I wasn't any longer sure, either, wliich of various spots in the sky he was. "I hope he flies to hell!" she said with a shiver of anger. Her face burned. At his fraud, that he should look such a cruel machine, so piercing, such a chief, and have another spirit under it all. "Is he hurt if he flies like that?" "But you threw rocks at him," I said. And once again I felt implicated, because he had been tamed on my arm. Well, it was hard to take this from wild nature, that there should be humanity mixed with it; such as there was in the beasts that embraced Odysseus and his men and wept on them in Circe's yard. At home, when we got there sadly, we sent the- horses back to Talavera's with Jacinto. Thea wouldn't have had the spirit to walk back from the stables, and I didn't want to leave her now. Entering the patio, we heard cries from the cook, who ran into the kitchen with her baby because Caligula was going back and forth on the shed roof. I said to Thea, "Here's the eagle, he's back. What do you want to do about him?" She said, "I don't care. I don't want to do anything. He just came back for his meat, because he's too much of a coward to hunt for it." "I disagree. He's back because he doesn't feel in the wrong. He simply isn't used to animals that fight when he grabs them." "For all I care you can feed him to the cats." I took some meat from a basket by the stove and went out to him; he came to my fist, and I hooded him and passed the swivel, then put him on the waterbox, his dark cool place. About a week passed and I was his sole custodian. Thea interested herself in other things. She set up a darkroom and started to develop the films she had taken en route. The eagle was left to my care; I exercised and handled him alone in the patio, like one man who rows a large lifeboat by himself. And at this time also I had an uneasy gut, an attack of dysentery, and thus saw him more often than I ordinarily would have cared to. The doctor prescribed Carbosome and told me to stay off tequila and town water. I had perhaps been taking a little too much of that smoky tequila, which made you unreliable if you weren't used to it. But the slump from nobility of pursuit harmed everybody. The house was dull while Thea was in her laboratory. Dull isn't perhaps the word when you consider what disappointment and wrath were kept down. And also I couldn't stay in bed while Caligula was being neglected, if only for the reason that he'd become dangerous through hunger, let alone the humane side