The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 127
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Suddenly Craig felt appalled at his own success. He had never beaten Roland at anything, not a single contest of any sort, not even monopoly nor darts, not once in twenty nine years. The elasticity and strength went out of his legs, and he stood on the baseline, just a long-legged gangling boy again, dressed in faded khaki shorts and worn tennis shoes without socks. He gulped miserably, pushed the hair out of his eyes, and crouched to receive service.
Across the net Roland Ballantyne was a tall athletic figure. He glared at Craig. Craig knew he was not seeing him, he was seeing an adversary, something to be destroyed.
"We Ballantynes are winners," Bawu had said. "We have got the instinct for the jugular." Roland seemed, impossibly, to grow even taller, and then he served. Craig began to move left, saw it was the wrong side and tried to change. His long legs tangled and he sprawled on the yellow clay. He stood up, retrieved his racquet, and went across to the other court. There was a bloody smear on his knee.
Roland's next service crashed in, and he did not get a touch of his racquet to it.
When his turn came, he hit one into the net, and the next one off the wood. Roland broke his service three times in a row, and it went on like that.
"Match point," Roland said. He was smiling again, gay and handsome and genial as he bounced the ball at his feet, and lined up for his final service. Craig felt that old heavy feeling in his limbs, the despair of the born loser.
He glanced off court. Janine Carpenter was looking directly at him, and in the instant before she smiled encouragingly, Craig saw the pity in those dark indigo eyes, and abruptly he was angry.
He sockM Roland's service, double-handed, into the corner, and had it come back as hard. He crossed with his forehand, and Roland was grinning as he drove it back. Again Craig caught it perfectly, and even Roland was forced to lob. It came down from on high, floating helplessly, and Craig was under it, poised and coldly angry, and he hit it with all his weight and strength and despair. It was his best shot.
After that he had nothing to follow. Roland trapped it on the bounce, before it could rise, and he punched it tantalizingly past Craig's right hip while he was twisted hopelessly off balance by the power of his own stroke.
Roland laughed, and vaulted easily over the net.
"Not bad, Sonny." He put his arm patronizingly around Craig's shoulders. "I'll know not to give you a start in future he said and led Craig off the court.
Those who had been gloatingly anticipating Roland's humiliation a few minutes before now crowded slavishly around him.
"Well played, Roly." "Great stuff." And Craig slipped away from them. He picked a clean white towel off the pile and wiped his neck and face. Trying not to look as miserable as he felt, he went to the deserted bar, and fished a beer out of the bath of crushed ice. He swallowed a mouthful, and it was so tart that it made his eyes swim.
Through the tears he realized suddenly that Janine Carpenter was standing beside him.
"You could have done it," she said softly. "But you just gave up." "Story of my life." He tried to sound gay and witty, like Roland, but it came out flat, and self-pityingly.
She seemed about to speak again, then shook her head and walked away.
Graig used Roland's shower and when he came out with the towel around his waist, Roland was in front the full-length mirror adjusting the angle of his beret. his beret was dark maroon with a brass cap-badge above the left ear. The badge was a brutish human head, with the forehead of a gorilla and the same broad flattened nose. The eyes were crossed grotesquely and the tongue, protruded from between negroid lips, like a Maori carving of a war idol.
"When old Great-grandpa Ralph recruited the Scouts during the rebellion," Roland had once explained to Craig, "one of his better-known exploits was to catch the leader of the rebels, and to hang him from the top of an acacia tree. We have taken that as our regimental emblem. - Bazo's hanged head. How do you like it?"
"Charming," Craig had given his opinion. "You always did have such exquisite taste, Roly." Roland had conceived the Scouts three years previously when the sporadic warfare of the earlier days had begun to intensify into the merciless internecine conflict of the present time.
His original idea had been to gather a force of young white Rhodesians who could speak fluent Sindebele and reinforce them with young Matabele who had been with their white employers since childhood, men whose loyalty was unquestionable. He would train black and white elements into an elite strike-force that could move easily through the tribal trust areas amongst the peasant farmers, speaking their language and understanding their ways, able to impersonate innocent tribesmen or.
ZIPRA terrorists at will, able to meet the enemy at the border or drop onto him from the sky and take him on at the most favourable terms.
He had gone to General Peter Walls at Combined Services Headquarters. Of course, Bawu had made the usual phone calls to clear the way, and Uncle Douglas had put a word in Smithy's ear during a cabinet meeting. They had given Roland -the go-ahead, and so Ballantyne's Scouts had been reborn, seventy years after the original troop was disbanded.
In the three years since then, Ballantyne's Scouts had cut their way into legend. Six hundred men who had been officially credited with two thousand kills, who had been five hundred miles over the border into Zambia to hit a ZIPRA training base, men who had sat at the village fires in the tribal trust lands listening to the chatter of the women who had just returned from carrying baskets of grain to the ZIPRA cadres in the hills, men who laid their ambushes and maintained them for five straight days, burying their own excrement beside them, waiting patiently and as unmoving as a leopard beside the water-hole, waiting for yet another good kill.
Roland turned from the mirror as Craig came into the bedroom. The pips of a full colonel sparkled on his shoulders, and over his heart the cluster of the silver cross was pinned below his dog-tab on the crisply ironed khaki bush-shirt.
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