The Centaur Read Online Free

the children were unnaturally still. Medusa, who kept perfect discipline, was at the head desk. She glanced up, yellow pencils thrusting from her tangled hair. Caldwell avoided looking at her face. Head high, eyes forward, mouth in a prim determined set, he walked along the wall at his right hand. From the other side of the wall, where industrial arts were taught, arose the spurt and cry,
txz! aeiiii
, of wood being tortured. On his left he heard the children rustle like shingle in a threatening tide. He did not look around until he had gained the safety of the far doorway. Here Caldwell turned, to see if he had left tracks. As he feared: a trail of red crescents, moons from his heel, marked his path. He pinched his lips in embarrassment; he would have to explain and apologize to the janitors.
    In the cafeteria, the green-gowned women were bustling, setting out 8¢ cartons of chocolate milk, arranging trays of sandwiches bound in waxpaper, and stirring the cauldrons of soup. Tomato today. The sickly plangent odor filled the tiled volume. Mom Schreuer, a fat soul whose son was a dentist and whose apron was black beneath her bosom from leaning against the stoves, waved a wooden paddle at him. Grinning like a greeted boy, Caldwell waved back. He always felt securer among the people who staffed the school, who fed its furnaces, the janitors, the cooks. They reminded him of real people, the people of his boyhood in Passaic, New Jersey, where his father had been the poor minister of a poor church. Along the neighborhood street each man had an occupation that could be simply named—milkman, welder, printer, mason—and each house in the row wore to his eyes, in itsindividual nicks and curtains and flowerpots, a distinct face. A modest man, Caldwell was most comfortable in the under-reaches of the high school. It was warmest there; the steam pipes sang; the talk made sense.
    The great building was symmetrical. He left the cafeteria by climbing a few steps and passing the girls’ locker room. Forbidden territory; but he knew from the tumble in the boys’ locker room that it was a male gym period, so there was no danger of blundering into the sacred. The sanctum was empty. The thick green door was ajar, exposing a strip of cement floor, a bit of tan bench, a tall segment of shut lockers under high frosted windows.
    Hold!
    Here it was, his feet frozen to this same spot of scratching cement, careless in his weariness, his eyes worn by correcting papers in the boiler room, the building growing dark, the students fled, the clocks ticking in unison throughout the empty rooms, that, climbing toward his room, he had surprised Vera Hummel, this same green door ajar, standing in view wreathed in steam, a blue towel held gracefully away from her body, her amber pudendum whitened by drops of dew.
    “Why should my brother Chiron stand gaping like a satyr? The gods are not strange to him.”
    “Milady Venus.” He bowed his splendid head. “Your beauty for the moment ravished me into forgetfulness of my fraternity.”
    She laughed and, twisting her amber hair forward over one shoulder, indolently stroked it with the towel. “A fraternity, perhaps, your pride disdains to confess. For Father Kronos, in the shape of a horse, sired you upon Philyra in the fullness of his health; whereas at my begetting he tossed the severed genitals of Uranus like garbage into the foam.” Turning herhead, she gave the negligent rope of her hair another twist. Sudden wrung water slipped along her collarbone. Her throat showed crystalline in silhouette against a red wet cloud; her near hair held the motion of running horses. With downcast eyes she displayed her profile. The pose overwhelmed Chiron; his guts became a harp. Her profession of sorrow at her barbarous birth, though its insincerity was patent, sent his tongue stammering in search of consolation.
    “But my mother was herself a daughter of Oceanus,” he said, and instantly knew that, in giving her light