Are the midgets angry because Reynaldo explained, as gently as he knew how, that they are, indeed, midgets? Or are they angry because he then left as quickly as he could, detecting the rising tide of bad feeling? The reasons are immaterial to him now. As the situation has developed, it is now merely incumbent upon him to run as fast as possible away from their little eyes, full of murderous hatred and no sign of mercy, before another little dagger finds its mark between his now bleeding shoulder blades.
-O you've really done it this time Rey, he worries to himself. -Gotta keep moving, gotta go, losing too much blood, gotta leave these homicidal midgets far behind.
He really has lost quite a bit of blood now, as it pours out of the wounds in his back and pools where the base of his once white shirt tucks into his belted pants, or sprays out the rents in the back of the shirt, or trickles into drying wormlike, then snakelike rivulets. It's rather amazing that his body pushes on. He is surprisingly unsurprised when his life begins to pass before his eyes, but the body pushes onward, trying desperately for the treeline.
-If I can just make it to Jaime's, becomes the litany inside his rapidly clouding head. -If I can just make it there, I know that's neutral ground. He won't help me, but he won't let them have me. Just another click or two, so close, so close...
His conscious state is now pretty much a walking faint. His brain is starved of blood, and while it still manages to repeat the mantra -if I can just make it to Jaime's, if I can just... it really isn't perceiving sensory input correctly, nor controlling his muscular matrix quite like it should. But somehow he stumbles on, passing the first young sapling which informs some still barely firing neuron that he has indeed reached the forest. But his inertia, thankfully, does not fail. He presses on, hardly conscious and still fading.
-This is not how an anthropological study should end, he rambles to himself. -I should have been more politic, I know, somehow I could have avoided this tearing, searing pain in my back, avoided this blackening world, my likely iminent death at the hands of these bloodthirsty midgets. What have I done? Why? Such a wealth of information, such a deep and meaningful wisdom the midgets had, why did I offend them? How could I know I wasn't supposed to say anything about their stature? This is Jaime's gate. Why do they want me dead? I'm here. I don't see them. Why did they cut me up? O god how can I stay alive? Too much blood. Falling. Crawling. What did I ever do to deserve this? This is Jaime's front door. Try to knock. thump. what did I do to them? why...
Betrayal has many flavors. All bitter. And many colors. All black. Many smells; all coppery. Like the blood Rey shed. Friendship is situational. For very many, life is a popularity contest. The search for truth can be the cruelest joke. Reynaldo had wanted to know the truth. His blue eyes so often possessed the innocence of inquisitiveness. Downright childish. As was his behavior when he tilted his hand. Terribly trusting when he asked his hosts -How do you get by so well in this huge world when you are so small?
He was an idiot. A brilliant idiot, perhaps, his thesis panel had thought so when they sent him forth with his papers to study the real world. But an idiot nonetheless. And just because Jaime had known him since well before his academic carreer had advanced to that level was no reason to blindly trust. No reason to expect rescue nor respite. Jaime knew the political face of the forest. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. He knew the lay of the land. He knew who had won the popularity contest and who was a maligned fool. Even had he wanted to help Rey, and perhaps he did, he was not an unwise man. In fact, the way he had tortured some of his allies in the past was a perfect foreshadowing for what was to come. But Rey knew none of this when he awoke in the hammock on the porch, his wounds cleaned and dressed, his ruined shirt and pants replaced by a green terry-cloth robe.
The porch was cool. Relative to the yard at any rate. The forest had been fairly well cleared for the gardens out front, but those trees which remained were right up against the house. Shading the porch and exhaling their cooling oxygen.