'Not me,' said Locke.
Tetelman turned his eyes on the man. They were wet. 'Oh yes,' he said politely. 'Extinction's in the air, Mr Locke. I can smell it.' Then he turned back to looking at the window.
Whatever was on the roof now had companions.
'They won't come here, will they?' said Cherrick. 'They won't follow us?'
The question, spoken almost in a whisper, begged for a reply in the negative. Try as he might Cherrick couldn't dislodge the sights of the previous day. It wasn't the boy's corpse that so haunted him; that he could soon learn to forget. But the elder - with his shifting, sunlit face - and the palms raised as if to display some stigmata, he was not so forgettable.
'Don't fret,' Tetelman said, with a trace of conde- scension. 'Sometimes one or two of them will drift in here with a parrot to sell, or a few pots, but I've never seen them come here in any numbers. They don't like it. This is civilisation as far as they're concerned, and it intimidates them. Besides, they wouldn't harm my guests. They need me.'
'Need you?' said Locke; who could need this wreck of a man?
'They use our medicines. Dancy supplies them. And blankets, once in a while. As I said, they're not so stupid.'
Next door, Stumpf had begun to howl. Dancy's con- soling voice could be heard, attempting to talk down the panic. He was plainly failing.
'Your friend's gone bad,' said Tetelman.
'No friend,' Cherrick replied.
'It rots,' Tetelman murmured, half to himself.
'What does?'
The soul.' The word was utterly out of place from Tetelman's whisky-glossed lips. 'It's like fruit, you see. It rots.'
Somehow Stumpf s cries gave force to the observation. It was not the voice of a wholesome creature; there was putrescence in it.
More to direct his attention away from the German's din than out of any real interest, Cherrick said: 'What do they give you for the medicine and the blankets? Women?'
The possibility clearly entertained Tetelman; he laughed, his gold teeth gleaming. 'I've no use for women,' he said. 'I've had the syph for too many years.' He clicked his fingers and the monkey clambered back up on to his lap. 'The soul,' he said, 'isn't the only thing that rots.'
'Well, what do you get from them then?' Locke said. 'For your supplies?'
'Artifacts,' Tetelman replied. 'Bowls, jugs, mats. The Americans buy them off me, and sell them again in Manhattan. Everybody wants something made by an extinct tribe these days. Memento mori.'
'Extinct?' said Locke. The word had a seductive ring; it sounded like life to him.
'Oh certainly,' said Tetelman. 'They're as good as gone. If you don't wipe them out, they'll do it themselves.'
'Suicide?' Locke said.
'In their fashion. They just lose heart. I've seen it happen half a dozen times. A tribe loses its land, and its appetite for life goes with it. They stop taking care of themselves. The women don't get pregnant any more; the young men take to drink, the old men just starve themselves to death. In a year or two it's like they never existed.'
Locke swallowed the rest of his drink, silently saluting the fatal wisdom of these people. They knew when to die, which was more than could be said for some he'd met. The thought of their death-wish absolved him of any last vestiges of guilt. What was the gun in his hand, except an instrument of evolution?
On the fourth day after their arrival at the post, Stumpf s fever abated, much to Dancy's disappointment. The worst of it's over,' he announced. 'Give him two more days' rest and you can get back to your labours.'
'What are your plans?' Tetelrnan wanted to know.
Locke was watching the rain from the verandah. Sheets of water pouring from clouds so low they brushed the tree-tops. Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, the downpour was gone, as though a tap had been turned off. Sun broke through; the jungle, new-washed, was steaming and sprouting and thriving again.
'I don't know what we'll do,' said Locke. 'Maybe get ourselves some help and go back in there.'
'There are ways,' Tetelman said.
Cherrick, sitting beside the door to get the benefit of what little breeze was available, picked up the glass that had scarcely been out of his hand in recent days, and filled it up again. 'No more guns,' he said. He hadn't touched his rifle since they'd arrived at the post; in fact he kept from contact with anything but a bottle and his bed. His skin seemed to crawl and creep perpetually.
'No need for guns,' Tetelman murmured. The statement hung on the air like an unfulfilled promise.
'Get rid of them without guns?' said Locke. 'If you mean waiting for them to die out naturally, I'm not that patient.'
'No,' said Tetelman, 'we can be swifter than that.'
'How?'
Tetelman gave the man a lazy look. 'They're my livelihood,' he said, 'or part of it. You're asking me to help you make myself bankrupt.'
He not only looks like an old whore, Locke thought, he thinks like one. 'What's it worth? Your wisdom?' he asked.
'A cut of whatever you find on your land,' Tetelman replied.
Locke nodded. 'What have we got to lose? Cherrick? You agree to cut him in?' Cherrick's consent was a shrug. 'All right,' Locke said, 'talk.'
'They need medicines,' Tetelman explained, 'because they're so susceptible to our diseases. A decent plague can wipe them out practically overnight.'
Locke thought about this, not looking at Tetelman. 'One fell swoop,' Tetelman continued. 'They've got practically no defences against certain bacteria. Never had to build up any resistance. The clap. Smallpox. Even measles.'
'How?' said Locke.
Another silence. Down the steps of the verandah, where civilization finished, the jungle was swelling to meet the sun. In the liquid heat plants blossomed and rotted and blossomed again.
'I asked how,' Locke said.
'Blankets,' Tetelman replied, 'dead men's blankets.'
A little before the dawn of the night after Stumpf s recovery, Cherrick woke suddenly, startled from his rest by bad dreams. Outside it was pitch-dark; neither moon nor stars relieved the depth of the night. But his body-clock, which his life as a mercenary had trained to impressive accuracy, told him that first light was not far off, and he had no wish to lay his head down again and sleep. Not with the old man waiting to be dreamt. It wasn't just the raised palms, the blood glistening, that so distressed Cherrick. It was the words he'd dreamt coming from the old man's toothless mouth which had brought on the cold sweat that now encased his body.
What were the words? He couldn't recall them now, but wanted to; wanted the sentiments dragged into wakefulness, where they could be dissected and dismissed as ridiculous. They wouldn't come though. He lay on his wretched cot, the dark wrapping him up too tightly for him to move, and suddenly the bloody hands were there, in front of him, suspended in the pitch. There was no face, no sky, no tribe. Just the hands.
'Dreaming,' Cherrick told himself, but he knew better.
And now, the voice. He was getting his wish; here were the words he had dreamt spoken. Few of them made sense. Cherrick lay like a newborn baby, listening to its parents talk but unable to make any significance of their exchanges. He was ignorant, wasn't he? He tasted the sourness of his stupidity for the first time since childhood. The voice made him fearful of ambiguities he had ridden roughshod over, of whispers his shouting life had rendered inaudible. He fumbled for comprehension, and was not entirely frustrated. The man was speaking of the world, and of exile from the world; of being broken always by what one seeks to possess. Cherrick struggled, wishing he could stop the voice and ask for explanation. But it was already fading, ushered away by the wild address of parrots in the trees, raucous and gaudy voices erupting suddenly on every side. Through the mesh of Cherrick's mosquito net he could see the sky flaring through the branches.