“Okay.” He shrugged away from me, and offered his thick black hands in resignation.
Speaking so much had worn me out, and I stood clutching the bomb in its aluminum case, ready to carry out the promise I had made to Itelo and his two aunts. The villagers knew this was a big event and were turning out in numbers, chattering or clapping their hands and singing out. Mtalba, who had gone away, came back in a changed costume of red stuff that looked like baize and her indigo-dyed hair freshly buttered, large brass rings in her ears, and a brass collar about her neck. Her people were swirling around in colored rags, and there were cows led on gay halters and tethers; they looked somewhat weak and people came up to give them a kiss and inquire about their health, practically as if they were cousins. Some of the maidens carried pet hens in their arms or perched on their shoulders. The heat was deadening, and the sky steep and barren.
“There is Itelo,” I said. I thought that he, too, looked apprehensive. “Neither of these guys has any faith in me,” I said to myself, and even though I realized why I didn’t especially inspire confidence, my feelings, nevertheless, were stung.
“Hi, Prince,” I said. He was solemn and he took my hand as they all did here and led it to his chest so that I felt the heat of his body through the white middy, for he was dressed as yesterday in his loose whites with the green silk scarf. “Well, this is the day,” I said, “and this is the hour.” I showed the aluminum case with its shoelace fuse to his highness and I told Romilayu, “We ought to make arrangements to gather the dead frogs and bury them. We will do the graves-registration detail. Prince, how do your fellow tribesmen feel about these animals in death? Still taboo?”
“Mistah Henderson. Sir. Wattah is …” Itelo could not find the words to describe how precious this element was, and he rubbed his fingers with his thumb as if feeling velvet.
“I know. I know just exactly what the situation is. But there’s one thing I can tell you, just as I told you yesterday, I love these folks. I have to do something to show my friendship. And I am aware that coming from the great outside it is up to me to take this on myself.”
Under the heavy white shell of the pith helmet, the flies were beginning to bite; the cattle brought them along, as cattle will invariably, and so I said, “It is time to start.” We set off for the cistern, myself in the lead holding the bomb. I checked to see whether the lighter was in the pocket of my shorts. One shoe dragged, as I had taken out the lace, nevertheless I set a good pace toward the reservoir while I held the bomb above my head like the torch of liberty in New York harbor, saying to myself, “Okay, Henderson. This is it. You’d better deliver on your promise. No horsing around,” and so on. You can imagine my feelings!
In the dead of the heat we reached the cistern and I went forward alone into the weeds on the edge. All the rest remained behind, and not even Romilayu came up with me. That Was all right, too. In a crisis a man must be prepared to stand alone, and actually standing alone is the kind of thing I’m good at. I was thinking, “By Judas, I should be good, considering how experienced I am in going it by myself.” And with the bomb in my left hand and the lighter with the slender white wick in the other-this patriarchal-looking wick-I looked into the water. There in their home medium were the creatures, the polliwogs with fat heads and skinny tails and their budding little scratchers, and the mature animals with eyes like ripe gooseberries, submerged in their slums of ooze. While I myself, Henderson, like a great pine whose roots have crossed and choked one another-but never mind about me now. The figure of their doom, I stood over them and the frogs didn’t-of course they couldn’t-know what I augured. And meanwhile, all the chemistry of anxious fear, which I know so well and hate so much, was taking place in me-the light wavering before my eyes, the saliva drying, my parts retracting, and the cables of my neck hardening. I heard the chatter of the expectant Arnewi, who held their cattle on ornamented tethers, as a drowning man will hear the bathers on the beach, and I saw Mtalba, who stood between them and me in her red baize like a poppy, the black at the center of the blazing red. Then I blew on the wick of my device, to free it from dust (or for good luck), and spun the wheel of the lighter, and when it responded with a flame, I lit the fuse, formerly my shoelace. It started to burn and first the metal tip dropped off. The spark sank pretty steadily toward the case. There was nothing for me to do but clutch the thing, and fix my eyes upon it; my legs, bare to the heat, were numb. The burning took quite a space of time and even when the point of the spark descended through the hole in the wood, I held on because I couldn’t risk quenching it. After this I had to call on intuition plus luck, and as there now was nothing I especially wanted to see in the external world I closed my eyes and waited for the spirit to move me. It was not yet time, and still not time, and I pressed the case and thought I heard the spark as it ate the lace and fussed toward the powder. At the last moment I took a Band-Aid which I had prepared for this moment and fastened it over the hole. Then I lobbed the bomb, giving it an underhand toss. It touched the thatch and turned on itself only once before it fell into the yellow water. The frogs fled from it and the surface closed again; the ripples traveled outward and that was all. But then a new motion began; the water swelled at the middle and I realized that the thing was working. Damned if my soul didn’t rise with the water even before it began to spout, following the same motion, and I cried to myself, “Hallelujah! Henderson, you dumb brute, this time you’ve done it!” Then the water came shooting upward. It might not have been Hiroshima, but it was enough of a gush for me, and it started raining frogs’ bodies upward. They leaped for the roof with the blast, and globs of mud and stones and polliwogs struck the thatch. I wouldn’t have thought a dozen or so shells from the.375 had such a charge in them, and from the periphery of my intelligence the most irrelevant thoughts, which are fastest and lightest, rushed to the middle as I congratulated myself, the first thought being, “They’d be proud of old Henderson at school.” (The infantry school. I didn’t get high marks when I was there.) The long legs and white bellies and the thicker shapes of the infant frogs filled the column of water. I myself was spattered with the mud, but I started to yell, “Hey, Itelo — Romilayu! How do you like that? Boom! You wouldn’t believe me!”
I had gotten more of a result than I could have known in the first instants, and instead of an answering cry I heard shrieks from the natives, and looking to see what was the matter I found that the dead frogs were pouring out of the cistern together with the water. The explosion had blasted out the retaining wall at the front end. The big stone blocks had fallen and the yellow reservoir was emptying fast. “Oh! Hell!” I grabbed my head, immediately dizzy with the nausea of disaster, seeing the water spill like a regular mill race with the remains of those frogs. “Hurry, hurry!” I started to yell. “Romilayu! Itelo! Oh, Judas priest, what’s happening! Give a hand. Help, you guys, help!” I threw myself down against the escaping water and tried to breast it back and lift the stones into place. The frogs charged into me like so many prunes and fell into my pants and into the open shoe, the lace gone. The cattle started to riot, pulling at their tethers and straining toward the water. But it was polluted and nobody would allow them to drink. It was a moment of horror, with the cows of course obeying nature and the natives begging them and weeping, and the whole reservoir going into the ground. The sand got it all. Romilayu waded up beside me and did his best, but these blocks of stone were beyond our strength and because of the cistern’s being also a dam we were downstream, or however the hell it was. Anyway, the water was lost — lost! In a matter of minutes I saw (sickening!) the yellow mud of the bottom and the dead frogs settling there. For them death was instantaneous by shock and it was all over. But the natives, the cows leaving under protest, moaning for the water! Soon everyone was gone except for Itelo and Mtalba.