“Oh, God, what’s happened?” I said to them. “This is ruination. I have made a disaster.” And I pulled up my wet and stained T-shirt and hid my face in it. Thus exposed, I said through the cloth, “Itelo, kill me! All I’ve got to offer is my life. So take it. Go ahead, I’m waiting.”
I listened for his approach but all I could hear, instead of footsteps, were the sounds of heartbreak that escaped from Mtalba. My belly hung forth and I was braced for the blow of the knife.
“Mistah Henderson. Sir! What has happened?”
“Stab me,” I said, “don’t ask me. Stab, I say. Use my knife if you haven’t got your own. It’s all the same,” I said, “and don’t forgive me. I couldn’t stand it. I’d rather be dead.”
This was nothing but God’s own truth, as with the cistern I had blown up everything else, it seemed. And so I held my face in the bagging, sopping shirt with the unbearable complications at heart. I waited for Itelo to cut me open, my naked middle with all its fevers and its suffering prepared for execution. Under me the water of the cistern was turning to hot vapor and the sun was already beginning to corrupt the bodies of the frog dead.
X
I heard Mtalba crying, “Aii, yelli, yelli.”
“What is she saying?” I asked Romilayu. “She say, goo’by. Fo’ evah.”
And Itelo in a trembling voice said to me, “You please, Mistah Henderson, covah down you face.”
I asked, “What’s the matter? You’re not going to take my life?”
“No, no, you won me. You want to die, you got to die you’self. You are a friend.”
“Some friend,” I said.
I could hear that he was speaking against a great pressure in his throat; the lump in it must have been enormous. “I would have laid down my life to help you,” I said. “You saw how long I held that bomb. I wish it had gone off in my hands and blown me to smashes. It’s the same old story with me; as soon as I come amongst people I screw something up-I goof. They were right to cry when I showed up. They must have smelled trouble and knew that I would cause a disaster.”
Under cover of the shirt, I gave in to my emotions, the emotion of gratitude included. I demanded, “Why for once, just once! couldn’t I get my heart’s desire? I have to be doomed always to bungle.” And I thought my life-pattern stood revealed, and after such a revelation death might as well ensue as not.
But as Itelo would not stab me, I pulled down the cistern-stained shirt and said, “Okay, Prince, if you don’t want my blood on your hands.”
“No, no,” he said.
And I said, “Then thanks, Itelo. I’ll just have to try to carry on from here.”
Then Romilayu muttered, “Whut we do, sah?”
“We will leave, Romilayu. It’s the best contribution I can make now to the welfare of my friends. Good-by, Prince. Good-by, dear lady, and tell the queen good-by. I hoped to learn the wisdom of life from her but I guess I am just too rash. I am not fit for such companionship. But I love that old woman. I love all you folks. God bless you all. I’d stay,” I said, “and at least repair your cistern for you …”
“Bettah you not, sir,” said Itelo.
I took his word for it; after all, he knew the situation best. And moreover I was too heartbroken to differ with him. Romilayu went back to the hut to collect our stuff while I walked out of the deserted town. There was not a soul in any of the lanes, and even the cattle had been pulled indoors so that they would not have to see me again. I waited by the wall of the town and when Romilayu showed up we went back into the desert together. This was how I left in disgrace and humiliation, having demolished both their water and my hopes. For now I’d never learn more about the grun-tu-molani.
Naturally Romilayu wanted to go back to Baventai and I said to him that I knew he had fulfilled his contract. The jeep was his whenever he wanted it. “However,” I asked, “how can I go back to the States now? Itelo wouldn’t kill me. He’s a noble character and friendship means something to him. But I might as well take this.375 and blow my brains out on the spot as go home.”
“Whut you mean, sah?” said Romilayu, much puzzled.
“I mean, Romilayu, that I went into the world one last time to accomplish certain purposes, and you saw for yourself what has happened. So if I quit at this time I’ll probably turn into a zombie. My face will become as white as paraffin, and I’ll lie on my bed until I croak. Which is maybe no more than I deserve. So it’s your choice. I can’t give any orders now and I leave it up to you. If you are going to Baventai it will be by yourself.”
“You go alone, sah?” he said, surprised at me.
“If I have to, yes, pal,” I said. “For I can’t turn back. It’s okay. I have a few rations and four one-thousand-dollar bills in my hat, and I guess I can find food and water on the way. I can eat locusts. If you want my gun you can have that too.”
“No,” said Romilayu, after thinking briefly about it. “You no go alone, sah.”
“You’re a pretty regular guy. You’re a good man, Romilayu. I may be nothing but an old failure, having muffed just about everything I ever put my hand to; I seem to have the Midas touch in reverse, so my opinion may not be worth having, but that’s what I think. So,” I said, “what’s ahead of us? Where’ll we go?”
“I no know,” said Romilayu. “Maybe Wariri?” he said.
“Oh, the Wariri. Prince Itelo went to school with their king-what’s his name?”
“Dahfu.”
“That’s it, Dahfu. Well, then, shall we go in that direction?”
Reluctantly Romilayu said, “Okay, sah.” He seemed to have his doubts about his own suggestion.
I picked up more than my share of the burden and said, “Let’s go. We may not decide to enter their town. We’ll see how we feel about that later. But let’s go. I haven’t got much hope, but all I know is that at home I’d be a dead man.”
Thus we started off toward the Wariri while I was thinking about the burial of Oedipus at Colonus-but he at least brought people luck after he was dead. At that time I might almost have been willing to settle for this.
We traveled eight or ten days more, through country very like the Hinchagara plateau. After the fifth or sixth day the character of the ground changed somewhat. There was more wood on the mountains, although mostly the slopes were still sterile. Mesas and hot granites and towers and acropolises held onto the earth; I mean they gripped it and refused to depart with the clouds which seemed to be trying to absorb them. Or maybe in my melancholy everything looked cocksy-worsy to me. This marching over difficult terrain didn’t bother Romilayu, who was as much meant for such travel as a deckhand is meant to be on the water. Cargo or registry or destination makes little difference in the end. With those skinny feet he covered ground and to him this activity was self-explanatory. He was very skillful at finding water and knew where he could stick a straw into the soil and get a drink, and he would pick up gourds and other stuff I would never even have noticed and chew them for moisture and nourishment. At night we sometimes talked. Romilayu was of the opinion that with their cistern empty the Arnewi would probably undertake a trek for water. And remembering the frogs and many things besides I sat beside the fire and glowered at the coals, thinking of my shame and ruin, but a man goes on living and, living, things are either better or worse to a fellow. This will never stop, and all survivors know it. And when you don’t die of a trouble somehow you begin to convert it-make use of it, I mean.
Giant spiders we saw, and nets set up like radar stations among the cactuses. There were ants in these parts whose bodies were shaped like diabolos and their nests made large gray humps on the landscape. How ostriches could bear to run so hard in this heat I never succeeded in understanding. I got close enough to one to see how round his eyes were and then he beat the earth with his feet and took off with a hot wind in his feathers, a rusty white foam behind.