“I had a little too much business with a certain type of creature for my own good,” I said. “If I had it to do over again, it would be different.”
We sat on the shaky platform under the gold straw belfry of thatch. The light was finely grated on the floor. We crouched, waiting under the fibers and straw. The odor of plants came up on the air-blue heat in gusts, and because of my fever I had a feeling that I had found, in midair, a changing point between matter and light. I was watching it being carried from within and thought I saw crying and writhing outside. Not able to stand this sense of things, I got up and stepped on the pole the king was supposed to balance on.
“What are you doing?”
I was trying it out for him. I said, “I am checking on the Bunam.”
“You must not stand there, Henderson.”
My weight was bowing the wood, but there was no crackling, it was a very hard wood and I was satisfied by the test. I lifted myself back to the platform and we sat together, or crouched, outside the grass wall of the shelter on a narrow projection of the floor, almost within reach of the weighted trap which hung waiting. Opposite us was the cliff of gritty rock, and, following the line of it beyond the end of the hopo, over the heads of the waiting spearmen, I saw a sort of small stone building deep in the ravine. I hadn’t noticed it before because in this ravine, or gorge, there was a small forest of cactuses which produced a red bud, or berry, or flower, and this partly blocked it from view.
“Does somebody live there, below?”
“No.”
“Is it abandoned? Used? In our part of the country, where farming has gone to hell, you come across old houses everywhere. But that’s a crazy place for a residence,” I said.
The rope by which the cage or net was slung had been tied to the doorpost, and the king’s head was resting against the knot. “It is not for living,” he told me without glancing toward the building.
A tomb? I thought. Whose tomb?
“I think they are driving rapidly. Ah! Do you think you can see them? It is getting loud.” He stood, and I did too, and shaded my eyes from the glare while I strained my forehead.
“No, I don’t see.”
“I neither, Henderson. This is the most hard part. I have waited all my life, and we are within the last hour.”
“Well, Your Highness,” I said, “for you it should be easy. You have known these animals all your life. You are bred for this; you are a pro. If there’s anything I love to see, it’s a guy who’s good at his work. Whether it’s a rigger or steeplejack or window-washer or any person who has strong nerves and a skilled body … You had me worried when you started that skull dance, but after a minute of it I would have backed you to my last dime.” And I took out my wallet, which I kept taped to the inside of the helmet, and to make these moments easier for him, within the rising blare of the horns and the constant running of the drums (while we sat as if marooned in the illuminated air), I said, “Your Highness, did I ever show you these pictures of my wife and children?” I started to look for them in the bulky wallet. I had my passport there, and four one-thousand-dollar bills, taking no chances on traveler’s checks in Africa. “Here’s my wife. We spent a lot of money on a portrait and had difficulties all through. I begged her not to hang it and almost had a nervous breakdown over it. But this photograph of her is a beauty.” In it Lily wore a low-necked dress of polka dots. She looked very amused. It was toward me that she was smiling, for I was at the camera. She was saying affectionately that I was a fool; I probably had been clowning around. Owing to the smile her cheeks were high and full; in the picture you couldn’t tell how pure and pale her color was. The king took it from me, and I have to hand it to him that at a moment like this he could contemplate Lilys picture.
“She is a serious person,” he said.
“Do you think she looks like a doctor’s wife?”
“I think she looks like any serious person’s wife.” “But I guess she wouldn’t agree about your species idea, Your Highness, because she decided that I was the only fellow in the world she could marry. One God, one husband, I guess. Well, here are the kids …”
Without comment he looked at Ricey and Edward, little Alice in Switzerland, the twins. “They are not identical, Your Majesty, but they both cut their first tooth on the same day.” The next flap of celluloid held a snapshot of myself; I was in the red robe and hunting cap with the violin under my chin and an expression on my face which I had never noticed before. Quickly I turned to my Purple Heart citation.
“Oh? That is so? You are Captain Henderson?”
“I didn’t keep the commission. Maybe you’d like to see my scars, Your Highness. The thing happened with a land mine. I didn’t get the worst of it. I was thrown about twenty feet. Now here in the thigh you can’t see it so well, because it’s sunken and the hair has grown over and hidden it. The belly wound was the bad one. My insides started to fall out. I held in my guts and walked bent over to the dressing station.”
“You are very pleased about your trouble, Henderson?”
He would always say such things to me and introduce an unforeseen perspective. I have forgotten some of them, but he once asked my opinion about Descartes. “Do you agree with the fellow’s proposition that the animal is a soulless machine?” Or, “Do you think that Jesus Christ is still a source of human types, Henderson, as a model-force? I have often thought about my physical types, as the agony, the appetite, and the rest, to be possibly degenerate forms of great originals, as Socrates, Alexander, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus …” This, and the like, was his unforeseen way of conversation.
He observed that I was peculiar about trouble and suffering. And, yes, I knew what he was saying as we sat on those poles beside the lavish bristle of the thatch, this grotesque, dry, hairy, piercing vegetable skeleton. As he waited to achieve his heart’s desire, he was telling me that suffering was the closest thing to worship that I knew anything about.
Believe me, I knew my man, and strange as he was I understood him. I was monstrously proud of my suffering. I thought there was nobody in the world that could suffer quite like me.
But we could not speak quietly to each other any more, for the noise was too near. The sounds of cicadas had been going up in vertical spirals, like columns of thinnest shining wire. Now we would hear none of the minor sounds at all. The spearmen behind the hopo lifted up the barred gate to let through the creatures whom the beaters had flushed. For the grasses of the bush were beginning to quiver, as water will when a fish-filled net approaches the surface.
“Look there,” said Dahfu. He pointed to the cliff side of the hopo, where deer with twisted horns were running; whether they were gazelles or elands I couldn’t say. A buck was in the lead. He had tall, twisted horns like smoked glass, and he leaped in terror with blasting breath and huge eyes. On one knee, Dahfu was watching the grass for signs, sighting across his forearm so that his nose was almost covered. The small animals were making currents in the grass. Flocks of birds went straight up, like masses of notes; they flew toward the cliffs and down into the ravine. The deer clattered beneath us. I looked below. Those were planks at the bottom. I hadn’t noticed that. They were raised six or eight inches from the ground, and the king said, “Yes. After the capture, Henderson, wheels are put under so the animal can be transported.” He stooped low to call instructions to the spearmen. When he bent, I wanted to hold on to him, but I had never touched his person. I wasn’t sure it would be right.