The ears received another message entirely. If she looked like a wet dream, she sounded like Cotton Mather on an acid trip. She ran down the gospel according to St. Sheena with the precise cadence of a New England preacher. I was occasionally reminded of the Book of Mormon; the Angel Moroni, like Sheena, had tended to transmit his revelations in King James English. And, also like Sheena, he had frequently made less than an abundance of sense. It kept sounding right, but it kept not meaning anything.
Actually, she might almost as well have been reciting the Book of Mormon, or the Magna Carta, or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or the Complete Works of Chester Alan Arthur, for all the impression it was making on her disciples. They evidently liked the sound of it, and the sound of it was all they got, because Sheena was babbling on and on in English – albeit her own personal version thereof – and of all the crowd gathered around her, only Plum and Bowman and I understood English. The rest of them – of us – could no more understand English than I could understand them.
I drew Sam aside and asked him if Sheena spoke the native language. “Just English,” he said. “I don’t think she understands the native tongue, either. And they don’t understand her. It’s a very heavy relationship.”
“What language do the natives speak?”
“I don’t know the name of it. I can get around in it without breaking a leg, but I don’t know what you’d call it. Some local dialect. It’s nothing like what they speak farther south.”
“How does Sheena talk to the men?”
“You’re hearing her.”
“I mean how does she communicate?”
“Through me, now. She’ll tell me something in English and I’ll translate it into wog-gabble. I don’t know how she worked it before I happened on. But dig, it’s weird. They always seem to know what she has in mind. Like I tried turning her orders upside down one day, and it didn’t take. She has this fantastic intuitive thing with them. A very down scene. She doesn’t tell them what to do so much as she does things, she gets into a set, and they act in concert with her.” He shook his head in reminiscence. “The best illustration is at a massacre. The lady’s at her best at a massacre. She doesn’t tell anybody what to do. She just wades right in and lets fly, reelin’ off her own personal scripture and swingin’ that machete of hers like the jawbone of an ass. When we raid a village or wipe out a mission, she is purely beautiful.”
“You sound as though you enjoy it.”
“Shit, man, who wouldn’t?” His eyes met mine. “It’s all the same scrum, baby. Whether it’s Oakland cops or back-country priests and nuns, it’s the same ofay establishment. It’s cuttin’ whitey up and makin’ him bleed, that’s what it’s all about. After four hundred years of slavery, you got to expect a little desire for vengeance.”
I must have backed off, or looked as though I was about to, because all at once the tension and fervor left his face and his features eased into a grin. “Nothing personal, Tanner cat. Course you understand that.”
“Sure,” I said, unsure.
“Just a matter of not cuttin’ off your hose despite your race, is how you maybe could put it. One white man is one thing. I can dig you on a personal level. But in the abstract, the whole lot of you, that’s somethin’ else.”
“But missionaries,” I said. “Priests and nuns, doctors and nurses. I don’t-”
“Missionaries!” He shouted the word, and several nearby warriors turned to gape at us. I tried to shrink away from them and avoid their eyes. My makeup job was fairly good, but the closer one looked at me the whiter I appeared. “Motherfucking bloodyminded missionaries,” he went on, in a lower register now. “Tanner cat, those are the worstest white devils of all. No question, no argument. Give me the straight-out colonialist any day of the week. You know where you stand with him. Like the Mississippi sheriff – he may kill you, but he won’t lay a load of bullshit on you. But the missionary, he comes into my country where I got my own religion and my own way of doing things, my own ceremonies and costumes and medicine and agriculture, and he gives out some vaccinations and passes around some food, and the next thing you know he’s sayin’ how my religion is a shuck and my ceremonies are a crock and my medicine’s a superstition and my crops don’t grow right, and what he’s tryin’ to do is turn me into a white man on the inside and leave me the same old bush nigger outside. The colonialist takes a man’s body and leaves him his soul, and that’s bad, but it’s a damn sight worse the other way around. That whole missionary attitude, that holier-than-thou routine, that white man’s burden birdsong. I hate that, man. It makes me want to reach out and rip things.”
And again the eyes were blazing, the forehead creased, the veins standing out on the glossy black temples. And again, too, the passion waned all at once and teeth flashed in a smile. “Course you wouldn’t buy that,” he said.
“No, I agree. Missionaries are the most arrogant people in the world, and they don’t even know it, they actually think they’re humble. But-”
“But you don’t buy killing them.”
“Not especially, no.”
“Because their hearts are pure, right?”
“Not exactly that, but-”
He clapped me on the shoulder. It was a friendly gesture but one that very nearly knocked me from my feet. “Tanner cat, the trouble with you, you know what it is?”
“I’m white.”
“Well, that’s maybe part of it. But you can’t help it, it’s just an accident at birth. The sort of thing that’s apt to happen to a man when both his parents is white. The real trouble is that you just aren’t a fanatic.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which checks my mail, thinks I’m a fanatic. The Central Intelligence Agency, which bugs my apartment, concurs in this judgment. The police of countries all over the globe, having spotted my name on lists of various unwelcome organizations, concur in the opinion. I’m not even allowed in Canada, and you can’t be a whole hell of a lot more fanatic than that.
But that wild-eyed fanatic was the old Evan Tanner. And if the leopard can change his spots and the Nixon his image, surely the Tanner can mature from youthful fanaticism to mature responsibility. And, I thought now, in my new role of Scarsdale Galahad and Levittown Lochinvar, in my chosen identity of breakfast-eating Brooks Brothers type, I couldn’t deny the truth of Samuel Lonestar Bowman’s remark. I just wasn’t a fanatic.
A little later I repeated most of the conversation with Plum. She didn’t concur in Bowman’s opinion of missionaries. As far as she was concerned, no one who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and healed the sick could be all bad. Her trouble was that she wasn’t a fanatic either.
“And they don’t just kill white people,” she pointed out. “They kill black people as well. There were black corpses at the mission.”
“I know. When they hit a mission, they kill everything that moves.”
“And when they raid the villages, they do not merely do this to get supplies and to recruit more men for their forces. They kill and loot and burn.”
“True.”
“And they kill all women, Evan. Not just white women. Black women as well.”
“True. That’s Sheena’s idea. It’s a particular fixation she has. She wants to be the only woman in the world.”
“Honestly?”
“So Bowman says. There’s no one else I can ask.”
“That’s some ambition of hers.”
“It’s every woman’s ambition, deep down inside. It’s just that she’s doing more to achieve it than most.”
“If someone does not do something, Evan, she may manage it.”