“Do you, Tanner, take this woman, Sheena, as your bride and goddess, to love, honor, and obey, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, until death do you in?”
“ Katanga Salami Nokomis.”
“Then by the authority vested in me I do proclaim us woman and husband. Sticks and stones shall break thy bones but names shall never hurt thee.” She shrugged off the pelts, exposing her naked flesh. Her body was so flawlessly formed and so lushly designed it seemed incredible that she did not fold into three parts, that her navel was indeed unstapled. She was honestly too good to be true, and the effect was perversely anaphrodisiacal – that which was so perfectly designed to turn one on had the effect of turning one (more precisely, me) off.
This may reveal a tragic flaw in my own character. I’m not sure. I seem to be encumbered with an unwillingness to believe in the ideal when I encounter it. Spectacular scenery makes me feel that I am watching a film or examining a picture postcard. When I see an extraordinary hairdo I assume the lady is wearing a wig. Plants growing luxuriantly appear plastic. It has occurred to me that this inability to accept perfection may be a corollary to the idea of a man’s reach properly exceeding his grasp. And I would have liked to pursue the thought further, but I had other things to contend with.
Sheena, for example.
“Dearly beloved,” she was saying, “we have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, and may God have mercy on your soul. You may fuck the bride.”
Outside, I knew, Plum and Bowman were getting ready to go into their acts. For simplicity’s sake, we had divided the task of escape into three parts, like Gaul. It was Plum ’s job to incapacitate about a dozen long dugout canoes, the entire navy of Sheena’s entire army. It was Bowman’s job to incapacitate somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty men, and it was my job to incapacitate Sheena herself. By any sort of logical analysis, my job was the easiest of the three.
I would have traded even with either of them.
I was still kneeling there, and thinking about this, when Sheena repeated her last sentence. There was a note of irritation in her tone. I had missed my cue, and she didn’t seem to like it. It seemed to me that this must happen rather often, since Bowman and I were alone among her husbands in being able to understand what she was saying. I guess the others were good at nonverbal communication and simply did what came naturally.
Time to go to work, I reminded myself. Nice work if you can get it, I told myself. Plenty of trouble if you can’t get it, I added. Up.
I reached for the bride.
Chapter 12
It was method acting, pure Stanislavski. The wish fathered the thought while necessity mothered invention, and I pressed buttons and flicked switches inside my head until I was what I seemed to be, an ignoble savage paying carnal homage to my white goddess. I lived the part and rose to the occasion, so to speak, and the lady was not displeased.
Her cries of passion would have been more inspiring had we not had a language in common. As she prepared to die the little death, she cried out in cadence and crescendo, and had I not understood the words I might have been moved. But what she cried out was the begat section of Genesis, singularly appropriate in a sense but hardly in line with my own mood.
We rested, and we resumed, and we rested once again. And then, while I lay with eyes lidded and chest heaving and mind wandering lonely as a cloud, I heard the voice of a child.
“Hello, Daddy. Hello, Mommy. May I go for a nice walk? May I play with my toys?”
I looked up to see who was addressing us as Daddy and Mommy. But there was no one in the room but me and the goddess, and I looked at her and away and back again in a rather clumsy double take. It was the goddess who was speaking, but in a distinctly ungoddessly voice.
“Mary had a little lamb,” she began, in a tinny tiny voice, and went on, reciting this and other Mother Gooseries. She made occasional mistakes – she had trouble, for example, in keeping Little Boy Blue and Little Bo-peep straight, but then they may have had that problem themselves. The little voice never faltered and was never at a loss for words. I reached out, tipped up her chin, looked into her eyes. There was nobody home.
According to the script, it was just about time for me to put Sheena temporarily out of commission. The precise mechanics of this were to be improvised on the spot, and would probably involve something like bopping her over the head and tying her up.
I hadn’t liked the idea then and I liked it less now. Some vestigial remnant of chivalry, anachronistic but undeniable for all that, made me less than enthusiastic about the prospect of treating any woman in this fashion. Women, after all, occupy a special niche in the great chain of being (if chains have niches). They stand (if one stands in niches) a little lower than the apes, a little higher than the angels. And they are to be approached courteously, and with respect, and not with a right to the jaw.
And if it is undecorous to knock a woman cold, it would seem just that much worse to do so after having shared a bed with her. I had taken this into consideration and had just about conquered my objections, and now yet another variable had been introduced. I had not merely shared a bed with Sheena. I had done so and had seen the bedding process induce a reversion to childhood. It was one thing to coldcock Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. It was another thing when Sheena had become Jane and when a child’s voice emerged from that unimpeachably mature body.
“My name is Jane and I am ten years old. Are you a stranger? My mommy says I am not to talk to strangers. Are you a nice man? My name is Jane-”
She’s a murderess, I told myself. A butcher. Next to her, Ilse Koch was just a life-of-the-party type with a lampshade on her head.
“My daddy is a man of God. He is tall and pretty. At night sometimes he sleeps with my mommy and they wrestle and call out God’s name. I have to wash my hands and face and eat all my vegetables and say my prayers or I will not go to heaven when I die. When my daddy goes away my uncle Bobby goes with my mommy and they say their prayers and wrestle. My daddy’s name is Mordecai. My mommy’s name is Prudence. My name is Jane.”
A cannibal, I thought. A butchering murdering cannibal. A menace.
“My name is Jane and I am ten years old-”
I swallowed. Whatever happened to Baby Jane, it had certainly left its mark on her. But underneath the animal skins and inside the lush flesh the innocent child lived on. It was all still there, trapped in a madwoman who roamed the jungle as if intent on having her life story serialized in the National Enquirer.
I said, “You poor little kid.”
“My name is Jane. Who are you?”
“Evan.”
“Jane, Evan. Evan, Jane.”
“You poor screwed-up little kid.”
“Round and round the mulberry bush to get a pail of water.”
I went over to the front of the tent and peered out through the flap. The two sentries remained on duty. Beyond them, I saw the tournament in progress. Pairs of warriors faced one another and crouched, ready for combat. Sam Bowman called out a signal and two of them rushed each other, making sudden movements, thrusting, parrying. Then one straightened up and stood erect while the other lay still in the dust. The winner took his place in line, others carried the loser off to the side, and Bowman signaled another pair of combatants to center stage.
Behind me, Jane went on babbling in rhyme. I hissed a volley of sibilant syllables at the sentries. They turned, and I crooked a finger to motion one of them inside. He came, voicing some question or other. I turned and pointed wordlessly at Jane. He looked at her, and while he was thus occupied I hit him as one hits rabbits, with a fist to the back of the neck. It couldn’t have worked very much better had he been a rabbit. He made a brief gurgling sound and then made no sound at all.