"Me Tanner, You Jane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

Chapter 10

“And the voice of the Lord came unto Jane, and spake unto her. And the Lord said, Lo, thou art white, and thy father was white and his father before him. And the whiteness of thy father and thy father’s father is an abomination in my eyes, and thou art whitened as a sepulcher. So henceforth shalt thy name not be Jane, but from this day forward and forevermore shalt thou be called Sheena, which means Queen of the Jungle.

“And the voice of the Lord spake unto Jane called Sheena, and said unto her, Lo, over every living thing shalt thou have dominion, over them that groweth in the ground and them that creepeth in the sky and them that lieth down and them that riseth up. And over every man and every woman shalt thou have dominion, and of the men, if they be white, then shalt they surely be put to death. And of the women, if they be black or white, they shall be surely put to death. And of the men, if they be black, let them come into thy tent, and let them lie with thee, and let them come unto thee when thou liest down and when thou risest up.

“And the voice of the Lord-”

I tuned out the voice of the Lord, no disrespect intended, and let my eyes take over for my ears. Sheena was a far cry better to look at than to listen to. As far as the eyes were concerned, she was a Playboy centerfold brought miraculously to life, the ideal Playmate of this or any other month. She had hair so golden the French peasantry would have hoarded it and eyes as blue as a Billie Holiday record. Her breasts convinced one that mammals were God’s chosen creatures, and that God had the right idea. Her legs went all the way up to her neck.

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.”

“It doesn’t seem too likely.”

“But Evan,” she said, her hand on my arm. “Listen to me. You have said how Bowman likes to kill white men, and his reasons, and I think the reasons are crazy but I can understand why he might feel this way. But what about the harmless villagers? And all of the black women? Why should he be willing to kill them?”

I covered her hand with mine, then let go abruptly and glanced hurriedly around. No one seemed to have noticed, and Plum looked oddly at me. I told her that everybody thought she was a boy, and that if we held hands and necked the other clowns would either figure out that she was female, in which case she would get the ax, or assume that I was some kind of a faggot. I wasn’t quite sure how tribesmen in the Modonoland interior felt about homosexuality. While it seemed the sort of thing worth knowing, I felt it might be just as well to wait until I was back in New York and then look it up in an anthropological journal. Sometimes secondhand research has its points.

But I didn’t dwell on this, and Plum took her hand off my arm, and I reminded myself that, from here on in, she might as well be a boy for all I cared. We’d had our last fling. It was time to be faithful to Kitty.

“Getting back to Bowman,” I said, by way of getting back to Bowman. “He’s a fairly arresting type, don’t you think? An extremely charming type. He can chill your blood one minute and take it all back with a smile.”

“He talks weird.”

“I know. He shifts back and forth from Harlem hard-bop jive to plantation hand to college graduate. Sometimes he even sounds vaguely British. It goes along with being a good linguist, which he damned well must be to handle the dialect they speak here. It sounds like turkey. Not the country, the bird. You know – gobble gobble.”

“I don’t trust him, Evan.”

“Neither do I. But we can’t really get out of here without his help – we can’t even survive without it. And he can’t get away without us.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s been here a long while now and never got away so far.”

“Maybe he wants to stay.” Her lip curled and her eyes looked older by some years. “Maybe your friend Bowman likes it here.”

“He doesn’t want to stay. He can stand it here, all right, but it won’t keep him happy for very long. He’s too complex to settle for the Noble Savage routine.”

“I suppose you are right. I know that he has depth. When he spoke of the death of the Retriever, even while I knew the political crimes of Knanda Ndoro, yet I was moved, Evan.”

“Well, he’s charming. And he’s complex, and he has depth, and I know damned well he has a use for us or else he would have killed us back at the mission. Because it’s not hard to say why Bowman goes along with killing innocent blacks and their women. I think he just plain enjoys it.”

The Red Ball Irregulars were just another army, after all. And armies are armies as sure as war is hell, and this one, like the one I had served in (and like the one Napoleon served in, and like the one Julius Caesar served in) was an organization of hurry up and wait, a group which spent most of its collective time doing nothing at all.

We spent the rest of that day doing nothing at all. Sheena had pitched camp on the site of an abandoned village about a dozen miles from the ruined mission. The abandonment of the village had not been entirely voluntary; several months previously Sheena had raided it, and its huts were subsequently unoccupied because of the demise of the previous occupants. The jungle had made a good start at reclaiming the cleared land, and weather had done a job on the huts, but they were still standing and reasonably sound. Plum and I had one all to ourselves, and we spent most of the day sitting in it and grunting at each other.

The others, forty or fifty of them, spent most of their time sharpening knives and machetes, practicing hand-to-hand combat, combing their ancillary hair for lice, picking their noses, and scratching themselves. In the interests of verisimilitude I tried to be doing one or more of these things whenever anyone was looking my way. The only knife I had was distinctly out of place in that company, and if I got involved in their hand-to-hand contests the game would be up in no time at all, so that left lice hunting, nose picking, and general scratching. I didn’t mind hunting for lice, but I was more than a little disconcerted when I began finding them. I tried to console myself with the thought that this lent additional verisimilitude to the pose. This was relatively little consolation.

Shortly before sunset, they began preparing for the feast. Men piled mountains of brush and planks from a dilapidated hut in the center of the village and poured a can of some petroleum distillate on it. One of them struck a match – looting does provide one with the trappings of civilization – and the whole thing went up in a glorious whooshing blaze.

They let the fire burn down, then heaped more brush and boards on it and let them flame up and burn down until there was a deep bed of fiery coals. By this time the sun had dropped behind the trees and the glow of the campfire was the only available light. Three men carried a huge cast-iron kettle and set it atop the bed of coals. Various men began throwing things into the kettle. This went on for quite some time. Then Sheena came out of her quarters and said something which sounded like a remake of the Book of Judges, a section dealing with a triumph given for Samson, I think. It was hard to be sure. It was even harder to guess what she had in mind, but the general gist of it was that the warriors of the Lord could not rest on their laurels but must move from victory through the fruits of triumph to a fresh engagement with the enemy. There was an all-purpose feel to it, and it didn’t differ much in content from what Vince Lombardi used to tell the Packers the morning after they won a close one.

Bowman said a few words after that, but I could no more understand him than the others could tell what Sheena meant. I hate not being able to understand what someone else is saying. I really find it unendurable. It’s a situation I don’t face very often, and it was consequently particularly maddening.

After his speech, the Gray Panther followed Sheena into her shack and the chefs let the caldron bubble for a spell. I was squatting on my haunches in the doorway of our hut, and Plum came up and squatted beside me. Cooking smells wafted in our direction, and I said that it smelled very good indeed, which indeed it did.

“What do you suppose it is?”

“Oh, all different things,” I said. I had managed to identify some of the ingredients as they found their way into the pot. “They evidently massacred the mission livestock along with the human beings. A couple of hens went into the pot, and what must have been a goat or a sheep, and I think a hog. Plus a variety of fruits and vegetables. Some roots that looked like parsnips, although I suppose they could have been almost anything.”

“Almost anything,” she echoed.

“We’re both starving, all right. That food is going to taste damned good, Plum.”

“Damned good.”

“Nothing to eat since I can’t remember when. Except for the eggs, and you remember what a failure they were. Pretty horrible, huh?”

“Pretty horrible.”

“But from the smell, this stew or whatever you want to call it, it should be great. You must be hungry as a bear, huh? You didn’t even keep the eggs down, so you must be just about ready to faint from hunger. I’ll tell you, when they bring that stew around, it’s going to taste like a banquet.”

“Like a banquet.”

I looked at her. “Why do you keep repeating everything I say?”

“Because I am trying to believe you, Evan, almost as hard as you are trying to convince me. But it is not working out properly.”

“Why not?”

“Because we both know what is in that stew.”

“Pork and lamb and chicken, and what’s so bad about that? Nothing wrong with pork and lamb and chicken, is there? Oh, maybe it wasn’t lamb, maybe it was goat, and maybe you’ve never eaten goat, but it’s as good as lamb if not better. They call it chevon, which is a handy word if the thought of eating goat bothers you. What the hell, different people eat different things all over the world.” I was talking rapidly now, and my voice hadn’t been this high since it changed a couple of decades ago. “The Chinese eat dogs, did you know that? Young puppies are considered a great delicacy there. They also eat monkeys. Sounds terrible, but de gustibus and all that. Goat, now-”

“Evan, you know I am not talking about goat.”

“Er.”

“I am sure there are all the things you said in that stew, but I am sure there are also parts of human beings.”

“Uh.”

“The parts that had been removed.”

“Umm.”

“So do not talk of goats.”

“ Plum, we have to eat.” She made a face. “I know, I know, but we have to eat. We can’t let ourselves starve to death.” She went on making a face. “Well, look at it another way. I mean, how do you know you won’t like it? Remember the fuss you made about the dead antelope? Couldn’t stand the idea of eating it, you said. It was dead meat, meat just lying there on the ground, you said. Unrefrigerated, probably teeming with bacteria, you said. But once you tasted it-”

“Evan, please stop it.”

“You can’t starve yourself.”

“Human beings fast for a month or more without harming themselves. They gain religious insight and learn important truths.”

“The most important truth they learn is that eating is good for you.”

“That is not true, Evan.” She tossed her head. “I am not eating any of that.”

“You could just pick out bits of vegetable-”

“I am not eating. I am not hungry. I am tired, Evan, and I think I will lie down and go to sleep before it is discovered that I am neither black nor a man.” Her eyes welled with tears. “You were right.”

“About what?”

“When you told me I should stay in Griggstown.” All at once she threw her arms around my neck and sobbed.

“Oh, I’m afraid,” she said. “I am truly afraid.”

When she was asleep I slipped out of the hut and joined the crowd. The feast was getting into gear now, with the stew almost ready for serving. The young bloods were starting to tank up on a home-brewed malty liquor, and when someone passed me a gourd of it I didn’t pass it back. It smelled of moldy bread and spoiled fruit, but the taste wasn’t bad and the stuff had a reasonable kick to it. It couldn’t compare to the grain alcohol of the night before, which was probably just as well. I refilled my gourd a few times and mingled with my fellow soldiers, scratching and picking my nose and grunting amiably at them. I thought I looked like a short-haired white man who had stained his skin with roots and berries, but if they thought as much they were good enough to keep it to themselves. They didn’t even seem to notice my ignorance of their language. Every once in a while I would say “Banana Kropotkin Pulaski,” a phrase I kept hearing others use, and I guess it was always appropriate, because no one took a swing at me.

Of course the fact that they were all stoned out of their gourds may have helped a little.

Somewhere along the way I set the gourd aside and accepted a plate heaped high with stew. I had been drinking not only because I wanted to but also with the thought in mind that the stew would be easier to take after a couple of belts, and now I tried it, and it was great. I guess there was human flesh in it. When all is said and done, I don’t think there’s any way to avoid that conclusion. I’ve tried rationalizing my way out of it often enough, God knows, but it won’t hold up. There was human flesh in that fine kettle of flesh, and I ate a heaping plateful of crud served from that kettle, ate it without picking it over, ate it unselectively and voraciously, and the argument that I might well have actually consumed nothing more unorthodox than pork and chicken and lamb (or chevon) is pure sophistry.

They were never going to believe this in Paramus.

Once I had finished with my food I let myself withdraw from the party. The festive mood had not quite caught hold of me, and I was afraid that another gourd of punch would make me lose my cool. I went back to my hut to check on Plum. She was still sleeping, and from the tenor of her breathing she was sleeping well, untroubled by nightmares. I wished her well and stretched out beside her for a few moments of rest. I went through the full cycle of relaxation exercises, all of which were easier on a full stomach and with a modicum of alcohol in my system. Certain muscle groups were stubborn – the eyelids, the solar plexus area, the calf of my left leg, each of them showing a persistent propensity for tightening up of their own accord. But I managed to unwind fairly well, and when I packed it in after a half hour or so and yawned and stretched and yawned again and sat up, I was better rested than I had been in a couple of days.

Outside, the party was just getting into top form. The bloody minded cannibals were dancing up a storm. They had discarded their clothing, and their red genitals flashed in the firelight. There seemed to be a limitless supply of the malt liquor, and it seemed to have a far greater effect upon them than it had on me. Every once in a while one of them would go rigid and fall over as if he had been clubbed. His fellows would leave him where he lay, and he would just stay there without moving anything.

It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that this would have been an ideal time for the three of us to get the hell out of there. I had been thinking this ever since they trotted out the booze, and the more the red crotch set drank, the more sense the idea made to me. But Bowman was still in Sheena’s hut, and there were two sober guards in front of that hut, and Plum was asleep, and we hadn’t made plans, and it looked as though we would have to put it off for a day or two. Not for too long, though, because judging from the familiarity my cannibal friends were displaying out there, feasts were not that unusual a part of army life. It looked as though they did this sort of thing rather often.

I did slip outside three or four times looking for Bowman, but it was no use. The first few times the sentry was doing his job and I couldn’t even get close to Sheena’s hut. The final time I got to it and inside it, and I called Bowman’s name a few times and got no response whatsoever. He seemed to be asleep, so I gave it up and went back to Plum. Now and then she would make a frightened noise and I would soothe her back to gentler sleep.

I was in the doorway at sunup when Bowman left Sheena’s tent and staggered across the central clearing, weaving his way through a maze of inert human forms. I gave him a wave and he came over and dropped to the ground, breathing very heavily. “Shee-it,” he said. “That woman ought to be outlawed. I never thought I’d live to have so much I wouldn’t want any more, but the day has done come. I know how Samson felt when he got that haircut. Maybe it wasn’t his hair they cut. You ever think of it that way?”

“Yes.”

“You did?” He shrugged, disappointed. I said something about how nice it would have been if we could have gotten the hell out of there that night, what with all of the others stoned. “Yeah, but we get another chance in two days,” he said. “There’s a party after every raid, and there’s a raid comin’ up tomorrow.”

“Another one?”

He scratched a map in the dirt. “She laid it all on me in between the acts. We’re here now. This here is the Yellowfoot River. It swings up and then winds down and out, and it’s the very same Yellowfoot that you followed north from Griggstown.”

“We followed the highway. That brilliant road the Retriever built.”

“Beautiful, ain’t it? You got to give the man credit.” He smiled and clicked his tongue. “Dig it, this here’s the Yellowfoot, and right at the top of this bend is the leprosarium. We break camp in a couple of hours and head for the river and get ourselves some boats, and then we-”

“The what?”

“The leprosarium, Tanner cat. Like a hospital for people with leprosy.”

“I know what a leprosarium is, for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, don’t get shirty, man. You asked so I told you. The idea is we spend today getting ready and tomorrow we hit the place sometime in the afternoon. We’ll be headin’ downstream, so that takes the pressure off. It ain’t all that far anyway. We hit the leprosarium-”

“Wait a minute. We hit the leprosarium? We kill doctors and nurses and, God help them, lepers?”

“That’s the drill, baby.” He furrowed his brow, scratched his head. “I get your drift, Tanner cat. I truly do.”

“Great.”

“I do. It don’t seem right, killing the lepers, wrecking the leprosarium. It don’t seem right at all.” He sighed mightily. “But to tell you the truth, I don’t see what choice we got open. We maybe can escape when the right time comes, but we sure can’t manage it now. And tomorrow’s the day we hit the lepers. So what else we gonna do?”