A Feast Unknown (7 page)

When I had walked a quarter of a mile, the shots ceased. From time to time, as I strode to the west, I looked back. Two miles away, a cloud of dust followed. When I stopped to bathe in a waterhole, the dust settled. I caught and ate several almost mouse-sized grasshoppers which inhabit this region. I threw a stone at a kingfisher but missed it by a wing’s length. There are many kingfishers in this region, where there is little water except during the rainy season. But the kingfishers have abandoned an aquatic diet; they have adapted to catching grasshoppers and other insects.

When night came, I backtracked. Twenty minutes later, I had found the camp of the sharpshooter. It was on the flat top of a small hill in a clearing around which was an unusual growth of bush and number of trees. A depression beside it held some water, which accounted for the dense growth. In the clearing were two large trucks, one of which carried a very large camper, and two jeeps. Three tents were pitched; two fires had been built. Some blacks were cooking over one fire, and coffee was boiling over both. There were six blacks and two white men in sight. Then I saw a white man move behind the half-opened flap of a tent. The weak light from the lamp within gleamed on a bronze back for a moment.

I had smelled the coffee a long way off and had been salivating. I love coffee. If these people had not been shooting at me that afternoon, I would have been tempted to join them.

I moved around until I could get a better view of the man inside the tent. I still could not see much of him, but I got the impression of a very large and very solid man. He seemed to be doing some peculiar exercises. I caught glimpses of bronzed biceps, bunching and smoothing over and over again. The muscles looked like mongooses slipping back and forth in a wild play under a blanket woven of bronze wires. I know that that is a rather fanciful description, but that is what occurred to me.

The other two whites, old men, sat on folding chairs with their backs to me. The smaller was thin, quick-moving, wary as a bird, and had a face sharp as the neck of a broken-off bottle. He was dressed as if he had just stepped out of the most expensive safari outfitter’s store in Nairobi. As he talked, he gestured frequently with a silver-headed black cane.

The other old man was so wide and had such abnormally long arms, thick neck, simian features, and low forehead, and his arms were so hairy, he could almost have passed for one of The Folk.

The blacks had talked among themselves in Swahili, so I knew the names of all three whites. The man in the tent was a Doctor Caliban. The dapper old man was a Mr. Rivers. The apish old man was a Mr. Simmons. All three were from Manhattan Island.

I suspected that the old men were talking so loudly because they hoped to entice an eavesdropper—me, of course—to come closer. I found the trip wire which would have set off some kind of alarm and got over that without disturbing it. I also detected the two rocks, made of papier-mâché, which held electronic eye devices inside them. I had come close to wriggling between them, because that was the natural route to a depression in the ground behind a bush, an excellent place to hide while listening. Only because I happened to rub up against the false stone did I discover what it was.

I became even more cautious then. And I noticed that the flap of the tent in which Doctor Caliban had been exercising was now closed. For all I knew, he might be slipping out the rear of the tent to catch a spy.

If the two old men were part of a trap, they certainly took no care to keep silent on matters that an enemy should not know. And they talked about Caliban as if he were deaf.

I crawled around to one side where I could see their lips. This was not as informative as listening, because I missed words now and then, but it was safer.

“...really know what’s got into Doc?” the dapper Rivers said. “Something sure as shit is wrong.”

“Looks as if he’s gone ape,” Simmons said.

Rivers laughed and spoke so loudly I could hear him. “Ape! Ape? You old Neanderthal, you’re throwing stones at a glass house!”

“Listen, you sick legal eagle, you,” Simmons said, “this is no time or place for your tired old bullshit. This is serious, I’m telling you. Doc has a screw loose somewhere. I think it’s the
elixir; it has to be. The side effects are finally coming through. I warned him years ago, when he offered it to us. I ain’t one of the world’s greatest chemists for nothing.”

I had been intrigued before. Now I was caught, a crocodile on a hook. Elixir!

“You really think he’s crazy? After all these years of doing good, combating evil, fixing up all those criminals we caught, and reforming them?” Rivers said.

The apish old man said, “That’s another thing …”

I missed what he said next, then his cigar left his lips. “… operated on them, he said. Cut out the gland that made them evil, he said at first. Then later on he quit talking about that gland, because there ain’t no such thing, and he started to talk about re-routing and short-circuiting neural circuits. Now, I ask you, do you really believe that shit? It was all right in the old days, because we didn’t know much about the causes of crime then. But it’s different now. We know it’s caused mainly by psychosocioeconomic environments.”

“Do we?” Rivers said. “What really do we know now more than we knew then, besides some things in the physical sciences and a little progress in the biological?”

“O.K., so they ain’t as smart nowadays as they like to think they are,” Simmons said. “But in the ’30s, we could believe anything Doc told us because he told us it was so. But did you ever see him operate on a criminal? Not that I doubt he did something to them, handy as he is with a knife. But this crap about curing criminals with surgery … know as well as I do that a criminal is the product of genetic predisposition plus environment.”

“Doc isn’t the man we knew, that’s for sure,” Rivers said. “I
don’t know. It’s like seeing Lucifer fall. Well, that’s stretching it. Doc’s no evil angel, but … if you want to get right down to the honest-to-God-call-it-shit-not-peanut-butter-reality, Doc may be right about the causes and cure of criminals.”

Simmons looked as if he were grunting. He said, “Maybe. And maybe Doc was getting his kicks … well, I shouldn’t say that, wouldn’t, if it wasn’t for his funny behavior now. You gotta admit he’s been acting kinda peculiar lately. Now, I ain’t saying he’s become a Doctor Jekyll-Mr. Hyde … but …”

They were silent for a while. Simmons puffed on his cigar. Rivers lit a long cigarette in a long cigarette holder. After a while, Simmons pulled some rectangles—photographs, I presumed— from the pocket of his bush jacket. He held them up so that the firelight illuminated them.

He said, “Looka the whang on that wild man! Did you ever see such a prick on a white man?”

Rivers took one of the photos and studied it. “My tool is longer,” he said. “Used to be, anyway. Eight inches. But it’s skinny. I never saw such a shaft on a man except once.”

“The son of a bitch is queer,” Simmons said. “I was looking through the glasses when he got up after breaking that lion’s neck. He had a hard-on you wouldn’t believe outside a zoo. And he was coming like a Texas oil well.”

“Yes, I know,” Rivers said. “My choppers about dropped out. I saw Doc once, just once, and he’s the only man I ever saw, black or white, with a dong as big as that Englishman’s. In fact, I’ll swear his was even thicker and longer.”

“You saw Doc’s cock?” Simmons said. “When the hell was that?”

“… adventure of the Tsar of …” Rivers said. “You remember, Doc and I’d been a long time hiding … had to piss … my eyes about flew the coop, believe me.”

Simmons looked around uneasily. “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking like this. Doc might …”

“You think he hasn’t heard us a million times before? He knows how curious we’ve been. Personally, I think he’s been listening to us for years. But what we said never seemed to bother him. You know what a button-down lip he’s got. And he’s the most self-controlled man in the world; he couldn’t admit that anything we said would stick in his craw. And maybe it doesn’t. He
knows
he’s the superman’s superman!”

“After what I seen today, I ain’t so sure,” Simmons said. “I’ve never seen anything like it! But I can understand now why Doc is so hot to tangle with him. He wants to test his mettle on somebody who looks as if he could give him a hard time!”

The little man said, as if he hadn’t heard Simmons, “You know, I used to put it out of my mind, or tell myself that Doc was just keeping his private life entirely to himself. But he never lied to us, as far as I know. And he always said he led too dangerous a life and was too busy and always off on some quest or other. He couldn’t afford to get married; it made him too vulnerable. That’s understandable. But he went further. He said he didn’t want to get involved with any woman because it wouldn’t be fair to waste her time. That’s understandable. But then he claimed he had nothing at all to do with women. Nothing at all! Now, didn’t you ever think that was peculiar? No ass at all! No pussy, no nothing, for God’s sakes!”

“Well,” Simmons said, “he coulda been jerking off. But it
just doesn’t seem like Doc to be doing that. I always thought maybe he wasn’t so perfect, after all. You know, maybe he was paying for his mental and physical superiority to the rest of us— to every fucking man in the world—by not being able to get a hard-on. Could be. Jesus Christ! There has to be some sort of compensation in this world!”

“There does?” Rivers said. “Who told you that, you shoddy imitation of a philosophizing orangutan!”

“One a these days, I’ll orangutan it all the way up your decrepit asshole,” Simmons said.

“No, you won’t. I don’t allow anything but high-quality shit up there,” Rivers said.

They talked for a moment with their hands over their mouths as they held their smokes in their mouths. Then I saw Rivers’ lips.

“You know, Doc and … as if they were brothers … coloring … black hair and gray eyes and a darker skin, but Doc has …”

They talked on, rambling much. I got the impression that these two octogenarians had known each other intimately for a long long time. They had been through much with each other, and they were very fond of each other. The abuses and insults they loosed at each other were good-natured, indeed, their second natures. And as I listened—read, rather—I understood that they were here on The Last Great Adventure. There had been three other men who had shared their exploits and dangers in the past. But these were dead now. The two old men expected to die soon, but they had insisted on coming to Africa with Caliban, and he had reluctantly agreed.

Now, they were sorry they had come. Or, at least, disturbed. Something had happened to the good doctor. He was here to hunt me down and to kill me. Not with guns. In bare-hand combat. This was not at all like Doc. He had always been averse to killing. He had only done so when he absolutely had to. And he had maintained that every man, no matter how evil, was worth saving.

Something had changed his mind. They knew what it was, but so far they had not named it. They referred to it circuitously.

Doc Caliban had told them that I was an abysmally evil man who should be obliterated. The two were not convinced. From what they had learned about me from other sources, they did not think I could be the monster that Doc described. Yet, all their adult lives, they had trusted Doc. They had regarded him as an oracle, as the fount of wisdom, as a doer of great good.

Doc had been born in 1903, I learned when the two were quarreling about the best sign in the zodiac. He was now sixty-five years old, but he looked as if he were still thirty.

They did not seem bitter that he had not shared his secret of prolonged youth with them. They spoke as if he had offered it to them, but they had turned it down.

I could not believe this. I assumed that I misunderstood them. There was the possibility that they had been over fifty when the offer was made. In that case, the elixir was only able to slow down aging somewhat. By the time they were ninety, they would have aged physically to about seventy. Perhaps, on considering the price they must pay for this slight prolongation of life, they had rejected it. What, after all, was an extra thirty years or so of life?

But when a man was offered a chance to live at least thirty thousand years, then the price looked small.

I liked to think so.

But listening to them, I was forced to dwell a little on that which I had pushed away because it was too painful. Had I, by becoming a god, become less of a man?

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