Henderson the Rain King (25 page)

are with me." There was nothing I could say after that. I decided that I would do the best I could with my helmet, which would be to strike the animal on the muzzle and confuse it. I grumbled that he would have been better off in Syria or Lebanon as a mere student, and, although I spoke unclearly, he understood me and said, "Oh, no, Henderson-Sungo. I am lucky and you know it." In his close-fitting breeches, he set off again. My trousers hampered me as I rushed over the ground behind him. As for the three men with spears, they gave me very little confidence. Any minute I expected the lion to burst on me like an eruption of fire, to knock me down and tear me into flames of blood. The king mounted on a boulder and drew me up with him. He said, "We are near the north wall of the hopo." He pointed it out. It was built of ragged thorns and dead growths of all sorts, heaped and piled to a thickness of two or three feet. Coarse, croaky-looking flowers grew there; they were red and orange and at the center they were blotted with black, and it gave me a sore throat just to look at them. This hopo was a giant funnel or triangle. At the base it was open, while at the apex or spout was the trap. Only one of the two sides was built by human hands. The other was a natural formation of rock, the bank of an old river, probably, which rose to the height of a cliff. Beside the high wall of brush and thorn was a path which the king's feet found under the spiky yellow grass. We continued toward the small end of the hopo over fallen ribs of branches and twists of vine. From the hips, which were small, his figure broadened or loomed greatly toward the shoulders. He walked with powerful legs and small buttocks. "You certainly are on fire to come to grips with this animal," I said. Sometimes I think that pleasure comes only from having your own way, and I couldn't help feeling that this was assimilated by the king from the lions. To have your will, that's what pleasure is, in spite of all the thought that has been done. And he was dragging me along with the power of his personal greatness, because he was so brilliant and had a strong gift of life, manifested in the smoky, bluish trembling of his extra shadow. Because he was bound to have his way. And therefore I lumbered after him without a weapon for protection unless you counted the helmet, unless I could pull down these green pants and bag the animal in them--they might almost have been roomy enough for that. Then he stopped and turned to me, and said, "You were equally on fire when it came to lifting up the Mummah." "That's correct, Your Highness," I said. "But did I know what I was doing? No, I didn't." "But I do." "Well, okay, King," I said. "It's not for me to question it. I'll do whatever you say. But you told me that the Bunam and the other fellow in the white pigment were from the old universe and I assumed you were out of it." "No, no. Do you know how to replace the whole thing? It cannot be done. Even if, on supreme moments, there is no old and is no new, but only an essence which can smile at our arrangement--smile even at being human. That is so full of itself," he said. "Nevertheless a play of life has to be allowed. Arrangements must be made." Here his mind was somewhat beyond me, so I didn't interfere with him, and he said, "To Gmilo, the lion Suffo was his father. To me, grandfather. Gmilo, my father. As, if I am going to be the king of the Wariri, it has to be. Otherwise, how am I the king?" "Okay, I get you," I said. "King," I told him, and I spoke so earnestly it might almost have sounded like a series of threats, "you see these hands? This is your second pair of hands. You see this trunk?" I put my hand on my chest. "It is your reservoir, like. Your Highness, in case anything is going to happen, I want you to understand how I feel." My heart was very much aroused. I began to suffer in the face. In recognition of the fellow's nobleness, I fought to spare him the grossness of my emotions. This was in the shade of the hopo wall, under the embroidery of stiff thorns. The narrow track along the hopo was black and golden, as when grass burns in broad daylight and the heat is visible. "Thank you, Mr. Henderson. I have understood how you feel." After a quiet hesitation, he said, "Should I guess? Death is on your mind?" "It's on my mind, all right." "Oh yes, very much. You are exceptionally given to it." "Over the years, I've gotten involved with it a lot." "Exceptionally. Exceptionally," he said as if he were discussing one of my problems with me. "Sometimes I think it is helpful to think of burial in a relation to the earth's crust. What is the radius? Four thousand five hundred miles more or less, to the core of the earth. No, graves are not deep but insignificant, a mere few feet from the surface and not far from fearing and desiring. More or less the same fear, more or less the same desire for thousands of generations. Child, father, father, child doing the same. Fear the same. Desire the same. Upon the crust, beneath the crust, again and again and again. Well, Henderson, what are the generations for, please explain to me? Only to repeat fear and desire without a change? This cannot be what the thing is for, over and over and over. Any good man will try to break the cycle. There is no issue from that cycle for a man who do not take things into his hands." "Oh, King, wait a minute. Once out of the light, it's enough. Does it have to be four thousand five hundred miles to be the grave? How can you talk like that?" But I understood him all the same. All you hear from guys is desire, desire, desire, knocking its way out of the breast, and fear, striking and striking. Enough already! Time for a word of truth. Time for something notable to be heard. Otherwise, accelerating like a stone, you fall from life to death. Exactly like a stone, straight into deafness, and till the last repeating _I__ _want I want I want__, then striking the earth and entering it forever! As a matter of fact, I thought, out in the African sun from which the hooked wall of thorn temporarily cooled me: it's a pleasure when harsh objects like thorns do something for you. Under the black barbs that the bushes had crocheted above us, I thought it out and agreed: the grave was relatively shallow. You couldn't go many miles inside before you found the molten part of the earth. Mainly nickel, I think--nickel, cobalt, pitchblende, or what they call the magma. Almost as it was torn from the sun. "Let us go," he said. I followed him more willingly after that short talk. He could convince me of almost anything. For his sake I accepted the discipline of being like a lion. Yes, I thought, I believed I could change; I was willing to overcome my old self; yes, to do that a man had to adopt some new standard; he must even force himself into a part; maybe he must deceive himself a while, until it begins to take; his own hand paints again on that much-painted veil. I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt. Anyway, I followed him empty-handed toward the end of the hopo. Probably the lion had already wakened, for the beaters, about three miles away, had begun to make their noise. It sounded very distant, far out in the golden stripes of the bush. An air-blue, sleepy heat wavered in front of us, and while I squinted against the sprays and flashes of sunlight I saw a sudden elevation in the hopo wall. It was a thatched shelter which sat on a platform, twenty-five or thirty feet in the air. A ladder of vines hung down, and the king took hold of it eagerly, this crude, slack-looking thing. He began to climb it sailor fashion, from the side, pulling himself powerfully and steadily up to the platform. From the dry grass and brown fibers of the doorway he said, "Take hold, Mr. Henderson." He had crouched to hold out the ladder to me and I saw his head, on which was the pleated, tooth-sewn hat, only slightly above his powerful knees. Illness, strangeness, and danger combined and ganged up on me. Instead of an answer, a sob came out of me. It must have been laid down early in my life, for it was stupendous and rose from me like a great sea bubble from the Atlantic floor. "What is the matter, Mr. Henderson?" Dahfu said. "God knows." "Is something wrong with you?" I kept my head lowered as I shook it. The roaring I had done, I believe, had loosened my whole structure and liberated some things which belonged at the bottom. And this was no time to trouble the king, on his great day of joy. "I'm coming, Your Highness," I said. "Take a moment's breath if you need it." He walked about on the platform under the elevated hut, then came back to the edge again. He looked down from that fragile dome of straw. "Now?" he said. "Will it bear our weight, up there?" "Come on, come on, Henderson," he said. I took hold of the ladder and began climbing, placing both feet on each rung. The spearmen had stood and waited until I (the Sungo) joined the king. Now they passed under the ladder and took up a position around the corner of the hopo. Here, at the end, the construction was primitive but seemed thorough. A barred gate would be dropped to trap the lion after the other game had been driven through, and the men would prod the animal into position with their spears so that the king could effect the capture. On the fragile ladder, which wavered under my weight, I reached the platform and sat down on the floor of poles lashed together. It was like a heat-borne raft. I began to size up the situation. The whole setup was no deeper than a thimble when compared to the volume offered by a full-grown lion. "This is it?" I said to the king after I had studied the layout. "As you see it," he said. Now on the platform stood this shell of straw, and from the opening on the interior side of the hopo I saw suspended a woven cage weighted with rocks at the bottom. It was bell-shaped and made of semi-rigid vines which were, however, as tough as cables. A vine rope passed through a pulley suspended from a pole which was attached at one end to the roof-tree of the hut and at the other was fixed into the side of the cliff, a width of ten or twelve feet. Below it ran another pole from the floor of the hut; it too was set in the rock at the other end. On this pole or catwalk, no wider than my wrist, if that wide, the king would balance himself with the rope and the bell-shaped net, and when the lion was driven in, Dahfu would center the net and let it drop. Releasing his rope, he was supposed to capture the lion. "This �?" "What do you think?" he said. I couldn't bring myself to say much about it, but, hard as I fought my feelings, I couldn't submerge them--not on this particular day. I was visibly struggling with them. He said, "I captured Atti here." "Yes, with this same rig?" "And Gmilo captured Suffo." I said, "Take the advice of a �I know that I'm not much � But I think the world of you, Your Highness. Don't �" "Why, what is the matter with your chin, Mr. Henderson? It is moving up and down." I brought my upper teeth down on my lip. By and by I said, "Your Highness, excuse it. I'd rather cut my throat than demoralize you on a day like this. But does the thing have to be done from up here?" "It must." "Can't there be an innovation? I'd do anything, drug the animal � give him a Mickey �" "Thank you, Henderson," he said. I think his gentleness with me was more than I deserved. He didn't remind me in so many words that he was king of the Wariri. I soon reminded myself of this fact. He allowed me to be present--his companion. I must not interfere. "Oh, Your Majesty," I said. "Yes, Henderson, I know. You are a man of many qualities, I have observed," he said. "I thought maybe I fitted into one of your bad types," I said. At this he laughed somewhat. He was sitting cross-legged at the opening of the hut that faced the hopo and the cliff, and he began to enumerate, half musingly, "The agony, the appetite, the immune, the hollow, and all of that. No, I promise you, Henderson, that I have never classified you with a bad group. You are a compound. Maybe a large amount of agony. Maybe a small touch of the Lazarus. But I cannot fully subsume you. No rubric will fully hold you. Maybe because we are friends. One sees much more in a friend. Rubrics will not do with friends." "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 Lily's 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. After the buck and the three does, which squeezed through the narrow opening of the hopo with heart-bursting terror, came a crowd of small beasts; they rushed the opening like immigrants. More cautious, a hyena showed up, and, unlike the other creatures who didn't know we were there, this creature shot a look up at us on the platform and gave its shallow, batlike snarl. I looked for something to throw at it. But there was nothing with us on the platform to throw and I spat down instead. "Lion is there--lion, lion!" The king stood, pointing, and about a hundred yards away, I saw a slow stirring in the grass, not the throbbing of the smaller animals but a circular, heavy disturbance which a powerful body made. "Do you think that would be Gmilo? Hey, hey, hey--is he here? You can take him, King. I know you can." I had risen on the narrow stand of floor projecting from beneath the grass wall, and I was thrusting and cranking my arm up and down as I spoke. "Henderson--do not," he said. Nevertheless I took a step in his direction, and then he cried out at me; his face was angry. So I squatted down and shut my mouth. My blood was full of fever, as if it flowed open to the glare of the sun. The king then set foot on the slender pole and took two turns of the cage rope around his arm and began to release the knot against which he had rested his head during our wait. The cage, with its big irregular meshes of vine and the hooflike stone weights, swung from the more rigid part at the bottom. Except for the rocks the thing had almost no substance; it was as near to being air as a Portuguese man-of-war is to being water. The king had thrown off his hat; it would have got in his way; and about his tight-grown hair, which rose barely an eighth of an inch above his scalp, the blue of the atmosphere seemed to condense, as when you light a few sticks in the woods and about these black sticks the blue begins to wrinkle. The sunlight deformed my face with strain, for I was exposed to it as I hung over the end of the hopo like a gargoyle. The light was hard enough then to leave bruises. And still, in spite of the blasts of the beaters, the cicadas were drilling away, sending up those spirals of theirs. On the cliff side of the hopo the rock was showing its character. It muttered it would let nothing through. All things must wait for it. The small blossoms of the cactus in the ravine, if they were blossoms and not berries, foamed red, and the spines pierced me. Things seemed to speak to me. I inquired in silence about the safety of the king who had a crazy idea that he must capture lions. But I got no reply. This was not the purpose of their speech. They only declared themselves, each according to its law, declaring what it was; nothing at all referred to the king. So I crouched there, sick with heat and dread. My feeling about him had crowded aside everything else within me, which put some pressure on the neighboring organs. With banging and with horn blasts and whooping and screams, the beaters came on, the ones at the rear leaping up from the grass, which was shoulder high, and blowing depraved notes on those horns of green and russet metal. Shots were fired in the air, maybe with my own scope-sight H and H Magnum. And at the front the spears were stitching and jabbing in disorder. "Did you see that, Mr. Henderson--a mane?" Dahfu leaned forward on the pole, holding the rope, and the rock weights banged together over his head. I couldn't bear to see him balanced there on a mere kite stick, with that fringe of stones clattering and wheeling inches above him on the circular contraption. Any one of them might have stunned him. "King, I can't stand this. Be careful, for Christ's sake. This is no machine to horse around with." It was enough, I told myself, that this noble man had to risk his life on that primitive invention; he didn't have to make the thing more dangerous than it was. However, there may have been no safe way to do it. And then he did look very practiced as he balanced on the narrow shaft. The rock weights circled with spasmodic power at the king's pull. This intricate clumsy rig clattered around and around like a merry-go-round, and the netted shadow wheeled on the ground. For the count of about twenty heartbeats I only partly knew where I was or what was happening. Mainly I kept a fixed watch on the king, ready to hurl myself down if he should fall. Then, at the very doors of consciousness, there was a snarl and I looked down from this straw perch--I was on my knees--into the big, angry, hair-framed face of the lion. It was all wrinkled, contracted; within those wrinkles was the darkness of murder. The lips were drawn away from the gums, and the breath of the animal came over me, hot as oblivion, raw as blood. I started to speak aloud. I said, "Oh my God, whatever You think of me, let me not fall under this butcher shop. Take care of the king. Show him Thy mercy." And to this, as a rider, the thought added itself that this was all mankind needed, to be conditioned into the image of a ferocious animal like the one below. I then tried to tell myself because of the clearness of those enraged eyes that only visions ever got to be so hyper-actual. But it was no vision. The snarling of this animal was indeed the voice of death. And I thought how I had boasted to my dear Lily how I loved reality. "I love it more than you do," I had said. But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life. But now I was blasted away from this practice by the throat of the lion. His voice was like a blow at the back of my head. The barred door had dropped. Small creatures were still escaping through the gaps in streaks of fur, springing and writhing, frantically coiling. The lion rushed under us and threw his weight against these bars. Was he Gmilo? I had been told that Gmilo's ears had been marked as a cub, before he was released by the Bunam. But of course you had to catch the animal before you could look at his ears. This might well be Gmilo. Behind the barrier the men prodded him with the spears while he fought at the shafts and tried to catch them in his jaws. They were too deft for him. In the front rank forty or fifty spear points feinted and worked toward him, while from the back there flew stones, at which the animal shook his huge face with the yellow corded hair which made his forequarters so huge. His small belly was fringed, and also his forelegs, like a plainsman's buckskins. Compared with this creature Atti was no bigger than a lynx. Balancing on the pole in his slippers, Dahfu released one turn of the rope from his upper arm; the net bucked, and the motion and the clacking of the stones caught the lion's eye. The beaters screamed up at Dahfu, "Yenitu lebah!" Ignoring them, he held fast to the line and turned around the rim of the net, which was now level with his eyes. Stone battered stone as the contraption spun around; the lion rose on his hind legs and threw a blow at these weights. Foremost among the beaters was the white-painted Bunam's man, who darted in and knocked the animal on the cheek with a spear butt. From top to bottom this fellow was clad in his dirty white, like kid leather, his hair covered with the chalky paste. I now felt the weight of the lion against the posts that held up the platform. They were no thicker than stilts and when he hit them they vibrated. I thought the structure was going to crash, and I clutched the floor, for I expected that I might be carried down like a water tower when a freight train jumps the tracks and crashes it to splinters, with a ton of water gushing in the air. Under Dahfu's feet the pole swayed, but he rode out the shock with rope and net. "King, for God's sake!" I wanted to cry. "What have we got into?" Again a thick flock of stones flew forward. Some struck the hopo wall but others found the animal and drove him under the circling weights of that cursed net of vines. God curse all vines and creepers! The king began to sway out as he pushed and maneuvered this bell of knots and stones. I was freed for one moment from my dumbness. My voice returned and I said to him, "King, take it easy. Mind what you're doing." Then a globe arose in my throat, about the size of a darning egg. That I could see was almost the only proof I had that life continued. For a time all else was cut off. The lion, getting up on his back legs, struck again at the dipping net. It was now within reach and he caught his claws in the vines. Before he could pull free the king let fall the trap. The rope streaked down from the pulley, the weights rumbled on the boards like a troop of horses, and the cone fell on the lion's head. I was lying on my belly, with my arm stretched out toward the king, but he came to the edge of the platform unhelped by me and cried, "What do you think! Henderson, what do you think!" The beaters screamed. The lion should have been carried to the ground by the weight of the stones, but he was still standing nearly upright. He was caught on the head, and his forepaws spread out the vines and he fell, fighting. His hindquarters were not caught in the net. The air seemed to grow dark in the pit of the hopo from his roaring. I lay with my hand still extended to the king, but he didn't take it. He was looking downward at the netted face of the lion, the maned belly and armpits, which brought back to me the road north of Salerno and myself being held by the medics and shaved from head to foot for crabs. "Does it look like Gmilo? Your Highness, what's your guess?" I said. I didn't understand the situation one bit. "Oh, it is wrong," the king said. "What's wrong?" He was startled by a realization of something I had so far missed. I was stunned by the roars and screams of the capture, and watched