The Female of the Species (4 page)

Charles turned to Gray and looked at her hard. “Have you always been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Running a fellow down all the time. Why don’t you give a guy a break?”

“It doesn’t seem to me that you need a break.”

“Why the hell not? Who the hell doesn’t?”

“Any man with a thousand loyal fans outside his door.”

Charles waved his hand in dismissal. “Yeah. A thousand of my closest friends.” He tapped the arm of his chair and stared at his models. “You know, I’ll tell you,” he began. “The funny thing is—” He stopped. He closed his mouth abruptly.

“What.”

Charles sat.

“What is the funny thing?”

Charles licked his lips, and went on reluctantly. “When that feeling…the way you feel around these models. The little houses. The little people. The way you look down on them. Put them places. When—”

“What?”

“When you walk outside to the regular-size place? And it’s no different. That’s what funny. When you’re around life-size shit and it all still feels like—toys.” Charles couldn’t look Gray in the eye. “Animals seem stuffed. People seem like dolls. My own house looks like the station in my train set. With spikes around it. Like Popsicle sticks.” Charles cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows, looking up at Gray with an indefinite smile, as if maybe he was pulling her leg. He laughed an unsettling little laugh. “You are here, aren’t you? Say something.”

“Something,” said Gray dully.

“An old kid’s joke. Not very helpful. You’re supposed to say something that makes me feel normal-sized. In the big village. With the actual people.”

“Isn’t that the trouble? That you’re not sure they’re actual people?”

Charles stood up. “I don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.” Charles rang a homemade bell; its clacker scrabbled in the tin. A native appeared below, by the stilts of the cabin. Charles ordered dinner—with one more look at Gray to make sure she was still there—for two.

At the end of the meal, roasted game with mangoes and banana, Charles rang his dented tin bell and the native climbed up to his doorway to take the plates away. Once the servant had climbed back down, Charles pulled the ladder up and set it against the outside wall. Charles invited Gray to his veranda, which looked out on the cliffs. He lit an oil lantern on the porch. Gray climbed into a hammock and stared up; the stars were brighter and more numerous than she’d ever seen. She felt peculiarly content. When she glanced down, Gray noticed that the sides of the porch were covered with long, sharpened wooden spikes. Charles explained, “They help me sleep nights.”

Corgie himself leaned back in a broad cane armchair, and they both sipped honey wine. Smoke rose from the manyattas on either side, and the lantern, which burned animal fat, gave off a meaty smell, like a barbecue. The hoot of night birds echoed between the cliffs. Gray relaxed into the netting of her hammock; it creaked gently when she moved. The wine was sweet and potent. The flame flickered beside Charles Corgie and lit his profile as he stared off into the black bush. He breathed deeply and held the wine in his mouth a long time before swallowing. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

“What’s your name?” he asked at last. “Your first name.”

“Gray.”

“Soft, for you.”

“It strikes most people as dour.”

“No, soft. Gentle.”

“That’s surprising?”

Charles reached over and rapped against her outstretched leg with his knuckles. “Hear that?
Bong, bong, bong
. That’s what it’s like when you knock against the side of a tank.” He went back to staring out into the forest. Gray stared, too. The foliage pulsed as her eyes fought to focus, to pick up any object however slight. The trees bloomed on the edges in explosions of black. There’s nothing like African darkness. It eats your eyes.

“Are you insulting me?” asked Gray.

“I’m not sure.”

Gray decided to change the subject. “I can’t believe you haven’t asked me about the war. Don’t you care what happened?”

“Kaiser—I left.”

“It’s over.”

“You don’t say. Who won?”

“I don’t know if you’ll be disappointed or not. Whose side were you on?”

Charles considered, leaning farther back in his chair and setting his boots up on the railing. “Adolf isn’t my style. I don’t like the way he moves, know what I mean? The guy’s too excitable.”

“And maybe you didn’t like like the way his uniform was tailored.”

“Actually,” said Charles, looking over at her with his black eyes gleaming quietly under the looming ridge of his brow, “the tie—with the shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck—I prefer a dictator with an open collar.”

“Clearly,” said Gray. Charles’s own shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, where the hair was thick and black like his eyes, and gleamed just as defiantly in the lantern light, with drops of honey wine.

“You did use the past tense,” Charles observed.

“Adolf isn’t that excitable anymore.”

“And Benito? Hirohito?” Gray shook her head. Charles shrugged. “Just as well. Me, I’m a Napoleon man.”

“Why’s that?”

“Those losers wouldn’t know what to do with a joint once they’d got hold of it. Bonaparte had plans. I liked his projects. But that slouch Speer built some nasty, hulking places. What a no-talent. Everything he put together looked like a goddamned morgue.”

Charles pulled out a packet and rolled himself a cigarette in a leaf, quickly and expertly into a long, tight spleef. “Tobacco ran out first week,” he explained. “But I found a weed—sweet, but with an edge to it. Wasn’t common, though, so I’ve got the flock growing some over there. Doing pretty well, too. They dry it and crush it and wrap it up in packets. I miss my tins of Prince Albert, but what can you do?” Charles lit up with the lamp, then exhaled in a long, slow whistle. “The laymen aren’t supposed to smoke any, but they do. I’ll let them get away with it, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. Catch one occasionally and make an example. See, they think this stuff gives them knowledge. Actually, it doesn’t even get you doped up.” Charles took another hit. “Besides,” he said with a smile, “it suits me if they keep looking for knowing with smoke.”

“So you have them growing weeds instead of crops they could eat.”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Let’s not talk about agriculture. I
like you better as the voice of the free world than as an anthropologist. So,” said Charles, leaning back with an imperial air, “did Franklin D. string our boy Adolf from the top of the Washington Monument?”

“Roosevelt is dead. Hitler killed himself. —This is like
Reader’s Digest Condensed World Wars
,” said Gray with frustration.

“Go on.”

Gray decided to save the atomic bomb for later.

Then she realized she could leave it out altogether if she felt like it. She could even have told Charles that Hitler now ruled Eurasia, the United States, and South America, and then this would be the truth in Toroto. It was a curious little moment of power.

“A number of Nazis are on trial right now in Nuremberg for war crimes,” she continued, thinking it was a little late in the day for inventing a whole new ending to an awfully big story.

“On
trial
?”

“Why not?”

“Seems pretty feeble is all. Why not shoot the guys and be done with it?”

“Out of respect for legal process. To reinstitute order.”

“Come on. Laws are just to give you an excuse for shooting somebody when you were going to shoot them anyway.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Gray.

“Nope. I know about laws. I make them.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about?”

“Not that I know about.” He added, “Except. I don’t know about you.”

Whenever he turned the conversation to her, Gray got inexplicably nervous. They sat in silence again.

“Hitler—” she ventured.

“Hmm?”

“He killed six million Jews.”

Charles looked up. “No shit,” he said noncommittally.

“Not in battles. In factories.”

“Huh,” said Charles.

Gray watched his face. “What do you think of that project?”

“Well,” said Charles, snuffing out his cigarette on the arm of his chair. “Seems like a real—waste of time, anyway.” He shot Gray a shrug.

Gray looked back at him in stony silence until she couldn’t take it anymore and started to laugh.

“I missed the joke,” said Charles.

“You are the joke! You’ve been trying to impress me, haven’t you?”

“How’s that?”

“You think if you’re blasé about six million Jews that’s going to impress me.”

“You figure that’s what Adolf was trying to do?” he said gruffly, looking away. “Impress little Eva?”

“Seriously, Charles, you want me to admire that, don’t you? I mean, that’s twisted, even horrid, but it’s sweet, too. Quaint.” Gray kept chuckling in her hammock. Charles rose brusquely from his chair. Errol knew these moments—Gray could be nasty in a light, lovely way, and she could turn a situation on a dime. Surprise, Charles Corgie.

“I’m going to bed,” he said coldly. “So are you.” He towered over her hammock, giving her a moment of nervousness Gray for once richly deserved. She stopped laughing.

“Where?”

“In my house.”

“Maybe I’ll stay outside.”

“No, you won’t. You’re a god now, Miss Kaiser, and you’ll sleep in Olympus with the rest of us.”

Gray got up cautiously from her hammock. “I’m sorry, I—”

“On the floor,” he assured her. “Believe me, it will give me far more pleasure to have you up half the night beady-eyed with worry than to do what you will worry about.” With that he blew out the lamp perfunctorily and strode inside, throwing her a hard, leathery skin for a blanket. “Good night, dear,” said Charles, crawling inside his own soft bed stuffed with feathers and pulling the warm, woolly skin over his head.

As it happened, Gray was up half the night. While Charles
Corgie’s thrashing and mumbling on the bed did keep her on edge, Gray’s real problem was far more prosaic: she did not know what gods did with honey wine once they were through with it.

When Gray told this story it was very funny. She could get tablefuls of international guests rolling on the floor. On the floor of that stilted African cabin, however, Errol imagined she had not been so amused. She couldn’t sleep. The ladder was pulled up from the ground and she didn’t know how to replace it, nor whether there were too many natives about for such a mortal safari. And the situation was not, of course, improving. She’d enjoyed the wine and had drunk her share; Gray’s abdomen gradually billowed higher, until—a magic moment in Gray Kaiser’s life—she cared nothing for power and reserve; her fantasies slipped from huge tribal celebrations in her honor and lines of obsequious good-looking men at her feet to ordinary indoor plumbing. Love, humor, and courage fell away. Money and fame, art and human history fell away. World War II and six million Jews fell away. Even, at last, remaining aloof with Lieutenant Charles Corgie fell away, and Gray found herself numbly climbing up off the floor and standing by his bedside at four in the morning.

“Charles—” she said softly. “Lieutenant—”

He only grunted and turned away. She put a hand on his shoulder. Charles sprang upright and in a single motion had a rifle pointed a few inches from Gray’s chest. His eyes were completely open and alert.

“Don’t shoot!” Corgie’s rifle had very nearly taken care of Gray’s problem abruptly.

Charles did not put down the gun. He said something in garbled Masai that Gray didn’t understand.

“Please,” she said in a small voice. “I need your help.”

Slowly he lowered the gun as he recognized her by the moonlight coming through the window. “If you were thinking you could get this gun—”

“No!”

Charles looked at her more closely. “Come here.” He reached
up and touched her cheek, then inspected his fingers. “No shit. You’re crying.”

Gray looked down. Tears fell on the bed frame.

Charles put the rifle aside and pulled her over to sit beside him. Her sharp shoulders were drawn to her head; she looked narrow. Charles put his hand on her cheek, turning her head to face him. “Having nightmares about terrible Charlie Corgie, who doesn’t care about six million Jews?”

Gray shook her head and looked away again.

“You miss Mommy and Daddy?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” said Gray, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

Charles pulled the hair from her eyes strand by strand and tucked it behind her ear. “What’s the trouble?”

“It’s stupid.”

Charles waited patiently.

“All this god business,” she went on. “You didn’t tell me what to do—” She stamped her foot and looked at the ceiling. “I’m not usually shy! Charles, I need the bathroom! I have for hours!”

It must have been hard not to laugh, but according to Gray he didn’t; he barely smiled. Charles cocked his head. His eyes were as warm and soft as they were going to get in the hard cool light of the moon. “That isn’t stupid, Miss Anthropologist. You’re new to your field or you’d know better. For a god, taking a leak is a serious business. You have to be careful. Quiet.” He led Gray to a corner, where she slid down a pole to the foliage below. When she returned Charles lifted her back up. He wasn’t a massive man but could pull her whole weight with obvious ease. When she was up, Charles kept hold of her hand a moment, then with a funny annoyance let go and told her to get back to sleep. As she was settling back down on the slats this time, again with irritation, he tossed her his feather pillow before turning his back on her with a grunt and wrapping his arms fondly around the muzzle of his gun.

“I’ve decided what to do with you,” said Charles cheerfully the next morning. He was shaving, with a sheet of polished aluminum from the siding of his airplane propped up for a mirror.

“Oh?” asked Gray warily, still groggy and on the floor.

“Yes.” Charles raised his chin in the air to sweep the razor underneath. “I’ve decided to let you go.”

The blade made a sheer scraping sound that raised the hair on Gray’s arms. “I did not come here,” said Gray, “to go.”

“You shouldn’t have come here at all,” said Charles. “You made a mistake. Usually when we make mistakes, that’s it. But: you are dealing with Little Jesus. You have your own personal fairy godfather. Click your heels together and in your case it will work.”

Gray picked herself up in order to get a better view of his face. Charles did not look at her but scrutinized his chin more closely. There was a bullet hole in the siding, and his stubble distorted and rippled in the aluminum.

“Aren’t you concerned that I’ll tell?” asked Gray slowly. “About you? About Toroto?”

“Now, why would you do that? When I’ve been so gracious? And these people have someone to take care of them?”

Charles may not have been looking at Gray, but Gray was certainly looking at Charles now, very very carefully. “Because I’m an anthropologist. I’d want to come back with reinforcements.”

“So military! And I thought we were friends.”

“You’re the one who sees this village as one more battle of World War II.”

“Against them, not you, sweetheart.”

“Sweetheart is on their side.”

Charles clucked his tongue. “No racial loyalty.”

“The point is, I’d have every reason to return here with company. You’ve murdered people here. This is a British colony. You could be arrested.”

“Miss Kaiser, are you trying to convince me to shoot you?”

“I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already thought about.”

Charles said nothing. It seemed to Gray he should have finished shaving by now. His face looked smooth. Still, Charles picked at individual patches with great attention.

“What are you planning to do, turn me loose in the bush? I had a guide to get here. How would I find my way out?”

“You could have an escort partway. Why, maybe the Tooth Fairy himself would help you up the cliffs.”

“Maybe I’ll stay here.”

“Sorry. No room at the inn. Booked for the season. Manger’s filled, too. One Jesus per village. It’s checkout time.”

“When those Jews were gassed in the camps,” said Gray softly, “they were told they were going to take a shower.”

Charles turned toward her finally and looked her in the eye. He said nothing. His eyes were large and deep and black and hard to read. The muscles in his face did not move.

“All right,” said Gray. “Maybe you hadn’t decided. But it had occurred to you. There was a good chance.”

Still, he said nothing.

“It makes you feel a little funny, doesn’t it?” said Gray. “You think because I’m white, American, it’s different. But you also
know, deep down, that it’s no different, and that you could do it.”

It was a strange moment. Charles still wouldn’t speak. There was nothing else for Gray to do but keep going. “I just feel we should discuss this, since I plan on staying here a while. For example, I find it pretty amazing that anyone could be so convinced of his own personal importance that no one’s sacrifice is too great. I mean, how many people, Charles? Is there any limit? You and Adolf. You may not like him, but. How many, Lieutenant?”

Charles seemed almost to smile. He turned his head a few degrees and looked at Gray from an angle. He pointed his forefinger slowly at her chest. “I don’t believe you,” he said at last.

“What?”

“I don’t believe you’re amazed. That you don’t understand.” Charles took his rifle from against the wall and slid it onto the table in front of her. “There. If you thought you could get away with it. If there weren’t several hundred religious fanatics outside that door. Would you use this? On me?”

This time it was Gray’s turn to be quiet.

“See?” said Charles. “If you climbed out of your cockpit a little dazed from an insanely lucky crash landing and you were surrounded by crouching men with sharp poles, would you be willing to shoot just one of them to make a point?”

Gray said nothing.

“And if one, why not two, if that’s what it took? And maybe, Miss Kaiser, over five years it would take
even more than two
.”

Gray stared down at the gun. “So is everyone like this?”

Charles stroked his chin. He touched it with a certain surprise, as if he’d never felt it so smooth; he didn’t seem to like it. He took his hand away. “Some women wouldn’t pick up that rifle, would they? Even with Charlie Corgie ready to cart them off down the trail. But you would.” Charles looked at her steadily. “We’re not so different.”

It was appalling. Gray found herself flattered. That was how she knew he was right.

“I know,” said Charles, looking Gray up and down. “You
think of yourself as some sort of warm, gooey-hearted darling. I don’t buy it.”

“How do you know what I’m like?”

“The way you move. That’s the way I get everybody’s number. I’m never wrong. For example, I’ve never met such a tall woman who walked around so straight.”

“You can tell I would shoot you because I have good posture?”

“Sure. And more. You use your hands a lot when you talk. They cut the air, slash, slash.” Charles did a comic demonstration. Gray couldn’t help but laugh. “Listen, I’ve made a study of this. I didn’t know the language when I got here. We used sign language. The natives signed completely different for the same word. Some signed way out here.” Charles flailed his hands on either side. “They’re wide open. Trusting.
Crazy
. You operate from the center. You keep your hands close in, stab and parry. You’d be good with a knife. And,” he went on, “you keep your chin up. You have an unnerving stare and a long stride. You’re sarcastic and you obviously think you’re so smart. In short, Miss Kaiser,” said Charles, taking his gun back from the table, “you move like a real bitch.”

Charles walked out the door, letting his hand graze her hip as he walked by. Gray let out a slow, controlled breath and ground her molars together. No one had warned her that anthropology was going to be so complicated.

Gradually Gray and Charles worked out their truce. Charles would allow Gray to study Il-Ororen as long as she did her part in promoting his mythology. Gray cooperated, but she didn’t understand how they got away with it. While they took the most obvious precautions with injury and excretion, they still sweated and coughed and laughed, ate and grew tired and slept long, heavy nights. There was a thin line between being improbable and being debunked altogether, and the two of them trod this line as precariously as she’d skirted the ledges to this village. It was a long way down.

The other abyss before them was their future. Gray would conclude her study, and then what? Likewise, Corgie’s religious
gadgetry was nearing its demise: the spare airplane batteries off which he ran his miraculous radio were finally running down. His stores of ammunition were running down.

“Do you ever think about going back to the U.S.?” asked Gray one day.

“I’m a god,” said Charles. “Why should I go back and be a schmo?”

The trouble was, while when Gray arrived Charles had seemed beleaguered, he now seemed to be enjoying his life among Il-Ororen with great gusto.

While Corgie was working on his projects, Gray helped the natives with their spring planting. It was right before the rains, but the only crop Charles cared about was his ersatz tobacco, so Gray taught Il-Ororen about topsoil and terracing while Corgie milled wood. Their first conflicts were over allocation of labor. Gray wanted tillers; Corgie wanted lumberjacks. Finally, Gray asked in the middle of a ritual confrontation over a work crew, “Why are you building that stupid tower, anyway?”

“Because I’m going to put a restaurant on top, why do you think?” said Charles blackly. “Three stars, with a great view of the city lights.”

“It seems about as useful—”

“Just the point, I don’t care about useful. I will build a scale model of King Kong or a ten-foot wooden replica of the Great American Hamburger if that’s what I feel like. Understand? And if I wake up one morning and decide that I can’t live without an Egyptian pyramid in my back yard, then these poor bastards will spend the rest of their lives mining stone—”

“Until they starve to death, and you with them. That’s all very capricious, but without a few Egyptians growing bananas along the Nile, those pharaohs would never have gotten past the first story.
Alot-too-toni
,” she said imperiously to the men, and looking confusedly from Gray to Corgie and back again, they followed Gray down the path to her fields, leaving Corgie by his half-built Babel furiously without lumber for the rest of the day.

Grudgingly, Charles walled off a portion of his one-room
Olympus for Gray. It was thanks to this arrangement that she discovered the advantages of being a god extended well beyond architecture.

Lying in bed one night, Gray heard the ladder outside clatter and a woman’s shy, nervous laughter. The ladder was withdrawn again, and set with a clack on the other side of Gray’s bedroom wall. Fully awake now, Gray listened stiffly to the noises from Corgie’s bed. She was used to his gruff, angry orders in the night; Corgie didn’t sleep easily, as, she thought, he had no right to. She was used to the occasional clatter of his rifle when it fell from his arms; though it was terrifying to wake this way, she actually preferred those times the rifle fell and even went off to what she was hearing now: the rustling, a chuckle, a light feminine squeal. A growl and snuffling as if an animal were rummaging through his things. Then, worst of all, the sound of Charles Corgie peacefully, silently asleep for the first time Gray had ever heard.

Gray’s toe cramped. She found she had a headache. Her eyes narrowed in the darkness. She rearranged herself loudly, sighed, and drummed the bedside with her fingertips. She was still awake when early that morning she heard the pad of small feet, a brusque grunt from Charles, and the ladder again, down and up. A great male sigh. Only then did Gray turn limply on her side and doze for a couple of hours.

“You slept soundly last night,” said Gray as they peeled mangoes at breakfast.

“Yes,” said Charles. “I feel refreshed.” He was imbedded in his mango up to the second knuckle.

Gray only toyed with hers, listlessly pulling the gooey orange strings apart and then leaving them in a pulpy pile. “I think you and I need to have a religious conference.”

“Convened,” said Charles. “Shoot.”

“Do you have to be so jaunty?”

“You’re always badgering me for being surly at breakfast. For once I wake up in a good mood and you run me down for that, too. I can’t win, Kaiser.”

Gray squashed a piece of fruit between her fingers. “I want to discuss a point of catechism.”

“Philosophy! So early, too. That brain of yours must start ticking away as soon as your feet hit the floor.”

“Some mornings,” said Gray. “But I don’t want to talk theory. I want to talk practice.”

“Which makes perfect, as I remember.”

“That depends on what you’re practicing.”

Having finished off his mango, Charles started in on a banana with large, lunging mouthfuls. “Want one?”

Gray shook her head. “You’ve got quite an appetite today.”

“I have quite an appetite, period,” said Charles. “So what’s our Sunday-school lesson for today?”

Gray crossed her arms. “Listen, I think we should discuss this, but not because I’m prim. We take so many precautions to avoid the appearance of mortality. But your adventure last night seemed perilously biological.”

Charles put his feet up on the table. “Kaiser, sweetheart, it’s great to hear you worry about keeping the old religion afloat. But believe me, when it comes to keeping an eye on my ass I am an expert—”

“Seems to me you had your eye on someone else’s last night.”

Corgie grinned. “They like it.”

Gray stood up. “Well, I don’t.” She walked out the door, Charles laughing after her.

“They think it makes them powerful,” said Charles, leaning over the ladder as Gray clipped rapidly down.

“That’s precisely my point,” said Gray. “I think it does.”

Charles must have watched her brisk and unusually rigid stride to her precious furrows with a smile on his face and a satisfied gleam in his eye.

In the process of overseeing the planting, Gray also conducted informal interviews. Especially after she’d applied first aid to several farming injuries, Il-Ororen confided in her completely. At the end of the day Gray would go back to Corgie’s cabin and take furious notes.

What fascinated Gray as she studied this tribe was that, on a scale of generations, they hadn’t been separated from the Masai very long. It seems they’d deliberately purged themselves
of their own history. Maliciously they insisted on having no ancestors but those they could remember, no larger culture to which they owed their ability to throw pots, to mine and forge metal tools. Their creation myths and cautionary tales were no longer traditional Masai ones. While they still built kraals, they gladly constructed new blond structures. Nor had they gradually distorted Masai music, ceremonies, and dances; they had dumped them. Il-Ororen had invented themselves.

Most surprising of all, Gray now had no doubt that, while they resented particular tyrannies and didn’t understand the gymnasium, they cooperated willingly with Charles Corgie. She’d anticipated a gentle native population abused and manipulated by a cruel Western intruder. Instead, she found a ruthless people that had eagerly latched on to an appropriate sovereign. They liked Corgie’s projects. They enjoyed his anger as long as it wasn’t directed against them personally. They identified with his arrogance. They’d rooted Corgie deeply in their mythology, and told stories as if his arrival had been predicted for generations, like a messiah. Il-Ororen were the only people in the world, and they’d gotten themselves their own private god.