Henderson the Rain King Page 5

  The undertaker in our town has bought the house where I used to take dancing lessons. Forty years ago I used to go there in my patent-leather shoes. When the hearse backed up the drive, I said, “You know, Lily, that trip that Charlie Albert is going to make to Africa? He’ll be leaving in a couple of weeks, and I think I’ll go along with him and his wife. Let’s put the Buick in storage. You won’t need two cars.”

  For once she didn’t object to one of my ideas. “Maybe you ought to, go,” she said.

  “I should do something.”

  So Miss Lenox went to the cemetery, and I went to Idlewild and took a plane.

  V

  I guess I hadn’t taken two steps out into the world as a small boy when there was Charlie, a person in several ways like myself. In 1915 we attended dancing school together (in the house out of which Miss Lenox was buried), and such attachments last. In age he is only a year my junior and in wealth he goes me a little better, for when his old mother dies he will have another fortune. It was with Charlie that I took off for Africa, hoping to find a remedy for my situation. I guess it was a mistake to go with him, but I wouldn’t have known how to go right straight into Africa by myself. You have to have a specific job to do. The excuse was that Charlie and his wife were going to film the Africans and the animals, for during the war Charlie was a cameraman with Patton’s army—he could no more stay at home than I could—and so he learned the trade. Photography is not one of my interests.

  Anyway, last year I asked Charlie to come out and photograph some of my pigs. This opportunity to show how good he was at his work pleased him, and he made some first-rate studies. Then we came back from the barn and he said he was engaged. So I told him, “Well, Charlie, I guess you know a lot about whores, but what do you know about girls—anything?”

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s true that I don’t know much, but I do know she is unique.”

  “Yes, I know all about this unique business,” I said. (I had heard all about it from Lily but now she was never even at home.)

  Nevertheless we went down to the studio to have a drink on his engagement, and he asked me to be his best man. He has almost no friends. We drank and kidded and reminisced about the dancing class, and made tears of nostalgia come to each other’s eyes. It was then when we were both melted down that he invited me to come along to Africa where he and his wife would be going for their honeymoon.

  I attended the wedding and stood up for him. However, because I forgot to kiss the bride after the ceremony, there developed a coolness on her side and eventually she became my enemy. The expedition that Charlie organized had all new equipment and was modern in every respect. We had a portable generator, a shower, and hot water, and from the beginning I was critical of this. I said, “Charlie, this wasn’t the way we fought the war. Hell, we’re a couple of old soldiers. What is this?” It wounded me to travel in Africa in this way.

  But I had come to this continent to stay. When buying my ticket in New York I went through a silent struggle there at the airlines office (near Battery Park) as to whether or not to get a round-trip ticket And as a sign of my earnestness, I decided to take it one way. So we flew from Idlewild to Cairo. I went on a bus to visit the Sphinx and the pyramids, and then we flew off again to the interior. Africa reached my feelings right away even in the air, from which it looked like the ancient bed of mankind. And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed. From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun. They shone out like smelters’ puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over. As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height. And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily. However, we made safe landings every time. Anyway, since I had come to this place under the circumstances described, it was natural to greet it with a certain emotion. Yes, I brought a sizable charge with me and I kept thinking, “Bountiful life! Oh, how bountiful life is.” I felt I might have a chance here. To begin with, the heat was just what I craved, much hotter than the Gulf of Mexico, and then the colors themselves did me a world of good. I didn’t feel the pressure in the chest, nor hear any voice within. At that time it was silent. Charlie and his wife and I, together with natives and trucks and equipment, were camped near some lake or other. The water here was very soft, with reeds and roots rotted, and there were crabs in the sand. The crocodiles boated around in the lilies, and when they opened their mouths they made me realize how hot a damp creature can be inside. The birds went into their jaws and cleaned their teeth. However, the people in this district were very sad, not lively. On the trees grew a featherlike bloom and the papyrus reeds began to remind me of funeral plumes, and after about three weeks of cooperating with Charlie, helping him with the camera equipment and trying to interest myself in his photographic problems, my discontent returned and one afternoon I heard the familiar old voice within. It began to say, I want, I want, I want!

  I said to Charlie, “I don’t want you to get sore, now, but I don’t think this is working out, the three of us together in Africa.”

  Stolid, he looked me over through his sunglasses. We were beside the water. Was this the kid I used to know in dancing class? How time had changed us both. But we were now, as then, in short pants. His development is broad through the chest. And as I am much the taller, he was looking up, but he was angry, not intimidated. The flesh around his mouth became very lumpy as he deliberated, and then he said, “No? Why not?”

  “Well,” I said, “I took this chance to get here, Charlie, and I’m very grateful because I’ve always been a sort of Africa buff, but now I realize that I didn’t come to take pictures of it. Sell me one of the jeeps and I’ll take off.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “All I know is that this isn’t the place for me,” I said.

  “Well, if you want to, shove off. I won’t stop you, Gene.”

  It was all because I had forgotten to kiss his wife after the ceremony, and she couldn’t forgive me. What would she want a kiss from me for? Some people don’t know when they’re well off. I can’t say why I didn’t kiss her; I was thinking of something else, I guess. But I think she concluded that I was jealous of Charlie, and anyway I was spoiling her African honeymoon.

  “So, no hard feelings, eh, Charlie? But it does me no good to travel this way.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not trying to stop you. Just blow.”

  And that was what I did. I organized a separate expedition that suited my soldierly temperament better. I hired two of Charlie’s natives and when we drove away in the jeep I felt better at once. And after a few days, anxious to simplify more and more, I laid off one of the men and had a long conversation with the remaining African, Romilayu. We arrived at an understanding. He said that if I wanted to see some places off the beaten track, he could guide me to them.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Now you’ve got the idea. I didn’t come here to carry on a quarrel with a broad over a kiss.”

  “Me tek you far, far,” he said.

  “Oh, man! The farther the better. Why, let’s go, let’s go,” I said. I had found the fellow I wanted, just the right man. We got rid of more baggage and, knowing how attached he was to the jeep, I told him I would give it to him if he would take me far enough. He said the place he was going to guide me to was so remote we could reach it only on foot. “So?” I said. “Let’s walk. Well put the jeep up on blocks, and she’s yours when we get back.” This pleased him deeply, and when we got to a town called Talusi we left the machine in dead storage in a grass hut. From here we took a plane to Baventai, an old Bellanca, the wings looked ready to drop off, and the pilot was an Arab and flew with bare feet. It was an exceptional flight and ended on a field of hard clay beyond the mountain. Tall Negro cowherds came up to us wi
th their greased curls and their deep lips. I had never seen men who looked so wild and I said to Romilayu, my guide, “This isn’t the place you promised to bring me to, is it?”

  “Wo, no sah,” he said.

  We were to travel for another week, afoot, afoot.

  Geographically speaking I didn’t have the remotest idea where we were, and I didn’t care too much. It was not for me to ask, since my object in coming here was to leave certain things behind. Anyway, I had great trust in Romilayu, the old fellow. So for days and days he led me through villages, over mountain trails, and into deserts, far, far out. He himself couldn’t have told me much about our destination in his limited English. He said only that we were going to see a tribe he called the Arnewi.

  “You know these people?” I asked him.

  A long time ago, before he was full grown, Romilayu had visited the Arnewi together with his father or his uncle—he told me many times but I couldn’t make out which.

  “Anyway, you want to go back to the scenes of your youth,” I said. “I get the picture.”

  I was having a great time out here in the desert among the stones, and continually congratulated myself on having quit Charlie and his wife and on having kept the right native. To have found a man like Romilayu, who sensed what I was looking for, was a great piece of luck. He was in his late thirties, he told me, but looked much older because of premature wrinkles. His skin did not fit tightly. This happens to many black men of certain breeds and they say it has something to do with the distribution of the fat on the body. He had a bush of dusty hair which he tried sometimes, but vainly, to smooth flat. It was unbrushable and spread out at the sides of his head like a dwarf pine. Old tribal scars were cut into his cheeks and his ears had been mutilated to look like hackles so that the points stuck into his hair. His nose was fine-looking and Abyssinian, not flat. The scars and mutilations showed that he had been born a pagan, but somewhere along the way he had been converted, and now he said his prayers every evening. On his knees, he pressed his purple hands together under his chin, which receded, and with his lips pushed forward and the powerful though short muscles jumping under the skin of his arms, he’d pray. He fetched up deep sounds from his chest, like confiding groans of his soul. This would happen when we stopped to camp at twilight when the swallows were dipping back and forth. Then I would sit on the ground and encourage him; I’d say, “Go on. Tell ’em. And put in a word for me too.”

  I got clean away from everything, and we came into a region like a floor surrounded by mountains. It was hot, clear, and arid and after several days we saw no human footprints. Nor were there many plants; for that matter there was not much of anything here it was all simplified and splendid, and I felt I was entering the past—the real past, no history or junk like that. The prehuman past. And I believed that there was something between the stones and me. The mountains were naked, and often snakelike in their forms, without trees, and you could see the clouds being born on the slopes. From this rock came vapor, but it was not like ordinary vapor, it cast a brilliant shadow. Anyway I was in tremendous shape those first long days, hot as they were. At night, after Romilayu had prayed, and we lay on the ground, the face of the air breathed back on us, breath for breath. And then there were the calm stars, turning around and singing, and the birds of the night with heavy bodies, fanning by. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. When I laid my ear to the ground I thought I could hear hoofs. It was like lying on the skin of a drum. Those were wild asses maybe, or zebras flying around in herds. And this was how Romilayu traveled, and I lost count of the days. As, probably, the world was glad to lose track of me too for a while.

  The rainy season had been very short; the streams were all dry and the bushes would burn if you touched a match to them. At night I would start a fire with my lighter, which was the type in common use in Austria with a long trailing wick. By the dozen they come to about fourteen cents apiece; you can’t beat that for a bargain. Well, we were now on a plateau which Romilayu called the Hinchagara—this territory has never been well mapped. As we marched over that hot and (it felt so to me) slightly concave plateau, a kind of olive-colored heat mist, like smoke, formed under the trees, which were short and brittle, like aloes or junipers (but then I’m no botanist) and Romilayu, who came behind me through the strangeness of his shadow, made me think of a long wooden baker’s shovel darting into the oven. The place was certainly at baking heat.

  Finally one morning we found ourselves in the bed of a good-sized river, the Arnewi, and we walked downstream in it, for it was dry. The mud had turned to clay, and the boulders sat like lumps of gold in the dusty glitter. Then we sighted the Arnewi village and saw the circular roofs which rose to a point. I knew they were just thatch and must be brittle, porous, and light; they seemed like feathers, and yet heavy—like heavy feathers. From these coverings smoke went up into the silent radiance. Also an inanimate glitter came off the ancient thatch. “Romilayu,” I said, stopping him, “isn’t that a picture? Where are we? How old is this place, anyway?”

  Surprised at my question he said, “I no know, sah.”

  “I have a funny feeling from it. Hell, it looks like the original place. It must be older than the city of Ur.” Even the dust had a flavor of great age, I thought, and I said, “I have a hunch this spot is going to be very good for me.”

  The Arnewi were cattle raisers. We startled some of the skinny animals on the banks, and they started to buck and gallop, and soon we found ourselves amid a band of African kids, naked boys and girls, yelling at the sight of us. Even the tiniest of them, with the big bellies, wrinkled their faces and screeched with the rest, above the bellowing of the cattle, and flocks of birds who had been sitting in trees took off through the withered leaves. Before I saw them it sounded like stones pelting at us and I thought we were under attack. Under the mistaken impression that we were being stoned, I laughed and swore. It amused me that they might be shying rocks at me, and I said, “Jesus, is this the way they meet travelers?” But then I saw the birds beating it through the sky.

  Romilayu explained to me that the Arnewi were very sensitive to the condition of their cattle, whom they regarded as their relatives, more or less, and not as domestic animals. No beef was eaten here. And instead of one kid’s being sent out with the herd, each cow had two or three child companions; and when the animals were upset, the children ran after them to soothe them. The adults were even more peculiarly attached to their beasts, which it took me some time to understand. But at the time I remember wishing that I had brought some treats for the children. When fighting in Italy I always carried Hershey bars and peanuts from the PX for the bambini. So now, coming down the river bed and approaching the wall of the town, which was made of thorns with some manure and reinforced by mud, we saw some of the kids waiting up for us, the rest having gone on to spread the news of our arrival. “Aren’t they something?” I said to Romilayu. “Christ, look at the little pots on them, and those tight curls. Most of them haven’t got their second teeth in yet.” They jumped up and down, screaming, and I said, “I certainly wish I had a treat for them, but I haven’t got anything. How do you think they’d like it if I set fire to a bush with this lighter?” And without waiting for Romilayu’s advice I took out the Austrian lighter with the drooping wick, spun the tiny wheel with my thumb, and immediately a bush went flaming, almost invisible in the strong sunlight. It roared; it made a brilliant manifestation; it stretched to its limits and became extinct in the sand. I was left holding the lighter with the wick coming out of my fist like a slender white whisker. The kids were unanimously silent, they only looked, and I looked at them. That’s what they call reality’s dark dream? Then suddenly everyone scattered again, and the cows galloped. The embers of the bush had fallen by my boots.

  “How do you think that went over?” I asked Romilayu. “I meant well.” But before we could discuss the matter we were met by a party of naked people. In front of them all was a young woman, a girl not much older,
I believe, than my daughter Ricey. As soon as she saw me she burst into loud tears.

  I would never have expected this to wound me as it did. It wouldn’t have been realistic to go into the world without being prepared for trials, ordeals, and suffering, but the sight of this young woman hit me very hard. Though of course the tears of women always affect me deeply, and not so long before, when Lily had started to cry in our hotel suite on the Gulf, I made my worst threat. But this young woman being a stranger, it’s less easy to explain why her weeping loosed such a terrible emotion in me. What I thought immediately was “What have I done?”

  “Shall I run back into the desert,” I thought, “and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven’t had enough desert yet. Let me throw away my gun and my helmet and the lighter and all this stuff and maybe I can get rid of my fierceness too and live out there on worms. On locusts. Until all the bad is burned out of me. Oh, the bad! Oh, the wrong, the wrong! What can I do about it? What can I do about all the damage? My character! God help me, I’ve made a mess of everything, and there’s no getting away from the results. One look at me must tell the whole story.”

  You see, I had begun to convince myself that those few days of lightheartedness, tramping over the Hinchagara plateau with Romilayu, had already made a great change in me. But it seemed that I was still not ready for society. Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay. Confronted with this weeping girl I was by this time ready to start bawling myself, thinking of Lily and the children and my father and the violin and the foundling and all the sorrows of my life. I felt that my nose was swelling, becoming very red.