Indeed, a few days later the Lakeys and the Minids had engaged in a seemingly spontaneous fiesta in a river strip of fig trees about halfway between Lake Kiboko and New Helensburgh. Such get-togethers, I understood, provided an essential social outlet for the habilines. A randy young male might well find a nubile
femme fatale
among the unattached ingénues of the other band. Depending on circumstances, he would either return with her to his own people or remain with his bride as an adoptive son of his in-laws.
As yet, however, I had witnessed no marriages and could not predict which of these two likely patterns would prevail. Mister Pibb was the only Minid even remotely close to marrying age, but he had not asserted himself during the shindy with the Lakeys, so nothing but chatter and good-natured wrestling had come of that meeting.
In addition to the Lakeys and the Minids, I had evidence—in the form of haunting morning songs and an occasional distant sighting of strange bipeds—that two other bands of habilines lived relatively near. One of these had colonized a wooded flank of Mount Tharaka to the southeast, while the other had established an amorphous principality somewhere in the opposite direction (a region today given over to Zarakal's chronic border disputes with Ethiopia and Somalia). The tacit understanding among all these bands was that they fared better as maverick units than as partners in even a semiformal alliance. The availability of edible plants and the disposition of game across the plains did not permit the mounting of a grandiose habiline republic, especially in seasons of drought.
United (beyond a certain ecologically determined limit) you fell. Divided (into autonomous bands of fewer than thirty) you stood. For which reason Alfie the Minid did not aspire to be Alexander the Great.
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During this fallow period, the Minids compounded their problems by missing several kills and allowing a pair of aggressive lionesses to drive them off another. It struck me that I could improve my status by demonstrating my talents as a breadwinner. I would make my reluctant cousins a present of an animal large enough to keep them well fed and sassy for two or three days. To that end, I went out one morning before dawn, before the ritualistic choiring of habilines, and walked in the cool half-dark all the way to the edge of Lake Kiboko. By the time I arrived the sun was rising, marbling the eastern horizon with delicate rose and salmon. The lake itself was a vast looking glass of turquoise.
I drew my .45 and crouched on a lava flow above the southeastern shore.
At which moment, glancing sidelong, I saw that the Backstep Scaffold from Kaprow's omnibus was hanging in space like a mechanical variation on the Old Hindu Rope Trick. My pulse quickened, and I leapt to my feet. Here, if I wanted it, was rescue. Even after all this time, Blair and Kaprow had not forgotten me. They had solved their Technological Difficulties. Peering upward, I approached the scaffold, startled anew by the window into deliverance. I was tempted, too. It would be so easy to chin myself into position, strap myself in, push the control retracting the scaffold, and dream myself back into the bosom of a world of double-digit inflation and percale bed sheets. Who could say, in fact, whether I would ever get another chance?
I took out my transcordion and keyed in the following message: “
I am fine, surviving quite well. Have
made contact with a band of local hominids—
Homo habilis
, I believe—and am gradually winning
acceptance. Intend to pursue these observations for several more weeks. Very necessary if we are
to learn anything. If possible, will return at weekly intervals, starting from today. Cannot afford
wasting time traipsing back and forth. Listen:
SCAFFOLD NOT HERE EVERY DAY!
Please
don
'
t forget me. I
will
be back. Best, J.
”
Then I put the instrument on the scaffold, and boosted the platform back into its spacious aerial womb.
The sky was whole again, and I had reduced my morning's various options to one. Quite a significant one. I felt better for having done so, too. My entire life had pointed to this mission, and I was not about to abort it simply because a drought was threatening my habiline cohorts and me with hard times—especially now that I knew I could, with a little luck, get home.
I resumed my vigil at lakeside. Fifteen minutes later I shot a small, lone antelope of a species unknown to both me and my field guide—the creature had a copper-colored pelt and graceful, corkscrewing horns—and dragged it away from the water's edge to prevent its being purloined by a crocodile. After gutting the antelope, I hoisted its lolling carcass to my back. My plan was to carry it over the intervening grasslands to New Helensburgh, lay it sacramentally before the Minids’ citadel, and thereby earn their undying gratitude and respect. This was a heroic scenario, but because I had fully envisioned it, I expected it to work.
The trip back to New Helensburgh, however, did not go as I had foreseen. As I staggered along, the body of the dead antelope grew progressively stiffer and heavier. Also, as part of my revolving alert for hyenas, wild dogs, and other potential dacoits, I made myself turn about in a circle every thirty or forty yards. Unhappily, about two hours into my journey, just as I was beginning to believe in my ultimate, if not my immediate, success, my conscientiousness paid off in a sighting. Some distance off, sharkishly patrolling the steppe, a pack of giant hyenas trotted toward me from the northeast.
“Oh, shit,” I murmured aloud. “Oh, holy shit.”
I dropped the antelope carcass (
Aepyceros whazzus
) and unholstered my Colt (
Equus fatalis
).
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Unbalanced by the sudden removal of so much dead weight, however, I fumbled the pistol to the ground, where it fired a muffled shot into the dust and kicked over onto its side. The noise halted the hyenas in their tracks, but only briefly. As soon as I had retrieved the .45 and pointed it shakily in their direction, they were already advancing again, contracting from a file of animals into an ugly, loping wedge. Only six bullets remained in my eight-clip, and although Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy might have found that number sufficient, it would fall about ten shy of what I needed to survive this onslaught. I sighted along the pistol's muzzle, pulled the trigger, and—
Click.
I had not slid a fresh clip into the butt of the .45 that morning. Further, under prevailing circumstances I was going to have a hard time extracting the old clip and feeding in a substitute. A single bandolier crossed my torso, and I hurried to squeeze seven or eight cartridges out of its canvas loops into my hands. I was shaking so badly that a couple of these fell into the grass at my feet. Looking up, I saw the lead hyena. Its mouth was as big as one of the Carlsbad Caverns; its shallow panting breaths seemed to be coming in perfect synchrony with my heartbeats.
The hyena jumped. Scattering bullets everywhere, I struck the creature a desperate blow to the head with the butt of my pistol. A froth of saliva showered up into my vision, and I fell backward over the little buck I had killed. The hyena rolled away from me, unconscious.
Dazed, I struggled to my feet again. A second and a third hyena, intimidated, went around me—but their remaining comrades had just crested a gentle swelling in the plain, and it did not seem likely that, in light of their overwhelming numerical advantage, they would all prove such cowards. I dug into my pocket for the Swiss Army knife, not even daring to think what good it might do.
If I should die before I wake,
/
I pray Ngai my soul to take
...
Whereupon, so help me, the cavalry arrived.
Leaping, ululating, brandishing their clubs, the Minids scurried into my field of vision from the east. Alfie and Helen were in the vanguard of this unexpected counterattack, and Alfie, bless him, had girded up his loins in the same pair of Fruit of the Loom that Roosevelt had snatched from my hand days and days ago.
Whether Roosevelt had relinquished the briefs willingly, I had no idea—but the sight of that hairy habiline modeling those dirty jockey shorts while laying waste about him with his stave—well, it cheered my twentieth-century soul.
All the Minids—Jomo, Ham, Genly, Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Helen—performed admirably, swinging their clubs so spiritedly that the hyenas, for all their size, were beset, bashed, brained, and bested.
Moreover, throughout this abbreviated combat my rescuers kept up a demoralizing stream of hoots, yodels, and yawps.
Those hyenas that could tucked tail and ran. Four or five others crawled away with crushed skulls. I, altogether overcome, crumpled to the ground, a collapse that could have spelled an end to White Sphinx—except that the Minids, when they came forward to finish off the hyena that I had knocked unconscious, treated me, not as an odious interloper, but as a fellow habiline.
A fellow habiline in rather indifferent standing, perhaps, but undeniably a comrade and band member.
Hunkering nearby, Jomo and Malcolm banged the dead hyena's massive head against the ground, fingered its nostrils and eyelids, and mumbled in their scraggly beards. Genly, squatting beside the antelope, was deeply curious about the bullet hole behind the buck's right ear. While Roosevelt kept
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popping up from his crouch to survey the savannah, Ham, Alfie, and Helen lackadaisically cut away strips of meat from the open belly of my kill. I had never, without a pistol in hand, been this close to the Minids as a group before, and I wondered that they did not take more interest in me. Only Helen occasionally made eye contact, and I could not tell whether she was finding fault with my appearance or trying to index me in her mental catalogue file of bipedal neighbors. Somehow, as she had known all along, I was not quite right. I was, and I was not, one of their own.
I gave her a smile—that ancient, self-serving primate signal of one's own inoffensiveness—and lay back on the ground. I had accomplished my design. All it had required was weeks of effort, a bribe of inexpensive underwear, a drought, a foolhardy hunting expedition, and a posture of absolute helplessness in the face of an attack by giant hyenas.
Helen sidled near.
Into my hand she placed a collop of antelope meat. I accepted this and looked into her eyes, which were red-rimmed and haggard—but beautiful for all that. Then I cast a glance at my slaughtered prey, the antelope, and a reminiscent queasiness flooded through me. (Bambi.) Embarrassed, memory-choked, I averted my head and closed my eyes.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Cheyenne, Wyoming
1969-70
Hugo
was stationed at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, and Jeannette, who had refrained from seeking salaried employment while Anna and John-John were preschoolers, had recently taken a part-time position as a feature writer for a local newspaper, the
Herald-Plainsman
. Hugo did not approve of her working, but because the money she earned was genuinely useful, at times almost a godsend, she had no intention of sacrificing her job to his wounded machismo. Besides, she enjoyed writing for the paper, even if Hugo, ambiguously tongue-in-cheek, would sometimes acknowledge one of her columns by crooning, Caruso-fashion, “Hark, the
Herald-Plainsman
sings...”
The Griers, from whom the Monegals had been renting their remodeled basement apartment for nearly three years, were a saltily robust couple in late middle age. They lived directly overhead, but with a porch entrance set regally above the sunken, half-hidden door by which the Monegals must go in and out. The house itself was a mint-green stucco affair with dark-green shutters. Pete Grier did the heavy yard work, while his wife Lily took care of the decorative gardening about the porch. They were decidedly idiosyncratic people, but the Monegals had almost come to regard them as family.
Lily Grier, a woman of Slavic extraction, wore her iron-gray hair in bangs and her lower body in heavy, pleated trousers. Her face had the off-white color and the noncommittal expression of a frozen Swanson's chicken pot pie—except when she smiled, for her teeth, all her own, were beautiful. She had been raised on a cattle ranch in Colorado, and her favorite interjections were “shit” and “goddamn.”
Nevertheless, the presentation of an unexpected gift or a stray kitten's mewlings would reduce her to tears. She was taller than Hugo, and weighed more, and had an abiding, paranoid faith that Pete took advantage of every trip to the drugstore or the post office to cheat on her. If that were so, Hugo told
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Jeannette, Pete undoubtedly packed the Fastest Gun in the West.
A whip-thin, red-haired man with forearms like Popeye's and the beginnings of a paunch under his belt, Pete had made his living driving heavy machinery. He still owned a small yellow bulldozer, which he kept in a collapsing wooden shed in the tiny backyard. Two or three times a year, at some rancher's request, he would dig a cattle pond or a drainage ditch, demanding his payment in cash to avoid having to mention the transaction on his income-tax forms. At the same time, however, he was an avid defender of his country's greatness, a patriot. The American military was the world's last best hope for the defeat and eradication of communism. Both he and Lily regarded the deployment around Cheyenne of intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos as tangible proof of their own and their neighbors’
faith.
Indeed, the Griers’ unflinching patriotism—at least in defense-related matters—had probably contributed to their readiness to rent to the Monegals. Hugo, after all, was a man with a dubious accent, and John-John's complexion suggested the radical politics of Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and H.