Страница 27 из 34
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It might be nice if you cooled it a little.”
“You never said you objected.”
“She objected.”
“Well, she ain’t but a girl, baby. I knew you were havin’ it off with her but I never thought you figured you had an exclusive. All you had to do was say.”
“Then I’m saying.”
“Because I didn’t think you been doin’ anythin’ with her since we got on this here hollow log of a boat, and I thought if you didn’t then-”
“Well, now you know different, don’t you?”
“I surely do. And since we’re buddies, I wouldn’t think to cut in while you’re dancin’.”
“That’s what I thought. Besides, you wouldn’t really want Plum anyway. You know she’s half white.”
“That’s a fact.”
“As soon as we get back home, you can get yourself a beautiful black woman in Bed-Stuy.”
“Now you talkin’. Soon as I get back home to Oakland, that’s what I’m go
Just some conversations which took place between or among various persons floating down the Yellowfoot River over a period of several days.
Chapter 14
Fortunately it was not all talk. Otherwise we would have gone mad. But the conversations were separated by long silences, long lazy hours of lackadaisical paddling down the broad meandering sleepy old Yellowfoot. The river wandered all over the place, and we spent as much time shifting from left to right and back again as we did making real progress toward the capital. We sat, the four of us, in the hollowed-out trunk of a wali tree, and we floated and paddled first through the overgrown jungle land and then through the flat coastal plain where the opium grew. We caught fish in the river. We picked fruit and dug roots and pulled up greens on the banks. It was not a diet to grow fat on, but neither was it as troubling to the mind as Stew à la Sheena.
The weather was good, the heat not too deadening, the rain light and infrequent. The local fauna did a good job of leaving us alone. Crocodiles floated at the water’s surface or su
There was, in fact, that special feeling of sublime peace that could only be the calm before the storm. We spoke no harsh words to each other, we were quite considerate of one another, and yet this was by no means the result of bonds of good feeling uniting us in peace and fellowship.
More than once, as I feigned sleep, did I sense that Bowman was considering feeding me to the crocodiles. More than once did I detect in Plum ’s expression a desire to pack the Queen of the Jungle off to the Happy Hunting Grounds. And, in a less murderous vein, each of us was upset about something or other. I was irritated with Plum because she was behaving childishly. She was a
Sheena, my wife, hated all of us but had to keep it to herself. We kept her trussed up in the rear of the dugout and kept a rag stuffed in her mouth except at feeding time. It seems excessive in retrospect, two presumably grown men keeping a girl tied and gagged, but she was wholly uncontrollable otherwise, much given to ear bursting wails and oaths and quite determined to turn the boat over and drown us all. Her strength was as the strength of ten, not because her heart was pure, God knows, but because she fought with the single-minded determination of the truly flipped-out. Inside there, I kept telling myself, was an i
That, then, was the sort of special peace of the voyage. A lazy peaceful time during which I would pretend to go to sleep in the middle of our little boat, with my hand always clenched on the hilt of my machete. A lazy peaceful time given to thoughts of Kitty, my wife to be, and Sheena, whom I had recently agreed to take for better or for worse. (Hardly a legal ceremony in anyone’s eyes, and yet if a ship’s captain could perform marriages on the high seas, couldn’t a ca
One night, just as the sun was dropping out of sight, Bowman turned poet again. He got carried away with the placid flow of the river and the lush beauty of the countryside and the sound of his own voice. How beautiful it was, he said, and how peaceful.
“It is utterly perfect,” Plum said, her lip curling. “It is truly a shame that our voyage must come to an end.”
More of a shame than she thought. Any sort of calm period is to be treasured for its own sake, I think, without regard to the conflict that must inevitably end it. On either a personal or a global scale, peace is that stretch of time during which preparations are made for the next war. This doesn’t make it any less satisfying.
Admittedly, though, the maintenance of this particular peace required a special sort of brinkmanship. In a sense our dugout was a Cold War world in microcosm, with an added similarity in that it was impossible to be sure just who was on who’s side, or just what the fighting was about. The true test of skill came when we ran the boat up on the bank and one or more of us got busy gathering brush for a cookfire, or pulling up edible weeds in the opium fields, or performing such bodily functions as are best performed in private. The object was to avoid leaving a fatal combination of persons together. If Plum and Bowman remained unattended, for example, he might ravish her. If Plum had unsupervised custody of Sheena, she might do something antisocial.
It wasn’t really quite that spooky, but it seemed that way now and again. It was, as I once remarked to Plum, like the old brain twister about the ca
“Technically you might say we’re all ca
“I had none of that stew, Evan.”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
We talked of other things, and of nothing at all, and one day followed another as days are wont to do, and the river, for all its shilly-shallying, flowed indefatigably to the sea, as rivers are wont to do.
Early in the morning of what ultimately proved to be a Thursday, we hit the outlying districts of the capital. By daybreak we were securely lodged in a neat little suburban house not unlike the one from which I had liberated the Volkswagen back when all of this was just getting started. We had walked through those dark and empty streets, and I quickly selected an empty house. Nothing could have been simpler. I merely looked for a house with a couple of lights on. People who go out of town always leave a light on, so that a burglar won’t drive by in the early evening and see their house just sitting there, dark and vacant. But should the same burglar drive by at, say, four in the morning, he would see their house more conspicuous than ever, light and vacant. Had we gotten to town in the early evening, this house certainly would have fooled us. We didn’t, and it didn’t, and a further check showed that the car was not in the garage, and a still further check revealed a note in the milk box – “Milkman/Please No Milk Until a Week from Monday Because We Are Going Away/ Mrs. Pe