Me Tanner, You Jane

Chapter 8

The thing to do, I thought, was not panic. This thought didn’t do too much good. The thing to do when mountain climbing is not fall, and the thing to do when swimming is not sink, and the thing to do when menaced by three naked black giants is not panic. Sensational.

One of the giants pointed at me. “ Uganda,” he said, more or less. “Mobutu Kasavubu Casaba Curare Montego. Uhuru Godzilla Colorado. Antigua.”

I kept my eyes on the three of them and reached blindly to my left, where I had left my pants. I fumbled in the pocket and found the Swiss Army pocketknife.

“Matilda. Piranha Daktari Laconic Malaysia Tomorrow. Llewellyn Otsego Decatur.”

I opened the knife as surreptitiously as I could under the circumstances, which were not as conducive to that sort of thing as I might have wished. I got the can-opener blade first try. That wouldn’t do at all. Next shot, I got the blade you use for punching holes in belts, if you’ve either lost some weight or stolen a fat man’s belt. I decided it would do for punching holes in people as well, and that I didn’t have time to search for a more conventional weapon. Besides, the belt-hole maker was certainly more useful than, say, the nail file. Or the tweezers.

I held the knife in my right hand and groped around with my left until I latched onto one of the forks with which we had been eating the lamented eggs. While all of this was going on the Modonoland Globetrotters held their ground, saying things like Toyota and Kon-Tiki and Mechanic to each other, and laughing their heads off between phrases. The humor was over my head, but I hoped they would stay amused. I had the feeling that the minute their sense of humor failed them they would turn ugly.

Surprise, I thought. The good old element of surprise, that’s what we had going for us. They figured that we were paralyzed with fear – an understandable misconception, that – and the last thing they expected was an attack. True, there were three of them and one and a half of us. True, they were large enough to astonish a Texan. But they seemed to be unarmed, whereas I had a knife and a fork. Well, a belt punch and a fork. Well, that was something, wasn’t it?

“ Corona,” said the one in the middle, approximately. “Melina Kandinsky Mercouri. Gowanda Kenosha Cunni-”

I attacked.

I did everything at once, because I had the feeling that there would be no second take, that all of this had to be done correctly first time around. I sprang to my feet and charged at them in one fine liquid motion, arms extended and weapons held high, face contorted in my most hideous snarl. I tore the air with a shriek designed to curdle the blood of my opponents and freeze them in their tracks. A phrase came unbidden to mind, a line from the advertisement of a factory-to-you discounter. “It’s time to cut out the middle man,” a voice spoke inside my head, and I sprang at the middle man, fully prepared to cut him out.

The next thing I knew I had left the ground and was flying ass over teacups through the air. It was the damnedest thing ever. I never even had the sensation of physical contact with the man. Obviously he did take hold of me and throw me, but it happened so very suddenly and with such ease and precision that I was never aware of it. I even thought for a moment that I had taken flight, or that there had been an earthquake, or that the world was coming to an end. Nor was I convinced that the three possibilities were mutually exclusive. But I didn’t have too much time to work things out in my head because almost immediately I hit the wall with it and crumpled up on the ground.

I got up again as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very. They looked quite as they had looked before, standing in a row taking things easy, the only change being that they had turned to face me. Behind them Plum was posing as an allegorical statue representing Surprise. The man in the middle was saying things like Salami and Horizon and Montezuma.

So I charged again. This time I started out once again for the man in the middle; then, halfway there, like any suburbanite I drifted to the right. This, see, was strategy. I seemed to be charging blindly ahead at the man who had sent me flying, but that was just to give the man on the right a false sense of security. To lull him into inattention.

It didn’t work. This time I landed on the floor instead of hitting the wall, and this time it took a few seconds longer to shake the errant confusion out of my head, and this time when I got to my feet I discovered the Swiss Army pocketknife was missing. I still had the fork, though. Otherwise everything was as before – the same extraordinary sensation of flight, the same utter rout for our side.

The man in the middle was talking again. Or maybe it was the one on the left, or the one on the right. I couldn’t be sure. Nor could I catch what they were saying. Before the words had been meaningless enough, but now I couldn’t even pick up on the sound. I suppose I was as close to sleep as it is possible to be while walking around, and closer than I had been in twenty years.

I looked around for my breath and couldn’t quite find it, and then the one on either the right or left said something, and the one on either the left or right giggled and took a step forward, and I gathered that the third time was going to be the charm. My man thrust one foot forward and planted the other at a right angle to it. His hands assumed the traditional posture, one up in front of his face, the other just in front of his shoulder. His face, so loose and composed before, was now drawn and deeply seamed.

I did not attack this time. He was not waiting for me, either. He took small steps toward me, extending the lead foot, bringing the rear foot up, constantly maintaining the stance. I tried arranging myself similarly, wondering at the same time why I was bothering. He was going to cut me up and use me for bait and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

And the hell of it was that I was never absolutely beyond redemption in hand-to-hand combat. They gave me lessons in it before they shipped me to Korea, and a couple of times on those numbered hills I had a chance to show what I had learned, and it went well enough. I was never great but I was never awful, either, but these three clowns were good enough to make my old judo instructors look like barroom brawlers.

The man came closer, and I looked at him and at the others, and I glanced among other things at his bright red genitals, and at the others’ bright red genitals, and I thought again of the judo instructors and my last thought in that connection, and something clicked.

I dropped my hands. I opened my mouth and, loud and clear, I shouted out, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny!”