Me Tanner, You Jane

Chapter 7

Plum screamed for about three quarters of an hour, pausing intermittently to vomit. She would throw back her head and shriek and wail, eyes rolling, nails digging into palms, tears streaming down face, and then the screams would break abruptly off and she would toss her head forward like a robin bobbin’ along, and then she would throw up. Followed by more screaming.

I couldn’t blame her. I spent a while trying to calm her down, and when that proved impossible I made her as comfortable as she was likely to get while I took a look around the place and surveyed the damage, which was total. When I took a head count, and I wish I did not mean that as literally as I do, I came up with a tally of thirty-four dead, twenty-five women and nine men.

They were not merely dead. Death in itself is chilling to look upon, however inoffensive and antiseptic the form it takes. But these men and women had been torn apart. It was not always possible to tell what belonged to whom.

I had seen this sort of thing before. In war movies soldiers die neatly of invisible wounds, but when I was in Korea death was apt to be messy. I can still remember the sight of a group of fellows who had been playing cards when a shell landed among the four of them. The task of sorting and compiling their bodies for shipment home was largely arbitrary. Like the Belgian priests and nuns and nurses, they had been made a hash of.

Yet this was different. A shell, a bomb, an explosive charge – these are essentially impersonal affairs, and if they make death a messy business they do so with no special malice.

Sheena had acted with malice. The carnage in the three buildings was the work not of a single explosive charge but of uncountable blows with knife and ax and machete, so that each aspect of the outrage had a very personal stamp upon it. All of the bodies had been decapitated, and most arms and legs had been hacked off as well. The women had been separated from their breasts. In similar fashion, the men had been emasculated, but in their case the organs of which they had been deprived were nowhere to be found. Sheena seemed to have taken them along, for reasons I did not care to consider.

I didn’t get sick. I felt the way I do when I drink too much strong coffee, all tightly strung and jittery. I paced from one building to another, stopping to comfort Plum, then moving on again, and I looked at flesh and blood over and over again until it lost its impact. Then I found Plum and took hold of her. She was still hysterical. I held her chin in one hand and slapped her face with the other. She clutched me and gasped and stopped the sobbing and caught hold of herself.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Let’s just get the hell out of here, that’s all. Back the way we came, I suppose.”

“But-”

“At least we know the route. We’ll try not to fall in the lion pit or get eaten by the flies. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but the sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll be there.”

“Where? Griggstown?”

“For a starter.”

“But we will be arrested there.”

“Not if we don’t announce ourselves. We’ll get out of the country, don’t worry. You can go to London or come to America or whatever you want.”

“But what about your friends, Evan?”

“My friends?”

“Sam Bowman and Knanda Ndoro.”

I started to tell her that they weren’t my friends, then gave it up as irrelevant. “They’re dead,” I said.

“You have found their bodies?”

I shook my head. “But I don’t give them much chance. The stories they tell about this Sheena are pure understatement. You saw what her gang did here.” She began to go green again, so I hurried on. “If Bowman and the Retriever met up with the White Goddess you could bury what’s left of them in a matchbox.” The image did little for Plum ’s complexion. “And if they didn’t run up against Sheena, then we’ve got even less chance of finding them. It would be a case of not knowing which haystack to look in for the needle. I would say that either they’re out of the country, in which case we can forget about finding them, or Sheena got them, in which case they’ve joined their ancestors. But in either case-”

“We should leave this place.”

“You’re on the right track now.”

She nodded. I thought she was nodding in agreement, and then I saw that her eyes had gone glassy, and she nodded again and started to pitch forward on her face. I caught her. She swayed dizzily and sagged against me. I held onto her.

She said, “I’m all right now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Evan, I cannot go anywhere now. And we do not dare to travel by night. We are not that fine at getting around in jungles to begin with, is it not so? And by night it would be much worse.” She took a breath. “We shall begin our journey in the morning.”

“I think we should go now.”

She raised her eyes beseechingly. “I do not think I could do this, Evan. I am so tired.”

“But if they-”

“I must sleep, Evan.” She blinked rapidly. “We both must sleep. I am sure that you too are exhausted, although it is possible you do not realize it.”

“Oh, I realize it.”

“For you are under strain and may be living on your nerves, Evan, but I know that you need a night’s sleep. You have slept so little since we left Griggstown. Whenever I look at you you are wide awake. I do not think that I have ever seen you sleeping.”

“Oh, I hibernate.”

“What is that?”

“What bears do.”

“Bears? Oh, yes, I know them. They live in Jellystone Park and are friends with squirrels and rangers. I have seen them in the cinema with Mickey the Mouse. They, too, can speak, can they not?”

“Uh.”

“But I do not understand what it is to hibernate.”

I explained what it was to hibernate, and that I was joking. I told Plum that I could get by without very much sleep, and we left it at that. My exact condition isn’t precisely a state secret, but it’s something I don’t bring up if I can avoid it. The revelation of my insomnia always leads into a predictable pattern of questions and answers, one I’ve had rather enough of over the years. It is simpler to avoid all that.

Still, Plum insisted, I must need some sleep now. We could not possibly travel all night, nor would it be safe. I didn’t really want to agree with this but I couldn’t avoid it. She was obviously shot, and while I might have been willing to try plodding through the jungle at night on my own, I couldn’t manage it with Plum slung over my shoulder.

But I didn’t like the alternative a hell of a lot. The idea of spending the night in the midst of all that carnage was profoundly unappealing, and the idea of spending any unnecessary time in Sheena’s neighborhood was positively chilling.

The smallest of the three buildings, a combination of chapel and office, was less gory than the other two. I parked Plum outside and did what I could to clear the building of the evidence of the massacre. Yoga has certain techniques for cultivating detachment during the performance of unpleasant tasks. I tried them, and while I couldn’t entirely blind myself to what I was doing, I did manage to get through it.

I found a straw tick and some bed linen from one of the other buildings and fixed up a bed for Plum. I fetched her. She had swung all the way from hysterical to numb, and I had to pick her up and carry her to the chapel and tuck her into her bed. She lay down, then propped herself up on one elbow and scanned the room.

“All gone,” she said.

“What is?”

“The dead bodies. Gone. Good.”

She flopped down and closed her eyes. I sat beside her for a few minutes. Then I got to my feet and walked quietly out of there.

It was growing dark now, the sky darkening rather abruptly as is its wont in that region. I went to the garden to pull some vegetables but stopped myself when I realized that I wasn’t really hungry. We hadn’t eaten anything substantial in quite a while, but somehow the thought of food was in and of itself enough to appease the desire for food. I examined the turnipish root I had pulled and decided that nothing could induce me to eat it. I dropped it and went into the middle building.

I guess it must have been the infirmary. It was hard to say for certain; all three buildings had evidently played mutiple roles, and everything was presently a complete mess. I tried to ignore the corpses and began searching the place without any conscious objective in mind. I was looking for something but it didn’t much matter what it was. The Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Fountain of Youth – any of these would have done.

What I found was a combination of the three. It was a half-gallon jug of pure grain alcohol, medicinal grade, distilled in Johannesburg and certified fit for human consumption. Grain alcohol. Around two hundred proof. Bottled and capped and labeled and, in the midst of the most extraordinary display of destructive power since Nagasaki, remarkably not to say miraculously unbroken.

And I held it in my hand and looked at it, and all at once I knew what it was I had been looking for, and that this was it. The Elixir of Life. The Universal Solvent. The Final Solution.

I found a gallon of bottled spring water and a plastic coffee cup, and I took the two jugs and the cup and went back to where Plum was sleeping. She was tossing restlessly, and I put a hand on her forehead and gentled her into a more restful sleep. Then I filled the coffee cup halfway with alcohol, topped it off with spring water, and drank the result.

It tasted like vodka, which was only right, since that is what it really was. Hundred proof vodka. It burned. It had a hell of a kick to it.

I liked it.

I emptied the cup and filled it up again, this time with a touch less alcohol and a touch more water. I worked on the drink and let my mind unwind and work the knots out of itself. Just what the missionary ordered, I decided, sipping appreciatively.

I closed my eyes. The missionaries, priests and nuns alike, were now either in Heaven or not, depending upon the validity of their basic assumptions, which they were now unfortunately in a position to confirm or deny. Bowman, my more or less fellow agent, was probably dead. So was Knanda Ndoro, the Retriever of Modonoland.

As the alcohol assumed its rightful place in my bloodstream, it became clear to me that I did not very much care about Sam Bowman – if he was a real secret agent, death was part of the game, and if he was a fraud, sic semper bolonis. Nor did I care if Knanda Ndoro got his, or if his royal treasury was lost forever. Royal treasuries are fun, but this one looked to be more trouble than it was worth, and farther out of reach than any grapes to any fox, as far as that went.

Nor, finally, did I really care about the missionaries. The only bothersome thing about Sheena’s annihilation of them was that Plum and I had walked in on its aftermath. Had I been in New York at the time, they could have died in the news without upsetting me a whole hell of a lot. A missionary, after all, assumes much the same sort of an occupational risk as does a secret agent or an African dictator. There is always the possibility that martyrdom will pave the road to sainthood, anyway.

I filled the cup and looked at it like Hamlet at Yorick. I sipped, and shuddered at the stuff, which I had perhaps not diluted as much as I’d intended, and swallowed, and shuddered again, and then basked in the flow of warmth from my middle. The alcohol brought an awful clarity of vision. I was in Modonoland, I realized now, for no good purpose whatsoever. The whole venture was stupidly negative. I had come here because I had not liked where I was, and because everything had been getting worse, and because I wanted to go someplace warm. I had fled from the implication that I might have ambivalent feelings toward my ersatz daughter, Minna, and had retaliated by taking a fourteen-year-old mistress. I had-

I had gone off, I saw now, on a particularly witless tangent.

And it was time to get back on the main road.

My mind worked as quickly as it could, stumbling now and again but plunging on undaunted. First things, I decided, first. I would begin setting my house in order and making some sort of logical pattern for my life. I would get out of the jungle and back to civilization, and I would find a place for Plum, and I would return to New York and marry Kitty and adopt Minna and move out of the mad jungle that was Manhattan. I could picture myself in some clean and neat suburban community in Jersey or Connecticut, say. A comfortable little ranch house. Steaks grilling over charcoal in the backyard. A power mower shaving the grass in front. Children gamboling like lambs over the back lawn.

I drank again and thought of Peter Pan. If you grew up you couldn’t fly. Well, it was time I grew up, and maybe it was time I stopped flying. A house in the suburbs, a wife, a family, a station wagon, a snow blower, a freezer, a power hedge trimmer, a dishwasher, a family room, a color television set, a breakfast nook – I closed my eyes and saw all the trappings of the good life fitting themselves into the picture, explaining and defining me. No more a ratty apartment on West 107th Street. No more crazy-quilt political organizations. No more chaos, no more anarchy.

No more trips to places like this one.

After a while I capped both jugs and slipped out of the building without waking Plum. There was no moon in view, but the sky was bright with stars. I was just beginning to get used to the southern skies, just beginning to recognize the various constellations. I looked up at them now and imagined myself in my spacious tree-shaded back yard in, say, Paramus, gazing up at the stars and contemplating the merits of pre-emergence crabgrass killer.

It sounds, I suppose, like a joke, but it was a joke I had given off laughing over long ago, and old jokes tend to become new truths. I had always wondered why sooner or later everyone packed it in and went to the suburbs. Everyone did this because sooner or later everyone realized that it was the only sensible thing to do. Sooner or later everyone realized that one had to put points on one’s compass and chart the course of one’s life. If it had taken me rather more time than usual, well, that might even be all to the good; it would give me things to look back fondly on in old age.

My head buzzed with plans. Cancel the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia; substitute the Parent-Teacher Association. Cross out the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and write in the Flat Hills Country Club. I could see it all now, and it all looked good. Charge accounts, color-coordinated bathrooms, labor-saving devices – all the little human touches that separate us from the apes.

If any doubts attempted to surface, I was too involved with my vision to pay them mind. I went back for the alcohol, cut it with some water, drank. I drifted outside again and wandered beneath the stars, only to return again for another drink. After quite a long while of this, the birds began singing their heads off. It was still perfectly dark when they did this, but I guess they knew something, because after about fifteen minutes of tweet-tweet-tweet the sky turned light with dawn.

Shortly after this happened, Plum woke up with a start. That’s not one of my all-time favorite expressions, but it’s what she did. Heretofore she had always awakened rather gently and comfortably, I’d usually been on hand when she woke up, and of late I’d often taken an active part in waking her, in which case the mornings started out very pleasantly for both of us.

(And this, I told myself now, would have to stop. In a sense, it constituted anticipatory infidelity to Kitty, my bride and helpmate to be. Furthermore, it struck me that the recurring carnal knowledge of a fourteen-year-old Welsh-African hybrid did not quite jibe with my new role as suburban pillar.)

This morning, as I said, she woke with a start. There was this sudden thrashing about, accompanied by a volley of small yelps. I held onto her and said things like, “Easy, easy,” and “It’s all right,” and the yelps and thrashing eased off and stopped.

“It was a dream,” she said, blinking. “Everyone was being cut into bits and raped and killed and-”

“It was a dream.”

She put her hand between her little breasts. “How it pounds! I cannot catch my breath.”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so. What is that, Evan?”

She was pointing to my cup. “Oh,” I said. “Well, it’s vodka.”

“Vodka? In a mission?”

I explained that I had made it out of alcohol and water, a process at least as praiseworthy in her eyes as the transmutation of water to wine. She asked if she could have some, and I told her she couldn’t.

“But why?”

“You’re too young,” I said.

“I am old enough to be slept with but too young to have a drink?”

I considered this carefully. “You’re too young to sleep with, too,” I said. I spoke carefully, too, because my tongue seemed thicker than usual. “But, you see, it’s a case of the smaller boll weevil.”

“The smaller-”

“The lesser of two weevils,” I said triumphantly.

“Evan?”

“Hmmm?”

“What is the matter with you?”

“I’m a pillar of the community.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I suppose I am.”

“You’re talking so funny.”

“Er.”

She reached for the cup. I drew it away from her. A pillar of the community would not serve alcoholic beverages to minors, I told myself.

She said, “Have you been drinking all night? And you did not get to sleep at all, did you?”

“Well, I had a few hours sleep-”

“Oh, Evan, you must be tired!”

I poured out the cup of vodka, capped the two jugs, got to my feet. This last process was by far the most difficult of the three but I managed it, swaying rhythmically to and fro. I wasn’t all that drunk, I decided. I was somewhere in that good gray area of insobriety, neither as sober as a judge nor as drunk as a lord. A full meal and a chance to walk off some of the alcohol would clear away the cobwebs.

“Evan, we ought to go now.”

“Breakfast,” I said.

“I am not hungry. The sky is light, it is morning, and I think-”

“Hungry,” I said. “Eat first, then we’ll talk.”

“You said last night that it was dangerous to stay here.”

“It is. A person could get drunk around here.”

“Evan-”

“There’s nothing to worry about, Plum.”

“But you said-”

“Never mind what I said. What do I know?” She blinked at this. “Come on,” I went on. “I’ll cook us something and then we can get started.”

“Where?”

“There’s a kitchen in the far building.”

“I do not want to go.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What will we eat?”

“Oh, I’ll find something,” I said lightly. “With all those bodies out there-”

“Evan!”

She had turned green again. I assured her that I was joking and she looked up at me, glaring balefully. I left her there and went to the kitchen, or, more precisely, the cooking area in the far building. I stepped over bodies and parts of bodies without reacting to them at all. I don’t know whether this was a result of the alcohol or if I was simply becoming accustomed to their presence, as one learns not to notice the wallpaper in a rented room.

Sheena’s men had found the kitchen before me, and had done what they could to kill it. The food they hadn’t carried off was now decorating the walls and floors. A great many eggs and melons had been smashed almost beyond recognition. I ignored all this, whistled a happy approximation of a tune, and found a couple of eggs and a frying pan in which to scramble them. I couldn’t find any salt or pepper or milk or cooking oil or, indeed, anything but the eggs, and the result was nothing James Beard would have wanted to hear about, but then he wouldn’t have been too happy with anything we had eaten since leaving Griggstown. Neither, as far as that goes, were we. The eggs were better than starvation, I decided. The smaller boll weevil.

I dished them out on two presumably clean plates, scared up a pair of forks, and went off in search of Plum. She was where I’d left her but she wasn’t how I’d left her. Her eyes were glassy and she had a stupid grin on her face.

“Whee,” she said. “Shmells like eggs.”

“They’re eggs, all right. Hey-”

She ignored the fork, took a handful of egg, stuffed it into her mouth. “Ughhh,” she said.

“I’m sorry if you don’t-”

“Yummy,” she said. She scooped up another handful of egg and pushed it in my face. “Eat, eat,” she said. “Later we’ll talk.”

“You’ve been drinking,” I said.

“Jusht a little tashte.”

“You’ve been drinking alcohol.”

“I’ve been drinking alcohol,” she agreed owlishly. “Fourteen yearsh old and I’m depraved. Drinking alcohol and running around in the jungle-”

“How much did you have?”

“-and fucking. Theshe eggsh are terrible. Are you shtill drunk?”

“I think sho. Damn it to hell. I think so. They aren’t that bad.”

“Dry and no tashte. I shouldn’t have had that drink, I shupposhe. It’sh bad for both of ush to be drunk, ishn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

She put the plate down. “But I really feel great,” she said. “Niche and looshe and everything.”

“Alcohol has that effect sometimes.”

“It’sh really great.” She extended her arms, beaming. “I’ve got a really wonderful idea.”

“Oh?”

“Let’sh shcrew.”

“No.”

“No?”

I tried explaining it to her. I don’t suppose I did a very good job of it, being still half in the bag myself, but I tried to make her understand about my need for a well-ordered life, my plans to marry and settle down and acquire a power mower and a mortgage. What I said may or may not have made perfect sense, but in any case Plum couldn’t make head or tail out of it, a cliché which, now that I think about it, has particular relevance under the circumstances. Her reply was nonverbal; she took off her clothes and unbuttoned my shirt and rubbed up against me.

“And besides that,” I said, shifting verbal gears, “we don’t have the time. It’s not safe to stick around here, and we should have left a long time ago.”

“You’re right,” she said.

“I’m glad you realize that. So-”

“We should have left lasht night, and we should have left when the shun came up this morning, and we shouldn’t have shtopped to have breakfast, and you shouldn’t have gotten drunk lasht night, and I shouldn’t have gotten drunk this morning. But we did all thoshe things wrong, and we’re shtill here, and it would be fun to make love, and I have all my clothes off, and you have most of your clothes off, and, oh, Evan, put your hand right here for a minute-”

And what I thought, since the human mind is well-equipped for letting ego figure out reasons to give id its way, was that this could serve as a line of demarcation between the old and the new. A final fling with Plum now at the apex of our adventure, and then we could head back the way we came just as I headed back to the life of the new Evan Tanner, the upright suburban Evan Tanner. One final taste of Plum Pudding and tomorrow the diet would begin.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Evan?”

I sighed a long and lazy sigh and rolled over onto my side. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of morning – the wind in the tall grasses, the flies swarming in the other buildings.

“I think I am not drunk any longer.”

“Neither am I.”

“That was very nice, Evan. Does it always make one sober to make love?”

“Not always.”

“We should dress now.”

“We should.”

“We should leave at once.”

“Yes,” I said. I sat up. “We really should.” I reached for my clothes. “We wasted far too much time already. Not that it was exactly a waste, but we should have been out of here hours ago. Fortunately it hasn’t done any-”

“Any what?”

I didn’t say anything. “Evan? You stopped in the middle of a sentence.”

She was facing the opposite way, her back to the doorway of the building. She couldn’t see what I saw.

“Evan?”

“I was going to say harm, it hasn’t done any harm. But I think it has.”

“What?”

“Don’t turn around,” I said levelly. “Stay where you are, stay calm, don’t turn around-”

So of course she turned around.

And saw what I saw:

Three men, black as power, naked as truth, and tall enough for pro basketball. Three huge naked black men with polished bones through their septa and bone rings on their fingers. Three naked black giants with their genitals painted bloody red.

Looking our way, and grinning.