Helen put Mary’s tiny hand into mine, the hand of a hirsute alien. I abruptly let it go.
“Mai mwah.”
“No, I said I wouldn’t, Helen, and I won’t.”
Helen shifted Mary from one hip to the other and wandered aimlessly away. The Minids—dear shadows all—watched me stagger several steps after her. They wanted something more of me, the Minids did, an epilogue or an exegesis. I halted and held up my palm so they could see its lines.
“This says I’ll never betray you. I’m here to stay. I’m going to time-travel only one more time—by dying and leaving my bones for Alistair Patrick Blair to discover. Maybe he’ll give me my own taxonomic designation.”
I was openly weeping, caught between two contradictory impulses, my affection for the habilines and a sudden powerful homesickness.
“I’ve come back to you from a tomorrow you’re not yet capable of visualizing, but you must never assume that I’m the be-all and end-all of your development as a people. You must try to look beyond what you cannot yet visualize toward that which is absolutely inconceivable. Even if it’s misplaced, you must have faith in your destiny. My .45’s not solely what you’re striving for, nor is my first-aid kit. The culmination of what you have begun, O my Minidae, will be a triumph that I am altogether incapable of imagining.”
* * *
The next day we straggled without incident across the grasslands to the gentle hills at the foot of Mount Tharaka. Helen, who obviously did not feel well, permitted me to tote Mary much of this distance and spent her time foraging vegetable foods for the australopithecine child.
Our arrival near the mountain was highlighted by the appearance on the scrub-covered ridge above us of three or four hunters from another habiline “nation.” We had trespassed into their territory, and in a season of drought, when dispersal spells survival, our advent must have seemed a challenge to their dominion. Holding Mary and gazing up into the glitter of snow frosting Mount Tharaka’s peak, I heard . . .well, I heard ancestral voices prophesying war.
Actually, Alfie, Jomo, and Ham were hallooing to the sentinels on the ridge, and the sentinels were hallooing back. These eerie how-d’ye-dos diddled the high dells of the mountain and loop-de-looped across the grasslands. They frightened Mary. She dug her toenails into my thighs and tried to climb me like a tree. She was strong, too, strong and persistent; I virtually had to squeeze the wind from her lungs to dampen her hankering for a howdah perch on my head. At last Helen noticed our struggle and relieved me of the imp. In her adoptive mother’s arms, even as the hooting on the ridge modulated from threat into invitation, Mary quieted.
As we labored slantwise up the incline, I realized that Mary was not the only naturalized Minid who dreaded the impending encounter. I was as out of place among the habilines as she, a bran flake in a box of Cheerios. What kind of reception could we expect from the strangers on the ridge? Their faces took on specific identities as we climbed, but I still found it hard to think they were people in the sense that the Minids were people. They were attired no differently (a hairy sort of nakedness being the uniform of the epoch), and their weapons had a familiar look (cudgel, bludgeon, stave, and femur), but they reminded me of Yahoos rather than human beings. This was a visceral prejudice that I would have to uproot or sublimate. It was, I told myself, unworthy of Joshua Kampa.
Ham and Jomo seemed to have had prior dealings with the hunchbacked honcho of this other band. (Attila Gorilla, I mentally dubbed him, for his habilines were Huns.) They presented their credentials, laying their weapons at Attila’s feet to demonstrate our peaceable aims and our willingness to beg the Huns’ indulgence while passing through their stomping grounds. Alfie, hanging back with the womenfolk, clutched the burnished thighbone of a wildebeest like a gigantic swizzle stick. If our reception proved less than hospitable, he looked altogether capable of mixing our adversaries into a habiline cocktail. Fortunately, this did not prove necessary.
Although I could not decode the guttural gibberish in which negotiations proceeded, in a matter of moments our uneasy truce had become a friendship treaty. Following Attila’s lead, our entire band scurried down the backside of the ridge into a briary dale. On Mount Tharaka’s elevated skirts there were trees and stands of bamboo, while the snow on the overleaning peak sparkled like the slush in a frozen banana daiquiri. We threaded our way through the briar patch, debouched into a naked ravine, and climbed through the ravine toward the delicious ices of the summit. A quarter of the way up, we maneuvered clockwise along a forested shelf to the Huns’ tiny mountain resort.
The habilines here regarded Mary and me with frank suspicion. I was the more disconcerting anomaly, a buffoon with boxy feet and blowzy britches. They had never seen anything like me before. They had no words—indeed, no mental concepts—for many of my accouterments. My shorts did not completely befuddle them, but only because some of the female Huns wore crude, animal-skin cloaks, a concession to the cooler temperatures at this altitude.
In spite of their antipathy toward me, these people left me alone. The Minids, after all, had me in tow, and I was several inches taller than Attila, their own acknowledged boss man.
Mary the Huns ogled with less self-consciousness. She was an idiot child who caricatured them simply by being who and what she was. They could not seem to decide if they wanted to cuddle or cudgel her, for which reason Helen was careful about accompanying Mary on all her little jaunts about the village, an odd assortment of lean-tos and huts. I was protective of Mary, too, and found myself holding her a great deal of the time.
We stayed with these habilines for six days, and I never did develop any affection for them. They interacted well enough with the Minids, I suppose, to the extent that Mister Pibb began laying the groundwork for a liaison with a dainty Hunnish ingénue—but I did not care for our hosts’ tastes in animal flesh, which ran heavily to bushbabies, colobus, vervet, and blue monkeys.
At intervals throughout this week Helen was fiercely sick, victim to a recurring malady that I attributed to our sudden change in habitat and diet. By the end of our sixth day on the mountain these bouts of vomiting had so enfeebled her that she spent the night prostrate, but wakeful, under my care. After patting Mary to sleep, I fetched back moist compresses of moss from the trickle-out of a nearby stream and applied these to Helen’s throat and forehead. Eventually I curled up beside her to sleep.
* * *
When I awoke, the highland forest was emphatically swaying. The impetus for this motion was not the wind. Instead, the flank of the mountain had begun to convulse beneath us in just the way that cowhide convulses to dislodge a persnickety fly. Both Helen and Mary were gone. I staggered outside. Through the swaying foliage I saw them on the bank of the spring from which I had filched my compresses. Helen was holding Mary, but a lurch of Mount Tharaka knocked her legs out from under her. The child tumbled from her arms to the ground.
“Helen!” I shouted. “Mary!”
Mine was just one more voice in a chorus of confused voices. A crew of Hunnish habilines had spread out through the woods above the spring, chastising the mountain for its bad behavior and celebrating their own fearlessness. Their whoops and catcalls piped a puny counterpoint to Mount Tharaka’s rumblings, but none of the Huns seemed to believe that their lives were at hazard. In fact, they grew angrier. The louder the mountain rumbled, the more vehement their protests. Like pinballs, the Huns caromed about among the trees caroling their courage and their outrage.
Mary leapt to her feet, and Helen hurried to catch her. Before she could, one of Attila’s henchmen swept down on the australopithecine child with a club. One swing nearly severed Mary’s head from her neck, and the next narrowly missed Helen. I wanted to scream, but could not get any sound out. Instead, my pistol jumped into my hand. With hate in my heart and a trembling grip I pointed it at Mary’s murderer.
Whereupon Mount Tharaka shrugged again, tumbling all of us.
When, a minute or two after this convulsion, I ag
ain lifted my head, Helen was presenting her posterior to the Hun who had killed our daughter. He touched her gently on the rump, then walked past her into the leaf mold where Mary’s corpse lay. To each of the other habilines who arrived at the spring Helen also presented her buttocks. When none of them either accepted this invitation or kicked her down the slope, she went groveling to the feet of the premier culprit. In the extremity of her terror and grief she was seeking reassurance from an unconscionable barbarian. The barbarian gave it. As his comrades-in-arms dismembered our daughter’s headless corpse, he patted Helen on the shoulders, stroked her consolingly, and murmured Hunnish commiseration.
I fired my pistol in the air, one shot for each habiline. Although they had not scurried for the mountain’s rumblings, they scurried for my gunshots. The quake, by now, had run its course, and the reports were as clean and hard as the sound of an icepick chipping ice. A few moments later Helen stumbled down the debris-cluttered slope into my arms. Much more tenderly than Mount Tharaka had just rocked all of us, I rocked her, rocked her and rocked her.
* * *
Later, as Helen lay glassy-eyed and immobile in our hut, I gathered up what was left of Mary and buried these remnants in the soft earth near the spring. Then I took a walk.
In the twilight, preserved in a bed of volcanic tuff high on the mountain’s side, a cyclopean skull caught my eye. It was the skull of either a mastodon or a dinothere, a rope-nosed beast that had ventured up the slopes of Mount Tharaka in search of shoots and leaves, only to die before being able to rumba back down to bush country. What seemed to be an immense eye socket in the animal’s skull was in fact its nasal cavity, but the early Greeks would later mistake such skulls for those of one-eyed giants and would stand in glorious awe of the visions conjured by their imaginations from this error. I, too, stood in awe of the skull.
Polyphemus was a pachyderm.
After prising the enormous skull from the tuff in which it was partially embedded, I let it steer me back down the mountain.
At Mary’s grave I erected it as a headstone, a memorial to our daughter.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Panama City, Florida
Summer 1981
THE MUSIC FROM THE PAVILION ON THE BEACH was stale disco stuff, jukebox leftovers from another summer. Lots of activity, though, and the activity drew him.
Clad in huarache sandals and cut-off jeans, Joshua ambled down from the Miracle Strip to see what was happening. Hubbard had just paid him, and with Hubbard’s intervention at a local bank he had recently obtained a loan to buy a motorbike. The bike was padlocked in a rack next to the public showers near the highway, and as he angled over the yielding white sand to the pavilion, he revolved to admire it. A red Kawasaki, just beautiful. Money was independence.
Old music, new wheels.
Down at the pavilion Joshua propped one foot on a wooden rail and watched the dancers. Continually eclipsed by half-naked, spasming bodies, the jukebox on the floor seemed to expand and contract like a huge, opalescent lung. The sun had just set. A lingering red stain lay on the waters of the Gulf, and this same color was reflected in the concrete floor of the pavilion. Joshua was hypnotized. The rhythms pounding out of the jukebox held him, as did the flamboyant, robotic movements of the dancers. They were mostly white college kids or giggling teeny-boppers, but the predominant impression was of damned souls undergoing the torments of hell and perversely enjoying them. Joshua did not see much hope of his fitting into either group.
If you want company, he told himself, scoot back over to Eglin and look up some of your old Air Force buddy-buddies.
Of course that was not possible. Nobody he knew from the days before Hugo’s death lived in base housing anymore. Military families were professional refugees. They came and went like gypsies. Last October he had hitched a ride onto base with a young airman and then strolled past the old Capehart unit in which the Monegals had lived for nearly three years. Out front, one of those headache-green plastic tricycles for preschoolers. You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one.
The number on the jukebox ended, not by resolving itself but by fading away into wounded silence. The next tune was a ballad with a lovely flute solo lifting above the repetitive thud of the bass. Sunburned bodies clutched each other and swayed together like amorous drunks. Refusing to acknowledge his disfranchisement, Joshua continued to watch.
Then a small miracle occurred.
A frail, brown-skinned girl with hair like liquid graphite was staring at him from the other side of the pavilion. Dragon Lady’s kid sister, he thought; an Oriental innocent. When she saw that he had seen her watching him, she closed her eyes and let her hair gust from side to side with the melancholy piping of the flute.
Alas, she was not alone. Beside her, gazing glassily at the dancers, slumped a skinheaded young man in a pair of polyester slacks and a pale yellow T-shirt commemorating the Freedom Flotilla of 1980. A trainee from one of the bases in the area, he had probably overdosed on potato chips and light beer, sunshine and Seconal. His date wanted to dance, but he was doing well to stay upright. Finally, his scalp shining obscenely pink, his chin fell to his breast and he began sliding slowly toward the floor. The girl tried to rescue him, but he was clearly too heavy for her to support alone. Struggling with his weight, she appealed to Joshua with her eyes, and the unequivocal message in that look was, “You see the trouble I’m having. Come on, turkey, give me a hand.” Joshua circled the crowd at the rail to do just that.
After some initial fumbling for handholds, Joshua and the girl walked her dehydrated beau back up the beach to the Miracle Strip, where they thrust his head beneath a shower spray and tried to revive him to at least zombie status. No go. The trainee regarded them with the bulging, transparent eyes of a whitefish. Dragon Lady’s kid sister wiped his face with a silk scarf and signaled her helplessness to Joshua by shrugging. They had exchanged no more than ten words since leaving the pavilion.
“Where’s he from?”
“Hurlbutt Field,” said the girl with no trace of accent, in spite of which Joshua had decided that she was of Thai or Vietnamese extraction. “He tells me he’s going to be a Ranger.”
“Hockey, baseball, or forest?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Never mind. We’d better put him someplace where he can sleep off his zonk. If he goes back to Hurlbutt like this, he’ll spend the next few days bayonetting potatoes instead of make-believe Iranians.”
“He rented a car. It’s over there.”
They laid the would-be Ranger in the back seat of the rental car, a blue Plymouth Fury, rolled up his pants legs, and placed the girl’s dampened scarf on his head for a compress.
The girl drove west along the highway to a deserted section of the dunes. Joshua followed on his Kawasaki. In the lee of a mimosa tree they discussed what else they should do for the fellow. By now, stars were guttering in a fabric of blowing clouds.
“He doesn’t have to be back until five o’clock Sunday evening. His pass is for the entire weekend.”
“Let’s crack a couple of windows, lock the keys up in the car with him, and let him sleep. He’s not going to convulse or suffocate, and nobody’ll bother him out here.”
In khaki-colored shorts and a T-shirt like her companion’s, the girl resembled a rather coltish Brownie Scout. She was almost exactly Joshua’s height, but slender, ethereal-looking. She was noticeably hesitant about accepting his suggestions, not so much out of loyalty to her date, Joshua thought, as from a cagey distrust of his own motives. No dummy, this one.
“I’ll let you drive,” he said, pointing at his motorbike. “If I misbehave, you can steer us into oncoming traffic and put the fear of God back into me.”
“If you drive, maybe you’ll be too busy to misbehave.”
“But you’d have no control over where I was taking you.”
“Would you go someplace besides where I asked you to?” She cocked her head and studied
him critically. “If it comes to it, I can hitchhike home.” She set off through the dunes toward the highway.
Flustered, Joshua walked along beside her. How was he supposed to address this sensuous Asian waif with magical hair and eyes like a pair of melting chocolate kisses? Not even his residence in New York—his exile, as he sometimes thought of it—had taught him how to proceed. He was a novice in these matters, an aspirant.
“How old are you?” he blurted.
“Seventeen.”
“I’m nineteen this November.” Even though November seemed at least as far away as Ho Chi Minh City, that put him back up. “I meant it when I said you could drive. I’ve just been paid. Take me back to the Strip and I’ll buy you something to eat.”
The girl halted. “A foot-long and a Coke?”
“Anything you want. I’ve just been paid.”
“Yeah, you told me.” She glanced back at the rental car beneath the mimosa tree. “All Rudy wanted was uppers, downers, and onion rings. He washed ’em down with white wine and Pabst Blue Ribbon, back and forth—just like this.” Rustling her hair like a veil of chain, she demonstrated Rudy’s unmannerly technique.
“Jesus.”
The girl smiled. Her smile was the fulcrum upon which his hopes precariously teetered. “I’ve never ridden a motorcycle,” she said. “I think I’d like to try.”
* * *
Her name, once upon a time, had been Tru Tran Quan, but now she was known as Jacqueline Tru. Her father, who had emigrated to the United States long before anyone had ever heard of Boat People or suspected that Saigon was ripe for the picking, ran a small ethnic restaurant where foot-longs and onion rings were not even on the menu. Although Joshua and Jackie did not eat in the old man’s establishment that first night, before the summer was over they had devoured rice, diced chicken, and fried vegetable sprouts in so many different combinations that Joshua began to regard mayonnaise as an exotic condiment and hamburger soup as a consommé devoutly to be wished.
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