Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  “Two sixteen-year-olds can create life in the back seat of a car.”

  “I mean out of nothing. Just primal atmosphere. You just keep shooting electricity into it and after a while you get proteins … amino acids. You don’t need too much equipment. A few flasks. I was thinking maybe we could do that here. In the basement. What do you think?”

  “Depends on how complicated it is.”

  “There’s a diagram in my biology text. It doesn’t look too hard.”

  “How do you get the ‘atmosphere’ into the flask?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll ask Professor Cramer.”

  Jackson had helped her fill out the divorce papers and had gone with her to have his lawyer look them over and get them notarized. He was thinking that by the end of the semester—before the end of the semester—she would be free. But out of the blue she said, “I heard from Earl. I got a letter yesterday.”

  She was standing at the sink with her back to him.

  “He’s going to contest the divorce. He’s coming to Colesville.”

  And suddenly everything became clear. Balanced reciprocity, which is anthropospeak for “tit for tat.” She’d given him a gift, her body, and now she expected a fair and tangible return: protection from Earl.

  But that wasn’t the way it felt. What it felt like was a wave of melancholy sweeping over him, and then leaving him high and dry. He watched her standing at the sink, washing a plate. Scrubbing it. Her left arm pumping. She was left-handed. They were both left-handed. He walked up behind her, stood behind her as if they’d been married for years and years and here she was, her hands in the sink, staring out the kitchen window at the propane tank. He put his hands on her shoulders and put his face in her hair and held her, feeling her shoulders work as she scrubbed the plate with a scraper sponge before putting it in the dishwasher.

  8

  The Garden of Eden

  In the third year after Claude’s death Jackson and Taphu, a young man from the cohort with whom Jackson had been initiated, went to swim in a hidden pool fed by a secret spring that only Taphu knew about. But as they approached the pool, which was deep into the Forest, more than an hour from the camp, they could hear voices.

  “There’s someone here,” Jackson said, somewhat alarmed.

  Taphu laughed.

  They came to a clearing where two girls were bathing naked in a shallow pool. Jackson recognized Sibaku and Amina, a beautiful girl who had filed her teeth to sharp points.

  “You knew they were here,” he said to Taphu.

  “Do you like Sibaku?” Taphu asked.

  “Of course I do,” Jackson said. “Why do you ask?”

  The girls had seen them by now but made little effort to cover themselves.

  Taphu removed his bark cloth and plunged into the pool. Jackson, who was wearing what was left of a pair of jeans, stayed on the bank. After a few minutes Sibaku called to him. “Aren’t you coming in?”

  She was a perfectly formed little woman who didn’t even come up to his waist.

  “Maybe later,” he called. He was not exactly shy, but he was uncomfortable. Not sure what was expected, or permitted. He went off to find the spring that fed the pool, which was not far. He drank and filled his water bottle. When he came back, Taphu and Amina were gone. Sibaku was alone, lounging on a rock, her bark cloth and belt on the rock next to her.

  “Why did you stay behind?” he asked, trying not to stare.

  “Because,” she said, “you’d never find your way back by yourself.”

  On the way back to the camp they came upon Taphu and Amina making love enthusiastically, right next to the path, in a complicated position that Jackson, as an anthropologist, thought he should record. But how? He asked Sibaku if this position had a name, and she laughed and said something to Amina as they walked by, and Amina and Taphu laughed too.

  The next night Sibaku came to his hut after a dance. Asumali, Sibaku’s father, had brought out a powerful new drum, made out of duiker skin and wood from the devil tree, and the men and women began to dance around the fire in separate circles. When one dance ended, another began, each more complex and frenzied than the last. Jackson danced with the men in the first dance, but then he sat in his three-stick chair and watched. Sibaku, her small breasts and her back beautifully painted, her glowing eyes shadowed with the Mbuti equivalent of kohl, gave him a sassy smile every time she came by, and later that night—after the storm put an end to the dancing—she came to his hut. “I want to sleep here,” she said.

  She was only thirty-three inches tall. He measured her later with a tape measure that he gave to her father, and he wondered how they’d manage. Other Mbuti wondered too and made lots of jokes outside the hut, jokes which he and Sibaku could hear perfectly well as she was sitting astride him. There was no privacy, and Sibaku threatened to build a new hut apart from the rest if the jokes didn’t stop.

  A week later the whole band moved to a hunting camp deep in the forest, where they stayed for several months. Sibaku built a hut for the two of them. She cleaned and cooked, and repaired the roof when it was necessary. He took his place with the men in the net hunting, and he managed, with Taphu’s help, to kill an antelope and present the skin to Sibaku’s father.

  Sibaku was five months pregnant when Jackson was arrested at Camp Rameau.

  And now, in a way, he had come back to the same place, the beginning of a new life. Standing behind Sunny at the sink he’d experienced a deep longing for a new life. In all his previous relationships, since Sibaku, he’d been guarding himself against this sort of thing, this urgent longing. But when he looked out the window later that night and saw her light—could see her in her window—he opened himself to it. He left his bedroom light on so she could see him. If she wanted to see him. He willed her to look up, to press the buzzer on the intercom, which was on her desk next to the computer. He closed his eyes and counted to sixty. When he opened his eyes, she was still at her window. But the minute he turned out his light and crawled into bed, she buzzed him. “Should I come down?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  At first Jackson was self-conscious about his yoga exercises, about all the antibiotics in the medicine cabinet, about the time it took to get out of bed in the morning, about needing a nap in the afternoon, but she started doing the yoga exercises with him, she helped him get out of bed in the morning, and she lay down with him in the afternoon, unless she was in her bio lab on Thursdays.

  He’d come to an understanding with Claire, so the only cloud on the horizon was Earl.

  Jackson had broken bread with some strange characters—he’d eaten porcupine with Kachelewa (the renowned elephant hunter) and boiled monkey with Arumba (the renowned singer), he’d drunk the local beer with Chief Mulebaloti (on the way north with Claude to the Mountains of the Moon). Once in Varanasi he’d shared a plate of alloo tikki with the King of the Dead (one of them; there were two). And in the same year he’d attended a banquet held by the Syrian Defense Minister in an underground room with pictures of bare-breasted actresses on the walls, including Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollabrigida, and Jayne Mansfield.

  As an anthropologist he was committed to respecting the belief systems and customs of other cultures. Like Claude, he thought that much of what was wrong with the world today came from a failure to respect others. You didn’t have to subscribe to the anthropologist’s mantra about cultural relativity to understand that it was important to listen to all the voices in the community.

  On the other hand, it seemed to him perfectly obvious that some cultures are better than others. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that. Take the Mbuti, for example: no headmen, no chiefs, no rich or poor, no taxes, no war. You worked about four hours a day and spent the rest of the time singing and dancing.

  But he was uneasy about Earl. And Sunny’s nerves made it worse. He figured that Earl was coming to claim his wife, and that Sunny had claimed him, Jackson, as her white knight.

  When she s
at down at the piano and started vamping and he joined her on the harmonica, chuffing along and whistling like an old freight train, Earl was there. When they made love after an afternoon nap, Earl was there. When they went to bed at night, Earl was there. When they played pinochle at the kitchen table, Earl was there, reminding them that card games (like gambling and movies and TV) were sinful. Sunny, who’d learned to play in prison, was a quick and aggressive player and studied his face every time she laid down a card or scooped up a trick.

  After supper Jackson would look at L’Avenir, a French-language newspaper published in Kinshasa that came irregularly. Jackson liked to keep up with the news in the Congo, which was almost all bad, and to explain to Sunny what was going on. Back in June the commander of the Uganda People’s Defense Force in the DRC, ignoring the protests of a Congolese liberation movement based in Kisangani, had carved a new “province” of Ituri out of an older province, and ethnic conflict had erupted between the Hema and the Lendu. But nothing was clear, and it was impossible to say how this conflict might affect the Mbuti.

  They went to concerts, lectures, plays, French Club movies—all the things that a large university had to offer, all the things that had been forbidden in the Church of the Burning Bush.

  But Earl was always there.

  Sunny had her own idea of how to prepare for Earl’s visit. Jackson tried to talk her out of it. She was sitting on the couch, conjugating irregular verbs out loud, then checking them against the textbook. Jackson was reading an article on Pentecostalism. When he got up to put another log on the fire, she looked up and said, “I want to buy a pistol.”

  “A pistol? What for?”

  “Earl’s coming next week.”

  “Not a good idea.” But in fact he thought it was a good idea.

  “You don’t know Earl.”

  “Well, buy a pistol.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m a convicted felon. I can’t get a Firearm Owner’s ID card. But you must have one—for your rifles. And for the shotgun.”

  “Why don’t you just load up the shotgun and hold on to it while Earl’s here?”

  “I’d feel better with a pistol.”

  “There’s a reason,” he said, “why convicted felons can’t get a FOID card.”

  But this really set her off. “God damn you, don’t treat me like a child.”

  They argued about the pistol for two days. Jackson could see he was up against something stronger than reason. Fear. There was no point in talking about it. In fact he was only pretending to object. He was glad, because he was afraid too.

  On the Thursday before Earl was going to arrive they went to a firearms store in Colesville. GUN COLLECTORS was the name painted on a big green sign. It was where Jackson had taken his .22 to have the barrel checked, and Warren’s guns and Claude’s old .35 to have them appraised.

  The guns were in locked cases behind a long counter, and the owner, who sported a biker mustache, was not very helpful.

  He showed Sunny a .22-caliber double-action revolver.

  “This is the gun I shot Earl with,” she said to Jackson. “All you have to do is pick it up and squeeze the trigger.”

  “Is that what you want?” Jackson asked.

  “I think I want something more powerful.”

  “Who’s buying this gun, anyway?” the clerk asked.

  “I am,” Jackson said.

  The clerk went to get another model.

  “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Jackson said. But he did have a good feeling.

  “Don’t worry. I know how to use it.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  The clerk brought out a .38-caliber semiautomatic, a Walther PPK.

  “That’s more like it.” She held the gun, turned toward the door, and practiced a draw. “Any draw that sweeps across part of your body, or across anyone else, is not a good draw,” she said.

  “I’ll remember that,” Jackson said. He remembered playing cops and robbers as a kid. Practicing dying. Falling down, groaning, thrashing around. Dying with a final dramatic flop.

  “It’s got plenty of power,” the clerk said. “Very reliable.”

  Jackson handed over his FOID card and his credit card. Sunny wanted to give him cash in the store while the clerk was ringing up the sale.

  “For Christ’s sake, wait until we get outside.”

  The pistol cost two hundred fifty dollars.

  They bought some police targets, showing a bad guy waving his arms, and every day she practiced. Setting the targets down the hill and shooting from the deck. Jackson tried it too. He was an okay shot with a rifle, but he’d shot a pistol only once, with his grandfather. Sunny gave him tips.

  “Keep both eyes open,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  “Then do it,” she said. “And don’t look up at the target. Look at the front sight, not over it. The target should just be a blur in the background.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Not it’s not. You’re raising up every time. There’s plenty of time to look at the target when you’re done shooting. And don’t pull the trigger. Squeeze it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Jackson was listening to NPR when he heard Earl’s truck in the drive. Sunny was upstairs. The program was about the shortage of accordion reeds in Madagascar. English missionaries had introduced the accordion back in the early nineteenth century. Jackson turned the radio off.

  Their plan was to cook some hamburgers on the grill, treat Earl as a guest. Not serve any alcohol.

  He watched Earl walk down the ramp. He was a large man, a prizefighter. He was wearing a tie. That was a good sign. A man wearing a tie wouldn’t be about to kill you. He was clean shaven. His shirt collar was too tight, or his neck was too thick. Jackson thought of a wild boar or a hippopotamus.

  “You must be Professor Jones.” Earl held out his hand. Jackson shook it. How did Earl know my name?, Jackson thought. How did Earl know where I live? Would Sunny’s lawyer—my lawyer—have given him my information? Maybe he hired a private eye.

  “I’m looking for my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes. Willa Fern Cochrane. She’s upstairs. I seen her peekin’ out the window.”

  “Willa Fern. She goes by Sunny now.”

  “Is that so?”

  Jackson nodded. “Ever since she got out of prison.”

  Earl laughed. “You want to be careful around her. Don’t leave your pistol on the table and then turn your back on her to get somethin’ out of the refrigerator.”

  “I don’t plan to.”

  “FERN,” Earl shouted. “Get on down here, I got something to say to you.”

  “I’ve got a gun, Earl,” she called down the stairs.

  “You planning to shoot me again?”

  “Not if I don’t have to.”

  “What have you got?”

  “It’s a thirty-eight, but I know how to use it.”

  “She’s been practicing in the woods,” Jackson said.

  “And she will too,” Earl said, aiming his voice up the stairs. “I learned my lesson.”

  “Why don’t we just sit down and see if we can’t come to an agreement,” Jackson said.

  “Sort of like the Jews and the A-rabs.”

  Jackson heard Sunny’s footsteps on the stairs.

  Earl looked around. “Nice place you got here. This is the kind of place I’d build if I had the money. Remember Ed Martin,” he said to Sunny, who had reached the bottom of the stairs. “Lived up on the river up by Old Shawneetown? He had a place like this.”

  “It belonged to Claude Michaut,” Jackson said, “the anthropologist.”

  “Some of them come to the church once.”

  “They study different peoples,” Sunny said, “and different cultures. Jackson’s one too.”

  “I know what they is. I just said, some of them come to the church.”


  “Jackson studied the pygmies in Africa.”

  “The little people. There was a pygmy come with the circus to Paducah. Wasn’t no more than three or four feet high.” He held his hand up to show how high.

  “You want something to eat?” Jackson asked. “We’re grilling some burgers.”

  Sunny was still holding on to the pistol, sometimes gesturing with it as she described the extent of the woods to Earl, always keeping her distance.

  Earl came out on the deck to watch Jackson grill the hamburgers. “You come on down to Naqada,” he said, “and we’ll catch us some bluefish. Nothing like ’em. Right, Fern?” He called to Sunny, who was still in the kitchen, through the screen door.

  “It’s ‘Sunny,’ ” she said.

  Sunny kept the pistol on her lap while they were eating at the glass-topped table on the deck. Jackson could see the pistol through the glass. She kept one hand on the pistol and picked up her hamburger with the other.

  Earl looked uncomfortable in his tie.

  Sunny took the pistol with her when she went in to get more napkins. The pistol didn’t seem to bother Earl.

  “I’ve been doing some reading,” Jackson said. “You’ve run into some hard times down in Egypt.”

  “Hard times keeps people in church.”

  Pentecostalism, Jackson thought—the religion of the disinherited. “Coal mining culture,” he said. “Drove out the old agriculture ways. Then coal went under. Marginalization. Embracing customs that keep you apart from mainstream culture.”

  “What you’re sayin’ is that Little Egypt is really a part of Appalachia. And it’s true. Everybody in Naqada’s got family across the river in Kentucky and down in Tennessee and West Virginia. We got the old slave house just off the hard road near Equality. We voted to go with the South in the Civil War.” Earl put his hamburger down on his plate. “But that don’t make us a bunch of ignorant hillbillies.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that you keep yourselves set apart from mainstream culture.”