by Dave Godfrey
He felt that logic was somehow slipping away from him, and yet he knew that if he were ever able to read her scattered letters of the past three months, without weaving his own yearnings into them, well then he would be able to logically chart his life up to this moment of thick-headed despair. He told himself so as he drove home.
He had no key to the house and stood there by the door for a long time, thinking of Christiana’s letters and considering sleeping on the grass in the roundabout’s circle of frangipani trees. But the watchman came up from the servant’s quarters with a light and rang a bell somewhere inside. Ure’s wife came down to let him in.
“You too are drunk,” she said. She led him into the living room and turned on one lamp. She was wearing a man’s red smoking jacket and while he stood there, blinking in the sudden light, she loosened the ties and revealed her body to him, welted and cut in manners he could not comprehend but strangely beautiful to him, as though she belonged to a tribe which was ashamed of its identity but had to mark that identity; and without words, with the bare movements of her body, she convinced him to make love to her, and he did, and he had never known he possessed such brutal and clambering lust.
When he awoke it was with a start; there had been a sharp click and there was a light on in the kitchen quarters. Ure was standing there in the light from the refrigerator. He was pouring himself a glass of water from one of the many jugs. The python meat was stacked on plates on many shelves, clean and white, like bleached salmon steaks. Ure closed the door and came towards him. Morley looked about himself groggily, but the woman was gone, the light was off, and his nakedness was covered with a coarse Mopti blanket of goats wool. The light in the room was coming from the early dawn.
“I do not think you are well,” Ure said. Except that as always the word think came out as though it began with a harsh, sibilant z. I do not zink you are well.
And in the morning it did seem he had contracted malaria, for he was weak and feverish. He had to be driven back to the dam site, for he insisted on moving, and the Italian doctor there chided him for not taking his Daraprin regularly. No matter how much he insisted that he had, the doctor would laughingly repeat his conviction that modern science no longer made mistakes and would stand over Morley as the patient swallowed the bitter, yellow, Chloroquin pills which were to cure the malady.
Flying Fish
It is a flying fish I want to catch.
I have lived in America for many years and it is strange, I am a doctor of philosophy, but I have as yet never laid hands on that elusive creature.
So I have presented myself at the Pier 66 Marina in Fort Lauderdale on the west shore of the Atlantic and I am repeating my phrase to the captain of CALL GIRL.
“It is a flying fish I want to catch, sir.”
I do not mention my doctoral degree, nor my feelings about the name of his boat. One does not change me; the other is his right.
I am not wearing sunglasses, a Palm Beach hat, a 35mm camera, although I possess all of these; I am very serious about all this fishing business. The captain and I have already made our arrangements.
“I’m sorry you don’t enjoy the name,” he says, “but none of us own our own boats anymore. The corporations have bought them all — because they can afford to with the tax loss and all. Mine’s Continental Can’s.”
“It’s a beautiful seventy-thousand-dollar boat,” I say, realizing how inane that sounds and how inane I now look in my French sunglasses, my white Palm Beach hat, my Leica belly, my green tennis shoes. I do not comment on his phrase, although I long to take a slide of it. Mine’s Continental Can’s. “That’s not exactly true what I just said;” he says, “there are still two owned by people, but they’re having a bad time.”
“It’s just a flying fish I want to catch,” I say.
“Sure,” he says. “Sure.” He does not look at me strangely. “And if you don’t mind, it’ll be cheaper for you because I’m bringing along another fisherman. Actually you can’t mind because he’s connected with the corporation somehow and he has to come if he wants.”
But I do not mind. Mr. Goodman is from Pennsylvania and he is not a Quaker, nor is he a Jew, nor is he Amish. But he is very active. Before we are out to the buoy he is already jigging more actively than is the mate for our fresh bait.
“Fresh bait is so much better,” he says between jerks. “So much better.”
“I am Mr. Goodman,” he then says. “From Pennsylvania. I am fifty-seven. I have one son in the arts, a professor of composition and theory at the New England Conservatory. I have one son in charge of jet engines for G.E. The arts don’t pay much, do they? I can’t see why they can’t draft all the motorcycle hoodlums instead of a genius in charge of jet engines, can you? How do you like Florida?”
“It is only for a flying fish that I came here,” I say.
“I’m after swords,” he replies. “You don’t have to ask my questions” he says, “but of course, since you can’t, I get first chance at the harness.”
I am willing. That’s where he is mistaken. My feet are shadows. I am willing to give him first chance at the chromium chair which is attached so securely to the floor of the boat. A side chair will do for me. I like to feel the bait down the fathoms. I can remember hauling a thirty-foot shark alongside a pirogue in the Gulf of Guinea long before daybreak with only five Fanti fisherman for my guides. Mr. Goodman can not. Life is easier when you can help others satisfy their envy of you by silence.
Neither of us catch anything.
“We should have come a week earlier,” Mr. Goodman says. “The run is over.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t,” I say. “But I find Florida unbelievable anyway. It is not just all the old people driving around looking for a Howard Johnson’s to die in. It is not just the young eating Krystal Hamburgers. It is not the miles of clean white boats. It is not the total lack of Fanti faces in the streets or shops. I did buy in Palm Beach as advertised: Articulated figures as carved by French prisoners of the Napoleonic wars in British gaols out of beef soup bones, but it is not that. Not even Fong Sha Noon’s — Home of the Chinese Smorgasbord. It is something ineffable, absolutely ineffable, and I do not apologize for my diction. I do think, though, that you have a Turtlecat Snapper on your line.”
But he does not agree.
There is a distinction between a marlin and a trash fish: a bottom fish, a Turtlecat Snapper, a monster fish. There can only be marlins on his esemplastic line.
When we are docked the captain rolls the ocean in after us and plucks me out a flying fish before releasing the ocean.
“Thank you most kindly,” I say. “This has been a most memorable experience.” The fish is already gutted and stuffed. It, in fact, seems made entirely of polyfoam with the exception of one fin, but I am rather too polite to complain. “It is something to mount on my wall,” I say. “It is something to always revere and be in awe of.”
These are the most pleasant aspects of fishing, I think: memories and mementoes of such a nature. I decide that I will just add a toque to my outfit next time I go after a flying fish. These are the times when I love the world, when it can be simplified like this. As was Florida simplified from the swamp and the sea.
Fulfilling Our Foray
It was Gamaliel Harding who brought back the biggest trophy from that trip. I caught malaria. Theophile Karamm grew a heel blister the size of a guinea-fowl egg.
But Gamaliel, who had backed down and wouldn’t dare run his Land Rover up north (it’s tooo hard to get parts now), Gamaliel who made us take Theophile’s red, Toyota jeep up into the arid bush (after one thirty-mile return jaunt to recover his sleeping pillow), Gamaliel who is probably the only African drummer to have played with Charlie Parker, Gamaliel the pure socialist brought back (eventually) an object of worth and beauty.
Theophile was of the third generation of Lebanese traders, reared in Britain
away from trade, safari-minded. He wanted an African elephant — no matter how strongly Mr. Marx’s black cameradoes were fighting to prevent him.
So we went right into the bush, far north into the bush up a trail that near the rare villages would be no more than a path through the maize, to a village that seemed at the end of the line, whose mosque was not even a mud one but a keyhole of riddled logs on the dry earth, a lightly raised pattern on the bare rug of the village earth — earth far from Medina.
“That road he be France,” said John Yarro, our guide.
Theophile had selected him and set his first duty: to direct Gamaliel to Lagadouga, where Gamaliel had been told he could obtain a true African xylophone, tuned to the proper mode, with calabash gourds as resonators.
“France, you lazy bugger,” said Theophile, “you mean high-up Volta. France he be civilized. But I thank you, my friend. If ever I want to make a dash out of here, I’ll know where to come. A dash clean into more of America’s strategic space. Very good, Branansi, now where’s Lagadouga. Which road be him, John Yarro?”
John Yarro smiled and pointed out a track, running west, and Gamaliel left along it, in the Toyota. Theophile waved goodbye as though he didn’t expect to see it again. “Watch out for my capitalistic tires,” he shouted at its red back.
“Gawd, if there’s a prize for slipshod, we’ll be awarded it,” Theophile said.
We began the hunt early the next morning. John Yarro directed us, wearing an Olympics T-shirt and bearing Theophile’s borrowed rifle. No firearms were permitted down in the capital, or in any of the large cities, because of the Redeemer’s fear of CIA plots. We had stopped in a northern market town and borrowed two guns from an old trader who remembered Theophile’s grandfather and thought us mad, although he was too polite to say it. He also lent me an old pair of canvas boots. Theophile put his trust in black riding boots.
I bore that shotgun and consoled myself with the thought that the white grandfathers, between 1880 and 1910, had destroyed two out of Africa’s three million elephants and that, in the best of times, there had never been many in this part of the continent. It was difficult to think of a reason why we were there; all I felt was thirst and that something absurd was going to happen. We were headed for a river.
I don’t know if Theophile thought we were really going to find something there or not, but he walked well. We kept to a trail and he walked steadily. The land was dry and crackling. I could only recognize a few of the trees. They were all stunted. At times birds went up from them, and up from the dried grass, dust-coloured birds, but we ignored them. We must have walked fifteen miles before we came to the river and we had talked little. John Yarro had explained where he had learned his English — on the coast in Takoradi when he had been a chainman for a surveyor crew. Theophile mentioned conserving the water several times, but drank most of it from the canteen. He enquired of my feet. We arrived at the river after about three hours of walking and saw at once that there wasn’t enough water around its rocks to fill a sponge.
“What the bloody hell,” enquired Theophile.
I was thinking of the twelve or more miles we would have to walk back. I took off my boots to stuff them with grass.
“There’s not enough water there to rub down a Mini,” Theophile stated. “There’ll never be an elephant there in your life. You’ve been watching too much cinema. Idiot.”
“Come off it,” I said. “You’ll frighten Samba away.”
But Theophile was seriously infuriated. He always spoke to his steward and driver as would a Sir Willoughby Patterne, but now he was unusually harsh. It was as though, after the generation and a half of playing cricket and smoking French cigarettes, unexpectedly, a bolt of Manchester mammy-cloth had been dumped into his hands; mere cloth instead of the long, long-awaited ivory tusk, the blood dripping tusk. John Yarro didn’t cringe, nor did he reply; until finally, quite a while after Theophile had called him foolish, he blinked his eyes and replied that in two or three moons the elephants would come there in multitudes.
Yes, he said that; I wrote it down when we got back.
“Oh, no master. You be completely wrong. Two three moons he go come here plenty.”
Moons.
When I had finished stuffing the canvas boots with river grass we started to walk back. Once John Yarro dug down about ten feet into the earth and came up with a liquid-bearing root, white and sweet. But still our throats dried down to our stomachs. When we came within a mile of the village and passed a girl bearing a gourd of muddy water we drank it.
We came back along the trail the surveyors had made, before they had taken John Yarro down to the coast with them.
I lay under the baobab tree the rest of the late afternoon, the baobab tree of the chief, who sat there also with his wife and a granddaughter of about two. The granddaughter was suffering from kwashiorkor and no one of us moved to stop her as she stuffed her mouth with small handfuls of the dirt on which we sat. From time to time the chief leaned over and attempted to interest her in his hand hoe, a small rectangle of metal fastened to a root carved into the shape of an old man’s curled hand. She showed no interest and cried when it was time for prayers, when the holy man came from his house and faced the far distant holy places and prostrated himself in the sandy dirt on which the keyhole of riddled logs formed the bare outline of a mosque.
The next morning I went out early with one of the real hunters of the village and shot a young antelope before the sun became burning. The hunter had antelope feces tied to his old British Army shirt and we didn’t go far from the village. Then he put me to shame by showing how he could kill a monkey eighty yards away in a tree, while something kept me from even desiring to aim at the absurdly dancing, chattering, swinging family of the hunter’s victim. There was a lovely white pattern to the brown fur of the monkey he had killed, but he built a fire as the day warmed and singed off the pelt deeply so as to preserve the meat against the day.
We shared the antelope with the whole village, feasting on it and on pounded greens prepared as is the fufu of the south by constant and rhythmical strokes of a woman-size mortar and pestle. And that evening it began to rain. Gamaliel walked in four miles to get us because there was a stream he couldn’t cross. He had the xylophone lashed to the top of the jeep and was afraid of jostling it.
The jeep’s tires fell apart before we reached the Spanish trader’s town and we had to have it towed in. Of course there were no spares and we left the jeep with the trader. Theophile later arranged to have the xylophone shipped down and some tires smuggled in. He and Gamaliel rode in a taxi the 150 miles back to Accra and fought each inch of the way.
I left them at Kumasi and rode a lorry into Cape Coast. The malaria had me by then and struck me badly when we got to Abidjan, but that was on another trip, with Rachel, where we didn’t pretend to be on safari but went third-class up into Ivory Coast and enjoyed ourselves through Bouake and Bobo-Dioulasso and Sikasso; and when we got to Bamako in Mali and were settled into a small hotel where they kept two tame antelope on the second- floor balcony that ran around the inner court yard, we made love, and afterwards I told her about how the three of us had been bitter on the trip down, with the rain leaking through the roof and dripping the dye from the native blankets wrapped around the xylophone down onto our faces and turning them indigo. I with the first signs of malaria, and Theophile with a huge blister from his riding boots, and Gamaliel happy with his instrument but uncertain as to how he would use it, I suppose, in the city where people distrusted him because he spoke so much about African personality and where the young people all followed The Avengers, whose electric guitars had been purchased for them by the Minister of Defence.
Mud Lake: If Any
Death too, I think at times, is just another one of our match box toys.
I am now, as the lecturing surgeons say, preparing the electrodes for insertion. I am now, into the alien ele
ments, inserting myself. My colleague, gentle Nye, will observe the reactions of the patient, if any. If any?
The duck boat has been swamped, almost suddenly. We are clinging to its metal sides. Cold; somewhat reassuring. Beyond us and around us, when we have recovered from the shock, from a frightened awareness of chill waters to which we submit not, there appears one of those dinky visions the times are wont to grant us. The Sporting Goods Department at Simpson’s, struck by flood, floats toward shore: six wicker goose decoys, a worn pair of oars, one green Alpine tent, eight hand-carved mallards with their neck-wrapped anchors, two arcticdown sleeping bags, a box of Cheerios, my ragged lambswool vest, a soggy blue duffel bag, Nye’s insulated pants and jacket of cross-hatched nylon, a spare pair of sole-up rubber boots. Lo, the affluent surface of things.
The waves are gentle. The water not too cold — for mid-September near Flin Flon. Shore less than a mile off. We can push it in thirty minutes, je me dis. We bob beside the camouflage-green boat, two anchored heads, and observe one another. A perfect layout of decoys, je me dis, if one wanted to call down some passing, strange flock of honking department stores, a migrating flock of Sears-Roebucks, Eatons, Fitchs, Saks, Morgans, Simpsons, Magnins.
Except who then would be the hunters? What highball could lure down such monsters? Nye and I are both submerged to our shoulders. The guns, the ammunition, the camp stove, all things of solidity, are already at the bottom of Mud Lake. Amidst this absurdity of floating paraphernalia, buoyed by their still water-proof lace of feathers, float the one single redeeming object, our afternoon’s booty of mallards and coots and buffleheads.
