The Devil in the Bush

by Matthew Head

  She got all the rest of the figures during the next twenty-four hours. She got a lot of them from me, without my knowing what they meant. Because now she asked me to do the talking, and to tell her everything I could remember that I had said and done with everybody at the Congo-Ruzi. I talked almost all the way back to Ruzi-Busendi, until my voice was so tired that it came out all weak and fuzzy. But she wanted to know every little thing, because she said I wouldn’t have any idea what was important or what wasn’t. Now and then she would nod her head and say, “That fits in,” or “That’s out of key,” or she would ask me to go over some incident again thinking hard, to try to get all of it. I told her everything I could remember, very much as I have written it down here, so far.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dodo

  THERE WERE NO LANTERNS for us at Ruzi-Busendi this time. The little shack where Madame Boutegourde had waited for Father Justinien was swallowed up in the black silhouette of the encroaching bush, and I’d have gone past it if Miss Finney hadn’t checked me. We had made poor time getting back. The truck had begun to sputter and cut out, and I had had to stop and blow out a feed line. It cost me a nasty mouthful of gasoline, and the truck ran well for only half an hour until it began to overheat. This time it was the fan belt, flapping around in shreds. There was a spare in the tool box and I managed to get it on, but what with one thing and another we didn’t get in to Ruzi-Busendi until close to midnight. It was a good half hour after that up the bumpy road to Henri’s, which was the first house you came to.

  With the ailing truck and with all the talking I had done for Miss Finney, and with the gasoline taste making me feel sick at my stomach, I felt more than all in. I was jumpy and nervous, and for all I tried to hold the wheel steady, the truck would careen every time an animal ran across the road. A night bird flew into our headlights and made a thud that brought with it a picture of sticky feathers plastered against the radiator. I don’t like the word “nervous” but that’s what I was, tired and nervous, with the feeling that everything was wrong and against me, the way you get when you’re tired out but have to keep going. When we reached Henri’s lane I turned into it automatically, just because I had done it the first night I drove up that road. I wasn’t planning to stay with Henri. He would be asleep, and anyway Miss Finney said the guest house wouldn’t be locked. As for her, she would just have to try to get into the Boutegourdes’ without waking anybody, and crawl in with Emily. She wasn’t going to stay at Gérôme’s any more, not with Jacqueline in the same house.

  “Then why don’t I stay at Henri’s after all and give you the guest house?” I said. We were stopped in the lane, with the headlights pointed toward Henri’s, but there were no lights burning tonight and our headlights showed us only the sharp brilliance of the bush nearby and the dense black beyond it. The faintly luminous sky overhead was all but blotted out by the overhanging bush on either side of the lane. There was nobody to overhear us, but in that oppressive tunnel of foliage you felt impelled to speak low. Miss Finney almost whispered to me, her voice just more than audible above the continuous murmuring of the bush around us. “No,” she began, “take me to the Boutegourdes’—” but she never finished it because two shots crashed close together through the air ahead of us. It was so sudden that I felt that the bush had been blasted away, leaving us exposed before some malevolent adversary. Then the stillness flowed back around us like the sea filling a great hole, and everything was exactly as it had been before.

  We sat there stupefied until Miss Finney snapped into life and said, “It’s at Henri’s. Get us down there.” I threw the truck into gear, and when I try to remember it just the way it happened I can’t get any impression except that we were lifted up and set down, in the space of a breath, by the little garden in front of Henri’s house. But I remember the hoarse screaming—scream, silence, scream, silence—that stopped just as we got there.

  There was a flashlight lying on the grass in front of the house, and in its glow we could make out Henri, crouched over close to the ground. I thought he was shot in the belly and bending over to clutch at himself. I was so excited that I didn’t have the sense to turn the headlights in Henri’s direction, but jumped out of the truck and left them blazing into the veranda.

  Miss Finney got there as soon as I did. She must have picked up that flashlight the way a rodeo cowboy picks a handkerchief off the ground at a gallop, because she had it trained on Henri right away. He turned a bewildered face into the light, as if he were wondering where he was and what had happened. He was sitting on his heels, holding the body of the mouse antelope on the palms of both hands, the way you might hold a serving tray. The delicate legs stuck out awkwardly, one of them still quivering, and the head hung down almost severed by the gash across the throat. The blood was flowing out in feeble pulses, drenching Henri’s wrists and running down onto his knees.

  “It’s Dodo!” I cried, and it wasn’t relief I felt, but the shock of personal loss, as if it had been a real person murdered there instead of a little animal I had grown fond of.

  “Put her down, Henri,” said Miss Finney firmly. “You’re getting all bloody. Who fired those shots?”

  “I did,” said Henri. He let Dodo’s body slide off his hands onto the grass. “Where’s my rifle?”

  Miss Finney played the flashlight around the ground and it picked out the rifle lying a few feet back of Henri. “Give him a hand, Hoop,” Miss Finney said. “Come on, Henri, you’ve got to get cleaned up.” She breathed out a trembling sigh and I began to feel the same weakness, that watery-kneed feeling that comes with relief from sudden fear.

  Henri said, with more color in his voice, “I’d better wash up out here,” and we followed him around the house into the back yard where I had seen Albert hanging out the clothes that first day. There were some oil drums full of water lined up by Albert’s laundry table and Henri plunged his hands into one of them. He stood there as if he were still a little dazed. He looked down and saw blood on the front of his shirt. He jerked his hands up out of the water and instead of unbuttoning the shirt he wrenched it open with both hands and tore it off and flung it away.

  “My God!” he said, coming to life with a rush, his voice rising. “I’m all over blood!” He began ripping his clothes off and in a moment he was naked, splashing water over himself frantically and rubbing his body wherever the blood had soaked through onto it.

  “Take care of him, Hoop,” said Miss Finney. “I’ll be right back.” The light of her torch began bobbing across the grass and she went up the back steps onto the veranda and into the house.

  “Take it easy, Henri,” I said. “You’re all right, you’ve got it all off.”

  He straightened up and took a deep breath. Then he laughed, still with a quaver in his voice, and began stripping the water from his arms and legs with the palms of his hands. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” he said.

  “Where’s Miss Finney?”

  Miss Finney reappeared carrying something big and white hanging over her arm. She came across to us and ran the light up and down over Henri a couple of times.

  “You’ve got a beautiful build,” she commented. “Here— take this.” The white thing was a sheet. “Dry yourself off before you catch your death of cold. I couldn’t find a towel.” Henri wrapped the sheet around himself and the two of us rubbed him dry.

  “Come on in the house, you,” said Miss Finney. “I’m going to put you to bed.”

  “I guess I’ve made a fool of myself,” Henri said. We started up to the house. “I acted like an old woman, but I’m all right now. I don’t have to go to bed.”

  “You’ve had a shock of some kind and a dousing in cold water,” Miss Finney said. “The doctor says you go to bed. Anyhow I want to hear what happened.”

  We all went into Henri’s bedroom, and Henri sat on the bed with the wet sheet clinging to him, shivering.

  “Take that wet thing off and get under the blanket,” Miss Finney directed him.
He dropped the sheet without the embarrassment I would have felt, and climbed in between the blanket and the remaining sheet.

  “You ought to take a lesson from Henri,” Miss Finney said, “you and Emily.”

  “This makes me feel pretty silly,” Henri said, “but I was asleep, and it was all of a sudden.” He sighed and relaxed against the pillow. You could see that the bed felt good to him, no matter what he said about feeling silly.

  I sat on the bed by Henri, and Miss Finney pulled up the only chair. She said, “Now let’s try to remember that Dodo is only an antelope after all, and let’s get the straight of this. What happened?”

  “What time is it?” Henri asked.

  Miss Finney looked at her wrist watch. “Going on one o’clock,” she said.

  “Then I must have been asleep about four hours,” Henri said. “I was tired tonight, hadn’t been feeling well all day. Stomachache. I hadn’t got ready for bed. I thought I would lie down for a minute and I fell asleep.” He frowned. “I woke up and I knew there was somebody out there. I suppose the eagle woke me.” That was the first time I knew what the screams had been— for that matter it was the first time I was conscious of having heard them. Henri went on, “The flashlight was here by the bed and I got the rifle out of my closet as quickly as I could. I went to the door and I could barely see this figure moving out there, moving away from Dodo’s stockade toward the bush. I think I knew right away what it was. Anyway I stood just inside the door and flashed the light on him. All I could tell was that it was a native. He dropped Dodo and began to run for it. The way she fell I knew he had killed her. I fired at him—no, I ran out there before I fired, I don’t know why. Anyway I was out there when I fired. If I hadn’t had to drop the light to fire, I’d have got him.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t,” said Miss Finney. “You’d have had worse than antelope blood on your hands.”

  “I suppose so,” Henri said.

  He had raised himself up on his elbow while he was telling all this, but now he sank back on the pillow again. His face grew white and sweat broke out on it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m going to be sick,” and he leaned over the other side of the bed, and was.

  Miss Finney said, “Hoop, run out to the truck and bring me my bag, the black one.”

  When I got back with the bag, Miss Finney was standing by the bed sopping one corner of the sheet with water from the carafe. She began to bathe Henri’s forehead and face with it. “Open the bag for me, Hoopie,” she said. I set the bag on the table, and as I begun to undo the catch I noticed a smear of blood on my own hand. I grabbed out my handkerchief and wiped at it. Most of it came off, but it was dried around the edge and stuck to me. “Here,” said Miss Finney. She never missed anything. She handed me the sheet and I scrubbed off the dried blood with the wet corner. I put the handkerchief back in my pocket.

  Miss Finney came over and opened the bag herself, and took out a syringe and a phial. “You’re going to get a hypodermic, my bucko,” she said to Henri, and began sucking the stuff up into the syringe.

  Henri protested, and said again she was making him feel like a fool, but she gave him the shot. She put the syringe away and closed up her bag. “I never heard of such a ruckus over nothing,” she said. “If you two he-men are all right, I’m going to get a little rest. I’ll stay here, Hoop. Henri’ll be asleep in no time but I’d better stick around.”

  I cleaned up the mess by the bed so Miss Finney wouldn’t have to, and it took another few minutes to help her find sheets for the couch in the living room. When I went in to say good night to Henri he opened his eyes slowly and mumbled something like “—damn nuisance of myself,” and closed his eyes again. He was pale and his eyelids twitched. Miss Finney followed me out to the truck. After I had got in and started the motor, she stayed by the side of the truck and I could tell she had something to say.

  She said in a voice more troubled and hesitant than I had ever heard her use, speaking very low against the sound of the motor, “Hoop, does something strike you as awfully—what was that word you used this afternoon? Screwy? Does something strike you as being awfully screwy about this whole business?”

  “Well, I don’t often wind up my day like this,” I said.

  She brushed this aside with a gesture of irritation.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “There are half a dozen things about it that worry me. Henri took it too hard, for one thing.”

  “Dodo was a pet,” I said. “I loved her myself.”

  “Sure, but Henri’s no softie,” said Miss Finney. “I don’t mean you are, Hoop. But if you really knew Henri you’d know what a hard shell he has. He wasn’t all wrought up like that just because Dodo was dead. It meant something special to him, something more than the death of a pet.”

  “It must have been pretty scary, though,” I said. “Waked in the middle of the night like that, then the prowler, the sudden excitement, and all that blood.”

  “That’s another thing,” said Miss Finney. “Why should anyone kill Dodo just that way?”

  “To eat her,” I said. “Henri told me that someday some native or some animal would come out of the bush and get her. I thought they were supposed to stay in their own area at night.”

  “Of course they are,” said Miss Finney, “but they don’t. They prowl around pretty much at will. I just can’t see why he cut Dodo’s throat.”

  “I guess I’m dumb,” I said. “I’d say he cut her throat to kill her.”

  Miss Finney shook her head. “I’ve seen them break the necks of those little animals with one blow of their hand,” she said. “But for that matter, why did he kill her at all? Here he was on the prowl, and he took time to kill her when he could have simply carried her off. You know how Dodo was—she’d let anybody pick her up. And they can’t make any noise, those little antelopes, not even a squeak. He didn’t need to kill her at all, he didn’t need to take the time to. But even if he had needed to, why take the extra time and make all that mess? Why all this butchery? See what I mean?”

  “You make sense,” I said, and I began to have an uneasy feeling, because the more sense Miss Finney made, the less sense Dodo’s murder made.

  “And that isn’t all,” sighed Miss Finney. “A lot of other things keep nagging me—won’t fit in. I wish the hell I knew what was going on.”

  “Maybe you’ve gathered some more figures,” I suggested.

  “I sure could use an answer book,” she grinned. “Well, good night Hoop. Thanks for being a sport.”

  “Boloney,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

  To reach the guest house you had to go around the loop the road made going through the grounds. You had to pass within sight of Gérôme’s house, and the Boutegourdes’ too. Gérôme’s house was spilling light all over the place. But it had a funny empty look and I slowed the truck to see better. The front door was wide open, which wasn’t too unusual since it might have been open in any case, to get the air. But the front screen was hanging open too, and that was where the empty look came from. This was strictly out of line, partly because it would have been latched as a token precaution, but mostly because everything was always closed against the mosquitoes.

  I thought of stopping, then I rationalized that it was none of my business. When I came to the Boutegourdes’, though, and saw all the lights on there too, I realized that I had been clutching the wheel, expecting to see the lights, and fearing that I would.

  There was so much commotion going on inside that I drove the truck up to the front and stopped and got out and went up the steps to the door without anybody paying me any mind. Papa and Madame Boutegourde were bending over the sofa, both of them in bathrobes and Madame Boutegourde with her hair hanging in a tail down her back. There was a third figure too, a small figure in a pale silk robe splashed all over with gigantic red poppies. It took me a minute to realize that this could really be Miss Collins, caught out of her bedroom in this revelation of an inner
yearning. She was making mewling sounds, and the Boutegourdes were exclaiming in frightened disconnected phrases of French, but most of the commotion was coming from the couch. Jacqueline was stretched out on it, in a fine fit of hysterics.

  She was horrible to hear. She would get herself under control and begin talking in a strange thickened voice, then the idiot laughing or sobbing would break through and she would be off again. She was a different Jacqueline from the one I had seen that afternoon. There were remains of makeup smeared over her face, and her hair was sticking out in every direction. She had on something that looked like red crêpe lounging pajamas; they were ripped and snagged all over, and spotted with dust and stains of moisture. It was a big sofa she was lying on, and she looked smaller and more slippery-boned than ever, writhing like an eel and twitching, and clutching at Papa Boutegourde’s bathrobe while she screamed with laughter or choked with sobs.

  “You’ll have to hit her to get her out of that,” I said.

  Jacqueline sat straight up on the couch and when she saw me come in the door her eyes popped out like golf balls. “Rape!” she screeched, and fell flat on her back again and went into peal after peal of laughter, twisting her fingers together until you would think they would never straighten out again.

  “They hurt me!” she whimpered. She began screaming again: “Oh, Gérôme, my poor Gérôme! Where’s Gérôme? What did they do to you, Gérôme? Oh, Géro-o-o-ôme!” and her voice went off into a long howl. Then she collapsed and lay there heaving, with hiccoughs jerking out of her.

  “Brandy!” yelled Madame Boutegourde into thin air, and Papa hurried away. “My God, Monsieur Taliaferro, what are you doing here?”