But I must leave, he said to himself. There’s nothing for it. All that work, all that blood, the opening of new country. Who could have imagined it would end so swiftly? The spoilers have it now, and we are out. He sighed and sipped his tea. It was tepid. He called the girl.
She came with hot tea and the morning post. In it was a letter from Blackrod.
“Jambo, Bwana,” it began. “Herewith my check in the amount of $8,500 for the safari we talked about on the telephone the last time you were in Cairo. We’ll be arriving in Palmerville on the Pan Am flight from New York about noon on the 15th June. I’m sure you’ll find my companions just fine for our purposes—a bit of hunting and a lot of photography. They are Donn and Dawn McGavern, a wealthy young couple from Montana who have never been to Africa before but are eager to see it. Later, they would like to meet General Bompah, of whom you have spoken so highly, and perhaps Donn—who is an avid photographer—could do a few sensitive portraits of him for publication in America. In any event, we are all eagerly awaiting this chance to see the beauty of Kansdu firsthand and admire the marvelous progress being made in the ‘Africanization’ of that lovely country. I will certainly do a few stories about it for major American publications. Sorry for the brevity of this letter, but I’m busy packing. Best. Bucky.”
Winjah smiled as he put down the letter and picked up the check. He had told Blackrod to stop payment on it just before he left New York. That way the bloody general wouldn’t get the money. Though he would get Winjah’s farm and all that went with it. Blast his grasping hide. Let’s see—the 15th June? That gave Winjah three days to cull his collection of books and memorabilia and pack the few he could afford to take with him. Well, it would make the days pass faster.
Overhead, a weaverbird fluttered onto the patio and perched on the horn of a buffalo skull. It cocked its head, the eye diamond-bright, and squawked querulously.
Bloody Africa, Winjah thought.
2
THE WANDERING Y
Both Donn and Dawn woke up grousing that morning.
“It’s all your fault,” grumped Donn, walking toward the marbled gloom of the atrium bath.
Dawn shook her long blonde tresses, first in slow amazement, then in waking awareness that the argument, begun last night over stars and Three-Eyed Toad, was still raging.
“No, it’s not,” she piped, sleep creaking in her delicate, always timorous throat. “It’s the heavens!”
Donn groaned piteously in his W. C. Fields voice as he slid back the door that opened the bathroom to the weather. Mother of pearl, he thought. No. Mother of toilet seat. The sky was iridescent at this early hour, a tumble of black-bellied clouds paling to blues and gleaming grays, a whole rolling skyscape washed through with the clean whites and yellows of a northern sunrise. The sun had not yet topped the horizon. The morning star winked balefully between the clouds. Venus, you bitch. That was the trouble between them now—that fucking horoscope.
Horrorscope, he cussed to himself, then yelled it aloud to the morning. Cattle raised their heads and stared.
“Your mother!” howled Dawn in retort.
“What?”
“Well, she’s the one that insisted.”
He pulled the shower curtain with its Basho haiku plastic impregnated silken furls and adjusted the Magic Fingers shower head while he framed his rejoinder.
“And you resisted?”
Silence, except for the upwinding purr of gushing water. He stepped under the tepid downpour and let it pound him, gradually turning the valve until the temperature was almost unbearably hot, feeling the steam open his night-clogged, oft-broken nose, then switching the knob hard left and bracing for the icy shock. He could almost hear his pores snap shut, like so many tiny clams. He counted slowly to one hundred in Japanese—ichi, ni, san, chi—as his sensei demanded, then shut off the shower. At his mother’s urging, strange woman now in her waning years, Dawn had had her horoscope charted for the month ahead: the month they would be on safari in Kansdu. A local astrologette had taken first crack at it—Iris Kornshok, pig farmer and mystic, dung and stars, the cosmic swineherd. Her prediction: extreme danger from water, darkness, mysterious disappearance.
“If you go,” she told Dawn in no uncertain terms, “you won’t come back alive.”
Dawn forked over two hundred bucks and squirmed in the seat of the silver Porsche Targa all the way back home.
Donn forwarded the chart to a higher-priced stargazer he’d met once at a coke party in New York, along with a check for half a grand, and asked for a second opinion. Pronto! The reply, though couched in language more elegant than Iris’s was nonetheless corroborative. “Grave danger surely exists,” wrote this stellar consultant, “yet it need not interfere with your travel arrangements. Keep in mind that the peril of the moment pervades the universe. Wherever your wife may be during the month ahead, she stands equally vulnerable to the verdict of the heavens. The stars are fixed, as is the threat they pose. Should she stay at home, in the seeming safety of your domicile, the powers of the planets, the strength of the stars will not be lessened. Water: She might bang her head in the shower. Darkness: She might fall down the stairs in the night. Mysterious disappearance: She might crash her car, after dark, into a bottomless quarry pool…”
“Or catch her tit in the garbage disposal during high tide in the black of the moon, you astral asshole,” grumped Donn as he emerged from the bathroom, toweling himself savagely.
Dawn lay curled in the fetal position on the rumpled king-sized bed, her china-blue eyes abrim, as Donn reentered the bedroom. His anger and frustration eased at the sight of her, as it always did. A beautiful woman, she was like so many of them: fearful. Either it hardened them, he thought, or it turned them timid. I suppose the timidity is better. Makes it easier to love them.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. “About Africa?”
Donn and Dawn had traveled widely for persons their age, and to the wilder parts of the world. On tours organized by the Audubon Society and Eric Lindblad, they had visited lands as remote as Antarctica and the Falkland Islands. Once they had studied the bird life of the upper Orinoco, amidst the headhunting tribes of Venezuela. The only headhunters they saw carried transistor radios and begged for chewing gum. Their favorite, though, was the trip to Scammon Lagoon in Baja California, that wild extension of plastic Los Angeles that belongs to macho Mexico but, since the highway went in, is rapidly turning to a junk sculpture of beer cans and ticky-tack. There they had seen the Pacific gray whales at their mating, the barnacled turbulence of cetacean love. Donn took a photograph of a male gray, rolling on its back in an ecstasy of foreplay, with its phallus flailing at the sky like Pequod’s mainmast. He had written a poem about it, heavily symbolic, titled “Chubasco.” One day it would be published.
They traveled the wilder parts of the world as their parents and grandparents had done the Grand Tour—it was expected. They went into the world with open minds, wide-eyed, sufficiently heeled. They sought sophistication and charm, not in the Louvre or the Uffizi, but in the tapestried halls of nature. They preferred the tapirs and coatis of the Costa Rican selva to all the sprites of Nymphenburg, the scream of the toucan or the chirrup of the rare Andean bee-hunting blackchat to the sweet voices of those castrati who had so charmed their forebears. Indeed, the world—even its wildest parts—was safer, more comfortable now than the most civilized corners of that Europe their ancestors had toured. Apart from the odds-against chance of a hijacking or a terrorist bomb in the lobby of a fine hotel, there was little to fear, little to cause discomfort. Donn had often told Dawn that, in the political climate prevailing in the late-twentieth century, the wild regions were certainly safer than the so-called civilized ones.
Now, though, he must comfort her again. Like most children of wealthy parents, she had been taught from toddlerhood to fear kidnaping; like most beautiful girls, to fear rape. These fears, he knew, overwhelmed even her fear of death. So he lay beside her and calmed her
and caressed her, then made easy, reassuring love to her. Preprandial love, their favorite kind.
“Africa,” he said later, when her muscles had relaxed. “I’ve got to think about it.”
After breakfast (Lebanese orange juice thick with brewer’s yeast, a dozen vitamin pills, eggs Benedict that oozed gently to the silver, the ham cut and cured in their own smokehouse from their own pigs, purchased from Iris Kornshok along with wisdom, and two piping-hot cups of mocha java), Dawn turned to the dishes while Donn went out for his morning survey of the ranch. Today it was not just routine: He had to ponder the chart.
But it’s never just routine, he thought, walking out into the late May morning. Five hundred acres spread before him, out from under the beech woods that shaded the house—The Wandering Y. Donn McGavern, Prop. Yes, the Wondering Why Ranch. Obscured just enough in the naming to keep his friends guessing, and himself as well. All his life he had kept them guessing—first with the guns and horses, then with the football and the race cars, now with the words. Quick-draw artist, rodeo rider, Big Ten linebacker, sports car champion, poet, novelist—what more could a rich boy do to answer the wondering? Well, he’d plugged himself thrice through the calf and right foot while slickening his border shift. He’d busted both collarbones on Braymers. He’d left fragments of his kneecaps on the playing fields of Ann Arbor and Columbus and Madison and Lansing. And his nose all over Turn Nine at Riverside, coming down into that ungodly hairpin there that still woke him at night sometimes, seeing the wall come up in his dreams as some see the earth while falling asleep. And the words rode him still, roweling, blasting, hitting hard without footsteps, blowing the doors off his mind when he least expected it.
The dogs bounded out to greet him, Norwegian elk hounds, hirsute basketballs of caninity that could leap from their toes and lick his nose without reaching apogee. The horses nickered as he passed the corral, shaking their elegant, bony heads at him, great umber orbs now dark in the vernal light. Donn broke into a canter of his own, running out toward the road and then hurdling the fence, cutting through the sweet young alfalfa, as the horses pounded beside him, inside the fence. Down the row of shivering poplars. His own long blond hair flew like their manes, and his nostrils caught the air as hungrily. Down to the lake, now, with the horses left behind him, he paused to watch the stippled surface as he caught his breath. Bluegills and pumpkinseeds rising to the early midges. He would skip writing this morning, go back up to the house, and assemble the slim five-and-a-half-foot bamboo Orvis, an ounce and a touch of delicacy, and cast to sunfish all day long—the two-weight line snickering through the guides, laying out straight and fine over the pale washed nests, the #32 Black Gnat tied by Harry Darby just ticking the water. Dancing lightly on its tiptoe hackles. Then the subtle slurp of a half-pound bluegill ingesting the fly, tipping up, then down again with the same balance as a big brown trout, aquatic blimp—but exploding as the point sunk home with the fractive energy of an Atlantic permit … yes, Donn thought, for the hundredth time, if you could breed a bluegill up to thirty pounds, you would have the permit’s peer….
Like hell you would, he thought angrily. And like hell I will.
Ah, but the stars—water, darkness, mysterious disappearance. What to do? He dropped to the lotus position, heel tucked deep in the yoni place, back straight, hands loose in his lap, thumbs to forefingers, palms up, and waited for the answer. Staring down into the lake, he felt his mind begin to clear, the murk of the moment settling out while his consciousness grew slowly pellucid like the lake water itself. Words rose like feeding fish from the layered lake bed of his mind to bubble at the warm and sun-washed surface. “It is the stars, the stars above us, govern our conditions.” That was Lear, Act IV, Scene iii. But hadn’t Shakespeare scorned that very fatalism elsewhere in the play? “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.”
Yeah, the stars as cop-out. Donn was not even certain that he believed in astrology. What was it John Fletcher had written in The Honest Man’s Fortune (1647)?
Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate.
Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
Very existential indeed, Donn thought, but existentialism is passé. It’s mysticism now. Charts and Chings and Suchlike Things. (And I’m a poet and don’t even know it.)
Astrology had come with the new life-style Donn had adopted after the near-fatal sports car crash in California, come with it free of charge, like a vest with a new suit. Recovering from the multiple fractures, suffering the endless operations to restore his face to something vaguely like its previous contours, he had discovered that, while he was going roundy-round in fast cars, his friends had all turned hippie. They switched him on to dope—grass at first, then coke and psilocybin, mescaline and three-eyed toad. Amphetamines to storm the brain, stunning downers to sooth it. Words had come washing up from the wreckage of his previous life, the flotsam of a rigid structure gone aground on a reef of dope, and idly he began piecing them together, until one day he discovered he was a poet. A hip poet. Hair to his elbows, pining and posturing like some latter-day Oscar Wilde, though without the faggotry. He’d taught high school English for a while, playing scar-faced guru to a bunch of midwestern yahoos who couldn’t make the football team, blowing gage behind the boiler room, quoting Basho and Rilke and Gary Snyder while living in Winesburg, Ohio. The college lecture circuit wasn’t much better. He came on between Tim Leary, crepuscular in his chemical satori, and one David Smith, a jolly jock turned freako who swam channels, ran through deserts with mushroom-blasted Mexican Indians, dove into Mayan death wells, and generally proved that even a long-haired doper could have muscles. And balls.
One night in 1968, during the height of the Vietnam hassle, Donn and David Smith had emerged from an auditorium on the campus of a small border-state college only to be confronted by a horde of likkered-up, prowar hard hats. Six longhairs already lay shattered on the concrete under the flagpole, writhing and whimpering under the torchlight in pools of blood, puke, and busted teeth. David walked straight up to the biggest redneck, grabbed him by the nuts and the shirtfront, lifted him face high, and bit off his nose. Then he tossed the redneck into the crowd, chewed up the nose—great gristly crunchings—and swallowed it. Nobody bothered them.
“How the hell did you do it?” Donn asked him later.
“It was easy,” Smith said. “My chart was right. Also, I didn’t really swallow the nose. Just tucked it in my upper lip till we got to the shadows.”
Clever.
But our chart is wrong, Donn thought. Or at least hers is. If only Blackrod hadn’t invited them on the safari…
Donn had met Bucky Blackrod, the sportswriter, a year earlier at Indianapolis during the race weekend. It was Donn’s first visit to a racetrack since his crash and he had intended it as a therapeutic visit, a chance to exorcise the demons of the Riverside Wall. Instead he had fallen in with Blackrod. They had boozed on the banks of the Wabash, trampolined with hookers on the beds of the Speedway Motel, guzzled beers and skinned their knuckles in the White Front, that den of dirty-nailed iniquity on Sixteenth Street where the wrenches and the race fans congregated before the big Memorial Day blowout. Walking to the track one morning, stunned after a night of rowdyism, they had seen Art Pollard kill himself in the short chute between Turn One and Turn Two. The car hit the wall, spun, hit, spun again, then burned in a pale, flickering methanol glow. Donn’s eyes felt as if they were melting like candles in his skull. Blackbir
ds squalled in the ash trees.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Bucky said. “I’ve seen them in pieces.”
Bucky Blackrod was crude and corpulent. He drank too much and smoked even more. At night he snored like a congress of Caterpillar tractors; during the day he mined his nose and crotch with pawky, smoke-stained fingers. But Bucky knew his stuff. He could bore from within, giving Donn introductions to car owners and their women whom Donn, with his new hippie shyness, would have approached only with stiff trepidation. There was something compelling, almost reassuring, about Bucky’s insensitivity—an American armor that glinted through the rust. Also, he wrote fairly well. Blackrod’s first and only novel, The Bruxist, had gotten good reviews. It was about a journalist who wept a lot and gnashed his teeth over the cruelties and inequities of the modern world, and the exploitation of that world by the press. When the journalist-hero finally got tough enough to rebel, symbolized by a physical attack on his managing editor in which he tried to chew the man’s throat out, he discovered that gnashing had worn his teeth down to mere stubs, ineffectual as his rage. Bruxism.
Blackrod’s current proposal was for the three of them—Donn, Dawn, and Bucky—to go on a month-long safari in Kansdu, a small African nation as yet unpolluted by hunters. It would be largely a “foot safari” on horse- and camel-back into country few white men had ever seen, much less hunted.
The Diamond Bogo Page 2