by Thom Jones
Hartman pitched his head forward and pretended to sob over his cards. “I’m an uncouth ruffian, I won’t deny it.” He gulped down some whiskey and said, “When that faggot over there wants to fly home for ballet lessons, it won’t be in my plane.”
“Aryan Brotherhood,” Indiana said.
Koestler raised his hand to silence the doctor while he turned on Chicago. “Where on earth did you score that joint?” he asked. “Did you give it to them, Jules?”
“Actually, it was your man, Johnson,” Indiana said. “God, am I ever high. Everything is so…surreal.”
“Johnson? That bugger!” Koestler said. “He’s got his hand in everything.”
Koestler put the wet end of the joint to his lips and took a tentative puff. As he did, Chicago pulled out another and lit it.
“Fuck,” Koestler said. He took another hit. A much bigger one.
Chicago handed the new joint to Koestler’s baboon, who greedily inhaled the smoke, and for the next few moments the whole curious party sat around the table attempting to suppress coughs.
“I’m so fucking high,” Indiana said. “Jesus.”
“A minute ago I was drunk; now you can’t tie your shoelaces,” Hartman said. “Poofter!”
“Let’s have a little music,” said Koestler. He flipped on the shortwave and fiddled with the dial. “I have got nothing but bloody Radio Ireland recently, half Gaelic, and then an hour of bird calls! Needs a new battery.” He slapped at the radio and then, with Dixieland accompaniment, an Irish tenor was singing, “I’ve flown around the world in a plane—”
Koestler joined in. “I’ve settled revolutions in Spain—”
He flipped the dial and slapped the set until he hooked into American Armed Forces Radio. After an announcer listed the major-league ball scores, Jimi Hendrix came on blaring “Red House.”
The men sat back and listened to the music. Koestler popped up to turn up the volume, his weather-beaten face collapsing inward as he took in another draught of marijuana smoke, closed his eyes, tossed his head back, and got into the song. He was soon snaking about the duckboard floor of the gazebo, playing air guitar to the music.
“Hey, if Father Stuart could only see us now,” Hartman said. “Father Stuart can see you now!” The priest flipped on an electric torch and stepped out of the darkness up into the gazebo. “This is a hospital, not a fraternity house! Kindly remember that. People are trying to sleep. Can’t you think of others for a change?” He turned to the new doctors. “I’m glad to see that you two lads are off to an auspicious beginning.”
The priest, dressed in a bathrobe and flip-flops, snatched the shortwave, switched it off, slung it under his arm, and clopped back toward the lodge. The beam of his flashlight, which was tucked between his shoulder and chin, panned the wisteria bushes, the ground, the sky, and the buildings of the compound as he attempted to push down the telescopic antenna on the radio. For a moment, the men sat in stunned silence. This was followed by an explosion of laughter.
Koestler started up as if to go after the priest, but then thought better of it and sat down at the table. He reached into his bush shirt and removed another can of sardines, handing them to Babbitt, who quickly tore off the lid, ate the fish, and then licked the olive oil from the inside of the can. “You might not believe it, but Georgie can open a can of sardines even with a key,” Koestler said proudly.
“Fuck, he’s got the munchies,” Indiana said, as he fell into a paroxysm of laughter.
Chicago studied the red sardine jacket, giggling as he read: “Add variety and zest to hot or cold meatless main dishes.…By special royal permission. Finest Norway brisling sardines.”
“Brisling?”
“It’s that advertising thing,” Chicago said. “Brisling is Norwegian for ‘sprat,’ which means small marine fish. Not each and every small fish you pull in is certifiably a herring; some other small fish get picked up by the school. No false advertising this way.”
“Wow,” Indiana said sardonically. “Are you Norwegian or something?”
“Lebanese,” Chicago said. “I already told you that.”
Indiana said, “Who runs that country, anyhow? I was there, and I don’t know that much. All I remember is that they won’t even give you the time of day.”
“No way,” Chicago said. “The people are friendly as hell. The government of Norway is a hereditary constitutional monarchy, a parliamentary democracy, and the king is endowed with a certain amount of executive power. In reality, however, the king is limited in the exercise of power.”
“He’s a Norway freak!” Indiana said.
“More likely he’s got a photographic memory,” Hartman said.
“Touché, Mr. Hartman,” Chicago said.
“I still can’t believe I’m in Africa,” Indiana said. “Heavy. Fourteen-year-old kids with machine guns—and, my God, look at the stars. There are so many of them.”
“Stop acting so fucking incredulous,” Hartman said. “You’re really getting on my nerves.”
“Watch Sister Doris,” Koestler said. “She’s forgotten more about jungle medicine than I’ll ever know.”
“Doris? Man, she’s unattractive. She’s ugly, man,” Indiana said.
“She’ll be looking pretty good in about five months; that is, if you last that long,” Hartman said. “You’ll be having some pretty intensive fantasies about that woman. Are you going to last, sonny boy?”
“Fuck off. I got through a residency at Bellevue. I guess I can hack Africa.”
“The thing about Doris,” Koestler said, slicing the air with the edge of his hand, “is that she’s what we call an A-teamer. The A-team takes all of this business seriously. Tight-asses. Father Stuart is A-team beaucoup. There are B-teamers, who take a more casual approach. You will line up with one of these factions. Personally, if the political thing doesn’t ease up a bit, I’m going to boogie out of this hellhole. I’ve no desire to have my throat slit. Stuart and Doris will stay until the last dog is hung.”
“Go back to Kiwiland and listen to them harp about All Blacks rugby and that bloody yacht trophy,” Hartman said. “Family’s gone. Africa’s your home, man.”
“I’ve got a few cousins left in Auckland, and I do miss New Zealand beer, rather,” Koestler said. “I’m not going to hang around and get my throat cut. I’d rather try a little lawn bowling.”
“The natives are restless?” Indiana said.
“Yes, Percy le Poof,” Hartman said. “The natives are restless.”
“Politics as usual. So far, it hasn’t filtered down to the villages,” Koestler said. “It’s a lot safer here than in Newark, New Jersey, I would imagine.”
Suddenly the men fell silent and examined their cards. Swarms of insects buzzed the gazebo in successive waves.
Despite the mosquito coils, the insects attacked ferociously. Hartman was the first to hop up, and he moved with a quickness that startled the others. With no warning, he roughly grabbed Indiana’s head in the crook of his muscular forearm and savagely rubbed his knuckles over the top of the young doctor’s head. His feet shuffled adroitly, like those of a fat but graceful tap dancer, as he yanked the doctor in various directions, never letting him set himself for balance. Hartman ran his knuckles back and forth over the young man’s crew cut, crying, “Haji Baba! Hey, hey! Haji Baba! Hey, hey!”
“Ouch, goddamn!” Indiana shouted. He was tall, with a basketball-player’s build, and he finally wrested himself out of Hartman’s powerful grip. He stood his ground, assuming a boxer’s pose. Both he and Hartman were suddenly drenched with sweat. “You fucker! Shit!”
Hartman threw his hands in the air, his palms open in a gesture of peace. As soon as Indiana dropped his guard, Hartman waded in throwing roundhouse punches. One of these connected, and a chip of tooth pankled off a can of Coke Classic on the table. Indiana pulled Hartman forward, going with the older man’s momentum. At the same time, he kicked Hartman’s feet out from under him, and the two men rolled off t
he gazebo, and Indiana rose astride Hartman’s broad back like a cowboy. Indiana had Hartman’s arm pulled up in a chicken wing with one hand while he felt for his missing front tooth with the other.
“You son of a bitch!” Indiana said. “Fat bastard.” He pounded Hartman’s large ears with the meaty side of his fist. “I’ll show you who’s a faggot. How do you like it?”
He continued to cuff the pilot and cranked the arm up higher until Hartman cried, “Oh God, stop!”
“Had enough? Had enough?”
“God, yes. God, yes. I give!”
Indiana released his grip and got up. He was covered with black dirt. He was studying an abrasion on his knee when Hartman leaped atop him pickaback and began clawing at his face.
Hartman cried, “Son-of-a-bitch, I’ll kill you!” Once again the two men began rolling about in the dirt. This time Hartman emerged on top, and his punches rained down on the younger man until Chicago and Koestler each snatched him by one of his arms and dragged him off and flung him back into his chair. He started to get up, but Koestler shoved him back down with both hands and then pointed a finger in his face.
“You’re drunk. Knock this shit off immediately!”
Hartman clutched his chest and panted frantically, wheezing. Rivulets of sweat coated with black dust rolled down off his face and dropped on his lap like oily pearls. Koestler poured out a large glass of whiskey and handed it to Hartman and said, “Here, old man. Drink yourself sober.”
“Just having a bit of fun is all,” Hartman said agreeably. “Didn’t mean anything by it.” Indiana drew away from Hartman, who managed the entire glass of whiskey in three gulps. “I believe all that marijuana got me going. No offense intended. Apologies all around.”
Hartman took a mashed cigar out of his pocket, twisted off the broken end, and lighted it. He puffed rapidly without inhaling and wafted the smoke in front of his face to clear away the mosquitoes. Then he pulled himself up, set his glass on the table, and said, “It’s been a long day, and here I am, shitfaced again. Good night, all.”
Hartman hastily made his way up the path toward the sleeping quarters beyond the surgery. As he went, he laughed again and repeated the famous Monty Python litany, “And now for something completely different—sawing logs. Ah, zzzzz! Ah, zzzzz! Ah, zzzzz!”
Indiana turned to Koestler. “What is with that guy?”
“Don’t mind Jules. He’s a jolly good fellow. You’ll grow to love him. And he won’t remember a thing about tonight. Blackout drunk, this—presumably. I might not remember any of it, either.”
From the distance, an elephant blared, a big cat roared, the hyenas began their freakishly human wailing, and the whole cacophony of jungle sounds took over the night.
Was it a minute or an hour later that Babbitt hopped on Hartman’s empty chair and seemed to beseech the cardplayers to deal him in? The men had drifted off into their separate thoughts. Babbitt grabbed the bottle of Canadian Mist from the card table and, brandishing sharp canine teeth that shone like ivory in the glow of the Coleman lanterns, caused both the young doctors to duck to the floor before he quickly sprang off into the black jungle. Even Koestler hit the deck, wrenching his knee. When he got up, he brushed himself off and said, “That settles it, I’m getting myself a dog.”
“Christ, that’s one mean son-of-a-bitch!” said Chicago. “And I thought you said a baboon will only get drunk once. Here I thought he was poised to go for that goat-shit cigar. I mean, so much for your full Cleveland.”
“Georgie is not your average baboon,” Koestler said with a shrug. “Especially when he’s stoned. When you’ve got a stoned baboon, all bets are off.”
Indiana looked at Koestler. “What are we going to do? Are we going after him?”
“Not likely—anyhow, you need to clean up. Put something on those scratches. They can go septic overnight in this climate.”
“But the leopard.”
“Not to worry. I’ll send Johnson and some of the men out with flashlights and shotguns. I’m absolutely fried from that joint. I’m not going out there—although we have to do something about that cat. He’s getting altogether too bold, and we have children about. I’m going to have to roust Johnson. Anyhow, welcome to the B-team, gentlemen—Har har! Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a rather difficult…a rather gruesome…well, shall I say, it won’t be your typical day at the office? Up at dawn and that sort of thing.” Koestler tossed back the last of his drink. “Rude awakening, the leper colony. Not for the faint of heart.”
The young doctors grimly nodded an affirmation as Koestler made a pretense of cleaning up around the card table. He watched the two men stumble back to their rooms in the dorm, and when they were out of sight, he picked up one of the fat roaches that were left over from their party. He lit it with his Ronson and managed to get three good tokes off it. He heard the leopard out in the bush.
Who was it? Stanley? Was it Sir Henry Morton Stanley who had been attacked by a lion, shaken into shock, and who later reported that he had felt a numbness that was a kind of bliss—a natural blessing for those creatures who were eaten alive? Not a bad way to go. Of course, leopards were smaller. Slashers.
Koestler picked up Indiana’s drink, which was filled to the brim; it was warm, and the Coke in it had gone flat. It didn’t matter. There seemed to be a perfect rightness to everything. That was the marijuana. Well, what difference did it make? It was his current reality. When he finished the whiskey, Koestler got up and clicked on his small chrome-plated penlight and followed its narrow beam into the bush. The beam was just long enough to allow him to put one foot in front of the other. Finding Babbitt would be almost impossible. Amor fati. Choose the right time to die. Well, there was no need to overdramatize; he was just taking a little midnight stroll. The leopard, unless it was crazy, would run from his very smell.
As soon as Koestler got under the jungle canopy, the air temperature fell ten degrees. The bush smelled damp and rotten. Yet, for the first time in thirty years, Koestler felt at one with the jungle. A little T-Bone Walker blues beamed in from some remote area of the brain: They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad.
At the sound of Koestler’s heavy boots, the nocturnal rustlings of the bush grew still. Koestler could then hear drums from the nearby village. There had been an elephant kill. Somehow his peripheral awareness had picked up on that news at some point during this most incredible day. Elephant kill. House of meat. Cause for celebration. The doctor proceeded into the darkness. The penlight seemed to dim; were the batteries low? Beneath the sound of the drumbeats, Koestler heard a branch snap. He stood stock-still in the middle of it all. He flipped his penlight right and left, and in a low, piping voice, said, “Georgie, Georgie? Where are you, my little pal? Why don’t you come on back home? Come back home to Daddykins.”
Pickpocket
THESE KIDS THAT slashed the top on the Saab (ain’t it a shame, twelve hundred miles on it, a black ragtop, turbocharger, five-disc sound system!), these kids call me Chop-a-Leg, which is what I had done to me. They chop a leg when the foot turns gangrene. I had diabetes twelve years and wouldn’t quit smokin’. My podiatrist warned me the day was drawing near, but I didn’t listen. I was still out there trying to get my kicks. Now I traded the five-speed in for an automatic since when you been chop-a-legged, your prosthetic foot don’t rightly feel the clutch and that can mean smash your ass!
I got a hardtop with a V-6 and these kids calling me Chop-a-Leg raked up the paint job with a blade, so now I don’t have to take care parking it or lay in bed and worry about no ragtop. See, I’m new to the neighborhood and they don’t know who I am. All that shit—“I got a new car, what if it gets nicked?”—is over. I got the problem defused. Those kids did me a favor. I mean I got friends, okay, who could see to it that I could park that car anywhere in the city and nobody but nobody would get near ’cause I’m a stand-up con with connections, but in my old age I find I really do abhor violence, squalor, and ugl
iness. And I was a kid once. I did stuff like that. So I let it slide and had a talk with those boys. It was a highly effective conversation. There won’t be no more fuck fuck with that car.
The doctors gave me the first diabetes lecture more than a decade ago. They fine-tuned the spiel over the years. There were updates. In one ear, out the other. I figured, You’re gonna die, no matter. But they were right. I got hit with the shortness of breath, blurred vision, borderline kidney function, a limp dick, and armpits so raw I got to use Tussy Cream Deodorant or go aroun’ with B.O. Is that Tussy like fussy or Tussy like pussy? Heh heh.
One night after I got proficient with my new foot, I hobbled down to the basement: Peg-leg Pete. I like to go down there at night and listen to Captain Berg’s Stamp Hour on the shortwave. Comes on at 2:00 A.M. I always know the time, right on the money, bro. Serious. I bought a German clock with a radio transmitter in it that computes with the real atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, and from that I set my watches. I got a solid gold Rolex President—your Captain of Industry watch. I got a two-tone Sea Dweller with a Neptune green bezel, a platinum Daytona, a Patek Philippe, and so on. They all right on time. Believe it. You might think, “Why is he worried about time? ’Cause he got so little left? What is the man’s problem? Like God going to cheat him out of a second or something?” When you are fascinated with clocks, it’s because you’re an existential person. Some guy wears a plain watch with just a slash at the noon, three, six, and nine o’clock positions, you can put your money on that man. If the watch is plain with Roman numerals, he’s also a straight guy. Non-neurotic. Trust that individual. That watch is your “tell”; it’s a Rorschach. If you see someone with a railroad face—same deal. Arabic numerals on a railroad face, trust him a little less. A watch with extraneous dials and buttons, don’t trust ’em at all, especially if they wearing a jogging watch and they ain’t in shape. This is just a general rule of thumb—your man may be wearing a watch that goes against type since his father give it to him. Wealthy people buy forty-thousand-dollar timepieces that look worse than a Timex ’cause they don’t want to get taken off. The people they want to know how much their watch cost will know, but no pipehead or take-off artist will know. As they say, if it doesn’t tick, it ain’t shit. You wanna know if your woman cheats? There’s a certain watch style and nine times out of ten, if she’s wearing it, she’s guilty. I swear.