Dark Memory

by Jonathan Latimer

  Eve said, “Breakfast is ready, Jay.” She had come back.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Come on. You must eat something.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  He saw her eyes were concerned, and he sat up. His cuts throbbed and he felt lightheaded.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m just not hungry.”

  He went to the river and washed. The water was cool. He thought he had a little fever. Near him, at the edge of the forest, a green hummingbird was poised over a flower the shape of a trumpet. When Jay moved the hummingbird flew away, making a metallic click like the sound of marbles being dropped into a bag with other marbles. He went to Bill’s grave. The sand had sunk a little, forming a shallow pit exactly the size of the body. He shoveled sand with his hands until there was a mound where the pit had been. There were no rocks, but he found four large pieces of driftwood and put them on the grave. He hoped the wood would keep animals from digging up the body. He went back to the shelter.

  “You’re sure you won’t eat?” Eve asked.

  “Yes. I’m not hungry.”

  “Then we may as well start.”

  “We’ll come back for Bill, won’t we?”

  Her eyes were startled. “Of course, Jay.”

  “I couldn’t leave if we weren’t coming back.”

  “But we are coming back. Mr. Palmer will bring us back.”

  “Thank you.”

  He felt her looking at him. He was not sure what he had said, his head ached so. What he meant was he could not bear to think of Bill being alone in a place he would not want to be alone in. That was what he had meant to say. She needn’t look at him so curiously.

  “I’ll carry the knapsack,” he said.

  “Jay, would you rather wait a while?”

  “No.”

  “I’d just as soon if you don’t feel well.”

  “I feel fine.”

  He filled the canteen with river water and put it in the knapsack and hung the knapsack over his unwounded shoulder and picked up the Springfield and started along the trail through the forest. He did not look back at Bill’s grave. The knapsack was heavy and hurt his shoulder. In the woods he looked for the dead leopard. He saw the place where he had fought him. The body had been taken away. Probably hyenas. It was very dark in the forest and he had a hard time keeping on the trail. He could hear Eve walking behind him. They came to a fork and he halted. He looked for footprints on both forks, but it was too dark for him to see them. The trails were good.

  “I think camp is to the right,” Eve said.

  “Do you?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. I think it’s to the left.”

  “What shall we do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should we try one fork for a time?”

  “Yes. Let’s take yours to the right.”

  “We can always come back,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  His head did not ache quite so much in the darkness of the forest. He felt cooler and it was easier to walk. They came to another fork in the trail and took the right branch again. A quarter of a mile further there was still another fork. Neither trail was very clear.

  “We’d better go back,” he said.

  Presently they came to the fork and he went to the left, remembering they had gone to the right before. The forest was quiet and their footsteps were muffled by the moss on the path. The moss was green and thick and their feet left wet marks on it. A curtain of pink orchids, hanging from a dead branch, blocked the trail.

  “I don’t remember this,” Eve said.

  “No.”

  “Oh, Jay, I hope we’re not lost.”

  “We’ll go back.”

  The trouble was, he decided, walking back over the soft moss, the forks they noticed going one way were not the forks they saw coming back. They could have taken a wrong fork without knowing it. If the forest only wasn’t so dark. They walked for a long time on the moss and came to a fork that did not look familiar to either of them.

  “We’ll have to keep going,” Jay said.

  They walked along many trails, trying one branch, retracing their steps, trying another, finding some wide and apparently well traveled and others that disappeared after a few hundred yards. Jay’s mind grew tired. He could not make it work on the problem. He kept thinking of a waterfall, not high, but with a steady rush of cold white water, and tried to imagine how it would be to stand under it. The waterfall, breaking over a slaty bank, falling straight and evenly into a rock-filled pool, roaring with a single deep note, flecking the pool with foam, making the gray boulders slick, became more real to him than the trails they followed. They were the dream and the waterfall was reality. There was a crooked fir growing near the top of the waterfall, its roots lodged in a rock crevasse. The fir had been stunted by the lack of soil, but the branches were green and healthy. If you moved quickly at the edge of the pool, trout would dart away like flashes of sunlight.

  “Would you like to swim, Linda?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The trout won’t mind.”

  “Jay! Jay!”

  Why was Linda looking at him so strangely? It wasn’t Linda. It was Eve. What had he been thinking of? Eve’s face was concerned.

  “Jay, you’d better rest.”

  “Are we still lost?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was thinking of something.”

  “You’ve a fever. Don’t you want to rest?”

  “No. I’d better keep going.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll keep going.”

  He tried to concentrate on the forest. His head throbbed and the forest did not seem right to him. It was not right for it to move away from him as he walked. It was not supposed to do that. It looked like landscape seen through the waves of hot air that rise over a road in the desert, the trees and the earth moving in and out of focus. It was very funny. He wanted to laugh at it. His shoulder brushed a tree and he fell. His head was filled with red flames. He sat up and leaned against the tree. His head throbbed with pain.

  “Oh, Jay!” Eve said. “Don’t give up.”

  “Let me sit here for a minute.”

  “Poor darling. I’ll put a wet cloth on your head.”

  “Could I have a drink, too?”

  He was very thirsty. He drank water from the canteen for a long time. Then Eve wet a handkerchief and put it on his forehead.

  “Is that better?”

  “Much better.”

  It was odd to have such a headache in the dark forest. It was the kind of a headache you got from a sunstroke. He could feel the sun in his head.

  “It will be better after sunset,” he explained.

  “What, Jay?”

  “The sun in my head. It will set.”

  “Oh, darling.”

  “Do you think I don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “Of course you know, Jay:”

  There were brittle lichens on the trunk he was leaning against. He tried to pry them off with his thumbnail. The trunk of the tree ran up and up until it was lost in the green dome of the forest. He could not see the sky at all. On an exposed root of the tree sat a chameleon, watching him with black unblinking eyes. Jay stared at the chameleon. He would stare it down. He fixed the creature with his eyes and it got bigger and bigger. It was the size of a lizard. It was the size of a Gila monster. It was the size of an iguana. Its eyes were black and ominous. He kicked at it; it became a chameleon again and ran into the grass. That was the way. Kick at them. He’d fixed it. Unless it had gone for help. That was it. It had gone for help. He could not face a dozen iguanas. He stood up.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He started along the trail. The iguanas were not going to catch him. He would fool them.

  “That’s the way we just came,” Eve called after him.


  “I don’t care. Come on.”

  He hurried. The path seemed to be closing in behind him. If he did not hurry it would close in on him. The path was dark and narrow and leaves stung his face. It was closing in all the time.

  “Please wait, Jay,” Eve called.

  “Come on.”

  “I can’t keep up.”

  He tried not to go so fast, but it was difficult. He could feel the path closing in. He turned left at a fork in the trail and thought triumphantly he had thrown the iguanas off the track. He could see them running down the wrong trail, big iguanas with red tongues, slavering and baying like bloodhounds. He laughed when he thought how much alike were iguanas and bloodhounds. They were exactly alike. Why hadn’t anybody noticed that before? He would tell Bill, if only he could escape them and their red, slavering tongues.

  “Jay!” called Eve’s voice. It was far away. “Jay!” It was far away and frightened.

  He was breathing hard and he was running. He could not remember why. Where was he? He stopped running and looked around. His head hurt. He made himself remember he was in the Ituri Forest. He saw again the bare gray trunks, the tangled grass, the fronds of fern like pale green lace, the gray and brown and maroon streamers of Spanish moss, the down-floating roots of parasite plants reaching for soil. He would rest against a tree. He stepped towards a trunk that had a wrist-thick vine twined around it and saw growing from a crack between the vine and the trunk yellow flowers with black hearts and then he touched with his fingers the rough thick bark and felt himself falling.

  CHAPTER 28

  EVE WAS BENDING OVER HIM. “Drink this, Jay.” She held a condensed-milk tin to his mouth.

  He said, “Hello.”

  “Hello.” She looked surprised. “Do you know me, Jay?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You’ve been having a little fever.” She touched his head. “Oh, it is cooler.”

  “It still aches.”

  “I should think so. Drink this.”

  He drank the warm broth that was in the milk tin. It tasted familiar. He took a swallow or two of the broth each time Eve held the tin to his lips. He was lying in a shelter on a bed of leaves and brush, and through the opening he could see the smoke of a fire rising in the sunlight. He was not hungry.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “I built this when you passed out.”

  “How long have we been here?”

  “Two days. Please don’t talk. It tires you.”

  He could feel the fever in his head, and after he finished the broth he went to sleep. Later he woke and had more broth and some crackers and then lay thinking, half awake, half dreaming.

  A tune kept running through his head: The Blue Room. We’ll have … a blue room … a two-room.… He thought of the record of The Blue Room, sung by the Revelers. It was on the other side of Valencia, and at first they had liked Valencia, but later they had played only The Blue Room. That was a wonderful summer. He had been in love with Bee—Bee what? Anyway, she had red hair and she’d gone to the dances with him at the country club, the girls lovely and tan in evening gowns, the girls beautiful as only girls sixteen, seventeen and eighteen are, no sags or softnesses or exaggerated curves; just Mr. and Mrs.… with nothing but kisses … on little blue chairs; and in Potter’s car there were two cases of green home-brew they had bought from the Pole in Traverse City who later went crazy and beat his wife and two little girls to death with a rock, taking the big rock in his two hands and smashing their brains out while they were sleeping, and five of them drank the bitter green beer, not liking it, making a grim business of it, but feeling grown up and wicked, and Bee had had to drive him home. The pieces he had loved at that time and would always love were Who, Sweet Sue, The Lime-house Blues, The St. Louis Blues, The Wabash Blues, Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, My Blue Heaven, Three O’Clock in the Morning, and the piece which went, Sometimes I’m Happy, sometimes I’m blue, my disposition depends on you. That was the summer he had seen the girls naked, swimming in Lake Michigan off the Sleeping Bear. They were the first he had ever seen. It was funny he should remember after all the years the water-on-marble quality of their skins, the white lily sheen of their bodies in the morning sun, their deerlike, laughing flight from him and his horse. You’ll sew … your trousseau … and Robin-son Crusoe … isnotsofarfrom world-ly cares … as a lit-tle blue room … away upstairs. And the blue of the lake when the sky was right, as blue as any lake in the world, set against the tan sand and the green second-growth timber.

  “More broth, Jay,” Eve said.

  “You’re awfully good to me.”

  “Yes, aren’t I?”

  He hadn’t noticed the sun go down, but the flames of the fire made red and yellow streaks in the rectangle of darkness at the shelter’s entrance. The broth was warm and salty.

  “You’re very brave to stay with me, Eve.”

  “I couldn’t get out alone.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But I would have stayed anyway.”

  “You’re a lovely girl.”

  “You’re feeling better. Try to sleep.”

  “What have I been doing?”

  “You’ve been muttering.”

  “I suppose it’s the fever.”

  “Yes. It gets worse in the afternoon. Try to sleep now.”

  “You’re such a lovely girl,” he said.

  She took the empty milk tin and went out to the fire. He wondered if he was dying. It would be very bad for her if he died. It would be lonesome in the jungle. Otherwise he did not care. Bill was gone. And Linda. There was only Eve. He did want to live for her. She was beautiful and good and brave. He loved her in some way; he did not know exactly how. He did not want her to suffer, though. How could you tell if you were dying? In books the dying person always knew. Did death come in the form of a headache? In the form of a ringing in the ears, in the feeling of pepper in the blood? Then he was certainly dying. He had cayenne pepper in his blood. He had death and cayenne pepper in his blood. He laughed. That was a funny combination. Death and cayenne pepper.

  “Darling.”

  Linda was bending over him. “Oh, Linda.”

  “I’ll put a cool cloth on your head.”

  “Oh, Linda, darling.”

  Water ran from the cloth into his eyebrows. The cloth was cool on his forehead.

  “You’re not Linda,” he said. “You’re Eve.”

  “Try to sleep, Jay.”

  People always died in the right place in books. That was another funny thing. They died so the book could end, or so it could begin, or so the heroine could marry the man she really loved. They knew they were dying and they lived just long enough to make the right speeches and then they died in just the right place. Death was a good way to give a book importance, he thought. Death gives a book importance and sleeping gives it romance and having children gives it reality. And if someone in it believes everyone ought to have enough food and says so and is electrocuted, then that gives it social importance. He would write a book with death and sleeping and children in it sometime, but he would give it social importance by having everyone catch syphilis from toilet seats. He would if he didn’t die. He could feel the pepper in his blood.

  What he would never forget was the gorilla coming into camp on the litter of vines, huge and sad, all belly and shoulders and head, the face like wet black leather, half seen in the light of the bonfires, a dead king, a dead god, and the porters chanting in voices that went above the noise of the rain in the bamboo and the uneven rush of the wind and the growl of thunder, and the gorilla sitting up on the litter, his head moving with the steps of the porters. And what he would never forget was the sick feeling he had when the female came on her litter, remembering the frightened, human look on her face as, running, she had looked back at the hunters. He had killed her, and he had killed Linda.

  No, Linda was with him. He’d just seen her. He had.

  “Linda, where a
re you?”

  “Here.”

  “Please don’t hide from me, sweet.”

  “I won’t.”

  “It’s so lonely.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “Lie beside me.”

  “I must put more water on the cloth.”

  “Don’t go, Linda.”

  “I’m coming right back.”

  She left him and came back.

  “I didn’t kill you, did I, darling?”

  “Let me put this on your head.”

  “Darling, did I kill you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Please lie here with me. Please.”

  “All right.”

  He took hold of her hand. It was cool.

  He was drinking broth again. Blue smoke rose from the fire into the sunlight. Birds sang around the shelter.

  “Is it morning?” he asked Eve.

  “It’s nearly noon.”

  “The broth is good.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “I’m a terrible nuisance.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You’d be better off if I died.”

  “Don’t talk of dying.”

  “You could get out of here then.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “I’ve been wondering how you can tell if you’re dying.”

  “Please,” Eve said. “Please don’t talk of dying.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you like the broth?”

  “Yes. It’s good.”

  “Drink it all, Jay.”

  In the early afternoon, before the fever rose again, he did not feel so bad. He watched Eve gather wood for the fire. She was carrying sticks to a pile he could just see through the shelter’s opening, bringing one or two pieces at a time. She had a good figure and she carried herself well, and her skin was firm and tan, and it was a pleasure to be able to watch her. She had lovely firm breasts. Once she glanced into the shelter and saw him looking and smiled. Later she gave him a drink of water.

  “Would you like some broth?” she asked.