by Baxter Black
When Hafiz was within six feet of the beast, he drew his sword. Garganzo had not moved. His coal black eyes followed the sword as it slowly withdrew from the black-and-gold sash. The silver glistened. Garganzo furrowed his brow.
The tip of the sword slowly reached out like a lethargic snake. Garganzo looked down at it, then back up at Hafiz. Hafiz applied his stare. The gorilla would not hold his gaze. He was intimidated.
Hafiz could tell. He had seen thousands of men look away. He knew what it meant. With the flick of his wrist, he thrust with the sword and nicked Garganzo’s chest.
What happened next could never be properly explained, even with the video replays, but literally one second later Hafiz was standing there holding half a sword and wearing no pants. His sash hung like a tattered loincloth. It fluttered briefly, then sagged limp.
For disbelievers who think I simply fabricated this debriefing of Hafiz I. Coca to further test the gullibility of the naive reader, allow me to repeat a similar harrowing incident that was told to me by a witness and related in that wonderful collection of tall tales, Horseshoes, Cowsocks & Duckfeet, Crown Publishers, copyright 2002 by BaxterBlack. The names I use could be fictitious to protect the innocent.
Del decided to build a fence in the spring but finally got around to it in December. He enlisted the aid of two friends, Chappy and Filbert.They all dressed warmly since it was twenty degrees that day in west Tennessee. The boys were havin’ trouble diggin’ one of the holes. It was close to the paved road, and the ground was hard.
Del backed his tractor up to the future hole and poised the postholeauger over the designated spot like an ovipositing wasp. The auger spun on the surface of the frozen ground. Chappy, who’s big as a skinned mule, pulled down on the gearbox. No luck. So Filbert stepped between the auger and the tractor and leaned his weight on the horizontal arm supporting the auger.
Now, Filbert had come prepared to work in the cold. He had on his hat with Elmer Fudd earflaps, mud boots, socks, undies, long johns, jeans, undershirt, wool shirt, and Carhartts™ (coveralls made of canvas and tough as carpet in a tugboat).
Filbert gave Del the go-ahead. Del engaged the power takeoff. The auger clanked and started to turn. Suddenly Filbert seemed to explode before Del’s eyes!
Del engaged the clutch immediately, and everything stopped. Filbert stood before them . . . naked.
I said naked. Not quite. He had on his boots and his belt, still snug through the belt loops. The jeans had been ripped off his body from the pockets down, leaving only a small piece containing the fly. Other than that he was immodestly clad.
Delbert’s explanation for his friend’s near denuding was that Filbert’spant leg had brushed up against the extended arm of the PTO. In a split second, as fast as Superman could skin a grapefruit, the PTO had torn all the clothes off Filbert’s body. In less than three minutes, his body turned blue. Nothing was broken, but he was as bruised as the top avocado at the supermarket. Chappy commented later that he looked like he’d been run through a hay conditioner.
Delbert figgered he was a blazing example of that expression “He looks like he’s been drug through a knothole.”
Back to Hafiz I. “Mano a Mano” Coca, who’s got the next move. Garganzo was still resting on his knuckles in the same position he had maintained during the face-off. The torn pair of white pants lay ten feet away and the first eighteen inches of the sword of Hafiz’s ancestors was embedded in a sign reading NO FEAR that hung on the cinder-block wall outside the cage.
The gorilla was now looking Hafiz right in the eye. The four muscular cheeks of Hafiz were trembling.
“Ayatollah, Sayyed, Monsieur, Señor, Capitan,” Ponce said urgently, “are you all right?” Hafiz I. Coca neither turned nor spoke. His right arm was still crooked at the elbow and holding the broken end of his sword. His left arm was posed stiffly at his hip as if he were waiting for a gunfight.
Ponce opened the catch on the cage door and slowly entered. He was holding a whip in his right hand and a pistol in his left as he worked his way around until he could see Hafiz’s face. It was blank, in a trance, the lips slightly parted. Hafiz’s eyes were dull, catatonic. You see that same look on the audience, old and young alike, halfway through Barney & Friends.
Garganzo was staring at Hafiz, at the ready, or so it appeared to Ponce.
“Hafiz, you need to relax. Just relax, turn around quietly, and walk out the door,” Ponce encouraged. “Nothing will happen, you’ll be fine.”
“Unless, of course,” a quiet voice said, “someone makes a threatening gesture, or fires a gun, or rattles the gorilla’s cage. Then the King of the Jungle might attack the naked Shah and bite a huge hole in his pride—and your pocketbook. How would it look to his influential friends if he went home circumcised?”
Ponce gently swiveled his head to the sound of the voice, careful not to make any sudden moves.
Teddie Arizona, the kept woman of Pharaoh’s Casino, demolisher of diabolic dreams and poi flinger, stood there boldly, like the Avenging Angel.
72
DECEMBER 13: PONCE GETS HIS
T.A. stood just outside the cage door, feet planted wide apart, hands on her hips, the long white lab coat billowing, streaked-blonde hair looking stiff and spiked, tight black jeans, fancy matator’s chaqueta open to the waist, the sweaty shirt undone three buttons down sticking to her skin, her chest rising and falling with each breath, and wearing bright orange Smith & Wesson wraparound sunglasses she’d picked up along the way.
The soundman snapped out of his trance and cued up the theme song from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
T.A. drew a large-barreled pistol from her waistband and aimed it at Ponce. “You’re done, Ponce. You’ve cooked your last goose,” she announced.
He studied her. He was a superb judge of animal behavior and reader of the mammalian psychology. He slowly raised the pistol in his left hand and pointed it at the gorilla. His aim was steady. He had called her bluff.
“It has come to this, my fine, spirited lady,” he said in his best Sheriff of Nottingham accent. “You, who are willing to give up everything to save these endangered beasts, have the choice. Submit to me or I will kill this grand specimen of the eastern lowland gorilla. A silverback in the prime of life. One of less than four thousand on the face of the earth.
“I know you do not doubt that I will do it. The question is only, Are you willing to sacrifice yourself to save him? Or is your quest just the hollow commitment of the Hollywood shallow. Is all your bluster just the hot air of an armchair do-gooder?
“You know you don’t really give a rat’s acetabulum about the animals. You’re just trying to get even with your husband. Personally, I don’t blame you. You could do a lot better than F. Rank. Matter of fact, I’m beginning to think, if you could be house-trained, you’d be good company. Think what you could achieve if I took you under my tutelage. With your spirit, you could actually be good in the lion’s cage. Or we could create an act with Garganzo here. Call it “The King of Kong.” Granted, I would expect certain favors—a grape peeled now and then, a shirt washed, a tension relieved. You would come to love me, I suspect. It has happened before, or are you really just a sophomore coed out for adventure who got in over her head, a clever country bumpkin who conned a conniving but gullible rich Texan?”
Ponce’s eye narrowed and his voice assumed a new malevolence. “The time for make-believe is over. Drop your gun and walk into the cage or I will kill the gorilla.” He cocked the hammer.
T.A. lowered her pistol, tucked her chin submissively, and stepped sideways into the cage. For a split second Ponce was partially hidden by the frozen Hafiz. T.A. dove back to her left, pointing the pistol at Ponce, and fired as she hit the ground and rolled!
She hit him right between the eyes. She fired again! Thwoot! Thump! The second shot hit him just below the collar. Balloons of color blossomed on his forehead and his chest. Odd, she thought, the color that blossomed was green.
S
imultaneously Hafiz I. Coca came to, whirled, waving his arms, and ran screaming from the cage, slamming the door behind him! Garganzo roared to life with a thunderous boom and ran after Hafiz! The door latch slammed closed right in front of the silverback, who grabbed the bars on either side and bent them like paper clips. The next time that door would be opened would be with the Jaws of Life.
Ponce thought he’d been killed. He dropped his gun and began reeling about like a bad guy in a B Western movie who was allowed twelve seconds in the scene in which to die. Blinded by the shot between the eyes, he staggered, clutching his face.
“I had always hoped to die in the cage with my tigers. The death of a true warrior. Quick, where’s my whip? I want to die with my whip in my hand!” He dropped to his knees. “There is no pain, everything is crystal clear, I can see a long, dark tunnel with a light at the end. It is so beautiful, so peaceful.”
T.A. looked at her gun curiously. Without thinking, she shot Ponce again, this time in the pant leg. A bright yellow blotch appeared where she hit him. She fired again. The result was a fluorescent orange blotch on his white shirt.
Her first thought was that Ponce was an alien bleeding Technicolor blood; then she tipped the pistol and a blue paintball rolled out of the barrel.
Ponce’s tiger-tamer pistol was lying in the sawdust less than ten feet from her. She rolled sideways in Ponce’s direction and snagged it.
By now Ponce had lain down on his side and was trying to remember Hamlet’s last words.
“Shoot him!” a voice shouted.
T.A. raised her eyes and saw the gorilla advancing on Ponce. Lick stood outside the cage shaking the jammed door.
“Shoot him, Teddie!” Lick shouted again.
Ponce looked up. His mind cleared quickly. “Shoot him!” he, too, shouted.
The gun was shaking in her hand. In three quick steps she placed herself between the gorilla and Ponce. The gorilla stopped less than four feet from her. T.A. lowered the pistol and looked down.
The gorilla was very agitated. He stood to his full height, opened his fearsome mouth, displaying a set of saber-toothed tusks, and let out a locomotive roar! Ponce, still behind T.A., lunged and grabbed the gun from her hand and fell back. The gorilla, with a strong backhand, swept T.A. off her feet and knocked her eight feet away. Then he was on Ponce like a mink on Marilyn Monroe. He picked him up by one ankle and swung him around his head like a helicopter blade. On one particularly painful revolution, Garganzo leaned a fraction too close to the cage and Ponce’s head rattled the bars like the two of clubs pinned to a bicycle spoke.
Finally Garganzo stopped spinning and tossed Ponce straight up in the air. Ponce grabbed the steel bars at the top of the cage and managed to get a leg wrapped around one. There he clung like a three-toed sloth. Garganzo stared up at him, took a lazy swat at Ponce’s hanging leg, but missed. It was too high to reach. He turned his attention back to the inert body in the sawdust on the floor.
“Who’s got a gun?” yelled Lick as he shook the hopelessly twisted door.
“I’ll find one,” said Cody, and he disappeared through the gathering crowd. He was about to head back outside when he practically knocked down Al, who was just stepping inside the room.
“What’s the problem here, Pilgrim?” asked the old man pleasantly.
“Al! Where you been?” screamed Lick. “Teddie’s in this cage with that gorilla! Get a gun! We’ve got to stop him before he kills her!”
“Now hold up, young Lick. Get a grip. He’s just lookin’ at her,” said the old man.
Lick stopped and looked into the cage. The gorilla was standing over an inert T.A. Unconscious, maybe; hurt, probably; in danger, no doubt.
The old man started playing a little rhythm on the bars and whistling.
“What the—” Lick started to say. Then he saw the gorilla turn his gaze back toward them.
The old man started singing along with his gorilla rap:
“See that sweet girl on the floor, oompa, oompa, oompa, oom,
Right there by that other door, poompa, poompa, poompa, poom.
It don’t take no wise old sage, roompa, roompa, roompa, room,
To get through the backdoor cage, stoompa, stoompa, stoompa, stoom.”
Garganzo had now turned around to get a good view of the old man and his mesmerizing percussion act.
The old man’s plan sank into Lick’s overloaded brain. “Okay,” he said, nodding his head. “I get it. Keep him busy, Al, I’m comin’ in the back way.”
Teddie Arizona had blacked out for less than thirty seconds. When she became groggily aware of her surroundings, she found herself looking up at the massive gorilla in his knuckle-dragging stance above her. She willed herself to remain motionless.
A plaintive whimpering from high above her carried on the air like a squeaking swamp cooler. Lick was yelling excitedly. She heard a rhythmic banging on the bars accompanied by whistling, then singing.
“Would somebody send out for a banana, please,” asked the old man politely. Then he returned to his gorilla rap.
“Pay no mind to Teddie A., toompa, toompa, toompa, toom,
She’ll only make your hair turn gray, voompa, voompa, voompa, voom.
We will rescue her right quick, whoompa, whoompa, whoompa, whoom.
Look behind you, here comes Lick! Zoompa, zoompa, zoompa, zoom.”
“Dadgummit, Al,” said Pickhandle, “you’ll give it away! Be careful what you say.”
“Right,” said Al, realizing that if Pickhandle could comprehend his coded rap message, it was entirely possible the gorilla could as well. But Garganzo, swaying gently to the beat, simply continued staring at Al.
T.A. slowly rolled her head to the side and spied Lick crawling down the tiger tunnel that connected to the cage. She managed a weak smile as Lick silently reached the back entrance to the cage. He was now six feet from her.
Lick quietly raised the sliding back door and eased into the cage on his hands and knees. He reached for her hand.
Suddenly, the old man sneezed! The crowd gasped! Garganzo shook himself out of his trance and lifted T.A. off the sawdust floor so quick her head snapped back. He roared, then lifted her over his head as if he was going to throw her across the cage.
Lick pushed off the cage wall and hit the gorilla with a shoulder-crunching body block to the stomach. Lick bounced backwards just as T.A. tumbled from Garganzo’s grasp. T.A. fell on top of him like a slamming car trunk just as Ponce lost his grip and fell from the ceiling into Garganzo’s open arms.
T.A. had had enough. She whirled on Garganzo and picked up the whip Ponce had dropped. Using the heavy, blunt handle end, she took a swing at him.
“I’m trying to save you, you ungrateful thickheaded pie-faced primate! It’s no wonder you’re becoming extinct! I’ve put myself through humiliation, heartbreak, heartburn, and horrific horrible hazards to save you and your unrelated, unthinking, unable, Feed-Me-I’m-Yours, moronic, mentally unsophisticated mammalian mothers of the Endangered Species Club! Get your act together, I can’t do it alone!”
Each expostulation was accompanied by a resounding thunk or whack of the whip. Garganzo used Ponce to block each blow. Finally T.A. ran out of steam. Garganzo was backed up against the bars, Ponce cringing in his arms. Lick was sitting upright in the sawdust out of the line of hellfire.
T.A. took a deep breath. Her shoulders fell. The white lab coat was ripped in two down the back and draped off her arms like angel wings. Pieces of sawdust speckled her wild hair. Her lip was bleeding. She stared at Garganzo, trying to regain her composure.
“It’s all right, boy. I just got carried away,” she said in a calm voice. Then to Ponce she said, “From you, I don’t want much.”
Ponce mustered a moment of bravado. “You won’t get out of here alive, you little—”
T.A. screamed at the top of her lungs. A collective chill ran down the multiple spines gathered in earshot, including that of Gorilla gorilla. Garganzo thrust Ponce
out in front of him in self-defense, holding the tiger tamer by the neck and thigh. T.A. brought the butt of the whip down hard on Ponce’s presented rear end. Ponce stifled his scream. His eyes were bulging and he was making gagging sounds.
“It’s okay, gorilla,” T.A. said, breathing heavily. “It’s okay.” Then to Ponce, “It is okay, isn’t it?” She looked at him quizzically.
Ponce gagged again.
“What?” she asked. “I can’t understand you.”
Ponce gagged again, his face turning redder.
“Maybe if you’d nod your head, I’d know you understood,” she suggested.
Ponce struggled to nod his head. Garganzo didn’t like that, so he shook him fiercely, causing Ponce’s head to bob.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “All right, gorilla, relax.”
Garganzo did. He released his chokehold on Ponce, dangling the tiger tamer by one foot like a doll.
T.A. slowly squatted down so she could speak to Ponce. “From you I would like a promise that you will never keep endangered species again. Since your promise is worth nothing, being as how you are a dishonorable man, in one month I am calling the FBI, the CIA, the Humane Society, the Rotary Club, whoever is in charge of the Endangered Species Act. I will tell them that there are reports that you’re holding these animals captive. You will return the millions you have already taken from these high-dollar scumbags you suckered into the hunt.”
“What about the money you took?” he gasped out.
“That money will be my insurance. For now you’ll have to cover the debit from your own account. You stay clean and out of the endangered-species business, and I’ll give you all your money back in ten years. You come after me or the animals in any way, and letters go out to every major newspaper and every animal rights organization you can shake a stick at. That’s my deal. Take it or leave it—and all your money.
“Anything else?” asked T.A., looking around at Lick and then at the old man, who still stood outside the bars.