MAGICATS II

by Gardner Dozoi

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Then there’s a panic, you know how they are. The tiger’s everywhere. In the village. In the other village. Up a tree, in the fields, down the well—He was going out the next night, or that’s how I heard it, torches and beaters, the whole bloody show. A little before dawn he was lying there with the gin bottle for company and—whap! One of his beaters found him and ran out screaming. It was mucky.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Doctor at Chadhur was called in to look at the body. I know Hari pretty well. Second-hand news, but reliable.”

  “It sounds unbelievable.”

  The fat man didn’t take offense. He shrugged. “It does, doesn’t it. But the Bombay papers had it, you know, a paragraph or two.”

  “How long ago was all this?”

  “A couple of months. Well, that’s life. I could do with something cool.”

  The dim wild cry of sunset worship was beginning to rise from distant mosques. I excused myself to the fat man and went away to get a drink alone.

  I digested Pettersun’s death slowly in the shadow of the turning fans, like huge insects in the ceiling. How else must a hunter die, but logically under the hoof or claw or fang of the entity he has so long himself stood over, his foot on its neck, the rifle smoking. Shot it in India. Though he had not been one for tigerskin rugs.

  I hadn’t, as I said, known him well. I hadn’t liked him, God forbid, or admired him, except possibly for his bravery, for there had been stories of that I had heard from other sources. I suppose to some extent he fascinated me, the forbidden fruit of what our own ethic tells us is wrong, which to another is only an ordinary facet of existence. I’d met him at a sprawling English party in Bombay, full of men in penguin costume and women in gold lame dresses, all of them brown as tanned leather, which made the coffee flesh of the waiters look almost blue. We spoke generally for a while, part of a group, which gradually drifted away, leaving Pettersun alone with me. He then said, smiling, as if he’d been waiting the chance, “You don’t like me much do you.” No question, no aggression; a statement. I said nothing. He swirled the last of his drink, drank it and said, “Or rather, you don’t like what I do. Orion the Hunter. The wicked man who kills the nice animals.”

  I shrugged, considering the neatest way of escaping, which hadn’t yet suggested itself. One of the waiters came by with more drinks, and Pettersun took off four, the fourth of which he handed to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. He drank the first of his new drinks straight down, and said, “Call me names, if you like. I don’t shoot men.”

  “Just tigers,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  “Just tigers? A tiger is never just tiger.”

  “For sport,” I said.

  “No,” he said. Still the smile, throwing me, enjoying it? “I’d never call it that.”

  This was becoming boring and uncomfortable.

  “Well,” I said, helpfully, “a maneater obviously—”

  “So you won’t stand up for your principles,” he said, and drank that second drink. “You think I’m an offense on God’s green earth, but you’re not about to tell me so.”

  “Mr. Pettersun,” I said, “what you do is your problem.”

  “Afraid I’ll hit you if you speak up, break the chiseled nose, is that it? I won’t. I’m a peaceable man. I like booze, preferably free. I kill tigers. Note, I didn’t say I liked killing them. That’s it. The sum of my parts.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. As I turned, he put the third glass into my other hand, which duly stayed me, because he had obviously wanted it himself. “Have a drink?” he said.

  I stood there with a glass in either hand, looking at him, wondering.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I think,” he said, “I want to talk to you, tell you—about the very thing you don’t want to hear about.”

  “In other words, you want to be a nuisance.”

  “No.”

  “Convert me? Not a chance.”

  “Well of course not,” Pettersun said. “There’s no pleasure in conversion. And debate is normally pointless, isn’t it?” I stayed where I was, caught despite myself because he had said something I myself believed. “So, what can it be?”

  I started to drink the drink he had given me. I said: “Drunken egomania needing to find a voice?”

  He laughed. “This affair stinks,” he said. “I know a place on the waterfront where a girl dances with cobras on all the tables. You like that kind of thing?”

  “Yes, I sometimes like that kind of thing.”

  In the “place” where the barefoot girl did her dance every two hours, swishing her black hair like a horse’s tail, the milked snakes knotted on her arms, at her waist, we drank something alcoholic curdled in lassi. I wasn’t even then sure what had made me go there with him. It would be easy enough, with hindsight, to say I sensed he needed to confess, last rites before execution. As someone I once knew said, there is something of the priest about me, somehow, somewhere, apparent both to myself and, under particular circumstances, to others.

  The preliminary conversation rambled, I don’t recollect much of it, but when he began to talk to me, as he had said he wished to, there came a kind of clarity which I do remember and maybe always shall. No sentences are left, but I retain their kernel. For this was when the free-masonry of the hunt was made known to me, and I was just drunk enough that it came in over or under the barriers of my mind and ethics, and I understood, and I still understand, though I won’t condone. Condone it less, probably, since I saw the attraction, the religious element, the extraordinary bonding that might occur (at least in the human’s mind), which must then be sought after like a drug. While it was some bloody old duffer with his rifle and his notions of sport it stayed safely and obscenely remote. But the sorcerous quality of the ritual of the hunt, arcane and special, and there, I suspect, in many of us, had a seductive frisson that had to be resisted—which in fact made it all the more repulsive—the venus flytrap.

  I recall, too, well into the night, staggering back along by the seashore, the black water and the towering ghosts of apartment buildings, and the moon like ivory, like the ivory inlay on the rifle, of which he carried a snapshot, just as other men carry photos of their women or their children, or lacking those, their dogs.

  In the morning, waking with a hangover, I thought it had been a waste of time, ridiculous. But very soon the teachings—for he had taught me his philosophy, under the wild fig tree of the dancing girl’s shade—came back. Hunter and hunted, the stalker and the prey, woven by reeds, by leaves, by shadows, by blood thirst and fear, and by desire. And which was which?

  Then getting up to put my head in the basin full of lukewarm water, I thought angrily: Rubbish. A man with a gun. What chance had the wretched tiger? Who did Pettersun think he was fooling? But he hadn’t been trying to fool me. He had only been saying, This is how it is, for some, for me. Right or wrong. This. I had never had much patience with Hemingway, but I reread The Old Man and the Sea a week later, in the blazing Indian veranda. The relationship between the fisherman and the great beautiful hooked fish—aside from necessity, thick-headed, wanton, unaware—anything its detractors will prove it—but powerfully illustrative, in its way, of the mystique Pettersun had revealed to me. But if it is possible to murder with honor and love and pity, then all the more reason to stop.

  I never met Pettersun again. A few months later, the fat man met me instead on the Memorial steps in Calcutta and said, “A tiger killed him. Funny business.”

  ###

  So, then. Just over twelve months later, doing this time some research on my own behalf, I ended up more or less randomly in Chadhur.

  Once I had my own professional affairs in hand, I went over to the hospital building. Here I loitered, pondering if I really wanted or intended to chase the matter. But someone asked me, as they do Europeans, who I was looking for. I replied
with the name of the doctor the fat man had called familiarly, “Hari.”

  Graceful and gregarious. Doctor Hari invited me into his office for very good coffee, and I broached my subject tentatively. The response was not tentative at all. Doctor Hari had had for Pettersun all the rage of the good physician for the intransigent patient. “If the tiger had not done for him, his alcoholism would have seen to it. His system was in revolt. On the path he had chosen he had a year or less.”

  “But it’s true, then. I heard the animal got into—”

  “—the bungalow and attacked him in bed? Quite true. Do you have a strong stomach?”

  Pettersun had been disemboweled, the heart and throat torn out—the rest of the corpse had been bitten, rent, virtually slit like a sack. “It was quite a mess. The villagers are used to death and mishap, but they were terribly afraid and superstitious. I too have seen a number of men killed by tigers or panthers. Never a body exactly in this condition, and all uneaten.”

  “Then it wasn’t the tiger he was out to get?”

  “Well, perhaps. The second village trapped a tiger about ten days after—an old tiger turned to man-flesh, as they sometimes do, because men are easier game. I should say this tiger was not strong enough to have done to the body what had been done. Naturally, sometimes they will kill and not eat, but then not maul so savagely, splitting open, almost a dissection. While the room was untouched.”

  “How did it get in?”

  “The door was open. He had left it open—wide, like an invitation, one might almost say. Very strange. Very unpleasant. And sad. There are other villages in the area with cause to be grateful to Pettersun.”

  I had a dead feeling, the letdown of anticlimax. I didn’t know what I had expected to hear. Then, as I was leaving, Doctor Hari said, “Of course, the drinking had made him do curious things. On the wall of the bungalow, for example, he had written something in big letters. A poem of some sort, some modern English or American verse, unrhyming. About a tiger, naturally. The villagers still refuse to go near the house at night.”

  ###

  To go out to the bungalow was the next thing to do, so I put off doing it. Pettersun’s death was stale a year now, and nothing to me or to do with me. My interest did not seem purely ghoulish, but probably was. Against that, I knew I couldn’t leave without following events to their proper conclusion. Finally I got a car and took to the new highway, which bore me all the way to the town of the fat man’s tale. From there the wisest course was horseback, colonial style, along the dusty road and into the blistered, streaked, striped heart of the jungle. Here I almost gave myself entirely to the spirit of the place, the intense enclosure of the massive trees skirted with broad leaves and thickets of bamboo. A few times women passed me on the track, walking what I call the sari-walk, wound in their jewel-bright garments, basket or pot on head. They were lean and proud and sometimes beautiful beyond measure. Presently I saw a village, downhill in a valley, where the jungle broke and scattered. Grain stood straight up at the sky, children ran about, a herd of buffalo wallowed in summer mud.

  The sky had turned briefly to a wall of glowing maroon beyond the trees, when I reached the bungalow—and nearly missed it. The jungle, as in Kipling, had been let in, vines and high grass all over everything, barely the glint of dirty-white veranda posts to show me. There was a cookhouse round at the back and a couple of huts, but these also were overgrown; the roofs had fallen in.

  I stirred about for a while, the horse cropping the grass, unconcerned. The doors to the house had been boarded up by authority, and I had no intention of forcing them in the dark. There seemed nothing dangerous abroad, but as the night smoked through the forest, I remounted and made my way back to the village. Here I was greeted with curiosity amounting to joy. I didn’t mention my errand or that I had been to the bungalow, merely did a little trading over the rice and spiced vegetables. Later a child of five appeared, who spoke to the men in Hindi of his wife and family, the family cow and goat, the ailment of his youngest daughter. It was the memory of the recent past life. Such things are not uncommon in India. The child’s mother presently came in and comforted him, telling him all would be well. He would soon forget prior responsibilities, as this life and its obligations claimed him. When the child had been taken off, I mentioned tigers, and at once a deep silence fell. The men looked at one another. Eventually someone told me, “There are no tigers here. They have gone away.”

  “But surely,” I said, “someone was attacked by a tiger in these parts, about a year ago . . . quite a well-known hunter—Porter, Potter—some name like that.”

  “Yes,” said another gravely. “That tiger was killed. There are no more.”

  I looked at their gaunt, passionless faces, so handsome some of them, enduring all. Outside, across the space of nighttime earth, the forlorn child, burdened by obligations he could no longer uphold, slept on his mother’s breast. They had shared food with me and would shelter me, and I could force no more of my own wants on them. I didn’t sleep that night behind their safe stockade, lying listening to the rustle of leaves and stars. At first light I left, walking the horse through endless-seeming ranks of goats being arranged for milking, and girls walking to the well.

  Up in the jungle-heart the bungalow had not altered, still locked up in its boards and creepers. Leaving the tethered horse I forced one of the windows, and climbed through into what had been Pettersun’s sleeping room. The low Indian bed, its lacquer peeling and webbing broken, still stood dutifully at one wall, the rotted netting hanging down about it like cobwebs. Some shelves, a desk, a chair, these things remained, but no niceties, if there had ever been any. There was no idiosyncratic odor in the room. Becoming one with the invading jungle, it had the jungle smell, tinders and juices. Lianas had come through the foundations even, and covered the floor, so that any stains there were hidden.

  The verse Doctor Hari had told me of was on the wall facing the bed, written in paint with long letters that leaned in all directions. It was dark enough, I had trouble making any of it out. When I did, an unnerving pang of recognition went through me, still displaced. Pettersun had written this:

  Symmetry fearful thy frame could

  Eye? Or Hand Immortal—What?

  Night—the; of forests. The in—

  Bright burning Tiger! Tiger!

  I stood there, breathing audibly, startled, hearing the birds and the monkeys calling through the jungle, silently reading the words over, until suddenly, of course, that Tiger! Tiger! gave me the key. It was nothing else but Blake’s poem, but all bizarrely reversed, the last line first, the second to last second, second line third, first line last. And each word in each line also reversed, first word last, last first, and so on. Gibberish. No astonishment Hari had thought it some avant-garde piece coined in Greenwich Village. The punctuation, too, was scarcely Blake’s.

  “Madman,” I said aloud, jolted to an abrupt disgust and compassion neither of which had I thought to feel so forcibly, if at all. “Poor bloody drunken murdering madman.” And. having spoken, I read the nonsense on the wall also aloud, to the quiet box of bungalow held in noisy jungle.

  Something clicked in my brain as I did so. I stumbled mentally after it. Elusive, it was gone. In some preposterous manner, the lunatic reversal of the fragment of poem—made sense. As if, blindfolded, one touched a cat’s fur in darkness, not knowing, yet instinct to say: Ah, but this is—before the acceptable name came or light to disclose.

  Then, letting in the jungle, something else was let in. Standing there with a shaft of olive green sunlight on the vine carpet, I visualized the tawny shadow of death-by-night shouldering through the opened doorway. Every hair stood up on my body and my loins were cold and empty with horror. It was imperative to escape. I fled through the window, tearing skin and clothing, pursued by demons of the mind. Pettersun’s mind.

  When I had calmed down, I got on the horse and rode in the direction of the other village the fat man, and Doctor Hari, had info
rmed me of.

  The simple explanation of what happened next is that I misjudged my road, got off the track, blundered about and made things worse for myself, ending up the proverbial panic-stricken lost traveler of song and story. I suppose that is what happened, though generally I rarely lose my way, or if I do I regain it fairly quickly. Not so in this instance. The track all at once dissolved, and carefully retracing my way for some distance, or trying to, I failed to rediscover it. Various formations of trees, angles of illumination, which I had noted and which might have provided guidance, seemed mysteriously changed, though the greenish jungle sun streamed through and the shadows massed and the monkeys screamed to each other, all as they had been doing minutes before. If anything, something was at fault in my own perception.

  I fell into the pit of compounding my error by then defiantly pressing on. I was sure I would soon pick up the path again, discover a fresh one, or merely ride through a break in the foliage and so into the village, by a sort of serendipity. None of these things happened. In the end sheer heat and exhaustion forced me to halt, dismount in the shade and drink water. Here I very foolishly went to sleep for almost an hour, an idiotic thing to do. As a rule, the beasts of the forest do not attack sleeping creatures, but Pettersun had probably been asleep when so attacked—what price faith? Besides, snakes haunt the wilderness, and sometimes itinerant human beings, the worst predators of all.

  When I woke, irritated by everything, mostly myself, I had given up on my quest. The second village was plainly enchanted, and had vanished. Using the compass, and occasionally aided by glimpses of afternoon sun marking the west, I turned back toward the first village which was real. Although I had been floundering for some while and my bearings were hopelessly out, that group of huts and persons, and the reincarnated child, lay directly over to the east, and the tracks which led to and from the place were good. I had no doubts I should get there well before sunset.