Jungle Horses

by Scott Adlerberg

  Back through the channel themselves, out to the sea, a swim along the rocks till they reached the shore and rested there on the white sand. They lay in the shade, near the forest’s edge, to avoid cooking in the sun. And when they got moving again, beginning their trek up the rising path ridged with tire tracks from the jeep, they tried to keep to the pools of shadow cast by the overarching trees.

  June said she was hungry and Arthur himself felt rumbling in his stomach, but neither could say what they’d find once they arrived at the house. If outraged still, Cripps might be waiting for them with his gun, plotting to do to each of them what he’d done to the keeper. If depressed by yesterday’s events, he might greet them in the spirit of rapprochement so they could all determine what to do next. The keeper had died without lifting his curse on Cripps, and as far as June and Arthur could guess, this meant that Cripps would remain impotent. He’d have no hope of ever again absorbing the horses’ energy aura and June and Arthur couldn’t envision him standing by and living with them while they carried on an affair.

  Of course, there was something else to think about: Cripps might be dead now, too. The horses might have killed him already. This would simplify everything, but June said they really shouldn’t hope for her husband’s death.

  They’d reached the top of the hill and stepped off the path. Crouched behind a thorn bush, they stared across the yard at the stilt-supported house and contemplated how best to proceed. Cripps was sprawled in the white wicker chair on the veranda--in front of him the telescope, beside him a bottle of rum--and on his lap he had the revolver. Since leaving the cove he’d changed into shorts and his green service cap, and even from across the lawn they could tell how red he was from the drinking, how haggard from lack of sleep. He’d positioned himself on the porch, evidently to have an overview of the island, but June and Arthur disagreed on why he was waiting and why with the gun.

  “To use it on us,” June said.

  “I don’t think so. He’s scared the horses will come.”

  They could walk across the yard, out in the open, and risk whatever would happen. They could stay in the bushes and go around the shed and enter the house by the back door, trying to take Cripps by surprise and wrest the gun away from him. But after whispered discussion on these points they opted to attempt a middle course, with June electing to approach from the front, as a distraction, while Arthur crept around behind.

  “He won’t shoot me,” June said. “He’ll want to know where you are.”

  Arthur hurried off, picking through the bushes. Nearby he heard snorting, rustling in the foliage, and he knew then the horses were close, perhaps in preparation for a rush on the house to get the man who’d killed their keeper. Even if he took the revolver from Cripps and neutralized Cripps as a danger, he and June would still have to think about what to do with her husband, where to put him for his own safety. His departure from the island would be the simplest thing (he could go next week on the supply plane), but Arthur doubted he’d accept defeat and leave behind his wife and her lover.

  Arthur slipped out of the underbrush. He ran behind the crumbling shed. It was a tiny structure of unpainted wood where tools for the house and junk were stored, and Arthur paused to consider going in and grabbing one of the rusted machetes. But then he continued, pressed for time, knowing that June must have popped into the open already, and he moved past the shed and across more grass and finally came to the splintery steps going from the yard to the house’s back door.

  Slow now, he thought, easy does it. He made it inside and climbed more steps, and as he tiptoed down the hall he heard Cripps talking on the porch, berating June in a bitter voice slurred from the alcohol. Cripps called her a whore and other insults, his assertions undercut by a ring of self-pity, and Arthur understood that June was playing it smart, letting her husband prattle on so he’d remain focused on her.

  “I ought to shoot you. Bloody hell.”

  Ahead was the opening to the veranda and Arthur rushed through it at full speed. He swerved left and toward the voice and found that Cripps was still seated, holding the gun. June was standing down in the yard, immobile, looking up. Arthur let his momentum carry him and crashed straight into the turning Cripps, and as he and Cripps went tumbling down, the gun slid across the veranda floor.

  Entangled, they fought, and Cripps scratched, flailed, and kicked. But he had indeed been drinking too much, all night perhaps, and could not sustain his fury. Like a person giving up, he stopped fighting. Arthur got off a punch to his face. Blood spurted from Cripps’ mouth and he sank back against the veranda railing, exhausted, a spent force. Then, as he began to moan, pawing at his cut, June arrived on the veranda and she herself picked up the gun while Arthur rose to his feet.

  “He won’t be a problem anymore,” June said. “He’s too pathetic.”

  From that day on, Cripps stayed inside, lying in bed. Or he would keep to the veranda where he’d lay in the huge hammock Arthur had carried up from the yard. With the horses running loose again he was afraid to wander as far as the yard, and he kept himself drunk from the hour he awoke till the time he went to sleep. Pallid as ever, grotesquely thin, he had dark pouches under his eyes, and he’d given up shaving and combing his hair. He acknowledged his defeat and said that he wanted to leave the island. They, June and Arthur, could have it to themselves, and he hoped they caught malaria. He hoped the horses died of a disease that rotted their bodies from within. In six days, in five, in four, the supply plane from Guyana would arrive, and no, they didn’t even have to suggest it; he intended to be sitting on that plane when it flew back to the mainland.

  ‘Cripps is done here,’ Arthur wrote to Vaughn, ‘but June and I will be staying on.’

  He then recounted, in great detail, all that had just happened on the island, and he urged Vaughn, ‘...to come to the island yourself. Come again and bring Jenny so you two can see what I mean when I talk about the horses’ energy aura. I don’t have to remind you of how sexually dead I was in England for you to appreciate how this place with the horses has changed me.’

  He knew that he’d done the job he’d been sent for--to observe the horses with Cripps and June and gather information on the creatures. But he could not bring himself to leave now that he’d rediscovered his vigor. The island’s heat no longer bothered him, the abundance of smells didn’t make him dizzy anymore, and each day he went swimming and rejoiced in the pleasure of having a robust body again. June, too, with the return of the horses, had recovered her vibrancy in full, and they would make love almost anywhere: on the beach, in the forest, in the water or house. England, for both, seemed a planet removed and in that world the air was gray, the buildings were gray, the people walked with gray expressions set against the cold and rain. Their wish was to live on the island for as long as it pleased them, but they would have to clarify for Vaughn why they felt they needed to stay. After all, he was paying for their provisions. In London June had been a friend of Vaughn’s, and Arthur was aware of what he owed Vaughn for having paid his gambling debt when his life had been on the line. Neither, therefore, wanted to exploit Vaughn for his wealth, and in writing the conclusion to his sheaf of reports, Arthur hammered home the point that he and June wanted Vaughn to visit, to fly over to the island with Jenny.

  ‘Only by coming,’ he insisted, ‘will you understand why the horses here should be left alone. They’re unique, and to capture them for study or breeding, as you’ve considered doing, would be a grave misfortune.’

  Arthur readied his letters for mailing. He bundled the collection and put it in a shoebox, which he sealed with wax. Tomorrow the plane from Guyana would come and he would give the letters to the pilot. That man, as he’d done in the past for Cripps and June, would post the mail from Bridgetown, and in a week or two Vaughn would have it. But Cripps would be going to England also, in all likelihood by plane, and he would want to meet with Jenny and Vaughn to tell his version of events on the island. As a matter of fact, Cripps would prob
ably beat the report to England, and to entrust Cripps with the letters, to ask him to deliver the letters to Vaughn so they could reach Vaughn faster, would be asinine. Cripps might burn the report or blot parts out or claim he’d lost it, and suspicious as Vaughn might be of him, there would be nothing Vaughn could do. So somehow, Arthur realized, the report had to get to England before Cripps did, or he and June had to stop Cripps from going on the plane tomorrow.

  “I agree,” June said, when Arthur explained the problem to her. “He’ll run straight to Vaughn when he gets to England.”

  “And say....”

  “Anything. I don’t trust him. It’ll be his word against yours when Vaughn finally reads the report.”

  That could not happen, they resolved, and they hashed out a plan there and then.

  Cripps slept in the hammock that night and Arthur and June went to the shed and cleared it of all useful tools. When Cripps awoke in the morning, Arthur shoved the revolver in his face and ordered him to start marching. Cripps obeyed while asking questions, while shaking his head, while trying to get his brain to work, and not until they reached the shed and he saw the waiting open door did he comprehend what was happening.

  “What the devil are you doing? I’m leaving today.”

  “We can’t allow that,” Arthur said. “Not yet.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Cripps turned to face Arthur, but Arthur poked his back with the gun.

  “We’ll feed you, we’ll give you your rum, there’s something we put inside for your toilet. But you’ll have to stay here awhile.”

  “Why?”

  “Safety precautions.”

  Cripps looked up and over the shed as if he was thinking of running, tearing into the bush for refuge. But in there, he knew, were the horses, and just what they would love to have was the chance to rip him apart.

  “Go in,” said June, who’d stepped from the shed. “All it means is a little more time lying in your alcoholic stupor.”

  “But the plane…..”

  “We’ll talk to the pilot about when to come back.”

  He sat on the cot they’d fixed up for him and Arthur padlocked him in.

  Chapter 10

  For two whole weeks June and Arthur waited, anxious to receive Vaughn’s response to his letters. Or would Vaughn simply come to the island and look things over again for himself? Restocked with supplies, June and Arthur continued to enjoy their life on the island, and yet they also couldn’t forget that their days living there might be numbered. If Vaughn cut off their funds, they were finished. They’d be done on the island – unless as a team they refused to go and tried to subsist on the island’s natural bounty. Even an existence like that might be better than parting from the horses and returning to England, though Vaughn and Jenny would certainly think they had gone off the deep end.

  “We’ll see,” they said. “We’ll see,” and they unlocked the shed so Cripps could drink outside again, in the veranda hammock. When the plane from Guyana next came, they promised, he could go.

  A plane did come not long after that, appearing in the western sky. June and Arthur were lounging on a beach and they could see that it was bigger than the plane that brought supplies. The supply plane wasn’t due for a week, and as this one got lower and lower, they both had identical thoughts: Vaughn, Jenny, London, the end…

  Quickly they rose, quickly they put their towels and books into the jeep. With Arthur at the wheel, they drove along the trail that cut through the forest. They went by several idling horses, who neighed at them as if in greeting, and by the time they got to the landing cove, they saw indeed that the plane was there, that Jenny and Vaughn, baggage in hand, were walking ashore. Jenny waved and Vaughn smiled, but June and Arthur didn’t react with enthusiasm. Confronted with what they’d thought they wanted, a visit from the pair, they felt acute anxiety. They’d had the island to themselves all this time, a sexual life without restrictions, and now they would have to explain their behavior and show Jenny and Vaughn around. They could only hope that the jungle horses’ energy aura would rub off on the visitors and that by this Vaughn would be convinced not to interfere with the pack or have the island changed in any way.

  “Well,” said Jenny. “Here they are.”

  Both she and Vaughn looked well. She still with her oval face and pinkish glow, he with his straight silver hair and the expression of a hawk. It seemed too fitting that Vaughn at least wore the gray colors of London, though Jenny, the old Africa hand, was wearing a white safari outfit. Arthur accepted the embrace Jenny gave him, and kissed her once on the left cheek, and then he and Vaughn fell into a hug while June and Jenny exchanged stares.

  “Let’s put our bags in the car,” Vaughn said. “The pilot’s coming with us.”

  At the house, where Cripps, dead drunk, lay in the hammock, Jenny and Vaughn took the room where Arthur had slept. He now slept in the room June had shared with her husband, and the Guyanese pilot, taking the cot, said he’d sleep in the hall. Vaughn made it clear that he wanted to spend no more than a couple of nights on the island, and he said he planned to tour the island to compare his impressions of the jungle horses with what Arthur had written to him.

  “Your report was thorough,” he said, “and you did a good job despite the unpleasantness that happened. But I’m the owner of the horses and this island and I’ll be the one to decide what we do. Leave them alone here or have them studied. Maybe do something with them for breeding.”

  Accordingly, he toured for two days, traveling around the island with Jenny. Arthur and June offered to go with them, but Vaughn declared it would be better if only he and Jenny went so they could experience for themselves what Arthur had described in his letters. He believed Arthur, he said, but sought verification, and Arthur and June waited, relaxing at the house with the Guyanese pilot or walking down the hill to the beach.

  What’s Jenny thinking? Arthur would wonder. How does she regard all this? He wanted to pick at Jenny’s mind and see what she thought of his rebirth, and when he and June weren’t making love they would discuss his wife and marriage. Since coming to the island, Jenny had been civil to June, but not once had his wife initiated a direct conversation with his lover. If nothing else, Jenny had to be surprised that he’d rediscovered his potency, and even though he had never complained about her closeness to Vaughn, perhaps his attachment to another woman did somehow eat at her.

  Finally Vaughn, on his third night there, said he had made up his mind. He’d formed his judgment about the horses. Though he’d been near them for just a brief time, he was feeling what Arthur had expressed, a transformation inside his body, a heat that enhanced his sensation of vigor. During the previous two days he and Jenny had been touching each other constantly – in the jeep as they drove, in the forest as they walked, at night (most passionately) in bed. When describing the horses, Arthur had exaggerated nothing, and everything about them would have to be studied more. He would, Vaughn said, contact zoologists and other animal experts and he would leave it up to them for how best to examine the creatures. Maybe they would work here on the island, maybe they’d transport the horses to England. But regardless of where they set up their lab, these creatures were too remarkable, too much of a find, to ignore.

  “I haven’t asked you to ignore them,” Arthur said, “but to let them be. Let them stay wild.”

  “That’s something a kid would say.”

  “Don’t have to be offensive,” June said.

  “I’m not,” Vaughn said. “I’m talking brass tacks.”

  “But what’s to be gained by studying them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something in them, something in their sweat or blood. Imagine if there is, and an aphrodisiac can be extracted. A real aphrodisiac and not some silly potion.”

  “You’d make a fortune,” Arthur said.

  “Precisely.”

  Arthur argued in defense of the horses, but Vaughn reminded him of why he’d been sent to the island i
n the first place. Deep in debt because of his gambling, Arthur had accepted the job on the island saying he would do what Vaughn asked – study the horses – and now that was done. Vaughn felt grateful, but Arthur should not become sentimental. The horses, Vaughn said, were property and he had the right to use them as he saw fit. They’d come with the island as an unexpected bonus (since he had bought the island to develop a resort), and he’d be a crack-brained businessman not to try to make the most of what he owned. Moreover, he added, from the point of view of science, wouldn’t people be fascinated by the horses? Finding them here was akin to discovering a brand new species, and one could say they almost had a duty to report the existence of these horses to the world.

  “We’re not children,” Vaughn said. “The horses are not our pets.”

  Discussion closed, dinner over, and Vaughn stood up from the kitchen table. He left the room to go pack his bags. Jenny, after shrugging at Arthur, got up and went with him, and outside on the veranda Cripps started clucking and laughing.

  “Isn’t he pleased?” June said.

  Vaughn had told the pilot they’d all be flying off in the morning and June and Arthur set their thoughts on the night ahead. One last night of forest sex, jungle love, one last night to absorb the energy coming off the horses, and not long after they’d be in London, cold grey drizzly London.

  “I do owe Vaughn a lot,” Arthur said.

  “Your life really.”

  “And I guess we can be together in England.”

  “Why not? Your wife has Vaughn.”

  “But.....”

  “I know.”

  “We can’t just let them do that to the horses.”

  “Or to us,” June said. “I’m not ready to say we’ve lost.”

  Later, in the forest, they could hear horses running through the bushes as they undressed on the grass. They could feel the horse eyes watching them while they rolled and bucked on the ground. The heat inside them would rise and rise until the exquisite moment of release, mutual eruption, and after a short interval for rest, for cooling down, the heat would start to rise again. They might, Arthur joked, be found dead in the morning, two bodies charred black from the fires of lust, and it was this image of themselves dead, burnt in the flames of their love and desire, that gave them an inkling of what they should do. Let Jenny and Vaughn return to London, that life, and let the useless Cripps go with them. They would remain a part of this island and try to save the horses from subjection.