by Mike Resnick
“Chicky?” I interrupted him.
“I always called her my little chickadee,” he explained. “Of course, that was before she done produced two ever littler ones.”
Well, we swapped life stories for the next hour, and he spent another hour asking me about the Clubfoot of Notre Dame and the Insidious Oriental Dentist and some of my other adventures and exploits and encounters, but if you’re reading this here account you probably already read them books so there’s no sense my repeating it all here. Anyway, I’d just brung him up to the present when Rama and Bella came out and clucked and gobbled at us, and he allowed as to how that meant dinner was ready, and we went inside and sat ourselves down at a table he’d made out of some defenseless tree that probably never did him no harm, and then the girls brought out a slab of meat that tasted as good as it smelled and a lot better than it looked, and we fell to feeding our faces.
When it was over MacNamarra lit up a cigar and told me that I’d brung him up to date about me, but I’d kind of left out the rest of the world, and he was sort of curious about it.
“For example,” he said, “did Woodrow Wilson keep us out of that little skirmish over in Europe?”
“For a while,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Only problem with all them foreigners is that they speak European and probably don’t believe in God and maybe eat their young, but other than that I can’t see that they’re all that much different from Americans except for being dumber and uglier.” He paused for a moment. “How about the fat guy with the girl’s name?”
“I ain’t quite sure who you’re talking about, Brother Corny,” I said.
“You know,” insisted MacNamarra. “He pitches for the Boston Red Sox. Calls himself Dolly or Honey, something like that.”
“You mean Babe Ruth?”
“That’s the feller!” he exclaimed. “I sure wouldn’t want to find myself alone in the men’s room with a guy called Babe. Whatever happened to him?”
“Traded to the Yankees, last I heard,” I told him.
“Good,” he said. “Ain’t no way Boston was ever going to win a pennant with a fat guy named Babe on the team.”
“Anything else you got a driving desire to know?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “You think my Rama and Bella could make it as Floradora girls?”
“Ain’t no Floradora girls no more,” I told him.
“Oh?” he asked, looking his disappointment. “What happened to ’em?”
“Talking pictures put ’em out of business,” I said.
“Talking pictures?” he repeated, kind of frowning.
“Like unto Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, but with talking,” I explained.
He threw back his head and laughed. “Talking pictures!” he guffawed. “By God, I’m gonna like having a son-in-law with a sense of humor!”
He began telling me about how he still had a pile of money in some Missouri and Oklahoma banks, except for the part he’d invested in Anaconda Copper, and I decided telling him about 1929 would just depress him, so I never brung it up.
We talked a bit more, and then he led me out to a tiny shed.
“Good night, Reverend,” he said. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you joining our little family.”
I heard a kind of snorting sound from the shed.
“Uh…I don’t want to sound unduly alarmed, Brother Corny,” I said, “but exactly what is residing in there?”
“Just Sadie, our pet pig,” he said. “Don’t mind her. She’s a right friendly sort, unless you get her mad.”
“Maybe I should just sleep in one of the houses,” I suggested.
“Rama lives in one and Bella lives in the other,” he said. “T’wouldn’t be moral, you spending the night under the same roof with one of ’em until after you’re married.”
Sadie grunted and the shed shook.
“Maybe I’ll just sleep on your rocking chair,” I suggested.
“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug. “If’n you don’t mind being et alive by bugs and having snakes crawl all over you, I can’t see why it should bother me neither.”
“On second thought, Brother Corny,” I said hastily, “I can see that Sadie’s a beloved member of the family, and I wouldn’t want her suffering no pangs of rejection.”
“Well, good for you, Reverend!” he said, slapping me on the back, which was starting to get more than a little sore from all these displays of friendship. “I like the way you think. Hell, build your tabernacle on the property here, and I just might join it. Probably get you three or four Indians, too, provided your religion ain’t got nothing against nudity or cannibalism or virgin sacrifice or any of them other little local customs.”
I thanked him for his concern and his confidence and his pig, and then I went off to spend the night with Sadie, who truth to tell smelled better and hogged the sleeping area less than some women I could name.
Came morning I wandered over for some breakfast, and Rama and Bella were all scrubbed up and looking their prettiest, than which not a lot of things and hardly no women were prettier, and MacNamarra asked me if I’d made my choice yet, and I told him I was still considering which of these lovely damsels I was going to grace with my hand in marriage, and I realized that I was going to have to come up with some kind of answer pretty soon, because while he smiled and allowed that it was a pretty tough decision, I noticed that his shotgun wasn’t never out of his reach.
I began reviewing my options. There were probably worse fates than marrying Bella and having an occasional friendly rendezvous with Rama, or vice versa. Hell, MacNamarra was so desperate to marry ’em off I don’t think he’d have raised any serious objections to me marrying both of ’em in the same modest little ceremony on his front porch — but I knew that sooner or later I’d get a little tired of bird talk. Probably in something under three minutes.
I could high-tail it for civilization, but I didn’t know where civilization was, and besides I wasn’t quite as young as I’d once been and I figgered it was mighty unlikely that I could outrun MacNamarra’s buckshot.
And then it occurred to me that there might very well be an alternative that didn’t involve getting hitched or getting shot. It wasn’t no sure thing, but it made a lot more sense than a long lifetime of chirping or a very short lifetime of no chirping.
“Hey, Brother Corny,” I said, “as long as I’m gonna spend the rest of my natural life here, how’s about me going out hunting with Rama and Bella and kind of getting the lay of the land?”
“Sure,” he said. “Whoever you marry, you figger to get her pregnant right away and keep her pregnant for years and years, so you might as well start acquainting yourself with the landscape.”
“Fine,” I said, standing up. “Ain’t no time like the present.”
“Girls,” said MacNamarra, “go with him so he don’t get hisself so lost that he can’t find his way back here. And if he tries to run off, fire two or three warning shots into his bow.”
“You mean across my bow,” I corrected him.
“I know what I mean,” he said. “Okay, girls, get a move on.”
Rama and Bella headed off toward the jungle, and I didn’t seem to have no choice but fall into step behind them. We wandered far and wide, to say nothing of high and low. Every now and then Bella would start gobbling and pointing, and sure enough there’s be a jaguar watching us from an overhanging branch, or Rama would begin clucking a blue streak and I’d see an anteater staring at us from behind some bushes.
But I wasn’t after jaguars or anteaters, nor any other fish or fowl. I never did find what I was looking for, and at day’s end we went back to the chartreuse mansions, and I reacquainted myself with Sadie, but we were off again the next morning, and the morning after that, going farther afield each time — and on the fifth day we finally ran into a couple of well-muscled good-looking young men, each wearing a little dinky loincloth and carrying a bow and arrows, and it was clear that they w
ere just about the right age for getting hitched.
Thank you, Lord, I said silently. Now I owe You one.
“Howdy,” I said to them when they became aware of our presence, and I could tell right off that they were smitten by Rama’s and Bella’s beauty. “I hope we ain’t intruding on your hunting grounds, and by the way where’s the nearest city?”
“Quack quack quack,” said the one on the left.
By God, Lord, I thunk, You outdone Yourself this time!
“Does your friend always talk like that?” I asked the one on the right.
“Squawk squawk squawk squawk squawk,” he said.
I took a quick look at the girls, and I could tell they’d already lost their hearts and were preparing to lose a couple of other things as well, and there wasn’t no doubt that the young men were hopelessly in love too.
The five of us went back to the chartreuse mansions, and when MacNamarra saw what I had in tow, and especially when he heard what I was bringing back for his girls, he was so happy he forgot all about shooting me. He broke out his drinkin’ stuff again, and before dark I presided at the ceremony what joined the bird boys and the bird girls together for all eternity, and then I stood clear just in case Brother Corny had a tractor and was going to let the girls use it to plight their troughs, and after spending one more night in Sadie’s company while each girl honeymooned in a chartreuse mansion, I announced that it was my intention to be on my way, because when you’re a man of the cloth whose business is saving sinners, you just naturally got to go to where the sinners congregate, and that meant a city.
“I’ll come with you,” said MacNamarra.
“I’d of thunk you’d be the happiest man in the world,” I said.
“I am.”
“Then why are you leaving now that you got both of your girls married off?”
“Truth to tell, Reverend,” he answered, “that bird talk was driving me crazy, and now suddenly there’s going to be twice as much of it as there was. I got to go where they speak some human language.”
“Well, it’d be un-Christian to refuse you a favor,” I said, “so pack up your gear and let’s be going.”
“I promise I won’t be no bother to you,” he said. “I just got to hear a human voice. Yours ain’t much, and it don’t make sense very often, but it’s better than clucking and gobbling.”
He kissed the girls good-bye, slung his shotgun over his shoulder, packed a satchel of ammunition and another of drinkin’ stuff, and off we went. He wasn’t too bad a traveling companion, except that he’d kick me awake two or three times each night and ask me to talk at him.
I think we’d been on the trail a week when we came to a village smack-dab in the middle of the jungle. It wasn’t much of a village, just four or five huts, and sitting in front of one of ’em was an almost-naked lady who was about MacNamarra’s age and maybe three or four times his weight.
“Good morrow, Madam,” he said, bowing low to her. “Has this here village got a name?”
She answered him in the very same language them guys what wasn’t Indians had used on me a couple of weeks earlier, and she guv him a great big smile, and I could see that her teeth were busy rotting away, and even from where I stood I could tell that she hadn’t bathed in the last ten or twenty years, but none of that bothered MacNamarra.
“Ain’t she got the most beautiful voice you ever heard?” he asked me.
“Did you understand a word she said?” I shot back.
“What difference does that make?” he said. “She didn’t chirp, and that’s all that matters.” He reached out and shook my hand. “It’s been nice knowing you, Reverend Jones, and I can never thank you enough for what you done for my daughters, but I’m smitten with this here delicate little frail flower, and I’m going to spend the rest of my natural-born days just listening to her dulcet tones.”
“If that’s what you want, Brother Corny, I wish you all the luck in the world,” I said, though from the way his delicate little three-hundred-pounder was talking a blue streak at him I figured he’d already found all the luck he needed.
I bid him a fond farewell, and headed off toward where I thought civilization was hiding, primed and ready to finally build the Tabernacle of Saint Luke.
The Lost Continent Of Moo
You know, there’s one thing I ain’t never figgered out, and man and boy it’s been bothering me most of my blameless life, and even now as a old man I haven’t come up with an answer, and I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since it was always happening to me, even back in 1935 which is when the tale I’m telling you took place, and though I’ve wandered the face of five continents (or maybe seven, if you count them two little ones down south) I still don’t know why it takes me such a short time to get lost and such a long time to get found again.
In fact, that was my very thought as I left Cornelius MacNamarra’s chartreuse mansions behind me and moseyed alongside the Amazon, waiting for civilization to raise its head so I could get together with it and finally get around to the serious business of building the Tabernacle of Saint Luke. But the closest I came to civilization in the next week was a couple of little fellers who were wearing paint on their faces and not much else. They didn’t speak no known language, which is something they had in common with the French, and they kept staring at me as if they were wondering how my head would look in their trophy case, so I finally took my leave of them.
I wish I could have took my leave of everything else, because I kept getting et by mosquitoes and hissed at by snakes and growled at by jaguars and giggled at by monkeys, and after I’d footslogged maybe another hundred miles and still hadn’t seen no shining cities filled to overflowing with sinners who were in desperate need of a man of the cloth like myself, I figgered maybe the cities had all migrated to the south when no one was looking, so I took a left turn and put the Amazon River behind me.
Now, I knew South America had a bunch of cities even back then, places like Rio and Buenos Aires and Caracas and Saigon, but it was like they’d seen me coming and had all tiptoed away before I could lay eyes on any of ’em. I picked up a female companion named Petunia along the way. She was a real good listener, but she didn’t say nothing and she smelled just terrible, especially after a rainstorm (of which we had an awful lot), and after a few days I finally had to admit that I just didn’t have much in common with lady tapirs, and we parted ways.
I kept trudging along, keeping my spirits up by reading my well-worn copy of the Good Book, and finally, after another couple of weeks, the forest started retreating, the mosquitoes found other things to do, the animals took umbrage when I kept reciting the Eighth and Fourteenth Commandments at ’em, and even the rain decided it had urgent business elsewhere. The land flattened out, the sun came out of hiding, and suddenly I was in this pasture that must have been a couple of hundred miles long, give or take a few inches.
And as I looked over my surroundings, I began to realize that this wasn’t like no part of South America I had ever seen, and I’d seen an awful lot of it, starting with San Palmero and working my way through the Island of Annoyed Souls and this big wet area everyone called the Amazon Basin though I didn’t see nary a single wash basin, with or without no love-starved Amazons, the whole time I was walking through it.
I kept looking around and thinking that maybe I’d fallen asleep and sleptwalked to some new country. I was still mulling on it when I realized I’d been walking forever and a day, and I decided to lay down right on the grass, and if there’d been a desk clerk I’d have told him not to wake me ’til maybe half past Tuesday, and then I was snoring to beat the band.
I woke up when something kind of cold and sort of wet and more than a little bit pushy rubbed against my face.
“I’m sleeping,” I said.
It nudged me kind of gently.
“Go away,” I said, scrunching up my eyes. “It’s a holiday somewhere in the world. I’ll get a job tomorrow.”
Then whatever it was
pressed right up against my ear and said “Moo!”
“What in tarnation was that?” I bellowed, jumping to my feet.
Suddenly I heard a dozen more moos, and I looked around, and damned if I wasn’t surrounded by some of the fattest cows I’d ever seen. There were hundreds of ’em, maybe thousands, and they’d all snuck on me my while I was sleeping.
And then I thought, well, maybe they didn’t exactly sneak up. Maybe they live here.
“Moo!” said a few dozen of ’em, staring at me with big brown cows’ eyes, as if they were begging me to come on over and choose a steak for dinner.
And then, being a educated man, I remembered my history books, or at least some stories I’d heard in Red Charlie’s Waterfront Bar in Macao, which comes to almost the same thing, and I realized that somehow or other I had stumbled onto a new land what no one else had ever seen before, and it didn’t take but forty or fifty more cows joining the chorus to for me to figger out that I was probably the first white man ever to set foot on the Lost Continent of Moo what had been writ up in fable, song and story.
I looked off into the distance, hoping to see a shining city filled with Moovians or whatever they called themselves, where I could build my tabernacle and set up shop, but there wasn’t nothing out there but cows. Now, I knew there had to be people somewhere, because in all my experience I ain’t never come across a cow that could sing songs or tell stories about lost continents.
And while we’re speaking of lost continents, them of you what’s read Encounters, the story of my attempt to bring the word of the Lord to the sinful nations of Europe, will know right off the bat that this here wasn’t the first lost continent I discovered. In fact, it seems that one of the things I’m really good at, other than helping poor sinners (and especially fallen women) see the light and the glory, is finding lost continents. It ain’t generally known—and in fact if you didn’t read my book it probably ain’t known at all—but not only did I find the lost continent of Atlantis, I actually bought it. Of course, it was buried under a few fathoms of water, but I’d be there still if the Greek government hadn’t objected to my placing a bunch of ads in the local paper offering to sell lots with a Mediterranean view. But that’s another story, and one what’s already been told with grace and elegance.