All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (35 page)

In the car Nhora asked, "What time is it?"

"Twenty past four."

"I don't want to go back to Dasharoons just yet. Unless you're worried about Champ."

"'No."

"Let's drive, then."

He put the car in gear and they left the settlement. Nhora pointed east, where the bayou tree line was clear and stark against the dawning sky, a few lingering bright stars.

"I think I'd like to go to the river. It's peaceful there. I've always loved Dasharoons, but lately I have to get out of the house, I feel I'll go crazy sitting around."

They took a paved road to the levee, then a dirt road down through slash land cut by backwater channels livid in the brinking light, channels numerous as the lines in the palm of an ancient hand. A larger channel which the river had made for itself years ago was silting up, loaded with swept-down trees that composed a naked, broken, dangerous-looking thicket 200 yards deep. Between this thicket and the body of the river lay a gentle brushy sandbar. Nhora showed him where to leave the car. Then she led the way, picking her path with certainty 300 feet to the edge of the river.

From the top of the levee, the river, then a quarter-mile away, had looked dark and as quiet as a vein in the throat. This close he experienced its rude, togging power. The air was milder, even cool at water level. The river lapped at a partly submerged log. It was the mightiest river on the continent, longer than but not as wide as the K'buru—river of the mind, his own, vital life stream.

Jackson felt the jolt of his rage leaving him; he was given over to interior currents, deep forces, a bewildering sense of having traveled endlessly to arrive at a point more than twenty years in the past. The same root terrors, the same questions waiting to be answered. He felt slow, witless, demoralized by grief. Low bluffs on the other side, roof lines, the galumphing bark of dogs, the sky a transparency unmarred by cloud or star fleck, prepared for red thunder, the upcoming sun, stupefying radiance and heat, another torpid day in the tropics.

"Jackson?"

He looked around at Nhora, who was standing a few feet downriver, holding her dress bunched at her thighs. She had taken off her shoes to cool her feet in an eddy. There were frozen points of light in the full pupils of her eyes, her smile was strained.

"You were making—sounds. You scared me."

Jackson exhaled slowly, but there was still a binding pressure on his chest. "Some boyhood passion come to mind. We lived totally at the mercy of a river like this one." He looked at the looming boneyard behind him. "Lived with the forest at our backs, and often at our throats. Or so it seemed." His throat was parched now. He remembered the gift of whiskey and took the bottle from his coat pocket. But he just held it, feeling awkward about needing a drink so badly.

"Oh? Where was this?"

"A missionary station and logging town called Tuleborné. On the K'buru River in French—"

"My God, you don't mean it! I lived in Equatorial Africa, in Zenkitu."

"When?"

From 1921 until about 1926. My father was a civil servant, not a very happy man. He died young. His health went very quickly in that climate. Of course part of his decline was due to me, the strain of not knowing if I was dead or alive." She moved closer to Jackson, shyly lowering her dress. "Is that whiskey? Could I have a taste?"

Jackson uncorked the bottle and handed it to her. She tilted it back with relish, drinking like a man, eyes closed in contemplation, her face faint ivory against the lightening sky. She handed the bottle back, lips pursed and rueful, a hint of tears.

"Probably homemade," she said, her voice coarsened by the fiery stuff. "But it isn't—half bad."

Jackson didn't care about quality. The whiskey bit away tension and settled down to a slow, pleasant burn in his stomach. "Dead or alive?" he inquired.

"Oh—when I was three years old I was kidnapped from a carriage of the Ocean-Zenkitu train. It had stopped just before that famous tunnel, the one where so many thousands of Negroes died—"

"From trapped gases in the mountain they were trying to dig through. I know the place. Dense forest all around. Who kidnapped you?"

"I barely remember what happened; my mother was so terrified by the experience she had to be institutionalized. Many years later it was still an ordeal for her to tell me the story. It seemed that the train was raided by a band of men from a decimated tribe called the Ajimba. They wore—"

"Crocodile 'headpieces. And S-s-s—" He turned, shaking, toward the river

"
Jackson!
"

"
Snake
skins. It's all right, I'm not going to have another of my bloody seizures." He drank a little more of the whiskey for safety's sake, held out the bottle. Nhora declined with a shake of her head. She put a hand on his elbow; then, after a reflective few moments, slipped her arm loosely around him.

Jackson stared at the flowing rivet, and continued: "I've had—experience with the Ajimba myself. They were a warrior sect, a secret society going back many centuries before the white man set foot in Africa. I believe at one time they were heavily involved in the slave trade. Their rituals incorporated human sacrifice. Throughout the nineteenth century the Ajimba were at their most powerful, ranging ferociously from the K'buru highlands to the sea. According to one legend, a demented Frenchwoman of unbelievable longevity ruled them for more than a hundred and sixty years. Her name was Gen Loussaint. Have you heard of her?"

"No."

"How many others were taken from the train?"

"I don't know. Half a dozen. I was the only European."

"And how long were you a captive?"

"Nearly three years."

"What? Didn't the government make an attempt to ransom you?"

"They tried everything, but they never heard from the Ajimba. Mother told me it was assumed I had been murdered, something to do with their bloodthirsty ceremonies. The truth is not very interesting. After I was kidnapped, the Ajimba seemed to lose interest in me. They had their hands full just staying alive—it seemed as if we were always on the move, dodging soldiers, the
gard indigène
. I never saw the men wear crocodile masks again. They hunted for their food. Kept wild dogs trained to kill. They were a rather sad, pathetic people. No one was ever cruel to me. I was part of a family—I had several 'brothers and sisters.' I remember that one of my brothers was playing too near the dog pens, he was snatched inside and torn apart. I still have vivid nightmares about that. And—there was a lot of sickness, we were always in mourning. I don't know how I survived, but when I was finally returned to civilization I was in perfect health. Not a blemish or a missing tooth. I had to relearn English and French, though."

She nudged Jackson for the bottle as he was having another swallow. He passed it to her.

"How were you returned?"

"I was given to an Arab trader in exchange for a bolt of cloth or a goat or something. I suppose they just got tired of me. The Arab made a very shrewd deal. He collected a reward of two thousand dollars."

Nhora drank until the bottle was half-empty. She had tightened her arm around him.

"Gets me weak in the knees," she said. "I
think
this is what has me so weak all of a sudden." She tucked the bottle into his jacket pocket and laughed, quite loudly. The sound echoed across the river. Nhora seemed as stunned as if she'd farted; she buried her face against his arm. "Where did that come from? Everything is
dreadful
—dying, dying. But I don't know what to feel. Jackson—how long do you think you'll be staying? There, I finally said it."

"I just take one day at a time. Always."

"Is that a good answer? It was a sincere question. From the heart. Jackson, remember when you were petrified in Old Lamb's yard, and I told you I understood how terribly you were suffering? Because I'm afraid so much of the time myself."

"Of Early Boy Hodges?"

"Nothing that easy to explain. You saw the dog by the chicken coop, his eyes glaring and dead, his bloody mouth locked open, the jaws and teeth around the pole he swallowed—what a nightmare. I just walked away, I couldn't take any more. All my life something like that has been coming after
me
. I dream of wild dogs, catching, throwing me down and pulling at me with their sharp teeth until I—I don't have hands or feet or arms, all torn off, my breasts too; all I can do is wriggle and crawl to try to get away. But they sniff me out and pounce and then the only protection I have is to coil like a sn—God, I'm so sorry! How you jumped."

"Never mind. That's certainly one of the most compelling dreams I've heard. A psychoanalyst's delight."

"Do you know the meaning?" she asked timidly.

I've hid only minimal exposure to psychiatry. How often does the dream recur?"

Nhora sighed. "Too many nights, lately." She studied him. "Are you thinking something you don't want to tell me?"

Jackson smiled, demurring.

"Well—Henry Talmadge said I was afraid of being a woman. It's the sort of thing he
would
say." She thought this over and regretted the churlishness. "I doubt if he knew much about psychiatry either. Henry thought there might be a physical reason for my restlessness and bad dreams, so he did a complete examination. Very complete. He took strands of my hair and even nail clippings for analysis, can you imagine? And
two
samples of blood—he came back for more, saying he'd mislaid the first vial. By then Henry looked awful, he wasn't sleeping himself, and he was at the end of his tether with Nancy. I never found out what he learned about me; it was only two days later that he hanged himself. And I'm still having those nightmares."

Dawn was shrilly alive with birds in the derelict trees behind them. The sky, like fine bone china, showed a rim of gold on the horizon.

"Let's walk," Nhora suggested, keeping her arm around him. He was lulled by the pleasant suspense of wondering just when he would kiss her, and what would follow. "There's something I want to show you, and it's almost light enough."

They went slowly along the glistening river toward the narrow south end of the sandbar, where saplings had taken hold, and the deadwood was laced with vines.

"It was a common practice," Jackson said, "for the Ajimba and other tribes to feed puppies minute rations of a deadly poison every day. By the time they matured and were trained as hunters, their tissues were permanently saturated with enough of the poison to paralyze an elephant. Just a scratch from a fang or a claw was enough to kill a small animal in a matter of seconds. But the dogs themselves were immune."

Nhora shuddered. "You know a lot about the Ajimba, Jackson."

"They carried my father off after one of their raids. He was a doctor. He'd spent eleven years In Tuleborné, which realistically can only be described as a hellhole, often working twenty hours a day to keep up with the demand for his services. He doubled the size of the hospital and trained many Negro assistants. The meager professional help he received was from the Sisters of Radiant Hope, a tiny Catholic nursing order—and he had my help. What ability I have today I owe to my father."

"How old were you?"

"Seventeen, when our luck turned bad. That was in 1920."

"Your father was killed?"

"No. By his account, they took good care of him. He was missing for three months but when he returned his memory was clouded, he thought at best he'd been away three weeks. He was confused in other ways, disoriented, and, I believe, severely frightened by his experiences in captivity. He claimed he was taken for the purpose of treating an ancient hag, a white woman, who convinced him that she was the legendary Gen Loussaint."

"You mentioned her."

"Stories about Gen Loussaint were always fantastic and frequently chilling. One met old-timers, traders who were on the river long before the turn of the century, and some insisted they had dealt with her. In her prime she was said to be very beautiful—what else?—but inhumanly cruel, unequaled in wickedness, a priestess of butchery among savages infamous for their bloody dealings with other tribes. Her cruelty so pleased the evil spirits of the forest that she was given the power to change her shape, to vanish in a twinkling and reappear miles away. Familiar rubbish. She became—reptilian, after the fashion of the Ajimba gods, but not less beautiful. Her otherworldly self was a kind of succubus, common in African folklore."

Jackson smiled. "When I was a boy, alone at night in my bed, I could work up a case of shivers in no time just thinking about such creatures swooping down on me. Symptomatic of the buried terrors of puberty, I suppose. At the hospital we were accustomed to seeing patients who seemed to have nothing organically wrong with them, yet inevitably drifted into comas and died. Sometimes the cause may have been untraceable poison administered by an enemy—Africans poisoned each other at a prodigious rate. Other victims were frightened into believing a succubus was having intercourse with them while they slept, draining the life force from their bodies. It's not difficult to look back with objectivity, but I grew up among primitives besotted with superstition, and the fantastic seemed commonplace then. Like the Shadow, the primeval forest clouds the minds of men. Insignificant spiritual wounds became gaping sores infested with the bacteria of unreason. My father was an educated, disciplined, God-fearing man. But eventually he succumbed."