No Enemy but Time (28 page)
in her place, he leapt for her throat. He did not come down alive. The reem impaled him on both her horns, shook him loose, and kicked him into a gully like a pancake pile of steaming dung. So much for the dog.
“Upon learning of his death, the other animals fell into a lengthy round of debate and recrimination. How had the reem become so powerful? All were outraged that the butt of their merciless merrymaking had suddenly acquired strengths comparable to, or greater than, their own. Who could be behind this heinous betrayal? Why, only the Creator, of course, and he must be made to pay.
“'We must annihilate Ngai,’ the tusk-bearer told the behemoth and the other animals. ‘We must kill the Creator.’
“Soon everyone on the plain had taken up the cry ‘Kill the Creator!’ And so aroused, they shambled off in unruly ranks toward his dwelling on the mountain.
“The reem, alerted to their intentions by their cry, hurried to warn her unsuspecting benefactor of the mischief afoot. In his dwelling on the slope the reem found Ngai febrile and shrunken, no bigger than a dung beetle. Quickly apprised of his subjects’ intentions, he begged the reem to take him aboard (he would sit between her horns) and give him passage to the safety of an uninhabited southern desert. The reem readily acceded to this request.
“When the tusk-bearer, the behemoth, and the others found the gardens on Mount Tharaka bereft of Ngai and saw the dust clouds billowing from the southern plains, they deduced that the reem was assisting the fugitive. Still, a vigorous pursuit would accomplish their capture, for she had insufficient stamina to maintain her pace and the Creator himself could hardly be at his best if he had chosen this unorthodox method of escape.
“Indeed, the reem soon began to tire. She halted in the broad vacancy of the savannah to recover her wind. Instead she lost a little—for at that moment she felt the necessity of relieving herself and let fall several droppings. Almost at once a coprid beetle that had been sleeping nearby awakened and scurried over to make use of this unexpected windfall.
“'Hurry,’ the Creator squeaked, peering over the reem's brow at their pursuers. ‘They're nearly upon us.’
“'Yes, oh yes,’ the reem acknowledged, holding back tears. ‘And the next time I stop they will certainly overtake us. Even though I am willing to die
with
you, Ngai, I would far rather die
for
you—but I'm exhausted, almost at my limit, and whatever befalls us, befalls us.’ She tactfully did not mention that Ngai might have solved this problem by granting her stamina along with his other tardy favors, but she
was
sensible of the irony of their plight.
“The dung beetle, who was not blessed with a sense of the ironic, had overheard this exchange between Ngai and the reem. He forsook the reem's droppings to circle the beast and address her from a point just below her drooping snout.
“'I love the Creator well,’ he piped, ‘for he has provided for me abundantly. The world is full of manure.
Tell the Sacred One to come down from your horns. I will then enclose him in a concealing brood ball.’
“'
A brood ball?
’ exclaimed Ngai and the reem together.
“'At your service, O Mighty One,’ replied the coprid. ‘By this expedient the reem may run ahead as
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decoy while you husband your strength and purchase enough time to reestablish your rightful rule.’
“The Creator, won over by the beetle's sincerity, agreed. It was not pleasant being plastered up inside a dung ball, but it was preferable to being murdered.
“The reem, meanwhile, trotted off to the south, drawing the Creator's enemies after. When next she stopped, they surrounded her—rather warily, she noted—and vilified her as both a traitor and a trollop.
Surely, they implied, she had done beastly things to entice Ngai to bestow such lethal armament upon her. Where was he, anyway?
“'I have no idea why he equipped me with these horrors,’ the reem asserted, craftily scything her snout this way and that. ‘I asked him only for the birthright withheld from me on the Sixth Day of Creation—better eyesight or more gracefully turned ankles. After killing the dog with these horns—accidentally, you understand—I realized what a cruel trick the Creator had played on me, depriving me of my peaceful nature and equipping me with these abominations. I determined to use his evil gifts to wreak my vengeance upon him, for in that, I felt, there would be a great deal of justice.
However, Ngai saw me coming and fled Mount Tharaka toward the south. If you, my friends and fellows, will join me in this crusade, I am certain that very soon we will run the rapscallion to ground.’
“This speech much impressed the animals, most of whom followed her southward for three more days. I should add, however, that many of the dogs’ relatives demurred. Grumbling without much conviction about their comrades’ gullibility, they began the long trek home. On their way they chanced upon the brood balls of the beetle who had confined the Creator in some of the reem's aromatic waste.
“'Look,’ said one of the dogs. ‘See how large this ball grows. And the beetle does absolutely nothing to help increase its size. This demands our undivided and most reflective attention.’
“The dog's many kith, kin, and kind sat down to observe the strange brood ball, while the coprid, who had begun to regret his involvement in the entire affair, stayed out of sight.
“Ngai was sweating in his little prison. He knew that, outside, the dog's family sat in a suspicious ring, waiting for a fateful revelation. Although his strength and size were slowly returning, he was still no match for a pack of dogs. Therefore, making the best of a bad situation, he nourished himself on the surrounding dung (just as would the larva of a coprid) and mixed his sweat with the remaining material to provide the ball with an ever thinner and more transparent rind. This labor cost him much effort, and its sacred heat imparted to the brood ball's surface a silver-gold glow.
“'Ah ha!’ cried the dog's family. ‘Here is the culprit, here is the Dastardly One responsible for our brother's death.’ And they immediately came forward and began nosing the brood ball, which had by now attained the size of, say, a tsama melon.
“As it happened, all the other animals were returning from their unprofitable Wily God Chase when they saw the dog's relatives playing ball with a luminous sphere. To winkle out the secret of the ball's remarkable contents took them only a moment—that glow was a dead giveaway—whereupon they joined in the game.
“The Creator was kicked and pushed from one end of the bush veldt to the other, and in a short while his head ached fiercely. It had been all he could do to keep the expanding brood ball from splitting open and spilling him out on the ground—to be trampled, bitten, pecked, and gored. Probably to death.
Undoubtedly to death.
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“And then the reem appeared. She narrowed her piggish eyes in an attempt to follow the action, but twilight had come and all she could really tell was that the animals were scurrying about in pursuit of an incandescent ball. My god, she thought, my God! Those animals have rooted out the truth.
“Shaking off her weariness, the reem charged. What she could see best, of course, was the glowing brood ball, and she rushed toward the shapes shoving it about.
“Ah, what a collision!
“The reem lifted the Creator into the sky with her horns. Upward and away he whirled, there to replace the moon he had broken.
“So that is how the reem acquired her horns, and likewise how the moon was restored to glory after a brief dethronement. Much is taken, but much abides.”
And, surrounded by hyenas, we continued to abide in the trees beside the water hole. Ah, but Helen had taken herself from me, I remembered, and my story had not really helped me to disguise this unsettling fact from myself.
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Blackwater Springs, Florida
July 1985
Late
in the afternoon of the day following Alistair Patrick Blair's lecture in Pensacola, Joshua was in a small community several miles north of the vast ordnance ranges of Eglin Air Force Base painting a water tower. He was suspended beneath the hemispherical belly of the tank in a set of rope falls, stretched out almost horizontal to the ground, when he saw a dark blue vehicle enter Blackwater Springs from the southeast. Lackadaisically rolling paint onto the underside of a thick steel supporting girder, he watched the automobile out of the corner of his eye. Its movement along the highway was in decided contrast to the little town's stubborn lack of animation. So far, the most entertaining groundside event of the day had involved a pack of dogs. Heatedly quarreling among themselves, the dogs had followed a lame mongrel bitch into the alley behind the Okaloosa Cafe. You could see a lot from a hundred feet up, but in Blackwater Springs not very much of it was edifying.
Joshua was an employee of Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., a Fort Walton company specializing in sandblasting, painting, and sometimes epoxying a variety of large metal structures. Water tanks. Bridges.
Mining equipment. Towers. Joshua had been nearly six years on the job—ever since running away from home and arriving back in Florida from New York. Although he routinely checked his safety belt before changing altitudes beneath the tank, he had long since lost his fear of falling. The cardinal rule of the steeplejack, or water-tank mechanic, was to keep his brain in gear. Joshua usually did, for which reason, along with experience, he was probably the best man in a set of falls then employed by Gulf Coast Coating, Inc.
As talented aloft as Tarzan.
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That was what Tom Hubbard, the president of the company, said about him. Hubbard knew Joshua's worth, and Joshua knew that he knew it, and the result was that Joshua sometimes took liberties with his work schedule or made disparaging remarks about Hubbard's business acumen. If the boss got his back up and canned him, Joshua could count on being rehired within a week or two, so long as he appeared repentant and asked for his job back. In six years Hubbard had canned and rehired him a grand total of fourteen times. This game united the two men in a resentful dependency on each other.
Of late, though, Joshua's discontent had begun to outpace his boss's. He had finally realized that he was never going to own his own tank-painting company. Or any other sort of business, either. What the future held for him, if he continued to jockey up and down in harness, was thirty more years as a blue-collar trapeze artist, right up to the day his brain clicked off and he tumbled ninety feet to the concrete or touched his spray gun to a power line and electrocuted himself. In time, both his luck and his skill would run out.
If he survived, he would look like a Jim Crow version of poor old R. K. Cofield. Cofield was a sixty-year-old peckerwood from east Alabama, who, at the moment, was operating a blasting hose in the tank directly over Joshua's head, doggedly stumbling about in a sandstorm of his own creation. Out from under his blasting hood the old man was a toothless zombie; he had once broken his back in a fall, and his eyes absolutely refused to focus on another human being's face. His whole life had been devoted to tank work, and although Joshua had once heard him mutter that every other sort of employment, viewed from a steeplejack's vantage, “looked like pitiful,” Cofield was himself a doddering object lesson in the curriculum of the woebegone. Hubbard found him wonderfully dependable, but the only reason Cofield reported to work each day, Joshua felt, was that the alternative—calling in sick or quitting, then confronting at every turn the ruins of his own personality—terrified him. That was also why he stayed drunk every weekend.
Joshua did not want to end up even a slightly less dissipated version of R. K. Cofield. Nevertheless, the demands of self-sufficiency and the narrow compass of his marketable skills were channeling him, inexorably, in that very direction. Also to blame were pride and inertia. He could not get off center.
Yesterday, though, the pressure of his dreams and the threat implicit in Cofield's vanquished eyes had set him zipping down Highway 98 to Pensacola.
* * * *
What the hell's going on? Joshua wondered.
Then he saw the Air Force limousine parked at the curb behind the equipment truck, well within the restricted area where falling paint could lightly polka-dot its dark-blue finish. Near the snaky tangle of hoses lifting sand and fresh air to Cofield stood Alistair Patrick Blair and the colonel who had attended last night's lecture with him. They were gawking at Joshua, their heads thrown back.
“Damn,” Joshua muttered. “The bastard came.”
He let go of the extension pole on his paint roller, which fell until the thong securing it to his seat caught it up and held it tick-tocking beneath him like a pendulum. The paleoanthropologist, clad today in a conventional business suit, smiled and waved.
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“Get down here, Kampa!” Hubbard shouted after he had turned off the air compressor. “These gentlemen want to talk to you!”
Joshua maneuvered his ropes toward a fixed ladder on one of the tower's colossal legs. It would have been easier to descend on his falls, but for reasons he could not quite articulate—to annoy Hubbard, to astonish Blair, to please himself—he wanted to make a spectacular dismount, even if it entailed a stupid as well as an illegal risk.