Henderson the Rain King

  “But him dange’ah too,” said Romilayu.

  “Yes, and so he was. Why should I ask to have it better than he? You’re right, old fellow. Thanks for setting me straight.” I thought a while, then asked him, as a man of proven good sense, “Don’t you think I’d scare those girls?” I grimaced to illustrate my meaning somewhat. “My face is half the length of another person’s body.”

  “I don’t t’ink so, sah.”

  “Isn’t it?” I touched it. “Well, I won’t stay, anyhow. Though I will never have another chance to become a king, I guess.” And thinking deeply about the great man, just dead, just settled for good and all into nothing, into dark night, I felt he had picked me to step into his place. It was up to me, if I wanted to turn my back on home, where I had been nothing. He believed that I was royal material, and that I might make good use of a chance to start life anew. And so I sent my thanks to him, through the stone wall. But I said to Romilayu, “No, I’d break my heart here trying to fill his position. Besides, I have to go home. And anyway, I am no stud. No use kidding, I am fifty-six, or going on it. I’d shake in my boots that the wives might turn me in. And I’d have to live under the shadow of the Bunam and Horko and those people, and never be able to face old Queen Yasra, the king’s mother. I made her a promise. Oh, Romilayu, as if I had ability to promise anything on. Let’s get out of here. I feel like a lousy impostor. The only decent thing about me is that I have loved certain people in my life. Oh, the poor guy is dead. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho! It kills me. It could be time we were blown off this earth. If only we didn’t have hearts we wouldn’t know how sad it was. But we carry around these hearts, these spotty damn mangoes in our breasts, which give us away. And it isn’t only that I’m scared of all those wives, but there’ll be nobody to talk to any more. I’ve gotten to that age where I need human voices and intelligence. That’s all that’s left. Kindness and love.” I fell into mourning again, for this was how I had gone on without intermission since being shut in the tomb, and I kept it up a while longer, as I recall. Then suddenly I said to Romilayu, “Pal, the king’s death was no accident.”

  “Whut you mean, sah?”

  “It was no accident. It was a scheme, I begin to be convinced of it. Now they can say he was punished for keeping Atti, having her under the palace. You know they wouldn’t hesitate to murder the guy. They thought I’d be more pliable than the king. Would you put this past these guys?”

  “No sah.”

  “You bet, no sah. If I ever get my hands on any of these characters I’ll crush them like old beer cans.” I ground my hands together to show what I would do, and bared my teeth and growled. Perhaps I had learned from lions after all, and not the grace and power of movement that Dahfu had got out of his rearing among them, but the more cruel aspect of the lion, according to my shorter and shallower experience. When you get right down to it, a fellow can’t predict what he will pick up in the form of influence. I think that Romilayu was somewhat upset by this jump from mourning to retribution, but he seemed to realize that I wasn’t myself, altogether; he was ready to make allowances for me, being really a very generous and understanding type, and quite a Christian fellow. I said, “We must think of crashing out of here. Let’s case the joint. Actually, where are we? And what can we do? And what have we got?”

  “We got knife, sah,” said Romilayu, and he showed it to me. It was his hunting knife, and he had slipped it into his hair when the Bunam’s men came after him on the outskirts of the town.

  “Oh, good man,” I said, and took the knife from him in a stabbing position.

  “Dig, bettah,” he said.

  “Yes, that makes sense, You’re right. I’d like to get hold of the Bunam,” I said, “but that would be a luxury. Revenge is a luxury. I’ve got to be canny. Hold me back, Romilayu. It’s up to you to restrain me. You see I’m beside myself, don’t you? What’s next door?” We began to go over the wall, and after a minute examination we found a chink high up between the slabs of stone and we began to dig at it, taking turns with the knife. Sometimes I held Romilayu up in my arms, and sometimes I let him stand on my back while I was on all fours. For him to stand on my shoulders was impracticable, as the ceiling was too low.

  “Yes, somebody tampered with the block and pulley at the hopo,” I kept saying.

  “Maybe, sah.”

  “There can’t be any maybes about it. And why did the Bunam grab you? Because it was a plot against Dahfu and me. Of course, the king let me in for a lot of trouble, too, by allowing me to move Mummah. That he did.”

  Romilayu dug, revolving the knife blade in the mortar, and he scraped and scooped out the scrapings with his forefinger. The dust fell over me.

  “But the king lived under threat of death himself, and what he lived with I could live with. He was my friend.”

  “You friend, sah?”

  “Well, love may be like this, too, old fellow,” I explained. “I suppose my dad wished, I know he wished, that I had gotten drowned instead of my brother Dick, up there near Plattsburg. Did this mean he didn’t love me? Not at all. I, too, being a son, it tormented the old guy to wish it. Yes, if it had been me instead, he would have wept almost as much. He loved both his sons. But Dick should have lived. He was wild only that one time, Dick was; he may have been smoking a reefer. It was too much of a price to pay for one single reefer. Oh, I don’t blame the old guy. Except—it’s life; and have we got any business to chide it?”

  “Yes, sah,” he said. He was keenly digging, and I knew he didn’t follow me.

  “How can you chide it? It has a right to our respect. It does its stuff, that’s all. I told that man next door I had a voice that said, I want. What did it want?”

  “Yes, sah” (scooping more mortar over me).

  “It wanted reality. How much unreality could it stand?”

  He dug and dug. I was on all fours, and my words were spoken toward the floor. “We’re supposed to think that nobility is unreal. But that’s just it. The illusion is on the other foot. They make us think we crave more and more illusions. Why, I don’t crave illusions at all. They say, Think big. Well, that’s boloney of course, another business slogan. But greatness! That’s another thing altogether. Oh, greatness! Oh, God! Romilayu, I don’t mean inflated, swollen, false greatness. I don’t mean pride or throwing your weight around. But the universe itself being put into us, it calls out for scope. The eternal is bonded onto us. It calls out for its share. This is why guys can’t bear to be so cheap. And I had to do something about it. Maybe I should have stayed at home. Maybe I should have learned to kiss the earth.” (I did so now.) “But I thought I was going to explode, back there. Oh, Romilayu, I wish I could have opened my heart entirely to that poor guy. I’m all torn up over his death. I’ve never had it so bad.

  “But I will show those schemers, if I ever get the chance,” I said.

  Quietly, Romilayu chipped and dug, then he put his eye to the hole and said, low, “I see, sah.”

  “What do you see?”

  He was silent and dismounted. I stood, rubbing the grit from my back, and put my eye to the hole. There I saw the figure of the dead king. He was wrapped in a shroud of leather, and his features were invisible, for the flap was down over his face. At the hips and feet the body was tied with thongs. The Bunam’s assistant was the death-watcher and sat on a stool by the door, sleeping. It was very hot in both these rooms. Beside him were two baskets of cold baked yams. And to the handle of one of these baskets there was tethered a lion cub, still spotted as very young cubs are. I judged it was two or three weeks old. The fellow’s sleep was heavy, though he sat on a backless stool. His arms were slack and pressed between his chest and thighs, the hands with their gorged veins nearly dropped to the ground. With hatred in my heart I said to myself, “You wait, you crook. I’ll get around to you.” Due to the peculiarities of the light, he appeared as white as satin; only his nostrils and the furrows of his cheeks were black. “I’ll fix your wagon,” I promised him in silence. br />
  “Well, Romilayu,” I said. “This time let’s use our heads. We won’t do as we did the first night here with the body of the other fellow, the Sungo before me. Let us plot. First, I am in line for the throne. They wouldn’t want to hurt me, as I’d be a figurehead in the tribe and they would run the show to please themselves. They’ve got the lion cub, who is my dead friend, so they are moving along pretty fast and we have to move fast, too. Boy, we’ve got to move even faster.”

  “Whut you do, sah?” he said, growing worried at my tone.

  “Bust out, naturally. Do you think we can make it back to Ba-ventai as we are?”

  He couldn’t or wouldn’t say what he thought of this, and I asked, “It looks bad, eh?”

  “You sick,” said Romilayu.

  “Hah. I can make it if you can. You know how I am when I get going. Are you kidding? I could walk across Siberia on my hands. And anyway, pal, there’s no choice. Absolutely the best in me comes out at times like this. It’s the Valley Forge element in me. It’ll be tough, all right. We’ll pack along those yams. That ought to help. You won’t stay behind, will you?”

  “Wo, no, sah. Dem kill me.”

  “Then just resign yourself,” I said. “I don’t think those amazons sit up all night. This is the twentieth century, and they can’t make a king of me if I don’t let them. Nobody can call me chicken on account of that harem. But, Romilayu, I think it would be smart to act as if I wanted the position. They wouldn’t want any harm to come to me. It would put them in a hell of a fix to hurt me. Besides, they must figure that we’d never be fools enough to go through two or three hundred miles of no man’s land without food or a gun.”

  Seeing me in this mood, Romilayu was frightened. “We have to stick together,” I said to him, however. “If they should strangle me after a few weeks—and it’s likely; I’m in no condition to boast or make big promises—what would happen to you? They’d kill you, too, to protect their secret. And how much grun-tu-molani do you have? You want to live, kid?”

  He had no time to answer then, as Horko came to pay us a visit. He smiled, but his behavior was somewhat more formal than before. He called me Yassi and showed his fat red tongue, which he might have done to cool himself after his long walk through the heat of the bush; however, I thought it signified respect.

  “How do you do, Mr. Horko?”

  Greatly satisfied, he bowed from the waist while he kept his forefinger above his head. The upper part of him was always much crowded by the tight sheath, his court dress of red, and he was congested in the face. The red jewels in his ears dragged them down, and as he grinned I looked at him, but not openly, with hatred. As there was nothing I could do, however, I converted all this hatred into wiliness, and when he said, “You now king. Roi Henderson. Yassi Henderson,” I answered, “Yes, Horko. Very sorry about Dahfu, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, very sorry. Dommage,” he said, for he loved to use the phrases he had picked up in Lamu.

  Humankind is still fooling around with hypocrisy, I thought. They don’t realize that it’s too late even for that.

  “No more Sungo. You Yassi.”

  “Yes, indeed,” I said. I instructed Romilayu, “Tell the gentleman I am glad to be Yassi, and it’s a great honor. When do we start?”

  We had to wait, said Romilayu, interpreting, until the worm came from the king’s mouth. And then the worm would become a tiny lion, and this cub, the little lion, would become the Yassi.

  “If pigs were in this, I’d become an emperor, not just a bush-league king,” I said, and took a bitter relish in my own remark. I wished Dahfu had been alive to hear it. “But tell Mr. Horko” (he inclined his thick face, smiling, while the ear-stones dropped again like sinkers; I could have twisted his head and pulled it off with great satisfaction) “it’s a terrific honor. Though the late king was a bigger and better man than I am, I will do the best job I can. I think we have a great future. I ran away from home in the first place because I didn’t have enough to do in my own country, and this is the type of opportunity I have hoped for.” This was how I spoke, and I glowered, but made the glowers seem sincere. “How long do we have to stay in this death house?”

  “Him say just three, fo’ days, sah.”

  “Okay?” said Horko. “Not long. You marry toutes les leddy.” He started to throw his fingers to show by tens how many there were. Sixty-seven.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” I said to him.

  And when he had left, with ceremony, showing that he felt I was indeed in the bag, I said to Romilayu, “We’re going out of here tonight.”

  Romilayu looked up at me in silence, his upper lip growing very long with despair.

  “Tonight,” I repeated. “We have the moon. Last night it was bright enough to read the telephone directory by. Have we been in this town a full month?”

  “Yes, sah—Whut we do?”

  “You’ll start yelling in the night. You’ll say I’ve been bitten by a snake, or something. That leather fellow will come with the two amazons to see what’s wrong. If he doesn’t open the door we’ll have to try another scheme. But suppose the door is opened. Then take this stone—you understand?—and jam it in by the hinge so the door won’t close. That’s all we need. Now where’s your knife?”

  “Me keep knife, sah.”

  “I don’t need it. Yes, you keep the knife. All right, do you follow me? You’ll holler that the Sungo Yassi, or whatever I am to these murderers, is bitten by a snake. My leg is swelling fast. And you must stand by the door ready to jam it.” I showed him exactly what I wanted done.

  So when night began, I sat plotting, concentrating my ideas and trying to protect their clarity from my fever, which increased every afternoon and rose far into the night. I had to fight against delirium, as my condition was aggravated by the suffocation of the tomb and the hours of vigil I spent at the chink in the wall straining one eye at a time toward the dead figure of the king. Sometimes I imagined that I could see some of the features under the flap of the cowl. But this was more mental… mental deceit; dream. My head was out of order, as I realized even then. I was most aware of it at night, under the influence of fever, when mountains and idols and cattle and lions, and gross black women, the amazons, and the face of the king and the thatch of the hopo visited my mind, coming and going unannounced. However, I held tight and waited for moonrise, the time I had chosen to go into action. Romilayu didn’t sleep. From the corner where he lay propped, his gaze was never interrupted. I could find him by his eyes, which were always there.

  “You no change you min,’ sah?” he once or twice asked.

  “No, no. No change.”

  And when I judged the time was right, I took a deep, stiff breath, so that my sternum gave a crack. My ribs were sore. “Go!” I said to Romilayu. The fellow next door was certainly sleeping, for I had heard no stir since nightfall. I picked Romilayu up in my arms and held him to the chink we had dug out. Clutching him, I could feel the tremors that ran through his body, and he began to yell and stammer. I added some groans as if from the background, and then the Bunam’s man woke up. I heard his feet. Then he must have stood listening as Romilayu repeated in his quaver, “Yassi k’muti!” K’muti I had heard from the beaters as they carried Dahfu toward the tomb. K’muti—he is dying. It must have been the last word to reach his ears. “Wunnutu zazai k’muti. Yassi k’muti.” It’s not a hard language; I was picking it up fast.

  Then the door of the king’s tomb opened and the Bunam’s man began to shout.

  “Oh,” said Romilayu to me, “him call two sojer leddy, sah.”

  I set him on his feet and lay down on the floor. “The stone is ready,” I said. “Go to the door and do your stuff. If we don’t get out we haven’t got a month to live.”

  I saw torchlight through the door, which meant that the amazons had come on the double, and it is the most curious thing of all that it was the murder in my heart which calmed me most. It gave me confidence. It was like a balm to me that if
I got my hands on the Bunam’s narrow-faced man I would be the death of him. “Him at least I will do in,” I kept thinking. So, fully calculating, I made cries of fear and weakness—and I gloated at these sounds of weakness, for I really did feel that my strength was low just then but that it would come back to me as soon as I touched the Bunam’s man. A strip of board was removed from the door. By the lifted flare the Bunam’s man saw me writhing, clutching my leg. The bolt was dropped, and one of the amazons began to open the door. “The stone,” I cried as if in pain, and I saw by the flare that Romilayu had pushed the stone oblong below the hinge exactly as I told him, although the point of a spear held by the amazon was right under his chin. He retreated toward me. This I saw under the great, lapping, torn smoky tissue of the fire. The amazon yelled when I pulled her off her feet. The spear point scraped the wall, and I prayed it hadn’t touched Romilayu. I struck the woman’s head against the stones. Under the circumstances I couldn’t afford to make any allowance for her femininity. The fire had been dashed out and the door swiftly closed, but it stuck on the stone just enough to let me get my fingers on the edge. Both the other amazon and the Bunam’s man pulled against me, but I tore the thing open. I worked in silence. I was now covered by the night air, which did me good immediately. First I hit the second amazon only with the edge of my hand, a commando trick. It was enough. It lamed her, and she fell to the ground. All this was still in silence, for they made no more noise than I did. Then I went after the man, who was escaping to the other side of the mausoleum. Three strides and I caught him by the hair. I lifted him straight up at arm’s length so that he could see my face by the almost risen moon. I snarled. All the skin of his face was drawn upward by the force of my clutch, so that his eyes slanted. As I took him by the throat and began to choke him, Romilayu ran up to me yelling, “No, no, sah.”

  “I’m going to strangle him.”