Henderson the Rain King

  “No kill him, sah.”

  “Don’t interfere,” I yelled, and shook the Bunam’s man up and down by the hair. “He is the killer. That man inside is dead because of him.” But I had stopped choking the Bunam’s wizard. I swung his whitened body by the head. No sound came forth.

  “You no kill him,” said Romilayu earnestly, “Bunam no chase us.”

  “There’s murder in my heart, Romilayu,” I said.

  “You be my friend, sah?”

  “I’ll break some of his bones, then. I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “You have a right to make a claim on me. Yes, you’re my friend. But what about Dahfu? Wasn’t he my friend, too? All right, I won’t break bones. I’ll beat him.”

  But I didn’t beat him, either. I flung the man into the room we had been locked in, and the two amazons with him. Romilayu took away their spears, and we bolted the door. We then went into the other chamber. The moon had now risen and every object was visible. Romilayu picked up the basket of yams, while I walked over to the king.

  “Now we go, sah?”

  I looked under the cowl. The face was swelled and lumpy, very much distorted. Owing to the effects of the heat, despite the love I felt for him I was obliged to turn away. “Good-by, King,” I said. I left him.

  But then I had an impulse as we were going. The tethered cub was spitting at us and I picked him up.

  “Whut you do?”

  “This animal is coming with us,” I said.

  XXII

  Romilayu started to protest, but I held the creature to me, hearing its tiny snarl and pricked in the chest by its claws. “The king would want me to take it along,” I said. “Look, he’s got to survive in some form. Can’t you see?” The moonlit horizon was extremely clear. It had the effect of making me feel logical. Light was released over us from the summits of the mountains. Thirty miles of terrain opened before us, the path of our flight. I suppose that Romilayu could have pointed out to me that this animal was the child of my enemy who had deprived me of Dahfu. “Well, so look,” I said, “I didn’t kill that guy. So if I spared him… Romilayu, let’s not stand here and gab. I can’t leave the animal behind and I won’t. Look,” I said, “I can carry it in my helmet. I don’t need it at night.” As a matter of fact the night breeze was doing my fever good.

  Romilayu gave in to me, and we started our flight, leaping through the shadows of the moon up the side of the ravine. We put the hopo between ourselves and the town, and headed into the mountains, on a straight course for Baventai. I ran behind with the cub, and all that night we did double time, so that by sunrise we had about twenty miles behind us.

  Without Romilayu I couldn’t have lasted two of the ten days that it took to reach Baventai. He knew where the water was and which roots and insects we could eat. After the yams gave out, as they did on the fourth day, we had to forage for grubs and worms. “You could be a survival instructor for the Air Force,” I told him. “You’d be a jewel to them,” I also said to him. “So at last I’m living on locusts, like Saint John. ‘The voice of one that crieth in the wilderness.’ ” But we had this lion, which had to be fed and cared for. I doubt whether any such handicap was ever seen before. I had to mince grubs and worms with the knife in my palm and make a paste, and I fed the little creature by hand. During the day, when I had to have the helmet, I carried the cub under my arm, and sometimes I led him on the leash. He slept in the helmet, too, with my wallet and passport, teething on the leather and in the end devouring most of it. I then carried my documents and the four one-thousand-dollar bills inside my jockey shorts.

  From gaunt cheeks, my whiskers grew in various colors, and during most of the trek I was demented and raving. I would sit and play with the cub, whom I named Dahfu, while Romilayu foraged. I was too simple in the head to help him. Nevertheless, in many essential matters my mind was very clear and even fine or delicate. As I ate the cocoons and the larvae and ants, crouching in the jockey shorts with the lion lying under me for shade, I spoke oracles and sang—yes, I remembered many songs from nursery and school, like “Fais do-do,” “Pierrot,” “Malbrouck s’en va-t’en guerre,” “Nut Brown Maiden,” and “The Spanish Guitar,” while I fondled the animal, which had made a wonderful adjustment to me. He rolled between my feet and scratched my legs. Although on a diet of worms and grubs he could not have been very healthy. I feared and Romilayu hoped that the animal would die. But we were lucky. We had the spears and Romilayu killed a few birds. I am pretty sure we killed a bird of prey that had got too near and that we feasted on it.

  And on the tenth day (as Romilayu told me afterward, for I had lost count) we came to Baventai. Sitting parched on its rocks, the town was not so parched as we were. The walls were white as eggs, and the brown Arabs in their clothes and muffles watched us arise from the sterile road, myself greeting everyone with two fingers for victory, like Churchill, and giving a cracked, crying, black-throated laugh of survival, holding out the cub Dahfu by the scruff to all those head-swathed and silent men, and the women who revealed only eyes, and the black herdsmen with sunny fat melting from their hair. “Get the band. Get the music,” I was saying to them all.

  Pretty soon I folded, but I made Romilayu promise to look out for the little animal. “This is Dahfu to me,” I said. “Don’t let anything happen, please, Romilayu. It would ruin me now. I can’t threaten you, old fellow,” I said. “I’m too weak, and I can only beg.”

  Romilayu said I shouldn’t worry. At least he told me, “Wo-kay, sah.”

  “I can beg,” I said to him. “I’m not what I thought I was.

  “One thing, Romilayu…” I was in a native house and lying on a bed while he, squatting beside me, took the animal from my arms. “Is it promised? Between the beginning and the end, is it promised?”

  “Whut promise, sah?”

  “Well, I mean something clear. Isn’t it promised? Romilayu, I suppose I mean the reason—the reason. It may be postponed until the last breath. But there is justice. I believe there is justice, and that much is promised. Though I am not what I thought.”

  Romilayu was about to console me, but I said to him, “You don’t have to give me consolation. Because the sleep is burst, and I’ve come to myself. It wasn’t the singing of boys that did it,” I said. “What I’d like to know is why this has to be fought by everybody, for there is nothing that’s struggled against so hard as coming-to. We grow these sores instead. Burning sores, fertile sores.” I held the lion on my breast, the child of our murderous enemy. Because of my weakness and fatigue, I was reduced to grimacing at Romilayu. “Don’t let me down, old pal,” was what I tried to say.

  Then I let him take the animal from me and I slept for a while and had dreams, or I didn’t sleep but lay on the cot in somebody’s house, and those were not dreams but hallucinations. One thing however I kept saying to myself and telling Romilayu, and this was that I had to get back to Lily and the children; I would never feel right until I saw them, and especially Lily herself. I developed a bad case of homesickness. For I said, What’s the universe? Big. And what are we? Little. I therefore might as well be at home where my wife loves me. And even if she only seemed to love me, that too was better than nothing. Either way, I had tender feelings toward her. I remembered her in a variety of ways; some of her sayings came back to me, like one should live for this and not for that; not evil but good, not death but life, and all the rest of her theories. But I suppose it made no difference what she said, I wouldn’t be kept from loving her even by her preaching. Frequently Romilayu came up to me, and in the worst of my delirium his black face seemed to me like shatter-proof glass to which everything had been done that glass can endure.

  “Oh, you can’t get away from rhythm, Romilayu,” I recall saying many times to him. “You just can’t get away from it. The left hand shakes with the right hand, the inhale follows the exhale, the systole talks back to the diastole, the hands play patty-cake, and the feet dance with each other. And the seasons. And the stars, and a
ll of that. And the tides, and all that junk. You’ve got to live at peace with it, because if it’s going to worry you, you’ll lose. You can’t win against it. It keeps on and on and on. Hell, we’ll never get away from rhythm, Romilayu. I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it’s the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man’s bad self, that’s the worst suffering that’s ever been known. But you can’t get away from regularity. But the king said I should change. I shouldn’t be an agony type. Or a Lazarus type. The grass should be my cousins. Hey, Romilayu, not even Death knows how many dead there are. He could never run a census. But these dead should go. They make us think of them. That is their immortality. In us. But my back is breaking. I’m loaded down. It isn’t fair—what about the grun-tu-molani?”

  He showed me the little creature. It had survived all the hardships and was thriving like anything.

  So after several weeks in Baventai, beginning to recover, I said to my guide, “Well, kid, I suppose I’d better get moving while the cub is still small. I can’t wait till he grows into a lion, can I? It will be a job to get him back to the States even if he’s half grown.”

  “No, no. You too sick, sah.”

  And I said, “Yes, the flesh is not in such hot shape. But I will beat this rap. It’s merely some disease. Otherwise, I’m well.”

  Romilayu was much opposed but I made him take me in the end to Baktale. There I bought a pair of pants and the missionary let me have some sulfa until my dysentery was under control. That took a few days. After this I slept in the back of the jeep with the lion cub under a khaki blanket, while Romilayu drove us to Harar, Ethiopia. That took six days. And in Harar I made Romilayu a few hundred dollars’ worth of presents. I filled the jeep with all sorts of stuff.

  “I was going to stop over in Switzerland and visit my little daughter Alice,” I said. “My youngest girl. But I guess I don’t look well, and there’s no use frightening the kid. I’d better do it another time. Besides, there’s the cub.”

  “You tek him home?”

  “Where I go he goes,” I said. “And Romilayu, you and I will get together again one day. The world is not so loose any more. You can locate a man, provided he stays alive. You have my address. Write to me. Don’t take it so hard. Next time we meet I may be wearing a white coat. You’ll be proud of me. I’ll treat you for nothing.”

  “Oh, you too weak to go, sah,” said Romilayu. “I ’fraid to leave you go.”

  I took it every bit as hard as he did.

  “Listen to me, Romilayu, I’m unkillable. Nature has tried everything. It has thrown the book at me. And here I am.”

  He saw, however, that I was feeble. You could have tied me up with a ribbon of haze.

  And after we had said good-by, finally, for good, I realized that he still dogged my steps and kept an eye on me from a distance as I went around Harar with the cub. My legs quaked, my beard was like the purple sage, and I was sight-seeing in front of old King Menelik’s palace, accompanied by the lion, while bushy Romilayu, fear and anxiety in his face, watched from around the corner to make sure I didn’t collapse. For his own good I paid no attention to him. When I boarded the plane he still was observing me. It was the Khartoum flight and the lion was in a wicker basket. The jeep was beside the airstrip and Romilayu was in it, praying at the wheel. He held together his hands like giant crayfish and I knew he was doing his utmost to obtain safety and well-being for me. I cried, “Romilayu!” and stood up. Several of the passengers seemed to think I was about to overturn the small plane. “That black fellow saved my life,” I said to them.

  However, we were now in the air, flying over the shadows of the heat. I then sat down and brought out the lion, holding him in my lap.

  In Khartoum I had a hassle with the consular people about arrangements. There was quite a squawk about the lion. They said there were people who were in the business of selling zoo animals in the States, and they told me if I didn’t go about it in the right way the lion would have to be in quarantine. I said I was willing to go to a vet and get some shots, but I told them, “I’m in a hurry to get home. I’ve been sick and I can’t stand any delay.” The guys said they could see for themselves that I had been through quite a bit. They tried to pump me about my trip, and asked how I had lost all my stuff. “It’s none of your lousy business,” I said. “My passport is okay, isn’t it? And I’ve got dough. My great-grandfather was head of your crummy outfit, and he was no cold-storage, Ivy League, button-down, broken-hipped civilian like you. All you fellows are just the same. You think U.S. citizens are dummies and morons. Listen, all I want from you is to expedite—Yes, I saw a few things in the interior. Yes, I did. I have had a look into some of the fundamentals, but don’t expect me to tickle your idle curiosity. I wouldn’t talk even to the ambassador, if he asked me.”

  They didn’t like this. I had the staggers in their office. The lion was on the fellows’ desk and knocked down their stapler and nipped them through the clothes. They got rid of me the fastest way they could, and I flew into Cairo that same evening. There I called Lily on the transatlantic phone. “It’s me, baby.” I cried. “I’m coming home Sunday.” I knew she must be pale and going paler, purer and purer in the face as she always did under great excitement, and that her lips must have moved five or six times before she could get out a word. “Baby, I’m coming home,” I said. “Speak clearly, don’t mumble now.” “Gene!” I heard, and after that the waves of half the world, the air, the water, the earth’s vascular system, came in between. “Honey, I aim to do better, can you hear? I’ve had it now.” Of what she said I could make out no more than two or three words. Space with its weird cries came between. I knew she was speaking about love; her voice thrilled, and I guessed she was moralizing and calling me back. “For a big broad you sound very tiny,” I kept saying. She could hear me all right. “Sunday, Idlewild. Bring Donovan,” I said. This Donovan is an old lawyer who was a trustee of my father’s estate. He must be eighty now. I thought I might need his legal help on account of the lion.

  This was Wednesday. On Thursday we flew to Athens. I thought I should see the Acropolis. So I hired a car and a guide, but I was too ill and in too much confusion to take in very much of it. The lion was with us, on a leash, and except for the suntans I had bought in Baktale I was dressed as in Africa—same helmet, same desert boots. My beard had grown out considerably; on one side it gushed out half white but with many streaks of blond, red, black, and purple. The embassy people had suggested a shave to make identification easier from the passport. But I did not take their advice. As far as the Acropolis went, I saw something on the heights, which was yellow, bonelike, rose-colored. I realized it must be very beautiful. But I couldn’t get out of the automobile, and the guide didn’t even suggest it. Altogether he said very little, almost nothing; however, his eyes showed what he thought. “There are reasons for it all,” I said to him.

  On Friday I got to Rome. I bought a corduroy outfit, burgundy colored, and an alpine hat with Bersagliere feathers, plus a shirt and underpants. Except to buy this stuff I didn’t leave my room. I wasn’t eager to make a show of myself on the Via Veneto walking the cub on a leash.

  On Saturday we flew again by way of Paris and London, which was the only arrangement I could make. To see either place again I had no curiosity. Or any other place, for that matter. For me the best part of the flight was over water. I couldn’t seem to get enough of it, as if I had been dehydrated—the water, combing along, endless, the Atlantic, deep. But the depth made me happy. I sat by the window, in the clouds. The sea was thickened by the late, awful, air-blind, sea-blanched sun. We were carried over the calm swarm of the water, the lead-sealed but expanding water, the heart of the water.

  Other passengers were reading. Personally, I can’t see that. How can you sit in a plane and be so indifferent? Of course, they weren’t coming from mid-Africa like me; they weren’t discontinuous with civilization. They arose from Paris and
London into the skies with their books. But I Henderson, with my glowering face, with corduroy and Bersagliere feathers—the helmet was inside the wicker basket with the cub, as I figured he needed a familiar object to calm him on this novel, exciting trip—I couldn’t get enough of the water, and of these upside-down sierras of the clouds. Like courts of eternal heaven. (Only they aren’t eternal, that’s the whole thing; they are seen once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities; Dahfu will never be seen again, and presently I will never be seen again; but every one is given the components to see: the water, the sun, the air, the earth.)

  The stewardess offered me a magazine to calm me down, seeing how overwrought I was. She was aware that I had the lion cub Dahfu in the baggage compartment, as I had ordered chops and milk for him, and there was a certain inconvenience about my going back and forth constantly and prowling around the rear of the plane. She was an understanding girl, and finally I told her what it was all about, that the lion cub was important to me, and that I was bringing him home to my wife and children. “It’s a souvenir of a very dear friend,” I said. It was also an enigmatic form of that friend, I might have tried to explain to this girl. She was from Rockford, Illinois. Every twenty years or so the earth renews itself in young maidens. You know what I mean? Her cheeks had the perfect form that belongs to the young; her hair was kinky gold. Her teeth were white and posted on every approach. She was all sweet corn and milk. Blessings on her hips. Blessings on her thighs. Blessings on her soft little fingers which were somewhat covered by the cuffs of her uniform. Blessings on that rough gold. A wonderful little thing; her attitude was that of a pal or playmate, as is common with Midwestern young women. I said, “You make me think of my wife. I haven’t seen her in months.”

  “Oh? How many months?” she said.

  That I couldn’t tell her, for I didn’t know the date. “Is it about September?” I asked.