The Female of the Species

“Here it is,” said Odinaye, handing her the paddle readily.

Gray accepted the paddle before she went white. Now that he was closer, his small grim smile was unmistakable.

The daring of the avant-garde potter left Gray entirely. Awkwardly she used the paddle to bat the collapsed side back out again. Using props inside the jar, she secured the sides and quickly put it aside to dry out. When she dipped her hands in a pot of water to rinse off the clay, she noticed they were shaking. Not saying another word, she ducked out the doorway and went straight to Charles Corgie.

“What’s going on?” asked Charles, leaning on his bed with a cigarette as Gray paced the room. “Why can’t you sit still?”

“Would you stop worrying about the way I move for once and listen to me?” Gray whispered.

“I’ll listen if you talk loudly enough for me to hear you—”

“Shsh! Talk more quietly.”

“WHY?” Charles boomed.

“Shut up!”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Shoot.”

“I was working on a pot that wasn’t going very well—”

“So your pot didn’t come out pretty and now you’re mad?”

Gray looked at him; there must have been something in her face to make him sit up without quite the same sultry boredom and put out his cigarette.

“Odinaye was there, naturally,” she went on in a low voice. “I said, ‘Hand me that paddle,’ and he picked it up and said, ‘Here it is.’”

Charles waited. Gray didn’t go on. “And?”

“That’s it.”

“Some story,” said Charles.

“Yes,” said Gray. “It is.”

“I guess it’s one of those subtle narratives that depends on texture.”

“Charles,” said Gray. “He said ‘Here it is’ in English.”

Corgie sat up. “No.”

“Yes.”

Corgie stood and paced. “Well,” he reasoned, taking out another cigarette, “one phrase. Big deal.”

“No, he knows at least two, Charles. I made a mistake. I asked for the paddle in English, too. And I didn’t point. He knew the word ‘paddle.’”

“So? Here it is. Paddle. So?”

“How do we know how many other words he’s picked up, Charles? What else has he heard?”

Charles grunted. He smoked fast, as if his cigarette were hard work to get over with. “Damn it.” He paced some more. “Jesus, we’re gonna have to be careful.” He was speaking more softly now himself.

Gray sighed. “He obviously figured out the language by watching us interact.”

“When have we been doing that?”

“We do still fight sometimes.”

Charles sunk into a chair. “So—what? We’re going to talk even less than we’ve been doing? I don’t even know if that’s possible.”

“Do you know any other languages? French, German, Latin?”

“Nope. But you do, of course.”

“That wouldn’t do any good if you don’t know them, too.”

“Why not? We could have our own separate languages. You could walk around speaking German. I can definitely see it, Kaiser.”

“Well, say. How’s your English vocabulary?”

“Me? The poor uneducated architect? All I know is damn, fuck, and shit. Jane-loves-Puff. Go-Timmy-go. You know that.”

“Stop it. We have to work on this. I mean, we have to—cogitate on our—contretemps.”

“Say what?”

“Odinaye may have learned go-Timmy-go. But he hasn’t learned perambulate-Timmy-perambulate.”

“Let me get this straight. When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I’m supposed to yell, ‘Oh, coitus!’?”

“Exactly.”

“This is going to be disgusting, Kaiser.”

“Or fun. As long as we can’t be heard we can drop it, but if we have to talk to each other in public we should only palaver, parley, or discourse.”

“Or lately, harangue, wrangle, or contend.”

Gray laughed as Charles leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Maybe their learning English is all for the best,” said Gray softly. “Maybe they’ll finally appreciate that your invocation is a Wrigley’s spearmint-gum commercial.” With a rare moment of affection, Gray reached out with a wistful smile and tousled his hair.

The plan seemed to work to a degree. When Gray and Charles were in earshot of Odinaye, they switched to their most professorial language, and Gray could tell by the light panic with which Odinaye’s eyes followed the conversation that he was no longer picking much up.

The whole vocabulary scam might have issued in an era of reconciliation, but Gray’s lexicon was considerably larger than Corgie’s. When she used a word he didn’t know, he would furiously stalk off in the middle of her definition. To her credit, Gray wasn’t trying to impress him but simply to use an effective scramble on their broken code. To her these multisyllabic marathons were an entertainment, like crossword puzzles.

Charles had his eye on another sport they could share, though; he waited impatiently toward the end of the season for a few dry days in a row. Finally the rain did let up for a week, and the ground was hard enough for Corgie to introduce Gray to the pleasures of his tennis court.

Charles claimed to have played an excellent game back in New York before he was drafted, and told Gray it was tennis he missed more than any other element of Western civilization. After setting a full work crew to refurbishing his court, he walked Gray proudly around its hard-packed clay. He’d had the crew lay down the sacred white lines with ash and string up the heavy hemp net the women of the tribe had woven. He showed her two rackets—laminated strips, soaked and bent and bound at the bottom with a leather grip. Carved at their throats were antelopes on one, lions on the other. They’d been strung with wet gut; as the gut dried it tightened, so the tension on the strings was surprisingly high. The rackets were a little heavy, but lovingly made, and beautiful.

Corgie’s most controversial achievements were his tennis balls. He’d scrounged rubber out of the carcass of his plane and bound it with hide. They were, Gray conceded, miraculously spherical, but the bounce was another matter. “But they do bounce,” said Corgie, taking his ball back from her ungrateful hands. “You try to make a tennis ball.”

Corgie led Gray happily to his court, swishing the air with his racket, the lions at its throat in a position of yowling victory. Charles stretched out before the game with large animal glee, like a predator who’s been cooped up in his lair too long and is ready for a hunting spree.

Il-Ororen gathered around the court with enthusiasm, and Gray called Corgie’s attention to Odinaye’s presence in the front row. “Heed your vernacular.”

Charles snorted and went to his side. He didn’t know the word “vernacular.”

“I attempted to—instruct this—population,” said Corgie after a couple of rather handsome warm-up serves, “on this—pastime. They didn’t—comprehend it. Every—primitive I—inculcated—played a lob game.” He went on quickly, irritated with the vocabathon. “I like a good hard rally, Kaiser. This counts.”

When she tried to return his serve, it thudded into the net.

“You ever—indulge yourself in this—diversion before, Kaiser?”

“Once or twice,” said Gray. That was all she said for the rest of their play.

On Corgie’s second point he double-faulted, but on the third Gray socked the ball into the net again; Corgie looked archly sympathetic, though he should have noticed that she’d nearly gotten the ball across this time. “It takes time to—accustom yourself to the—facilities,” said Charles. “First game’s practice.”

Gray did win one point in their practice game, and Corgie was elaborately congratulatory. Compliments can be far more insulting than criticism; she hadn’t won on a very good shot. Still, Gray gathered her lips together and said nothing.

Later, Corgie no doubt regretted his concession on the first game as practice, for Gray “accustomed herself to the facilities” quite readily. And Gray didn’t play a lob game.

Corgie stopped making conversation. He lay into the ball with his full weight, but consistently started driving it into the net. His eyes blackened; his stroke got more desperate; his game plummeted. In fact, the whole set was over in short order. Corgie strode with steely control past Gray, his grip on his racket tight and sweaty. The lions at its throat were whining.

“You don’t desire to consummate the entire match?” asked Gray.

“No, I do not desire to consummate the entire match,” Corgie mimicked her through his teeth. “You didn’t tell me you were some kind of all-Africa tennis champion.”

“You didn’t inquire.”

Charles started to walk away, and Gray called after him, “Il-Cor-gie!” He turned. “Would you have preferred that I feign a fraudulent ineptitude?” Gray was exasperated with having to talk this way; the words themselves made him angry.

“I don’t need your condescension,” said Corgie.

“And I don’t need yours.”

Corgie waved his hand and shook his head. “This is pointless,” he said, and walked away.

It was pointless. Gray had just wiped the court with Charles Corgie and she couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel victorious. She looked down at the antelopes on her racket. They looked back up at her with their antlers at a sheepish angle and their soft wooden eyes forlorn.

I can’t find my tape recorder,” Gray told Corgie in the cabin the next afternoon.

“You mean you lost it?”

“No, I know where I left it. It’s not there anymore.”

“Someone took it?”

“If you didn’t—I think so.” Gray felt a funny sense of trepidation.

Charles reached for his gun.

“Charles—”

“Then we’re going to find it. They have never taken anything from here before. We’re going to nip this sport in the bud.” He checked that the gun was loaded. “You think that asshole who knows the word ‘paddle’ knows the word ‘tape recorder,’ too?”

“Odinaye is a natural suspect.”

“Good. We’ll see if he knows the words ‘Hand it over’ and ‘Say your prayers.’”

“Charles, it’s only a tape recorder.”

“When there’s only one of them and it makes you a god, there’s no such thing as only a tape recorder.”

Gray followed Corgie warily down the ladder.

When they got to Odinaye’s hut, sure enough they could hear from outside the snap of buttons and the whir of reels; snatches, too, of native conversation about funeral rites. “How appropriate,” Corgie muttered as he ducked inside.

In the corner was a dark figure huddled over the machine. Corgie dragged the man outside by his arm and threw him down. In the light, though, the figure turned out to be Odinaye’s younger brother Login, who was only fourteen. Login crumpled at Corgie’s feet, with his face to the ground. The only sound the boy made was a high, raspy breath, which hit eerie harmonics. Corgie took the safety off his rifle.

The wives, including Login’s mother, quickly gathered around the scene, not daring to interfere. They said nothing. Gray turned and found, with no surprise, Odinaye, tall and silent and glowering ten feet away.

“Okay, you son-of-a-bitch.” Corgie addressed Odinaye in English. “You know those words, mister? You should. Son-of-a-bitch. Now you listening to me? I don’t know for a fact that you took it, so I’m not going to shoot you. But you’re going to watch.”

“Charles—”

“Go get the recorder.”

Gray retrieved the machine. Charles announced in Il-Ororen to the crowd that Login had stolen the sacred voice box. Then he picked the boy up and propped him against the wall of the hut.

Gray put her hand on Corgie’s shoulder. “Charles, we’ve got it back now—”

Corgie brushed her hand off and, with astonishingly little ceremony for a god, took the rifle to his shoulder and shot the thief against the wall, right in the heart.

The shot echoed back and forth between the cliffs of the valley, but died quickly; so did Login. Corgie slung his gun back over his shoulder and left Il-Ororen behind him blithely, the way he might walk away from one of his models with the dark clay figures posed in their attitudes of worship or chagrin. With one glance at Odinaye, who looked back at her with a stiff, unfazed resolve that seemed oddly familiar, Gray trailed after Charles, carrying the hallowed tape recorder. That’s right. That look, it was Corgie’s.

When Gray walked into the cabin Corgie had his back to her and was looking out the window. “Go ahead,” he said shortly, not turning around. “I’m ready.”

Gray stood staring at Corgie’s back, watching those broad shoulders heave up and down from the kind of breathing he might do before battle. For a time she said nothing. She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t rallied the disgust she would need now. It must have been disturbing to enter a room with a man whose gun was still warm, with a dead fourteen-year-old down below, and not feel sufficient revulsion. Gray was shaken, but right now her deepest wish was to sink her fingers into the bands of his neck and relax the muscles, to rearrange his frayed black hair. Gray must have been asking herself what Errol had always wondered, too: how could she overlook that Charles Corgie murdered people? Maybe she wasn’t a “warm, gooey-hearted darling,” but she had her limits and one of them had always been shooting a young boy at five paces. No, she didn’t go for that. How could she go for that in Corgie? Was she actually attracted to a man who shot fourteen-year-olds for stealing tape recorders? Did that impress her? Or did she understand that he didn’t know what he was doing? That Charles’s vision was narrowed enough that for him firing at natives was no different from shooting down ducks at a county fair? Could she forgive that poor eyesight? Yet even if people are born a certain way and end up a certain way for reasons out of their control, aren’t there actions you hold them accountable for, regardless? Wouldn’t Charles be convicted posthaste at Nuremberg? Or would Gray Kaiser be the one stolid juror who would vote to let him off the hook?

Errol had never answered these questions to his satisfaction.

It was with reluctance, then, that Gray began now, though there was one long moment when she actually considered keeping quiet and massaging his neck; in that same moment she also understood that he was tired and upset and would have let her. Instead, she said for the second time, still from across the room, “Charles. It was only a tape recorder.”

Corgie sighed at the window. His body slumped, as if he could feel the fingers withdrawing from his neck. So it was this again. They were both good soldiers, but there were days—Gray, why can’t we shut up? It was hard enough to shoot that boy. Why can’t we drop it? But instead he said, “What was I supposed to do, Gray? Slap his hand and send him to his room? Or sit him down and ask him, If everybody did that, what kind of world would we live in?” He turned around. “Gray darling, we’re not in school anymore. We’re in the middle of Africa. Keeping up this immortality stuff isn’t just a game.”

“It is in a way,” said Gray. “You set the rules. Didn’t you choose to be immortal?”

“That’s right, to save my ass. I saved it, I have to keep saving it. Haven’t we been through this?” Their talk was still without heat. The argument was tired. “In Toroto religion is a matter of life and death. It is for me. So it is for them. It’s only fair.”

“All of which fails to explain why you had to shoot a fourteen-year-old boy—”

“All of which does explain it!” Corgie at last took a few steps toward her, at last gave his voice some edge, some pitch. “I swear, Kaiser, you just don’t want to understand, do you? You just have to be against me. Have to be on the other side.”

“Of this, yes.”

“Of everything and you know it. Kaiser, the irony of this whole business is that I have never met a woman more like me in my life. Lady, you surpass me! I mean it! You bitch all the time, but you took to divinity like a fish to water!”

Gray’s chin rose a little higher. The idea of massaging this man’s neck was now out of the question. “I have done here,” she said coldly, “what I had to do. For my work and for my own survival.”

“Which is what I said, but it doesn’t wash when I say it.”

“I haven’t killed people.”

“You haven’t had to! I do it for you! Why do you think they’re afraid of you, Kaiser? Why do you think you’re still alive? Why do you think nobody’s stolen your lousy tape recorder before now? Darling, you’ve cashed in. Your ticket was already paid for.”

Gray shut her mouth.

“But come on, Kaiser. It hasn’t been so bad, has it? Ordering guys around? Being revered?”

“Actually,” said Gray, “I’ve found it quite uncomfortable.”

“You’re so full of shit!” shouted Corgie. Gray took a step back. For all the reluctance with which this argument began, it was in full swing now; she’d never seen Corgie so angry. “You eat it up, don’t you think I can see that? Oh, you’re nicer than I am, I’ll give you that, but that’s because having them worship you isn’t enough, is it? You have to get them to like you, too. You want them to worship and adore you. At least I have the humility to let them hate me as long as they bring me my supper every night.”

Their voices were carrying. Outside, the sky started to rumble; after a moment it poured. “Convenient,” said Gray. “The gods are fighting. Venting their wrath on Il-Ororen.”

“If there is a real one,” said Corgie, “He’s on our side. We’ve been lucky. You are dangerous. You may have a good time playing Jesus Christ, but I’ve never met more of a human being in my life.”

“That should be a compliment, but it doesn’t sound like one.”

“Oh, cut the humanism shit, will you? For a minute? I mean the reason you’re dangerous is that you’re so jealous. And that’s one big giveaway. That’s the most mortal emotion I know.”

“Jealous of what?” asked Gray incredulously, raising her voice over the rain.

“You can’t stand it that I got here first, can you? You can’t stand not having this whole shebang to yourself, can you?”

“That is—” Gray turned red. “That is the most ridiculous accusation I have ever heard—”

“Miss Gray Kaiser, valiant, beloved anthropologist—everyone goes to you, bows down, asks for advice, but Miss Kaiser doesn’t need anyone, no—”

“You mean I don’t need you.”

The two of them stood face to face. Perhaps they were gods now, at this moment, and this was omnipotence: to know exactly how little they cared. Glaring at each other silently, both Gray and Charles recited together their real credo: Who cares about you, or anyone? Who needs you, or anyone? I blink and you disappear. I turn my back on you and all I see is the door that I can walk out of, always. I am tall and smart and powerful without you. I can make jokes and laugh, and then they are funny. I can write down thoughts and read them back and nod, and then they are wise. I put my hands over my ears and hum, and the things you say that so upset me could be birdcalls or the radio or a fly. You think I want you, and sometimes even I think that, but you are wrong and that is weakness in me, for I am stronger than even I know. I am a god. I am making it rain now. So if I want you to evaporate like a shallow puddle in the bright heat of my brain, then you will shimmer in this room and dissolve into the heavy air and I will not care—I will be thinking about what I would like for dinner; I will be thinking about my important work; I will sleep well at night and get up the next morning deciding what I want to wear. Goodbye, Charles Corgie; goodbye, Gray Kaiser. Only someone outside of us will be able to remember we were ever standing in the same room, that we ever laughed at the same jokes. Since no one else was there, no one will remember that we ever held each other on that bed and kissed and ran our fingers through each other’s hair.

Perhaps at the end of their litany both Gray and Charles looked around the room in confusion, wondering, To whom am I talking, anyway? I must be talking to myself. So, since there was no one else in the cabin, Gray did not need to excuse herself, but turned on her heel and walked out the door. It must have been disconcerting for a woman who could control the weather to step into a torrent and immediately be drenched to the skin.

Charles turned away and went back to building his model. Yet had Charles watched Gray a moment longer he would have seen her fall from grace most literally. Her foot slipped at the top of the ladder to pitch her ten feet through the air to the thick black mud below.

As she lay spitting mud out of her mouth, Gray was sure that her left arm had never been in precisely this position in its life. She thought, Get up, but for some reason she did not get up. All that rose were her eyes, and as she took them up from the ground, they met a pair of long, muddy, patient feet, and, at the top, other eyes, with great frightening whites and too much intelligence. Gray found herself thinking rather irrelevantly that Africans were lucky to have waterproof hair. As strands dripped into her face, she wished hers would bead like that, with smart gleaming droplets crowning her head. For the goddess was looking poorly; Odinaye, princely and serene.

“I help you?” asked Odinaye in English, extending his hand.

Gray didn’t take it. She felt suddenly as if the arm under her chest were a filthy secret she should keep to herself and protect. “I’ll be fine,” said Gray, pointedly in Il-Ororen. “Even a god must rest sometimes.”

“Kaiser,” he said, like Charles. “No rest in ground.” There was that gleam in his eyes again, that slight smile at his mouth, as he grasped her right arm and started to pull her up. When Gray gasped on her knees he let go. It had been a small, dry cry, but it was unmistakably the sound of pain.

With his eyebrows high and a look of feigned solicitude and surprise, Odinaye looked down at Gray’s left arm. Gray, too, couldn’t resist discovering what was hanging on the other end of her elbow. The flesh was swelling and purpling as they watched. There was a foreign object poking into her arm. It took her a full moment to realize that the object was sticking not in but out—that it was her own bone. All of this was bad enough, but worst of all for the immortal on her knees was the other, that substance, and Gray kept wishing it would rain harder; but the rain could not wash down her arm fast enough to rinse away her bright-red secret winding its watery way in streams to the tip of her elbow and pooling in the crook of her arm.

“Oh my,” said Gray, “look at that.” She tried for a tone of mild, disinterested curiosity; to a surprising extent she succeeded, too. Yet the whites of Odinaye’s eyes loomed large before her, and she was sure now that this man knew her every weakness, her every flaw—that he could see not only that her bones were fragile and her blood red as his, but that she had stolen a roll of Life Savers from a drugstore when she was ten.

“I call help,” said Odinaye, and he was now unabashedly smiling, his teeth sharp, shining in the rain.

“No—” said Gray, but Odinaye was already shouting; four other natives appeared around her. She thought clearly: They are witnesses. Coldly Gray requested a board. Refusing any other assistance, she placed the wood under her arm and stood, carefully holding her limb before her like a roast on a platter. All this while the natives stared, and not so much at her arm as at her face. Gray knew this and gave them a fine performance. Those muscles were a miracle of ordinariness and careless physical comfort. Standing straight as ever, Gray dismissed her parishioners and balanced herself elegantly rung by rung up to Corgie’s cabin. It was a shame Charles missed this ascent—it was one of those moments he would have hated but also admired, the way he felt about most things she did, but maybe for once the admiration might have won out. It was hard, after all, to strike a fine figure covered in black mud, or to look that haughty and regal and unaffected when in the very process of being dethroned.

“I think we’re in trouble,” said Gray from behind Charles.

“Woman,” said Charles, not looking up from his model, “we’ve been in trouble from day one.” He may not have fallen at her feet for returning so soon after such a fight, but for once his woodchips would stay where he put them, and he bound the sticks with dry grass easily and with satisfaction.