The Female of the Species

Oh, Gray, Errol thought, looking back on this evening much later. It had been too early to be asleep. Dusk is a time to be preyed upon. Wise herds are astir, on their feet with their heads high and eyes open, but Gray stayed in bed with her long, bony head at a forlorn angle against the mat, picking up the pattern of the tortured weave in her cheek. The brush outside the compound rustled. It was not the wind. Bare feet pattered across the hard-packed earth of Toroto. Old women spoke in low whispers. They’d been frightened before, and this was ridiculous. Weren’t Il-Ororen savvy now? They ate Almond Joys and Pez candies. They complained in their own language about static and weak stations. They knew the word “tape recorder” and how little magic it really was, without money. Some even had guns, and no longer particularly admired them. Yet anthropology is not about nothing. There was a culture here, and it rose. It believed in ghosts, despite Pez candies. And here their protector slept with her head on the mat, as if, because Charles Corgie had been “just” a man, there were no more mysteries.

You couldn’t blame them for being frightened, though once again they’d made a mistake. Il-Ororen needed no protection. He was coming for a woman “very tall and very strong and very brilliant,” though a woman with her length reaching toward she didn’t know what anymore, her strength turning to an irritation, her brilliance casting about in the dark until it shattered aimlessly into a disappointed dispersion across the night sky.

It was dark now. Errol was surrounded by whispers and running feet. When he felt a hand on his arm, he started.

“He is alive!” It was Elya, with her voice low. “He has returned!”

“What?”

“I tell you, he has come back! And he has not grown older.”

“Who?”

“Il-Cor-gie!” she said breathlessly.

Errol’s mouth twisted, and he was glad she couldn’t see his face in the dark. Sometimes Errol was not a perfect anthropologist, and all this admirable myth and culture soured into native weirdness. It was late, and Errol had had a hard day. What in Christ’s name was she talking about, anyway. “Maybe you’d better talk to Ol-Kai-zer,” said Errol. He’d worked on this dialect before the trip, but maybe he wasn’t understanding her right. Besides, this was annoying and Errol wasn’t in the mood—he’d finished that interview himself, and Gray was just lying there. Do a little work, Kaiser. On your feet.

But another woman had already run into Gray’s hut and was dragging her out the door. Gray, too, looked confused in the light of the woman’s lantern. Several women clustered behind her as she approached Errol.

“What’s all this about?” asked Gray, with the same unanthropological annoyance.

“Damned if I know. Something about Corgie still being alive if I heard right.”

The women tugged on Errol and Gray, with a strange combination of fear and excitement. “He is back!” they kept saying. “Il-Cor-gie has returned to us!”

As Errol and Gray went with the women, the natives pushing them toward the center of the village, Errol muttered quietly to Gray, “Why do I feel as if I’m in the middle of a New Testament reading?” Gray laughed.

It was getting chilly. Gray and Errol rubbed their arms. Amid the chatter and the quickened air and the odd, unexplained secret they were approaching, the evening had an offbeat holiday atmosphere. There was a glow in the center of Toroto that proved to be a bonfire. Its light cast brilliantly on an unfamiliar figure with such intensity that the man with his hands held gently before the fire seemed to be aflame himself.

As they drew nearer, Gray slowed. The man in the flames looked straight at her. Gray stopped. Took a step. Stopped. The sound of her breathing at Errol’s side cut off altogether, as if she’d forgotten to inhale. Finally she herself stepped into the surreal molten glow of the fire, and stood, once more a statue; stone.

Errol looked away from his mentor to the man on the other side of the fire. Flames licked across his line of vision; the face burned among the yellow tongues. Errol found it hard to swallow.

But Charles Corgie was dead. Charles Corgie had fired his gun at his own bomb and exploded. Or were Il-Ororen lying again? Had they allowed Corgie to escape and made up that final episode? Then how would they have known about bombs to make up such a story?

On the other side of the fire there was a tall, dark Caucasian with a hat. His hair was black, his stubble heavy and rising, his eyes sharp and unblinking, but he could not be more than twenty-five. Even if Corgie had slunk away to rule another tribe, or moved to Nairobi and sold car insurance for thirty-seven years, he would still be over sixty now.

Errol started to speak, but Gray shook her head. She smiled more sweetly than he’d ever seen. In the hiss of escaping steam and the pop of knots, Gray seemed lost in a dream from which she had little eagerness to wake.

“What is your name?” asked Gray at last.

“Sarasola,” said the man. “Raphael Sarasola.”

Now, thought Errol. Wrong name. The joke is over. But Errol did not sense the feeling in the air change.

“I was unaware,” said Gray with evident pleasure, “we’d become a tourist attraction.”

“You made it one,” said Raphael.

“You read my book?”

“The parts that interested me,” he answered coolly. It was something Charles would have said.

Several women crept up to Raphael and laid offerings of bananas and dried meat at his feet and scurried away. Raphael looked at them without enough surprise, as if he was used to being given things. He picked up a banana, and peeled it.

Gray could not take her eyes off him. “How did B.U. happen to send me an assistant who hasn’t even read the whole book?”

“There are other ways of getting what you want besides spending a lot of time in the library.”

“You’ll have to explain those sometime.”

“I won’t have to. But I might.” Errol thought distinctly, He doesn’t behave like a graduate student. “Don’t worry, though,” said Raphael. “They sent you the right man, all right.”

“Yes,” said Gray. “I think they did.”

There was more silence; the fire popped. Errol was beginning to feel something he’d never felt before. Terror.

“I’ve been traveling for two days,” said Raphael. He threw the skin of his banana into the fire and watched it sizzle. “I’m tired.”

Gray led Raphael to the hut where she and Errol were staying. Errol trailed after them.

“That’s my mat,” Errol mumbled when Gray showed the new assistant where to sleep. Gray didn’t seem to hear. “That’s my pillow,” he said more loudly as Raphael unrolled his sleeping bag.

“You can live without it for the night,” said Gray quietly. “He hasn’t slept in days.” She whispered good night and walked softly out of the hut, pulling Errol with her, as if leaving a sleeping child.

They ambled back toward the fire. “You didn’t introduce me,” said Errol after a time.

“Sorry,” said Gray, not paying the slightest attention.

They sat down on the warm stones before the bonfire, and though she’d been in bed only an hour before, “absolutely disgusted and tired and stupid,” Gray’s eyes were alive now, and she sat on the edge of the stone rubbing her hands together. “You know, I’m getting a lot of ideas for this film,” she said. “It could be exciting.”

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