It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  “Evan?”

  I sighed a long and lazy sigh and rolled over onto my side. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of morning – the wind in the tall grasses, the flies swarming in the other buildings.

  “I think I am not drunk any longer.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “That was very nice, Evan. Does it always make one sober to make love?”

  “Not always.”

  “We should dress now.”

  “We should.”

  “We should leave at once.”

  “Yes,” I said. I sat up. “We really should.” I reached for my clothes. “We wasted far too much time already. Not that it was exactly a waste, but we should have been out of here hours ago. Fortunately it hasn’t done any-”

  “Any what?”

  I didn’t say anything. “Evan? You stopped in the middle of a sentence.”

  She was facing the opposite way, her back to the doorway of the building. She couldn’t see what I saw.

  “Evan?”

  “I was going to say harm, it hasn’t done any harm. But I think it has.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t turn around,” I said levelly. “Stay where you are, stay calm, don’t turn around-”

  So of course she turned around.

  And saw what I saw:

  Three men, black as power, naked as truth, and tall enough for pro basketball. Three huge naked black men with polished bones through their septa and bone rings on their fingers. Three naked black giants with their genitals painted bloody red.

  Looking our way, and grinning.

  Chapter 8

  The thing to do, I thought, was not panic. This thought didn’t do too much good. The thing to do when mountain climbing is not fall, and the thing to do when swimming is not sink, and the thing to do when menaced by three naked black giants is not panic. Sensational.

  One of the giants pointed at me. “ Uganda,” he said, more or less. “Mobutu Kasavubu Casaba Curare Montego. Uhuru Godzilla Colorado. Antigua.”

  I kept my eyes on the three of them and reached blindly to my left, where I had left my pants. I fumbled in the pocket and found the Swiss Army pocketknife.

  “Matilda. Piranha Daktari Laconic Malaysia Tomorrow. Llewellyn Otsego Decatur.”

  I opened the knife as surreptitiously as I could under the circumstances, which were not as conducive to that sort of thing as I might have wished. I got the can-opener blade first try. That wouldn’t do at all. Next shot, I got the blade you use for punching holes in belts, if you’ve either lost some weight or stolen a fat man’s belt. I decided it would do for punching holes in people as well, and that I didn’t have time to search for a more conventional weapon. Besides, the belt-hole maker was certainly more useful than, say, the nail file. Or the tweezers.

  I held the knife in my right hand and groped around with my left until I latched onto one of the forks with which we had been eating the lamented eggs. While all of this was going on the Modonoland Globetrotters held their ground, saying things like Toyota and Kon-Tiki and Mechanic to each other, and laughing their heads off between phrases. The humor was over my head, but I hoped they would stay amused. I had the feeling that the minute their sense of humor failed them they would turn ugly.

  Surprise, I thought. The good old element of surprise, that’s what we had going for us. They figured that we were paralyzed with fear – an understandable misconception, that – and the last thing they expected was an attack. True, there were three of them and one and a half of us. True, they were large enough to astonish a Texan. But they seemed to be unarmed, whereas I had a knife and a fork. Well, a belt punch and a fork. Well, that was something, wasn’t it?

  “ Corona,” said the one in the middle, approximately. “Melina Kandinsky Mercouri. Gowanda Kenosha Cunni-”

  I attacked.

  I did everything at once, because I had the feeling that there would be no second take, that all of this had to be done correctly first time around. I sprang to my feet and charged at them in one fine liquid motion, arms extended and weapons held high, face contorted in my most hideous snarl. I tore the air with a shriek designed to curdle the blood of my opponents and freeze them in their tracks. A phrase came unbidden to mind, a line from the advertisement of a factory-to-you discounter. “It’s time to cut out the middle man,” a voice spoke inside my head, and I sprang at the middle man, fully prepared to cut him out.

  The next thing I knew I had left the ground and was flying ass over teacups through the air. It was the damnedest thing ever. I never even had the sensation of physical contact with the man. Obviously he did take hold of me and throw me, but it happened so very suddenly and with such ease and precision that I was never aware of it. I even thought for a moment that I had taken flight, or that there had been an earthquake, or that the world was coming to an end. Nor was I convinced that the three possibilities were mutually exclusive. But I didn’t have too much time to work things out in my head because almost immediately I hit the wall with it and crumpled up on the ground.

  I got up again as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very. They looked quite as they had looked before, standing in a row taking things easy, the only change being that they had turned to face me. Behind them Plum was posing as an allegorical statue representing Surprise. The man in the middle was saying things like Salami and Horizon and Montezuma.

  So I charged again. This time I started out once again for the man in the middle; then, halfway there, like any suburbanite I drifted to the right. This, see, was strategy. I seemed to be charging blindly ahead at the man who had sent me flying, but that was just to give the man on the right a false sense of security. To lull him into inattention.

  It didn’t work. This time I landed on the floor instead of hitting the wall, and this time it took a few seconds longer to shake the errant confusion out of my head, and this time when I got to my feet I discovered the Swiss Army pocketknife was missing. I still had the fork, though. Otherwise everything was as before – the same extraordinary sensation of flight, the same utter rout for our side.

  The man in the middle was talking again. Or maybe it was the one on the left, or the one on the right. I couldn’t be sure. Nor could I catch what they were saying. Before the words had been meaningless enough, but now I couldn’t even pick up on the sound. I suppose I was as close to sleep as it is possible to be while walking around, and closer than I had been in twenty years.

  I looked around for my breath and couldn’t quite find it, and then the one on either the right or left said something, and the one on either the left or right giggled and took a step forward, and I gathered that the third time was going to be the charm. My man thrust one foot forward and planted the other at a right angle to it. His hands assumed the traditional posture, one up in front of his face, the other just in front of his shoulder. His face, so loose and composed before, was now drawn and deeply seamed.

  I did not attack this time. He was not waiting for me, either. He took small steps toward me, extending the lead foot, bringing the rear foot up, constantly maintaining the stance. I tried arranging myself similarly, wondering at the same time why I was bothering. He was going to cut me up and use me for bait and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

  And the hell of it was that I was never absolutely beyond redemption in hand-to-hand combat. They gave me lessons in it before they shipped me to Korea, and a couple of times on those numbered hills I had a chance to show what I had learned, and it went well enough. I was never great but I was never awful, either, but these three clowns were good enough to make my old judo instructors look like barroom brawlers.

  The man came closer, and I looked at him and at the others, and I glanced among other things at his bright red genitals, and at the others’ bright red genitals, and I thought again of the judo instructors and my last thought in that connection, and something clicked.

  I dropped my hands. I opened my mouth and, loud and clear, I shouted out, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny!”

  Chapter 9

  The three of them took the news in diverse fashion. The one approaching me with murderous intent stopped in his tracks, which was good, and blinked, which wasn’t bad either. Another just stood around looking puzzled, although my statement must have made as much sense to him as his dialogue had to me. And the third man – the man in the middle, the tallest and broadest and blackest of them all – paused only long enough to register recognition, surprise, and resolution.

  Then he moved. One arm lashed out, palm flat and fingers extended, swinging in a sure backhand stroke that caught the standing-around-looking-puzzled man full in the throat. As the blow landed my man was already striding forward, his other hand reaching out to the man with murderous intent. The hand caught a shoulder and spun, and the other hand, no longer busy with the puzzled man’s throat, bunched its fingers and stabbed at the midsection, burying itself in the solar plexus and thrusting upward.

  All of this happened very quickly while I just stood there and held onto my fork. The man who’d been chopped in the throat made a terrible sound and fell in stages to the ground. His knees buckled, and his body bent at the waist, and he went down as if torpedoed. The other man came right up onto his toes, lifted by the claw in his middle. He made a whooshing sound as air came out of him in a rush, making its exit either from his mouth, which seemed more likely, or through the hole in his belly, which seemed possible at the time. His back was to me so I couldn’t really be sure, but either way the air went out of him, and so did the resistance, and so, I guess, did life itself. He flopped onto the floor and stayed there.

  And the big man, who had done all of this as easily as he had flung me across the room, said, “You’re absolutely right about that, needless to say. Ontogeny certainly does recapitulate phylogeny.”

  “Every time,” I said.

  “One never sees phylogeny,” he said, “without it’s been recapitulated by ontogeny.”

  Plum was saying, “Wha’, wha’-” The two men on the ground were saying nothing at all.

  I said, “Sam Bowman.”

  The big man looked at me. He just stood there looking at me, and then slowly his lips eased into a broad grin, parting to show white teeth. “Yeah,” he said, drawling. “Sam Goddamn Bowman himself. And just who in the hell are you, man?”

  Introductions didn’t take long. When we all knew who we were, it was time to look to the future. The future looked uncertain at best.

  Bowman checked the two men on the floor, and they turned out to be dead, which is what we had assumed. “So much for witnesses,” he said cheerfully. “But that ain’t the end of the problem. The question, baby, is what we gonna do about you two.”

  I told him that was simple – we were heading for home and he could join us. He said it wasn’t that simple at all.

  “Ol’ Sheena has her boys strung out all over this patch of real estate, man. We knew you were here last night. If we tried to split now, we wouldn’t make a mile without coming up against some of my old buddies.”

  “Are they that good at combat?”

  “You believe it. I trained ’em myself.”

  “These two didn’t give you much trouble.”

  “Oh, they didn’t expect anything, see. They were digging you, and I just came along and zapped them. And then they trusted me, see, which is always a mistake, like.” He shook his head. “No chance,” he said. “Only thing is to go back to where Sheena is at and pass you off as members of the tribe.” He shook his head. “Which ain’t gonna be exactly easy. Sellin’ you two to Sheena is like sellin’ sand in the desert.”

  “Tell her we’re friendly. That we’re on her side, something like that.”

  “You’re the wrong color, man. And the bird, she’s the wrong sex. You know anything about Sheena? She’s one beautiful crazy-ass chick, man. Great big blonde with jugs out to here and wild legs, looks like something out of a Swedish movie.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “She was a missionary’s daughter.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  But he wasn’t. Sheena, it seemed, had started life as plain Jane Grey (“Unlucky Lady Jane,” Bowman said) until a cannibal gang cooked and ate her parents. Jane was on hand to watch all this, and was at a sufficiently impressionable age for the spectacle to leave scars. Additional scars were left by the cannibals’ subsequent treatment of Jane herself – they used her to satisfy another hunger entirely, raping her beyond the bounds of good taste.

  One might think that this sort of treatment would have made Jane, who had been shy anyway, and who had experienced a typically repressed childhood, into a man-fearing black-hating desiccated old bitch, and perhaps a vegetarian in the bargain. But somehow the Fates turned the picture inside out and printed it as a negative. She hated whites, not blacks. She hated women, not men. Far from desiccated, she was genuinely juicy, a full-fledged polyandrous nymphomaniac. (These – mark it well – are my words. Bowman’s description was less scholarly.)

  Nor was she any sort of vegetarian. I learned now what had happened to the various human organs the absence of which I had last night noted. They had been eaten.

  “So you see where it’s at,” he summed up. “Certain people don’t get to live when Sheena has any say about it. Like all women, white or black. And like all white men. And like any black men who won’t come join the harem. Which comes out” – he sighed – “that we got a problem. You’re white. The chick is half-white and also she’s a chick.”

  Plum snorted quietly.

  “Not that I’m complainin’ myself, understand.” He beamed at her, and her irritation dissolved in the glow of the smile. “Wouldn’t have you any other way, baby. That mixed-blood bag is very exotic. I dig it.”

  I think she blushed.

  “Thing is, you can’t come into Sheena’s camp looking like yourselves. But there’s a way around it. There generally is, has been my experience. We cut your hair short enough and darken it up some and it won’t look so bloody Caucasian. Use some dyes to darken your face. Darken up the bird’s, too, and her hair. At least it’s kinky to start with. Makes it easier.”

  “I knew it would come in handy someday,” Plum said.

  “Have to tie them there up a little,” he went on, pointing at her breasts. “And Evan, my man, I don’t guess it would hurt for you to join the red crotch club. It’s just this cochineal dye she has us put on. Don’t hurt none, and to tell you the truth I think it keeps the flies off.”

  “What about Plum?”

  “She have much trouble with flies?”

  “No, but-”

  “No point then, man.”

  This stupidity got sorted out when Bowman explained that Sheena and her Merry Men only went naked on selected occasions, such as massacres, so that they wouldn’t get blood on their clothing. He and his two erstwhile buddies had been fully dressed when they came calling on us, but had stripped outside and left the clothes there. We could even wear their clothes, he suggested; it might help make the deception effective.

  I don’t know if it did or not, really. In Plum’s case, the white duck slacks were a foot and a half too long for her, the waist almost that much too large for her, and the canvas tunic was so oversized that her breasts disappeared in it; there was really no point in binding them. My outfit came a little closer to my size – either my opponent had been less gigantic than he had seemed or the clothes had been too small for him.

  We had no sooner gotten the clothes on than we took them off again and began making ourselves over as members of Sheena’s gang. Bowman took charge of things, and I was more than happy to let him. I had lost the ability for intelligent planning somewhere along the way and didn’t know if I would ever get it back. It was easier by far to nod and grunt while my hair got shortened and my skin darkened and my generative paraphernalia dyed a screaming scarlet.

  He did the honors for Miss Pelham Jenkins, too. I had to admit that the transformation was fairly remarkable. The little bridge of freckles disappeared as her skin turned several shades darker. The very unusual cap of blond curls became a very usual cap of dark brown curls. Sam Bowman did good work, and if it seemed to me that his hands lingered rather too affectionately on the flesh he was darkening, there was really nothing I was entitled to do or say about it.

  And through it all, Bowman talked. About the life he had for himself, roaming the jungles with Sheena’s gang and instructing them in hand-to-hand combat and guerrilla warfare techniques. About his flight from Griggstown, and how he had been very nearly killed a dozen times, and how he would have starved to death or died of a fever if he hadn’t met up with Sheena. About the Chief, and the stupidity of this assignment, and the superiority of the average urban ghetto to the average jungle, and of the average urban ghetto dweller to the average denizen of the bush.

  “Not that these cats don’t have a certain charm, you dig. Because they do. And they are purely beautiful at getting their bodies to do what their heads tell them. When I was in Oakland with the Panthers we would get all these very straight college boys stuffed up to here with Black Power slogans. All hung up on Afro culture and Mao and Che, the whole bag. Intense, you know. I’d lay some judo and karate on them and they’d practice day and night and concentrate on nothing else, but it was like their bodies wasn’t right for it. They didn’t feel it, they didn’t have the rhythm for it, and they never did get it down right.”

  I asked about Knanda Ndoro, and about the details of his assignment. He said he had been sent to rescue the Retriever but was rather bitterly surprised when I let him know that America had simultaneously supported the side that deposed the dictator. “They never told me that,” he said.

  “Maybe they wanted to make your performance more convincing.”

  “They do one thing with one hand and the opposite thing with the other.”

  “The other hand was the CIA.”