The Female of the Species

Gray looked at her hands.

“All right,” said Charles with a clap. “I’ve got it.” He rummaged around the cabin until he found a long scrap of cheetah skin. “Your shirt.”

“No!” said Gray, but with Corgie’s urging she went behind her partition and tied it around her chest. For her skirt he dragged out his old parachute and began to tear off a long swath of the silk.

“Are you sure you want to rip that up?”

“Now, what good is a parachute going to do me in Toroto?”

“You never know when you’re going to have to bail out of here.”

“You bring that up a lot,” said Charles, tucking the chute around her hips, making a full, low-swung wrap, like a belly dancer’s. “My leaving. You don’t seem to get it, Kaiser. I’m gonna be buried here.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Ah-ah. No more morbid talk. Now, let’s see.” He patted her hip. “Step back.” She did so; Charles let out a slow whistle. “Terrific.”

Gray looked down at the thin band of animal skin around her breasts, the long flat expanse of her bare stomach, the blousy white silk draping down to her feet. She extended her leg between the folds and smiled. “It’s slit practically up to my waist, Charles.”

“Very sexy.”

“Are you trying to humiliate me?”

“Couldn’t if I tried. Whatever we put on you, the congregation will receive you with tragic seriousness.”

Gray put her hair high on her head, slipped on her sunglasses, and billowed down the ladder.

“Hold it,” said Charles. “Where’s that camera of yours? I want a picture.”

Gray told him, but by the time he returned with her camera she was disconcerted. “This will have to be developed, you know.”

Charles posed her by the ladder. “Raise your arm. Chin in the air. Come on, you’re a goddess! And let’s see that leg through the slit. Right.—Come on, what’s the problem? The pose is great, but your face looks like you’re still fourteen and your mother’s dragging you to church.”

“I just wonder how you propose to get this photograph if you’re going to be buried here.”

“Mail it to me,” said Charles, looking through the shutter. “Charles Corgie; The-Middle-of-Fucking-Nowhere; Africa. Or send a caravan. You’ll think of something.”

Gray managed to smile, though wistfully. Errol knew this. He’d seen the picture: the wind catching the white chute, which trailed off to the side, her leg streaking toward the camera, and the poignant expression of a woman who hadn’t yet finished a story that gave every indication of ending badly.

On the way to Corgie’s cathedral they processed arm in arm with Il-Ororen decked out and ululating behind them. Corgie held his rifle like a papal staff; Gray’s camera swung from her hand like an incense burner. Charles led her into the cavernous interior, with its one huge, unadorned room. The great thatched ceiling let in an uneven mat of sunlight over the dirt floor. As Il-Ororen passed into the sanctuary they went silent, threading in neat rows before the dais. Charles pulled Gray up with him on the raised platform before the crowd and waited with gun in hand for the gathering to assemble. When as many as could fit in the room were seated and still, Charles stepped forward. A baby began to cry. Charles pulled the trigger on his rifle, and the shot vibrated up through Gray’s feet. There was an echoing rumble through the crowd, though they quickly sat still again. The mother of the crying child pressed the baby to her breasts and cowered out the door. Gray looked up at the roof. There was a whole smattering of holes in the thatch the size of bullets, and when she looked down she saw they let in absurdly cheerful polka dots of sunlight at her feet.

Deeply Charles intoned his invocation. His manner was so serious, his voice so incantatory, that it took Gray several moments to realize he was chanting a Wrigley’s spearmint-gum commercial.

Gray stared.

“Knock, knock!” boomed Corgie.

“Hooz dere!” the cry came back, with the solemnity of a responsive reading.

“Mm-mm, good!”

“Mm-mm, good!”

“That’s what Campbell’s soup is!”

“Mm-mm, good!”

Somehow Charles kept a straight face. Gray stuffed her fist in her mouth.

Corgie launched into a hearty version of “Whoopee tai-yai-yo, git along, little dogies,” and rounded it off with a Kellogg’s corn flakes jingle. He gave them tips on freshening their refriger-ators with Arm and Hammer and painlessly removing corns. He exhorted the merits of Wombley’s uncrushable ties. For his sermon, Charles pulled a tattered Saturday Evening Post out of his leather jacket and read a rousing portion of “We’ll Have Fewer Cavities Now,” the stirring story of Bobsie Johnson of Brockton, Mass., and her battle with bad teeth. After the sermon he led the congregation in a moving rendition of “Little Rabbit Foo-Foo.” He had taught them the hand motions, so an expanse of several hundred African tribesmen bounced their fists up and down, “scoop-nup de field mice an’ bop-num on de head.” Every once in a while Charles would look over at Gray and smile. Gray shook her head. Listening to Corgie was like putting your ear to the crack in a playroom door.

Yet the gathering also functioned in a serious religious sense, perhaps to Corgie’s dismay. His English rambling seemed no more sardonic to his parishioners in its untranslated state than Latin to uncomprehending Catholics or Hebrew to unschooled Jews, so that the feeling in that assembly built to true spiritual frenzy despite Campbell’s soup. The audience swayed and clapped in the best revivalist tradition. Finally, when Corgie turned to the miraculous radio behind him and delicately tuned in the one broadcast he could barely pick up—a Swahili station that also played American music—the Il-Ororen were on their feet craning forward and at a pitch of silence. Gradually the grainy voices drifted in, then out, then in—Il-Ororen’s ancestors, men from other planets, gods, fairies, whatever, until the talking stopped and Corgie smiled; the reception became exceptionally clear and loud and Louis Armstrong’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” blasted across Corgie’s cathedral. Charles reached for Gray’s hand, and they danced across the dais.

“Kaiser!” said Charles quietly, “you’re a great dancer.”

Gray smiled. She was a great dancer. Errol had watched her join celebrations all over the world. And this must have been something. Gray at twenty-two and this handsome, outrageous man in his red baseball cap and goggles and little strip of a tie whipping across his bare chest, all in front of hundreds of Kenyans in a swoon. Whenever Charles twirled her around or swept her back until her hair brushed the floor, Il-Ororen whooped. Finally he spun her until her feet lifted off the floor, pulled her out and into a turn and a bow, and the song was over. Il-Ororen roared. At a nod from Corgie they poured happily out the door.

Gray and Charles stayed on the platform until the last churchgoer was gone. The expanse of the room was serene. “How much of that was for my benefit?” asked Gray softly. The question echoed.

“In a way, all of it. But I don’t usually read Leviticus, if that’s what you mean. Last time I read them ‘The Other Woman Was My Best Friend’ and made them sing ‘One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ to the last verse.”

“That’s real despotism, Charles. So what’s next?”

“Everyone eats a lot and gets drunk. Then I coach the football team.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Hey, Sunday afternoon, right? I’m an American missionary. I’d bring them beer and pretzels and narrow-mindedness if I could, but as it is, we have to make do. I sewed my own leather ball. Works pretty well, too. And I’ve changed a few of the rules.”

“Why?”

“Because I could,” said Charles.

“It must be frustrating,” said Gray, looking around the big empty hall.

“How?”

“Well, they don’t know you’ve changed the rules, do they?”

“No. So?”

“When you make the rules you can’t break them, can you? A funny sort of solipsistic hell.”

“My, we are talking mighty fancy.”

Gray settled her eyes on this strange dark man in his little red baseball cap. Poor Charlie had surely spent his Sunday mornings as a boy sending spitballs arcing between pews; yet now if he were to introduce spitballs into his services, the whole congregation would obediently wad and wet them, and little boys would grow to resent sopping them in their cheeks every bit as much as Charles had resented stale communion wafers on his tongue. Here was a heretic whose every blasphemy turned uncontrollably to creed. Adherence to his own religion must have followed Corgie like a loyal dog he couldn’t shake. Gray pulled his visor affectionately over his face. “All I mean,” Gray explained, “is it must be hard when no one gets your jokes.”

“Were you amused?”