The Female of the Species

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.”