Lawrence Block - Me Tanner, You Jane

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.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, it’s part of the policy of competing brands. They learned it from Procter and Gamble.”

He didn’t seem amused at this. He thought it over and just shook his head, and I asked again what had happened to Ndoro.

“Knanda Ndoro,” he said. “The Modonoland Retriever. Quite a man, Tanner cat. Quite a man. Know much about him?”

“Not much,” I said.

“He was a fascist bastard,” Plum said.

Bowman seemed not to have heard. His face took on an odd quality. “A natural leader,” he said. “An infinitely charismatic man. A charmer. Tremendous natural intelligence, a good British education, and enormous personal magnetism. Maybe he was bad for the country in some ways, but he was damned good for it in others. Gave these buggers a sense of identity, a feeling of national purpose.

“I had a hard time getting him to leave the capital. He wanted to stay. Of course we got out at the last minute. You must know about that. Then that mad rush through the jungle. I thought we were clear at one point. I thought the two of us, you know, would be equal to anything the jungle might throw up against us.”

He lowered his eyes and dropped his voice. “Then the fever struck. I caught it first and came close to dying. But he nursed me through it. And then, just as I was recovering nicely, he came down with it. He was burning up with fever and couldn’t eat and was delirious and, oh, it was terrible.” A pulse worked in his temple. “I stayed up with him day and night. I tried to bring him out of it by sheer force of will, but my will just wasn’t equal to that fever. After three days and nights of it he died.

“I dug his grave with my own two hands. By the side of a tree near a river bank. Scooped out the dirt with my own two hands and laid him to rest. I thought of a poem they taught me in school. Stevenson wrote it, Robert Louis Stevenson, for his own epitaph. It went like this:

Under a wide and starry sky,

Dig my grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea

And the hunter home from the hill.

“I thought that might make a good epitaph for him, that it was fitting. But I had nothing to write with and nothing to write on, and anyway I knew I’d never be able to mark that grave so I could find it again. So what was the point of an epitaph if wasn’t anybody going to know who was buried there? What I did was I just spoke the words aloud, and I don’t suppose that did any more good than writin’ them, but it was something to do and I did it.”

He heaved a sigh, and we were all three respectfully silent for a few moments. “He must have been a very great man,” Plum said. A few moments ago, I seemed to recall, she had characterized the late Retriever as a fascist bastard. Women are decidedly fickle.

Bowman agreed that the Retriever had indeed been a great man. “You hear all these people talk about Black Power,” he said, “and here’s a guy actually went and did something about it. And with such style, such flair.”

“You must have been terribly devoted to him,” she said.

“Well, I could say it was just a job. Just the same old shuck.” He grinned gently. “But I’ll tell you a thing as straight as anything anybody ever told you, Plum kitten. And that’s that nobody on earth was ever as devoted to anybody as I was to Knanda Ndoro. And that’s the truth.”

Plum bowed her head and closed her eyes. Bowman let the poetic beauty of the scene build to a peak, then borrowed my Swiss Army pocketknife to scalp his two former comrades. Scalp is not the right word for it, but it will have to do. There was still some alcohol in my jug, and we used it to wash the red dye from the, uh, scalps. They would be presented to Sheena, who would accept them as trophies of the hunt even as she accepted Plum and me as faithful members of her rebel band. At least that was the theory.

I pictured Bowman digging Knanda Ndoro’s grave with his own two hands. I wanted to ask him about the treasure, but it seemed inappropriate to bring it up now.

“And the voiceof the Lord came unto Jane, and spake unto her. And the Lord said, Lo, thou art white, and thy father was white and his father before him. And the whiteness of thy father and thy father’s father is an abomination in my eyes, and thou art whitened as a sepulcher. So henceforth shalt thy name not be Jane, but from this day forward and forevermore shalt thou be called Sheena, which means Queen of the Jungle.