Hazards (14 page)

I couldn’t tell whether that got him laughing or choking, but he did so much of whichever it was that he tripped on the edge of the porch and the gun went off as he tumbled to the ground.

I started counting all my limbs, got up to four, and figgered he’d missed me. Still, I knew he’d hit
something,
because I heard this kind of buzzing sound in my ears. I raised my hands to my head and made sure both my ears were still attached. I couldn’t figger out what had happened, but I saw that he was getting to his feet, and I didn’t plan to just stand there until he finally shot me, so I turned to the east and prepared to take off like a bat out of someplace that smelled a lot worse than Heaven, when I saw that the sky was black with angry hornets, and I realized that Harvey’s buckshot had accidentally blown half a dozen hornets’ nests off a nearby tree.

The hornets looked around for someone to get mad at, and as it happens, they were closer to the ants than to Harvey and me, so a bunch of them started dive-bombing the ants while them what was left went around to recruit all their friends and relations.

Harvey was just standing there kind of dumbfounded, and I figgered since he wasn’t aiming the shotgun no more I was safer on the porch than out here in the middle of the battlefield, so I went back there, and we pulled up a couple of chairs, and spent the next three hours watching the war. For a while it looked like the ants was going to pull it out, but this was one time that air power prevailed over boots on the ground. Both sides took a ton of casualties, and in the end the ants were in full retreat and the hornets had carried the day.

“Well, I can’t say you were any help,” announced Harvey when the battle was over, “but you didn’t desert us, and that’s worth a little something. Come into the house with me.”

I followed him into the living room, where there was a couch and a couple of chairs and a huge strongbox, which he walked over to and unlocked. I tried not to look too eager to see what I was going to inherit when the old gentleman went the way of all flesh, but I couldn’t help but lean forward and take a peek, and what I saw was a box full of shells.

“I collect them,” he said, handing me something that looked like it had once played house to a clam. “This one’s the treasure of my collection. It’s yours, Lucifer.”

I realized I’d been flim-flammed but good, that there wasn’t nothing in his strongbox but a bunch of seashells. Still, he was the father of the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I just handed it back and explained that I couldn’t take such a treasured item, and if he had some gold or diamonds lying around I’d be happy to settle for some of them instead, and he laughed like I was making a joke and slapped my back and allowed that maybe my parents shouldn’t have drowned me at birth after all.

And then I heard dainty little footsteps behind me, and I turned and saw Merry Bunta in all her radiant beauty, and I decided that coming all this way out from Rio was still a worthwhile undertaking, and that Merry without no riches was better than no Merry without no riches.

“Miss Merry Bunta, ma’am,” I said, bowing low, “I’m the Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones, here to pledge my heart to you.”

“I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you back in Rio,” she replied, “standing there outside Madame Sarcosa’s den of scarlet women. Once we got back home, I prayed night and day that I might somehow be able to see you again.”

“And here I am,” I said, “the answer to your prayers. Do you want to get hitched here or back in Rio?”

A look of sadness spread over her face. “I watched you this afternoon, Lucifer, and no one can doubt your bravery or your loyalty.”

“Two of my lesser virtues,” I said modestly.

“But the fact remains that if I marry you, you will be the father of my children, and you were outsmarted by a bunch of ants on three different occasions.” She sighed deeply. “I will always love you, Lucifer, but for the sake of my unborn children, I can’t marry you.”

I explained that the ants had all year to plan their campaign and I’d just stumbled into the fray on a moment’s notice, and that I’d be happy to stick around until the next time they were on the march and have a rematch, but she just kept shaking her head and saying that it just wasn’t meant to happen, and it was when I asked her
what
wasn’t meant to happen, the marriage or the rematch, that she just turned and went back to whatever room she’d come out of.

And that was the end of my tragic romance with Merry Bunta. I began walking north, hoping I’d run into a city sometime before I hit the Arctic Circle. But what I ran into was an old friend and a passel of trouble, and I’ll tell you about it just as soon as I hunt up a little drinkin’ stuff and refresh my artistic sensibilities.

A Jaguar Never Changes Its Stripes

I’m a city boy at heart. I’ve heard others sing the praises and charms of living in the wide open spaces, but games of chance and obliging women of quality just ain’t in abundance out in the wilderness, and of course my calling—bringing the Word of the Lord to all the unwashed and godless heathen of the world—requires me to go to where the sinners all congregate.

Which is why I find it puzzling that I spent so much of my young manhood being lost in the bush. There are glittering capitols on every land mass I ever been on, just filled to overflowing with works of art, many of which are called Fifi and Bubbles, but it seems that for every hour of heavenly rapture I could snatch with one of ’em I spent days and weeks getting et alive by six-legged critters and sharing my lunch with no-legged ones.

So I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised that a couple of days after taking my leave of old Harvey Bunta, his daughter Merry, and a couple of trillion army ants, I decided I was about as thoroughly lost as I’d ever been, and that is mighty thorough.

My sense of direction has stopped me from ever wandering as far as Mars or Venus, but beyond that it ain’t been all that much of a help. The only things I’d seen in two days besides them what flies and them what slithers were a pair of lovelorn tapirs what was absolutely shameless and had the kind of stamina you could only wish for in a horse what runs in them super-long six-day races across the desert. I couldn’t remember which fruits were good eating and which turned you into wormfood, so I settled for eating grass, which is kind of like eating salad without the tomatoes and the dressing.

Finally I came upon a river. I figgered at least I’d finally have some fish for dinner, but the alligators and anacondas what lived there weren’t real keen on sharing. Every time I’d reach into the water to grab a fish, up would come an alligator intent on grabbing a preacher. Finally I found a rope some native had left lying around, and I attached a thorn to serve as a hook, and I stuck a worm on the end of it and tossed it in the water, and sure enough, a twenty-foot anaconda swum by and grabbed it. Well, I pulled on my end and he pulled on his, and long about the time he’d drug me waist-deep into the water and a bunch of his friends and relations starting heading our way I figgered that raw anaconda probably didn’t taste as good to me as raw person did to him, and since he had the better motivation on his side I let go of the rope and climbed ashore just before his ladyfriend could give me a great big hug.

I sat on the shore for a few hours, trying to figger out how to con one the alligators out of a fish dinner when suddenly a small canoe came around a bend of the river and a little guy wearing nothing but a loincloth and a couple of bones in his hair paddled up to the shore and shot me a friendly smile and signaled me to hop in. I figgered I couldn’t be no hungrier and no loster anywhere else than I was here, so I accepted his invite and a minute later we were floating down the middle of the river.

We’d gone a couple of miles, and the river widened out some, and suddenly he stopped paddling and looked over the side of the boat, and then quick as lightning he reached into the water and pulled out a fish, which he tossed onto the floor of the boat. It started flopping around, and he cracked it on the head with his paddle, and then it just lay there, all quiet and peaceful-like.

I waited until he was busy paddling again, and then grabbed the fish and took a few bites, spitting out a couple of bones and swallowing the rest for some much-needed roughage. I didn’t forget my new-found benefactor neither, and left him the head, the tail, and one dorsal fin.

I never did learn his name, but we traveled north along the river for three days, and he was so good at nabbing fish that I didn’t feel guilty about gobbling half of them while he was hunting for
his
dinner, and the only problem I had during that whole journey was when he plucked a pirhana out of the water what was even hungrier than I was. We rassled to a draw, and I finally tossed him back after promising to come looking for him again when I was a little better equipped, like with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Then one day my companion headed for shore. We clambered out, pulled the boat up out of the water, and then he jabbered at me in some foreign tongue, and I blessed him and forguv him for his sins and asked if he had any romantically inclined sisters, and finally he went his way and I went mine.

I was still lost, but at least I was lost on a full stomach, and I began walking north along the river. There was the same fruits and berries that I hadn’t eaten a week ago, but I figgered if a bunch of raw fish, scales and all, hadn’t killed me, probably nothing growing on a tree could neither, always excepting poisonous centipedes with bad attitudes.

I was munching on something soft and almost tasty, and wondering how many years it would be before I hooked up with civilization again, when civilization manifested itself in the distance with the sound of a gunshot. This was followed by thirty or forty more shots in quick succession, and I realized that I’d stumbled into one of them revolutions what are even more popular in South America than baseball.

Now, I know some people would have run the other direction when they heard all them shots, but I’d
been
in the other direction for close to two weeks and I couldn’t find nothing to recommend it, so I began walking toward the sound of the gunfire, ready to sell my services to the first side that would make me a general and promise me three squares a day.

The gunfire became louder and louder, but as near as I could tell it was all coming from one side, and if that meant the enemy was out of ammunition, or better still all dead, then I knew which side I planned to join up with. I got to within maybe two hundred yards of it and was just passing a big shade tree when a voice rang out:

“Duck, Lucifer!”

I figured it was God Himself shouting at me, because none of these here revolutionaries could have known my name, and I took my Silent Partner at His word, diving head-first to the ground.

A couple of seconds later I heard a
thud!
just off to my right.

“What the hell are you doing out here in the Motto Grasso?” said that same voice, and suddenly it sounded mighty familiar and a lot less Godlike, and I lifted my head up and sure enough, there was my old friend Capturin’ Clyde Calhoun and maybe eight or nine of his gunbearers.

“Well, howdy, Clyde,” I said, getting up and brushing myself off. “Why in tarnation were you shooting at me?”

“Not
you
,” he said, walking forward. “Take a look.”

He pointed to where I’d heard the thud, and there, sprawled out on the ground where it had fallen from an overhead branch, was a jaguar with a hole right betwixt its eyes.

“Well, that’s one you ain’t bringin’ back alive,” I said.

He pulled out a flask, took a swig, and handed it to me. “You still ain’t told me what you’re doing here,” said Clyde.

“Mostly I been concentrating on being lost and starving to death,” I admitted.

“For a minute there I thunk we might be working for the same side,” he said.

“I don’t want to appear unduly ignorant, Clyde,” I said, “but who’s on the jaguar’s side?”

“Come on back to my camp and I’ll tell you all about it,” he said. “Dinner should be just about through cooking by the time we get there.”

“What kind of grub you got? I asked.

“Deer, tapir, alligator, and sloth,” said Clyde.

“You traveling with an ice box?”

“Shot ’em all this morning,” he replied. “Takes a lot of meat to feed a safari with five trackers, ten gunbearers and twenty skinners.”

“Twenty skinners?” I repeated.

“Well, nineteen. One up and run off with a headhunter’s daughter.”

“Should I presume from the fact that you’re traveling with nineteen skinners and no veterinarians that you ain’t capturing nothing for zoos and circuses on this safari?” I said.

He nodded. “This time I’m after jaguars.”

“I think they’re an endangered species.”

“Pretty much so,” he agreed.

“Ain’t it against the law to hunt endangered species?” I asked.

“They wasn’t endangered when I got here,” he said with more than a little trace of pride.

“So why are you denuding the countryside of jaguars?” I asked. “Have they been killing all the livestock?”

He laughed. “You see any farms around here, Lucifer?”

“Then what leads you to come all the way out here to hell and gone, just to shoot jaguars?”

“It’s political,” he said.

“Jaguars got the vote?” I asked.

“It’s really complicated,” he said. “I’ll tell you while we eat. In the meantime, what have you been doing with yourself? I ain’t seen you since we hunted that Yeti in the Himalayas.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it wasn’t no Yeti but just a eight-foot-tall basketball player on the lam from the mob for not shaving points, so I told him everything I’d experienced since then, covering such heroic adventures as the Clubfoot of Notre Dame, the Island of Annoyed Souls, my six hours as President of San Palmero, and many other such exploits, which I’ve writ about before and won’t thrill you with again (or at least not right this moment), and Clyde, for his part, told me about the mountain gorillas and pandas and blue whales he brung back—them few what was still alive and feebly kicking—after his veterinarians nursed ’em back to health, which he assured me was the very safest way to bring ’em back alive. I told him of the fifteen or twenty times I’d fallen passionately and eternally in love, and he told me about the eighty-three times he’d fallen passionately and briefly in lust—well, eighty-one if you don’t count the gorilla and the orangutan—and when we’d caught each other up on the past few years we went to work on dinner. I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t have no scales, and that was enough for me. And then, as we shared his flask and lit a couple of cigars, just to keep the insects away, Clyde decided to tell me why he was decimating the jaguar population of the Motto Grasso, which I didn’t even know we was in until he mentioned it.

“It happened about two months ago,” he said. “I was back in the States, peaceably blowing away spotted owls and turning the survivors over to some local zoos, when I got a request from down here for three hundred jaguar skins. I made sure that the jaguars didn’t still have to be in ’em, we hit upon a price, and I put together a safari and came down here on the double, figgering them what I only winged could be shipped back home to the Capturin’ Clyde Calhoun Circus.”

“Why does some guy want three hundred jaguar skins?” I said. “And what’s all this got to do with politics?”

“My very questions,” replied Clyde. “Well, after my first ques-tion, which was what did the job pay?”

“And what’s the answer?”

“Well, it’s kind of complex,” said Clyde. “Maybe not for a sophisticated preacher like yourself, but for a simple world-traveling sportsman like me. You ever hear of the Leopard Men?”

I shook my head. “Sounds like a bunch of men what picked up some disease that left ’em covered with spots.”

“Funny,” said Clyde. “That was my first thought, too. But the Leopard Men are a cult back in Africa, and the way you can tell they’re Leopard Men is that each of ’em wears a mask and cloak made of leopard skins.”

“What do they do once they get decked out in their leopard skins?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Beats me. Probably engage in a bunch of fun and fascinatin’ acts against God and Nature.”

“So you’re killing all these jaguars so some local tribe can indulge in some obscene sexual orgy?” I said, and then added: “Can we join in?”

“T’ain’t that simple, Lucifer,” said Clyde. “Near as I can tell, this particular tribe of Injuns plans on overthrowing the government and grabbing political power.”

“And they don’t want to share it with no jaguars?” I said, trying to follow his line of reasoning.

“They don’t want no one to identify ’em, so they’re going to wear these here skins as a disguise and call themselves the Jaguar Men.”

“That don’t make no sense at all, Clyde,” I said. “If I was the government, I’d just shoot anyone wearing a jaguar skin. I think they’d be better off dressing like any other savage out here.”

“Well, I ain’t privy to their plans, except of course for supplying their wardrobes,” he answered, “but I figger the reason they want the skins is so no one can finger ’em in case they got an informer in the group.”

“And how big is this government they plan to overthrow with just three hundred Jaguar Men?” I asked.

“It better not be much more then two hundred,” opined Clyde. “I mean, hell, if they can’t kill their own jaguars, it don’t say much about their ability to kill the enemy, does it?”

“Sounds like you better make sure you get your money before the revolution gets out of the starting gate,” I agreed.

“Yeah, that’s been my thinking on the matter too,” said Clyde. “In fact, payday’s coming up pretty soon.” He turned to one of his trackers. “How many did we bag today?”

“Sixteen,” said the man.

“We’re getting close,” said Clyde. “I figger we’re gonna run out of jaguars just about the time I run out of bullets.” He turned back to me. “You want to see what one of these here Jaguar Men is gonna look like?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Then follow me,” he said, getting up and walking to one of the tents his men had pitched.

We entered it, and there, laid out in near piles, were a few hundred jaguar skins.

“The heads are still attached,” I said. “Come to think of it, so are the claws.”

“The heads are the masks,” said Clyde. “The claws are just for show, though I imagine you could scratch your back with ’em.” He picked one of the skins up and handed it to me. “Here, try one on. You’ll see how comfortable it is.”

I picked up a skin, gathered it around my shoulder, slid my arms into the little loops that his skinners had attached, and then I fitted the head over my face.

“Can you see okay?” asked Clyde.

“Plain as day,” I said. “You know, if they decide to cancel the revolution, you could cart these here things to Paris and start a new fashion trend.”