The Ape Man's Brother (2 page)

O
ne day me and Big Guy we’re out there in the depths of the jungle, beating an antelope to death with sticks, and we heard a noise that wasn’t our antelope expiring, but was something else altogether different.

It was a melodious sound that reminded me of a bird. I often sat and listened to their sweet songs for an hour before I took a rock to one of them, ripped off the feathers and ate it, but this was different.

We left our dead antelope for the moment and took to the trees. Down there on the trail we saw a string of individuals, that except for the fact their bodies were covered in what I was to learn were clothes and pith helmets, looked a lot more like The Big Guy than me.

One of them was a delicate looking thing (actually she wasn’t that delicate) with a long, blonde mass of hair bound back by a blue ribbon. At that point in time I had never seen blonde hair. Big Guy’s hair was black as night. But they had the same eyes—blue like water. She had a bag on a strap slung over her shoulder, and when she stopped singing, she started talking to the man in front of her, that fellow with enough dark whiskers he could, at least in the face, pass for one of my kind. The rest of him, not so much. He was plump in the belly, which we are not. The way he walked was funny, and reminded me of how Big Guy would walk from time to time when he wasn’t climbing trees or moving about on all fours. Later I would learn this was the blonde female’s father.

The Delicate Thing struck me at that moment in time as ugly as Big Guy. Reason for this, I’m sure, is obvious. My view of what was beautiful was based on my upbringing, my culture, and my own appearance. My idea then of attractive was fur-covered, no sores, both eyes worked, they had a vagina, and the fleas were minimal, though sometimes you could eat fleas while you mated, which I suppose for us could be classified as a cheap dinner date.

In time my views on attractiveness changed. That’s another can of worms, and I’ll come to it.

But even then I liked the way she moved that butt. And I realized that though she wasn’t making that bird-like sound now, it had been her voice I had heard, and to me in memory, it had sounded like music, which, except for clubbing a log with a stick and hooting wasn’t something I was familiar with at that moment. I use it as a reference now as I think it can be more immediately understood. I was also thinking when she quit singing maybe we could club her to death and eat her same as the birds, peeling that stuff that covered her off the way we would yank out a bird’s feathers.

Me and Big Guy watched them from the trees, swung above them silently as they moved along the jungle trail. It must have been especially interesting to Big Guy, because he had never seen any of his own kind before, not remembering his parents at all. I remembered them slightly, but only as crispy shells of cooked meat. I never did tell Big Guy that a few of the tribe, one who will not be named, later partook of that flesh in a waste not want not attitude.

We followed them along, and it grew close to night. The moon was about half full, and shining through the trees. We could see clearly into their camp as they put up tents, built a fire, and so on. They had some long things with them that at the time I thought were clubs, but would later learn were rifles.

We watched as they ate from their supplies and went to bed. When we could hear them breathing deep in sleep, we climbed down and made our way cautiously on all fours toward where their packs were. We silently went at unfastening them, looking through them. Another trait of our kind is we’re dadburn thieves.

What we found were cans of food, though we didn’t know that, and we tossed those aside in favor of dried meat and fruits; the kind of drying used for keeping something way past the time it ought to be kept.

They had also, stupidly, left a number of their pots and pans they had prepared their meals in unwashed. It was just the sort of thing that could call up a beast or one of us Jungle Folk. I found a kind of goo in one of the pans with chunks of vegetables I didn’t recognize. I scooped it out on my finger and tasted it. I was suddenly aware—except for that one really swell meal after the plane crash—that what we had been eating was nothing more than grass and worms and ticks and stolen bird eggs and raw meat and such. This whole cooking thing was all right. You see, we Jungle Folk, smart as we were—and this is embarrassing to say—had yet to discover fire. And I might as well mention that we hadn’t found out about the wheel either, or the missionary position.

So, me and The Big Guy are licking pans, and all of a sudden, The Woman is standing there. Next thing I know she’s jabbering in a language that at that point in time I didn’t understand. But I knew enough from her tone to know what she had to say wasn’t pleasant and had something to do with us.

Next thing I know The Big Guy is walking up to her. He had a look on his face like he had just been born and was seeing the world for the first time. He reached out to touch her, and she gave him a kick in the old melons that would have made an elephant go to its knees. Damn sure made The Big Guy drop. Strangely, he had a smile on his face when he looked up at her.

Frankly, she had me feeling a might warm and contented myself. I wasn’t sure why a non-hairy, clothed female should make me feel that way, but she did. And to reiterate, I never was quite the same for the hairy women folk of my tribe after that. One look at the woman had spoiled me.

I had seen gold and I no longer wanted silver.

I
have to go backwards a little, because as I said before, I tend to wander. But I should say that where we lived in that deep jungle was a kind of bowl. It dipped deep down on the sides and went wide, and as far as we knew, there was no way out. It was miles and miles across, in all directions. If we climbed up any one of the sides, moving through the trees, eventually, the trees played out. When that happened there were some rocks to climb, and caves, if you were willing to go up that high. There were nasty things that roosted in those caves and they had lots of teeth and could fly, so we were extra careful. Finally, above that, there were straight slick walls, all around, and way up for miles. And when I say slick, I mean slick. The stone that made up the walls was like glass, and often damp. It wouldn’t even hold moss that you could grab onto. There was no way to climb. For us, that deep bowl of jungle, and all it contained, was it. A plane flying over might not even know what it was looking at, with all that jungle hiding what was down below, and the fact that a mist rolled high and over most of it much of the time like a roof of sun-leaking cotton.

At one time, Dr. Rice (and you will soon know who he is) in his zeppelin, exploring, saw our world. He had made an aerial expedition all the way from New York City, based on old records written by an Italian sailing captain and navigator who claimed to have found a large island, possibly a continent, rising out of the ocean. It was thought for centuries to be a myth, or an incorrect sighting of some known land, but Dr. Rice had taken it seriously and flown over our world by zeppelin, feeling sure that through the mist he had seen a flash of green, lush land. He told his colleagues, The Big Guy’s parents, and they thought they could follow Dr. Rice’s navigational information, fly out of Greenland, but the navigational charts were off, or they misread them. It was a longer trip than they expected. Even though they wouldn’t have had enough fuel to return, they made it to our world, had seen the ruins of our civilization, and were most likely looking for some place to land when the accident happened that turned them from archeologist to well-done with no sides.

I learned all this later, of course. Dr. Rice’s guilty feelings about his report leading to The Big Guy’s parents trying to come to our world and losing their lives, led to his coming back on a possible rescue expedition, something it took him years to finance. He had hopes they and their baby son might have survived, some nineteen years later by the way they calculated time.

But, there we were, me and The Big Guy, The Woman having caught us in their pans. She was mad, surprised, and there was sweat on her forehead, her hair coming loose from being tied back, falling on her cheeks and neck, one leg bent forward, the back leg ready for another kick.

The Big Guy, the most powerful being I have ever seen, was on the ground holding his melons like he was testing them to see how ripe they were. Me, I’m just standing there grinning. My race is like that. We grin. It may look friendly, and sometimes it is, but it’s a grin that can mean a lot of different things. From, how about you and me go over in the bushes, to I’m about to bite your face off, or how about we share that dead snake. Even we have trouble sorting out meanings from time to time, and mistakes are sometimes made.

So, there we stood.

That’s when one of the men, a tall, flame-headed one, came running up, pointing one of those clubs at me. I’m thinking he can’t do much business with it, the way he’s holding it, part of it tucked against his shoulder and all. And then The Woman hits the end of it and the club goes up and barks, and fire comes out of the tip of it, and something rattles off in the bushes, like a rock has been thrown, and an suspecting monkey falls dead out of a tree without so much as a squeak.

I shit all over the place. It’s not an unnatural reaction to fear, I might add. It’s just I didn’t know it was unseemly or might even be thought of as cowardly by those of your race, so I just let it fly. There’s a comfort in it, and I want to add promptly that though I had this problem for quite some time, and the chimpanzee that played me in the movies certainly had some similarities, I was quickly civilized on the matter. I know. I’ve brought this up before, but I’m bothered by it, and I want people to know I’ve moved on from my primitive state, and though I’m a little embarrassed by the subject, I feel it is only fair that I trudge ahead and be honest and stress my developmental growth.

Next thing I knew, The Big Guy was up, and stirring. He could always recover from something bad quicker than anyone I have ever known. He grabbed that banging club and jerked it out of that man’s hands and hit him in the head with it, knocked him down. Then he held it by what I now know to be the stock of the rifle, and grabbed the barrel, and he bent that barrel like it was a green vine. Bent it and tossed it into the greenery. Damn if he didn’t bang another monkey. It fell out of the undergrowth and into the moonlight and thrashed around on the ground, then sort of crawled off to cover inside a flowered bush and quivered for awhile before it went still. It was not a good day for monkeys.

All the others of The Woman’s group came running up then. They all had the same kind of clubs. They were pointing them at us. During all this action, I had rushed up beside The Big Guy. I thought it was going to be a fight to the death, and I was more than willing, maybe even a little anxious to try it out, see how we’d fare against all those men. I had no idea about the guns, then. I had heard one, and I had seen it spit fire, but I didn’t know they threw bullets. I thought that first monkey had just fainted at the sound of the shot. I thought it would be us against them, arms against arms, legs against legs, fists against fists, skulls against skulls, and their clubs against us. But, of course, that isn’t how it would have been. That many armed men, no matter how strong and quick The Big Guy was, no matter how savage the both of us were, we’d have lasted just about long enough for our balls to swing once between our legs before we hit the ground, torn apart by bullets. What saved us was The Woman raised her hand and yelled at the others. Everything stopped. She stood staring at The Big Guy, and he stood staring at her.

The Big Guy had never seen anything like her, all curved up in the right places, wet, red lips and shiny blue eyes. And she was looking at a very big man with dark hair and a body that was all long, lean muscle, dirt and scars and deep suntan; from the way her face relaxed, I had a pretty good idea she liked what she was looking at as much as he liked what he was looking at.

It was while they were looking at one another, The Woman with her arm raised, holding back action from those behind her, that there was a screech loud enough to make my backbone shift. A great shadow flowed across the moon and a flying, feathered lizard as big as one of your air planes, swooped down and grabbed The Woman by hooking its claws in her shoulder.

Those damn things were all over our part of the world. A nuisance is what they were. So, it was pretty much over for The Woman, I thought, and then the next thing I know The Big Guy is running. I mean, he is moving. He took to one of the tall trees, and went up it swiftly. Those flying creatures have an odd habit of grabbing something, then circling back, maybe to see if they’ve left part of it on the ground. This habit was something The Big Guy, of course, was fully acquainted with, and he took advantage of it.

It was circling back, true to from, and The Big Guy having judged its circle had quickly climbed that tree, and as the thing winged by, The Big Guy leaped and effortlessly landed on its back. He wrapped one arm around its neck, went to beating its hard head with his free fist. You could hear him whapping it all the way from where we stood.

As the thing flew over us, blood sprinkled down on us from the The Big Guy’s blows, that and brains from that thing, and the next thing you know, its crashing into a tree, and letting go of The Woman. The Big Guy, moving faster than a snake can strike, leaped off that flying, twisting, falling wreck, grabbed The Woman’s arm as he went, and swung them both into the leafy boughs of the tree.

There they were, standing on a limb in a tall tree, her shoulder slightly wet with blood, bleeding through the cloth of her torn shirt, and there he was, standing without clothes, staring into her eyes; his pecker standing up like a snake rising to strike. She moved the short distance between them, took hold of his long, tangled hair, pulled him to her, pressed her mouth against his, and even from where we stood, that kiss sounded like someone pulling their foot out of a deep mud puddle.

“That son-of-a-bitch,” said the flame-headed guy, who I would later learn was called Red.

The Big Guy picked her up with one arm, leaped off the limb, grabbed another limb with his free hand, swung them up into the cover of a thick-leafed tree, and they were gone. Let me add as an aside, swinging from limb to limb with one hand while holding a very fine and sturdy female is not a feat that anyone else I know of, other than The Big Guy, could accomplish.

I took off.

The men were so shocked to see what had happened, that they didn’t know if they should yell or turn in a circle or draw pictures in the dirt. By the time they looked for me, I was across the clearing and into the trees.