Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [50]
and bury them. We will do the graves-registration detail. Prince, how do your fellow tribesmen feel about these animals in death? Still taboo?" "Mistah Henderson. Sir. Wattah is �" Itelo could not find the words to describe how precious this element was, and he rubbed his fingers with his thumb as if feeling velvet. "I know. I know just exactly what the situation is. But there's one thing I can tell you, just as I told you yesterday, I love these folks. I have to do something to show my friendship. And I am aware that coming from the great outside it is up to me to take this on myself." Under the heavy white shell of the pith helmet, the flies were beginning to bite; the cattle brought them along, as cattle will invariably, and so I said, "It is time to start." We set off for the cistern, myself in the lead holding the bomb. I checked to see whether the lighter was in the pocket of my shorts. One shoe dragged, as I had taken out the lace, nevertheless I set a good pace toward the reservoir while I held the bomb above my head like the torch of liberty in New York harbor, saying to myself, "Okay, Henderson. This is it. You'd better deliver on your promise. No horsing around," and so on. You can imagine my feelings! In the dead of the heat we reached the cistern and I went forward alone into the weeds on the edge. All the rest remained behind, and not even Romilayu came up with me. That Was all right, too. In a crisis a man must be prepared to stand alone, and actually standing alone is the kind of thing I'm good at. I was thinking, "By Judas, I should be good, considering how experienced I am in going it by myself." And with the bomb in my left hand and the lighter with the slender white wick in the other--this patriarchal-looking wick--I looked into the water. There in their home medium were the creatures, the polliwogs with fat heads and skinny tails and their budding little scratchers, and the mature animals with eyes like ripe gooseberries, submerged in their slums of ooze. While I myself, Henderson, like a great pine whose roots have crossed and choked one another--but never mind about me now. The figure of their doom, I stood over them and the frogs didn't--of course they couldn't--know what I augured. And meanwhile, all the chemistry of anxious fear, which I know so well and hate so much, was taking place in me--the light wavering before my eyes, the saliva drying, my parts retracting, and the cables of my neck hardening. I heard the chatter of the expectant Arnewi, who held their cattle on ornamented tethers, as a drowning man will hear the bathers on the beach, and I saw Mtalba, who stood between them and me in her red baize like a poppy, the black at the center of the blazing red. Then I blew on the wick of my device, to free it from dust (or for good luck), and spun the wheel of the lighter, and when it responded with a flame, I lit the fuse, formerly my shoelace. It started to burn and first the metal tip dropped off. The spark sank pretty steadily toward the case. There was nothing for me to do but clutch the thing, and fix my eyes upon it; my legs, bare to the heat, were numb. The burning took quite a space of time and even when the point of the spark descended through the hole in the wood, I held on because I couldn't risk quenching it. After this I had to call on intuition plus luck, and as there now was nothing I especially wanted to see in the external world I closed my eyes and waited for the spirit to move me. It was not yet time, and still not time, and I pressed the case and thought I heard the spark as it ate the lace and fussed toward the powder. At the last moment I took a Band-Aid which I had prepared for this moment and fastened it over the hole. Then I lobbed the bomb, giving it an underhand toss. It touched the thatch and turned on itself only once before it fell into the yellow water. The frogs fled from it and the surface closed again; the ripples traveled outward and that was all. But then a new motion began; the water swelled at the middle and I realized that the thing was working. Damned if