Multiples (1983-87) Read online

  “I had it all wrong, didn’t I?” I say later to B.J. “You were all just testing me, sure. But not to see how good a hunter I am.”

  He looks at me without any comprehension at all and doesn’t answer. B.J., with that crafty architect’s mind of his that takes in everything.

  “You wanted to see if I was really human, right? If I had compassion, if I could treat a lost stranger the way I was treated myself.”

  Blank stares. Deadpan faces.

  “Marty? Paul?”

  They shrug. Tap their foreheads: the timeless gesture, ages old.

  Are they putting me on? I don’t know. But I’m certain that I’m right. If I had killed the Neanderthal they almost certainly would have killed me. That must have been it. I need to believe that that was it. All the time that I was congratulating them for not being the savages I had expected them to be, they were wondering how much of a savage I was. They had tested the depth of my humanity; and I had passed. And they finally see that I’m civilized too.

  At any rate the Scavenger Man lives with us now. Not as a member of the tribe, of course, but as a sacred pet of some sort, a tame chimpanzee, perhaps. He may very well be the last of his kind, or close to it; and though the tribe looks upon him as something dopey and filthy and pathetic, they’re not going to do him any harm. To them he’s a pitiful bedraggled savage who’ll bring good luck if he’s treated well. He’ll keep the ghosts away. Hell, maybe that’s why they took me in, too.

  As for me, I’ve given up what little hope I had of going home. The Zeller rainbow will never return for me, of that I’m altogether sure. But that’s all right. I’ve been through some changes. I’ve come to terms with it.

  We finished the new house yesterday and B.J. let me put the last tusk in place, the one they call the ghost-bone, that keeps dark spirits outside. It’s apparently a big honor to be the one who sets up the ghost-bone. Afterward the four of them sang the Song of the House, which is a sort of dedication. Like all their other songs, it’s in the old language, the secret one, the sacred one. I couldn’t sing it with them, not having the words, but I came in with oom-pahs on the choruses and that seemed to go down pretty well.

  I told them that by the next time we need to build a house, I will have invented beer, so that we can all go out when it’s finished and get drunk to celebrate properly.

  Of course they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but they looked pleased anyway.

  And tomorrow, Paul says, he’s going to begin teaching me the other language. The secret one. The one that only the members of the tribe may know.