The Delicate Prey: And Other Stories

He leaned further over the railing and looked intently down at the dock. There were baskets for sale, crude painted toys of hard natural rubber, reptile-hide wallets and belts, and a few whole snakeskins unrolled. And placed apart from these wares, out of the hot sunlight, in the shadow of a crate, sat a tiny, furry monkey. The hands were folded, and the forehead was wrinkled in sad apprehensiveness.

“Isn’t he wonderful?”

“I think you’re impossible—and a little insulting,” she replied.

He turned to look at her. “Are you serious?” He saw that she was.

She went on, studying her sandaled feet and the narrow deck-boards beneath them: “You know I don’t really mind all this nonsense, or your craziness. Just let me finish.” He nodded his head in agreement, looking back at the hot dock and the wretched tin-roofed village beyond. “It goes without saying I don’t mind all that, or we wouldn’t be here together. You might be here alone . .

“You don’t take a honeymoon alone,” he interrupted.

“You might.” She laughed shortly.

He reached along the rail for her hand, but she pulled it away, saying, “I’m still talking to you. I expect you to be crazy, and I expect to give in to you all along. I’m crazy too, I know. But I wish there were some way I could just once feel that my giving in meant anything to you. I wish you knew how to be gracious about it.”

“You think you humor me so much? I haven’t noticed it.” His voice was sullen.

“I don’t humor you at all. I’m just trying to live with you on an extended trip in a lot of cramped little cabins on an endless series of stinking boats.”

“What do you mean?” he cried excitedly. “You’ve always said you loved the boats. Have you changed your mind, or just lost it completely?”

She turned and walked toward the prow. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Go and buy your monkey.”

An expression of solicitousness on his face, he was following her. “You know I won’t buy it if it’s going to make you miserable.”

“I’ll be more miserable if you don’t, so please go and buy it.” She stopped and turned. “I’d love to have it. I really would. I think it’s sweet.”

“I don’t get you at all.”

She smiled. “I know. Does it bother you very much?”

After he had bought the monkey and tied it to the metal post of the bunk in the cabin, he took a walk to explore the port. It was a town made of corrugated tin and barbed wire. The sun’s heat was painful, even with the sky’s low-lying cover of fog. It was the middle of the day and few people were in the streets. He came to the edge of the town almost immediately. Here between him and the forest lay a narrow, slow-moving stream, its water the color of black coffee. A few women were washing clothes; small children splashed. Gigantic gray crabs scuttled between the holes they had made in the mud along the bank. He sat down on some elaborately twisted roots at the foot of a tree and took out the notebook he always carried with him. The day before, in a bar at Pedernales, he had written: “Recipe for dissolving the impression of hideousness made by a thing: Fix the attention upon the given object or situation so that the various elements, all familiar, will regroup themselves. Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern.”

He lit a cigarette and watched the women’s hopeless attempts to launder the ragged garments. Then he threw the burning stub at the nearest crab, and carefully wrote: “More than anything else, woman requires strict ritualistic observance of the traditions of sexual behavior. That is her definition of love.” He thought of the derision that would be called forth should he make such a statement to the girl back on the ship. After looking at his watch, he wrote hurriedly: “Modem, that is, intellectual education, having been devised by males for males, inhibits and confuses her. She avenges . . .”

Two naked children, coming up from their play in the river, ran screaming past him, scattering drops of water over the paper. He called out to them, but they continued their chase without noticing him. He put his pencil and notebook into his pocket, smiling, and watched them patter after one another through the dust.

When he arrived back at the ship, the thunder was rolling down from the mountains around the harbor. The storm reached the height of its hysteria just as they got under way.

She was sitting on her bunk, looking through the open port-hole. The shrill crashes of thunder echoed from one side of the bay to the other as they steamed toward the open sea. He lay doubled up on his bunk opposite, reading.

“Don’t lean your head against that metal wall,” he advised. “It’s a perfect conductor.”

She jumped down to the floor and went to the washstand,

“Where are those two quarts of Whit e Horse we got yesterday?”

He gestured. “In the rack on your side. Ate you going to drink?”

“I’m going to have a drink, yes.”

“In this heat? Why don’t you wait until it clears, and have it on deck?”

“I want it now. When it clears I won’t need it.”