The Best of Gerald Kersh by Gerald Kersh

Author:Gerald Kersh [Gerald Kersh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571304493
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Men Without Bones

WE were loading bananas into the Claire Dodge at Puerto Pobre, when a feverish little fellow came aboard. Everyone stepped aside to let him pass – even the soldiers who guard the port with nickel-plated Remington rifles, and who go barefoot but wear polished leather leggings. They stood back from him because they believed that he was afflicted-of-God, mad; harmless but dangerous; best left alone.

All the time the naphtha flares were hissing, and from the hold came the reverberation of the roaring voice of the foreman of the gang down below crying: ‘Fruta! Fruta! FRUTA!’ The leader of the dock gang bellowed the same cry, throwing down stem after stem of brilliant green bananas. The occasion would be memorable for this, if for nothing else – the magnificence of the night, the bronze of the negro foreman shining under the flares, the jade green of that fruit, and the mixed odours of the waterfront. Out of one stem of bananas ran a hairy grey spider, which frightened the crew and broke the banana-chain, until a Nicaraguan boy, with a laugh, killed it with his foot. It was harmless, he said.

It was about then that the madman came aboard, unhindered, and asked me: ‘Bound for where?’

He spoke quietly and in a carefully modulated voice; but there was a certain blank, lost look in his eyes that suggested to me that I keep within ducking distance of his restless hands which, now that I think of them, put me in mind of that grey, hairy, bird-eating spider.

‘Mobile, Alabama,’ I said.

‘Take me along?’ he asked.

‘None of my affair. Sorry. Passenger myself,’ I said. ‘The skipper’s ashore. Better wait for him on the wharf. He’s the boss.’

‘Would you happen, by any chance, to have a drink about you?’

Giving him some rum, I asked: ‘How come they let you aboard?’

‘I’m not crazy,’ he said. ‘Not actually … a little fever, nothing more. Malaria, dengue fever, jungle fever, rat-bite fever. Feverish country, this, and others of the same nature. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Goodbody, Doctor of Science of Osbaldeston University. Does it convey nothing to you? No? Well then; I was assistant to Professor Yeoward. Does that convey anything to you?’

I said: ‘Yeoward, Professor Yeoward? Oh yes. He was lost, wasn’t he, somewhere in the upland jungle beyond the source of the Amer River?’

‘Correct!’ cried the little man who called himself Goodbody. ‘I saw him get lost.’

Fruta! – Fruta! – Fruta! – Fruta! came the voices of the men in the hold. There was rivalry between their leader and the big black stevedore ashore. The flares spluttered. The green bananas came down. And a kind of sickly sigh came out of the jungle, off the rotting river – not a wind, not a breeze – something like the foul breath of high fever.

Trembling with eagerness and, at the same time, shaking with fever chills, so that he had to use two hands to raise his glass to his lips –

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