cave as if he had encountered a snake. Or discovered a mystery. Was he seeking the source of the cantor’s voice? Cohn took the lamp from him and held it to the phonograph. He explained the voice was in the record. The ape, without glancing at it, rushed to the
cave opening, pulled aside the vines, and stared into the humid night Buz’s head-hair bristled, his canines glowed. He growled in his throat.
“What do you see?” Cohn held the lamp aloft.
The chimp whimpered as a musty hot odor, like a burning tire, or someone’s stinkingly sweaty body, with a redemptive trace of mint, flowed into the cave.
Calvin Cohn stared into the primeval night and saw nothing. An essence, unformed and ancient in the night’s ripe darkness, caused him to sense he was about to do battle with a dinosaur, if not full-fledged dragon; but he saw neither. Yet he thought he had heard an explosive grunt and had observed a shadow flit out of the hut and into the trees.
Cohn went out in his stocking feet. No stars were visible, but a slender emerald crescent moon was rising. He stood for a while probing the night. When he returned to the cave Buz was snoring as if accompanying a dream of hot pursuit.
In the morning, Cohn returned to his chores in the rice paddy and Buz went exploring. On the way, he played in the acacias and tumbled among the branches of a bushy eucalyptus a little farther down.
He tore off a long leafy branch and leaped to the ground, dragging it up the rocky slope to the escarpment, and then charged down, venting a long scream as he pulled the hissing branch after him. A shower burst on his head as he plunged down the slope. Buz danced like an Indian chief in the rain.
When the rain had let up the next morning, the little chimp went out, stopping to throw rocks at a mangrove tree he didn’t like. Before slipping into the rain forest he heaved chunks of coconut shell at two epiphytic trees in the leafy gloom, as if to drive away any lingering evil spirit.
Then he disappeared into the forest, sometimes hooting from trees deep in the green growth. That afternoon when the chimp returned from the rain forest his face seemed gone several shades pale. He covered his shoulders with Cohn’s poncho and sat in the chair, hoo-hooting to himself. Cohn squatted, stroking his shoulders, at last quieting him. At dusk he climbed into his acacia sleep-tree and bent some branches back to make a nest for himself, but had second thoughts and slept in the cave.
A quarter moon rose and Buz walked in his sleep. Either that, or he had been frightened as he slept and walked away from the offending sleep-cage.
Cohn asked him if he had had a bad dream but the chimp made no reply.
The next evening, after they had eaten a supper of yams and black beans and drunk tumblers of coconut juice, Cohn played on the phonograph a record of his father the cantor praying. The chimp yodeled along with him, and Cohn, in a sentimental mood, danced to the music of his father’s voice. He snapped his thumbs, shook his hips, and sang in Yiddish, “Ich tants far mayn tate.”
Buz also tried a few dance steps, dangling one foot, then the other. Abruptly he stopped, his face a frozen sight. What had troubled him? He was these days a nervous chap.
Puberty? Cohn wondered. Simply unfulfilled sexual desire? Certainly he was mature enough to want a female—lost cause.
But if there was a female chimp around, Buz wasn’t responding in an attractive fashion. Standing at the cave entrance, he pitched into the night a teapot, two tablespoons, a salad bowl Cohn had sculpted with his jackknife and chisel. He had to wrestle two porcelain dishes away from Buz.
Peering through the vines, the chimp bristled and hooted, then retreated, grumbling. Cohn wondered whether the little ape knew something he didn’t and ought to?
It seemed to him he heard someone mumbling, or attempting to sing in a guttural voice. It came out a throaty basso aiming an aria to the night sky, possibly
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