A Feast Unknown Read Online Free Page A

chopped him on the side of the neck with the edge of my palm and dragged him back behind the pile. Nobody had noticed us. Everybody was looking at a group of young Bandili dancing a spear dance around the dead dog.

3
    Zabu awoke on his back with my hand over his mouth and my knife at his throat. His eyes widened like water boiling over. He shook. With a rip of gas, he shot out a long turd. His breath stank of my whiskey and of terror. The blood on his belly and genitals stank of the terror and agony of the bitch, and of the sperm he had loosed.
    “Tell me how this happened, Zabu,” I said. “Otherwise, I kill you right now.”
    He was willing to buy a few minutes of life, although his grandfather and father would have died rather than tell an enemy anything. His lips spewed Bandili. His eyes rotated as if he were looking for some device to appear from the air and give him a handhold whereby he could be whisked away from my knife.
    Perhaps he thought I had been killed and my ghost had come back.
    He had gone through school and college with my assistance. He had denied believing in ghosts. He was an educated man, hehad said. But he believed. The hindbrain is almost always stronger than the forebrain, though in a subtle fashion.
    Zabu said that the Kenyan army had moved in with the assistance of some of the young Bandili. At the last moment, the older Bandili in the nearby village had found out about the attack. They were told to keep quiet or die. Three of the old men had tried to warn me. One was Paboli, the Spear-Launcher, Zabu’s grandfather. All three did die.
    A strange thing happened then. Zabu, speaking of his grandfathers death, wept.
    The army units had moved in on three fronts, leaving the western open because I was returning from a hunting trip in that direction. After I got home, the units quietly closed the gap.
    During the night, with utmost care, a cannon and six .50-caliber machine guns were hauled in by foot soldiers. The trucks were kept far out in the savanna to avoid noise. The young Bandili had told the army officers that the stories of my supersensitive hearing and sense of smell were not exaggerated.
    Zabu talked on and on, as if enough words would build up a wall thick enough to bar my knife. He tried to justify his treachery, although he did not call it that. He called it patriotism and Africanism.
    Humans are always labeling deeds. No doubt, he thought he was right. But he was moving his thoughts around in two boxes labeled blacks and whites, just as the whites he hated— with the exception of myself—moved their thoughts around in their two boxes.
    What happened next surprised me. I did not intend to do it and had no thought of doing any such thing.
    Looking back, I see that the treachery, so unexpected in those who had been my people for sixty years, combined with the shock of the explosions, had literally loosened something in me.
    Rather, loosed it.
    It had always been in me but shoved down as deep as deep was.
    I stunned him with the knife hilt. While he lay half-unconscious, I cut his tongue off close to the root to keep him from screaming. The pain brought him to his senses. He tried to sit up, and his mouth gaped. The blood shot out.
    I kissed him. One, to drink the blood, which I needed because I was thirsty. Two, to stop any sound he might have made. Three, I was compelled to do so.
    The blood was salty and unpleasant, as if it contained the essence of a sea-bottom built up from the decomposing flesh and bones of a million poisonous fish. It contained a trickle of tobacco, which I hate. In other words, his blood was like most of the humans from whom I have drunk.
    But the blood was strengthening, and I began to feel an excitement similar to that which I felt when in battle or making a kill. However, when it became more intense, it was obviously sexual.
    Quickly, before I climaxed, I cut Zabu open with a stroke down his belly. It was not deep enough, however, to cut into the intestines.