I was lucky. He didn’t discern what Aleka had accomplished, nor what I was trying to do. Perhaps it was because he was bemused by another matter entirely.
“Is your name Steve Victor?” he asked me.
“You speak English!” I was surprised.
“I went to the missionary school in Lagos,” he in- formed me.
“And you came back to the jungle?”
“I didn’t like the food there!” He grinned. “I prefer the diet of my people.”
A cannibal with a sense of humor! Just what I needed! “Yes, I’m Steve Victor. How did you know?”
“An educated guess. There’s a telephone call for you.”
“There’s a what?”
“A telephone call. Operator Nineteen, Miami. It's being relayed by jungle tom-tom.”
“It’s my mother.” Tears sprang to my eyes. “Well, at least I’ll be able to say goodbye to her.”
“Perhaps. The trouble is it’s collect. And our Chief isn’t willing to accept the charges.”
“I’ll accept the charges.”
“I’m afraid you’re not in any position to do that, Mr. Victor.”
“Then tell my mother to pay the charges herself,” I wailed.
The fine young cannibal summoned another tribesman with a tom-tom. He said something to the jungle telegrapher in their native tongue and the drumbeater beat his drum. When he stopped, another drum picked up the beat in the distance. Then another, and another. After this, the process was reversed. The drumbeater said something to the other cannibal and he turned to me to interpret.
“Operator Nineteen says it’s against telephone company policy to relay any messages as you request.”
“Ask her if I can mail the money in stamps,” I said desperately.
The process was repeated.
“No,” I was told finally. “The telephone company has a regulation against that too.”
“But they’re always telling me they’ll refund my money in stamps!” I wailed. “It’s not fair.”
“Wait a minute. Something else is coming over.” More drumbeating, another exchange between the two cannibals, and then he turned to me again. “Operator Nineteen says she can charge it to your home telephone if that will be satisfactory.”
“Yes.”
“All right, your mother’s on the wire.” That was the word after another short wait.
“Hello, Mama?”
“What do you do with your money, you couldn’t even pay for a phone call?” the cannibal translated.
“Mama! I’m being held prisoner by cannibals! They're going to eat me!”
“Oy! Vey! Heartburn and indigestion they should get for the rest of their lives from such a diet and the kind of son you are, Stevie, and you could be sure they’ll get an ulcer just like you give to your mother. . . . There’s a doctor there?”
“We have a tribal witch doctor,” the young cannibal added in an aside to me.
“So tell her.”
“I can see you’ve never resolved your Oedipal conflicts,” Aleka observed.
“She wants to talk to the witch doctor. Okay?”
“Why not?”
“This is going to be a pretty expensive call,” the cannibal reminded me.
“You can’t take it with you,” I told him philosophically.
The witch doctor was summoned. I watched as the tom-tom operator relayed my mother’s message to him. Then the English-speaking cannibal explained the conversation to me.
“Your mother wants to know if he’ll lance a macka on your behind, and he says he will.”
“Considering what you’ve got in store for me, what’s the point?” I wondered.
“Just because we’re cannibals doesn’t mean we can’t be humanitarian,” my interpreter told me stiffly. “Your mother wants to know if you’ve got your Blue Cross card with you,” he added.
“It’s in my pants -- wherever they are. Which reminds me, why did you take all our clothes anyway?”
“Would you cook a chicken with the feathers still on it?”
I was sorry I’d asked.
My pants were produced and my Blue Cross card was taken out of the wallet in the back pocket. Meanwhile there was a discussion going on via the tom-tom between my mother and the witch doctor. As translated, it had to do with the witch doctor’s inexperience in the matter of lancing mackas. Evidently my mother was giving him explicit instructions how to sterilize the lance by boiling and how to approach the lancing of the boil itself. The witch doctor was professionally admiring. He sent back a message that he insisted on splitting his fee with my mother because of her engaging in consultation with him. liter much polite drumbeating, my mother accepted the offer.
“Your mother wants to talk to you,” the interpreter told me. “She says that now she can sleep nights knowing that at last your heinie will be macka-free.
“Ask her for her recipe for parboiled son,” I replied bitterly.
“She says it’s for your own good and you don’t own stock in Bell Telephone, so she’s hanging up now.”
“Sometimes,” I observed to no one in particular as the tom-tom operator left, “my mother is a pain in the ass!”
“You’ve taken the first step in confronting parental authority,” Aleka assured me.
Before I could reply, the witch doctor approached. He was holding a spear. The tip was red-hot. He beamed and bobbed his head at me as if to acknowledge what a truly remarkable woman my mother was. Then he walked around to the back of the stake. I craned my head over my shoulder and saw him drawing a bead on the macka.
“The AMA is going to hear about this,” I told him. “If I ever get out of here, I’m going to sue you for malpractice. As a matter of fact, I may even sue my mother!”
I watched him carefully. When his arm shot forward with the lance, I gauged the motion carefully and jumped. It worked. Instead of searing my tooshie, the red-hot spear point struck the knot securing the vines holding me to the stake. I was free!
I threw my body to one side, kicking out with one foot, and managed to trip up the witch doctor. He was so surprised he made no outcry, and none of the other cannibals noticed what was happening. Before he could think twice, I flattened him with a right to the jaw.
I grabbed up the spear and slashed Aleka’s bonds to shreds. Just as she threw them off, the young cannibal who spoke English came into view, saw what had happened, and let out a yell. Then he grabbed up a spear and hurled it at us. We ducked it successfully, falling back into the underbrush. I threw the spear I’d taken from the witch doctor back at him.
It also missed. But its flight carried it right past where Krapinadytch and Natasha were tied to their respective stakes. Krapinadytch grabbed the shaft as it went past. The last I saw of them, he was slashing away at the vines holding Natasha, taking advantage of the fact that the cannibals’ attention was on us.
Aleka and I went crashing through the jungle, the sounds of pursuit behind us. But we had an advantage in the fact that Aleka knew the area rather well. She guided me by a circuitous route until she was sure we’d shaken our pursuers. Then she led me back to her native village. It was dawn when we got there. The place was in turmoil. It seems a party of Pygmy warriors led by the Chief and Josef Dorembi had set out during the night to try to rescue us. They still hadn’t returned. However, just before we’d arrived, Kapinadytch and Natasha, both naked, had stolen into the unguarded village and kidnapped one of Aleka’s sisters. They’d been spotted leaving with her, but they’d gotten away.
I cursed. Now the Russians also had a Pygmy princess for Sheikh Ali Khat. All they had to do was get out of the jungle alive and deliver her. That could be no mean feat. But then I faced precisely the same problem.