‘Don’t Hand Me That Hash’

Harry’s frustration mounts. His timidity is in business only; in the battle of the sexes his instinct is to stand up to anything if it means a match. Competition is just the thing to give the sportsman an edge. No, he doesn’t mind bucking with another man for a woman’s affections. But if the man is dead? The dead are the stiffest competition. They certainly can do no wrong.

In any case this is his honeymoon. He cannot go back to blackjack and leave Sarah dry humping the dead in the hotel room. He takes her away from the games of Mondo Banco and off to James-land, Jujuba, a rough diamond in the crown of the Isle of Grammar’s colonies on the Dark Continent. Once again, at the hotel in the Capitol, Sarah asserts her right to separate sleeping accommodations. The following morning she appears smartly dressed and deadly perfect, ready to set out into the bush. Although they are going by four-wheel-drive vehicle, she is in a Grammar School habit: the boots, jodhpurs and crop of the riding academy. Poor love-hungry Harry feels his heart melt and his breath shorten when he sees her. Her figure is so striking that the bearers all have to adjust their loin cloths.

Into the grassland they go. Here Harry does not expect his sister to be quite so dogged in her spying; he certainly feels safer around the native guides and porters than the throngs of tourists milling about the casinos and hotel lobbies. But sadly, there is no other female in the hunting party but Sarah. It is she or no one.

When time comes for camp, Sarah has her bearers set up her tent away from her husband’s. They make jokes among themselves in their native tongue, and Harry can tell that they are saying the great white hunter is not master of his own marriage.

He must earn the respect of the natives and get his wife’s attention. The next day, while they are tracking a lion, they feel the rumble from a herd of antelope thundering through the grass. Harry seizes the opportunity to show off what a great shot he can be. He goes to one knee, aims, and bushwhacks a slow one, shooting it in the behind as it hops by. It flops, and Harry approaches, puts his big gun between the flailing beast’s eyes, and fires. Sarah witnesses his demonstration, and is thoroughly sickened rather than impressed by it. The unsportsmanlike conduct in the way that man sports makes her yearn all the more for paradise lost, heavy petting with her best friend Cornie Dog.

She chokes on emotion when she remembers that spring, taking the primrose path out of Zion to where he waited. Green in love, she laid back and let him take a licking. He brushed her font and scratched the spice of her sex with his nose. She pulled him by his ears up to snuff in the swelling wet tabernacle. In the embrace that followed she tasted her own wilderness in his kisses, and was at one with the salty, sweaty, sweet and sour, holy spirit bouquet of her body. If the God of her father was good, that moment’s puppy love would have lasted an eternity.

If those days were heaven this night is hell. The hunter, fresh from the kill, comes to her tent and tries to turn her head with the dog-eat-dog side of animal nature, antelope steak.

“Harry, don’t hand me that hash. What kind of a man shoots a defenseless deer in the back and then executes it?”

Harry doesn’t know the answer. He killed on an instinct to be a big shot in her eyes and those of the bearers, and to prove his love for her by providing her with fresh meat. He can’t explain it if she, who inspired the display, doesn’t understand. Standing there speechless, hot for her, he thinks how exciting she is when she’s angry. Under the influence of his own desire, he still thinks she will swoon and surrender if he sweeps her off her feet. The gentleman loses some gentleness. He grabs his woman by the pucker in her safari pants and tries to bend her backwards and force a kiss. The good game gets away, wipes her mouth and snarls, “How dare you! I’m not just some animal you can use for target practice.”

Realizing how off the mark is his shot, Harry bows his head and apologizes. “I’m sorry. I really am.” At the same time he is digging in his heels stubbornly, making it clear that he is not leaving her tent unless she shows some him some gesture of feminine kindness. “I love you,” he says. “All I want is you.”

“Harry, damn you, you’re not living up to your half of the bargain. I’ve honored and obeyed my pledge, and done my best to look like a good wife, one you can be proud of, one that you can take out and show off. Even in front of those maids I behaved every inch a lady.”

She would stick to her guns and ask him to leave, but looking down on him, she thinks of all she’s done since she left Zion. She sees in her husband something of the beasts in Dejection Junction, those low-life men she first modelled for as she made her way west. It never ceases to amaze Sarah how, once in the upright position, a man’s manhood leaves him little in the way of pride or principles. A pretty woman needn’t do much to cut him down to size. “Harry, what am I going to do with you?” she says as she briskly begins unbuttoning her shirt. Her shoulders and breasts, white as cold cream, are visions of delight. She unbuckles her belt, takes her snow white legs out of her pants and stands up to him, knees apart, buff naked. “Here, look but don’t touch. If you really love me back off and whack off.”

In an act of fallacious feminism, she half-opens herself to him. The sight of the happy hunting grounds hits the bull’s eye in his mind. He sinks to his knees and, in a sexual misexperience, fires, spilling the beans from his pea shooter all over everything from the antelope steak on the table to the zebra skin rug on the floor.

Marching in like a lion, Harry goes out like a lamb. The native guides sitting around the camp fire have not taken their peripheral vision off the white goddess for a moment, and are naturally extravigilant around bedtime. When the great white hunter passes them by they chuckle softly, letting him know they have been looking at the silhouettes and listening to the sounds that are the same in any language.

The following morning Harry arranges for them to get to the nearest airport. And thus the honeymoon is over, far ahead of schedule.