The Ape Man's Brother by Joe R. Lansdale Page A

depths of the jungle there was only greenery, and as seen from above I’m sure our primitive city was nothing more than a few flashes of white stone gripped in the clutches of moss and vines. Flying up there in their little plane they must have seen it and decided to come closer. But they came too close, and the top of a tree caught the bottom of the plane and ripped it.
    I was young then, and I saw it happen from a perch in a tree. Saw the belly of the silver bird rip, saw it twist and spin and finally fall, spewing goods out of it like guts, throwing oil and gas like blood. It hit the top of one of our pyramids, bunched together like a wad of paper, and blew up, sending shrapnel skyward and amongst the trees in a hard, sharp rain. A piece of it killed one of my cousins, but I never liked him anyway.
    The pyramid, the tallest one, the one the plane struck, was not Egyptian high or Egyptian grand, but it was well up there, and as I said, cloaked in moss and vines. From where I stood, even watching through the trees, I felt the heat from the blast of the plane lick at me like a baboon’s breath, saw some of the vines curl and blacken, smoke and crumble. There came from the wreckage a horrible howl. All of us raced to the source, and as we came closer, I could smell meat cooking.
    Then I heard a whine that turned into a gasping cry. There, lying on them moss-covered steps near the top of the pyramid, as if he had been placed there, was something I had never seen before. A near hairless thing, naked; its little bit of dark hair was smoking on its head. I ran over and beat out the flames gently with the palm of my hand, and lifted the thing high. It stopped crying immediately. As if in salute, it lifted its little pecker and pissed straight into my face.
     
    …
     
    Much has been written about The Big Guy, and I want to say right here and now, the one who wrote the most about him, claimed he was my man’s main biographer, had no business telling the story in the first place. He wasn’t there. But that didn’t stop him. It didn’t stop him from telling it wrong and making up facts and situations so he could sell a novel, and later profit from the motion pictures made from the series of stories he wrote about my good friend, The Big Guy. Well, we profited too, I have to admit. But I resent any profits he made. It was our story, not his, and he didn’t deserve a single penny.
    First off, the name in the books and movies is way wrong. I can say the name but you can’t. I can say it because it was given to him in my language. It sounds a little like a cough and a fart to say it right, but it is hard to repeat in human language. So, that’s how he came to be known by the name in the books and movies and so on. In the books a monkey takes my place, and in the movies it’s that chimpanzee. They gave the chimp a name close to my name but it’s not my name.
    Everyone now just calls me Bill.
     
    …
     
    So, here I am, holding this young human child in my arms, him pissing in my face, and all the others laughing. I admit, I was about to toss him from the top of the pyramid, when my mother, who had recently lost her child to some sort of jungle disease, comes up and takes The Little Guy from me and holds him to her breast. A moment later, she and The Little Guy disappear into the trees. I didn’t know exactly what was going on. I thought maybe she was going to eat him in privacy, because it had crossed my mind to do just that. There wouldn’t have been a lot of preparation and very little hair to spit out. Just swing him by the feet, whack him on a rock, and a hot dinner was served.
    But mother carried him away from me, went swinging through the foliage. We can move amongst the jungle tree tops better than any human or ape our size. We are swifter than the chimpanzee because we are lighter, but stronger. I should also add that we have larger brains than the branch of humanity that survived. That would be you.
    All I got to say