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

is, “Good for you, you survivor you.” But we were very good too. It was just fate that made you the main human branch and led to our dying out in the jungles of our lost world, amongst the trees and stones of our forefathers. If we just hadn’t gotten religion for a while, no telling what we might have accomplished.

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T he Little Guy, who became The Big Guy, was a real whiner, and if mother had not been sad from losing my little brother to a hungry panther, he might well have been, as I stated, a nice hot lunch. But he clung to her tit with the enthusiasm of a leech, and her milk filled him and he grew.
    Even when he was quite old for it, he still sucked that tit. I wanted to suck the tit, but nope. Only The Little Guy, who was hairless, and in my view a little on the ugly side, got the tit. Full grown, he’d come to the great nest in the trees, give our mom the fruit he had gathered, or the animals that he had killed, and before the feast, he would suckle. No one ate until The Big Guy was through drawing milk through the tit, and he liked to stretch this out, hugging mother, closing his eyes and sucking slowly, occasionally popping one eye open to see how the rest of us were taking it. The rest of us being my two sisters and myself. The best thing to do was to not look perturbed, but to just go about some business of a sort, and forget it. He was more likely to quit that way and let us all get down to eating.
    I will admit, however, there was something about him that made him special. We could all see it. We could all sense it. I would learn later that he had been the subject of an experiment. Dr. Rice, who you will learn more about, told me this. He never told The Big Guy. I’m not sure why. Maybe he planned to when the time was right. I don’t know. But the time didn’t get right and he didn’t tell him. But I will come back to that later. What I know is this: His parents allowed The Big Guy, before birth, to be injected, right through his mother’s stomach, with an experimental drug that was designed to give him elevated intelligence and great physical prowess and grant him an extraordinary life span. In the books his so-called biographer says this was achieved by the workings of a witch doctor, or at least I think he said that. As I was telling you, things are starting to slide off my brain like greased butts on a grassy slope. Important part is the injection worked. More on that later.
    At the time all we knew was that he grew up to be tall and muscled and gold of skin and hung like a zebra. He could travel through the trees with the best of us, though he had to take to cinching up his snake with vines, least he catch it on a snag or drag it through thorns, something he once did, and something that took a couple days of careful work on my part to pull the thorns free. I don’t know how I ended up with the job, but there you have it.
    To say the least, this endeared him to me, and I to him. Why the latter, I’m a little confused. But, once again, there you have it.
    He learned our language and customs quite comfortably. In time they were his language and customs, and he became my brother. He is still my brother, and will forever be. We lived a wild life, a good life, and there were many great adventures. We found lost cities containing civilizations thought long dead. We stole all manner of jewels and raped women with and without tails. Sometimes we did the men. This was just the way things were, so don’t get highfalutin’. We chased creatures that your kind would call dinosaurs. We wrestled with saber-toothed tigers and wild boars as big as horses.
    When they were in heat we fucked our sisters. Mom was off limits, being dry, but the sisters, they got to that time of the month we were all over that stuff. We couldn’t help it. That was the custom. That was biology. We were no different than most jungle apes. I should add, technically, none of these sisters were The Big Guy’s blood kin, and he