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The spring meeting of the Eastern Section of the American Anthropological Association had broken
up, and Dr. Saddler had had dinner with two of her professional colleagues, Blue of Columbia and
Jeffcott of Yale. She mentioned that she had never visited Coney and meant to go there that
evening. She urged Blue and Jeff cott to come along, but they begged off.
Watching Dr. Saddler's retreating back, Blue of Columbia crackled: "The Wild Woman from
Wichita. Wonder if she's hunting another husband?" He was a thin man with a small gray beard and a
who-the-Hell-are-you-Sir expression.
"How many has she had?" asked Jeff cott of Yale.
"Three to date. Don't know why anthropologists lead the most disorderly private lives of
any scientists. Must be that they study the customs and morals of all these different peoples, and
ask themselves, 'If the Eskimos can do it why can't we?' I'm old enough to be safe, thank God."
"I'm not afraid of her," said Jeffcott. He was in his early forties and looked like a
farmer uneasy in store-bought clothes. aI~m so very thoroughly married."
"Yeah? Ought to have been at Stanford a few years ago, when she was there. It wasn't safe
to walk across the campus, with Tuthill chasing all the females and Saddler all the males."~
Dr. Saddler had to fight her way off the subway train, as the adolescents who infest the
platform of the B.M.T.'s Stillwell Avenue Station are probably the worst-mannered people on earth,
possibly excepting the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. She didn't
much mind. She was a tall, strongly built woman in her late thirties, who had been kept in trim by
the outdoor rigors of her profession. Besides, some of the inane remarks in Swift's paper on
occulturation among the Arapaho Indians had gotten her fighting blood up.
Walking down Surf Avenue toward Brighton Beach, she looked at the concessions without
trying them, preferring to watch the human types that did and the other human types that took
their money. She did try a shooting gallery, but found knocking tin owls off their perch with a
.22 too easy to be much fun. Long-range work with an army rifle was her idea of shooting.
The concession next to the shooting gallery would have been called a sideshow if there had
been a main show for it to be a sideshow to. The usual lurid banner proclaimed the uniqueness of
the two-headed calf, the bearded woman, Arachne the spider-girl, and other marvels. The piece de
resistance was Ungo-Bungo the ferocious ape-man, captured in the Congo at a cost of twenty-seven
lives. The picture showed an enormous Ungo-Bungo squeezing a hapless Negro in each hand, while
others sought to throw a net over him.
Although Dr. Saddler knew perfectly well that the ferocious apeman would turn out to be an
ordinary Caucasian with false hair on his chest, a streak of whimsicality impelled her to go in.
Perhaps, she thought, she could have some fun with her colleagues about it.
The spieler went through his leather-lunged harangue. Dr. Saddler guessed from his
expression that his feet hurt. The tattooed lady didn't interest her, as her decorations obviously
had no cultural significance, as they have among the Polynesians. As for the ancient Mayan, Dr.
Saddler thought it in questionable taste to exhibit a poor microcephalic idiot that way. Professor
Yogi's legerdemain and fireeating weren't bad.
A curtain hung in front of Ungo-Bungo's cage. At the appropriate moment there were growls
and the sound of a length of chain being slapped against a metal plate. The spieler wound up on a
high note:
" . ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Ungo-Bungo!" The curtain dropped.
The ape-man was squatting at the back of his cage. He dropped his chain, got up, and
shuffled forward. He grasped two of the bars and shook them. They were appropriately loose and
rattled alarmingly. Ungo-Bungo snarled at the patrons, showing his even yellow teeth.
Dr. Saddler stared hard. This was something new in the ape-man
line. Ungo-Bungo was about five feet three, but very massive, with enormous hunched shoulders.
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