A Visit From the Goon Squad (8 page)

Charlie stands up and moves closer to the warriors: a skinny girl in shorts and a raw cotton shirt with small round buttons made of wood. Her teeth are slightly crooked. When the drummers pat their drums, Charlie’s warrior and the other one begin to sing: guttural noises pried from their abdomens. She sways in front of them. During her ten days in Africa, she has begun to act like a different sort of girl—the sort that intimidates her back home. In a cinder-block town they visited a few days ago, she drank a muddy-looking concoction in a bar and wound up giving away her silver butterfly earrings (a birthday gift from her father) in a hut belonging to a very young woman whose breasts were leaking milk. She was late returning to the jeeps; Albert, who works for Ramsey, had to go and find her. “Prepare yourself,” he warned. “Your dad is having kittens.” Charlie didn’t care and doesn’t now; there’s a charge for her in simply commanding the fickle beam of her father’s attention, feeling his disquiet as she dances, alone, by the fire.

Lou lets go of Mindy’s hand and sits up straight. He wants to grab his daughter’s skinny arm and yank her away from these black men, but does no such thing, of course. That would be letting her win.

The warrior smiles at Charlie. He’s nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten. But he’s sung for enough American tourists to recognize that in her world, Charlie is a child. Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He’ll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his
lalema:
the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions). He’ll marry an American named Lulu and remain in New York, where he’ll invent a scanning device that becomes standard issue for crowd security. He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather’s hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas, directly under a skylight.

“Son,” Lou says, into Rolph’s ear. “Let’s take a walk.”

The boy rises from the dust and walks with his father away from the fire. Twelve tents, each sleeping two safari guests, make a circle around it, along with three outhouses and a shower stall, where water warmed on the fire is released from a sack with a rope pull. Out of view, near the kitchen, are some smaller tents for the staff, and then the black, muttering expanse of the bush, where they’ve been cautioned never to go.

“Your sister’s acting nuts,” Lou says, striding into the dark.

“Why?” Rolph asks. He hasn’t noticed anything nutty in Charlie’s behavior. But his father hears the question differently.

“Women are crazy,” he says. “You could spend a goddamn lifetime trying to figure out why.”

“Mom’s not.”

“True,” Lou reflects, calmer now. “In fact, your mother’s not crazy
enough.”

The singing and drumbeats fall suddenly away, leaving Lou and Rolph alone under a sharp moon.

“What about Mindy?” Rolph asks. “Is she crazy?”

“Good question,” Lou says. “What do you think?”

“She likes to read. She brought a lot of books.”

“Did she.”

“I like her,” Rolph says. “But I don’t know if she’s crazy. Or what the right amount is.”

Lou puts his arm around Rolph. If he were an introspective man, he would have understood years ago that his son is the one person in the world with the power to soothe him. And that, while he expects Rolph to be like him, what he most enjoys in his son are the many ways he is different: quiet, reflective, attuned to the natural world and the pain of others.

“Who cares,” Lou says. “Right?”

“Right,” Rolph agrees, and the women fall away like those drumbeats, leaving him and his father together, an invincible unit. At eleven years old, Rolph knows two clear things about himself: He belongs to his father. And his father belongs to him.

They stand still, surrounded by the whispering bush. The sky is crammed with stars. Rolph closes his eyes and opens them again. He thinks, I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life. And he’s right.

When they finally return to camp, the warriors have gone. Only a few die-hards from the Phoenix Faction (as Lou calls the safari members who hail from that dubious place) still sit by the fire, comparing the day’s animal sightings. Rolph creeps into his tent, pulls off his pants, and climbs onto his cot in a T-shirt and underwear. He assumes that Charlie is asleep. When she speaks, he can hear in her voice that she’s been crying.

“Where did you go?” she says.

II. Hills

“What on earth have you got in that backpack?”

It’s Cora, Lou’s travel agent. She hates Mindy, but Mindy doesn’t take it personally—it’s Structural Hatred, a term she coined herself and is finding highly useful on this trip. A single woman in her forties who wears high-collared shirts to conceal the thready sinews of her neck will structurally despise the twenty-three-year-old girlfriend of a powerful male who not only employs said middle-aged female but is paying her way on this trip.

“Anthropology books,” she tells Cora. “I’m in the Ph.D. program at Berkeley.”

“Why don’t you read them?”

“Carsick,” Mindy says, which is plausible, God knows, in the shuddering jeeps, though untrue. She isn’t sure why she hasn’t cracked her Boas or Malinowski or Julian Jaynes, but assumes she must be learning in other ways that will prove equally fruitful. In bold moments, fueled by the boiled black coffee they serve each morning in the meal tent, Mindy has even wondered if her insights on the link between social structure and emotional response could amount to more than a rehash of Lévi-Strauss—a refinement; a contemporary application. She’s only in her second year of coursework.

Their jeep is last in a line of five, nosing along a dirt road through grassland whose apparent brown masks a wide internal spectrum of color: purples, greens, reds. Albert, the surly Englishman who is Ramsey’s second in command, is driving. Mindy has managed to avoid Albert’s jeep for several days, but he’s developed a reputation for discovering the best animals, so although there’s no game run today—they’re relocating to the hills, where they’ll spend the night in a hotel for the first time this trip—the children begged to ride with him. And keeping Lou’s children happy, or as close to happy as is structurally possible, is part of Mindy’s job.

Structural Resentment:
The adolescent daughter of a twice-divorced male will be unable to tolerate the presence of his new girlfriend, and will do everything in her limited power to distract him from said girlfriend’s presence, her own nascent sexuality being her chief weapon.

Structural Affection:
A twice-divorced male’s preadolescent son (and favorite child) will embrace and accept his father’s new girlfriend because he hasn’t yet learned to separate his father’s loves and desires from his own. In a sense, he, too, will love and desire her, and she will feel maternal toward him, though she isn’t old enough to be his mother.

Lou opens the large aluminum case where his new camera is partitioned in its foam padding like a dismantled rifle. He uses the camera to stave off the boredom that afflicts him when he can’t physically move around. He’s rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he’ll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.

Structural Incompatibility:
A powerful twice-divorced male will be unable to acknowledge, much less sanction, the ambitions of a much younger female mate. By definition, their relationship will be temporary.

Structural Desire:
The much younger temporary female mate of a powerful male will be inexorably drawn to the single male within range who disdains her mate’s power.

Albert drives with one elbow out the window. He’s been a largely silent presence on this safari, eating quickly in the meal tent, providing terse answers to people’s questions. (“Where do you live?” “Mombasa.” “How long have you been in Africa?” “Eight years.” “What brought you here?” “This and that.”) He rarely joins the group around the fire after dinner. On a trip to the outhouse one night Mindy glimpsed Albert at the other fire near the staff tents, drinking a beer and laughing with the Kikuyu drivers. With the tour group, he rarely smiles. Whenever his eyes happen to graze Mindy’s, she senses shame on her behalf: because of her prettiness; because she sleeps with Lou; because she keeps telling herself this trip constitutes anthropological research into group dynamics and ethnographic enclaves, when really what she’s after is luxury, adventure, and a break from her four insomniac roommates.

Next to Albert, in the shotgun seat, Chronos is ranting about animals. He’s the bassist for the Mad Hatters, one of Lou’s bands, and has come on the trip as Lou’s guest along with the Hatters’ guitarist and a girlfriend each. These four are locked in a visceral animal-sighting competition
(Structural Fixation:
A collective, contextually induced obsession that becomes a temporary locus of greed, competition, and envy). They challenge one another nightly over who saw more and at what range, invoking witnesses from their respective jeeps and promising definitive proof when they develop their film back home.

Behind Albert sits Cora, the travel agent, and beside her, gazing from his window, is Dean, a blond actor whose genius for stating the obvious—“It’s hot,” or “The sun is setting,” or “There aren’t many trees”—is a staple source of amusement for Mindy. Dean is starring in a movie whose sound track Lou is helping to create; the presumption seems to be that its release will bring Dean immediate and stratospheric fame. In the seat behind him, Rolph and Charlie are showing their
Mad
magazine to Mildred, one of the bird-watching ladies. She or her companion, Fiona, can usually be found near Lou, who flirts with them tirelessly and needles them to take him bird-watching. His indulgence of these women in their seventies (strangers to him before this trip) intrigues Mindy; she can find no structural reason for it.

In the last row, beside Mindy, Lou thrusts his torso from the open roof and takes pictures, ignoring the rule to stay seated while the jeep is moving. Albert swerves suddenly, and Lou is knocked back into his seat, camera smacking his forehead. He swears at Albert, but the words are lost in the jeep’s wobbly jostle through tall grass. They’ve left the road. Chronos leans out his open window, and Mindy realizes that Albert must be taking this detour for him, giving Chronos a chance to advance against his rivals. Or was the temptation to knock Lou down too sweet to resist?

After a minute or two of chaotic driving, the jeep emerges a few feet from a pride of lions. Everyone gawks in startled silence—it’s the closest they’ve been to any animal on this trip. The motor is still running, Albert’s hand tentatively on the wheel, but the lions appear so relaxed, so indifferent, that he kills the engine. In the ticking-motor silence they can hear the lions breathe: two females, one male, three cubs. The cubs and one of the females are gorging on a bloody zebra carcass. The others are dozing.

“They’re eating,” says Dean.

Chronos’s hands shake as he spools film into his camera. “Fuck,” he keeps muttering. “Fuck.”

Albert lights a cigarette—forbidden in the brush—and waits, as indifferent to the scene as if he’d paused outside a restroom.

“Can we stand?” the children ask. “Is it safe?”

“I’m sure as hell going to,” Lou says.

Lou, Charlie, Rolph, Chronos, and Dean all climb on top of their seats and jam their upper halves through the open roof. Mindy is now effectively alone inside the jeep with Albert, Cora, and Mildred, who peers at the lions through her bird-watching binoculars.

“How did you know?” Mindy asks, after a silence.

Albert swivels around to look at her down the length of the jeep. He has unruly hair and a soft brown mustache. There is a suggestion of humor in his face. “Just a guess.”

“From half a mile away?”

“He probably has a sixth sense,” Cora says, “after so many years here.”

Albert turns back around and blows smoke through his open window.

“Did you see something?” Mindy persists.

She expects Albert not to turn again, but he does, leaning over the back of his seat, his eyes meeting hers between the children’s bare legs. Mindy feels a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist. She understands now that it’s mutual; she sees this in Albert’s face.

“Broken bushes,” he says, resting his eyes on her. “Like something got chased. It could have been nothing.”

Cora, sensing her exclusion, sighs wearily. “Can someone come down so I can look too?” she calls to those above the roof.

“Coming,” Lou says, but Chronos is faster, ducking back into the front seat and then leaning out his window. Cora rises in her big print skirt. Mindy’s face pounds with blood. Her own window, like Albert’s, is on the jeep’s left side, facing away from the lions. Mindy watches him wet his fingers and snuff out his cigarette. They sit in silence, hands dangling separately from their windows, a warm breeze stirring the hair on their arms, ignoring the most spectacular animal sighting of the safari.

“You’re driving me crazy,” Albert says, very softly. The sound seems to travel out his window and back in through Mindy’s, like one of those whispering tubes. “You must know that.”

“I didn’t,” she murmurs back.

“Well, you are.”

“My hands are tied.”

“Forever?”

She smiles. “Please. An interlude.”