Still Life with Elephant (10 page)

B
E CAREFUL
what you wish for, my mother always said. The gods had heard me. I was to spend the night with Matt in cozily intimate sleeping quarters in an exotic setting. Except I had changed my mind. I didn't want to share the continent with him, let alone a cramped tent.

Matt was in his sweats and fiddling with his sleeping bag by the time I ducked into the tent. There was a small flashlight perched upward, distorting his arms and body into liquid, eerie shadows as he moved. I wordlessly placed my sleeping bag as far as I could from him, a full three feet away, and pulled over my suitcase. The air was humid and warm, and the tent was filled with his scent—the scent I had sniffed at his pillows for, only a few weeks earlier. I studiously avoided meeting his eyes as I scrambled through my suitcase to find something lighter to wear overnight.

“Aren't you going to talk to me?” Matt asked.

A dilemma is always presented when someone you are not talking to asks if you are talking to him. To say no, you have to talk. And that inevitably leads to more conversation. I ignored him.

“Neelie?” He stood there, waiting for me to answer. I couldn't look at him. His hair was tousled, and his face vulnerable and tired, his voice inviting.

“Neelie?” He said my name again, softly.

“No,” I finally said.

“How long can you punish me?” he asked, flipping open his sleeping bag and unrolling it across the plastic floor-mat.

It was my turn to answer, and I wasn't going to take the bait. I pulled out a pair of cutoff jeans and a tee shirt, then realized it
meant changing in front of Matt. He was in his sleeping bag by now and lying on his back and smiling up at me, his head resting on his upwardly folded arms. If I didn't change my clothes, I would have been living in my present clothes for the past two days, which actually didn't faze me all that much. I had set a minor record wearing the same clothes the first few weeks after learning of Matt's betrayal. However, I did want to change my underwear. I had done at least that. But I was not going to do it in front of Matt. I eyed my sleeping bag and tried working out the logistics of a wardrobe shift inside of it. Matt caught on.

“Come on, Neelie,” he said softly. “We're still married.”

“Marriage terminated,” I said.

“It doesn't have to end.” He held his sleeping bag open. “You can come in here with me.”

“Privileges terminated,” I said. I pulled a pair of rolled-up panties from my suitcase. They unrolled before I could stop them and flapped in front of his face.

“You won't need your underwear,” Matt added, a hopeful note in his voice.

“Not gonna happen,” I snapped.

He sat up. “Isn't that why you came?” he asked. “To work things out with us.”

“Wrong,” I said, getting into my sleeping bag with an armful of clothing.

“Why else?” he asked. “Why would you make a trip like this? You don't know anything about elephants.”

“Neither do you.” I was wriggling out of my clothes while lying on my back, and my words were coming out in gasps.

“But
I'm
going to be treating her. Dr. DuPreez is going to teach me so I can take care of her after we get her home.”

“And I'm going to be training her so you can treat her without getting stuck between her toes,” I said. I had my jeans off. Undies were next. I tossed them out of the bag and slipped into clean ones, followed by my cutoffs.

“I know you love me,” Matt continued. “And I love you. Come
inside my sleeping bag.” He gestured for me to come to him. It was all I could do to turn away.

“We can work it all out,” he added.

I turned over to face him again. “You meant to say we can
all
work it out, don't you?” I snapped. “You're forgetting Holly-Makes-Three.”

“Stop it,” he said loudly. “She's in a very difficult situation. You just don't underst—”

“Like my situation is all roses,” I raised my voice, too. “How dare you make
her
the victim.”

“I told you I was sorry.” His voice was filled with pain. “I don't know what else to do. I'm a pail full of flounder here.”

“Pail full of flounder?” I repeated acidly.

“Isn't that just like you,” he said, “to retreat back into your safe little shell when I reach out to you. You never heard me when I needed you. You never did. I said I was painfully floundering.”

“I heard what I heard,” I muttered, turning my back on him. He turned out the flashlight.

“I
need
you,” he whispered.

“You come with too much baggage,” I said.

He sighed loudly. “She can be as much a part of our lives as you will allow,” he said.

“You don't understand,” I answered. “I don't want that bitch in my life at all.”

“I didn't mean Holly,” he said. “I meant the baby.”

I paused for a moment to let that sink in. My heart felt like it was imploding, shrinking into itself, and turning into a hard black stone, then plummeting through my body in a free fall of agony as it tore its way through my guts.

“It's a girl?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said across the dark. “I've seen the sonogram.”

Something inside my mind got sucked into a black hole. I jumped out of my sleeping bag and ran from the tent. There was nothing but pain inside the tent, but there was nothing outside to
ease it. The night was blinding black; above were the sharp crystal points of faraway stars. The humid air became a suffocating presence, pressing against my face. I had jumped from one black hole into another, and I needed to get away. I needed to stop thinking that this should have been
my
daughter.

I groped my way forward, trying to remember where the jeep was, thinking I would curl up in the back seat, under the khaki blanket, and try to regain my composure. It was a girl, a girl, and I heard a soft cry escape from me without my consent. Where was the damn jeep? I stumbled against something and felt an arm around my waist, catching me.

“You can't wander around without a rifle,” Tom said softly, into my ear. “You are not at the top of the food chain here.”

“I'm not at the top of the food chain anywhere,” I said, choking on my tears.

“So I heard.”

“You heard?” My face flushed with embarrassment, although I knew he couldn't see me.

“The night carries sound very well.” He was still holding me. I could feel the warmth of his breath close to my face. “I was walking about, checking on everyone before I turned in.”

I turned my head away. “I'm sorry,” I said. “It's just that—it's—a girl.”

He turned me around and took my face in his hands, his warm fingers pressed against my cheeks. “Listen to me,” he said in a low voice. “This is a patriarchal society. Don't disrespect Matt here. My men won't help him if they see him as”—he groped for a word—“weak.”

“I'm sorry.” I stood motionless, unable to think. “I'm going to sleep in the jeep,” I finally said.

“It won't be safe.”

“I don't care,” I said. I didn't. It didn't matter to me anymore if I became fast food. I turned to where I thought the jeep was parked. “My life is over.” I started walking.

“Don't talk like that.” He grabbed my arm, restraining me for a moment. My skin burned from the touch of his hands. He smelled of mint and wild grass. “Don't be foolish.”

“I can't stay with him,” I whispered. “He took a lover—and the baby—the baby is a girl.”

“Come with me,” he said, and took my hand, leading me behind the tents so that we avoided a group of men sitting around a campfire, and then to his own tent, on the other side of the camp, walking through the darkness with sure-footed ease. It wasn't until we were inside his tent that I realized he had a large rifle slung over one shoulder. He leaned it against the wall. I waited there, in the dark. Some of the men who were sitting around the campfire were singing and clapping now, to the accompaniment of sweet, haunting chimes.

“What is that?” I whispered. “It's so beautiful.”

“It's a folk song, ‘Muka Jona,'” he replied.

“The chimes,” I said, “the chimes.”

“A
mbira
,” Tom said, “a thumb piano.”

Their voices rose and fell in a rhythmic chant-song; the clapping broke against the still of the night; the chimes floated behind, like feathers caught in the wind. I felt calmer, comforted. There is dark and there is dark.

He rested his hands on my shoulder. “Use my sleeping bag,” he whispered. There was heat in his hands, in his voice. There was something else there—a steadiness, the sympathy I didn't know I wanted, there was strength, and the excitement of him standing just close enough. I reached out to touch him, to dare touch him. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to feel desirable again. I wanted to tear my heart into pieces and throw away the parts that held Matt, and take the rest and press it together so that it would beat properly again, and send life and feelings through me once more. I wanted Tom, for crazy, unthinkable reasons. I wanted to hurt Matt until he was crumpled with pain. I wanted to feel arms and shoulders and hands touching me, reaching through the shadows and pulling me back, into desire.

I could feel his face coming closer to mine, his breath against my face, and I reached out and put my hands on his chest. I leaned toward him and raised my face to him. Suddenly he put his arms around me and kissed me. I wanted him to, yet it caught me off guard. The hardness of him, the heat in his lips, in the urgent way he pressed them against mine. Time stopped, the moment held us, suspended like a drop of water hovering from the tip of a spigot. It was all heat, burning through my clothes, my skin, burning into me. A piece of star had fallen from the sky and caught us, spinning us along in its gravity. It was a minute, it was forever, until we broke apart and stood wordlessly, the only sound our breath. I pressed my hand to my mouth and stepped back.

“Get some sleep, Neelie,” he finally said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” I dropped to my knees and crawled inside the sleeping bag. “But where are you going to sleep?” I asked. I could feel him standing over me, the smell of mint sharp and compelling.

“I'll be right here.”

I reached up and touched his hand. “Please, you can sleep with me,” I blurted out, wanting him more than anything, and ashamed of it, and ashamed that I had to ask.

He knelt beside me and stroked my hair. “This isn't the right time,” he said gently. “You know that.”

T
HERE IS
a distinct difference between implosion and explosion: one collapses into a heap onto itself, the other collapses outward onto everything else. They both break your world apart. The damage is just done differently.

I curled up in Tom's sleeping bag and silently wept, a little bit from embarrassment over offering myself to him and getting rejected, and mostly because I was heartsick over Matt's remarks about the baby. Tom placed my head on his lap and continued to talk to me, patting my head like I was a favorite dog and telling me that I was a beautiful woman and a fine person and I would be all right.

“There are losses that etch themselves forever, deep into your soul, and losses that can be replaced,” he said, very softly. “Peace of mind comes when you learn to tell the two apart.”

“I guess so,” I said. Here was Thomas Princeton Pennington, sitting on the ground on a piece of plastic and cradling my head.

“I'm sorry,” I murmured to him.

“For what?” he asked.

“For this,” I said. “For—you know—for coming here—with all my problems and—stuff.” My words refused to come out smoothly. “I was hoping that this trip…would fix things between me and Matt.” How foolish I must sound, I thought, hoping to save my marriage by running off to Africa, and then propositioning the man who had brought me there.

I could hear Tom breathing in the dark. He ran his fingers over my face. “Yes, well, I noticed in the jeep,” he said quietly, “the tension between you and Matt. I knew right away there was something wrong.” His fingers traced my nose, my lips. “I should not have
kissed you,” he said. “You're a beautiful woman, but I—I was out of line.”

I tried to sit up, but the sleeping bag didn't give. “I wanted you to,” I said. “It's my fault, too. I feel so stupid. You must think—”

“Shhh,” he said, gently putting a finger to my lips.

There was quiet between us. “I'll still work hard,” I said. “I'll do whatever I have to do for, you know, the elephant.”

“I know you will, Neelie,” he replied. “Everything will be okay.” I lay down again and let him rub circles in my hair until I drowsed off, and slept like a baby for the rest of the night.

 

Tom apparently had gotten up much earlier before dawn, because I awoke alone. I crawled from the sleeping bag, rolled it into a corner, and stepped outside. No one noticed me; everyone was preoccupied, packing up the city of tents.

Dawn was just breaking over the savanna. The navy sky dissolved into fingers of rose, threads of gold wove themselves upward, upward until everything was cast in gold. The grasses shimmered gold, the tops of the trees glowed with rose and gold. I stood outside my tent and stared, astonished at its clarity and beauty, moved by the pure light.

I took off for the nearest baobab tree, then came back to camp and found a large bottle of water and a tin basin in Tom's tent, placed there by Grisha, so I could wash. I scrubbed the scent of mint from my face and neck, fixed my hair into one braid, and rubbed insect repellant on my arms and legs before stepping outside.

Grisha brought me a breakfast of
mealie sadza
, a thick corn porridge, and fruit and coffee. “Madame Sterling sleeps well?” he asked. I didn't know how to answer. “Mr. Thomas gives peoples amusing account how he sleeps the night in jeep,” he remarked, casually handing me the tray of food.

“Thank you,” I said, now understanding that Tom had taken care of protecting me.

Everyone in camp was busily folding tents and checking equipment and loading the trucks to get ready to track the elephant. It was a whirlwind of movement, with Tom at its center, directing traffic, checking maps, consulting with his crew, burning enough energy to fuel a nuclear reactor.

He had at least thirty workers, recruited from the villages. Local tribesmen, with strong, proud, upright bearing and dark-brown skin and sinewy arms and muscled legs. They worked hard, talking among themselves, an organized, efficient army of rescuers. I wandered through the camp, trying to stay out of everyone's way, until I ran into Tom. He was stowing an elaborate-looking radio in the back of our jeep. He looked up at me, his face closed. I understood.

“Good morning, Neelie,” he said in a casual voice. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you,” I replied. He nodded and went back to work on the radio. He left for a moment to direct some of his men, then returned.

“What do your men do when they aren't working for you?” I asked him.

“I have a don't-ask, don't-tell policy.” He made a face. “They need to earn a living, and I need them. Plus I bring them food. But when I'm not here…” He shrugged. “They need to survive…”

I went back to Matt's tent for my suitcase. The tent had been folded; the suitcase was standing next to it. So was Matt, drinking a cup of coffee. His face brightened when he saw me.

“I tried to go after you last night,” he said. “But it was so dark. Where did you disappear to?”

“I slept in one of the jeeps,” I lied. His eyes were tired, defeated, and I wondered if he would turn out to be one of the replaceable losses Tom was talking about. I picked up my suitcase. “I'm floundering, too,” I said.

“Give me time,” he said, giving me a tenuous smile. “I know we can work things out.”

I refused to smile back. He took my suitcase from me, just brushing my hand with his fingers in the process. “Please forgive
me,” he said. “I'm so stupid. I didn't realize what I said last night—how it would affect you.”

“How things affect me seems to be last on your list,” I replied, then glanced around, remembering what Tom had cautioned me about. “This isn't the place to discuss it.”

He looked relieved. “We'll talk about everything when we get back,” he said.

“Sure.”

Donovan Hobbs, the helicopter pilot, came over to inform Matt that Tom was ready, the crew was ready, and they were leaving in a minute or so. Matt would be flying along with him and Dr. DuPreez, to learn how to tranquilize the elephant with a dart gun. They would be flying ahead of us and would radio her position back to the trucks just before darting her, so that the men could locate her immediately and load her onto the truck.

I would be in the jeep with Tom, Richie, and Grisha, the trucks behind us. Tom would stay in touch with the helicopter by radio. We had been given packages of biltong to chew on if we got hungry, a sort of salted jerky, consisting of whose meat I didn't want to know, and a pail of fruit. Donovan Hobbs started up the helicopter, and dozens of lavender and crimson birds screamed into the air. Billy DuPreez and Matt climbed aboard, and a moment later, the helicopter took flight. Grisha hopped into the jeep and motioned for me to sit next to him.

“Sit with me,” I begged Richie under my breath. “I'm going crazy trying to understand Grisha.”

He laughed. “And I thought you two were hitting it off so well.”

 

Our jeep followed the helicopter, tracing our way across the savanna toward Makuti, leading two big open trucks, one transporting a huge wooden crate with twenty men standing next to it in the open bed, the other holding another ten or so men sitting in the back and chatting. Our driver had to gun the engine to keep up with the helicopter. Richie was studying the horizon with binoculars, while
Grisha chatted his ear off. Tom and I made polite conversation, as though we hadn't spent the night together. We were jolted and bounced around for another two hours, until, slowly, Makuti bush country revealed itself, the green and yellow grasses, tan-green bushes, and long patches of rocky, dried-out, concrete-hard dirt giving way to thickets of odd-shaped trees. Tom named them for me,
majanje,
red and gold
msasa,
acacias,
mpanes,
strangler figs that hosted huge brown puffs, nests built by weaverbirds. There were termite mounds the height of a man. Giraffes observed us in stately groups as we drove past, buffalo ran next to us, hyenas loped away in small packs laughing eerily; a straggly lion continued to sun itself without showing any interest in us.

The jeep bounced over the thick grasses like an unbroken horse. I held hard onto the bar over my head to keep from flying out of my seat and braced my legs against the floor. Hours passed and we continued tracking.

Then I saw them. A troop of baboons. They were sitting under a tree, busily grooming one another, swatting at the flies that hovered over them, chewing on pieces of bark. A female moved from the group to pass near us, her baby clinging to her back, its arms and legs wrapped around her, buried in her thick brown coat. She hesitated for a moment, and stared at us, worried, most likely, that we were a threat, then she moved on. The baby looked back at me with its dark human-like eyes. An infant. I could feel something rising inside of me and took a deep breath. “Stop, stop, stop,” I admonished myself and looked away.

 

Dusk came and we had to make camp. The helicopter found a flat spot to land, and the tents were erected nearby. Dinner appeared quickly, and we ate a chewy meat and some vegetables and washed it all down with strong coffee.

I avoided Matt—I didn't want a replay of the previous night—and I sat in the jeep, wondering where to sleep. Tom came up to me.

“Take my tent,” he said. “I'll stay out here tonight.”

 

I slept fitfully—maybe drinking two mugs of black coffee hadn't been the best idea—and was up early enough to witness another dawn as incredible as the first. I watched the day break over us and wondered how a land so rich with beauty could be so poor in spirit. So broken.

The trucks were packed in record time, the helicopter lifted off, and we were back in the jeep as it flew northward.

“Every day that passes, we could lose her,” Tom muttered.

I dozed under a hot sun, and the dust settled over me, coating my face and my hair. I kept my eyes shut. The scent of the grasses filled the air—woody, spicy scents—and I drifted along with them.

“She's ahead,” the radio crackled loudly and I snapped awake. “We're trying to get a fix on her.” There was a static-filled pause, and Tom leaned forward, his ear pressed to his radio as the volume nearly disappeared.

“These are fresh batteries,” he complained, fiddling with the knob.

“Trying to get a fix.” I recognized Billy DuPreez's Afrikaans accent come back on the air. The helicopter circled around and over the jeep. “She's gone off into the bush,” Billy declared into the radio. “I can't get a clear aim with the dart gun.” I looked up to see him hanging out the helicopter door, the dart gun poised on his shoulder.

They circled again and made another pass close to the trees, but to no avail. The elephant had escaped into the bush. Donovan Hobbs landed the helicopter on a plain of grass and shut the engine down. Matt and Billy DuPreez jumped out, carrying dart guns.

“We have to dart her on foot,” Billy called over. “Let's go.” He and Matt ran ahead toward the trees.

“You stay in the jeep,” Tom barked to me as he climbed out.

“I want to see,” I said.

There was no time to argue. I followed behind Richie and Grisha as Tom, Matt, and Billy ran ahead, racing across the thick
grass. The crewmen in the trucks were on the ground now, dropping ramps and chains, working all of a piece, in well-practiced precision.

My heart beat wildly with anticipation. This was it. In only a few minutes, we were going to rescue an elephant.