Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (13 page)

She searched the slope above, saw mossy trees vast and secretive in the curling mist. A flock of birds, long tails of cobalt and vermillion, ribboned through the air above.

Jesus
, she thought,
Africa
.

Mutara gestured them forward, moving slower now and looking all around.

 

Two decades ago, when Max was growing up, not much was known about Asperger's. Confused with psychosis, it had yet to be officially classified as a condition in the United States, much less have a standard treatment. Still her mother fought to help Max, her will unshakable. Using research, she battled with the school system for the best services and teachers.

In return, Max worked as hard as she could at her lessons, with all her focus. And every once in a while, she'd bring home something for her mom that had caught her eye. She handed the gift over, careful not to touch her mom's skin: a shiny spoon or crumpled blue napkin or a tiny disco ball she'd found half-crushed in the trash. Her mom took the gift, whatever it was, examining it. In lieu of her daughter's hand, she held the gift for a long time.

Afterward she placed it on a shelf by her bed, lined up with the other gifts, where she could look at them first thing when she woke up, while she gathered the energy to get out of bed.

The year before Max went to college, she happened one day to notice these gifts afresh. Stopped on the way to the bathroom to stare at the group of them there on her mother's shelf. Broken bits of glittery trash.

After that, she bought her mom socks instead, on the appropriate days of her mom's birthday and Christmas. Brown knee-highs. She would take an old pair to the store each time to match the size, kind and color exactly. Bought six pairs every time. In spite of the lack of surprise about the contents, Max had the gift wrapped. Humans had their customs and she tried hard to follow them.

Unwrapping the socks, her mother understood the effort. She always said, “Thank you, Max, this will be of use. I love you.” And she wore a pair of them every day.

Still her mom continued to keep the childhood gifts, dusted them and left them lined up right beside her bed.

Her mom's older sister, Aunt Tilda, had had children who were all smiley and cuddly. Growing up, they had many play-dates and sleepovers with friends and classmates. The youngest, Nina, for a while was on the state gymnastics team. After college, she and Sarah got jobs as salespeople; Robert became a psychologist. On Christmas cards, they grinned into the camera, blond hair, arms linked around each other. Their bodies fitting together as tightly as a puzzle.

Talking on the phone with Tilda, Max's mom said mostly, “Congratulations,” and “Well, that's great.” When she did discuss Max, she tried to emphasize the gains.

Max imagined returning with the vine she searched for. It could be a blockbuster drug, saving the lives of thousands of people. The vine's discovery would allow her mom to talk to her sister in something other than that small voice.

It would help make up for how Max had sat rocking in a corner while her dad's brain—a major vein to it blocked off—suffocated and then died.

 

The three of them stepped into a clearing, the underbrush trampled down. They stopped at the edge.

Mutara sniffed the air.

Max copied him. The sweet decay of forest litter, the green oxygen of thick foliage, the thin tropical dirt. And in the background was the slightest hint of something animal.

Yoko leaned close, about to whisper something.

Max moved back.

Yoko blinked, then remembered. “Around the gorillas, no matter what happens, don't run away, because they'll chase you like a cat would. And you
really
don't want to be caught.”

Max remembered the forest buff charging her. She tried to imagine standing still while a gorilla rushed her.

Yoko noticed something and she pointed with her chin. “Look.” A pile of manure lay there.

Max tried to picture a primate big enough to make that. It was as large as a horse's dump and smelled similar: grassy and sweet. From the scent, she understood two things. One, gorillas were absolute vegetarians and, two, Yoko always smelled a bit of this manure.

“What do you research?” Max asked.

“Parasites,” Yoko said. “Poopies are my profession.”

Mutara began to cluck his tongue against the roof of his mouth, the sound a farmer might make to warn a large barnyard creature he was approaching. Mutara watched the foliage around them. The three of them moved forward.

Yoko whispered, “Titus is the silverback for this family, weighs about four-hundred pounds. He's basically a gentle soul, but he's seen a lot of violence in his life. His uncle and father were killed by humans in front of him. Don't ever do anything he might consider a threat. I once saw him attack a researcher. This guy, Matt Rupert, a bit of a hotshot, was getting too close to a newborn, wanted to figure out the gender. Titus rushed him like, I don't know, a furry train, bit him in the neck and tossed him thirty feet. We all helped Matt walk down into town for medical help.”

“He could walk?”

“No choice. He had to.” Yoko ripped a stalk off some wild celery and handed it back to her. “When we spot them, munch on this. Keep crouched down, on all fours.
Never
stand upright. Move slowly. Act like a harmless ape.”

Max looked at the celery in her hand. “They fall for the act?”

“What the hell.” Yoko turned. On the slope above, she loomed over Max. Her feet planted wide, her short hair standing up, a few stray leaves caught in it. A forest nymph in a rain slicker. “Recognize your phylogeny. You are a Great Ape. We're more related to gorillas than most warblers are to each other.”

She turned back and continued to climb, clucking.

Max searched for movement or dark fur anywhere above them. To her right, she spotted an imprint in the mud. After a moment of considering it—some kind of footprint or part of a face?— she understood it came from four knuckles. Taken together they were the width of a boxing glove.

When she was a child, whenever Aunt Tilda visited, she demanded a hug, would chase Max around the house to get one. Loud and extroverted, she believed Max just had to get used to the experience. “Regular hugs every day and she'll settle right down,” Tilda used to say, “Look at my children.” She was the least Asparagus-like person Max knew. Whenever she caught Max, she'd crush her to her bosom, the scent of armpits and floral perfume, the rigid structure of undergarments.

Max's whole adult life, she'd had nightmares of this, her panicked fleeing, her lumbering aunt, the inevitable capture, herself pressed into the heavy body so hard. She knew her aunt wanted to shove Max right through her body to come out the other side draped in normal flesh.

Max imagined all the worst parts of humans in a four-hundred-pound body with sharp teeth.

She was getting whiffs now of something in the air. Wet dog combined with sweaty teenager. The scent came and went with the breeze.

Her face felt hot. She forced herself to keep climbing. Her fear wasn't at all like that shot of adrenalin she'd got after being chased by the buff. This wasn't exhilarating or transformative. More insistent and unpleasant. Her stomach felt nauseous. Her breath came too fast.

She climbed, digging her toes into the mud for traction.

A startled chuff. Maybe twenty feet to her right.

The branches there shook.

She stopped, kept her head rigidly down, looking at nothing directly, sucking air in through her teeth.

The bushes exploded with dark objects popping up for a look. A moment passed while she steeled herself for the attack. Do
not
run, she thought. Do
not
.

Then, as she feared, came the loud crashing of foliage, a pell-mell flailing of limbs and leaves and mammoth hairy bodies.

All of it, however, scrambling uphill and away. Fleeing. Startled screams, the thick musk of fear and diarrheic dung.

Within seconds, the gorillas were gone, the jungle stunned into stillness.

A last distant shriek. The pock-pock of a chest being beat.

“Huh.” Yoko said into the silence afterward, “Guess they're not so used to newcomers anymore.”

S
hame was something Jeremy had dealt with before. He had a complete lack of ability with the cattle on the farm, a deep unease around blood and, in social chatter with the women of his social milieu, a certain persistent awkwardness.

The skills he did possess were mostly those of a type unappreciated by his mother and Grandpapi: a general excellence with numbers, a clean execution of design drawings, and a methodical care when ordering supplies. He did not know how much of their unwillingness to admit his strengths was exacerbated by the more profound difference they increasingly sensed within him since he had reached adolescence.

Once he reached twenty-two years of age, his mother took him to the family physician. Red-faced Patterson had the habit of breathing through his mouth in a way that did not advertise good health, decreasing the gravity with which Jeremy was wont to listen to his advice. Jeremy's mother and the doctor closeted themselves away in his office for a few minutes to discuss the reason for the visit. Then, while she waited outside, the doctor had Jeremy undress and sit on the leather examination couch. The moment he took out his stethoscope, Jeremy could tell his mother's good manners had impeded her clarity. Patterson listened to his heart, palpated his belly, and asked him about aches and bowel movements just as he always did. While he was peering into Jeremy's ears he finally inquired what his mother believed was wrong with a young buck like him. On the doctor's breath was the smell of the pork he had had for lunch.

Jeremy cleared his throat. He had agreed to go to the doctor's only on the assumption his mother would do the talking. Sitting here, on the leather table in his undergarments, staring at a glass cabinet full of medicines that would never help him, the shame of his position overwhelmed him. “A man of my years,” he said, borrowing one of his mother's phrases, “should be more rowdy and disobedient.”

In his ear, Patterson's raspy breath paused. “That is not something most mothers complain of.”

Looking down at his spidery body, a thin fold of belly pressing against the linen of his underclothes, he felt much more naked than he would if he were completely unclothed. He used more of his mother's words. “I do not display any great interest in marriage.”

“Of course, that's natural. You are still a young man. You have got a few years before you settle down. Believe me, you'll meet the right woman, feel differently.”

Exhaling through his nose, Jeremy closed his eyes. He tried to imagine describing the visions his dreams were full of, the desires seemingly built into his loins. Through sheer frustration, he allowed his voice to take on some of its real emotion. “I won't feel different.” He turned to face the doctor, his expression bare. “I am
different
.”

The doctor stared at him, comprehension erasing his smile. He stepped back, fumbled with his instruments, putting them away. “You may get dressed.”

Patterson's instructions to his mother included the advice he exercise regularly and vigorously, perhaps pulling stumps or pounding fences in. He might spend more time with older married men on whom he could model his behavior. He should not drink hot liquids but try to sit out in the sun a little bit each day.

Perhaps the rumor started with Patterson, or maybe just an observant neighbor. Soon afterward Jeremy noticed that fewer people asked him which girl he had set his cap on. At social events, he felt the eyes of others on him. He went into town less and less.

By the time he was twenty-four, Burt Donahue was one of the few people he still saw. His mother was not encouraging of a friendship with a papist, but, given that he was the town priest, at least she could not impugn his reputation. Most times the two men would play an aggressive game of horseshoes or go duck shooting. Wearing normal clothing instead of his vestments, Burt showed himself to be adept with a rifle. In a way their friendship was an alliance. Whenever they saw a courting couple riding by in a buggy, holding hands, both the young men shifted their eyes away. And at the kinds of subjects that other men around them were wont to bring up upon occasion, Jeremy and the priest would both tighten their mouths, sometimes their throats working involuntarily. Jeremy never knew what desires exactly Burt fought against (there were those clothes he had to wear on Sundays, so confusing, his male legs slapping impatiently with each stride against the confines of his skirt). Whatever the reason, being around Burt was enough for Jeremy to feel a trifle less alone, less different. He looked forward to each visit.

It was not as though Jeremy thought it out, would ever have planned it this way, when one hot day they went for a swim in the pond. The air so stifling and motionless, the water such a cool relief. Surfacing, they howled and splashed about like any youths, but as Burt started sloshing out to shore, the wet wool of his bathing suit began to cling to the outlines of his body. Jeremy waded slower, hanging back a bit, his expression frozen. Glancing back, sensing something, Burt was unwilling to give up his lightheartedness. He stepped forward to grab Jeremy's shoulders, attempting to toss him back into the water. Both of them wrestling intently, struggling for purchase in the mud and silt.

And, feeling his balance beginning to give, his toes starting to slide, Jeremy planted a rough and wet kiss on Bert's lips.

Even as he pulled away—before Burt wound back his arm to punch him with a force and skill startling in a priest—Jeremy registered for a moment the joy in the man's face, the gloating that in the end the weakness had been Jeremy's.

The requirement of the church to keep a secret, such as one divulged in the confessional, evidently did not extend to what happened at a waterhole. Within a few days the rumor had reached his mother. She began suffering from a tightness in her breath, sometimes had migraines that lasted for days. She gave up her position in the church knitting circle and as secretary for the whist association. His whole family became nearly cloistered in their house. Each time he walked into the kitchen where his family sat, their harsh silence rang in his ear. He began to retreat even further, into the solitude of his room. Looking around at the four walls, he saw the confines of his future if he stayed in town.

Within weeks, he happened to read a pamphlet on the many opportunities available in Africa.

 

Jeremy had a hunting blind built for himself next to where the lion had leaped over the boma, figuring the animal might return to a spot where she had obtained food. Other than the sound of the hammers pounding together the blind, the camp was comparatively quiet. The workers were not laboring on the railway, filling the air with the clangs of shovels and picks. Instead they built and rebuilt the thorn fence around their tents, making the boma walls higher and thicker. They worked faster and more intently than he had ever seen them. The only sounds were those of the branches being stacked and restacked and the men hollering out instructions. This morning, he had observed that when they were off duty, they no longer sat outside their tents, playing cards, laughing, and singing their strangely nasal songs. Instead they came out of their tents only to get their food, peering around intently for lions and then scuttling back inside to eat, the flaps jerked shut.

Today, when the Indians walked by him, they no longer smiled or called good morning. The story of his aborted hunt for the lion, the way he had been found snagged in the nyika, had quickly traveled around camp. The feeling of isolation seemed uncomfortably familiar.

A little after ten in the morning, while he was overseeing the camouflaging of the hunting blind, using bundles of branches to make it look like a bush, he turned to see Patsy's groom running toward him.

“Your horse,” the man called. “She fell.”

Jeremy sprinted across the camp, the mud splashing under his feet. Vaulting over the paddock fence, he found Patsy gasping on her side. Sprawled this way, her legs appeared implausibly delicate for the round heft of her belly. He threw himself down beside her, lifting her head onto his lap, brushing her neck and talking softly. Her eye rolled to look at him, a clean white froth bubbling from her mouth and nose. Her head rocked with each labored breath.

“I'm sorry,” he kept whispering. “So sorry I brought you to this.” Gradually her eye moved past him to regard the sky. He heard a faint ticking noise deep inside her. Over the next half an hour, the ticking gradually slowed.

In the silence afterward, he thought of the tribal woman clicking in the forest.

Until now, when Jeremy considered the many men who died during their first year here, he had had faith he would not end up that way. He had believed he could not die.

Alan proclaimed it African Horse Sickness. Standing over the body, tamping the tobacco into his pipe with his thumb, he pointed out the froth and the way her head and neck were bloated, especially the hollow above her eyes. Her lungs, he said, were full of liquid. She had drowned on dry land.

“Bloody shame,” he said. “Right nice horse.” He spun his flint lighter a few times before the wick caught, then he lit the pipe and puffed hard on it, the wet smack of his lips audible.

Jeremy had always tried to be as stoic, a man of few words—the way his mother said the male Turnkeys always were—but for him there had been times when he could not stand the tension anymore. Those times, back in Maine, he had gone riding long and hard on Patsy. Deep in the forest, he had whispered quietly into her ear, bowed his face onto her hot working shoulder.

There was the question of what to do with her remains. Jeremy could not stand the idea of throwing her into the bushes, hyenas cackling over the feast, a fox perhaps running between the tents with her ear.

He started the Indians working on a grave immediately, but within twenty minutes mountainous black clouds rolled in from the east and the wind picked up, scattering twigs and dirt across the ground. Flocks of small birds zigzagged confused from bush to bush, riding the gusts. When the rain came, everything further than fifteen feet away was grayed out from the ferocity. Even after two weeks here, he still expected the rain to feel cool against his face, a refreshing summer shower. Instead the rain hammered the earth and his body, warm as sweat. It went on and on, the air more humid, the spray kicking up off the dirt. He bid the men to keep digging.

Utterly soaked by the downpour, he paced the camp, waiting for the grave to be completed. He spied a coolie in a tree up ahead, his oversized Indian shirt matted against his body, tying several jerry cans together to a branch. With some curiosity, Jeremy approached. When the Indian had finished trying the cans, an askari standing on the ground experimented with yanking on the attached rope. The cans clanked together loudly. The askari backed into the nearby tent and, closing the flaps, tried yanking the rope again. The askaris were responsible for watching over the camp at night. This one hoped to scare away any lion without leaving the safety of his tent.

Jeremy found himself trying to recreate the exact rhythm Patsy's hooves had made at a walk. Such a sassy walk she'd had, her ribcage rolling from side to side. Dup dup da dup, he said to himself. Dupup da dup.

He had already given one of his extra guns to an askari in each of the three main boma encampments, retaining only one for himself for his evening wait in the hunting blind.

The lion, so far, took one man per night. On the other hand, two to four Indians tended to die from malaria in that same time frame. The engineer inside of Jeremy could not help calculating, if the lion continued to kill at this rate—keeping the terrified Indians in their tents slightly more protected from mosquitoes—a considerable number of lives might be saved overall.

Coming back to the grave, he found the pit's sides had collapsed in the downpour. The body, covered by several sodden blankets, lay on the ground nearby, hooves peeking out. She would need to be buried at least six feet down to keep the animals away. So far the hole was not deeper than two feet. He told the men to hurry, to shovel the water out first, put some muscle into it. If anything, the rain was coming down faster.

Alan arrived under an umbrella, a tight snare drum of rain. A careful man, he wore his Wellingtons even in this heat. Somehow the toes of them gleamed, clean of mud. He stood there for a moment, surveying the work. The pit looked like a pond with the men standing up to their calves in it.

Raising his voice over the rain, Alan said, “If the lion is still in the neighborhood, it would be good to dispose of the body before nightfall. We don't want the smell of carrion in camp, now do we?”

At four, Jeremy ordered her remains soaked with kerosene and thrown on the bonfire with the rest of the day's cadavers.

Her ashes would be mixed in with humans'. He did not know if the workers minded. At the moment, he did not care.

 

About an hour after dusk, Jeremy heard a lion roar. The sound echoed through the trees, the call of dominance, of health and raspy strength and speed. No human could make such a noise, lacking a ribcage big enough, a throat long enough to growl out such a deep sound.

Once riding back from Rensselaer Polytechnic for summer break, Jeremy had crossed a noisy river and ascended the far bank slowly, the day hot and gusty. Climbing over a ridge, he had halted in the face of an immense crackle and heat, a monstrous shimmering light in the trees not a hundred yards hence, the crack of branches and the roar of destruction. The sound so overwhelming, it filled his eyes and mouth and lungs; it vibrated in his muscles. There was no conscious thought to his reaction or to Patsy's assent to his request. They had wheeled and were galloping back across the river before he could recognize what he had seen, give it the name “forest fire.”

The lion's roar created some of the same physical reaction inside. The sound shivered up his back and vibrated even in the air that he drew into his lungs. It brought forth a straightforward primal reaction. Run, said his feet, run. Instead sitting in the small room of the hunting blind, he shifted on his stool and held tighter to his rifle.