Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (19 page)

A linen closet smelling of dust and cedar.

Hot, sweet pee tinkling into the toilet.

She let her finger drop.

Dimly she was aware of Yoko behind her, wrapping her arms around Max's waist and across her chest, her whole body tight against Max's. Mutara took hold of her upper arm with both hands.

“One,” he said.

The times those boys had been with her, there was a lot less surface area involved than this. Still she found being held by these two was easier.

A pile of autumn leaves: airy and rich decay.

“Two,” he said.

Cold white wine, like sharp metallic sunshine.

She was older. She'd worked hard on changing, acting more neurotypical.

Also, she trusted these two.

“Three.”

His yank was firm and clean. He twisted the arm, angling it, and then pushed it back toward the socket. There was the grinding of bone against bone, pain poured a searing liquid across her chest, and her arm grated sideways, all wrong.

He let go and stepped away for a moment, breathing, before trying again.

She closed her eyes now and worked on finding something
much
more interesting to focus on.

Yoko swore, holding her from behind, her mouth against Max's ear, her voice flat and mechanical. “Shit shit shit.”

Between each try he would wipe his hands several times off on his pants. Each time when he pushed, trying to pop the bone into place, Max let no noise escape her lips, while he grunted low in his chest as though he'd been cut.

The fifth time—both Mutara and Yoko half-panting by now from their effort—he spat out something angry in another language, then slammed her arm hard, shoving it home with a force that made both Yoko and her half-stumble backward. The shoulder clicking into its socket. The pain shrieking like metal.

Mutara sat down at the base of a tree, breathing through his teeth. Yoko stepped away and walked around and around, slapping her arms forward and back, a swimmer just before a race. “
Fuck
that shit,” she said.

Max though stayed still. She had finally found her focus. That moment Rafiki crouched over her, her rough hair, her raspy inhale, the vinegar scent of the
benutis
. That moment they'd communicated.

Max stood there, her head tilted. Not even moving.

 

After that day, Asante wouldn't get very close to her again, unnerved by the slap and the scene that had followed. Max didn't mind all that much. Now she didn't have to look at Asante's tiny hands and contemplate their future.

Instead, over the next few days, she found Rafiki began to take Asante's place at her side. Rafiki would wander gradually in until she foraged three or four feet away, studiously ignoring Max the whole time, as though this proximity was pure accident.

She wondered if Rafiki came closer partly because Max's arm was in a sling now, forcing her to forage with one hand also.

Since Asante now always stayed on the far side of her mother, Rafiki didn't seem as anxious anymore. The times she looked at Max, it was at her hand, perhaps to check her picking technique or to see if she'd found something especially good to eat.

Max didn't mind her being close. She remembered that moment of Rafiki standing over her, her head turned away as she smelled the
benutis
. She felt no fear of her.

Because of her missing right hand, Rafiki moved through the jungle in a different way than the other gorillas. Putting weight on her stump seemed to hurt, so she didn't knucklewalk very often. Instead when she needed to move a few feet, she would heave herself up onto two legs and walk. The transformation was startling. Upright, she became human: her head, her shoulders, her posture. The main difference was her legs, half the length of a person's. However this difference seemed more like a birth defect than the design decisions of a different species. Faced away and in a dress, she could have walked through any mall and people would throw her glances of pity, not alarm. Massive and muscular, her torso rolled from side to side over her hips, the way dwarves with congenitally short legs moved.

And when Max moved forward, she still tried to knucklewalk. Because of the sling, she could only use one hand, so she half-crawled along, on that one hand and her knees, awkward and breathing hard since this position put pressure on the bandages round her fractured rib. She labored forward in limping impersonation of a gorilla.

The pair of them wandering this way through the jungle.

Yoko had said Rafiki had lost her hand as a child, when the silverback Uncle had ruled the group. Her right hand must have gotten caught in a hunter's wire trap, a noose meant for much smaller prey. Of course with her hand snagged, first thing she would have done was jerk her arm back, trying to free herself. This would have ripped the trap loose from its anchor in the ground, but also tightened the noose, cutting the wire in through her flesh to the bone. Now the wire became impossible to pull off, not with fingers, no matter how frantic they were. Tugging on the end of the noose just pulled it tighter.

Yoko explained that every few years a gorilla would get caught in one of these wire traps. If the noose wasn't loosened, then the hand slowly died from lack of blood and over the next few weeks it rotted and fell off. If the gorilla was young and strong, sometimes she survived this.

Three times, researchers had witnessed different silverbacks successfully help the wounded ape. Right after the noose had tightened and the snared gorilla had yanked backward, jerking the wire deep into the flesh, the silverback would begin to scream and display and bark. He would act more terrifying and out of control than ever before, throwing small trees around and slapping the ground and making short furious charges at the injured one, until she lay there utterly still, so terrified she was barely breathing. Then the silverback would step in close, lean down and bite her wrist. Sink his incisors into the flesh far enough to wedge at least one tooth under the wire and tug up, then bite again and again in different spots, prying upward until the noose was loose enough to come off.

When Rafiki was a juvenile and her hand had gotten caught, Uncle had ruled the group. She'd been too young to understand what he was trying to do. And even in his prime, he'd been a bit jumpy and hesitant. He hadn't been able to terrify her into submission, to let him bite her wrist. And so she'd lost her hand.

She'd learned to cope. Her left hand could pluck food surprisingly quickly, much faster than Max could with her one hand. Sometimes when working on an exceptionally bounteous harvest, Rafiki would roll back onto her tailbone and use one foot as well as her left hand, balanced there in what looked like a yoga pose.

She seemed interested in Max's clumsy foraging, as well as in the plant samples she collected. She glanced sideways each time Max pulled out a sample bag, watching from the edge of her eyes as Max tucked edible plants away into her knapsack.

Once, when Max left one of the sample bags on the ground for a moment, Rafiki reached forward to prod it with a single knuckle. At the light crinkle of the plastic, she pulled her hand back to her chest. Max continued to examine the
Pygeum
leaves in her hand, trying to look busy. Rafiki leaned down close to sniff the bag, then backed up, tucking her chin in.

Max didn't want her putting the bag in her mouth to taste it or perhaps try to swallow it, so she casually picked it up, opened it and slid in the plant sample, then put it away in her backpack. Rafiki watched this from the edge of her vision, considering it all.

The next morning on the mountain, within the first hour of being with the gorillas, Max came upon five nettle leaves, all balled up on the ground beside each other, ready to be swallowed. She glanced around, unsure of which gorilla had gone to the trouble of rolling the leaves up, then forgotten to eat them. Rafiki was the closest. Perhaps Asante had distracted her just before she'd swallowed the leaves. Max unrolled each one, smelled and examined it to make sure there wasn't something different about these leaves that a gorilla might have detected just before eating them. Rafiki glanced at her twice while she did this.

An hour later, she found another pile of food, this time of
Loranthus luteo-aurantiacus
, the mistletoe mounded on the ground as neatly as if it had been patted down by a spoon. Again Max took the pile apart, examining the specimens.

She caught Rafiki in the midst of assembling the third offering, trying to get a blackberry to balance on top of the others. It kept rolling off. After the third try, she snorted, popped the berry in her mouth and stalked off on two legs to a thick cluster of ferns. Max sidled over to the berry pile and contemplated it. What use could this abandoned food serve? She glanced at Rafiki and caught her watching, sideways, but with interest.

Considering the neat pile of berries, on impulse she pulled out a sample bag and dropped the blackberries one by one away in it, the bag open on the ground where it could be seen. Then she tucked the bag away in her knapsack, buttoning the flap afterward.

Rafiki watched, motionless, then roused herself and went back to foraging.

After that, when she left the piles, they were closer to Max, sometimes right beside her, two to three a day. Each time Max would elaborately accept them.

And of course, at no point during this, did either of them look directly at each other.

 

Max and Yoko walked through the darkness to Pip's cabin for dinner, waving their flashlights and calling out, “Hee yaw.” Max imagined the forest buffs standing in the darkness of the meadow all around them, their massive heads turning to track the women, the swaying flashlights reflected in their eyes.

To distract herself from this image, Max asked, “How come Pip and Dubois don't go up to see the gorillas?”

“Dubois, she runs the station, the administration and stuff. She spends her days pleading with the government for more money or help. Pip, she works on the gorilla's phylogeography using samples of their DNA. She's trying to figure out when the mountain gorillas split off evolutionarily from the lowland ones
,
and how much diversity remains in the survivors. You know, at what point the inbreeding will get so bad they'll all be hemophiliacs or something, unable to reproduce viable offspring. The last few weeks she's been working like mad to make sure she's got all the data she needs. She
really
doesn't want to have to come back here later for more.”

“She said she had a kid. How old?”

“Eight, named Annie. She's staying with the dad right now. If Pip finishes the research, she can publish. Get a better job.”

“Hey, I forgot. When's she flying out?”

A beat of time passed before Yoko answered. “It turns out all the flights leaving the country this week were booked. But she's got a reservation for next Tuesday.”

Max considered the way Yoko had said that. She asked, “Were all the flights
into
the country booked?”

“No, they were empty.” Yoko opened the door to Pip's cabin and rather busily stepped away from Max to get herself a bowl of soup.

Max sat down next to Mutara, thinking about this while she awkwardly tried to saw open a box of tofu with a knife, her left hand cradled against her in the sling.

Mutara gently took the box from her, cut it open and put it back in front of her. He asked, “Excuse me, but has it truth that the Madonna likes women?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Women. The Madonna, she likes them? I hear this and always wonder.”

“Oh.” She understood abruptly. “Oh, you mean the singer. Yes, I guess that's the rumor.”

He shook his head. “Beautiful woman.”

“Can I ask you a question?” The others were busy debating whether to save the last few bottles of beer for Christmas dinner or drink them now. “Can you tell me about the Kutu?”

Mutara turned away from her to rub at a smudge on his spoon with his napkin, considering her request. “What is it you are wishing to know?”

“Anything, everything.”

He was silent for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. When he spoke, his voice was much quieter. “The Kutu, they like things of the dead, like to hold them. Play with their toys, put on their clothes.” His words came out quickly as though they'd been in him for a while, waiting to get out.

“Why?”

“They think this way they have power of the dead person. Their favorite is, ahh, how you say?
Une mariée
? A woman who joins with a man.”

Max cocked her head. “A wife? A bride?”

“Ahh yes. A bride.” He repeated the word to make sure he remembered it. “Brides of Affonso, this is what they call themselves.”

“Who's Affonso?”

“Long ago Affonso is the last true king of Kongo, back when the country is powerful, before the whites start wanting slaves. The Kutu love Affonso and the Kongo back then.” He actually whispered now. “It is said the Kutu hate Rwanda, you know, for the invasion.” He spoke these words with weight.

Unsure of which part of this information to ask about first, she said, “More than everyone else they hate?”

Before he could respond, Yoko interrupted. “It's just a rumor.”

The rest of the room was silent in a charged way. Max glanced
.
Yoko and Dubois were watching Mutara with narrowed eyes. Pip was looking down at her napkin, folding it into squares. The napkin wasn't a face, so Max studied it, watching it get folded into smaller and smaller squares.

“There are plenty of rumors,” Yoko said. “You can't look to the Kutu for accurate predictions of what they'll do next, attack Rwanda or Uganda. They want to freak the crap out of as many people as possible. That way everyone's too scared to fight them. Rumors work even better for them than killing people.”

Mutara was rubbing his napkin against the spoon, busy with the dirty spot. His posture turned away. She realized he'd been told not to tell her this.