Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (22 page)

The men's voices, tight with fear, soared from boma to boma throughout the camp. Some yelled in English; the rest yelled foreign words he did not know. Jerry cans clanked and rattled. Slowly his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. He shifted his grip on his rifle. A faint illumination came from one of the askari's bonfires twenty paces away, the glow flickering across the roof and walls of his tent. He watched for the shadow of anything moving.

Lying here, Jeremy considered all the children in the villages nearby, attempting to sleep curled tight against the sides of their parents, the thin doors of their huts barricaded as well as possible. He imagined in the morning all those mothers lugging their laundry down to the river, uneasily watching the bushes lining the sides of the path. He pitied the fathers stepping out of their bomas to hunt, holding tightly to their spears.

As time passed—twenty minutes, half an hour—numb with the monotony of fear and from four nights with little sleep, he found himself drifting into a state he had never experienced before. Each sound struck him strongly and clearly. He could identify each and even locate it in space. The frightened squeal of a hyena near the quarry, the chuff of a hippo on the river, the low whispers of the men who had bedded down for safety on top of the water tower. Meanwhile, his breath deepened, his eyes closed.

His viewpoint gradually floated up in the air, rising slowly to a point far above his body. Spread out below him, he saw the landscape of Tsavo, the trees and animals and Indians and Africans, rocks and river and the railroad. And beneath all this, the skin of the continent oozed its red mud, the laterite dirt binding it all together, discoloring clothing, coating tents, dyeing any hand that touched it with a bloody stain.

In this half-conscious state, floating gently above camp, Jeremy could feel the animals out there, probing the base of the bomas, sniffing, seeking weaknesses with those huge tawny eyes, testing each possibility. Determined and smart, nature's perfect hunters, in the wide curve of their skulls they had capabilities he could not even imagine.

Hour after hour passed. Strangely, the lack of any sudden screaming did not reassure him. He could almost see the animals tucking their heads down and pressing forward into a subtle weakness in a boma. They had no long manes to get snagged. The thorns jabbed and sliced, but sinuous as snakes, the lions twisted through.

Silently appearing in the firelight beside a tent full of Indians.

Soon men would bellow and die once again, shots would be fired and pans clanked. In the pandemonium, the lions would vanish into the darkness all around. And tomorrow evening he would climb into a hunting perch, forced up there by the Indians' expectations and his own emotions.

Until this was all over, he would spend his nights in the trees, beside Otombe. He could not stand it any other way.

 

I
n her nightmare, she saw her aunt's pale dress walking toward her through the darkness of the cabin, the floral pattern as oversized as on upholstery.

Frozen with fear, she lay in bed, her limbs heavy and unmoving.

Then, as the dress moved into the light of the window, four feet away, she saw it hung loose on a man's skinny body.

Dahmer took a step forward, pushing his glasses up on his nose with one finger. Good-looking and blond, his thin lips holding tight to all his secrets, he stood as close as she'd always imagined the right man might be able to do. He leaned tenderly down over her bed, bit into her cheek and began to chew.

 

In the afternoon Titus climbed a tree. Generally the gorillas stayed on the ground or on the branches only a few feet up. Like humans, they were heavy and ponderous, not aerial long-limbed monkeys meant to fly from tree to tree. The branches rustled and creaked as he pulled his four-hundred-odd pounds gingerly upward, ten feet, then twenty, his expression concentrated.

Max moved back to survey the tree. It was vaguely oak-like, the leaves cordate and serrate, intermittent clusters of small blue fruit. Thirty feet up, Titus stopped and began to pluck at something she couldn't see from down here, half of his body obscured by leaves. She couldn't tell if he were eating part of the tree—the leaves or berries.

Or perhaps some vine growing on it.

This was the only time she'd seen Titus climb a tree to eat something. The other gorillas waited patiently below, as though they'd been through this routine before. None of them made a move toward this food source he'd found. She remembered Stevens telling her that only silverbacks touched the beta-blocker vine, the vine they used as medicine.

She knuckle-walked to the trunk and looked up. If she got a large sample now, she could do a crude extract tonight. Assuming the results demonstrated enough beta-blockers—proving this was the vine—she could leave with the remaining sample tomorrow, hire a car in town, wait in the capital until a flight out was available. It would be safer there. Once home, she could work on transforming this plant into a medicine to save lives.

The first branch arched off the trunk just three feet from the ground. She put one foot on it.

“Hey,” whispered Yoko from a few feet away. “What are you doing?”

Max didn't answer. She began to climb the staircase of branches around the trunk, concentrating on the placement of her feet, the grip of her hand. She slid her dislocated arm out of the sling in order to use it, but it felt weak. Her hand didn't want to reach any higher than her shoulder and she didn't trust its grip. Within a few feet, the climbing got more difficult, the branches uneven. Her hands were too small to span the branches. She understood why humans exited the trees.

“You are a Great Ape,” she thought to herself. Changing the inflection, she repeated, “
Great
ape.”

“Pssst, Tombay,” whispered Yoko from down on the ground. “Get the fuck down here.” Uncle, the second silverback, coughed at her for talking, and she didn't say anything more.

Max held as tightly to each branch as she could, picking each step with care. In the tree, she found her boots a hindrance. In them, her feet were unable to grip the branches or feel for traction. She figured she only had to climb high enough to see what Titus was putting in his mouth. Probably twenty feet up, maybe twenty-five.

One of her feet slipped. She threw her good arm round a branch to catch her balance.

Holding tight, she kicked off her left boot and let it fall, then her right. The distance she'd climbed was all too clear from the many thuds the boots made hitting branches on the way down. Titus jerked around. He was only ten feet above her now and a few feet to the side. She sensed him staring in the direction of his family for a moment, listening intently. When nothing else happened, his head swiveled toward her.

If he wanted to, he could move through these branches much faster than she could. He could push her out of the tree, no matter how tightly she tried to hold on.

When his head turned away, she flash-glanced at him. He was looking off in the distance, chewing mechanically. She tugged off a chunk of nearby
Sphagnum
and pretended to eat it, for the slow count of thirty. Then she eased herself up onto the next branch.

She looked down. It was clear what a fall from this height would mean. Her body a fleshy water balloon.

She imagined death. It would be gray and spacious. No bodies to touch, no faces to avoid. She climbed up to the next branch.

From this angle below, Titus's hip blocked the view of whatever plant was in his hands. She was close enough now that tiny chunks of leaves and stems were pattering onto her head, too small and chewed up to tell what kind of plant they came from. With Titus, she didn't normally get closer than ten feet.

Still, he continued to eat, didn't act particularly bothered by her proximity. Perhaps, with his family at the base of the tree, further away, he had no need to act the tough guy, no need to scare anyone. Or maybe he'd just grown accustomed to her as the others had.

He glanced down at her again, yet made no aggressive motion or sound. Perhaps he was curious to see her in a tree, the way she eased herself so gingerly upward. He turned back to grab more of whatever he was eating. She could hear his lips making the rubbery slaps of a horse mouthing grass. Below him like this, it was obvious he was more than three times her size. The furry span of his rump eclipsed much of the sky.

If she did bring back the vine, it was possible she would have leverage. She could try demanding Roswell keep paying the park guards. She could work with the Rwandan government to manage the influx of people harvesting the plant. She could attempt to set some rules up.

In any case, the harvesting wouldn't continue more than a year or two. Probably.

Pulling herself up to within six feet now, she kept her weight back a bit, ready to retreat if needed. He turned toward her. She glanced. He was pursing his lips as though considering the situation. Some type of foliose lichen hung from his mouth, long strands of it, hairy and fine.

It would be easy for the chemist who analyzed this plant to have misidentified it as a vine. Not a true plant at all, lichen was a symbiosis of both fungus and algae, capable of surviving everything from extreme drought to life in the Arctic. Some specimens lived for hundreds of years in areas where no conventional plant could last an hour. Lichens were ancient and canny, could definitely have evolved a chemical that strongly affected the heart.

Four feet up and to her right, a clump of the same lichen was growing in a big pad of moss, and she reached for it. Slowly, slowly. So close to Titus—her body stretching forward into his shadow, not even a branch between them. Her hands sweaty. She could feel him watching her intently, lips still pursed, making no sound but that of his breathing. She tugged a chunk of lichen off and, in an effort to reassure him, stuffed some of it into her mouth.

Busy doing that, her left foot slipped.

For a long moment, her body twisted, her balance off, her damp fingers scrambling, unable to hold.

She began to slide.

A hand clamped down on her arm, the fingers iron strong.

Her dislocated arm. Her weight jerked the shoulder clear out of the socket again.

The pain exploded, all encompassing, a bright light in a new room she'd entered. High in the tree, she swung in his grip, bumping twice against the trunk, her breath loud as a furnace. Her tendons creaking.

In this drama
, she thought,
I am not playing the role of the good guy.

His nails up close were not animal claws at all but flat nails, with a pale rim that looked almost manicured. The width of his grip covered her forearm.

Roswell, she remembered, had never even shaken her hand.

Belatedly, she kicked her feet about for purchase, her other hand grabbed a branch. When she was standing again, Titus let go. Her arm flopped down against her side. The imprint of his five fingers remained on her skin, her arm changed.

She flash-glanced at Titus's face. His startling dark eyes, thin-lipped surprise at his own action.

Turning politely away, without any other method of communicating her thanks, she nodded once, a short but serious motion. Then, double-checking her traction at every step, one arm slack at her side, she climbed down. The pain was strobing in the periphery of her vision. She breathed through her teeth and worked on not fainting before she got out of the tree.

“What the hell were you doing?” whispered Yoko as she reached the ground. “Fuck. Your arm again? How'd you do that? Mutara is
not
going to be happy.”

Max sat down fast on the ground, leaning back against the trunk. “I'b god it,” she mumbled around the lichen in her mouth. She tried to muster up some sense of giddy discovery. She didn't look at Rafiki or Asante. She didn't glance up to where Titus sat in the tree still eating, blissfully unaware his life had changed. She didn't look at any of the gorillas she was betraying.

Her trembling hands pulled the lichen out, held it up and she said more clearly, “I've got the plant I came here for.” On the ground, she had no desire—and no words with which—to describe the moment hanging from his hand.

A laugh burst out of Yoko. “Are you kidding?” Her laugh was close to a cough, involuntary, no enjoyment in it. “That's not it. You think we could let it be that easy?”

Looking at the lichen, Max understood afresh how badly suited she was to her own species.

A
n askari tried to shake Jeremy awake in the predawn dusk. At first he thought the rough handling was the lions mauling him. Still, he tried to sleep on, so exhausted. When he finally sat up, his face felt slack as dough and a pulsing headache made him touch his fingers to his forehead. Dehydration, he thought, happened quickly here.

“Pukka sahib, hurry,” said the askari. “They pulled down a tent. The lions. Come, come. Men are inside.”

Barefoot in his bathrobe, Jeremy started running, chasing the askari between the tents. His head throbbed with each jolt of his wounded feet on the path.

From a distance the tent looked like a crumpled jacket tossed on the ground. Sprinting closer he saw the gaping rips in the fabric, the feeble movements of the men underneath, wrapped in ropes and bloody canvas. In the dirt, leading away from the tent, was the bloody trail of something dragged toward the wall of the boma. The lions were gone.

“Why has no one helped these men?” yelled Jeremy. “Get Dr. Thornton, get help.”

“He is here,” said the askari quietly and Jeremy turned around to see Alan standing a few feet back, fully dressed and methodically packing tobacco into his pipe with the ball of his thumb.

Alan said, “I assumed you would like to see the unaltered clues.” The distance in his watery eyes could be disturbing.

Later, the survivors told their story. An hour before dawn, a lion jumped onto the roof of the tent. The tent collapsed onto the sleeping men, ropes and tent poles falling. The Indians thrashed blindly around beneath the heavy canvas, seeking a way out. The lions, being cats, attacked the muffled movements, biting and clawing. The resulting screams made all the men flail harder while the snarling lions hopped from one squirming bump to another.

It took perhaps five minutes before they had sliced a hole in the canvas large enough for them to drag one of the victims away. Seven men were left behind, severely mauled.

After the survivors' stories, Jeremy summoned up an image of his Grandpapi, the way he would talk, chin jutting forward, eyes stern. Jeremy addressed the men in a carefully deep voice, ordering the bomas be thickened yet again.

Several nearby Indians turned to look at him, their faces expressionless.

After breakfast, a hundred men filed out to cut down more thorn trees for the walls. Guarded by askaris with guns, the men were divided into three different crews: one to cut the trees down, another to chop the branches off, and the last to drag the branches back to camp. Every chance the different crews got—waiting for another tree to fall or a fresh pile of branches to be cut—they squatted on their heels in the shade and stared at the ground.

Singh stood with his perfect posture beside Jeremy, his silk vest neatly buttoned in this heat.

“Singh,” he asked. “Do the men seem to be working slowly today?”

“Sahib?”

“The men, Singh. It seems to me they are working slower than a few days ago. Do they not seek to make the camp safer?”

Singh's eyes moved to the work crew, then back to Jeremy. A moment passed. His irises were such a dark brown they seemed black, designed for protection against the equatorial sun. It was at this point that Jeremy wondered if eye coloration could create subtle differences in vision. Perhaps his own pale eyes had to close down so much in this blinding light that they missed out on details the Indians could easily see. And maybe, in anything close to shade or darkness, Singh's eyes were not able to discern subtleties that jumped out to Jeremy. Perhaps during the dazzling day gazing at the stacks of railroad ties left to be laid, and during the dark night examining the jungle surrounding them, and at any time in between looking at the differences in hue between Singh's and Jeremy's skin, their two sets of eyes beheld completely different worlds.

The man replied. “They are dispirited.”

“In what way?”

“The lions, sahib. No matter what the askaris do, no matter how tall the bomas are, no matter how many trees you hunt from, the lions still get into the camp and kill.”

“They do have damnable luck.”

“That is just it, sahib. Some of the men believe the creatures have more than luck.”

“What do you mean?”

A nyika tree shrieked and fell crashing to the ground. The coolies stared at it for a moment before a jemadar yelled at them to chop it up. Several walked slowly over.

“Some of the men,” Singh said, “believe the lions are not strictly lions. These men believe no matter what we do, each night the beings will appear to take their victim, seeking to kill all those connected with the railroad.”

“Many of the men down there,” Singh continued, “the only thing they spend energy on now is prayer. Praying to be spared, or at least to be at peace with their God when it happens.”

 

Walking down the lane between the tents, Jeremy spotted an African boy with an Indian worker. This boy was perhaps seventeen and slender as a woman, dressed in a cobalt blue shirt and calf-tight Indian leggings. None of the men looked twice at the coolie and the boy walking hand in hand. Instead, they turned toward Jeremy, at his expression as he stopped dead, staring.

He made himself shut his mouth and walk on, tried to piece his normal expression back together. These days, people figured him out faster than when he was younger. His tendencies must be more transparent, betraying themselves though his gaze, through his gestures.

As recently as seven years ago, his mother had hoped his friendship with Sarah Madison might turn out to be more than it was. Of the women who used to come calling occasionally in hopes of bumping into him, Sarah was not from the wealthiest or most respected family, but she was clearly the only one he willingly took on walks. She was unfashionably wide in the waist, and he felt a sympathy for her labored breath in the cinched-tight corset, as well as for the way her eyes jumped about from some inner shame that was about more than just the width of her middle. In the interest of good manners, he never inquired into the origins of this shame. For a while he tried to believe they might marry their awkwardnesses together, decrease the pain of it all through a public pretense at pairing.

In the end, though, he had decided his mother would never be fooled. She had such sharp eyes and a clenched mouth. Since his father had left, she had always been tight as a post with vigilance. Before she entered a room, the noise of her bereavement preceded her, the black crepe rustling around her, the clinking of her jet beads. Her clothing was made of a matte darkness like the pure absence of light.

In spite of her public mourning, he knew hidden away in her desk lay the letters his father sent each year for Christmas from a different area of the world. Jeremy had discovered them when he was twelve and missing the concept of a father deeply. Each time she left the house for town or to visit a neighbor, he would systematically search her room for clues about his father until he had found this correspondence, bound unceremoniously in white twine. In three short minutes he had read through all seven of the missives, each of which contained only a few chatty sentences. The contents were what you might send a family friend or elderly neighbor, concerning the weather or a play just seen, hopes for good health to all. No word of a possible return, no address to reach him, no mention of money enclosed.

Sometimes from the tightness of her jaw and the look she turned on Jeremy—the only male of his father's issue—he thought the many years of her mourning were more than a deliberate pretense about his father's fate.

Directed at his father, it was a deep wish that the pretence come violently true.

 

At lunch, as the WaKikiyu woman bent over to put down the gazelle chops and potatoes, Jeremy blinked. With her face turned away like this, for a moment there was a resemblance to Otombe, her slender brown body, her goat-skin robe and sinewy arms. Jeremy was beginning to see him everywhere, walking away around the corner of a tent wearing a turban or glimpsed in the posture of an askari at the edge of camp scanning the forest all around.

Pouring water into his glass, she caught him staring at her. Like Singh, her eyes were a dark brown.

“Excuse me, what is your name?” he inquired.

Her expression assessed him, warily. She responded with a phrase that had several
t
's in it.

“Can you say again?” he asked and she repeated the phrase. Her name, he wondered, or was she announcing she could not understand him? She straightened up slowly, to her full height. Like so many of them, she had admirable posture, as though she were wearing a corset and had been trained in the finest of schools.

He said, “How about the name Sarah then?”

She nodded, perhaps understanding or maybe simply wanting an end to the exchange. There was the chance the nod did not signify “yes.” The Indians, he had found, signaled “yes” with a diagonal waggle of the head (to him the gesture looked more like confusion, or the way a dog angled its head from side to side to focus on a tidbit of food held in the hand).

When she walked away, her shaved scalp shone in the sun around the tiny patch of hair at the back of her skull, like a handle to hold her with.

 

While he stood by the new canal, overseeing the digging men, a lone coolie came running from the station, the tail of his oversized Indian shirt flapping behind him. Collapsing at Jeremy's feet, it took him half a minute before he was able to speak around his ragged breathing.

“Lions at the station. Three men trapped within. No gun.”

If anything, Jeremy was irritated. This was the fifth time this had happened. The men were so spooked, they made the glimpse of the tiny back of a dik-dik into a sleeping lion, or the foraging head of a gnu fifty yards away into a near-death stalking. Each incident meant he had to waste time checking out the possibility. He had tried to persuade them the lions were primarily nocturnal, that during daylight hours they were almost certainly safe. Most of the men wouldn't look him in the eye while he made these statements.

This Indian, trembling from his run, flat out refused to accompany him back to the station. Thus, Jeremy paced out the half mile on his own, carrying his rifle under his arm, thinking about how best to word his letter to Preston about the setbacks in schedule. In this heat, Jeremy could not sprint madly about, especially not the way he felt today, clammy and overheated, a tight pain pulsing in his temples. Maybe the lack of sleep was getting to him, his body having a harder time coping with its combined stresses. All day, no matter how much he drank, he had felt parched.

Thus he walked on, the rifle's safety on, his head down, until at a turn in the road, no more than a hundred yards from the station, he came upon a large pile of droppings, fresh enough that only one dung beetle had discovered it. Passing by, Jeremy surveyed it with mild interest. If it were from an oryx or bongo, he should tell Thornton, who had yet to pot one of these on his hunts. Then he noticed the dark clump of fabric sticking out, a fragment of someone's clothing.

A distinct lion print no more than a pace away.

For a single moment, he paused in his walk, one foot still dangling forward, while his eyes slid over the bushes on both sides of the road. He forced himself to walk on, trying to look natural while being silent, pulling the rifle up to the level of his chest, cradling it in both hands as he eased the safety back. His breathing so scratchy and loud.

Circling cautiously round the bend in the road, he could see the station now, the window on this side unbroken, the nearby embankment empty. As he moved up the gentle rise, an Indian's face appeared in the window. Behind the glass, his mouth began soundlessly to shout.

“Where,” Jeremy silently mouthed back, “Where?” His eyes ran along the brush all around, the leaves glittering in the sun. No wind, nothing moved. A drop of sweat rolled into his eye, making him blink. In this instant, he found what he desired most was a glass of cool water. For once, he was not thinking of how his Grandpapi would handle the situation.

Now all three men stood in the window, pointing to the left side of the station, far left corner. Their arms jabbed wildly, their mouths yelling. Flee that way, he wondered, or was that where the danger lay? There was a high ringing in his ears. Standing here, scenting the wind like an animal, he realized what Africa smelled like to him: wood smoke and raw onions, human sweat and the Indians' curries, the sun-baked earth and creosote from the railway sleepers. Such a wonderfully smelly place, he thought.

In his mind, he pictured the topology of the land around the left corner of the station. The railroad tracks ran parallel to the building, both the tracks and the station elevated on their barren manmade embankment, a few water barrels under the eaves, the forest fifty feet beyond. He prayed no spare sleepers had been offloaded from the last train, casually piled about to give the animals cover.

Readjusting his hold on the rifle, he used his shoulder to wipe his cheek free of sweat as he began to pace to the left, slowly circling the station, keeping thirty feet out from the wall. How fast could a lion charge? Would he have time to get off one shot? From the corner of his eye, he tried to suss out from the men's expressions if he were taking the correct action. Their gestures got more vehement, less clear. One man kept pointing up at the roof, another curled his fingers like claws by his face.

In this moment, easing forward, eyeing the corner, he felt so vividly the sensations of his body. The shirt rasping across his chest with each motion of his arms, the pain of the worm cuts jabbing his feet, his ribs rising and falling in the continuing work of his breath. He realized his body, which he had always disliked, was doing all it could, as well as it could. He felt terribly alive, sensitive to the slightest sensation.

He stepped around the corner. The red dust of the ground lay bare in all directions. No sleepers, no lions. He looked up on the roof. The only signs left anywhere were their prints on the ground and the sharp stink of cat piss.