Every Breath(6)

Though she’d known what Tru did for a living, Kim had assumed that when they had a child, Tru would find a job that didn’t keep him away for weeks on end. Instead, he continued to guide, Kim eventually met someone else, and their marriage came to an end less than five years after it had started. There were no hard feelings on either side; if anything, their relationship had improved since their divorce. Whenever he picked up Andrew, he and Kim would visit for a while, catching up like the old friends they were. She’d remarried and had a daughter with her second husband, Ken; on their last visit, she’d told Tru she was pregnant again. Ken worked in the finance office of Air Zimbabwe. He wore a suit to work and was home every night for dinner. That’s what Kim wanted, and Tru was happy for her.

As for Andrew…

His son was ten now, and the one great thing to come out of the marriage. As fate would have it, Tru contracted the measles when Andrew was a few months old, leaving him sterile, but he had never felt the need for another child. For him, Andrew had always been more than enough, and he was the reason Tru was detouring to Bulawayo instead of heading straight to the farm. With blond hair and brown eyes, Andrew resembled his mother, and Tru had dozens of drawings of him tacked to the walls of his shack. Over the years, he’d added photographs—on almost every visit, Kim would hand Tru an envelope filled with them—different versions of his son blending together, evolving into someone entirely new. At least once a week, Tru would sketch something he’d seen in the bush—usually an animal—but other times, he would draw the two of them, trying to capture a memory from their previous visit.

Balancing family and work had been a challenge, especially after the divorce. For six weeks, while he worked at the camp, Kim had custody and Tru would be entirely absent from his son’s life: no calls, no visits, no impromptu soccer matches or ice cream runs. Then, for two weeks, Tru would assume custody and play the role of full-time father. Andrew would stay with him in his house in Bulawayo, Tru ferrying him to and from school, packing lunches and making dinner, and helping with homework. On the weekends, they did whatever Andrew chose, and in each and every one of those moments, Tru would wonder how it was possible to love his son as deeply as he did, even if he wasn’t always around to show it.

Off to the right, he spotted a pair of circling buzzards. Searching for something left over from the hyenas last night, perhaps, or maybe looking for an animal that had died earlier in the morning. Lately, many of the animals had been struggling. The country was in the midst of yet another drought, and the watering holes in this area of the reserve had gone dry. It wasn’t surprising; not far to the west, in Botswana, lay the vast Kalahari Desert, home of the legendary San people. Their language was thought to be one of the oldest in existence, heavy on knocks and clicks, and sounded almost alien to outsiders. Despite having virtually nothing in the way of material things, they joked and laughed more than any other group of people he’d ever met, but he wondered how long they would be able to maintain their way of life. Modernity was encroaching and there were rumors that the government of Botswana was going to require that all children in the country be educated in schools, including the San. He guessed that would eventually spell the end of a culture that had existed for thousands of years.

But Africa was always changing. He’d been born in Rhodesia, a colony of the British Empire; he’d watched the country descend into civil unrest, and he had still been a teenager when the country finally split, eventually becoming the nations of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Like in South Africa—which was regarded as a pariah because of apartheid in much of the civilized world—in Zimbabwe, much of the wealth was concentrated among a tiny percentage of the population, almost all of them white. Tru doubted that would last forever, but politics and social inequality were subjects he no longer discussed with his family. They were, after all, part of that privileged group, and like all privileged groups, they believed they deserved their riches and advantages, no matter how brutally the original wealth and power might have been accrued.

Tru eventually reached the limits of the reserve and passed the first of the small villages, home to about a hundred people. Like the guide camp, the village was fenced for the safety of both the people and the animals. He reached for his thermos and took a drink, resting his elbow on the windowsill. He passed a woman on a bicycle loaded down with boxes of vegetables, then a man who was walking, most likely headed for the next village, about six miles away. Tru slowed and pulled over; the man ambled to the truck and got in. Tru spoke enough of the man’s language to keep a conversation going; in all, he was relatively fluent in six languages, two of them tribal. The other four were English, French, German, and Spanish. It was one of the qualities that made him an employee sought after by lodges.

He eventually dropped the man off and continued his drive, finally reaching a road paved in asphalt. He stopped for lunch soon after, simply pulling off the road to eat in the bed of his truck in the shade of an acacia tree. The sun was high by then and the world around him was quiet, no animals in sight.

Back on the road after lunch, he made better time. The villages eventually gave way to smaller towns, then larger ones, and late in the afternoon, he reached the outskirts of Bulawayo. He’d written Kim a letter, telling her when he’d be arriving, but mail in Zimbabwe wasn’t always predictable. Letters usually reached their destination, but timeliness wasn’t something that could be counted on.