The Lioness(16)

But once again that past August, Felix had fortified himself with bourbon before meeting his in-laws for dinner their first night in California, and by the time they’d all finished their appetizers, her parents were exchanging glances or her father was sitting back against the leather booth, his arms folded across his chest, and staring over Felix’s shoulder at the fish in the restaurant’s aquarium. Felix just couldn’t stop pretending he was the Crown Prince of Hollywood because his father was an A-list director and he himself had a few screenplay credits. By dessert, Felix was getting the rapier-like slice of the Richard Tedesco side-eye.

She wanted to tell Felix, this isn’t who you are. This isn’t the man I married. This isn’t how you are when we’re alone, and this isn’t the man I love.

And so when they said good night to their parents and sent them off to the hotel, when it was just the two of them in their jazzy little Thunderbird (a wedding gift from Felix’s parents), she started to tell him all that. But he was morose and drunk and she wanted him to focus on the road, especially when she thought of how his poor sister had died. And so she said nothing, and an idea came to her and it gave her pause: what if this is the man that I married?



* * *



.?.?.

And now these white men with their Russian accents were telling her to get up off the ground, this dry Serengeti soil, barking their orders. They were commanding her and Reggie and Felix to stand up. She looked at her husband and the tawny dust that his tears had glued to his face, and how he wasn’t moving.

“Get up!” one of the men hollered at him, kicking him in the ribs with his foot, the sound of his boot against Felix’s side reminiscent of the thud of her mother’s mallet on chuck steak on the cutting board. (What women’s magazine recipe was that? The one with the dry onion soup mix? That revolting powder that came in the packet?)

Instead, Felix curled up into a ball, but Reggie took him by his arm and whispered urgently into his ear, “You’re going to stand up and I’m going to be right beside you. You’re okay, Felix, and Carmen’s okay.” Then, with a strength that Carmen had always suspected Reggie had but had never seen, he practically lifted her husband to his feet.

Felix glanced at her furtively, ashamed, but Carmen was ashamed, too. She was mortified that she had seen so deep into her husband’s soul—it was pornographic—and she was almost as disgusted by her reaction as she was by his.

“This way, move, now,” the fellow was telling them, and he started to march them toward the second of the two Land Rovers.

“Carmen, I’m sorry,” he sniffled. “I’m sorry.” His apology only annoyed her further. He sounded like a little boy.

“No,” she told him, feeling more like his mother than his wife. “You’re right to be scared. We should be. But…”

He wiped at his eyes with his fists.

“But we’ll be fine,” she told him. She wasn’t so sure about their African porters and Muema, the lone surviving guide, and she wasn’t even so sure about Charlie Patton. But the white people from California? She had the sense this was all about them, and they were far more valuable alive than they would be dead.





CHAPTER SEVEN


    Terrance Dutton





Terrance Dutton was among those spotted in Washington, D.C., last month, listening to the Rev. Dr. King, Jr., Mrs. Medgar Evers, and other speakers. The actor has always been a little “outspoken” when it comes to the changing politics of America, and most people in Hollywood know that to work with the Negro actor means playing as much by his rules as theirs.

—The Hollywood Reporter, September 15, 1963



They changed the tire and they left the camp.

The fellow who was driving didn’t look like the plantation scions who wanted to make sure that Terrance and his family never “forgot who they were” (the words of one elderly descendant of a local general from the Lost Cause), other than the fact he was white. He was too solid and boxy to be the sort of southern white boy who drank booze with sprigs of mint in a highball glass, and he lacked those eyes that could transform in a blink from condescending but kind to acid if a Black man said the wrong thing. He was muscular and, it seemed, a little battle-scarred himself. He exuded weariness—maybe a war, Terrance surmised, but maybe a lifetime of petty degradations he himself had endured in one communist country or another—and the little hair he had on his head was as short as two-day-old beard stubble. Meanwhile, his partner, the one in the last row of seats in the Land Rover with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol aimed at the back of their heads, seemed rather self-satisfied. Pleased with how things were turning out. Both of their captors spoke English, but Terrance couldn’t decide how fluent they really were. Terrance wasn’t positive, but he suspected that the rifle might have been one of Charlie Patton’s weapons.

The Land Rover had three rows of bucket seats and a solid row in the back. The driver was alone in the first row. Billy and Margie Stepanov were in the second. Their guard was in the fourth. And he and David and Katie were wedged together in the third, though Katie was more in her husband’s lap than in the bucket seat.

The camp was growing small in the distance as they bounced along the savanna, and Terrance was feeling more anger than fear. Yes, there was the helplessness of having to accept treatment like this because these two men had guns and they didn’t, and, yes, there was the unmistakable reality that these bastards were part of a group that had coolly shot an unarmed grandfather and two rangers—one who had his rifle out and was going to try to protect the Americans, but one who had simply failed to drop his gun quickly enough. Terrance was frightened, readily he could admit that to himself. But he was also furious. How the fuck had he escaped the humiliations great and small that dogged a Black man in huge chunks of America, only to wind up with two white guys holding him at gunpoint in Africa? Was there no place on the planet where he wouldn’t have to calculate whether a slight was worth a response or whether he should let the indignity breeze past him? Was there no place in the world where he wasn’t going to—in this case, quite literally—have to fight to survive?