The Lioness(22)
Billy was a shrink and had said, half joshing but half serious, that children had formative experiences in the womb and the kid—their kid—would benefit from the Serengeti. He or she would absorb all the happy chemicals that Mom was creating as she communed with lions and elephants and giraffes.
Well, that supposed it was a joyful excursion. If Billy was right, she shuddered when she thought of what she was doing to the kid now.
She was in the Land Rover with the rear and side windows that had been shattered, and a new tire pressed into service to replace the one that had been shot. But they hadn’t been allowed to wipe the glass shards off the seats, and though she didn’t think her ass was bleeding badly, she could feel the way at least some of the shards had cut through her khakis and sliced into her skin. Billy had managed to staunch the bleeding where pulverized slivers of glass had shredded a part of her shirt and gashed her stomach, but it wasn’t as if he had sealed the wound with gauze and an antiseptic: he’d poured some canteen water on the cut as the Land Rover sped away and then pressed a bandanna firmly against the laceration until the bleeding stopped. It started again when he removed it, though he pulled it away from the skin as gently as he could, as if her stomach were an unopened Christmas present and he didn’t want to tear the wrapping paper. But she thought it was starting to scab over now. Still, she was afraid the cut would only get worse. She feared an infection, either from the broken glass or the bandanna or even the tepid canteen water.
There were also bugs trapped inside the vehicle with them because they weren’t allowed to open the roof, and the insects were too damn stupid to find their way to an open window or through the broken glass. One moment, they would be flying into the windshield, trying to escape, and the next they would be landing on the humans’ arms or getting caught in their hair. She tried to shoo some of them through the shattered window beside her, but she dinged her fingers when she tried and the last thing she needed was yet another cut.
They could no longer see the other Land Rover that had left with them because the two vehicles had spread out in different directions. But she was pretty sure that she had only witnessed Felix, Carmen, and Reggie being shoved into it before they had left the camp. She was not 100 percent certain because it had all happened so fast and she had just seen Juma and the rangers shot dead, and then she was sobbing in a way that she never before had in her life. But in this vehicle, she could account for Billy (thank God) and Katie and David and Terrance.
It crossed her mind that it was the agent who was missing. Merrick. Peter Merrick. So was Charlie Patton. Or at least she had no idea where he was either. The last she could recall, the two older men had been laughing together over breakfast in the dining tent. Patton had just taught the agent an expression, and the two of them had shared it with her as she passed them on her way to see the giraffes at the watering hole.
Still drinking their booze.
Something like that.
Or, in the past tense, if you were back in Arusha or Nairobi. Still drank their booze.
It was the way a guide hunter would describe a safari that had all gone to shit because the clients were cowardly or stupid or cruel—because they snapped at each other or the woman tried sleeping with the hunter or the man was spooked by a buffalo or asked the hunter to bag his rhino for him—but it was part of the code that you never spoke ill of the people who were paying you well to find them their trophies. And so, if the safari had become one long annoyance, a hunter, when asked about it, would nod and murmur, “Still drinking their booze.”
And that was it. Hemingway, according to Patton, had co-opted the expression in a short story, and some of the hunters who read it had thought it was a betrayal—as if Hemingway had shared a secret code with the world.
Up until that moment in the breakfast tent, Margie supposed, no one in this group had been cowardly or stupid or cruel. But, of course, this was just a photo safari. So no one was ever leaving their Land Rovers when they spotted animals. No one was trying to “collect” (and that was the euphemism that Charlie and Peter seemed to use instead of “kill” or “shoot” or “slaughter”) a lion or leopard or buffalo.
And she rather doubted that Katie Barstow or Carmen Tedesco had tried to seduce Charlie Patton.
But then it dawned on her. The reason that Peter Merrick and Charlie Patton were laughing about such things was because Merrick was staying an extra week and Patton was taking him hunting in another section of Tanzania. Merrick knew at least something about guns. Maybe the two of them weren’t in either Land Rover because they were hatching some sort of scheme to rescue the rest of the group.
No. That wasn’t happening. She was trying to think like a screenwriter, and this wasn’t a movie and those two older men weren’t going to save them: this was real life and if Peter or Charlie weren’t in one of the Land Rovers, it was probably because they were dead. That was the difference between a horror film and a real horror. No one was going to appear suddenly on the horizon—the cavalry coming over the hill—and rescue them.
* * *
.?.?.
Juma’s patience was endless, Margie decided, a guide whose affection for the natural world never waned, no matter how many times he was out here in the Serengeti. And, clearly, he had been out here a lot, once upon a time as a cook boy, then a porter, a gun bearer, a head man, and now the chief guide for Charlie Patton, whose company these days brought far more Westerners to see the animals than to shoot them. He loved to speak of his grandchildren, whom he had taken on photo safaris since the creation of the reserve, sometimes having them travel in groups of two or three on the vacant seats of the puddle jumpers that flew from Arusha to the grass strip near Wasso.