The Lioness(23)

By the end of the first day, Juma already had taught Katie Barstow’s group dozens of small facts that she thought would stay with her forever: a hyena’s poop was white because it ate so many bones; a topi was distinguishable from other antelope in a heartbeat because the coloring on its hind legs was reminiscent of blue jeans; a zebra’s striping was as unique as a human’s fingerprints, and zebra babies could instantly recognize their mothers in the herd.

Now, at the end of the second day, they were all drinking around the fire outside the dining tent, most of them sitting in canvas camp chairs, but Juma and Charlie were standing. The two of them were drinking tonic water, but everyone else was sipping gin or hot black coffee. There was a surprising chill in the air, and Margie finally decided she was just cold enough that she climbed from her seat and plopped herself into Billy’s lap, curling up against him for warmth like a small child. The stars stretched forever here, a quilt that spread beyond the horizon and offered a zodiac one constellation at a time. Each star was a bright pinprick, and Margie imagined little astronomy projects she would find in magazines that she would share with her child someday: black construction paper and colored chalk, using nail scissors to punch holes in the firmament, a bedroom light without a shade providing for her child the light of the cosmos.

Billy wrapped his arms around her. “Your fingers are like ice,” he observed and kissed her neck. She rapped his chest with one little fist because he had given her the chills on purpose. He did it all the time. He thought it was funny: he’d told her that he’d never met a person who got goosebumps as quickly.

“Soon you will be too big for Billy’s lap,” said Katie. “You’ll be a big, beautiful, pregnant whale.”

“Nope. She’ll still climb into my lap whenever she pleases,” Billy told his sister.

“Yes,” said Margie. “I will.” But she wasn’t nearly as confident as she sounded. Once Billy had made a joke about his first wife and how plump she had grown when she had been carrying their son. He hadn’t meant anything by it, but the remark had stayed with her.

“Tomorrow we want a leopard,” Charlie told them all. “I feel…leopardy.”

“Whenever bwana feels leopardy, watch out,” Juma said, chuckling.

“Is it because we’ll actually see one or because bwana will take us on a wild goose chase that will leave us all exhausted and cranky, but we won’t get anywhere near one?” Margie asked. Billy rocked her a little bit. She snuggled deeper against him.

“We’ll see one,” said Juma. “I thank Jesus none of you wants to shoot one—”

“This week!” said Peter Merrick, who Margie supposed wanted very much to kill one when he was alone with Charlie next week, after the other Americans had returned to the United States.

“Yes, this week. When bwana feels leopardy, he means it. Ten years ago, he felt so leopardy he nearly got us both eaten by an especially smart cat.”

“Oh?”

Everyone looked back and forth between the hunter and the old guide who had been with him for so many years in one capacity or another. Charlie said nothing for a moment, staring skyward at the great star-speckled quilt above them. Finally, he offered a few details, careful to protect the anonymity of his client. The gist of the story was pretty simple: a guest from the American South had wounded a buffalo, angering it and sending the injured animal into the brush beside a kopje with trees growing up and over the boulders. Charlie had murmured that he felt leopardy, but so far they had seen no sign of the big yellow animal with rosettes, and so Charlie and Juma began creeping on their stomachs toward where they thought the buffalo might be stewing. Sure enough, the damn thing charged and charged fast. A buffalo’s head is virtually bulletproof, and its horn will poke a hole through a man that’s as thick as a rolling pin. You have to aim for the nostril if it’s racing toward you at thirty or thirty-five miles an hour and hope to obliterate the brain. But Charlie did precisely that, and Juma exhaled. Unfortunately, no sooner had Charlie accomplished that monumental bit of marksmanship, dropping a justifiably ornery buffalo in its tracks, than a leopard bounded from the branch of a tree and was about to leap on the hunter. Juma didn’t have time to raise and aim his own rifle, so he swung it like a club, stunning the animal in midair.

“Then did you shoot it?” Margie asked. She hoped not. The whole story and the idea that Charlie Patton and Peter Merrick were going to spend the next week slaughtering things disgusted her.

“No. Didn’t have to,” said Charlie. “The cat turned and ran off.”

“But when Charlie says he feels leopardy, stay in the Land Rover. Stay in your tents,” Juma added.

“It’s a violent world,” murmured David Hill, and Margie couldn’t help but wonder if her husband’s childhood pal was thinking of things his father had done or alluded to at one point or another. Billy had told her two or three stories that David had shared with him that had left her shaking her head. MK-ULTRA. That was the name of the CIA task force he worked for, and she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. David didn’t know quite what it was—he’d just overheard his father use the term on the telephone—and so Billy didn’t either. But one time when David was in his mid-twenties, he was making his father a drink while visiting his family in Washington, and he’d dropped the cap to the whiskey bottle behind his parents’ bar. It was during the period when his aimlessness was a source of frustration to his mother and father because he had no idea what to do with a degree in art history, since he had no desire to teach. He’d had to climb behind the bar to retrieve the cap, and there—in addition to the bottle top—he’d found the carbon copy of a phone message from Frank Olson. He was calling from the Statler Hotel in New York City. Olson was some kind of CIA spook who worked with David’s father, David had told Billy, and he’d killed himself by diving from his hotel room on the tenth floor. What so disturbed David was that the message, taken by his father’s secretary, made it clear that Olson had been calling over and over for two days—the two days before he’d fall one-hundred-plus feet to his death on a Manhattan sidewalk. And then there was that Ken Kesey strangeness, and that was well before Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Something about the CIA and LSD. David only revealed these stories to Billy when the two of them were drinking, and Billy only shared them with her when he was feeling wistful after sex. It was pretty damn peculiar pillow talk, but she knew Billy’s anxieties as well as anyone. At least she hoped she did.