The Lioness(37)

Casually, she took off the scarf that she had tied around her neck, the scarf that had seemed to begin each day in Africa there but by lunchtime was covering her hair and her ears against the dust and the sun. She was holding it in her hands, stretching it out. It was yellow, just like the one that Joseph Cotten had used to strangle Marilyn Monroe in Niagara.

He wanted to press her, but he was trembling and he was afraid to draw further attention to her or to Reggie. Because now he knew. He knew. And he didn’t know which scared him more: the idea of his wife and this PR flak doing something dangerous or, like him, doing nothing at all.



* * *



.?.?.

And yet, just yesterday, neither his wife nor Reggie Stout thought he was such a pitiful child. God, along with Charlie Patton, Peter Merrick, and Reggie Stout, he and Carmen had had a rather good time. The five of them were sitting on two big blankets eating lunch: Coca-Cola and sandwiches made from cheese and leftover gazelle from last night. It was before they raced to the Mara River like Indy car drivers to see the great crossing. He had been thrilled by the company, because it was another chance to bond with Merrick and show the agent that he was (or could be) a force in his own right. He wouldn’t drop his father’s name (he wouldn’t drop any names) the way he had during their first breakfast in Nairobi, and he would play entirely by the rules of etiquette that seemed to apply here on safari: you didn’t try and leverage who the hell you were professionally in real life (because, except for Patton, this sure as hell wasn’t real life), but instead shared the details of your life that were genuine and personal—that is, if you spoke at all of your life back in America. Mostly you focused on the way the sight of a rhino in the wild changed you. Because it did.

And, suddenly, he wasn’t thinking about what he could say that would make him sound smart, or whether he needed to jump in so he wasn’t forgotten in the conversation. Charlie Patton was talking about elephants.

“There really is such a thing as an elephant nursery,” he was saying. “An old girl, not likely the mom but maybe the grandmom, keeping an eye on a bunch of the young ones. I always enjoyed it when I stumbled upon an elephant nursery.”

“And yet you never had children yourself,” Carmen said.

“Never even married,” he replied, and Felix thought for a second that Charlie was going to say more, perhaps file this reality under regrets. But he didn’t, instead continuing as if he had never paused. “I also love it when I come across some new mother trumpeting the birth of her son—or daughter. Elephants are smart: they love daughters, too. They’d like your Betty Friedan.”

“And yet you hunt them,” Carmen reminded him. It was an observation, but there was a hint of judgment in the tone. “And you will too, Peter, next week.”

“Honestly? It was usually the old men I was collecting,” Charlie said. “The ones who’d been kicked from the herd or had chosen to leave because, well, it was just their time. Their backs are moss, their ears are rags. Their tusks are broken, but still, it seems, too damn heavy for them to manage. You can tell from their tracks that they’re dragging their feet because it hurts like hell just to walk.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound very sporting,” Peter said. “It’s never a fair fight because we have the guns. But shooting an old codger like that? I don’t know…”

“You want a raging bull, do you?” Charlie asked the agent. “We can do that, too. But my days of wanting to take down some elephant in the prime of his life? They’re over. I cried the first time I collected one like that. I got a little teary two years ago when I finished off what I supposed was my last one. And I only shot him because…never mind.”

“Because your guest dropped his gun and ran,” said Carmen.

After a long pause, the hunter confessed, “No. But he wasn’t squeezing the trigger, either.”

Felix looked at Peter, wondering how the agent would respond to the idea that another guest had frozen. Finally, Peter said, “An old dog can break my heart. The white whiskers, the milky eyes. The weak back legs. The only time I saw my father cry was when a dog of ours died. The dog was so old he could barely walk, and so my dad used to pick him up and carry him outside so he could do his business. And he was a black lab, and so even at the end he probably weighed sixty or seventy pounds. He was deaf, he was blind. An old elephant must be even worse. Sadder.”

“I agree. But why do you think that is?” Reggie asked, not directing his question at anyone in particular. “Because it’s so smart?”

“Perhaps,” said Peter. But then everyone turned toward Charlie Patton and waited like schoolchildren for him to weigh in.

“First of all, it is smart. But that’s not what I was getting at. It’s because if you don’t kill it, eventually it’s going to die alone and be eaten,” Charlie told them. “And, most likely, eaten alive. That’s certainly the case with old lions. When I took an old lion, I was saving it from that sort of fate.”

“Hyenas?” Felix asked.

“Precisely. I remember one old fellow who had once been very regal. You could tell. Earned his crown. But those days were behind him. Long kicked from the pride by a younger, tougher male. Still had a gorgeous mane, but he was all ribs and you could see the scars on his hide. A road map. His roar was more of a cough, and he had a hobble to his gait that was painful to watch. For all I know, he had a broken bone in a foot or one of his rear legs. And, yes, the hyenas were circling.”