The Lioness(41)

“I’ll handle it,” he told her. “I’ll also retrieve a few things. Why don’t you get out of the sun?” He pointed toward the branches on the side of the acacia farthest from the vehicle.

“Which way should we go?”

Again, he glanced up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen. Nothing but the cerulean heavens that marked this part of the world when it wasn’t raining. There seemed no in-between. There were either torrential rains and gunmetal skies, or there was a blue so vibrant it belonged in a stone on a ring.

“West,” he decided.

“Because we might find some Maasai?”

“That would be great. I honestly don’t know what we’ll find, but I think it’s the fastest way to civilization.”

“Okay.”

She walked toward the shade, almost stumbling once, and waited there, a solitary woman who looked like she had but one eye and a gash across her forehead—a woman who, just hours, ago, had been a movie star.



* * *



.?.?.

When Reggie Stout had returned to America after the war, there was no Mattachine Society. Not yet. He heard rumors of groups calling themselves Bachelors Anonymous or the Androgynes. He knew that men sometimes met near the water in Westlake Park (and he knew where), and he knew of at least two bars in West Hollywood, one off of Sunset and one on Hacienda, where discretion was a little less necessary because everyone understood they were safe spaces for men of a certain (and here was a word that was supposed to show empathy and psychological understanding, but just made him cringe) proclivity.

For two years he saw (“dated” suggested too public a relationship) an actor his firm represented, but in 1953 the fellow married. The man continued to want to see him, but Reggie wanted nothing to do with married men: it wasn’t fair to their wives, it wasn’t fair to them, and it sure as hell wasn’t fair to himself. There were the pool parties, but from the very beginning he felt too old. He wasn’t, not in chronological years, but he had just seen too much in the Pacific. He didn’t want to sit in his swimsuit on a diving board with actors or insurance agents or doctors who had no idea what it was like to watch whole rows of men collapsing—arms akimbo, blood spraying from them like water from a wet dog—when machine guns opened up in caves you didn’t even know existed.

Then, until 1960, he had an on-again, off-again thing with another veteran, a fellow his age named Luke (and he liked to be called Luke, even though he was born Lucas, because his father was a Baptist minister) who had been with the 101st Airborne. He’d dropped over Normandy, he’d dropped in Market Garden, and he’d survived both battles without a scratch. It was while being trucked into Bastogne just before Christmas that he was machine-gunned in the legs. Both legs. Right thigh, left shin. Right femur, left fibula. He was in the makeshift hospital that was shelled on Christmas Eve and was one of the few G.I.s who survived. He came home and worked himself back to the point that his limp was barely noticeable, and, through his uncle, got a job with E. F. Hutton as a stockbroker. They might still have existed in that liminal world between friends and lovers, but on the sixteenth anniversary of the hospital shelling, Christmas Eve, 1960, alone in his apartment, he took a Colt .45-caliber and shot himself dead. Reggie was the one who found the body, when Luke didn’t answer his phone that night or again on Christmas Day. The stockbroker’s family never asked Reggie why he had called the apartment superintendent and convinced the man that they had to open the door. Even Luke’s father, the Baptist minister, never pressed.

Since then, Reggie had lived a rather monastic life. Rather. Not total. But monasticism seemed about right when he thought about the last time he saw Luke. His friend had cut short their lunch on December 21, because, he had said, he had some last-minute shopping to do for his niece and his nephew, and he wanted to get to the toy store and then clean up some trades at the office. He hadn’t struck Reggie as depressed. Melancholic, yes. But they were both melancholy around the holidays. They had never spent Christmas Eve or Christmas Day together, but they always spoke on one day or the other. When Luke hadn’t answered his phone or called him by lunchtime on Christmas Day, that sixth sense that Reggie was convinced sometimes separated the living soldiers from the dead kicked in. He intuited that something was wrong, and so he went to Luke’s apartment and, with the super, found the body dead in the bed. It said something about his life, Reggie thought as he stared at the corpse while the super called the police, that the sight of a gunshot suicide was far from the worst thing he had ever seen.

No one ever suspected that Reggie killed the stockbroker, but the first cops on the scene and one of the beat reporters clearly believed that Reggie had called the super because of his (and here was that awful word again) proclivities. Reggie’s name appeared in a few of the newspaper stories, and that fueled speculation and innuendo about what sort of relationship he might have had with the man. But the world continued to spin, and Reggie understood there were enough people in Hollywood like him, women as well as men, that it didn’t derail his career. Besides, the industry appreciated him as a human being, and he was good at what he did. And, yes, he had survived Okinawa. If you walked away from that island, people were always going to cut you some slack.



* * *



.?.?.

There were four canteens full of water in the Land Rover, and he carried them all to the shade of the acacia. He had to crawl over the corpses of the three dead men to retrieve them, getting still more of their blood on his hands and his clothes, aware always of how solid were some parts of the human body and how gelatinous were others. But water was essential, and these were not the first corpses he had navigated in his life.