“Can we stop here?” Roberta leans in from the back seat, hooch thick on her breath. “I’m hungry. Please?”
It’s one o’clock. Without exchanging a word, they’ve driven deep into the park and well away from the river. The roads here are bumpy and overgrown. The trees are dead and bare. The only sign of life is a trampled lane of earth that stretches into the distance. They call these hippo highways, another safari catchphrase. At night, after a long, hot day pressed against each other in the water, hippos strike out to feed. They go one by one into the dark, each of them using the exact same route, not erring an inch. Over time, they stamp grooves into the earth. They excavate gorges. Abandoned highways become flash-flood conduits in high rains and can even redirect rivers.
“It’s romantic, don’t you think?” She’s crouched in the middle of the highway, a sandwich in her hand. Today, she’s wearing a long, black dress and gray hooded sweatshirt, just the kind of ridiculously inappropriate attire someone like her would bring on safari. “I mean, they feed alone, right? But they’re never far from their community. Or the impression of it anyway. Don’t you think that’s romantic?”
Slouched on the hood of the vehicle, Gordon tilts his head and blinks at her. “Don’t I think?”
“Yeah. Don’t you? Even the outcasts use these passages to find their graves. It’s beautiful.”
This swell of friendliness, this probing for conversation, for depth — obviously she’s drunk. Two days of hard drinking, maybe more. Woozy in the sun. No food. Hardly any water. Drunk for sure, and innocent like a child.
Gordon bites his cheeks, trying not smile. He slides off the hood of the vehicle and plods toward her, hands sweating in the pockets of his shorts. “Just imagine it. Pitch black. Sometimes there are stars, billions of them. But when it rains, there’s nothing. Only darkness. And then there’s two tons of mammal, amazingly soft footed as it slips into the night, so devoted to its course it wears away the very earth beneath it.”
Roberta stands up, dress rippling in the warm breeze. “I think we should stay here for a while. Just soak it up. Maybe have a few drinks and eat some more of those sandwiches.”
He closes his eyes, recollects the sight of her yesterday, hunched for a photo, wind rustling through her clothes. Then this morning, her back glistening between the rocks. He won’t tell her he hates drinking, because this won’t be a normal drunk.
So Gordon unloads the Cruiser and sets up a day camp on the hippo highway. He arranges two folding chairs under a parasol. The water in the coolers is warm, but there’s nothing he can do about that. At least she likes the sandwiches, lunch meat and cucumbers, slices of tomato. By the time he’s massaging suntan lotion into her freckled shoulders, it’s like everything has been renewed, everything refreshed, their shadows stretching up the highway and merging in the distance.
“It’s not like I never knew,” Roberta’s saying, a bottle of whiskey between her open legs, the hem of her dress bunched up at her thighs. “I knew the first time he did it. I smelled it. A hotel in Bangkok. He went for takeout and came back two hours later smelling like lavender.”
Gordon can’t keep up with her on the hooch. His gag reflex lurches with every slug. He craves a cigarette, pictures for a moment his old man leaning against a fencepost back in Zim, smoke between his teeth and grasping a bottle of spirits by the neck. You don’t run away, Gordo. You run toward. And sometimes, when you’re ready, you run back.
“He only did it when we travelled,” Roberta says. “I never caught any signs of it at home. Home was real life. We went to work. Our friends came over. My mother visited. But travel was vacation, right? So he went on vacation. In every sense.”
“Maybe we should go for a walk, yeah? I’ve got a pack. We can put some water in there. I’ll bring a tent. We can follow the highway a bit, you know? If it gets dark, we’ll make camp and listen to the night. I’ve even got a spotlight.”
Roberta claps and laughs happily. “I left him at the bus station in Lusaka,” she says, standing up, swaying. “Said I had to go to the washroom.”
“I thought you left him in the hotel.”
“I left him everywhere. He’s an asshole.”
He can no longer picture her forcing her way through a market, imposing herself on chaos. Now he sees her huddled in the crowd, nervous, fearful, camera in her backpack, hidden from robbers. The sun dives toward the horizon, sending up bursts of red and orange. She reaches out, finds his hand, and holds it in her sweaty palm. They walk a while in silence.
“And your story? What’s the drama behind the bushman?”
Not too far ahead of them, a herd of buffalo moves across the land, tails swinging in the gathering sunset. Gordon squints and shields his brow. “Typical white African sob story. Family kicked off our farm in Zim, moved to Zambia to start over. Every ’oke in Lusaka’s got that story, though. Nothing special about it.”
“I’m sorry.” She squeezes his hand. “I bet you’d love to go back.”
Gordon returns the squeeze. “Would you like to camp right here? I don’t reckon we’ll make it to the vehicle before dark now. Best to get a fire started and hunker down.”
She passes him the bottle. “Better still to have a drink first.”
“Look,” he says, pointing at the buffalo. “They’re headed for water.”
He could tell the boys all about her. Could tell them anything he wants, really. It doesn’t even matter if he screws her in his tent. The next time he bumps into Lenny, Gordon can spin whatever lie he chooses, can say he ploughed her on the hood of the Land Cruiser while the sun went down. Sweeten it with a round of drinks.
But they’d see through him. They’re always on the lookout for guff, those guys. Everyone’s so steeped in suspicion and anger. They’ll latch onto the slightest irregularity, the smallest wrinkle. Then they’ll pull the whole thing apart and he’ll be left to muscle through the impossible force of their scorn.
But as Gordon sets up camp, the god of safari sex adventures answers his prayers: a lion roars. The buffalo are being hunted, closing ranks around their calves and keening nervously. He leaves off the tent poles and turns to Roberta. She’ll be trembling, shoulders up, back stiff. Everyone does that first time they hear a lion. Unfiltered by television, the sound’s unearthly. It’s demonic. He’s seen grown men literally shit themselves two hundred metres from a purring female. Roberta will melt, her tiny lips trembling. He’ll have to comfort her, to coax her into the tent, away from the cruelty of the wild. Into his arms.
Except, bathed in the red light of the setting sun, her face flushes with excitement. She sucks off her bottle and sets it on the ground. She rubs her hands together and reaches for the bottle again, but then lets it go. Every inch of her body language points to the herd, her shoulders and neck and head, as if she were about to sprint out there and join in the kill. “Oh my god.” She giggles, claps her hands again, smooths her dress over her thighs. “I’ve always wanted to see something like this.”
Gordon returns to the tent, hurriedly snapping the poles together. “No,” he says, shaking his head sadly. “No, this kind of thing is really ugly. You don’t want to see this kind of thing. Trust me.”
She waves him off, absently, without looking, as if he were a scolding parent.
The buffalo form a defensive line against six or seven circling lions. They canter in panicky ovals, trying to block access to their calf, to its spindly, failing legs, to its ample flank. Lions lunge between the hoofs of the older buffalo, swiping at the calf, dodging stabbing blows from the horns of its elders. A young male with a scruffy mane sinks his claws into the rump of the calf, knocking it over, dust exploding around them. Roberta claps like she’s at a sporting event. But the adult buffalo swing their heads and dislodge the cat. As a group, they break into a gallop, the calf bandied between their huge bodies, but gradually slipping away, not fast enough to keep up. T
railing behind the herd, it’s easy prey, a black lump in a surge of red, sun-stroked dust. Gordon winces as it’s tackled again.
Ordinarily, this would be it. This would be death. The lamenting adults would gallop away, their hooves pounding the earth. From a safe distance, they’d watch the exhausted lions shred their child. Then they’d wander off into the cooling night, one legacy less.
But there are sometimes surprises. Two adults double back for the calf, one of them goring a lioness with its horn, lifting the cat into the air and tossing it aside like taxidermy. The other one stumbles over the young buffalo, crashing into the land and making a natural barrier with its body. Instinctively, the calf accepts this sacrifice, bounding to its feet and galloping for the herd, the fastest it’s moved in its short life.
The fallen buffalo struggles to stand up. Lions pounce on it. They cling to its flanks. Tear at its back and hang from its throat. They slap and swipe with their claws. They snap their jaws, ripping away clumps of furry flesh. Even from a distance, Gordon can see the dull resignation in the buffalo’s dark eyes. He imagines a legion of flies buzzing round its carcass. Ribcage blanching in the sun.
“This is so beautiful,” Roberta says, camera in hand. “Nature. With the sunset and everything.”
Throughout the night, after the lions have had their fill, hyenas chuckle circles around the body. The campfire crackles, spitting sparks at the stars. Gordon squats in front of the fire, prodding the coals with a stick.
“Are you thinking about your home? I can tell, you know.”
She stands on the edge of dancing shadows, naked, her body pale and shapeless, hair hanging in her face, and a dark patch around her crotch. Gordon turns away, stares into the fire.
“No. Just thinking about what we can do tomorrow. Now that you’ve seen it all.”
“Right. Sure.” She walks over and puts a hand on his shoulder, grip assessing, grip appreciative. He knows he will have sex with her. She tugs, pulling him toward the tent. “I guess you can always think of it this way: it was never really your home, right? It was always someone else’s. And they’re the ones who came back.”
She releases him. A moment later, he hears the tent flap unzip, hears her body rustle around inside. Gordon spits in the fire. His footsteps fall quietly and he closes the tent behind him.
III.
It’s cool in the morning, one of those late-season days when you can smell the coming rain. He’d driven them deep into the park and it takes an hour just to get back to the smoother roads. There are problems with what he’s done. Logistical mostly. There are records that she commissioned him. And people saw them together. The wardens at the park gate will wonder where she is when he exits.
But it’s not like he killed her. She’s probably asleep right now, dreaming through a hangover. She’ll be grateful for the water and sandwiches he left behind. She’ll get to watch vultures picking at the buffalo. And if she’s smart, she can follow the hippo highway to water.
Behind Both Sides of a Door
I.
The hotel room door was closed, and inside he swept his shirt over his shoulders, shivering as the ceiling fan puffed against his sweating back. He was late with his research, late with his reports, but it wasn’t his fault, and frankly, at least at the moment, he barely cared. He was too distracted by that smell, that angry, prickling pong. Was it the wig-wearing maid named Blessing or Charity or some such garishly Christian thing, her smooth black arms taut across her chest and glossy with light refracted through the room’s worn red curtains? Or was it his own body, broiled by three idle days of West African sunshine, liquored and anxious and salty? Or maybe it was something from his past, the smell as years before and an ocean away, when his parents were putting an addition on the house, and Wallace, leaning out the window of the bedroom he shared with his brother, pointed an air rifle at the big-boned girl who lifeguarded the public pool up the street, dressed in her scarlet one-piece and short-shorts and riding her bicycle in circles around the school parking lot across the road, and he shot her in the face, once, knocked her over, and the bike clattered off the pavement as he ducked beneath the windowsill, smelling exactly as he did right then in the hotel room with the door closed and the curtains drawn and the maid inches from his tingling fingers.
Outside, the hallway was semi-covered, crumbling cement arches leading into a bright courtyard, the paving stones long since turned to sand and any vegetation trampled by the dozens of pairs of tiny male feet stamping and slashing and sliding after a soccer ball, every morning and afternoon just like this one, while at the bottom of a hill that spills from the edge of the courtyard, their sisters and mothers waded into a palm-surrounded stream bed. Occasionally the ball, with a resounding thump, would go sailing out of bounds, arching down toward the stream and crashing into one of the wide and glittering steel bowls the women carried on their heads. The children would shriek, and this would get a laugh from hotel staff who leaned against the stout, grey walls enclosing the pitch.
Now a young man strode through this daily scene with sharp pleats in his neat, black pants and the sun twinkling off the lenses of his dark glasses as he thumbed messages into his cellphone and dabbed a square of cloth against his perspiring brow, seeming to annex the very ground with every confident, well-heeled footfall on his way to Wallace’s hotel room door.
“You give me something small,” said the maid, her voice unsure, striving to be bold, so that Wallace, retrieving his pants from his ankles, found her easy to ignore, was instead held rapt by the lingering smell and the memory of peeking over the windowsill, the air rifle mute on the carpet at his knees, and his brother down there in the parking lot, standing over the lifeguard, a beach towel slung over his bare shoulder, one athletic arm reaching down to her, and the way she shot to her feet and slapped his arm away, tears and blood and gravel pressed into the skin of her neck, her breasts jiggling as she struggled back onto her bicycle and rode away, ears buried in her shoulders. His brother had known, hadn’t he? That Wallace fired the shot? His brother had pursed his lips at the small, fierce hole in the lifeguard’s cheek, had arched his eyebrow at the sight of the rifle — the secret rifle! — on the floor beneath the windowsill in the bedroom, had banged angrily at the bathroom door while Wallace hid himself in the steam of a warm soapy shower. And yet, at dinner that night, their parents tired and irritable, he passed the salt and ate the steak and held his silence: another of life’s little secrets.
“Sa,” said the maid in awkward English. “It is not free.”
“Get out,” he said, stricken by the revulsion on her face, the way her eyes recoiled from his semi-nudity, the patchy hair on his sagging, lobster-red chest, all this reflected in the mirror. “Get the fuck out.”
She jolted against the dresser, shook the mirror on the wall, because of his tone, he realized, and the word itself — fuck — and the way he seemed suddenly to loom over her, all terrifying things, fateful things, and it was the knock on the door that broke the tension, sucked the ferocity out of his posture and inspired her with bravery, so that she pushed past him toward the entrance and swung open the cheap, flimsy door, daylight streaming in, the sounds of kids playing soccer and adults cheering them on.
The man with the black pleated pants tapped his foot and looked instantly amused, his phone held slackly in one hand, his sunglasses pinched in the fingers of the other, and he said something to the girl, something in one of those dozens of languages Wallace had decided to ignore, and the girl spat something back, shoved past him and repeated herself as she fled down the walkway and along the courtyard.
The man looked back into the room at Wallace, who stood there, hesitant and unsure, and the man’s almond eyes seemed to be looking for something in particular, some specific detail, and finally they stopped, focused, widened, and the man burst out laughing. Protectively, Wallace put a hand over his crotch.
II.
“So tell me,” said Cass, backing the sedan out of the hotel’s gravel parking lot. “Are you lost?”
“Me?” said Wallace, sitting in the front, his equanimity returned. “I’ve been waiting here for three days. Three. I should be back in Accra right now writing my report.”
“And is that where is your boss? In Accra?” Cass gave Wallace a probing look, saw the sweat oozing from all over and smiled. He extended a manicured hand to the control console and turned on the air conditioning. “White man,” he added with a chuckle. “You dey sweat, oh.”
“Look,” said Wallace, wiping his brow and soaking the thick, blond hair on his arm. “Thanks to you, I’m running behind. Way behind. And where’s your boss, exactly?”
The sedan bounced over potholes as they drove slowly down the dirt lane from the hotel to the main drag, which was clogged with vehicles smouldering in the heat, great billowing clouds of exhaust blowing from their tailpipes.
“Meetings,” said Cass. He placed a finger on his chin, looked up and down the traffic jam and shook his head with a tiny sound of incredulity. “Traffic, cha’lay. You see, oh? Big time traffic, Mr. Wallace. Big time.”
“Fuck,” Wallace spat, slamming his back into his seat. “Fuck-fuck-fucking traffic! You were supposed to come in the morning so we could avoid this mess.”
“Ah,” Cass said with a gentle shrug of his shoulders. “We tried, Mr. Wallace. Past two mornings, cha’lay, we try very hard. We call all the hotels in the city, enh? All the big hotels, enh? With pools and gyms and very pretty girls. But we don’t find you there. We say, oh, how come the big man from IMF no go stay at these nice hotels for give Ghana a good reputation back in his country? On his blog and Facebook? Why not, enh?”
A Plea for Constant Motion Page 15