Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  Too hot to do schoolwork today. In the book I am reading the British are marching across Egypt to the Suez in 128-degree heat. I know how they feel!

  November 17, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  In the morning, Mokupi arrived to go to Maun with us. We started out all right and the road wasn’t too bumpy. I thought, “Wow. We’ll get there at 11 a.m.!” I was so wrong.

  After about two and a half hours, the car skidded suspiciously. We got out and found that our back right tire was completely flat. No problem. We put on the spare and were about to get in the car when Mokupi shouted that the spare was flat too. For two hours Dad and Mokupi fought the rusty split rims of the spare tire, snapping one tire iron completely in half in the process. Mom, Lucy, and I tackled the other tire. Mom held a tire iron jammed in between the rim and the tire and Lucy and I jumped on the tire to get all the air out. The new tubes were put in, then the liners and hubs. Then we had to pump them both back up again, which takes a long time with only one tiny bicycle pump! But finally we got the spare on the car and the other tire in the back and started driving again. Getting close to Maun we heard a loud explosion. The back left was flat! Because we had spent so much time fixing the two tires, we luckily enough had another tire. From then on, the drive was fine, though we had to stop every half hour or so to cool the car off under a tree. The engine kept overheating and making pinging sounds that Dad said were no good.

  On that trip to Maun we stayed as we usually did with Tim and Bryony, our friends with the ostrich farm on the Boro River. In the early morning before the heat became too much to go outside, Bryony asked us if we wanted to go riding with her and her daughters, Maxie and Pia. Neither Lucy nor I were particularly good riders, but it sounded like a lot of fun so we said we’d love to.

  The horses hadn’t been fed yet and were a bit jumpy, particularly Bryony’s new stallion, Kwebu, which she’d recently purchased from a San breeder near the Kalahari Desert in the middle of Botswana, near a town called Ghanzi. Bryony suspected the horse hadn’t been treated well by his previous owners, and every time she tried to put the saddle on him he reared and snorted. Bryony showed me how to calm him down by rubbing his neck, which I did quietly while the rest of the horses got saddled and ready for our ride.

  When the other girls were mounted, Bryony gave me a leg up and I jumped on Kwebu’s back. Instantly, he took off. Since the paddock was gated and he couldn’t get out, he raced toward the far side of the enclosure, which was connected to the saddling area by a small opening in the fence. As he ran through this opening, my left arm was wrenched backward by the fence post and I could feel one of the nails rip into my elbow. Kwebu wasn’t slowing down, and I remember thinking, He’s going to jump the fence. He’s going to jump the fence and I’m going to get swept off into that thorn tree. I couldn’t think of what else to do, and since my feet weren’t in the stirrups anyway, I launched myself sideways off of his back, slamming into the paddock fence and landing in a pile of horse poop.

  Bryony ran over and helped me sit up. My breath had been completely knocked out of me and there was a huge hole in my elbow—it looked like an animal had bitten a chunk out of it. There wasn’t any blood, oddly, but I could see some kind of white stuff in the hole and something smooth that I thought might be the bone, before I leaned over and threw up in the sand. I don’t remember how I got there, but I remember the cool tile of the Longdens’ bathroom and something cool and sticky on my elbow. Bryony later told me that they didn’t have any antiseptic so she’d cleaned the wound with the herbal salve they used on the ostriches when they got hurt. There was no doctor in town to take me to, and since the hole was too wide to stitch, Bryony covered the salve with a clean piece of cloth and duct-taped the whole thing closed. Later she winked and told me that a piece of the bone had indeed splintered off, but that she went back to the paddock and couldn’t find it to put back in.

  “Ha ha,” I said, before throwing up again.

  Mom and Dad had been running errands in town, and when they came back at sunset I was lying on a canvas chair by the firepit behind the Longdens’ house, eating a piece of toast and talking with Lucy and Bryony’s daughters, Maxie and Pia. My head had cleared and the throbbing in my arm had begun to fade into the background, though it still hurt quite a lot. I asked Mom and Dad whether I’d have to fly to Gaborone, the capital of Botswana and geographically the closest metropolitan area that might have a surgeon of some kind, but they said no, we’d just have to deal with it when we went back to the US in a month. Neither of them seemed particularly worried once they and Bryony discussed the situation, so I didn’t think too much more about it.

  November 22, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  Last night the scene in front of camp was unbelievable. First a cow/calf herd of elephants drank at the lagoon and grazed quietly while the sun went down behind them. Then, out of nowhere, two hyenas ran out of the woods, grabbed a female impala, and started fighting over her, laughing loudly the whole time. They wrestled and tackled each other all over the place. The elephants tried to ignore them but would trumpet and shake their heads whenever the hyenas got too close.

  The elephants were nice to look at during dinner but at night they moved into camp and started tearing things down. They uprooted a tree near the choo and trampled all over our paths, which means we’re going to have to resweep them tomorrow and clean off all the branches they’ve dumped on them. After a while Mom and Dad started to worry that the elephants would rip down something important like the radio antenna or the water tank, so they started running out from the tent to throw firecrackers at the elephants to “encourage them” to move out. No effect whatsoever. They just bellowed at us and continued ripping apart the trees. Lucy and I were up for most of the night listening to the elephants huff and puff next to our tent.

  There isn’t much I’m looking forward to about going back to America. It will be nice to have some cold weather, but why would I want to leave when so much is happening here? Mom and Dad keep trying to make it sound like going back to America is a good thing, but I know they’re just doing it to make me feel better. It annoys me that they keep saying, “We’re going home,” like I’m not home already.

  December 5, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  I’m going to miss the wide sky, the islands, and the beautiful views. Most of all I will miss the animals. All the babies are being born and they are so cute…also the early morning coolness and the way the birds sing after it rains. I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT TO GO IT IS SO, SO, SO, SO SAD!!

  CHAPTER 12

  The Elf Princess Plays Lacrosse

  We returned to the US in January so my parents could go through another round of teaching and grant renewal. The cycle was so familiar by this point it was just part of our lives: furiously working in the US in order to get the funds to go back to Baboon Camp and furiously collecting data before repeating it all over again. Again, Lucy and I packed away our Baboon Camp gear in duffel bags under our cots and braced ourselves for the freezing cold and the snow—both completely impossible to imagine in the searing heat of Botswana. Again, Nat’s mother picked us up at the airport in the family minivan and drove us home to our cold and shuttered house to unpack. Again, Dad went out to find something for dinner and returned with frozen dinner rolls and fried chicken, claiming that nothing had ever tasted as delicious in his life. Again, I went to sleep wrapped in my cold sheets listening to the radiator clang and hiss while wishing that the noises I heard were elephants, lions, and hippos. The process of returning to America and settling in to such a different existence felt familiar by this point but never seemed to ease my sadness at leaving Botswana or the jarring sensory overload of life in Pennsylvania.

  The next morning, my mother drove me to an appointment with a plastic surgeon. Though my arm was healing and didn’t appear to be infected, Mom felt extremely guilty that we hadn’t been able to get it stitched up by a professional. There were no doctors i
n Maun at the time, except for one ex-psychotherapist from South Africa who was sometimes able to obtain illegal antibiotics from Zimbabwe. He hadn’t been available when I hurt my arm, however, since I was thrown off the horse at 10 a.m. and he was known to be blindingly drunk at any time after 9 a.m. So I was left with the beginnings of a half-dollar-sized mound of pink scar tissue surrounded by ropy, raised skin that itched and stretched around my elbow like dried glue.

  Mom and I sat down in the waiting room and I flipped through the pages of a glossy magazine on the coffee table. It appeared that the world was still very upset about the death of Princess Diana a few months earlier. I’d heard about it from Bryony at the ostrich farm since she was British, and I knew that Princess Diana had been married to Prince Charles, who was next in line for the British throne. Bryony didn’t have the details on what happened but knew it had involved someone named “Paparazzi,” who I didn’t recognize.

  Finally, the plastic surgeon called us into his office. He sliced the dusty duct tape off my arm with a pair of surgical scissors and began poking the wound thoughtfully.

  “Well,” he said after a few minutes. “This is certainly a change from another breast enhancement consultation, that’s for sure.”

  Mom looked uncomfortable.

  “We did our best with what we had,” she said. “I wish it could have been more…” I knew she was embarrassed and felt like a Bad Parent, something she seemed to be concerned about with increasing frequency. She’d said as much more than a hundred times on the way to the doctor. I didn’t see why she should feel so guilty—it wasn’t as though she could have done any more than what she did. This was just part of the risk that our family assumed in living where we did and I thought we had all made our peace with that. But maybe I had been wrong.

  “It’s actually fine,” the doctor said, running a gloved finger along the edges of the raised patch. “Whatever you put on it seemed to clean it well enough and the duct tape was certainly effective in keeping out any infectious agents.” He laughed. “It actually looks great. In fact, I don’t think she needs surgery. Anything I would do would just leave her with a scar the same size as the one that she’ll already have, so why bother?”

  “That went better than expected,” Mom said in the car on the way home. “At least, I don’t feel quite so bad about it.” I squirmed. The car was cold and my arm ached from being poked and prodded by the doctor. I was restless and had not seen the sun in nearly two days. The cold, still world smelled like salt.

  “Can we just go back to the house?” I said. Nat’s mother, Cathy, had lent me his copy of The Subtle Knife, the sequel to The Golden Compass, and all I wanted to do was make a cup of tea and curl up in a chair to read it. I had tried retreating into the castle in my head at the doctor’s office but found it harder to get into than I remembered. I hoped a book would quiet the anxious pacing that my brain was doing instead. School started the next day, and I didn’t want to go at all.

  I entered school for the second half of eighth grade much the same way I’d started sixth and seventh: my hair bleached light brown by the sun and my skin deeply tanned and marked with mosquito bites and slashes from thorn branches. My backpack still puffed soft clouds of dust whenever I dropped it and now sported a brown stain on the side from where a baboon had pooped on it. (Mom made me promise not to tell anyone what caused the stain. Apparently, this would become another marker of a Bad Parent.) Armed with Nat’s copy of The Subtle Knife, I walked through the doors of the middle school and searched the student lounge for him. I’d only made it halfway through the book but already had a lot of questions I wanted to discuss.

  A group of blonde girls were chatting at the table closest to where I stood. I didn’t pay much attention to them as I scanned the room for Nat’s curly hair but thought fleetingly how odd it was that girls from the high school were hanging out in the middle school lounge. They were clearly too old to be where they were. I didn’t see Nat and was getting ready to go to homeroom when one of the high school girls stood up and called my name.

  “Hey, Keena!” she said. “Welcome back!” I stared in complete shock. What had happened to Meghan while I was gone? Half a head taller than the last time I’d seen her and with a stylish-looking haircut that brushed blonde bangs casually across her forehead, she looked far older than fourteen. Did she magically become eighteen while I was gone? Didn’t she know the rest of us only aged in one-year increments?

  Meghan gave me a hug as the rest of the group looked on.

  “Are you still fourteen?” I whispered over her shoulder. Her hair smelled like flowers and fresh grass and I pulled back. I didn’t want to make her dirty.

  “Yes, of course I’m still fourteen,” she said, taking a step back to look at me. “But you look older.”

  “I do?” I said. “I don’t feel any older.”

  One of the other girls came to stand next to Meghan and I realized that in giving me a hug in the middle of the student lounge, Meghan had bestowed upon me the blessing of the coolest girl in middle school. I was instantly accepted.

  “Your tan looks really good,” the other girl said. I vaguely recognized her and thought her name might be Sarah or Katie. “Where did you get it done? It looks so professional.”

  “Oh…um, thank you,” I stammered and shifted my backpack on my shoulder. What should I say? I didn’t know the names of any tanning salons and didn’t want to lie to this girl. Should I tell her it’s a real tan and I got it from spending two months baking in a heat so intense that it melted pens and shampoo bottles? Or should I just let it go?

  “Come on,” Meghan said, sparing me from responding to the other girl. “The bell just rang; it’s time for homeroom.”

  I finally found Nat in my homeroom and slid into a desk next to him.

  “You got tall,” I hissed at him under the noise of the other students banging open the door and dropping books on their desks. “You’re not supposed to get tall; you’re supposed to be short like me.” Nat shrugged.

  “What do you want me to say?” he said. “Maybe I’ll be faster than you now.”

  “Never,” I said. “You’re only good at math and losing when we play tennis.” He reached over and punched me in the shoulder.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” he said.

  As they did the last time I returned from Baboon Camp, my teachers were insistent that they test me immediately to see if I’d learned all the things that I was supposed to have learned while I was away. They didn’t believe that I could keep up with the curriculum while essentially teaching myself, and wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to hold up the rest of the class. I understood why they wanted to do this but resented being assessed and tested more than the other students. Why didn’t my teachers just believe me when I said I knew how to solve algebraic equations and that I’d actually read Lord of the Flies? I’d even had a whole discussion about it with my mom one day when we were out with the baboons. We’d decided that baboons could be called more civilized than humans because their social structure was more stable and they were less likely to devolve into chaos without leadership.

  My new math teacher was a fierce old lady named Mrs. Graff (which no one seemed to think was funny except me) who made me stay after school to take an exam to see how far I’d gotten in that year’s lesson plan. I scored a 92 percent, and after Mrs. Graff realized she’d mistakenly given me the final exam and not the midterm, called me into her office to apologize for not believing me.

  “Well, you’re just going to be bored for the rest of the year since you already know what we’ll be covering,” she said. Nat told me I had no right to call him a dork after that and said that if I wanted to be useful, I could do his homework for him so he would have more time for computer games.

  I wanted so badly for eighth grade to be peaceful and calm. I’d figured that, as the oldest students in the middle school, we’d be mostly left on our own and could relax a little bit before starting to think about high school.
I already felt uncomfortable around all the other students and wanted nothing more than quiet, though there seemed to be very little of that to spare in my American life. From the moment I got up to the moment I went to sleep, there was noise: cars honking at each other on the way to school while the reporters on the radio talked about wars and bombs in faraway places, lecturing from my teachers, gossiping and teasing from other students at lunch, and then more noise and honking on the way home. The beeps and rings and bells were jarring and artificial and nothing like the blowing wind and chirping birds in Baboon Camp. They made my ears ache.

  I craved solitude and silence, but found it in only a few places. One of these places was lacrosse practice. Every day after my last class, I collected my textbooks and grabbed my lacrosse stick from the back of my locker, joining the steady stream of girls who walked down the sidewalk toward the fields at the elementary school. Everyone who wanted to play was on the team, so there was less pressure to be good, which I appreciated since I’d never played before. I usually walked by myself but sometimes followed Meghan and her crew, all of whom also played lacrosse because that’s what the cool kids did. They carried their shiny aluminum lacrosse sticks in bags with their initials monogrammed on them in pink and blue thread and wore cleats to practice. When I told Mom about the special shoes other girls wore at lacrosse, she told me regular sneakers had always been good enough for her when she played lacrosse and they’d be good enough for me too. I did manage to persuade Mom to buy me an aluminum lacrosse stick like Meghan’s when I reported that my coach said I shouldn’t use Mom’s old stick because I might “break an antique.” My new lacrosse stick was shiny and had a yellow plastic head just like the other girls’. In my head I named her Laurana, after the elf princess from my Dragonlance books, but I knew enough not to say that out loud.