Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  This reminded him of another green trail, somewhere else. He could not think of where that other path had been, but knew that it had spoken to him. Thinking back, he felt that it must have had a connection with both the source of his new hyper clarity and his ticket to freedom from William. That experience had been at night, in near total darkness.

  Now, in the bright light of day, this path was speaking to him, too, its voice so clear that he could not believe he’d never discerned the words before.

  No, not words, but a message, bold and unmistakable.

  He closed his eyes and listened hard, and heard the path – saw the path – speak to him about William.

  William and the little creep from marketing had been presenting him with updates on their PR strategy. All along, however, Hugh had known it would be up to him to take that strategy and convert it to something with much greater life than those two could ever give it. They were barely alive themselves, while Hugh was more alive than ever.

  And the flow of understanding that the green path had introduced him to – that flow had grown, become stronger and more varied. Now every particle, every neutrino and photon of that flow spoke in relation to every other, and did so in the most complex and sublimely perfect equations that ever a human mind could understand.

  The vision, the plan, came to him in such a way that he could see all of its parts at once. There were two essential elements: the descent and the ascent. They must happen simultaneously.

  The descent would be into the hellish valleys of smoke and blood where Lou Burr resided, and when Hugh Sanderson ventured into such places, he would have to wear his own cloak of smoke and blood, like an astronaut walking on a poison planet. He had a fleeting but clear vision of himself in suspenders and dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, using a yard-long piece of two-by-four to punish a faceless figure on a carpeted floor.

  The ascent would be his transformation of the company’s plans for the green campaign. The best persona William’s man had been able to come up with for Hugh was an anemic facsimile of the late Australian crocodile wrangler – costume and all. But Hugh Sanderson could, with the subtlest of alterations, transform the safari getup into the majestic rags of a holy man.

  The latest script called for the Sanderson brothers to recount publicly how Hugh had won William over during a trip to Africa. Hugh, according to the story, had threatened to leave the company unless the company started giving back to Mother Nature as much as it was taking. William had acquiesced because he remembered the promise they’d made to Dad that they would always stick together. And Dad had loved animals, too…etc.

  That would work, but Hugh now saw that he must infuse the script with language borrowed from the pseudo-Hindu cults that had come around to popularity again.

  Soon the world would see Hugh Sanderson as a beacon of planet love, shining bravely in the darkness of worldwide corporate culture. A visionary who radiated truth so mightily that his own family had been moved to reject greed and embrace the sacred heart of the earth mother. An evangelist calling on other corporate entities to cast off worldly things, or at least two percent of the purchase price thereof, and join him in a new monastic order. Male prophet of an amorphous Earth deity encompassing every face of the Exalted Feminine that anyone cared to spot in it: Gaia, Virgin Mary, Diana the Huntress, Dian Fossey or the Little Mermaid.

  He would appear as a mighty, fearsome devil down in the valleys, and the most pristine of angels when he strode the airy peaks of public relations.

  The visual, tactile, audible chatter of the forest suddenly swelled in volume, as though a DJ somewhere had pushed up all the sliding controls on a vast and complicated mixer.

  Then the spirit of the green path showed him another vision: it was the mud-covered woman he’d seen on the mountain pass on his way to the logging camp. She stood where the path ended at the main road, blocking his way back to the Land Rover like a demon guarding some magnificent treasure. Just beyond her stood an enormous, curly-bearded guy, about thirty years old, one of the handful of groupies that his eco-celebrity status had gained him. He’d always made Hugh think of a mildly retarded version of Bluto from the Popeye cartoons. The guy had shown up at every one of Hugh’s speaking engagements, sitting there with an unlit cigarette in his hand, his lumpy wet lips agape in what seemed like awe or drunkenness, but which was probably just his default expression. Hugh had just recently seen him at Free Forest Campground, which probably accounted for his imagining the guy now.

  Looking in the direction of those apparitions, Hugh emptied his bladder on the red and white flowers of a new liana that was just beginning its long climb up to the canopy. He walked back to the Land Rover and passed through the vision of Bluto and the mud woman without so much as a shiver.

  He changed into the spare set of clothing he kept hanging in the back of the vehicle, and threw his ruined shoes and trousers out the window.

  The new minister of the interior was moderately miffed that Sanderson was late. In the course of their meeting, Sanderson offered cash outright in exchange for a no-hassle concession in the southeastern part of the country. No polite dancing around the subject. The minister was taken aback at the American’s bluntness, perhaps even offended, but only showed it for a moment. He was also clearly pleased, and promised to herd any remaining members of bush tribes out of the region by the time the company was ready to harvest.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Amy opened the front door of her foothills bungalow and found her neighbor Rita looking like a giant muscular rag doll, with rivers of red hair backlit by early morning sun. Amy was five-foot-nine, but when Rita hugged her hello, it was like an adult reaching down to pick up a nine-year-old. It had been Rita who had gotten Amy into triathlons and yoga after she bought the little house. Amy had moved here shortly after Andre’s death in a freak boating accident, and her new neighbor had been like a spiritual nurse to her.

  Rita followed Amy inside and handed her a UPS package that she’d signed for the previous day. It was about the size of a phone book. Amy got a knife from her desk to cut the layers of tape on the package. “All my plants look happy,” she sang. “Thank you thank you thank you.” She was in a bathrobe, full of jetlag, with no gut sense of whether she needed to be asleep or awake.

  “I wouldn’t have come over so early,” Rita said, “except your lights were on and I thought I saw you moving around.”

  “I got in about two last night, but I didn’t sleep long. Over in Senegal it’s still…I don’t know. I can’t think yet.”

  “Does that mean you’ll have coffee with me?” Rita held up a glossy bag with a regal-looking label.

  Amy sat on the sofa and poked a knife point under the tape. Stephen Stokes had revealed his full name and his location a few emails back, and she’d done the same. His return address was printed on the kind of sticker that charities give out whole sheets of in order to say thanks for a donation. He’d apparently given some spare change to an animal rescue organization in the Bay Area. Even without his name, Amy could have guessed who’d sent the package; her own address had been neatly handwritten in the medieval script that Stephen had identified in one email as “Gothic textura.” She didn’t realize she was smiling until Rita spoke.

  “Who’s this Stephen that’s got you all lit up? Did you stop in Oakland on the way home?”

  “Going there next.”

  “Tell me about him,” Rita commanded on her way into the kitchen. “What’s he look like? When do I meet him?”

  “He’s got a nice voice,” Amy said. “Kind of a nerdy edge to it when he gets excited, but nice.” She sliced away at the tape and brown packing paper, being careful not to tear the part with the writing. “I haven’t even met him.”

  Inside the package was an aging primatology textbook with a yellow sticker on the binding that read, USED. The rigid cover had worn edges, and there were half a dozen purple Post-its sticking out of the top.

  Amy flipped through the tagged pages. There w
ere photos of various prosimians, and Stephen had made notes about them in the margins. One page had front and side views of a tarsier skull. The eye sockets were so huge that, from the front, they looked like big white Mickey Mouse ears stuck over a row of upper teeth that included two long incisors in the very middle. Stephen’s note pointed out that the fangs of the mystery animal in his medieval pictures were positioned just like the tarsier’s long incisors, but were three times longer proportionally.

  He had also highlighted a sentence in the textbook explaining that the reason for the name ‘tarsier’ was the animal’s long ankles, or tarsal bones, which gave it fantastic leaping powers. Although generally no more than six inches tall, some tarsiers could leap about ten feet horizontally and six vertically. In the margin was a sketch of the bones of a Philippine tarsier’s feet and lower legs. Of course there are no tarsiers in Africa today, he had written, but fifteen million years ago there were. And they were slightly larger than modern ones. Maybe what you saw is more related to tarsiers than to other prosimians.

  Rita came in from the kitchen with two steaming mugs. Amy sipped for a while, staring at the pictures, wondering about the difference between her animals and Stephen’s medieval ones. Were they different but closely related species, like chimpanzees and bonobos? Or just different subspecies of the same thing, like highland and lowland gorillas?

  Rita’s voice broke off that train of thought, “You pretty much woken up yet?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “I guess I’m about there. I don’t think I’m ready to go running up on the trails with you, though. Maybe in a day or two.”

  “No, it’s not that. I wanted you to be awake so I could ask you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  Rita said, “Well, you didn’t happen to hire a private security company to watch your place while you were gone, did you?”

  “I thought I hired you. For the price of dinner this Friday, remember?”

  “I remember. But…nothing was missing when you got back, right?”

  Amy set the book on an end table, still open to the tarsier pictures. “I haven’t really looked around all that closely, but nothing seems wrong to me.”

  She hardly kept anything in the place. All of the expensive gifts Andre had given her over the years were now in a safe deposit box, and she had accumulated nothing else of real value. She traveled too much for that.

  “Uh huh.” Rita paused. She looked troubled now. “Well, there were these two guys in green rent-a-cop uniforms when I got back from my run yesterday morning. They didn’t see me coming because I was walking through the back yard from the hiking trail. One guy was right by your front door, and the other was heading down your driveway. I asked what was going on, and they said you hired them to watch the house while you were in Africa.”

  “No way!”

  “I don’t know how they knew you were over there, but I was damn sure you didn’t hire them. Maybe they looked in my mailbox and saw one of the postcards you wrote me.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Girl, these guys were soooo creepy. One was a big, pink-faced bulldog with a brush cut, like an old-time professional wrestler. He didn’t say a word. The shorter one that did all the talking was this, like…too-big leprechaun, with a pointy beard all twirled together at the end, so it made a kind of a hook about two inches long. It would have just been geeky on anyone else, but this guy looked scary. I ran back inside my place and got on the phone to the sheriff’s department before those guys even made it back to their van. It was way down the street, and I couldn’t see it that well from my window. All I could tell the cops was that it was dark green and looked like it used to have some kind of round logo on the door. The cops said thieves do this kind of thing all the time. They pretend to be protecting the place they’re ripping off.”

  “Oh, my God.” Amy was standing up now, holding onto Rita’s long upper arm. “Thanks for taking care of it.”

  “I got your back, darling.” Rita squeezed Amy’s shoulder with a big, reassuring hand. “Tried to call and tell you about it, but it went right to voicemail, so I figured you were in the air. Didn’t see any point in leaving a message and getting you all stressed out before you got home and got some sleep.”

  Amy’s fatigue and jetlag weren’t helping her sort things out. She thought for a few minutes and said, “I guess there’s not much the cops can do except tell people in the neighborhood to be on the lookout. I mean, since there’s no report of a crime actually being committed.”

  “You’re right,” Rita said. “But we might get a little extra attention. I kind of got to know one of the deputies who came. His name’s Phil. I’m meeting him for dinner tomorrow, and if that goes well, you’ll meet him soon enough.” She stood up. “I’m going back to my place to shower. You want to have breakfast in a little while? Try out my new waffle iron?”

  “Sounds perfect. I can use the fuel. I’m driving to Arizona to see my parents in a little while.”

  “You driving all that way in your condition? All jet-lagged out?”

  “Looking forward to it,” Amy said. “I’ve always liked that drive. Besides, tomorrow’s my mom’s birthday. See you in half an hour?”

  Rita’s news made it impossible for Amy to relax. She told herself that the thugs in the rent-a-cop uniforms were ordinary burglars, and that they probably wouldn’t be back, given the way Rita had reacted to them.

  But it was also possible that someone – maybe owners of the commercial fishing boats that had gotten banned from the Sea of Cortez, or the developers closer to home whose project had been held up over erosion worries – found out who had been funding the activists that had done them damage, and had come either to spy or to exact revenge.

  There was also the unhappy coincidence of her having arrived at the logging camp right after an American scientist had mysteriously disappeared. But if the government knew she’d been there, then why would they bother sneaking around? They could simply knock on her door and demand that she explain her visit to the camp. Whoever the phony rent-a-cops were, they probably weren’t government spooks.

  For the first time ever, she thought about hiring private protection. She hated to waste any of her money – what Andre used to call the War Chest – on personal things, but this was the first time she’d ever felt vulnerable in her own home. She also realized that she hadn’t really recovered from the events in Equateur. A lot of the fear still flowed somewhere below the surface of her thoughts. She could afford private security services; she’d look into it soon.

  In the meantime, she went to her bedroom closet, reached up to a cluttered shelf in the very back, and found a memento from Andre’s life that she’d never expected to need.

  Amy was not a gun person, and neither had Andre been. But one of his extreme-sport friends came from a family that collected firearms of all kinds, from early pistols with powder pans to modern assault rifles. The guy’s father had once given Andre an eighty-year-old Finnish pistol that looked similar to the Lugers that German officers carried in war movies, although of an entirely different make. Along with the gun had come a lengthy discourse on its history, including stories of Finnish freedom fighters using the weapon in battles against both Soviet and German domination. She couldn’t remember the name of the model, except that it sounded like “latte,” so Andre had always called it the “latte burner.”

  Andre had never registered the weapon, although he and the friend had gotten a bunch of ammo and fired it at beer cans in the desert a few times. Amy had joined them once. There were three boxes of ammo on the shelf now.

  She loaded eight rounds into the magazine and set the gun on top of her refrigerator, covered it with a dish towel, and hoped she was just being paranoid.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hugh Sanderson stepped into his brother William’s office to be greeted with long, startled stares. The reaction was no doubt due to his rather unhealthy appearance, which he had warned Will about on the phone, explaining his current conditi
on as the aftermath of his fictional bout with malaria. The stares were from his brother and from Wes Gimble, the young marketing man who had first suggested a green campaign to counter bad PR. The idea that Hugh should be its figurehead was also Gimble’s brainstorm.

  The kid had seen the storm coming, and at first, no one had believed him. Hugh remembered attending that meeting, watching the managers filling their coffee cups at the big brass urn. Meaty-faced William and that androgynous little pixie Gimble had been sitting at the end of the table, heads bent close, framed by the enormous aerial photograph behind them that showed a glowing expanse of Malaysian rainforest.

  When Gimble stood up and warned that activists were targeting Sanderson Tropical Timber, he had been met with scoffs.

  “But ninety percent of our logging is done abroad,” had been the first objection. “How many people do you think they’re going to recruit to fly to Africa and lie down in front of the machinery?”

  “The trees are over there,” Gimble had responded, “but the market for the wood is here and in Europe. And what’s headed our way is the mother of all boycotts.”

  “How does anyone boycott a wholesaler of raw materials?” the CFO had said while picking muffin crumbs off the front of his shirt, nibbling on the occasional larger one. “Somebody buys an ottoman, the label doesn’t tell them who cut down the tree. How are they going to boycott us with no name recognition?”

  “Creating name recognition is exactly what their new strategy is about,” Gimble had countered. “Their term for it is ‘unmasking.’ They keep hitting people on their email list with sound bytes, making sure everyone knows who we are, and dropping phrases like ‘bushmeat,’ and ‘clear-cutting.’ I don’t think a single company has ever been the target of so many of these groups at once. They’re planning a massive boycott of retail goods made with our timber. Manufacturers are going to start avoiding us like the plague.”