Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  He stepped around the corner. The red dust of the ground lay bare in all directions. No sleepers, no lions. He looked up on the roof. The only signs left anywhere were their prints on the ground and the sharp stink of cat piss.

  He sat down hard in the dirt, his hands slack on the rifle. That high whine in his ears. Behind him the door opened and the Indians came piling out, calling out their gratitude for scaring the beasts away.

  For the rest of that day he felt flushed and overly aware of his body, its discomforts and wants. Just before sunset, standing waist deep in the river, watching Otombe scoop water up and across his gleaming chest, Jeremy felt the heat in his head like a pressure. He took a half-step toward Otombe, almost reached out to touch him, even with the two askaris watching. Then stopped.

  Glancing down at his own body through the distortion of the dark water, it no longer appeared gawky and reprehensible. Perhaps it had a purpose.

  He touched his fevered brow. In the cool of the river, he was still sweaty. He had never been this sleep-deprived, this thirsty, this hot.

  He had never felt so at home in a land or with another person.

  Otombe turned into his stare. He must have sensed by now the difference between Jeremy and other men. Still he did not move away or cover his body up. He returned his gaze levelly.

  Jeremy stared, his mouth open. This tension could not last.

  That afternoon, Otombe had found the satchel again along the empty riverbed, this time in a spot closer to camp. As the sun descended, he and Jeremy climbed up a ladder into a tree about sixty feet from the satchel. Before they were even settled, the askaris below were hurrying back to camp with the ladder, casting fearful looks all about. Every day, Jeremy found the coolies were a little more terrified and less obedient. Occasionally he caught them staring at him, their dark eyes filled with thoughts he could not read.

  He believed one day soon they would stampede en masse to a departing train to climb on, clinging to its side and roof, fleeing this murderous river and area. After that, the building of the railroad would cease. The rails would be left just as they were, the project abandoned, the army ants and termites gradually chewing through the ties, the embankments caving in one by one.

  If the railroad project were stopped, what would he feel? Failure, regret? Relief?

  Up in the tree, hammering the bottom board of the seat into place, he searched for conversation, nervous about the long night alone with Otombe. “You mentioned before your younger brother was killed by the lions. May I inquire how it happened?”

  Otombe kept his head down for a moment, while he held his side of the board. “He was ten summers old.”

  “If you wish, please continue.” Jeremy passed him the hammer.

  “The lions had killed twice, perhaps twelve miles away. We were not scared yet, not careful. That night my brother stepped out of his hut to make water. Our mother slept inside. She was awoken by his body hitting the hut. She heard the lion roaring, Ituma’s struggle. She had three other children with her, could not open the door to fight for him.” Otombe stood there for a moment looking toward the sun, then bent down to hammer the board into place.

  At that moment the sun dipped below the horizon and from the point where it had been, a momentary green flash lit the trees. Alan had described to Jeremy these tropical sunset flashes: some strange artifact of refraction and humidity.

  “He is not the only child of my tribe to die.” Otombe turned to face him, his gaze intent. Was he focused on Jeremy or on the memory of his brother?

  “I would die to kill these lions.” Otombe said this not as an empty turn of phrase, but as a simple statement of fact. “It is dark now. No more talking.”

  Jeremy took his seat beside Otombe, allowing himself to sit closer than he ever had before. Quickly he found himself beginning to tremble with what he labeled at first as excitement. Then the shivering got worse, every muscle in his body vibrating with an electric ferocity. Only once his teeth began to chatter did he understand he was medically ill. Hunched over, he clenched his teeth into silence, wrapped his fingers tight round the edge of the seat and settled down to wait out the attack. In the darkness, there was no safe way back to the camp and the doctor, to his quinine.

  Otombe touched his shoulder lightly to ascertain the source of the vibration, then reached down to undo Jeremy’s belt. Staring at his dark fingers tugging the leather out of the first few loops, Jeremy was unable to piece together the entirety of his emotion. Then Otombe fastened the end of the belt round the board of their seatback, making sure during the night Jeremy would not fall from the tree in his delirium.

  Exhaling, Jeremy closed his eyes and leaned back. A headache began to press itself into his temples, as sharp as fangs.

  To the east, the first lion roared.

  Rubbing his temples as best he could with his trembling fingers, he forced his thoughts away from Otombe, and to the animals instead. It was not the sheer number of people the lions killed that produced the men’s terror of them. The mosquitoes killed more, as did the parasites in the river’s water. However, no one screamed at the sight of a mosquito or at a glass of water, for neither type of bug sought human flesh in particular. Dying that way seemed more like pure chance, as impersonal as getting struck by lightning.

  But, with the lions, what elicited the men’s terror was the predators’ intelligence and free will. From near the quarry, he heard a raspy grunt. This lion, able to manage the complex strategy of stalking prey in coordination with another, surely had the capacity to think ahead to the likely result of the hunt. At the moment, having just awoken, smacking his jowls sleepily, the creature was probably considering what he wanted to eat tonight (a gazelle, a wildebeest, a person), considering his options the way a child standing at an ice cream counter might pick a flavor. Then, rising to his feet, he sauntered toward the railroad camp.

  And later tonight, once the lions had stalked and caught a human, their prey would shriek, through sheer volume struggling to explain how much more important he was than the taste of his flesh.

  In response, one of the lions would kick out his bowels.

  Jeremy’s teeth were now distinctly chattering no matter how hard he attempted to clench them together. With his knife, Otombe cut off a bit of his own robe and gently pushed the piece between Jeremy’s lips, using it as a cushion to silence the chattering. He closed his eyes and let his mouth fill with the flavor of goatskin, fire, crushed grass, fresh earth, and sweat. He sucked on the leather, tasting Otombe’s skin.

  In the night’s slow wait that followed, he felt the fevered distortion of time. It seemed he had been perched precariously up here above the half-completed canal for several months, near the chewed-up satchel, craving sleep, waiting for the lions to show themselves. He felt he had been born sitting near Otombe.

  The lions stopped roaring. He nodded off into the new silence, his shivering worse, his teeth vibrating against the goatskin. In the distance the men’s voices in camp called out from boma to boma, warning each other. He saw his mother pacing slowly round the house in her nightgown, checking all the locks as she did every night, the metal snick of each bolt sliding home. Outside, the snow fell lazily, the bright twinkle of stars in a cold winter sky. In the barn, his Grandpapi eased his large hand between a birthing cow’s legs, his head resting companionably on her rump, eyes closed and the steam of his breath rising. He tugged the calf’s thin fetlocks partway out, holding them together in his hand like some type of mucus-covered bouquet.

  Trembling with exhaustion and cold, Jeremy lay back on his narrow bed in Grandpapi’s house, tugging his childhood duvet up to his shoulders. Abruptly, the canvas of a tent slapped down across his face. He stiffened in the utter darkness, the weight of poles and ropes across his limbs, knowing his only hope lay in staying completely still. In the room next to him, he heard his sister cry out and beat at the canvas, then the hard thwap of the lion’s pounce and her scream. Before she had stopped moaning, the lion paused
, then stepped through the doorway. Jeremy felt a heavy paw tread on his leg. Breathing against the canvas, he tried so hard to quell his shivers. Still, the lion’s claws begin to tighten into the meat of his leg, the animal’s weight shifting forward as he lowered his giant head.

  As the lion closed his teeth around Jeremy’s skull, the animal transformed into the three African women who had stared at him in the forest. They were pressing the points of their machetes slowly into his temples.

  His mother in the hall screaming.

  Gasping, he forced open his eyes, blinking around at the night. The moon was full, a pale orb starting to set. The silhouettes of bats swooped through the night sky. The screams came from camp half a mile away, rifles shooting wildly. Beside him, Otombe sat still as a statue, no emotion visible.

  After the camp’s uproar faded, Otombe shifted in his seat for a more comfortable position, readying himself for sleep now that the lions had completed their hunt. Exhausted, Jeremy leaned his head back against a tree branch.

  He had just begun to drift off when he became aware of a distant rustling. Whatever was moving, shoved its way through the bushes near the half-dug canal, breaking branches and crunching through the undergrowth. He and Otombe sat up. Something heavy dragging and bumping along the earth, coming closer.

  The dragging stopped on the other side of a giant baobab tree fifty feet away. The first growl rumbled out, low and raspy.

  And then every noise rang clear in the silence. The lapping and chewing, the crunching and wet smacks. The occasional thud of a limb dropped or the snap of a tendon. The animals purred under their breath as content as two housecats at their meal.

  Horrified, Jeremy took Otombe’s hand. He cared not a whit anymore about respectability. He clung to the hand as hard as a child to his father’s, a man to his lover’s, a boy to his mother. He rubbed his fingers over the back of the hand, the palm, the soft skin between the fingers. He moved over it knuckle by knuckle like a rosary for at least a full minute listening to the lions eat, until he realized in all that time Otombe had not tried to wrest his hand away, nor let his fingers go limp in silent protest. Instead, Otombe held him firmly back.

  For a single instant, Jeremy believed it possible that from his sickness not just evil could come.

  And drunk from elation, feverish from malaria, jumpy with fatigue, he jerked his rifle to his shoulder and shot in the general direction of the baobab tree without a chance of hitting the lions, simply unwilling to listen to those grisly noises for a moment longer.

  Even as the rifle jerked with the shot, he realized what he had done. In the terrible silence following, as clearly as if he could see it, he felt the two lions raise their bloody mouths, lifting their yellow gaze toward the sound, their cat eyes cutting easily through the darkness until they spotted him and Otombe in the tree.

  From now on the lions would know how to find them.

  TWENTY-TWO

  December 25, 2000

  Christmas had never been a day Max cared much about, but that morning, before she started climbing up with Yoko and Mutara, she gathered a gift for the gorillas. She harvested a large bunch of baby bamboo shoots, a tender treat the gorillas loved that was hard to find higher up on the mountains. She tied the bunch together with the cobalt silk ribbon she’d had since she was a child. Whenever she was anxious she used to rub the ribbon between her fingers, its softness and color so calming. The last few years she hadn’t needed the ribbon that much. Perhaps they would enjoy it.

  The bamboo bundle barely fit in her knapsack. Hefting the bag up, she used only her right arm. Even though Mutara had popped her left shoulder back in its socket again, the whole joint was swollen to twice its size and the throbbing of blood through the area was so insistent she hadn’t been able to swallow any food this morning.

  This relentless distraction irritated her, getting in the way of how she functioned. She alternated ibuprofen and aspirin every other hour and worked to focus elsewhere.

  She pulled the knapsack onto her good shoulder, tying the other strap tightly across her waist to hold the bag somewhat in place and set off after Yoko and Mutara. Although it wasn’t easy to hike with this weight balanced only on one side, she managed to climb the whole way to the gorillas without falling.

  There, she knucklewalked gradually in among the family, placed the bundle of bamboo on the ground and backed off a few yards to watch.

  Rafiki was the first to wander over to it, followed by Asante and the others. They all crowded around to consider the food, their heads tilted. None of them tried to grab the whole bundle and run.

  Titus reached out and, with two fingers, delicately tugged a single shoot from the bunch.

  His teeth made a crisp crunch biting into the bamboo. Several of the others grunted, low in their throats.

  Still they each waited for a turn to pull out a shoot and gravely bite into the food.

  With them all crowded together like this, Max was struck by the sheer size of them, a bunch of linebackers, a wall of vast shoulders and backs. Or perhaps, given their gentle nature, more like cows crowded round a trough. For a moment she saw them the way people at the base of this mountain might (starving on their tiny farms, their children screaming for food). Titus’s body alone would feed a village for a week.

  Uncle, the second silverback, was the one to pick up the ribbon, while the others chewed through the bamboo. He sniffed the material, then rubbed the smooth silk between his calloused fingertips. Startled at the sensation, he cocked his head for a moment before he raised it to his face to brush across his eyelids, where the skin was most tender.

  Asante grabbed the ribbon from him and ran with it through the jungle, waving it as a blue trail through the air. Another juvenile chased her, and for twenty minutes they played furiously as puppies until it caught on a thorn five feet up and tore, hanging there sad and ripped.

  The family sat around and watched the ribbon—a bit like a TV—as it swayed and twisted in the wind, while they chewed on the last of the bamboo.

  Scratching under his chin, Titus eyed the ground around him for any last bits of food. “Ra-ooom,” he grunt-chanted, low in his gut.

  One by one, they answered, purring their contentment back. “Ra-ooom,” “Ra-ooom.” Grave jungle souls.

  During the gorillas’ siesta, the humans retreated as usual two hundred feet downhill, to give them some peace. Lying down on a thick bed of ferns, Max fell asleep for a few minutes, worn out from the pain in her shoulder.

  When she woke, the sun had appeared from behind the clouds. The last two weeks on these mountains, she’d been surprised by how much the light could change along the jungle floor. At times it was as gloomy as a basement, at other points it gleamed otherworldly with mist. Sometimes it dazzled the eyes, as brazen as a spotlight.

  Right now, a thick beam of dusty light poured down through a hole in the canopy. In the brightness of this luminance, everything shone as though lit from within, the stained-glass of the flickering leaves, the brilliant red of a parrot flying by, the hewed columns of the giant trunks. The cathedral of the trees. This must be where humans came up with the architecture of churches—the vaulted spaces and filtered light imprinted in the genes as the original holy place.

  By now climbing these mountains had become as natural to her as climbing stairs. The jungle comfortable. The plants, the smells. The gorillas.

  Her good hand was resting against her sling, touching her forearm where Titus had held her. When she noticed, she pulled her hand away.

  Late that afternoon, they hurried down from the mountains to listen to the BBC broadcast, wanting to hear about the downed UN flight. In Pip’s cabin, huddled around the hand-cranked radio, they ate their soup while the announcers discussed the exploits of Manchester United and then the recent downturn of the Venezuelan economy. Max ate tofu out of its aseptic container and the others chewed mechanically through their potato soup. The soup was what they ate now three times a day, all the other food consum
ed. Their diet as repetitive as an aspie’s.

  She accepted by this point that the other four knew where the vine was and weren’t telling her, even though that meant keeping her here in danger. She didn’t blame them, because she figured she was doing the same thing—choosing to keep herself in danger. And their motivation was more pure, had nothing to do with their careers, or even their species. It would be hypocritical to feel anger.

  In the last week, they’d begun to ask her opinion on different aspects of the gorillas. Dubois had asked her if she thought any of the females might be pregnant—were any of them eating or acting differently? Yoko wanted to know if they might be using some of the plants they consumed to remove intestinal parasites: maybe through a bioactive ingredient or simply from the exfoliating property of the nettles passing through the intestines. They listened to her observations carefully and posed follow-up questions. Only afterward did she marvel at the fact that she was being asked to interpret the actions of others.

  Halfway through BBC news hour, the announcers hadn’t mentioned the Kutu and their hostages. Perhaps discussion of them had been eased out by that morning’s suicide bombing in the Middle East.

  Then the announcer said, “And now to Julian Turner in the Democratic Republic of Congo where a United Nations airplane full of peacekeepers was shot from the sky two days ago by a surface-to-air missile. Julian, any word on the survivors?”

  “Why, yes, Robin. Yesterday morning, a rebel group, the Kutu, claimed responsibility for the downing of the flight, saying they now had possession of both the airplane and the twenty-four soldiers.”

  “Twenty-four? Weren’t there more?”

  “Yes, evidently eighteen died in the crash. The Kutu say they have the surviving twenty-four and will trade them for concessions of territory from the UN. Then, just an hour ago, François Kutu, the militia’s leader who the group was named after, announced the UN wasn’t acting quickly enough so he’d had three of the soldiers killed and eaten.”