One night, after we ate dinner and were escorted back to our tented cabins with our usual firearm-bearing protector, I decided to delve into the Wilbur Smith book that Clifford had loaned me. Still narcoleptic, I didn’t even get past the dedication before I fell into a deep slumber. I had no need to feign sleep for Wilbur, as I didn’t even remember him climbing into bed that night.
A few hours later, I was awakened by a sound, one very different from the African wake-up call. It was the drumming of the Natives, something similar to what I’d heard in Havasupai. I was drawn to it. I rose from the bed and moved over to the door. Without fear, I opened it and stepped outside. And there she was. Dancing. My mother was dancing and laughing, spinning around and around in the tall grass. She was holding a pomegranate high up in the air. Then suddenly, I saw the coyote stalking her, hiding in the bushes with that sinister grin. I tried to run and call out to her, but I couldn’t; I was frozen. I was only a spectator.
The coyote began to slither through the tall grass. He turned and looked right into my eyes as if he was mocking me. He seemed to delight in my inability to save her, daring me to try. But my mother just kept dancing and laughing, oblivious to the coyote, and to me. At first, I couldn’t decipher whether he was after my mother or the pomegranate, but in a matter of seconds, the coyote sprang out of the grass and pounced on my mother.
I awoke with a start to find Wilbur wrapped around me. I was still lying comfortably in bed. But just outside the cabin there was rustling and odd, indistinguishable animal noises. I attempted to both interpret the noises and determine whether or not I might be having another lucid dream. I wanted to wake Wilbur up, but I hesitated, remembering how Evan had reacted whenever I awakened him during the night: one would have thought the gates of Hell had opened up.
The noises continued getting louder and closer. I thought of my mother and the coyote. This time I was spooked. Was my mother luring me to join her? Was the coyote the Natives’ version of the Grim Reaper?
I lifted Wilbur’s arm from around me and grabbed the flashlight from the nightstand. I shined it wildly through the mesh window, trying, from the safety of the bed, to decipher what was going on out there in the black night. But my cowardly tactics failed; I couldn’t see anything. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I reached over and shook Wilbur awake. If nothing else, it was a good opportunity to test his patience with me and see what he was really made of.
“Wilbur!”
“What’s the matter?” he groaned.
“There’s something out there! I think it’s a coyote!” I hissed in a panic.
He only half awakened and gave me a gentle rub.
“There aren’t any coyotes in Africa.”
“Don’t you hear that?” I prodded.
It was so dark, I couldn’t even see his face.
“That’s just the lions calling to each other. They probably captured some prey,” he mumbled, casually rolling onto his side.
“Oh, is that all?” I grumbled, half-convinced that the prey the lions had found were the current occupants of our tent.
I guessed that to Wilbur, it was just a run-of-the-mill night in Africa, but there was no way I was going to be able to sleep with the circle of life in full force right outside—especially if I was at the center of the circle. With every bit of bravery I could muster, I crawled over to the mesh window and with shaking hands, again waved the flashlight around. I was terrified, but at the same time, I just had to determine what was going on out there. I searched for quite a while, calming my hands to a steady motion with the flashlight.
Finally, I spotted the smooth back of a hippo in the tall grass. The air was quiet and the hippo stood motionless as I stared. The poor creature was a sitting duck—like my mother had been—oblivious to the earlier calls of the lions, who were now eerily silent.
“The lions are hiding over there!” Wilbur suddenly exclaimed from over my shoulder.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, swinging around so fast that I cracked him in the head with the flashlight. I’d never heard him get out of bed. He didn’t appear to be the least bit put off that I’d ruined his night’s sleep or that I’d nearly given him a concussion. He just rubbed his head then pointed.
“Look! There they go! They must be really hungry. I’ve never seen lions go after a hippo!” Wilbur gushed like an excited schoolboy. “Hippos can cause a lot of damage before going down.”
There were four or five lionesses circling the hippo. We watched in tense anticipation as the lions systematically pounced on the hippo’s back as it tried to return to the water. They began to gnaw on its spine, immobilizing the hippo, so they could go in for the kill. The largest lioness clamped onto the hippo’s throat with her teeth and he went down for the count, just shy of the safety of the watering hole. Once the hippo was on the ground, the brush mostly impaired our view; however, we could still hear the chomping and growling of the lions devouring their feast.
Wilbur grabbed a pillow and a blanket and we lay together on the floor in the dark, next to the mesh window, listening intently to the sounds of the lions delighting in their kill. It proved to be the most strangely romantic and disturbing night of my short life.
CHAPTER 28
Our last night at the Delta was another celebration of traditional African culture. We shared another meal to be eaten with our hands, but this time the staff served us all equally. There was no need for us to bow down on our knees in subservience to our men. Instead, Edison delivered a lecture on the myriad of other ways African women are expected to express their subordination. For instance, in traditional African culture, men do not perform household chores. Nowadays, many younger African men have come to abandon this way of thinking, but never in front of their elders. If a man is caught washing dishes or cooking, his parents would quickly accuse his wife of bewitching him with a “love potion.” In others words, no man in his right mind would ever help his wife with domestic duties unless he was under some sort of hex or spell. Edison found the appalled female reaction to this revelation quite amusing, but he refused to admit one way or the other whether he was a bewitched dish-doer himself.
After the discussion, the staff performed traditional dances and songs of the area around a huge bonfire. Once again, it reminded me of Havasupai—of the dancers spinning ’round and ’round and the trance I fell into as I watched them. I imagined my mother dancing amongst them. It had been so nice to see her, even if it had been only in a vivid dream. Then I remembered the man with the black eyes, and it shook me out of my nostalgic trance. The old Native man who had asked me “Why are you here?” I still didn’t know the answer. Why was I anywhere? I had yet to serve a purpose in my life; my death still wasn’t going to make a difference.
I fixed my eyes on Raashida, who danced in a much more high-energy fashion than I’d thought possible for her late stage of pregnancy. I’d seen enough pregnant women in my nursing career to guess that she was close to term. Because of this and so many other reasons, I found her mesmerizing. The way she spun and laughed was reminiscent of the dream I’d had of my mother the night before. I felt, in that moment, that my mother was trying to tell me something about Raashida. She was special in some way—important.
I had found myself envious of Raashida at times—jealous of her youth and her sweet smile, but mostly of her capacity for reproduction. She embodied everything I was never to have, or at least that’s how I interpreted it. She must have a special love, I thought. One that made her so happy, she was able to maintain her constant sweet smile. Or the baby—maybe that’s what did it: the promise of a new life. Whatever it was, I wanted a taste of it—just a morsel—simply to experience that kind of contentment and joy, even for a day. I wanted to know her secret. She seemed to have the feeling I’d experienced atop the Piazzale Michelangelo, gazing upon the red rooftops over Florence. It was the one time I’d felt as though I were truly living in that exact moment. Only, hers was a continuous string of perfect moments, not just
a fleeting solitary one.
I was unable to take my eyes off Raashida as the other staff members took turns dancing with her. Then she grabbed us all, one by one, pulling us into her personal party. I danced out of obligation; I couldn’t extract the same joy from it as she did, but I couldn’t stop wondering about her. I wanted to know her story. Why had she traveled with us from camp to camp while all the others had stayed behind? Why, when all of the other staff had been so open about their lives, had she remained silent? Most spoke of their homes and families at mealtime, but not Raashida. And Edison was never far away from her, which drove me to the conclusion that Edison must be Raashida’s husband, or at least the father of her baby. I imagined that, for similar reasons as Wilbur’s not wanting the guests to know he was the owner of the travel company and accommodations, Raashida and Edison did not want to divulge their personal relationship.
All of the African camps were in the boondocks, far away from civilization, which meant that many of the employees of the camps lived a good distance away, and some even lived in other African countries. So Wilbur had come up with the arrangement that they would work for three months at a time, and then travel back to their homes to spend four weeks with their families. It made sense now that Raashida had been following us from camp to camp. She wanted to stay close to her husband.
CHAPTER 29
Waiting for us in the morning was yet another nightmarishly minuscule airplane, this one ready to take us to Zambia. When Carol asked if it would be all right if she rode shotgun instead of babysitting me, I tried not to look profoundly relieved as I nodded my approval. The tradeoff was that Clifford plowed his behind down next to me, once again encroaching upon my personal space.
As we rolled down the runway, I recognized that I should have prepared for the inevitable. Luckily, Edison was way ahead of me. He had a barf bag in hand and held it in front of my face just as my stomach began to turn. I was grateful to not have to subject Wilbur to the unpleasant task.
“You don’t travel very well, do ya?” Clifford asked.
He had a knack for offensively stating the obvious.
“I didn’t know there were planes this small. Or that we’d be on so goddamn many of them.”
“Didn’t y’all read the brochure?”
“No, this trip was sort of a spontaneous decision.”
“That’s kinda weird, ’cause they told me I got the las’ spot six months ago.”
“That is weird. Guess there must have been a last-minute cancellation,” I responded, carefully avoiding eye contact.
Lying wasn’t permitted in my “being a good person” credo, but I didn’t want to rat out Wilbur. Instead, I decided to change the subject altogether.
“What did you do for a living before you retired, Clifford?”
“I was a cop.”
That made perfect sense. He even had the cop mustache, complete with crumbs.
“They use ta’ call me ‘The Dog’ at the station.”
“You mean after Clifford the Big Red Dog?”
“Naw. Whaddaya mean?”
“Oh, it’s a…never mind. Go on.”
“I was a detective. They called me ‘The Dog’ because I could sniff out the bad guys. Speakin’a dogs, lemme show you my princess.”
He reached into his pocket and extracted one of those accordion-style plastic holders containing what seemed like hundreds of pictures of his cutesy little purse dog. He wasn’t satisfied until I had admired and complimented every last one.
At least when Carol blathered on, she was oblivious to my apathy. Clifford was insistent upon my complete engrossment in his nonsense. Truth be told, they would have made a perfect couple, Clifford and Carol, if only they hadn’t despised one another so much. They both just needed someone to listen to them, and right then I made the conscious decision that it was my duty to become that someone.
When the flight reached its destination, I was verging on tears of joy to have solid ground beneath me once again. Terra firma. As I reveled in the lack of motion under my feet, I walked as far away from Clifford as possible. I’d had enough of his particular brand of torture for the moment. I contemplated how good people do it. How do they remain so patient with people who are so irritating? Or are the “good people” the ones who eventually snap, bursting into their place of business with an assault rifle and taking out all of their coworkers? Being a good person was going to take a lot of practice, and I was starting to doubt whether I had enough time to master the art.
Edison walked us to the main convergence area and began to explain that the camp in Zambia offered mostly water activities. Water activities equal boats. I disliked boats as much as, or even more than, flying contraptions. I had psychosomatic motion sickness just imagining myself on a boat. To add insult to injury, the tented cabins were situated right on the water. Rather than focusing on that every time I looked at the water in Zambia, I tried to recall the naked conversation I had with Wilbur while bathing in the river in Sedona. Sadly, we were not going to relive the adventure in Zambia, as the Kafue River was infested by crocodiles, hippos, and various other predatory creatures. I loved having a view of the river, as long as it remained a safe distance from me, and vice-versa.
To my pleasant surprise, the actual pontoon boats were nothing like the motion-laden, nausea-inducing demons that I had conjured up in my addled brain. As it turned out, the movement of the boat agreed with my stomach just fine. In fact, the wind felt invigorating. Despite this, I still managed to vomit in Zambia on a somewhat regular basis.
Zambia has issues with the tsetse, a large biting fly that causes trypanosomiasis, or “sleeping sickness.” The symptoms include fever, joint pain, headaches, itching, swollen lymph nodes, confusion, complete organ failure, and eventually death—basically, every unimaginably horrible symptom possible. The parasite produces tryptophol, a chemical in the body that induces sleep. The sufferer experiences alternating bouts of extreme fatigue and fits of wakefulness.
We were all against getting the sleeping sickness—especially the “eventual death” aspect of it. As if the sleeping sickness didn’t make the tsetse flies scary enough, the little bastards were completely immune to insect repellant.
Some brilliant local had discovered that burning elephant dung caused the tsetse flies to stay away. That is what I remember most about Zambia: the revoltingly pungent smoke of burning elephant feces—hence my vomiting. We all spent the majority of our time there with bandanas over our mouths and noses like bandits in the Old West. There were a few times I would have opted for the organ failure over that wretched smell. Every time I complained to Wilbur about the smoldering elephant dung, he just shrugged his shoulders in bemusement. It seemed Wilbur, Edison, and all of the rest of the staff were immune to the fumes.
Just hours after we arrived in Zambia I found myself with the group on a pontoon boat with the multitalented Edison at the helm, piloting us down the Kafue River. Within minutes, the boat was surrounded by hippos and crocodiles. Everyone spotted them immediately—everyone except Carol, that is.
“Can we swim here?” Carol asked. “I wore my suit.”
She felt the need to traumatize us with the sight of her neon-yellow bikini under a white shirt, which she lifted up for our viewing displeasure.
Sure. Go ahead…I thought in my less than charitable brain before reigning myself back into “good girl” mode.
“Um, no. The crocodiles may ignore you, but hippos are actually very dangerous,” Edison replied with more composure than I could have mustered. Everyone else muffled snickers.
“Huh?” Carol questioned.
Then, as she scanned her surroundings, her eyes bulged at the sight of a crocodile basking in the sunlight on the shore. It registered in her pea brain that she wasn’t on the Lido deck of the Love Boat.
As Carol collected herself from her perceived near-death experience, Edison drew our attention to various species of birds and some water monitors, which looked like miniature dinosaurs.
Then he pointed to a hippo on the shore eating grass, with red streaks running down his face and back.
“Over there,” Edison announced, “is a hippo out of the water. Hippos don’t usually like to be out of the water during the day. Their skin is very sensitive, but that oily substance it is secreting contains a red pigment that protects the hippo’s delicate skin from the sun. Humans have been trying to replicate it for years. It is a natural sunscreen, antiseptic, and insect repellent all in one.”
Edison chuckled. To me, it appeared as though the hippo was bleeding from every pore on his body. It was one of the oddest things I had ever seen.
After leaving the majesty of the hippo, we spent a few hours traveling slowly down the Kafue. As the day wore on and the sun began to set, Wilbur put his arm around me. No sunset I had ever beheld before was as beautiful as an African sunset. It was almost as stunning as the lovely man next to me, into whose chest I instinctively nuzzled my face.
One cloudy day in Zambia, Edison took us fishing. I had never really understood the concept of catching something for sport, but I played along anyway. We were back out on the pontoon boat, but this time with worms and reels. Edison went over the basics of fishing, mostly for the sake of the women, or possibly just for the sake of Carol. He explained to us that there were large catfish in the water, and if one took hold of our hook, we should let it take the line and swim for awhile, then wait for the catfish to tire in order to keep it from snapping our line.
Almost immediately Carol threw her line back, hooking Clifford’s hat in the process. Unaware, she cast her line into the water, sending Clifford’s hat with it and exposing his mostly bald head. Edison attempted to fish the hat out of the water with his pole, while concealing his “OMG: white people!” smile.
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