Stash stared at the list. “Who has so many bedrooms?”
“Motembo,” Chiddy said, leaving us as unenlightened as before. He waved another typed page. “These are the dimensions and specifications. You are requested to use fine, fine woods such as African mahogany, ‘with blackwood or ebony accents,’” he said, reading the last few words straight from the page. “Accents are drawer pulls, hooks, and trim, I believe.”
“Motembo?” I asked.
“A safari camp. Six new guest tents. Quite far, far away.”
Our biggest order ever and from a safari camp. I felt a shiver of excitement.
“How soon can you begin?” Chiddy asked.
Stash looked at me. “We’ll start today.”
From that morning forward, Uncle Stash and I put in long hours, seven days a week. The instructions from the camp referred to furniture we had sold before, one-of-a-kind pieces of the highest quality, made from the most beautiful materials. We were happy to apply that standard again and to charge the premium such work deserved. Cost didn’t seem a problem for Jackson Quinn, Motembo’s manager. He had signed our contract with a bold slash through the Q and included a down payment of 40 percent. Chiddy told us Jackson Quinn was a certified guide with an excellent reputation in the safari business. He had risen to management in another premier camp. Now he planned to transform Motembo into the finest of them all.
Although I hadn’t met Jackson Quinn, he became a valiant figure in my mind. He was enterprising, successful, and particular about quality. He was a man who understood the allure of the African bush and created welcoming outposts for like-minded souls. Best of all, he was a safari guide. I wondered if he knew my longtime heartthrob, Ruby, of Ruby’s Amazing Safaris. Ruby had stirred my youthful fantasies for so long that she had grown in my imagination to Amazonian proportions. I doubted even Jackson Quinn could stand up to her.
Mr. Quinn was never far from my mind as I cut, joined, sanded, and finished each piece of furniture destined for Motembo. I expected that our number one customer would personally inspect every knob and hook, and I did not want to disappoint him.
During those weeks, I seldom saw the rest of my family. Baba went through his usual swings, making frequent trips to Captain Biggie’s and working hard in the field when he felt well enough. Hannie was consumed by her new school and friends, already bringing home decent teachers’ reports. Zola? I didn’t want to know how Zola spent her time. Actually, I did. Yet I never asked about her boyfriend because I hoped she would tell me on her own. She cooked and organized for us as always. Our household ran as efficiently as ever. I supposed the boyfriend gave her a sense of a larger life, something that was hers and hers alone. Why should she have to explain?
My new attitude about Zola’s romance had a lot to do with Mima Swale. I hadn’t told anyone that I had begun stopping at Swale’s Grocery after work or that Mima possessed the power to double my heart rate in five seconds flat. Mrs. Swale departed the store promptly at closing to return home and cook dinner for Mima’s younger brothers. Fortunately for me, Mima stayed behind to tidy the shelves and sweep. Although my days in Stash’s shop were long and intense, I never felt too tired to visit Mima after work—to watch her eyes widen when I tapped on the window, to see the smile that lit her face when she opened the door.
At first, I stayed only a few minutes, nervous, not wanting to get in the way or slow down her chores. I would say hello, ask about her day. She usually told a funny story about a customer or a mishap involving a toppled display or a bird that had flown in the window. Once I brought a small bowl I had made and another time, a sack of fresh sawdust for soaking up spills. More than once, I found myself in speechless thrall to the lilt of her voice, the movement of her lips, or the twist of hair that coiled against her neck. We were unnaturally careful not to touch each other. An accidental brush of our shoulders felt like a seismic event. I looked into her eyes. She looked away. She looked into my eyes. I looked away. The lunacy of young love. She always asked me to come back and see her again, so I did.
8
STASH USED SOME OF OUR windfall from the Motembo project to buy a rugged used van with four-wheel drive, wide rear doors, and a spacious interior. The previous owners had installed a winch and heavy-duty tires for off-road driving. Stash and Aunt Letty owned an ancient station wagon that had served them and the shop for years. But now our booming furniture business required more supplies, more deliveries, and more frequent trips to the bank. Stash said that after I got my license, I could relieve him of most of our errands.
“Driving a vehicle is a big responsibility,” he told me. “You could kill someone.”
I nodded, trying to hide my excitement. Not many people in our village owned cars or knew how to drive. Baba once had a truck, but he crashed it, and that was that.
“Hitting a donkey at night could be fatal.”
“A donkey?”
“They’re attracted to the heat of the road. You can’t see them until too late. Death by crashing into donkeys is quite common.”
“I’ll be very careful.”
After I studied the rules of the road, Stash drove me to the Motor Vehicle Department in a town some distance away. To my relief, I passed the written test with ease. An eye exam confirmed my excellent vision. While Stash read from a stack of old National Geographic magazines, I took a lesson in a shiny new car with an encouraging instructor who afterward pronounced me fit to drive under supervision. At the end of the day, I possessed a learner’s permit, a big yellow “L” to place on the dashboard, and permission to “proceed with practice.”
On my first outing with Stash, I killed the engine three times before reaching first gear. The van wasn’t the well-oiled machine I had driven with the instructor. Then I shifted into second and tore out a patch of road.
“In some places that’s against the law,” Stash said, gripping his seat belt.
My hands choked the wheel as we shuddered along. But soon I found the rhythm. After I had achieved a few smooth cycles through the shift pattern, driving felt as natural to me as riding my bike.
We careened around a corner. “Early cars didn’t have steering wheels,” Stash informed me. “You had to steer with a lever.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes, I think so.” He settled back in his seat, relaxing a little as my technique improved. We were nearing a crossroads choked with vehicles, pushcarts, pedestrians, and a cyclist balancing a pig on the handlebars. I downshifted, causing only a minor jolt to my passenger.
“During the polar bear migration in Churchill, Canada, you have to ride in a special Tundra Buggy so the bears can’t climb in the windows and eat you. I read it in National Geographic.”
“Do polar bears want to eat you?”
“Yes, because they’re famished.” He looked at me. “The inside of a vehicle is the safest place in the bush too, especially at night. You can write that in your journal.”
I nodded, wanting to be agreeable. I didn’t tell him that so far I had written nothing in my journal. The immaculate, leather-bound volume, still wrapped in brown paper, remained as blank and unblemished as the day Mr. Kitwick gave it to me. What, exactly, I was waiting for, I couldn’t say. But I had a feeling I would know when the right time had come.
Although I wasn’t superstitious, I had to admit that another graduation gift, the lucky bean seed bracelet from Zola, was serving me very well. “For luck in love and work,” she had said. At the time I had brushed off the notion of an easy shortcut to important life goals. But at present I was inclined to look upon her gift with a tad more respect.
For one thing, I was wearing the bracelet the first time I kissed Mima. I had stayed late at the grocery store to help her carry in boxes from the back room. When we were getting ready to lock up and leave, she took off her apron and hung it on a peg, turned out the light, and then hesitated at the door. She must h
ave turned to face me, but all I remember is that our lips came together with predestined ardor and precision. My arms found their way around her. The length of our bodies met, pulsed, rubbed, and said hello. Lucky bean seeds were far from my mind during that first kiss. But I couldn’t deny the bracelet was there, on my wrist, while I was touching the girl who so thrillingly wanted to touch me too.
For another thing, work with Uncle Stash was turning out even better than I had hoped. I had never guessed that in addition to learning carpentry and woodworking, I would become a licensed driver—or that my job would connect me even remotely to places like Motembo or people like Chiddy and Jackson Quinn.
After I passed my final driver’s test, I used the van to transfer items from the shop to Chiddy’s larger truck parked on the outskirts of the village. The furniture Stash and I built for Motembo was solid and handsome, with elegant wood grains and lustrous finishes. “Too fine to wheel down the street,” Chiddy declared on his first pickup. “Too classy for street walking, you know,” he whispered in my ear, grinning.
Each bedroom suite included eight pieces plus a detachable frame for mosquito netting. Chiddy estimated his truck could hold all six suites if we broke down the beds and frames for reassembly at their destination. Because of limited space in the shop, we agreed that Chiddy would pick up and store the Motembo pieces as we finished them. When the entire order was complete, he would drive the furniture to the camp in one trip, a two-day journey over sketchy roads.
“I believe your furniture will be very well received at Motembo,” Chiddy said, puffing as he and I hoisted a recently completed desk into his truck. “The quality is equal to the best I’ve seen in other lodges, even in the finest lounge and dining areas.”
Lounge and dining areas? I knew nothing of safari camps. Details such as this thrilled me. “There are separate tents for the lounge and dining areas?”
“Oh yes, always separate. And quite grand in an outdoorsy, African way. These spaces often have high thatched roofs and sofas with many cushions. There is a bar as long as a canoe. The dining table will seat fourteen or more, with wide, wide arm chairs for maximum comfort.” As he said this he patted his own impressive girth. I was becalmed for a moment by the image of fourteen Chiddy-size diners.
“Does Jackson Quinn already have the lounge and dining furniture for Motembo?”
“I couldn’t say. The last time I was there, we dined on logs around a campfire.”
I wondered how well Chiddy knew Motembo’s owner. I didn’t need to inquire about this because he added, “Safari camps are quite isolated, you know. Far, far from towns and each other. Sometimes I deliver food and beer and always the latest newspapers. When I arrive, everyone is happy to see me, especially Jackson Quinn.”
I suppressed a smile. Of course they were. I could almost hear his cheery greeting as he rolled into Motembo. Helloooooooo, Jackson!
“I spend the night in the staff quarters before returning home, so there is dinner and talking.” He gazed into the distance as if remembering a particularly enjoyable evening. “Jackson is an excellent host. Often we have Amarula at his campfire.”
“Amarula?”
“I see you have yet to discover the pleasure of Amarula. This is drink made from the fruit of the marula tree. Very strong. Just a little can give you a pleasant feeling. But you must be careful not to drink too much.”
I had watched elephants shake marula trees to dislodge ripe fruit. They butted their heads against the tree trunks and pulled down branches as thick as their legs. “Elephants love marula.”
He nodded. “People claim elephants get drunk on it. This is a humorous idea, but untrue. Elephants do not say, ‘Stop! No eating yet. We must wait for the fruit to ferment.’”
Chiddy’s laugh echoed through the cavernous cargo hold of his truck. We had filled about a quarter of the space with furniture. The finished pieces sat at the back, wrapped in felt, securely strapped to the walls. Stash and I still had a lot of work to do.
* * *
Every two weeks or so, Chiddy turned up for the transfer of new items from the shop floor to the van for the ride to his big truck parked outside the village. Driving through our narrow streets with Chiddy by my side swelled me with pride, especially when we passed Swale’s Grocery. Often I glimpsed Mima through the open door and sometimes her mother. When they spotted the van passing by, they smiled and waved.
“I see you have won the mother too,” Chiddy said, peering through the window. “This is very helpful in a romance.”
Although I hadn’t made that calculation, I was glad Mrs. Swale seemed to like me. She was a striking woman with long limbs typically clad in pants and sleeved shirts that gave her an aura of unfettered competence. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail that failed to contain the wispy strands floating around her face. She had thanked me for my gift of sawdust, saying she used the compound to absorb and sweep up spills at home as well as in the store. Her brisk, no-nonsense manner concealed the pain she must have felt at the loss of her husband. Bastian Swale had left her with twin boys, Donovan and Drew, in addition to Mima. Caring for the boys while running the grocery business would have been impossible without help from her daughter.
Rather than tying her down, Mima’s growing responsibilities increased her freedom and, thrillingly, our chances to see each other. Like me, she had earned a driver’s license in order to take over important errands for the family business. Driving the same truck that had seen the last of her father, she delivered groceries to customers, fetched supplies, and made weekly runs to the bank. She was conscientious in these matters, combining two or three errands in one trip for efficiency’s sake, not wasting time. We were alike in this way and in our equally serious efforts to meet. We learned to coordinate our business in town, parking side by side on the cool, shadowed side of the bank building. If we felt we could take a few extra minutes, we would stop for ice cream or sit in the van and talk about everything and nothing: our work, bad drivers, happenings in the village.
“Your aunt Letty came into the store,” she told me one day. “She’s nice.”
“Yes.”
She leaned closer. “You might want to stop and see her. She’s baking pies.”
I feigned shock. “What happened to grocer–shopper confidentiality?”
She suppressed a laugh.
“What if I came in to buy, say, condoms?” I managed to pose this question while looking her straight in the eye. “Would that be a confidential matter?”
Her cheeks bloomed with color, but to her credit she did not break my gaze. “That would be a very confidential matter.”
Passersby who saw us would never guess the high, intense pleasure that came from these encounters, from simply being together. We were careful not to touch in public, but even then, the slightest tap, the most casual brushing of our limbs, caused carnal upheaval out of all proportion to the apparent cause.
When we were truly alone, at night in the grocery store, Mima returned my kisses with heat and urgency that matched my own. Once she surprised me by parting her lips to admit my tongue, and we both discovered the pleasures of deeper probing. Did all lovers do this? Put their tongues in each other’s mouths? I found the practice mildly shocking, even as it felt elemental and true.
Mima’s face became my tender playground—her temples, nose, cheeks, and mouth nakedly available to my fingers and lips. Time went unnoticed during these stirring explorations. I got lost in the exquisite topography of her features, the curve of her brow, the symmetrical alignment of cheekbone and chin. One night she turned so that her face was half-dark and half-light, a quarter moon. Closing her eyes, she encouraged my kisses with soft sighs and a dreamy half smile.
But from the neck down, she guarded her body like a no-hunting zone. Whenever my excursion wandered south, to the buttons and zippers that fortressed her clothing, she snapped to full attention. Clam
ping her hand on my wrist, she redirected the expedition to more neutral territory in the vicinity of her ear or shoulder blade.
On one occasion, she murmured, “Not yet. Let’s wait.”
I took a deep breath and tried to focus on the delicate contour of her wing bone. Through her T-shirt and whatever she wore underneath, I felt the warmth of her body and a pulse as rapid as my own. “How about in five minutes?”
She pulled away. “I’m serious, Bonesy. I want us to take our time. Everything between us has to be right. Memorable. Like a slow dance.”
“A slow dance,” I said, considering.
She raised her face to mine, and I kissed her deeply, taking my time. When we came up for air, she gasped, “And a long future.”
Stirring thoughts about Mima and our future together took up residence in my mind, where they stepped to the fore, unbidden, at all hours. I walked around feeling weightless, slightly drugged, half drunk. I imagined her fending off other boys who had come before me, saving herself for her future husband, the real deal—a notion that pleased me. She had the confidence of an attractive girl accustomed to setting boundaries. Whenever I ventured into forbidden territory, my inexpert fumblings found a roadblock in the certitude of her limits. But I knew how to wait. Even with my arms around her, when my heart was beating fast and I wanted nothing more than to touch every inch of her, I knew how to wait.
9
JACKSON QUINN HAD NOT SPECIFIED a deadline for the delivery of his order. Nonetheless, Stash and I put unrelenting pressure on ourselves to complete the work as quickly as we could. The owner of Motembo, even absent and unintroduced, loomed large in our minds. We were determined to impress him with our diligence as well as our attention to his very particular needs. We were at-your-service custom builders who also valued the prospect of a showcase in a premier safari camp, where guests from all over the world would see, use, and appreciate our work.
The income was important to me and my family, of course. Yet I took the greatest pleasure in daily, hands-on tasks that used and honed my skills. In the shop I felt competent and useful, proud to have a job I did well. Most of all, I welcomed the challenge of creating fine, original, one-of-a-kind objects that would meet the exacting standards of a person such as Jackson Quinn.
The Story of Bones Page 9