She described the smell of the bodies, the rough hands and the familiar phlegmy voice. She showed them the photos on the tiny screen of her camera. There was Muthega, how guilty he was! Just sitting there.
“It had to have been him,” Jane said. “He obviously doesn’t care about the elephants and he is in league with the poachers. He wanted the cameras destroyed.”
Johnno answered, “We cannot have criminals working for us like that. Sorry, so sorry we had to learn this way.”
Jane thought she would feel stronger when she reported Muthega, when she set in motion the wheels that would punish him for what he did to her, to the elephants. Johnno told Jane it had happened before—poachers bribing protectors to look the other way. Ivory was a lucrative trade, and it paid to hand out bribes for easier access to the animals.
“But Muthega,” he said, “Muthega surprises me. He’s been an excellent, trustworthy employee for years. We’ve only recently given him a substantial raise. This drought, though... Everyone is desperate. People’s children are dying.”
He shook his head, disappointed, as betrayed as Jane was.
Later that afternoon Johnno drove Jane to the US Embassy to file a report. The marine who inspected her passport looked like a boy from home. The carpeted hallways, the smiling portraits of the president and the familiar accents Jane heard around her made her dizzy with longing—how she wanted to go home.
It was a man about her age who helped her fill out the paperwork to lodge a criminal complaint. He was tall with dark hair, and when she told him what happened, his brow furrowed and he winced. Jane thought she heard him curse under his breath. When the paper was filled out, he pulled a business card from inside his desk and reached over to hand it to Jane. Under the seal of the United States was his name in gold letters—Paul O’Reilly.
“I don’t know if you were planning to go back to Narok to work, or back to the States, but you’ll have to stay around Kenya for a few weeks, maybe a few months,” he said. “Authorities will want to question you. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. Call me.” He smiled and Jane felt dizzy again. She slipped the card into her backpack.
Jane stayed in a hotel in Nairobi that night. She showered until the water turned cold, scrubbing and scrubbing and wishing to turn herself inside out to be able to clean every part of her of the memory of those men. Then she crawled into bed and she slept and dreamed about her mother. In the dream, Jane was an elephant and her mother was chasing her, and every time Jane turned around to see if her elephant mother was there, she saw the flash of a machete through the dust she’d kicked up behind her as she ran.
The hotel phone woke her.
“Muthega,” Johnno said immediately. “Are you sure he was among the men who assaulted you? Did you absolutely see him?”
“I heard him,” Jane said. “I thought I did.”
Jane remembered the smell of the men, meaty and smoky. She wondered if Johnno ever smelled that way.
“Is there any way, any way at all—” he said this gently, apologetically “—that you could be mistaken? You see,” he went on, “the Narok police have found a body. They think it may be him, but it’s too maimed to tell. Hacked with a machete the same way the poachers hack apart the elephants—face and feet and hands.”
Jane listened, both to Johnno and to her own heart, banging in her chest. Johnno kept talking, his voice small and sharp through the phone, a needle to her brain.
“Some of the other locals are saying Muthega was targeted. He’d made enemies of the poachers recently—instead of staying away like he’d done before, letting them do their business unimpeded, he’d been watching them closely, taking photos of suspects in the town while they drank beer. He’d been taking names.”
Jane thought of Muthega the day they watched Twiga through the barren trees, the way his voice softened when he told her Twiga’s name and the reason for it. Jane thought of how he always spoke quietly and made little clicking sounds when they drove together, slowly, through the herds of Thomson’s gazelles because they were too fatigued to move like they should have and he didn’t want to scare them. Jane thought of his smile and his easy banter with the women by the river, the bits of hard candy he’d sometimes hand out to the children. She thought of his possible wife and how she had never asked if he had one or if she could meet his family. She’d never treated Muthega like a colleague, not like the people she’d worked with in offices back home.
Then she remembered that tiny, critical word—too. Jane heard one of the men say “too”—he spat it at her like a stone. “Next time we kill you, too.” Jane hadn’t forgotten that word when she told Johnno her story. But it referred to Twiga, the elephant. Jane had been sure of that. “Next time we’ll kill you as we did the elephant.” That’s how she’d explained it to Johnno. She hadn’t considered any other angle. She was angry and scared and wanted Muthega punished.
The rain came that night. It beat the windows and dimmed the streetlights. When it moved on and left nothing but heavy, dripping trees, cool air and pools of water in the streets, the winged termites released themselves from their subterranean caves and spun through the air in frantic, pale clouds. They beat against Jane’s window in a desperate attraction to the bedside light she had turned on. Jane watched them flicker and dive, flicker and dive, until finally they fell away when the sky turned to dawn.
In the morning, she called her father. She had no idea what time it was back home, but the phone rang only twice before his new wife answered, sleepy but happy to hear Jane’s voice.
“Jane? Your dad’s been wondering when we might hear from you! We’re dying to hear all about it, let me get him...he’s in the bathroom.”
Jane heard what sounded like the phone dropping from her stepmother’s hands, and then a voice calling through the halls of the house she remembered so well.
“Honey, it’s Jane! Come quick!”
Then her father’s voice, low and soothing, said, “Janie! So glad, so glad to hear your voice! We miss you. We’ve been gathering things to send you in a care package. But we haven’t finished. Is the address you gave us still the right one?”
Jane imagined the house. The warm kitchen with the old blue table where she always ate breakfast—weekdays cereal and every Sunday waffles that Jane and Lance would pool in syrup.
Jane tried to keep the tears out of her voice when she spoke. “I miss you, too, Dad. I miss you both. How’s Lance?” This time, when her father described Lance’s progress, and how the new medication helped with his moods, and how his new psychiatrist was brilliant, Jane listened. In her mind she saw Lance at five or six, sitting at the dining room table alone, eating the peanut butter sandwich she’d slapped together for his dinner so quickly that the slices of bread didn’t line up. She thought of how he looked up that evening and asked her to read to him. Had she even bothered to answer before leaving him there, alone, and shutting herself back in her bedroom? Even then, when he was just a regular kid, she’d been a terrible sister. She’d made him a shadow, a vague annoyance, as she thought her father had done to her. How unfair that was.
“Dad,” Jane said when her father paused. “I called to ask you something. It’s important. You’ve made a will, right? You’ve made me his guardian if something happened to you? I’m next in line. He’s my brother, and I want to help.”
Jane flew to Narok that afternoon. She was terrified to go back to the place where she had been both victim and perpetrator, but she had to—one more time.
She slipped the card out of her backpack and studied it again. Paul O’Reilly. She assumed she’d still have to be questioned in the case. She’d have to go back to Nairobi and meet him again soon—tell him the whole story and maybe help find the people who did this to Muthega. There were no papers to accuse the faceless men she didn’t know, but she’d do what she could to find them.
The tiny plane cruised over the edge of th
e Rift Valley, and the earth fell away below. The scroll of the land spread out below Jane, empty and pale. The rains had swelled the river and its banks were dark with dampness. The plane banked steeply and suddenly the land swung out of Jane’s view, replaced with nothing but sky, darkening into evening, and another storm’s arrival. When the plane tipped back and leveled, Jane looked down again. The land was too dark to see details now. It had turned into shadows and long, ill-defined shapes where the river once was. Jane thought of the local women standing in their muddy courtyards, holding their faces and their buckets to the sky. The plane was a winged termite, released from the dry, tight earth. And Jane was one, too—flinging herself into the darkening sky, desperate for softening earth, desperate for light.
NAROK
Leona had lied to the white Kenyan, and now it was time to tell him the truth and ask him to help her. She hated needing help, and with every breath she fought the instinct to give up, to go back to the manyatta and let Adia have her old life, no matter what that meant for her future.
The expression on Simi’s face when they left the manyatta that day flashed in Leona’s mind. What on earth had she done? Simi was the one who’d mothered Adia all these years; she was the one who protected the girl. Leona felt weak. No matter what, she would go back, she would tell Simi that she was sorry, she would let Simi know that she’d always be a mother to Adia, even if Adia lived in Nairobi or Solai or somewhere else. She vowed to keep the connection between her daughter and Simi alive.
Leona felt frozen somehow now that she’d made the sudden decision to move out of the manyatta. She wasn’t Maasai, and the white Kenyan wasn’t, either. Leona thought about the white Kenyan’s family, and in her imagination he’d had the perfect childhood; one foot in the customs of his European heritage, and the other firmly in the ways of this place. Leona couldn’t think of a better solution for her girl, but her thoughts were unsettled, confused. She felt unable to make a decision bigger than what to eat for dinner or when to make Adia take a shower. Narok was a small town—most people knew each other at least by sight—but it was far bigger than the manyatta, and that allowed Leona the illusion of anonymity. That, for now, was a relief.
In the manyatta, Leona was peripheral to Adia. The girl had moved with a constantly shifting school of manyatta children, all between the ages of two and seven, who swirled in and out of the individual inkajijiks like tides. All the mothers there were fine-tuned to the concept of benign neglect; that was the Maasai way.
In that sense, Leona knew, her version of new motherhood was vastly different and perhaps completely opposite to that of her own mother’s, who birthed Leona in a bright Portland hospital while Leona’s father drank coffee in the lobby. Leona’s maternal grandparents lived an hour’s drive away, but Leona was told, later, that they never came to stay after she was born; they never helped Leona’s mother ease into the first days with the new baby. Being a mother was immediately a lonely thing. Leona’s mother hadn’t taken to the role, or the isolation. As soon as she could, she hired the nanny and the housekeeper. She’d never had another baby. The similarities Leona was beginning to see between herself and her mother made Leona feel bruised deep inside. She’d never wanted the comparison. It was the main reason she hadn’t wanted children of her own. She was from a long line of mothers who didn’t mother. And now, here she was.
In Narok, motherhood became central to Leona for the first time. It became a lonely and alien way of being. She was uncomfortable directing Adia’s every move, and she wasn’t used to being the girl’s only source of entertainment. Time stretched out thin and slow, and even Leona’s body seemed to move as if through deep water. The daily ritual was her job, while her position in Nairobi sat waiting. She wouldn’t leave until she made a decision about Adia’s father. She’d called the department head and assured him she still wanted the job, but lied about why she’d have to delay her start. There was a new piece of information she was tracking down—old stories of days when Maasai crossed into Tanzania for grazing. She didn’t know if he believed her, but he said he’d hold the job for one semester. The university could wait.
Now, since they arrived in Narok less than two weeks ago, every day was the same. Breakfast at the café next to the hotel was first. Adia ate piles of sweet dough in the form of greasy, fried mandazis, and Leona drank cup after cup of hot chai. She hoped that if she drank enough of the sweet tea, the caffeine would eventually bring her back to life; speed up her blood again, throw a spark into the damp ash she’d become. Without her work, she didn’t know who she was, and she could feel that the absence of purpose was making her depressed, empty. But she had to push that aside. She had to find Adia’s father. Everything else had to wait.
For the first two weeks in Narok, Leona went to the bar daily. She described what she remembered of the white Kenyan to anyone who would listen. Often her audience were at their most unsuspecting, tired from their day and only wanting to order a beer, and when she pulled at their shirtsleeves or nudged their shoulders, they looked at her askance, suspicious. She knew someone, eventually, would know who she was describing, and also that her behavior would be talked about, but she kept her voice low; she murmured like a spy. Rumors blew like the dust around here, and she didn’t want the white Kenyan to know anything before she could look him in the eyes.
She wondered if she’d recognize the man if he walked in. She’d only seen him twice, after all. The drunken, sweaty night of Adia’s conception and then again only days after Adia’s birth three years ago, when she was exhausted and terrified and had lied to him to make him disappear. She wondered if Adia looked like him and if, when she saw him, she’d know it instantly.
It was an aid worker’s driver who finally gave her what she needed. One morning at the end of their second week in Narok, Leona saw a set of waxy Chinese crayons and a lined exercise book in the window of Narok’s only stationery store and, on a whim, she pulled out a small wad of shillings and bought them. Leona didn’t know what was normal for a three-year-old American, but she knew Adia missed her manyatta friends. She’d never been without a gaggle of age-mates, and Leona hoped the crayons and paper, which Adia had never used before, would help make the sitting and waiting more bearable. Back at the bar, Adia proudly showed the bartender her new gifts, and just as Leona was instructing the child on how to hold a crayon, she felt a tapping on her shoulder.
“Madam.” The voice was gruff and wrapped in the scent of beer. “You are looking for Mister John?”
Leona spun around so fast the crayon she was holding flew across the room and rolled under a distant table. Adia screeched and hopped off her stool, then scrabbled on the floor to retrieve it. The speaker was a tall, muscular man around her age, she figured. He had scarification marks on his cheeks that told Leona he wasn’t Maasai. Perhaps Kikuyu, she thought. He wore a khaki safari suit with a badge that said, “The Mara Lodge—Driver.”
“Mr. John?” Leona tried to keep her face impassive. Suddenly she was frightened. Maybe it was a mistake to find him.
“Yes, Mister John, from Solai. Wilson—” here the man indicated a bar regular, slumped in a chair in a dark corner “—Wilson told me you were looking for Mister John. I know him.”
“Is he here?” Leona asked, her voice unintentionally high.
“No. I am also from Solai. I can tell you how to go.”
He nodded at the bartender, asked for another Tusker and, when it was slid across the polished surface to him, tipped his dusty hat toward Leona. She would pay.
He used Adia’s blue crayon to draw a rough map in the little exercise book. Then he ripped out the page and handed it to Leona.
“You can go there by car in one day. But the road is bad, so if it is raining, you cannot make it.” He swigged back a long drink of beer.
Leona was grateful for the checks her parents enclosed in their letters. Her Fulbright fellowship was long expired and the stipend fr
om it had dried up. The only money she earned anymore was the pittance her articles received when they were published, and the promise of an advance on the book. In the manyatta, money hadn’t mattered. There was nothing to spend it on. But in Narok everything cost. She fished a two-hundred-shilling note of her father’s money out of her wallet and handed it over to the dusty man standing next to her. He answered with a solemn nod and placed the blue crayon carefully back in the box. Leona folded up the paper with the blue crayon map and slipped it into her bag.
Occasionally, Kamau, the guide who had drawn the map, came back to the bar she still visited. She didn’t ask after the white Kenyan, John, anymore, though. She had the information she needed and now only had to decide how to deal with it. Those days she watched Kamau across the room, and when he looked over she always waved. She didn’t want to talk to him, wasn’t attracted to him in any way, but Kamau’s presence gave her a connection to John. John. His name. She could hold it in her lips and write it down on paper if she wanted to. She could give it to Adia. But it felt unnatural to say it out loud, slightly uncomfortable, like wearing a heavy jacket on a warm day. The tenuous connection to Kamau was the only kind of relationship she could manage right now. Her thoughts were too ragged and her indecision was a living thing inside her, like cancer.
One afternoon Kamau caught her by the arm as she made her way out of the ladies’ room.
“Have you followed my map, madam? Have you gone to Solai?”
“No,” Leona lied easily. “My car is in the garage. Have to wait.”
Then she felt a shiver of terror when he answered, “I can take you there. I am going to visit my father. I can take the car of my boss.”
Kamau turned and waved at a friend across the room. As he walked away, he shouted back to Leona, “I will find you here in two days, and we can go to Solai.”
It was late that night when a pounding on the door woke Leona from a dead sleep.
The Brightest Sun Page 8