Safari

by Tony Park

  He withdrew his hand and smiled. ‘Fair enough. I’ll walk you out.’

  ‘Fletcher . . . we still haven’t had a chance to talk about the other night. I don’t know if we should . . . if we ought to . . .’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  It was a damned good question. Her reservations, her concerns over what he did for a living, over whether or not there was a future for them, suddenly evaporated.

  They lay in the outdoor bathtub outside her bungalow, bubbles and hot water cascading over the rolled enamel top when either of them moved. He had followed her into the national park in his vehicle, not questioning her preference to sleep at her place rather than in his luxurious lodge. Her back was against his chest, his muscled arms around her. She held his left hand in hers, inspecting it by the mellow light of the full moon. His other hand was under the water, covering her mound – claiming it.

  They had made love on her single bed. She had climaxed again under his soapy caress when he’d made her stand in the tub, knee deep in water under the night sky, while he sat on the edge and washed her. He had stilled her embarrassment, wanting to show her off ‘to the gods,’ he’d said. He still made no comment about her tattoo. A herd of elephant had drunk noisily at the waterhole on the vlei below them as she’d slipped beneath the warm suds.

  ‘I have to leave at dawn,’ he said. ‘The Americans are flying out early.’

  ‘I’ll head up around ten,’ she said, then kissed his fingertip, before licking the length of the digit.

  He kissed the sensitive skin behind her ear and she squirmed playfully. ‘Will you be bringing your kitundu with you – your clothes and whatnot?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He hugged her and kissed her cheek. ‘Good. I’m pleased.’

  10

  Shane showered and dressed in the morning, still thinking about Michelle Parker as he ate a simple breakfast of cereal, tinned fruit and coffee. He was glad he had taken it easy on the booze, but resolved to make up for his temperance that evening in Victoria Falls.

  As he lit his second smoke of the day and walked out to his old Land Rover he dismissed the thoughts of her. If she had been single, he might have made an effort. She was certainly attractive. He liked the way the sun had bleached some pale highlights into her auburn hair. She was tall, and had the angular grace and poise of a giraffe – a little aloof and, at the same time, a little vulnerable on her lofty perch. ‘Enough,’ he said out loud as the starter motor put on its usual whining protest before finally coaxing the engine to life.

  Shane was an habitual early riser – something the army had indoctrinated in him – so even though last night was his first in a bed for ages, he was still up at five am. Outside, smoking his first of the day in the cool dawn light, he had been surprised to see Fletcher’s vehicle coming up the driveway. His boss, who hadn’t noticed him, was dressed in the same clothes he had worn to dinner. There was nowhere else he could have been except with Michelle. Pity.

  Shane drove the Land Rover out of the main gate to the lodge’s airstrip, which paralleled the main dirt road north to the Falls. Dougal’s Cessna roared overhead on final approach. He was coming to collect the gangsters. Shane had no wish to see the men, but Fletcher would be there to farewell them and Shane wanted to catch him to discuss the following week’s patrols before he and his men left for their two-day leave.

  The Americans were already aboard the aircraft as Shane pulled up next to Fletcher’s Discovery. His employer, freshly changed, was leaning into the rear passenger area. Dougal was obviously in a hurry or, more likely, short of fuel, so he wasn’t wasting any time. Fletcher turned and strode back to the Discovery, and returned to the aircraft carrying a brown and green canvas suit bag.

  Shane strode over to the aeroplane. ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ he yelled to Fletcher over the engine noise.

  ‘Change of plans. I have to fly to Bulawayo for a couple of days. I got a call this morning from a senior army contact of mine, Brigadier Moyo, who wants to talk urgently about some work in the Congo. Wants me to meet some other investors tomorrow. There’s a note for Michelle on the front seat explaining everything.’ He pointed back to the four-by-four. ‘She’s coming up later this morning. Can you give it to her?’

  Shane nodded. The discussion about the forthcoming patrols would have to wait until he returned.

  Fletcher leaned close to Shane’s ear again. ‘I promised to take her shopping. Could you be a pal and take her to the Falls with you and your boys? I’ve left her some money for a hotel room – it was supposed to be my treat.’

  ‘She doesn’t strike me as the kind of girl who needs looking after,’ Shane observed.

  ‘She mightn’t get there without you. The diesel tanker I was expecting today has been delayed at the South African border. It won’t be here for another three days. Unless she’s got enough fuel in her Landcruiser, she won’t be going anywhere.’

  ‘Right,’ Shane said. He swore to himself. The last thing he wanted to do on his leave was chauffeur someone else’s girlfriend around. ‘I’ll take an empty drum with me and cross over the border into Livingstone for fuel. It’ll keep us going until the bulk delivery arrives.’ Zambia, unlike the rapidly deteriorating Zimbabwe, had no fuel shortages.

  ‘Good man.’ Fletcher clapped him on the arm in thanks and climbed into the Cessna. Shane waved a hello and goodbye to Dougal, slammed the door shut, and the aircraft raced away.

  Babysitting. That’s all it was. He took his annoyance out on the road, driving hard and fast on the corrugated dirt surface.

  ‘Hey, careful. I think you missed a rock back there,’ Michelle chimed in from the passenger side. Charles, Wise and Caesar were having an even rougher ride in the open back of the four-by-four.

  From the lodge to the Falls was a little less than a hundred kilometres, the first half on badly rutted secondary roads. The Tarmac of the main Bulawayo to Victoria Falls road, when it finally came, was like a balm. He relaxed his grip on the wheel and got over his earlier resentment. He felt for the girl. Although she tried to hide it, she was clearly disappointed by Fletcher’s sudden departure. As Shane had predicted, she had initially rejected the offer of a lift, saying she would drive herself. A check of her fuel gauge had changed her mind.

  ‘So, what have you guys got planned for the day?’ she asked him.

  He told her the surprise he had in store for the rest of his team. He had asked them to give him three hours, in the morning, and after that they could go their separate ways. Charles was planning on spending his leave with his family, who lived just outside of the town; Wise would ensconce himself at the first shebeen he came across, while Caesar was going to the library, church and his girlfriend’s place, in that order. Shane thought that Wise’s parents had named him well.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked.

  ‘Shopping. Food and clothes. You know, the funny thing is that I’ve been to the town of Victoria Falls maybe twenty or thirty times since I got to Zimbabwe, but I haven’t seen the Falls themselves since I first visited as a tourist, nearly ten years ago.’

  ‘The last time I saw them was when I was fifteen years old, just before my folks moved to Oz. I have to cross over to Livingstone on the Zambian side of the river to fill up with diesel,’ Shane gestured over his shoulder to the empty two hundred litre drum around which the men sat in the back of the Land Rover’s tray. ‘I’ve never seen the Falls from the other side.’

  ‘Me neither, and I’ve got my passport with me.’

  He hadn’t meant it as an invitation, but he supposed there were worse ways of spending a day than sightseeing with a pretty girl – even if she were a left-wing greenie pain in the arse who belonged to his boss. However, it seemed that she was trying to make amends for her brusqueness the night before. ‘Okay. Right after we drop the guys off in town.’

  A billboard for Zambezi Lager welcomed them to Victoria Falls but, short of the town itself, Shane took a left turn to the airport. Som
e African women had set up a stall selling lace tablecloths in the hope that the few international tourists who still visited the town might stop on their way.

  ‘Are we collecting someone else?’ Charles asked as Shane stopped the truck outside a cluster of hangars in front of which were parked a row of single-engine privately owned aircraft.

  ‘No, we’re training.’

  Charles’s hacking cough was getting worse and they had had to stop the Land Rover twice on the relatively short journey from Isilwane for him to scurry off into the bush, with barely a shred of dignity, to void his bowels. Shane was getting worried about the man’s deteriorating health and he had suggested Charles visit a doctor during his leave. When Shane had hired him, the first thing Fletcher had said to him was, ‘You know that old gondie’s Henry the Fourth?’ Gondie was one of the myriad derogatory terms used to describe black Africans, but it had taken Shane a moment to realise the second colloquialism meant H-IV, HIV-AIDS. ‘The virus’; ‘the big A’; and ‘slow leak’ were just a few of the many euphemisms for the plague that lowered life expectancy to the early thirties in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. He’d explained to Fletcher that he intended on primarily using Charles’s skills for training and patrol coordination. He looked at the old man’s bloodshot eyes and said, ‘Training for Wise and Caesar.’

  ‘Are we going flying?’ Caesar asked. ‘I have never been in an aeroplane.’

  ‘I have, in the army,’ Wise said.

  Shane said nothing, but motioned for the men to follow him into a small demountable building that advertised joy-flights over the Falls and skydiving. ‘Hi, I called ahead. My name’s Castle,’ he said to a young white man with dreadlocks, sitting behind a desk.

  ‘Ja, free-fall rig for one, accelerated free-fall first jump for two, right?’

  Charles was relieved, Wise was excited, Caesar was scared to the point of wetting himself, Shane was in his element, and Michelle was laughing until he said, ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ she protested. ‘I’d forget to pull the ripcord!’

  ‘There are ways around that. Have you ever seen a tandem jump?’

  ‘I won’t jump unless the madam jumps,’ Caesar said defiantly.

  ‘Okay, I’ll do it!’ Michelle exclaimed. Caesar looked sick.

  Shane had done his static line and free-fall parachute courses in the army as part of his SAS training and had often jumped for pleasure back in Australia at weekends. He’d later qualified as a parachute jump master and then as an instructor and was a veteran skydiver, with more than six hundred military and civilian entries on his respective parachute log cards.

  He inspected the tandem rig and explained to Michelle that all she had to do was cross her arms, trust him, and start her legs moving in a running motion as they neared the ground. In an empty hangar, Wise and Caesar were being taught the first of the drills they would need to know to qualify as free-fall parachutists. ‘Arch!’ the instructor commanded and the two men, lying face down on trolleys resembling cut-down hospital gurneys, raised their feet and arms in the starfish position they would need to adopt when they left the aircraft.

  Heat haze rippled from the Tarmac and the temperature soared inside the cramped Cessna as they waited for permission to take off. Shane sat on the floor with his back to the fuselage wall. Michelle was in a harness clipped to the front of him, her back against his chest. The air was thick with the acrid smell of sweat and fear, but all he noticed was the scent of the shampoo in her hair. He gave her a thumbs-up and she returned it, her face a little pale. He smiled broadly. Wise was sitting opposite them with two instructors, a muscled African with a shaved head and yellow-tinted goggles, and a white man with peroxided short hair, who turned out to be a New Zealander. The pilot yelled back over his shoulder for them to hold on and the aeroplane raced down the runway. The wind through the open door provided some welcome relief.

  As their aircraft gained altitude it passed over the majestic Victoria Falls, and the sun made a rainbow through the mist of spray that rose like smoke over the tumbling water.

  ‘Awesome,’ Michelle called in his ear, craning her head back so that her silky hair brushed his chin for a fleeting moment. He tried to concentrate on revising his parachuting drills instead of the presence of her lithe body.

  They circled the drop zone, a secondary dirt runway carved into the bush, and the African instructor climbed out onto a step above the right-hand wheel of the Cessna, gripping the strut with his right hand and offering his left to Wise, who forced a smile for Shane’s sake and stepped out. The second instructor followed him, and hung half in and half out of the aircraft. It was a complicated aerial ballet, but they had rehearsed it several times on the ground. At the jump master’s signal the three were gone, hurtling into the clear blue nothingness, each instructor holding one of Wise’s arms. Shane heard the brash young man’s scream as he fell away.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Michelle wailed as she and Shane left the aircraft.

  ‘Arch!’ Shane reminded her and she mimicked his spread-eagled arms and legs. Their fall stabilised as he deployed a small drogue chute, to slow their descent, and he yelled, ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Incredible!’ she hollered back.

  He looked left and right over a broad expanse of Africa and spotted three brightly coloured parachutes deploying as Wise and his instructors slowed their descent to earth. He reached for the ‘bunny tail’, a nylon tab low on the right-hand side of the parachute, which did the same job as a ripcord, and said, ‘Here we go!’

  The stillness under the open canopy was a sharp contrast to the mad, freight-train rush of adrenaline during their freefall. ‘God, it’s beautiful,’ Michelle said as she took in the Falls from a bird’s perspective.

  She started pumping her legs as they neared the ground and Shane pulled down on the steering toggles, flaring the parachute and allowing them to sink gently to the baking earth. Michelle whooped for joy as Shane unbuckled her harness, then she turned and gave him a hug. ‘Thank you so much!’

  For a moment he wondered if she were going to kiss him. He took a half-step back, remembering that she was another man’s woman.

  Her cheeks flushed and she held out a hand, which he shook. ‘Welcome to the airborne fraternity,’ he said.

  Wise’s first question was when could he jump again. Shane explained that he had convinced a reluctant Fletcher Reynolds to pay for a free-fall course for both Wise and Caesar as a team bonding exercise. Wise, if he wanted, could stay at the airport and do another two jumps that day, putting him well on the way towards the nine he needed for an initial qualification. ‘This is better than beer, man,’ Wise replied, eagerly taking up the offer.

  The group waited for Caesar, who was in the Cessna orbiting above them. They watched, heads tilted to the sky, hands shielding their eyes, as the three rectangular parachutes blossomed against the blue. Caesar smiled weakly as he stumbled towards them, the gathered folds of his canopy billowing in the warm breeze.

  ‘Well?’ Shane asked.

  ‘Ah, this is for the birds, not for man.’

  They left Wise to continue his training, and Shane dropped Charles and Caesar near the Wimpy hamburger bar in the centre of the small tourist town, with a promise to meet at the same spot the following afternoon for the return trip to Isilwane.

  Victoria Falls looked like an ageing whore down on her luck and damn near out of business. Once pretty, now tatty, she struggled along, barely eking out a living as the customers passed her by for a new face. However, there were still shops open in a new-looking arcade on the main road heading down to the Falls. Shane parked the Land Rover out back in the shade of a tree and tagged along with Michelle as she wandered through stores selling curios and clothes.

  He waited in a shop full of T-shirts, board shorts, bikinis, hats and ladies’ wear with complex African prints. Michelle emerged in a sleeveless shift dress that reached halfway down her thighs.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.
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  He wasn’t wild about the lime green or the childlike elephant print, but the total look – her showing acres of skin and dressed like a woman rather than a unisex bush baby – was ‘Fantastic.’

  She smiled, told the sales assistant she would take the dress, then ducked back into the change room. Shane felt odd, waiting for her. The girl smiled at him, as though he were a husband or boyfriend bored with waiting for his woman to finish shopping. He didn’t feel restless or ill at ease at all. In fact, he reckoned he could watch Michelle Parker try on clothes all day. But there were precious few other boutiques on offer.

  There were a few tourists wandering the streets of the Falls as they emerged from the relative cool of the shop into the muggy, stinging heat, but they were outnumbered by young men in shiny football skirts and baggy shorts offering to change money and sell drugs. There was too much hassle and not enough cash to feed either the legitimate or the black market.

  Shane and Michelle agreed that they should press on to the border post and cross into Zambia, then view the Falls from that side. Neither had a place to stay in mind, and Shane assumed they would part company at some stage and then rejoin each other at wherever they were spending the night.

  Customs and immigration was a crush of tourists and locals, a human traffic jam exacerbated by the presence of two overland trucks full of road-stained young backpackers from a score of different countries, and a long-distance bus that seemed to carry as many caged chickens as people. Shane bought bananas and Cokes from an enterprising bicycle-based vendor as they waited in the sun in a queue to get into the immigration hall. The monotony of the wait was briefly relieved when a baboon – one of a cheeky trio who danced along the tin roof of the building – stopped to urinate, the stream falling on the wide-brimmed hat of a temporarily unaware African man. The women and children on either side of him hooted at his embarrassment, and some young boys tried but failed to hit the primates with rocks.