Kalahari

by Jessica Khoury

  I finally forced myself into motion, sensing that if I stayed in my cocoon of shock for much longer I’d never rise out of it. Avani and I wrapped Theo in the canvas that had been the Cruiser’s roof. Her hands shook as much as mine, and I guessed that for all her talk of her doctor parents and her medical know-how, she’d never dealt with an actual corpse before.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “He seemed like a nice guy.”

  Before we covered his face, I bent to kiss each of his cheeks and his forehead. They were cool and dry, so utterly lifeless that I had trouble believing those eyes had ever been open. This wasn’t my Theo, my vibrant, laughing Theo who was forever cracking jokes and trying to make me smile, the Theo who’d distracted me after Mom’s death with silly games and long, wandering treks through the bush. This was some kind of awful trick. This was a nightmare.

  The boys placed Theo in the shallow grave of sand and helped me fill it in. After it was done, I tried to say some words of mourning, to describe what Theo had meant to me, all that he’d taught me and how much I’d relied on him after Mom’s death, but the words wouldn’t come. I choked on them, and Avani and Sam supported me on either side.

  We stood there for a long while, until Avani’s teeth began to chatter from the cold. I busied myself with making a fire beside the Cruiser.

  Sam combed the truck, looking for any supplies the animals might have missed, and returned with nothing but a single bunch of bananas. “I found these. They must have fallen out of one of the crates. They’re bruised but I think they’re okay.”

  So we each had a banana for dinner. Mine tasted like ashes and I could barely swallow. My earlier hunger had turned to nausea. We all sat silent and motionless, wrapped in our own thoughts. The air around us was numb and flat, like a room that’s had all the oxygen sucked out of it.

  After the others eventually dropped off to sleep, I went to sit by Theo’s grave.

  “Want company?” asked a soft voice.

  I hesitated, then nodded, and Sam joined me. He was like my shadow, but instead of getting angry with him like I had before, I was glad for his quiet presence.

  “It was Theo who taught me how to track,” I said. “He’d take me out in the early mornings, when the animals were all moving around, and he’d leave me deep in the bush. ‘Find your way home, Tu!um-sa,’ he would say. He called me Tu!um-sa because it means ‘rain on the sand,’ which is what he thought my freckles looked like. He would pretend to leave me alone, but he was always close by, watching out for me.” I shifted, crossing my legs and resting my elbows on my knees. “After my mom died, he would try to cheer me up by doing some of the traditional San dances—you know, pretending to be an ostrich or an oryx or a giraffe and stamping around the fire, making animal noises. It was the only thing that ever made me smile.”

  “Sounds like a great guy,” said Sam. He plucked a tuft of grass and began pulling it apart, tossing the stalks absently to the sand.

  I stared with glassy eyes at the freshly turned earth. “It was a dumb move, killing Theo. The penalty for poaching lions here isn’t that steep—they’d probably get away with a fine—but murder?” I shook my head. “They’ve taken their crime to a whole new level.”

  “You aren’t serious about going after them, are you?”

  I sighed. “Not alone. You’re right. It’s too dangerous. But there’s an air rescue operation in Maun, and they can call in the Defence Force. . . .”

  “If the poachers find us before then...” His fingers tightened around the grass.

  “We have to be careful.” My mind was wrestling over what to do next. I was desperate to search for my dad, but I couldn’t just abandon the group. “We’ll go back to the camp tomorrow like I said, but we’ll have to be quick in case the poachers are nearby.” These were no ordinary poachers. They had more to lose now, and I doubted that they’d hesitate to commit other murders in order to cover up this one. “We’ll grab more water and any other stuff we can use and head out again.”

  I sighed and rubbed my forehead. “We’ll have to forage and hunt while we go.” Which would slow us down considerably. “We’ll go west. It’s the shortest route to Ghansi, anyway, and that’s the closest town. We can reach the embassies from there, and the police and everyone’s parents. Once you guys are taken care of, I’ll go back and look for Dad.”

  I think he wanted to argue, but the look on my face seemed to stop him short. He simply remained silent and sat by me until, hours later, I must have fallen asleep. I was woken in the night by a shout and sat bolt upright, dimly noticing that I was by the fire, some distance from Theo’s grave. Sam must have carried me there, which made my face warm a little. He’d even taken off my boots and placed them neatly at the foot of my sleeping bag.

  I looked around for the source of the shout. It was Kase, barely visible in the light cast by the fire’s remaining embers. He was swinging a flashlight around the bush and calling Miranda’s name.

  “What’s wrong?” Sam asked, clambering out of his own sleeping bag.

  Kase spun, his flashlight beam hitting Sam in the face. “She’s gone! I was on watch and I—I fell asleep, and when I woke up she was gone!”

  “Miranda’s gone?” Avani asked sleepily. “Where’d she go?”

  Immediately I was on my feet, my flashlight in hand. “How long were you sleeping?” I asked Kase.

  “I don’t know . . . maybe half an hour?”

  “She can’t be far. Spread out, but keep each other’s lights within view. If you look around and see only darkness, head back. We get separated out here, we get separated for good. Got it?”

  I scanned the sand around the campsite, but we’d been coming and going so much that it was impossible to tell which tracks were Miranda’s. So we fanned out and began walking away from the campfire, calling her name into the night and swinging our flashlight beams in wide arcs across the bush. I was already imagining the worst—she’d run across lions, leopards, any one of the numerous poisonous creatures that stalk the Kalahari.

  When I heard Avani’s shout change to, “Here! Over here!” I nearly fainted with relief. I reached her just before everyone else.

  Miranda was stumbling through the grass, shivering and muttering, looking as if she’d just been through a war. She was scraped and dirty and half-delirious. I stepped in front of her, but she just tried to push her way around me.

  “Gotta get out,” she mumbled through chattering teeth. “Can’t stay here. I have to go home.”

  “Miranda, it’s me, it’s Sarah. You have to stop!”

  Kase caught up to us, his face panicky. “Mir! Are you okay?”

  Her eyes were unfocused and unblinking, her skin was pale, and her breath was flowing in quick, shallow bursts.

  “Miranda?” Kase looked in her eyes and took her hands. “Your skin’s so cold. . . .”

  Avani took Miranda’s hand, and when Miranda didn’t react, I knew something had to be wrong with her.

  “She’s in shock,” said Avani. “Her pulse is weak and her eyes . . .” She shook her head. “We need to get her back to the fire.”

  “She hasn’t said a word since she saw the body,” said Kase. “But I thought . . . I didn’t think it was this bad.”

  We rushed her back to the campsite and built up the fire. Kase held her close, rubbing her arms and shoulders, trying to warm her up.

  “I shouldn’t have brought her here,” he said, sounding close to tears himself. “I thought . . . She’s had a hard year. I thought coming here would help take her mind off things.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I sighed. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

  “You’re right, it’s not my fault—it’s yours!” Kase snapped.

  “Enough!” Sam growled, and for once, Kase fell silent. I dropped my gaze, wondering if he was right.

  “She’ll be okay, I think,�
�� Avani said. “We should get some more sleep while we can.”

  Sam sat on his sleeping bag and rubbed his face, yawning. “I’ll keep watch.”

  “You’ve already done one shift,” said Joey.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  Sam blinked at me with bloodshot eyes. “You sure?”

  “I won’t go back to sleep anyway.”

  They dropped off one by one, Kase last of all. He lay on his side, one arm curled around Miranda, who still sniffed and whimpered in her sleep. I rested my chin on my knees and stared at the fire, losing myself in the memory of a hundred fires, a hundred starry nights that had been spent with my family, when we had learned the dances and the stories of a fading culture from one of its last and truest sons.

  SEVEN

  Hank wouldn’t start in the morning. The battery was dead, and there was no way to jump it.

  “Now what?” asked Joey, kicking the rear tire, as if that would inspire Hank to start up.

  “Like my mom used to say, ‘Elbow grease and a prayer,’” I said. “There is a trick we can try.”

  I had Avani sit in the driver’s seat, since she was the smallest, and the rest of us lined up across the hood and pushed as hard as we could. I wedged dry wood under the tires since the sand gave zero traction and called for Avani to turn the ignition. The engine didn’t start, but with a great amount of grunting and heaving, we got the truck to roll a few feet back, turned slightly away from the trunk it had crashed into. I did a quick check on the engine; everything seemed to be intact despite the deep dent in the front bumper and the buckled hood. I picked up the pieces of wood and placed them on the other side of the tires.

  “Okay, now push from the back.”

  Miranda was quiet but much more present than she had been the night before. She joined in. Together we all threw our weight into the rear end of the Cruiser. Sweat poured down my neck despite the cool morning temperature, and my back and legs ached, but I pushed relentlessly. It would have been so much easier with a hill, but even at its most extreme, the Kalahari could be described only as gently rolling.

  Once we got Hank moving, I yelled, “Clutch!” to Avani. We kept pushing, beginning to gather a small bit of speed, and then I called for her to press the gas pedal. At first, nothing happened, and my heart sank.

  Then with a cough and a grunt, Hank rumbled to life, sounding grumpy, as if he were annoyed that we’d disturbed his rest.

  The boys hollered and high-fived and strutted as if they were wholly responsible for the working vehicle, but no smile would touch my lips. I had to willfully bend my mind each minute to the task at hand, because otherwise it kept slipping to Theo. I had kept watch until dawn, not daring to go back to sleep; I had been too afraid of the dreams waiting for me in the dark. As soon as the sun rose, I went and sat by Theo’s grave. I told him stories about the two of us, calling up memories I’d nearly forgotten, anchoring myself to his spirit. Not for the first time, I wondered if the dead could hear the cries of the living. I hoped that wherever he was, Mom was there too. She could make a fish feel at home on dry land, if she wanted. It helped a little, to imagine them together, to imagine they could hear me.

  We were still a mile away from camp when I sensed that something was wrong. I smelled it first—smoke in the air—but it took me a minute to process the scent and what it could mean. At first my mind leaped to the most probable conclusion: a bushfire. I’d seen dozens of them out here, and though they were dangerous, they were fairly easy to avoid if you knew what you were doing.

  But this fire was different. It smelled wrong, like burning plastic, and my heart rate suddenly spiked. They found the camp. Why would they go after the camp? And what did it mean for my dad? Had they caught him? And if so, why weren’t they in South Africa or Namibia by now, on the run, instead of hanging around the scene of their crime? Oh God—what if we’d been here when they arrived?

  I slammed my foot on the brake and Hank fishtailed in the sand, throwing my passengers forward.

  “What was that?” Miranda shouted, rubbing her head where it had slammed into the seat in front of her. The ride seemed to have pulled her out of her state of shock; perhaps the comforting sound of a running engine, and the tenuous thread to safety it represented, had finally reached her through her daze.

  “Stay here.” I shut off the engine and climbed over the door. Since crashing into the tree, both doors were jammed shut.

  Sam looked unhappy about it, but he stayed in the car with the others while I jogged ahead. When I drew near the camp, I ducked into the grass and ran doubled over, stepping on patches of bare sand to muffle my steps, hissing softly at the pain that rippled from my porcupine-induced cuts.

  At the edge of the clearing where our tents were, I dropped to my belly and crawled forward on my elbows, startling a mongoose out of hiding. As it slunk away, I came to a stop and parted the grass in front of me for a better view.

  The camp was in ruins.

  The tents had been piled in the fire pit and were now nothing more than smoldering black fragments. Strips of charred cloth had been blown all over the place and were caught in the branches of the acacias. Twisted bits of metal that had been the frames of the cots stuck out at crazy angles from the remains of the bonfire, giving the scene an eerie, skeletal look. A piece of paper, half-burned, was stuck in the sand near my elbow. I picked it up and stared at it, my stomach twisting.

  It was a page of handwritten field notes—my father’s handwriting. It was dated just three weeks ago, from his work documenting a herd of zebras that had moved into the area. He’d been so excited when he saw them, because it could mean they’d found a permanent source of water, which in turn meant the door was opening for all kinds of species to move back into the central Kalahari: elephants, buffalo, monkeys, and baboons.

  They’d burned all of our research. I was speechless, at a loss as to why. What threat did field notes on the social behavior of the local zebras pose to them? My parents’ entire collection of work on the central Kalahari was gone, destroyed by fire. Sure, we had electronic backups of some stuff that we’d sent to the universities that funded the research, but so much of it had been irreplaceable—not least because some of it was in my mother’s own hand, often including beautiful sketches of the wildlife and scenery. Both my parents had preferred to handwrite their notes, though my mom had also been fond of voicing her thoughts on a recorder, leaving me the job of painstakingly deciphering their messy scrawl and her meandering monologues in order to type their research into our laptop. Since Mom’s death, I’d fallen woefully behind in transferring her notes to the computer, because it had been so difficult to look at her handwriting or listen to her voice.

  I crumpled the paper in my fist and stood up—then dropped like a stone. Two men had stepped into view, not twenty feet from where I was crouched in the bushes. They were dressed in fatigues and carried assault rifles, but they didn’t look like soldiers. Their clothing was too messy, their hair too long. One was blond and the other redheaded, both with beards and cigarettes hanging from their lips. They spoke to one another in Afrikaans, so they had to be South African. I knew enough of the language to decipher their conversation.

  “. . . they’ll come back?” the blond man was saying.

  “Not if they’re smart,” his partner replied. “But if anyone can find them out here, it’s Abramo. God knows he’s got the cash.”

  “I shouldn’t have taken this job. It’s getting too weird.”

  “For what they’re paying, I can swallow weirder.”

  They paused to glance across the camp, where two more men had appeared. They must have had vehicles parked somewhere in the brush near the water pump. Of these two men, one was tall and black, the other white, gray haired, and likely in his fifties. The latter seemed to be in charge, because he started shouting orders. He was too far for me to make out his accent. At his word
s, the two Afrikaners took off at a trot, joining the others at the far side of the camp and out of my hearing.

  I stared at the remains of the fire, a heap of white ash and black charred cloth. There was no telling what they had taken and what they had burned; everything was gone. I didn’t have a house to go back home to where my family albums and mementos would be safely stored. All that I had in the world, I’d had right here, and that included my mom, my dad, and Theo. And now . . . now there was just Dad. And maybe not even him. My fingers turned into fists, digging into the sand.

  Who were these people? They’d seen Dad before he’d seen them. If they were just poaching, why didn’t they simply leave when they were discovered? They could have turned around and driven the other way, cleared out of the area with their identities still under wraps. They would have gotten away clean. It just didn’t make sense. My parents’ lives—and by extension, my life—were built upon finding the rationale driving behavior patterns in species. So what was driving these poachers to such extremes, in murdering Theo, pursuing my dad, and now destroying our camp? I needed more information, but it was too risky to investigate now. Drawing on what little I knew of these guys, all I could guess was that they’d followed Dad here—though I couldn’t imagine Dad coming home if he knew doing so would lead the poachers right to us. But even if they had followed Dad here, why go through the trouble of burning everything? My line of questions, strung one to another like a chain of paper links, led me right back to where I’d begun: pretty much nowhere.

  I was certain of one thing though: Something bigger than poaching was happening here. But what?

  I was only glad that we’d been gone when they arrived at the camp.

  Miranda, Kase, and the rest of the group were going to be irate. Their bags with all their extra clothes and belongings had been burned with the rest of the camp, and deliriously, I wondered how I could afford to replace their gear. Would the Song Foundation hold us financially responsible? Would we be sued for the ordeal these kids were going through? The program, which was supposed to boost our research, could very well destroy it once and for all.