Читать книгу The Brightest Sun - Adrienne Benson - Страница 11
ОглавлениеNairobi lay in the highlands, but Narok was on the floor of the Rift Valley, and when Jane’s plane cruised over the valley’s edge and the land fell away in a great crack, she stared out the window and searched for her first glimpse of the elephants. Kenya was red. The terrain was rusty and volcanic—the dust made from layers and layers of ancient lava, dried to a crust and ground down by time. The earth looked like gaunt stretches of skin seen through a magnifying glass—gray-brown and pocked, with the scabby outcroppings of rock and the dried blood of the barely damp riverbeds.
Kenya was new to Jane. Africa was new. Her flight from Washington had come in for its bumpy landing at Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi less than twenty-four hours ago, and now she was about to touch down in her new home. Her eyes were raw with fatigue, and her skin felt dry and grimy. She pressed her face to the tiny plane window and tried not to blink. She didn’t want to miss any of this first introduction to her new home. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see. She’d been told that the drought was severe, that all of eastern Africa was drying out, dying. The rivers were low and water was precious.
Jane traced her interest in elephants back to a day at the National Zoo. She was six, and her brother, Lance, was four months old. Her mother had Lance strapped in a front pack, snuggled against her chest. This made her walk slowly under the weight of the baby. Jane wanted to hurry, to run from one animal to another, taking everything in at once. She knew if Lance weren’t there, they would have been able to walk faster, and it made her angry with the baby. Her mother led Jane over the zoo’s winding pathways, and when they reached the elephant enclosure, she let Jane step up onto the lowest rung of the metal fence. The elephants had just been fed, and they rooted through the bales of hay and grasses with their trunks. They waved their enormous ears gently, like the tails of the tropical fish her father kept in the tank in his study. Jane heard her mother sigh with pleasure. The gentle motion of the animal’s trunks up and down between hay and tiny mouth, and the rolling motion of their jaws, gave them a delicacy that made Jane laugh and clap her hands. Jane’s mother wrapped her arm around Jane’s shoulders, and her breath was warm and sweet in Jane’s ear. Jane could feel her mother’s joy at the sight of them.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked. “They’re very maternal creatures. I read that somewhere.” She leaned down and kissed the top of Jane’s head. “Very maternal, just like I am.”
Jane’s mother was sick for a long time before she died. Jane was ten when the diagnosis came, Lance was four. At first nothing changed. There were doctor’s appointments and days when her mother was too tired to cook dinner so her father brought home McDonald’s instead. But mostly it was the same as it always had been, and Jane began to believe it would always be this way. On the tired days, Jane would come home after school and curl up on the couch next to her mother and do homework. Lance would lie on the carpet watching TV and eating Cheerios one by one from a plastic bowl. But by the time Jane was twelve, there were more and more tired days. She turned thinner than any grown-up Jane had ever seen, and she was always cold. She began coughing and spitting up blood into a bright green bandanna she kept shoved up the sleeve of the nubby brown sweater she always wore. The sounds of the wet coughs scared Jane, and she found herself avoiding her mother; instead of sitting next to her on the couch, Jane spent the hours between school and dinner in her bedroom. Once she heard her mother calling her in that thin, weak, dying voice. When Jane came down the stairs, her mother was standing at the bottom of the flight, clutching the newel post to steady herself.
“I understand it’s hard to watch me, Jane,” her mother said. “And I know you love me and if you need this time alone, take it. But we have to talk about Lance. You’re his sister. That gives you some responsibility.” Jane didn’t hear what her mother said next, because she’d already turned and raced back up the steps. She slammed her door as loudly as she could, and after that, she always pretended she couldn’t hear when her mother called.
There was an open casket at the funeral. Jane’s father left Lance with a babysitter and wanted to leave Jane home, too, but she begged and cried and finally he relented. Her mother’s body was ravaged by disease, but someone had put foundation on her face, blush on her cheeks. Jane thought she looked beautiful, and that she would like the blush and the rosy color of the lipstick they’d put on her. But it struck Jane that just under the powders and the creams her mother’s face was gone. That is, it was intact and Jane could see it all—eyes, lips and the familiar way her mother’s ears curved and the diamond studs in her lobes that she wore every day. But they didn’t add up to her anymore. Her mother was an empty shell—like the ones cicadas left behind in late summer, only this one resembled the person Jane loved most in the world. The unfairness of that moment, the trickery, made Jane burst into sobs so loud and incessant her grandmother had to lead her away.
The house was quiet after her mother died. Jane hated it. She missed the singular sounds of her mother’s movement, the way she slowly climbed the stairs and shuffled along the hallways in her slippers. Jane even missed the ugly sounds of the coughing. Most of all, though, she missed how it felt before she hated herself. She replayed all those recent afternoons when she’d avoided the sounds her mother’s sickness made, and instead closed her bedroom door. She would do anything to have those afternoons back. She didn’t bother with homework, but she did take up her old place on the couch—napping there after school and then, again, after dinner. Sleep was the only way she could turn off her mind.
Her father must have noticed that Jane didn’t do anything except sleep, and one evening, a few months after the funeral, he looked at her across the dinner table and he said, “Life goes on. She’d want us to be happy.” As far as Jane could remember, that was the last they’d spoken of the grief they all stumbled through alone.
Lance grew silent. Far quieter than a boy his age should be. He spent hours draped in an armchair in the family room, watching TV. He barely spoke to Jane.
Her father started smoking and spent evenings in his study, watching his fish and blowing rings of smoke up toward the ceiling. “You shouldn’t be near all this smoke,” he’d say when Jane was lonely after dinner and wanted to be near him. “I’ll come and find you later, tuck you in. We can talk then.” But he rarely remembered, and Jane eventually stopped trying. She felt like a shadow, visible, but of no substance, and it frightened her. It felt like fading away. Some days she thought she might just disappear.
Two years later her father was married again, and the only thing Jane had left of her mother was a pile of photos and some ugly antique furniture that traced the maternal line back for generations. Her father’s new wife was kind to Jane and Lance, but she hated to “wallow,” as she said, in the memories of their life before, of Jane’s father’s other wife.
When her father remarried, Jane and Lance lost their mother all over again, in Jane’s mind; by picking a new wife, he erased her mother further. The new wife moved into their house, opened the windows, banished the fish tank and aired out the smoky study in favor of a guest room and a small, barking dog. Soon, all the photos that included Jane’s mother were gone, piled into boxes in the attic with her books and the antique furniture Jane would inherit when she grew up and had a house of her own.
It was true that her father was happier, and his new wife was kind and funny and cooked dinners every night so they could sit around the table “like a family should.” Lance watched TV less, and smiled more, and all of this made Jane grateful. But she couldn’t push past the notion that this woman was an intruder in their house, in their lives, and that this new family they had formed was just a weak facsimile of what it should have been.
Jane was in graduate school before Lance began showing signs of his own sickness. Her master’s program in conservation biology was difficult. Jane struggled with math—the tricks of statistics and probability eluded her. She had to work hard, and this gave her a ready excuse to ignore her father’s calls, to listen to, but not return, his messages saying that Lance was seeing things that weren’t there and talking to empty corners. One message sounded as if her father were about to cry—a depth of emotion Jane hadn’t even seen from him after her mom died. That was the message saying that Lance was sent home from college because of a violent outburst and was under psychiatric care.
She’d never mentioned the conversation her mother tried to have about Lance, the one where Jane was supposed to agree to be a good big sister. And now she never would—being a responsible sister to a normal little boy was one thing, but Lance was an adult man now, with psychological issues. The calls and the urgency in her father’s voice made Jane increasingly desperate to flee.
Within days of arguing her thesis, Jane applied to the Elephant Foundation. Her adviser knew the foundation’s director, and Jane was hired. She went home for the first time in months to tell her dad. Lance was at home at the time, but Jane remembered the message her father left her, telling her they might have to put Lance in a home, right before her thesis was due, and how she’d listened to it once and then deleted it. Now she saw that her father’s face was pinched. He looked older than he should. At dinner one night, when his new wife was in the kitchen, filling plates with dessert, Jane told him she was leaving, soon, for Kenya.
“Wow,” he said, nodding. “That’s far away...but you’ll be happy.”
His blasé attitude made Jane illogically angry. It was her choice to leave, to go as far away from home as she could. She was the one leaving him, leaving Lance and the new wife. He should be angry, or sad. But he didn’t seem to care, and he didn’t beg her to stay. She’d always be just a small, annoying shadow in his smoky study, or a child with grief so big it made his new wife uncomfortable. Jane wasn’t surprised by his reaction, but the vicious rush of anger and the grief she tasted on her tongue stunned her. She’d almost forgotten it was there, secret tinder she kept hidden away.
“Before one, two years ago...this was green,” Muthega, the Kikuyu guide hired by the Elephant Foundation, told her when he parked the Land Rover and fumbled for the keys to her new front door. He’d waited on the airstrip of the tiny Narok airport for her plane to land, and he was standing there, in a khaki shirt with the foundation’s logo emblazoned on the chest pocket holding a handwritten sign with her name on it, when she’d disembarked. It made Jane laugh; there was only one other passenger on the little plane.
“Are you sure you’re here for me?” Jane had joked, but Muthega just nodded solemnly and hoisted her suitcase onto his shoulder.
Jane’s house in Narok was a two-room building, low and squat and slapped together with rough, gray concrete. Just to the south were the dusty streets and the warren of other flat-topped concrete buildings of Narok, but north was nothing but dry grassy savannah edging the Maasai Mara game reserve, and the distant line of trees that clung to the bank of the Mara River. The yard space around the house was bare dirt, with a little dry scrub grass and one lone pink bougainvillea that climbed the wall next to the front door and grasped the earth below it in a constant struggle for water.
Now Jane looked around the dry patch of land that was her new yard. The high concrete wall surrounding her plot of land distracted her. It was at least six feet tall, and the top edge glinted with shards of broken bottles.
“For thieves,” Muthega said, following her eyes with his own. “It can be dangerous for you here.”
Jane thought of the dingy little town they’d driven through to reach this house. It seemed quiet and charming, in a dusty way, not particularly dangerous. Anyway, she’d keep the gate locked, she told herself, and better to be safe than sorry. She didn’t dwell on the thought; she was desperate to get out into the bush.
Muthega’s job was to drive her to where the elephants were. He did his best to track their movements. Elephants are creatures of habit and in the dry season their daily range is somewhat limited. Once Jane tracked them long enough, she could calculate the specifics of different groups. And once she and Muthega had figured that out, they’d situate bush cameras in the areas the various elephant groups were likely to congregate. Timing was critical; once the wet season came, the elephant groups would migrate much farther afield and be nearly impossible to track. Muthega smoked cigarettes that smelled like burning rubber, but Jane was glad to have him around because he had watched the elephants in this area for years, and because he wore a rifle slung over his shoulder. It was for people, not game, he told Jane. It was the people who made her uneasy; it was people who she was here to combat. The presence of Muthega’s gun was comforting.
The foundation’s war on poaching was waged in three ways: the collection of DNA samples from elephant dung, which would help other researchers pinpoint sources of illegal ivory; the logging of traps, poacher sightings and slaughtered elephants on a GPS; and the placing of elephant cams in areas most heavily used by the animals. The foundation hadn’t tried the cameras here before, but there had been a successful pilot program in Sumatra, where faces of three poachers were caught so clearly on the cameras that within days of posting Wanted posters promising financial rewards, they’d all been jailed. Jane brought ten remotely operated cameras with her from the foundation headquarters in Washington. She was responsible for safeguarding the expensive equipment, and because the elephant cameras would bring a high price if stolen and sold, Muthega’s gun was necessary.
Jane and Muthega followed the elephants by tracking their footprints in the dust. Often they saw them at the edge of the Mara River, where the water was low and groggy and ran thickly, more solid than liquid. The edges of the river were gray with silt, and the elephants had to lumber farther and farther from shore to find spots deep enough to settle into and drink from during the hottest hours of the afternoon. This left them exposed for Jane to count and study, but exposed, also, to the poachers.
Smaller streams and tributaries, and the springs far from the river, had dried up to nothing more than trickles. The last good rainy season was two years ago, and now crowds of eland, gazelles, zebras and giraffes migrated off their habitual feeding grounds, away from their usual watering holes. The river teemed with game in numbers it couldn’t possibly sustain, and daily Jane and Muthega saw the dead—gazelles dropped in their tracks, bony and starving, set upon by hyenas and eaten alive, their bones and gristle left behind, fodder only for the vultures and the marabou storks who held their ground as Jane and Muthega drove by.
Muthega and Jane didn’t talk much. He smoked constantly, and scanned the horizon. It kept him busy, and to make conversation, Jane felt, would be too distracting. She told herself he needed to keep his focus on the signs of elephants and hints of poachers. Jane put her feet on the dashboard and studied the unfamiliar landscape. When they did speak to each other it was brief exchanges about the land, the animals they saw, how the lack of water affected the game, and the dead. The dead, always the dead, in little leather piles of hoofs and bones, the only parts left after the feasting and the incessant sun.
Jane had a cistern at home, filled up biweekly by a water truck. She had no idea where her water came from, and never wondered. She conserved it as much as she could, bathing only every two days. It never occurred to her to ask Muthega about his family, if they had enough, or if the people in the town worried about the endless drought. Jane only thought of the thirsty, skeletal game. She saw the women of Narok clustered daily by the drying river, washing clothes and filling up cans and buckets and calabashes to carry home. Often when they crossed the river at the low, wooden bridge closest to town, Muthega slowed the Land Rover for the women who thronged there. They gathered in groups, their heads weighted with basins of clothes to rub with bricks of lye and then rinse in the sluggish river. There were always tiny children with them who splashed in the water and flickered like dark flames in the mud. Muthega greeted the women in Swahili, his smile breaking open and his tongue clicking his teeth to punctuate his words. The throngs of women around the car made Jane uncomfortable. They watched her during the exchanges, and sometimes they gestured at her, and Jane knew Muthega was answering questions about who she was and why she was here. None of the women spoke directly to Jane. They just watched her.
Sometimes, when they crossed the river in the evening, returning to town for the night, Muthega stopped and let some of the women climb up in the back seat with their basins of laundry, which smelled like the sun, and the buckets they’d filled. It felt too crowded then. The women pushed and laughed behind Jane, their knees bruising her through the back of her seat and their joking, singsong voices saying things Jane couldn’t understand. She wanted to tell Muthega not to pick up the women, but she didn’t know how to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t seem unkind. How could she explain that the women made her feel unseen all over again, or that watching the toddlers walk home in the care of older siblings made her sick with guilt? It was seeing these little children take care of each other that made her guilt unfurl. She’d flown halfway around the world just to escape her family, her obligation to care for her brother.
One morning, less than a month after she arrived in Narok, Muthega tapped the Land Rover horn outside Jane’s gate. He always came early and today was no different. The sun hadn’t risen. It was a navy blue dawn, cool and clear.
“The poachers were nearby last night. The dead one is just by the river. I will show you,” Muthega said.
The sky lightened as they drove, silently, into the scrubland on the opposite side of the river. But still, when Muthega waved his hand to indicate the body was nearby, Jane saw only a dusky gray, curved rock. It looked like a boulder lying there in the flat grassland. Then she saw the carrion. Vultures circled the sky and marabou storks stood by, as still as fence posts but for the way they tipped back their heads to swallow their mouthfuls of meat. They didn’t scatter when the truck rumbled up next to them, but merely stepped back a few paces on their backward-kneed legs, more annoyed by the presence of humans than afraid. The sky-hung vultures retreated to the upper branches of the nearest acacias. Muthega jerked the Land Rover into Park and reached behind him to pull his rifle from the back seat. He double-checked it was loaded and climbed out. Jane assumed he suspected the poachers were still close.
“Coming?” he asked, slamming his door. “We must gather the evidence.”
The flesh that burst from the bloody hacked holes in the animal’s face was bright pink. Against the sullen brown of the earth it looked unreal, plastic. The dead elephant was young, Jane could tell instantly, in the prime of his life. Likely he’d only recently left his family clan to find a mate. He’d been shot first and then hacked through with machetes to harvest the parts poachers would sell—tusks, tail and feet. The rest of him was left for the feeding frenzy of hyenas, jackals and wild dogs that slunk out of the underbrush, and the rancid-beaked vultures and storks that floated in from wherever they’d been lurking to feast on fresh meat.
Muthega climbed up onto the elephant’s shoulder and pulled the giant ears up to search for a tag.
“This one I think is Twiga,” he said.
They had seen Twiga just days before, feeding on the bark of a baobab tree a few miles to the north of here. When Muthega told Jane his name that day, she had laughed. “He’s named ‘giraffe’?” she asked.
Muthega complimented her on a new Swahili word learned, and told her that when Twiga was younger, still in his mother’s clan and unnamed, he’d been seen stretching his trunk as far as he could up the side of a nearly bare tree to pull down the few remaining leaves.
“Like a twiga!” Muthega explained.
Jane closed her eyes and pulled her bandanna from the pocket of her shorts. She tied it tightly around her nose and mouth. The flesh wounds on the animal were fresh, the blood on the ground still sticky, and the iron smell of raw meat hung in the air.
Muthega laid a calloused hand with wide, flat fingernails on her upper arm.
“Miss Jane,” he said slowly, as if she hadn’t been trained in this already, “you must photograph the body for the records, collect samples for the DNA and measure him.”
Then he let go of Jane’s arm and left her standing, dizzy, next to the body. She watched him walk out into the surrounding scrub bush so, she assumed, he could look for tracks or evidence of the people who’d killed Twiga. But instead he set his gun down under an acacia and hunkered on his heels. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
Jane glanced down at the raw place where Twiga’s face used to be and it felt like looking at someone she once loved. She’d seen photos of poached elephants before, of course, and had worked on collecting DNA samples from elephant dung and tusk fragments during an internship in Sumatra. But this, the reality of a healthy, beautiful animal in the midst of the drought that was killing so many others...felled by the brutal force of humans, stunned her more than she thought it would. A rage swelled up in Jane. “Goddammit!” she muttered. “What the fuck is wrong with these people? What kind of abhorrent subhuman asshole does this?”
Jane reached down to pull a tiny flake of severed tusk from the ground. She placed it carefully in a plastic vial. She gathered a skin scraping and a marble-sized piece of dung. She took measurements to determine the rough age of the animal and the size the tusks might have been. She did her work—what she’d come here to do. She could feel that her face was twisted and hot, and tears and snot were soaking the bandanna. Flies, awakened by the rising sun and attracted to the smell of blood, buzzed in waves around her head, settling on her arms and cheeks, licking thirstily at the tears hung in the corners of her eyes. Jane waved her arms fruitlessly. It was getting hot, and the meat was beginning to smell. Muthega’s cigarette smoke caught in a gasp of the breeze and mixed with the smell of meat. Her stomach rolled over in her belly and she bit her lip, forbidding herself to vomit.
Sweat dribbled down her forehead, and when she rubbed it with her hand, a flake of dirt fell in her eye. It hurt and she cursed and cried out. Muthega hunkered and smoked, just watching her. She hated him then. The way he just sat there, emotionless. He didn’t care, Jane thought, and she wanted to smack him, to see him feel pain, to watch him cry. She felt the flicker of that angry ember she had forgotten was in her, and the rage spilled out like blood.
“Goddammit, Muthega! At least get off your ass to get the fucking measuring tape! There’s one in my bag—in the trunk. Sample collection jars, too. Jesus Christ!”
“Okay, Miss Jane, okay,” he said laconically.
Jane pulled her small digital camera out of the pocket in her shorts and pointed and clicked, pointed and clicked through her tears. First she photographed Twiga, what remained of him, for the foundation’s records. Then she pointed the lens at Muthega as he rummaged through the trunk of the car for the measuring tape. He’d placed it on Twiga’s hind leg, and then he’d sat down again. She would go to her boss in Nairobi. She would have Muthega fired for not even trying to trail the poachers, for avoiding the responsibility of helping her get the information they needed from the body. Jane snapped picture after picture of him hunkered there, in the dust, a calm look on his face and smoke circling his head.
He smiled up at her as she clicked and cried. He said in a voice so calm it made Jane want to kill him, “Anger will not bring Twiga back to life, Miss Jane.”
Then he stuffed the end of his cigarette into an anthill and stood up. “If you have finished with the work, we can go now.”
Jane watched the body as they drove away. The vultures and the storks slipped back through the sky and began their feast. There would be nothing left soon, Jane thought. “Take me home again, Muthega,” she said. “I need to deal with the samples.” She wanted to be alone now; she didn’t want to have to talk to Muthega or watch him sucking on his cigarettes. She didn’t want him to see her crying.
That night she climbed into her little wooden bed early. She wanted sleep to blot out the day. It was late when the smell of them woke her, the African smell of wood fire and meat, dust and sweat. She kept her body still but cracked one eye. Her front door was open and she could see the sky, a shade lighter than the dark of her room. She heard the low murmur of their voices through the dark. They’d come for the cameras, she thought. She kept them in a tin trunk locked with a padlock. Her heart choked her and panic took over. She wished she had Muthega’s gun.
In a single movement, Jane pulled herself from under her sheets and ran. She had no desire to fight or to defend the few things she kept in the house; even the cameras weren’t worth her life. She made for the open space beneath the sky. She thought the air might save her, or the land. The wall around her garden was tall and too smooth to climb. She turned and ran for the gate.
Jane was halfway across the bare yard before she was caught. Dry, calloused hands jerked her forearm and she fell. The voice attached to the hands grunted and spoke rapid-fire Swahili, and then she felt fingers around the back of her neck, pressing her face into the ground. She couldn’t understand the Swahili. It was too fast and her vocabulary too small. Jane thought there was a familiarity to one voice, though, a growl, a shudder of smoke in the throat.
It seemed like hours before they were gone. She heard them rummaging through her little house, going through her things. She heard the smashing of glass—the outdoor elephant cameras, she knew—on her concrete floor. But why had they broken them? The thought occurred to her that they’d be of no value to sell now. So, what did they want? There was nothing else to steal. Even her little digital camera, which would bring the men a couple of hundred dollars in the market, wasn’t in the house. It was in the truck. Jane kept it in the glove compartment so she’d have it if she ever needed it. Finally, they crossed the yard to leave. One voice spoke to Jane in halting English. “Next time we kill you, too.” Jane lay there for a long time. She was terrified that if she moved they would come back, or that if she looked up, she would see nothing but the flash of a blade slicing toward her.
The light came in the Kenyan way—quickly, like a shade pulled up. Jane finally sat up. Her whole body hurt. She wondered if she was bleeding. There was a puddle of her own saliva in the dirt where the men had pressed her face. Jane felt bits of dirt on her tongue.
Jane pulled herself up, knees cracking as she bent them straight. She focused only on her next step. She thought of nothing else. She was frozen and terrified that, if she stirred her mind in any direction, what had happened would crush her.
Luckily, there was space on the afternoon flight from Narok to Nairobi. When the plane landed, Jane took a taxi from the airport directly to the Elephant Foundation’s main office on Wayaki Way. She focused on reporting Muthega to the regional director, a large Kenyan man called Johnno, famous for his lifelong dedication to elephants and his harsh indictment of poachers.
Jane hated that she cried, again, when she told Johnno the story.
“Muthega and his friends, they were the ones,” Jane sobbed.
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.”
