Next to Albert, in the shotgun seat, Chronos is ranting about animals. He’s the bassist for the Mad Hatters, one of Lou’s bands, and has come on the trip as Lou’s guest along with the Hatters’ guitarist and a girlfriend each. These four are locked in a visceral animal-sighting competition (Structural Fixation: A collective, contextually induced obsession that becomes a temporary locus of greed, competition, and envy). They challenge one another nightly over who saw more and at what range, invoking witnesses from their respective jeeps and promising definitive proof when they develop their film back home.
Behind Albert sits Cora, the travel agent, and beside her, gazing from his window, is Dean, a blond actor whose genius for stating the obvious—“It’s hot,” or “The sun is setting,” or “There aren’t many trees”—is a staple source of amusement for Mindy. Dean is starring in a movie whose sound track Lou is helping to create; the presumption seems to be that its release will bring Dean immediate and stratospheric fame. In the seat behind him, Rolph and Charlie are showing their Mad magazine to Mildred, one of the bird-watching ladies. She or her companion, Fiona, can usually be found near Lou, who flirts with them tirelessly and needles them to take him bird-watching. His indulgence of these women in their seventies (strangers to him before this trip) intrigues Mindy; she can find no structural reason for it.
In the last row, beside Mindy, Lou thrusts his torso from the open roof and takes pictures, ignoring the rule to stay seated while the jeep is moving. Albert swerves suddenly, and Lou is knocked back into his seat, camera smacking his forehead. He swears at Albert, but the words are lost in the jeep’s wobbly jostle through tall grass. They’ve left the road. Chronos leans out his open window, and Mindy realizes that Albert must be taking this detour for him, giving Chronos a chance to advance against his rivals. Or was the temptation to knock Lou down too sweet to resist?
After a minute or two of chaotic driving, the jeep emerges a few feet from a pride of lions. Everyone gawks in startled silence—it’s the closest they’ve been to any animal on this trip. The motor is still running, Albert’s hand tentatively on the wheel, but the lions appear so relaxed, so indifferent, that he kills the engine. In the ticking-motor silence they can hear the lions breathe: two females, one male, three cubs. The cubs and one of the females are gorging on a bloody zebra carcass. The others are dozing.
“They’re eating,” says Dean.
Chronos’s hands shake as he spools film into his camera. “Fuck,” he keeps muttering. “Fuck.”
Albert lights a cigarette—forbidden in the brush—and waits, as indifferent to the scene as if he’d paused outside a restroom.
“Can we stand?” the children ask. “Is it safe?”
“I’m sure as hell going to,” Lou says.
Lou, Charlie, Rolph, Chronos, and Dean all climb on top of their seats and jam their upper halves through the open roof. Mindy is now effectively alone inside the jeep with Albert, Cora, and Mildred, who peers at the lions through her bird-watching binoculars.
“How did you know?” Mindy asks, after a silence.
Albert swivels around to look at her down the length of the jeep. He has unruly hair and a soft brown mustache. There is a suggestion of humor in his face. “Just a guess.”
“From half a mile away?”
“He probably has a sixth sense,” Cora says, “after so many years here.”
Albert turns back around and blows smoke through his open window.
“Did you see something?” Mindy persists.
She expects Albert not to turn again, but he does, leaning over the back of his seat, his eyes meeting hers between the children’s bare legs. Mindy feels a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist. She understands now that it’s mutual; she sees this in Albert’s face.
“Broken bushes,” he says, resting his eyes on her. “Like something got chased. It could have been nothing.”
Cora, sensing her exclusion, sighs wearily. “Can someone come down so I can look too?” she calls to those above the roof.
“Coming,” Lou says, but Chronos is faster, ducking back into the front seat and then leaning out his window. Cora rises in her big print skirt. Mindy’s face pounds with blood. Her own window, like Albert’s, is on the jeep’s left side, facing away from the lions. Mindy watches him wet his fingers and snuff out his cigarette. They sit in silence, hands dangling separately from their windows, a warm breeze stirring the hair on their arms, ignoring the most spectacular animal sighting of the safari.
“You’re driving me crazy,” Albert says, very softly. The sound seems to travel out his window and back in through Mindy’s, like one of those whispering tubes. “You must know that.”
“I didn’t,” she murmurs back.
“Well, you are.”
“My hands are tied.”
“Forever?”
She smiles. “Please. An interlude.”
“Then?”
“Grad school. Berkeley.”
Albert chuckles. Mindy isn’t sure what that chuckle means—is it funny that she’s in graduate school, or that Berkeley and Mombasa, where he lives, are irreconcilable locations?
“Chronos, you crazy fuck, get back in here.”
It’s Lou’s voice, from overhead. But Mindy feels sluggish, almost drugged, and reacts only when she hears the change in Albert’s voice. “No,” he hisses. “No! Back in the jeep.”
Mindy swivels toward the window on her other side. Chronos is skulking among the lions, holding his camera close to the faces of the sleeping male and female, taking pictures.
“Walk backward,” Albert says, with hushed urgency. “Backward, Chronos, gently.”
Movement comes from a direction no one is expecting: the female gnawing at the zebra. She vaults at Chronos in an agile, gravity-defying spring that anyone with a house cat would recognize. She lands on his head, flattening him instantly. There are screams, a gunshot, and those overhead tumble back into their seats so violently that at first Mindy thinks they’ve been shot. But it’s the lioness; Albert has killed her with a rifle he’d secreted somewhere, maybe under his seat. The other lions have run away; all that’s left is the zebra carcass and the body of the lioness, Chronos’s legs splayed beneath her.
Albert, Lou, Dean, and Cora bolt from the jeep. Mindy starts to follow, but Lou pushes her back, and she realizes that he wants her to stay with his children. She leans over the back of their seat and puts an arm around each of them. As they stare through the open windows, a wave of nausea rolls through Mindy; she feels in danger of passing out. Mildred is still in her spot beside the children, and it occurs to Mindy, vaguely, that the elderly bird-watcher was inside the jeep the whole time that she and Albert were talking.
“Is Chronos dead?” Rolph asks flatly.
“I’m sure he’s not,” Mindy says.
“Why isn’t he moving?”
“The lion is on top of him. See, they’re trying to pull her off. He’s probably fine under there.”
“There’s blood on the lion’s mouth,” Charlie says.
“That’s from the zebra. Remember, she was eating a zebra?” It takes enormous effort to keep her teeth from chattering, but Mindy knows that she must hide her terror from the children—her belief that whatever turns out to have happened is her fault.
They wait in pulsing isolation, surrounded by the hot, blank day. Mildred rests a knobby hand on Mindy’s shoulder, and Mindy feels her eyes fill with tears.
“He’ll be fine,” the old woman says gently. “You watch.”
By the time the group throngs the bar of the mountain hotel after dinner, everyone seems to have gained something. Chronos has gained a blistering victory over his bandmate and both girlfriends, at the cost of thirty-two stitches on his left cheek that you could argue are also a gain (he’s a rock star, after all) and several huge antibiotic pills administered by an English surgeon with hooded eyes and beery breath—an old friend of Albert’s whom he unearthed in a cind
er-block town about an hour away from the lions.
Albert has gained the status of a hero, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He gulps a bourbon and mutters his responses to the giddy queries of the Phoenix Faction. No one has yet confronted him on the damning basics: Why were you in the bush? How did you get so close to the lions? Why didn’t you stop Chronos from getting out of the jeep? But Albert knows that Ramsey, his boss, will ask these questions, and that they will likely lead to his being fired: the latest in a series of failures brought on by what his mother, back in Minehead, calls his “self-destructive tendencies.”
The members of Ramsey’s safari have gained a story they’ll tell for the rest of their lives. It will prompt some of them, years from now, to search for each other on Google and Facebook, unable to resist the wish-fulfillment fantasy these portals offer: What ever happened to…? In a few cases, they’ll meet again to reminisce and marvel at one another’s physical transformations, which will seem to melt away with the minutes. Dean, whose success will elude him until middle age, when he’ll land the role of a paunchy, outspoken plumber in a popular sitcom, will meet for an espresso with Louise (now a chubby twelve-year-old from the Phoenix Faction), who will Google him after her divorce. Postcoffee, they’ll repair to a Days Inn off San Vicente for some unexpectedly moving sex, then to Palm Springs for a golf weekend, and finally to the altar, accompanied by Dean’s four adult children and Louise’s three teenagers. But this outcome will be the stark exception—mostly, the reunions will lead to a mutual discovery that having been on safari thirty-five years before doesn’t qualify as having much in common, and they’ll part ways wondering what, exactly, they’d hoped for.
The passengers in Albert’s jeep have gained the status of witnesses, to be questioned endlessly about what they saw and heard and felt. A gang of children, including Rolph, Charlie, a set of eight-year-old twin boys from Phoenix, and Louise, the chubby twelve-year-old, stampede along a slatted path to a blind beside a watering hole: a wooden hut full of long benches with a slot they can peek through, invisible to the animals. It’s dark inside. They rush to the slot, but no animals are drinking at the moment.
“Did you actually see the lion?” Louise asks, with wonder.
“Lioness,” Rolph says. “There were two, plus a lion. And three cubs.”
“She means the one that got shot,” Charlie says, impatient. “Obviously we saw it. We were inches away!”
“Feet,” Rolph corrects her.
“Feet are made out of inches,” Charlie says. “We saw everything.”
Rolph has already started to hate these conversations—the panting excitement behind them, the way Charlie seems to revel in it. A thought has been troubling him. “I wonder what will happen to the cubs,” he says. “The lioness who got shot must have been their mom—she was eating with them.”
“Not necessarily,” Charlie says.
“But if she was…”
“Maybe the dad will take care of them,” Charlie says, doubtfully. The other children are quiet, considering the question.
“Lions tend to raise their cubs communally”—a voice comes from the far end of the blind. Mildred and Fiona were already there or have just slipped in; being old and female, they’re easily missed. “The pride will likely take care of them,” Fiona says, “even if the one killed was their mother.”
“Which it might not have been,” Charlie adds.
“Which it might not have been,” Mildred agrees.
It doesn’t occur to the children to ask Mildred, who was also in the jeep, what she saw.
“I’m going back,” Rolph tells his sister.
He follows the path back up to the hotel. His father and Mindy are still in the smoky bar; the strange, celebratory feeling unnerves Rolph. His mind bends again and again to the jeep, but his memories are a muddle: the lioness springing; a jerk of impact from the gun; Chronos moaning during the drive to the doctor, blood collecting in an actual puddle under his head on the floor of the jeep, like in a comic book. All of it is suffused with the feel of Mindy holding him from behind, her cheek against his head, her smell: not bready, like his mom’s, but salty, bitter almost—a smell that seems akin to the lions themselves.
He stands by his father, who pauses in the middle of an army story he’s telling with Ramsey. “You tired, Son?”
“Want me to walk you upstairs?” Mindy asks, and Rolph nods: he does want that.
The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows. Outside the bar, Rolph is suddenly less tired. Mindy collects his key from the front desk, then says, “Let’s go out on the porch.”
They step outside. Dark as it is, the silhouettes of mountains against the sky are even darker. Rolph can dimly hear the voices of the other children, down in the blind. He’s relieved to have escaped them. He stands with Mindy at the edge of the porch and looks at the mountains. Her salty, tangy smell surrounds him. Rolph senses her waiting for something and he waits, too, his heart stamping.
There is a cough farther down the porch. Rolph sees the orange tip of a cigarette move in the dark, and Albert comes toward them with a creak of boots. “Hello there,” he says to Rolph. He doesn’t speak to Mindy, and Rolph decides the one hello must be for both of them.
“Hello,” he greets Albert.
“What are you up to?” Albert asks.
Rolph turns to Mindy. “What are we up to?”
“Enjoying the night,” she says, still facing the mountains, but her voice is tense. “We should go up,” she tells Rolph, and walks abruptly back inside the hotel. Rolph is troubled by her rudeness. “Are you coming?” he asks Albert.
“Why not?”
The three of them ascend the stairs, sounds of merriment jingling up from the bar. Rolph feels an odd pressure to make conversation. “Is your room up here, too?” he asks.
“Down the hall,” Albert says. “Number three.”
Mindy unlocks the door to Rolph’s room and steps inside, leaving Albert in the hall. Rolph is suddenly angry with her.
“Want to see my room?” he asks Albert. “Mine and Charlie’s?”
Mindy emits a single syllable of laughter—the way his mother laughs when things have annoyed her to a point of absurdity. Albert steps into his room. It’s plain, with wood furniture and dusty flowered curtains, but after ten nights in tents it feels lavish.
“Very nice,” Albert says. With his longish brown hair and mustache, he looks like a real explorer, Rolph thinks. Mindy crosses her arms and stares out the window. There is a feeling in the room that Rolph can’t identify. He’s angry with Mindy and thinks that Albert must be too. Women are crazy. Mindy’s body is slender and elastic; she could slip through a keyhole, or under a door. Her thin purple sweater rises and falls quickly as she breathes. Rolph is surprised by how angry he is.
Albert taps a cigarette from his pack, but doesn’t light it. It is unfiltered, tobacco emerging at both ends. “Well,” he says, “good night, you two.”
Rolph had imagined Mindy tucking him into bed, her arm around him again as it was in the jeep. Now this seems out of the question. He can’t change into his pajamas with Mindy there; he doesn’t even want her to see his pajamas, which have small blue elves all over them. “I’m fine,” he tells her, hearing the coldness in his voice. “You can go back.”
“Okay,” she says. She turns down his bed, plumps the pillow, adjusts the open window. Rolph senses her finding reasons not to leave the room.
“Your dad and I will be just next door,” Mindy says. “You know that, right?”
“Duh,” he mutters. Then, chastened, he says, “I know.”
III. Sand
Five days later, they take a long, very old train overnight to Mombasa. Every few minutes, it slows down just enough for people to leap from the doors, bundles clutched to their chests, and for others to scramble on. Lou’s group and the Phoenix Faction install themselves in the cramped bar car, which they share with African men in suits and bowler hats. Charlie
is allowed to drink one beer, but she sneaks two more with the help of handsome Dean, who stands beside her narrow bar stool. “You’re sunburned,” he says, pressing a finger to Charlie’s cheek. “The African sun is strong.”
“True,” Charlie says, grinning as she swigs her beer. Now that Mindy has pointed out Dean’s platitudes, Charlie finds him hilarious.
“You have to wear sunscreen,” he says.
“I know—I did.”
“Once isn’t enough. You have to reapply.”
Charlie catches Mindy’s eye and succumbs to giggles. Her father moves close. “What’s so funny?”
“Life,” Charlie says, leaning against him.
“Life!” Lou snorts. “How old are you?”
He hugs her to him. When Charlie was little he did this all the time, but as she grows older it happens less. Her father is warm, almost hot, his heartbeat like someone banging on a heavy door.
“Ow,” Lou says. “Your quill is stabbing me.” It’s a black-and-white porcupine quill—she found it in the hills and uses it to pin up her long hair. Her father slides it out, and the golden, tangled mass of Charlie’s hair collapses onto her shoulders like a shattered window. She’s aware of Dean watching.
“I like this,” Lou says, squinting at the quill’s translucent point. “It’s a dangerous weapon.”
“Weapons are necessary,” Dean says.
By the next afternoon, the safarigoers have settled into a hotel a half hour up the coast from Mombasa. On a white beach traversed by knobby-chested men selling beads and gourds, Mildred and Fiona gamely appear in floral-print swimsuits, binoculars still at their necks. The livid Medusa tattoo on Chronos’s chest is less startling than his small potbelly—a disillusioning trait he shares with a number of the men, the fathers especially. Not Lou; he’s lean, a little ropy, tanned from occasional surfing. He walks toward the cream-colored sea with his arm around Mindy, who looks even better than expected (and expectations were high) in her sparkling blue bikini.