Die Again (14 page)

“Wait. Johnny,” I speak up. “Should you be out there by yourself?”

“He’s got the fucking gun, Millie,” Richard says. “We’ve got nothing.”

“While he’s hunting for tracks, someone needs to watch his back,” I point out.

Johnny gives a curt nod. “Okay, you’re my spotter, Millie. Stay close.”

As I step over the perimeter wire, my boot bumps the strand and the bells tinkle. Such a sweet ringing, like a wind chime on the breeze, but out here it means the enemy has invaded and my heart gives a reflexive kick of alarm at the sound. I take a deep breath and follow Johnny into the grass.

I was right to come with him. His attention is fixed on the ground as he searches for clues, and he could very well miss seeing the flick of a lion’s tail off in the underbrush. As we move forward I am constantly scanning behind us, all around us. The grass is tall, up to my hips, and I think of puff adders and how you might step on one and not know it until fangs sink into your leg.

“Here,” Johnny says quietly.

I look where the grass has been flattened and see a bare patch of soil and a scrape mark left by something being dragged across it. Johnny’s already moving again, following the trail of flattened grass.

“Did the hyenas take him?”

“Not hyenas. Not this time.”

“How do you know?”

He doesn’t answer, but keeps moving toward a grove of trees, which I’m now able to recognize as sycamore figs and jackal berries. Though
I cannot see the river, I hear it rushing somewhere close by, and I think of crocodiles. Everywhere you look in this place, in the trees, in the river, in the grass, teeth are waiting to bite, and Johnny relies on me to spot them. Fear sharpens my senses and I’m aware of details I’ve never noticed before. The kiss of river-chilled wind against my cheek. The way freshly trampled grass smells like onions. I am looking, listening, smelling. We are a team, Johnny and I, and I won’t fail him.

Suddenly I sense the change in him. His soft intake of breath, his abrupt stillness. He is no longer focused on the ground, but has straightened to his full height, shoulders squared.

At first I do not see her. Then I follow the direction of his gaze, to the tree that looms before us. It is a towering sycamore fig, a majestic specimen with wide-spreading branches and dense foliage, the kind of tree where you’d build a Swiss Family Robinson house.

“There you are,” whispers Johnny. “Such a pretty girl.”

Only then do I spot her, draped over a high branch. The leopard is almost invisible, so well does she blend into the leaf-dappled shade. All along she’s been observing us, waiting patiently as we drew near, and now she watches with keen intelligence, weighing her next move, just as Johnny weighs his. Lazily she flicks her tail, but Johnny stays perfectly motionless. He is doing exactly what he advised us to do.
Let the cat see your face. Show it that your eyes are forward-facing, that you, too, are a predator
.

A moment passes, a moment when I have never felt so afraid or so alive. A moment when each heartbeat sends a sharp thrust of blood up my neck, whistling through my ears like wind. The leopard’s gaze stays on Johnny. He is still gripping the rifle in front of him. Why doesn’t he lift it to his shoulder? Why doesn’t he fire?

“Back away,” he whispers. “There’s nothing we can do for Isao.”

“You think the leopard killed him?”

“I know she did.” He lifts his head, a subtle gesture that I almost miss. “Upper branch. To the left.”

It has been hanging there the whole time, but I didn’t notice it.
Just as I didn’t at first notice the leopard. The arm dangles free like the strange fruit of a sausage tree, the hand gnawed down to a fingerless knob. Foliage masks the rest of Isao’s body, but through the leaves I make out the shape of his torso, wedged in the crook of a branch, as if he’d dropped from the sky and landed like a broken doll in that tree.

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “How are we going to get him—”

“Don’t. Move.”

The leopard has risen to a crouch, haunches tensed to spring. It’s
me
she’s staring at, her eyes fixed on mine. In an instant Johnny’s rifle is up and ready to fire, but he doesn’t pull the trigger.

“What are you waiting for?” I whisper.

“Back away. Together.”

We take a step back. Another. The leopard settles back onto her branch, tail flicking.

“She’s only protecting her kill,” he says. “That’s what leopards do, store their prey in a tree, where other scavengers can’t get it. Look at the muscles in her shoulders. In her neck. That’s real power for you. The power to drag a dead animal that outweighs her, all the way up to that high branch.”

“For God’s sake, Johnny. We need to get him down.”

“He’s already dead.”

“We can’t leave him up there.”

“We get any closer, she’ll spring on us. And I won’t kill a leopard just to retrieve a corpse.”

I remember what he once told us: that he would never kill a big cat. That he considered them sacred animals, too rare to sacrifice for any reason, not even to save his own life. Now he stands behind those words, even as Isao’s corpse dangles above us, and the leopard guards her meal. Johnny suddenly seems as strange a beast as any I’ve yet encountered in this wild place, a man whose respect for this land runs as deep as the roots of these trees. I think of Richard, with his metallic-blue BMW and his black leather jacket and aviator glasses, things that made him seem masculine to me when we first met. But they
were only trappings, to adorn a mannequin. That’s what the word means, isn’t it? A model of the human body, not real. Until now, it seems that I have known
only
mannequins who look like men, pretend to be men, but are merely plastic. I will never find another man like Johnny, not in London, not anywhere, and that is a heartbreaking thing to realize. That I will search for the rest of my life, and will always look back to this moment, when I knew exactly which man I wanted.

And would never be able to have him.

I reach toward him and whisper: “Johnny.”

The rifle blast is so shocking I lurch backward, as if I’ve been struck. Johnny stands as frozen as a marksman’s statue, his gun still aimed at the target. With a deep sigh he lowers the weapon. He bows his head as if praying for forgiveness, here in the church of the bush, where life and death are two halves of the same creature.

“Oh my God,” I murmur and stare down at the leopard, which fell dead only two paces away from me, seemingly in mid-leap, her front claws a split second away from sinking into flesh. I cannot see the bullet hole; all I see is her blood, trickling into the grass, soaking into the hot soil. Her fur shines with the glossy elegance so coveted by the flashy tarts of Knightsbridge tycoons and I long to stroke it but it seems wrong, as if death has reduced her to nothing more than a harmless kitten. A moment ago she would have killed me, and she deserves my respect.

“We’ll leave her here,” Johnny says quietly.

“The hyenas will get her.”

“They always do.” He takes a deep breath and looks at the sycamore fig, but his gaze seems distant, as if he sees beyond the tree, even beyond this day. “I can get him down now.”

“You told me you’d never kill a leopard. Not even to save your own life.”

“I won’t.”

“But you killed this one.”

“That wasn’t for my life.” He looks at me. “That was for yours.”

• • •

T
HAT NIGHT
I
SLEEP
in Mrs. Matsunaga’s tent so she will not be alone. All day she has been nearly catatonic, hugging herself and whimpering in Japanese. The blondes have been trying to coax food into her, but Keiko has consumed nothing except a few cups of tea. She’s retreated into some unreachable cave deep in her mind, and for the moment we’re all relieved that she’s quiet and controllable. We did not let her see Isao’s body, which Johnny brought down from the sycamore fig and quickly buried.

But I saw it. I know how he died.

“A big cat kills by crushing your throat,” Johnny told me as he dug the grave. He shoveled steadily, his spade cutting into the sun-baked earth. Though insects harassed us, he didn’t wave them off, so intent was he on carving out Isao’s resting place. “A cat goes straight for the neck. Clamps its jaws around your windpipe, ripping through arteries and veins. It’s death by asphyxiation. You choke on your own blood.”

Which is what I saw when I looked at Isao. Though the leopard had already begun to feast, tearing into abdomen and chest, it was the crushed neck that told me of Isao’s final seconds, fighting for air as blood gurgled into his lungs.

Keiko knows none of these details. She knows only that her husband is dead and that we have buried him.

I hear her sigh in her sleep, one little whimper of despair, and she goes quiet again. She hardly moves but lies on her back, like a mummy wrapped in white sheets. The Matsunagas’ tent smells different from mine. It has a pleasantly exotic scent, as if their clothes are impregnated with Asian herbs, and it is tidy and well organized. Isao’s shirts, which he will never again wear, are neatly packed in his suitcase along with his gold wristwatch, which we retrieved from his body. Everything is in its place, everything is harmonious. So unlike my tent with Richard, which is the opposite of harmonious.

It’s a relief to be away from him, which is why I so quickly volunteered to keep Keiko company. The last place I want to sleep tonight
is in the tent with Richard, where the hostility hangs as thick as sulfurous fog. He’s hardly spoken two sentences to me all day. Instead he spends his time huddled with Elliot and the blondes. The four of them seem to be a team now, as if this is a game of
Survivor Botswana
, and it’s their tribe against my tribe.

Except I don’t actually
have
anyone in my tribe, unless you count poor fractured Keiko—and Johnny. But Johnny belongs to no team, not really; he is his own man, and killing that leopard today has left him troubled and brooding. He’s hardly spoken to me since.

So here I am, the woman no one talks to, lying in a tent beside a woman who talks to no one. Though it’s silent in here, outside the tent the night symphony has begun, with its insect piccolos and hippo bassoons. I’ve grown to love those sounds, and I’ll surely dream about them when I go home.

In the morning, I wake up to birdsong. For once there are no screams, no shouts of alarm, just the sweet melodies of dawn. Outside, the four members of Team Richard are huddled together at the campfire, sipping coffee. Johnny sits by himself under a tree. Exhaustion seems to drip off his shoulders, and his head bobs forward as he tries to fight off sleep. I want to go to him, to massage away his weariness, but the others are watching me. I join their circle instead.

“How’s Keiko doing?” Elliot asks me.

“Still asleep. She was quiet all night.” I pour myself coffee. “I’m glad to see we’re all alive this morning.” My quip is in poor taste, and I regret it as soon as the words are out of my mouth.

“I wonder if
he’s
glad about it,” Richard mutters, glancing at Johnny.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I just find it strange, how everything’s gone so wrong. First Clarence gets killed. Then Isao. And the truck—how the hell does a truck just go dead like that?”

“You blame Johnny?”

Richard looks around at the other three, and I suddenly understand that he’s not the only one who thinks Johnny’s at fault. Is this
why they’ve been huddling together? Exchanging theories, feeding their paranoia?

I shake my head. “This is ridiculous.”

“Of course that’s what she’d say,” Vivian mutters. “I told you she would.”

“Meaning what?”

“It’s obvious to everyone that you’re Johnny’s favorite. I knew you’d stand up for him.”

“He doesn’t need anyone to stand up for him. He’s the one keeping us alive.”

“Is he?” Vivian glances warily in Johnny’s direction. He’s too far away to hear us, but she drops her voice anyway. “Are you sure of that?”

This is absurd. I search their faces, wondering who started this whispering campaign. “You’re going to tell me Johnny killed Isao and dragged him up that tree? Or maybe he just delivered him to the leopard and let her take it from there?”

“What do we really know about him, Millie?” Elliot asks.

“Oh God. Not you, too.”

“I gotta tell you, the things they’re saying …” Elliot looks over his shoulder and even though he whispers, I can hear his panic. “It’s freaking me out.”

“Think about it,” says Richard. “How did we all end up on this safari?”

I glare at him. “The only reason I’m here is because of
you. You
wanted your African adventure, and now you’ve got it. Is it not measuring up? Or has it gotten too adventurous even for
you
?”

“We found him on the Internet,” says Sylvia, who has been silent up till now. I notice that her hands tremble around her coffee cup. Her grip is so unsteady she has to set the cup down to keep it from spilling. “Vivian and I, we wanted to do a camping trip in the bush, but we couldn’t afford to spend a lot. We found his website, Lost in Botswana.” She gives a half-hysterical laugh. “And so we are.”

“I tagged along with
them
,” Elliot says. “Sylvia and Viv and I,
we’re sitting in a bar together in Cape Town. And they tell me about this
fabulous
safari they’re going on.”

“I’m so sorry, Elliot,” Sylvia says. “I’m sorry you ever met us in that bar. I’m sorry we talked you into coming.” She takes a shaky breath and her voice breaks. “God, I just want to go
home
.”

“The Matsunagas found this tour through the website, too,” says Vivian. “Isao told me he was looking for a true African experience. Not some tourist lodge, but a chance to really explore the bush.”

“That’s also how we ended up here,” Richard says. “That same fucking website. Lost in Botswana.”

I remember the night Richard showed it to me on his computer. For days he’d been surfing the Web, drooling over images of safari lodges and tented camps and feasts spread across candlelit tables. I don’t remember why Lost in Botswana was the site he finally settled on. Perhaps it was the promise of an authentic experience. True wilderness, the way Hemingway would have lived it, although Hemingway was more likely just a convincing bullshitter. I had no part in planning this holiday; it was Richard’s choice, Richard’s dream. Now a nightmare.