Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (12 page)

The wind came fitfully from the south where the bonfire was. Alan had told him two more men had died from malaria during the night. Drifting through the tree branches came a wisp of black smoke and the stench of burning hair.

By this point in his investigation of the murder, over fifty Indians clustered behind him, waiting to see what his next move would be. They did not say a word, standing silently around the edges of the clearing and back along the path, watching him. He assumed some of them were the friends and relatives of the dead man.

In a deep and—he hoped—confident voice, he called for his 450 Express and his gunbearers and trackers. He on announced he would follow the lion's tracks into the nyika. The rifle arrived, but, one by one, all of the men who had gone on the hunt for the eland refused to accompany him now. One man threw himself to the ground, his hands clasped, pleading he had four children. Jeremy let them refuse. It seemed to him theirs was the preeminently logical choice. He could not imagine why the British disparaged the intelligence of other races when over the last century they had proudly pioneered the role of wandering into thick brush after large carnivores, a role which he now felt forced to take on.

With Singh and the others watching, he searched the ground for any signs of where the lion might have exited the clearing. He tried to step as lightly as he could on the stained dirt, but still felt as though he were desecrating a body. Crouching down, holding his rifle, he spotted a tunnel in the nyika, the pugmarks going in. He did not know how tall a four-hundred-pound lion would be, but he imagined the beast must have had a hard time fitting down this passageway, especially with a fully gorged belly. Either she had wiggled ignominiously forward on her elbows or she had pushed bravely through, ignoring any knifelike punctures of the thorns through her skin. The lion could be sleeping off her meal in the brush fifty feet in or she might have wandered miles away.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the Indians watching. They stood so close together, their white shirts and turbans glimmered like a single object. He turned back to slash roughly at the undergrowth with his machete. The entwined branches were hard wood, the machete an instrument unfamiliar to him. Within a minute, he had ascertained he would need an axe and an hour to chop open a path ten feet long. Any animal within half a mile would hear him and easily escape.

For a brief moment he thought of Otombe, wishing he were here to offer him advice on what to do. Without any better idea, he impulsively got down on his hands and knees, swung his rifle behind his back and crawled into the tunnel after the lion.

Inside of fifteen feet, the tunnel narrowed. He had to crouch low even in his crawling position, his head tucked down, his rapid breathing echoing off the ground. In here, under the tangled brush, the shade was thick. His eyes blinked, working hard to adjust. Because of the way the tunnel curved, he could not see more than four or five yards ahead. There was the smell of earth and leaves. In this position, in an enclosed space, he was not entirely sure he could reach his rifle where it lay against his back. Still, he crawled on, pushing the machete in front of him, knowing the camp might mutiny if they saw his legs squirming immediately back out of the nyika. He imagined trying to explain to Preston why he had given up the hunt after half a minute. Preston had worked in Africa for years, Brazil and Australia before that. He would listen to Jeremy's stuttered excuses with amazement.

He did not think his Grandpapi would ever get himself into this situation. He would have a much better plan than this ineffectual creeping forward into what might be the animal's lair. However, if it came down to it, if he felt there was no better choice, Grandpapi would certainly crawl forward.

While he was trying to peer ahead, a sweat bee landed on his cheek. Buzzing, it began to sip at a drop of perspiration near his ear. The nyika around him was tight with thorns; he would not be able to easily reach up to slap it. The sting of these bees was, if anything, worse than that of wasps at home. Pausing in its drink, it spotted a bigger pool of liquid and strode confidently across his face in the direction of his eye.

When he slapped roughly at the bee, the strap of his rifle caught on the thorns above. While trying to rub his now-stung cheek, his right arm got snagged in two places. In trying to free that arm, he got his left shoulder caught.

He fought the thorns for three endless minutes, getting progressively more entangled, before he started bellowing for help.

If the lion were sleeping her meal off nearby, if she ambled over to see what all the hubbub was about, he knew he would be able to do nothing more in self-defense than swing the machete about in a mild limp-wristed manner.

He waited for the men to cut their way through the undergrowth to him. His scrawny ankles were found first, twisted in their safari linen, helplessly kicking at the red laterite dirt.

I
'm concerned about the Kutu,” Max said, but halfway through the sentence, the satellite phone spat static back at her, then cleared again.

“What?” Stevens half yelled over the phone. In a lower voice, talking to someone on his side of the line, he said, “Do you know how to work this thing? The signal's breaking up.”

The station was running low on diesel, so the generator had been on for only two hours last night. Perhaps the phone hadn't had time to charge fully.

Stevens spoke loudly. “The reception's bad, Max. I don't know if you can hear me, but if you can, keep talking and we'll do what we can on this side.” Near the end of this, the static flared, but—other than that—the signal was clear on her side. He added in an aside to someone there, “Is there a way to switch channels on this? You know, like on a cordless?”

She spoke as clearly as she could, popping her consonants. “If you hear me, please say so. I can hear you. It is unknown how much of an imminent danger the Kutu represent, but I believe it would be wise to have an exit strategy prepared just in case.”

“I tell you, Fred, all I'm getting is static.” His voice sounded muffled now and there was a rustling noise. Perhaps he held the receiver against his chest.

“Stevens,” she half-yelled, “Get . . . me . . . an . . . open-ended . . . ticket . . . back . . . just . . . in . . . case.”

“What do you think this button does?” he asked.

The certainty struck her he was pretending not to hear, trying to keep her at the research station.

“Sure,” he said. “Try it.”

And the phone went dead.

In order to get her here, he hadn't told her about the Kutu, was willing to risk her life in hopes of getting the drug.

She snorted. He didn't know whom he was dealing with. To get a chance at finding this vine, she would have come anyway.

 

Yoko, Mutara, and Max hiked up the mountain to find the gorilla group, T2, the one habituated to Yoko's work. The three days of Max's quarantine had passed. The trees loomed above. The humans were tiny ants climbing near their base, swimming waist-high through bushes and ferns.

Max's lungs were getting more acclimatized to this atmosphere, and she didn't lose her footing as often. She knew now to climb without shoes, to feel with her toes for tree roots and always to hold onto one branch or another. She was still slower than the others, however, and sometimes slipped and fell onto her knees.

After half an hour her breathing was ragged and hard, her vision getting blotchy at the edges. Still she kept forcing her feet forward, head down in concentration.

Somewhere ahead of her, Yoko called out, “Hey Mutara, let's take a break.”

“What?” he said, surprised. He was in the front, his voice faint with distance.

Perhaps he turned around and saw Max. When he spoke again his voice sounded different. “Yes, good idea.”

Yoko and he leaned against a tree, chatting about when the research station might get their overdue supplies. They breathed easily. In her rain gear, Max flopped down on her back in the mud, her feet propped up against a trunk so she wouldn't bobsled down the mountain. Every part of her—mouth, shoulders, back, and ribs—was deeply involved in the action of sucking as much air as possible into her lungs.

Meanwhile, she stared up at the tree her feet were braced against. A distant part of her mind identified it.
Hypericum lanceolatum
, a tree-sized version of Saint John's Wart. Hanging off the branches was the mistletoe,
Loranthus luteo-aurantiacus
. If its leaves were crushed in the hand, they had the scent of bell pepper with an overtone of fresh-cut grass. Probably some type of pyrazine inside.

She moved her eyes from plant to plant—recalling names, remembering smells. She already could identify almost all of them. Her preliminary work had been done well.

Her love of plants came from three ways in which they differed from animals and, most importantly, from humans. First off, on a purely olfactory level, they were more pleasing. They never farted methane from the inefficiencies of digestion, never reeked of bacterial effluvium if they hadn't showered. Even when dead and decomposing, plants didn't stink of protein breakdown like rotting meat did. No, the scent of an old log or a large pile of leaves came from their decaying carbon bonds: a fragrance sweet and vaguely nostalgic.

Plants were also much more interesting chemically. Rooted in one spot throughout life, a plant had no need to lighten its load by regularly discarding its byproducts. What an animal piddled away carelessly upon the ground, a plant instead treasured and experimented with. If you ground up one specimen of every animal species and chemically compared the remains, the variation would be nearly nonexistent. Various proteins and lipids rearranged as either massive rhino or microscopic rotifer. This bland sameness was not true of plants. Even the most primitive could borrow any of the intermediate chemicals involved in the fifty steps of the Krebs cycle. They used these to manufacture other compounds and then returned the chemicals like a borrowed cup of sugar. Plants had to be master chemists, for they weren't able to yank up their roots to flee from predators or chase after mates. Instead they issued commands to animals in a terse chemical voice, using fragrances, colors, tastes, or poisons. “Rub against my stamens.” “Eat my fruit, then poop out my seeds in a steaming pile of compost.” “Don't touch my leaves.” Even today, half of the medicines sold in drug stores were directly made from extracts of pharmaceutically active plants. The concept behind many other drugs had been cribbed from the original inspiration of a plant.

Her third, and perhaps most important, reason for loving plants was that their movements never scared her.

Most people didn't understand; they considered plants as static as a bureau or a shoe. When Max was focused on a problem, she could be
still
, concentrated and barely breathing. An hour passing, two. Most humans in comparison were jittery squirrels, shifting this way and that, crossing and recrossing their legs, jumping up within fifteen minutes to use the phone or get a glass of water. This difference between her and others allowed her to understand there wasn't just one speed in the world; other organisms could have a different meter to their movements. When she looked at a tree, she saw not a stationary object, but a photo of a dancer in mid-motion, the gesture of its branches describing its battle for food or love.

She'd always wanted to set up a tripod and camera to take a photo once a minute of a tree—for instance this
Hypericum
her feet were propped against. After a week's worth of timed exposures, she could play the images together as a film. Immediately, any animal life would transform into a fuzzy mist at the base of the tree, insubstantial and irritating, obscuring a true clarity of vision. Having stepped into the botanical scale of time, what would reveal itself as truly alive would be the plants, a vine twisting up the
Hypericum
trunk like a snake, its branches spreading their fingers and its leaves turning their faces to follow the sun's progress.

If she slowed down her camera even more, taking a photo only once an hour, the narratives of the plants would be revealed, their individual struggles for life, their strategies and stealthy attacks. At this speed, flowering wouldn't be seen in terms of individual blossoms, but more as an event that swept across the organism, a shimmer of the skin, the blush of a shy mate. Against this painterly exhale of sex, this colorful beat of time, the
Hypericum
would stretch its limbs high into the canopy, ruffle its plumage out into maturity, and then fall over. Two saplings below would race for the sunlit hole, twisting and arching over each other as canny as basketball players. Meanwhile, a few feet downhill, a strangler fig growing out of the fork of that
Pygeum
tree would lob its roots like ropes down into the ground, more and more roots until they encircled the
Pygeum
, thickened and then merged, the fig swallowing its host alive, voracious as a boa.

Max didn't fit in with the restless timescale of her own species. At the same time, she was exiled from the life of plants, left examining only a still frame of their struggles. But from that photo, she conjectured what had come before and might come afterward. In her mind, she imagined living long enough, standing motionless enough, to see the graceful dance of a tree.

“Hellooo,” said Yoko, waving her hand in front of Max's face. “Time to get going.”

She jerked back, startled. She breathed for a moment, then got to her feet and climbed again, following Yoko and Mutara.

The two of them kept their heads up now as they climbed, watching the jungle. Perhaps they were getting close to the gorillas' territory. No one talked.

In childhood, one of the few people she'd felt comfortable with was her dad. A mathematician at the university, he could be still, contemplating the permutations of a theorem for most of an afternoon. She'd lean against him, confident there would be no movement other than his breathing and perhaps a slight vibration in his chest as he hummed. She could depend on him. Her mom tried so hard to stay still for Max, but the feeling was different, concentrated and stiff. Within ten minutes she would inadvertently shift her weight or check her watch or try to pat Max's hair, her touch frittery and jarring. By the time she was three, Max wouldn't sit in her lap anymore.

“Asparagus” was one of the code words that aspies used to discuss their syndrome in public, as in “Do you think Sam might have a bit of asparagus?” Max found this botanical term so appropriate. When her dad was sitting, his stillness had an almost Zen feel to it, calm and engaged. For a plant, each motion was energy-intensive and final, the direction in which it would grow. A plant considered its actions carefully. Her dad sat, thinking. Asparagus.

Her dad. The day she was six years old, two months and twenty-four days. A Tuesday in November. She wasn't making the most graceful transition to school. She'd watched the others enough to know everyone else in her class played together. That day, she tried playing trucks with Ricky Draegor. Well, not so much playing “with” as “next to.” He insisted on driving the trucks all around, making
vroom-vroom
noises, rather than lining them up on their sides and spinning the wheels, staring at their metal spokes. So she clonked him on the head hard with a Tonka dumpster. The principal called her parents. Her dad picked her up at school early, brought her home and fed her lunch. Afterward she sat in his lap for a long time, needing the comfort, playing with his wooden necklace.

At 1:43 (still in his lap, she was staring at the oven clock, watching the way the minute dial twisted, rolling the new digit into view. For a distinct portion of each minute, there would be no number there at all. A very literal person, she wondered what time it was when it was ‘1:4 ') he abruptly jerked to his feet. She was thrown to the floor.

He made noises, garbled words she didn't know. One arm flapped.

Alarmed, she shot a glance at his face. His features twisted and unreadable.

She scuttled into a corner and began to rock. The noises behind her got louder. She began to knock her forehead into the wall. With each hit, there was a
clunk
inside her skull and a flash of light.

Something fell over behind her.

She hit her head into the wall harder, staring at the light. She hummed loudly. Time went away.

By the time her mom got home, he'd been lying half turned on his belly for a long time, motionless. Max, in the corner, slamming her head against the wall, her forehead dripping blood.

 

At the funeral, her Aunt Tilda had forced her to wear a dress. The air moving past her bare legs jingled along her nerves, making her jumpy. The bandage on her forehead crinkled with every movement, the sound inside her skull. She had a hard time keeping herself calm. When the normals began to lower her dad inside of the box into the ground, she began to slap her chest, moaning. Had to look away.

Her vision moved past the people and the intoned words, past everything happening here. She saw the tree at the edge of the clearing. An enormous oak. Her eyes rolled up it, rising into its branches, its presence expanding inside her. So vast and patient. Motionless and dependable. Her slapping slowed. She took a step closer, then another. Drifting forward bit by bit, staring, until she leaned against its trunk. Letting her face rest against its rough skin. Wrapping her arms around its solidity. The wind moved through its branches, creating a noise a little like an inhalation. When she stopped moaning, she could hear these breaths better.

The trunk smelled like the wooden beads around his neck. The beads she now wore.

She rested against the tree, eyes closed.

Throughout the funeral, no one came over to talk to her, to touch her or try to move her away from the tree. Since his death, now it was others now who wouldn't look at her.

When she finally stepped back from the trunk, she was calmer. She blinked around at the world.

The sun had moved to an entirely different side of the sky. Her mom was the only one remaining, sitting on a tombstone a few feet away. Max glanced; her mom's body was concentrated, sitting still, her face pointed toward her. Who knew what thoughts she had, watching Max on this day?

After a moment her mom pushed herself heavily to her feet and the two of them turned and headed home.

 

Max bumped into Mutara's back. Stepped away fast. She saw now he had his hand up, calling for a halt. He was examining the mountainside, listening.

“Keep your eyes open, Tombay.” Yoko whispered. “We're near where they bedded down last night.”

In the silence Max heard some bird make a call that sounded remarkably like a Ping-Pong ball dropped from a height, bouncing and bouncing and finally coming to a halt.