But he didn’t want to risk drawing the attention of the guard with the guns behind them. That scared him too.
God, everything scared him. Everything. He had to pee, he had to pee badly, and he knew it was more because he was frightened than because of the breakfast coffee.
He spotted a lone ostrich in the distance, and the big bird seemed fearless to him. He wondered what that was like—to be stoic, to be strong, to be unafraid—as his eyes, once more, began welling up.
CHAPTER NINE
Margie Stepanov
The rumor is that Katie Barstow’s wedding dress is being designed by MGM’s legendary costume designer Helen Rose. But the actress was spotted at a bridal boutique on Santa Monica with her sister-in-law, Margie Stepanov. Margie is married to Katie’s brother, Billy, and very likely a bridesmaid. And so it’s possible that Katie was merely picking out dresses for her entourage. We would know if the star had had a falling out or a couture disagreement with the venerable Miss Rose.
—The Hollywood Reporter, June 15, 1964
Margie put both of her hands across her belly as the Land Rover bumped along, and she thought of the child inside her. The link had been the baby baboons they had just passed. She was terrified for herself, but she was filled as well with self-loathing for being here in the first place. She should have listened to her physician; she shouldn’t have come. She had jeopardized the kid. （Already that’s what she and Billy were calling the fetus. The kid. It worked for them since they had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl, and the reality that she had not had any morning sickness further solidified the nickname in their minds. Their baby was jaunty and easy and unflappable: the kid was such a trooper that he or she didn’t even make Mom vomit.） Neither the monster who was driving nor the one who was in the last row of seats and pointing a gun at them had even bothered to wipe the remains of poor Juma’s brains off the window.
Billy was a shrink and had said, half joshing but half serious, that children had formative experiences in the womb and the kid—their kid—would benefit from the Serengeti. He or she would absorb all the happy chemicals that Mom was creating as she communed with lions and elephants and giraffes.
Well, that supposed it was a joyful excursion. If Billy was right, she shuddered when she thought of what she was doing to the kid now.
She was in the Land Rover with the rear and side windows that had been shattered, and a new tire pressed into service to replace the one that had been shot. But they hadn’t been allowed to wipe the glass shards off the seats, and though she didn’t think her ass was bleeding badly, she could feel the way at least some of the shards had cut through her khakis and sliced into her skin. Billy had managed to staunch the bleeding where pulverized slivers of glass had shredded a part of her shirt and gashed her stomach, but it wasn’t as if he had sealed the wound with gauze and an antiseptic: he’d poured some canteen water on the cut as the Land Rover sped away and then pressed a bandanna firmly against the laceration until the bleeding stopped. It started again when he removed it, though he pulled it away from the skin as gently as he could, as if her stomach were an unopened Christmas present and he didn’t want to tear the wrapping paper. But she thought it was starting to scab over now. Still, she was afraid the cut would only get worse. She feared an infection, either from the broken glass or the bandanna or even the tepid canteen water.
There were also bugs trapped inside the vehicle with them because they weren’t allowed to open the roof, and the insects were too damn stupid to find their way to an open window or through the broken glass. One moment, they would be flying into the windshield, trying to escape, and the next they would be landing on the humans’ arms or getting caught in their hair. She tried to shoo some of them through the shattered window beside her, but she dinged her fingers when she tried and the last thing she needed was yet another cut.
They could no longer see the other Land Rover that had left with them because the two vehicles had spread out in different directions. But she was pretty sure that she had only witnessed Felix, Carmen, and Reggie being shoved into it before they had left the camp. She was not 100 percent certain because it had all happened so fast and she had just seen Juma and the rangers shot dead, and then she was sobbing in a way that she never before had in her life. But in this vehicle, she could account for Billy （thank God） and Katie and David and Terrance.
It crossed her mind that it was the agent who was missing. Merrick. Peter Merrick. So was Charlie Patton. Or at least she had no idea where he was either. The last she could recall, the two older men had been laughing together over breakfast in the dining tent. Patton had just taught the agent an expression, and the two of them had shared it with her as she passed them on her way to see the giraffes at the watering hole.