“Yes,” she said, because she knew she was supposed to. But when she tried to take comfort in his scenario, she found it too rosy. It was a fairy tale. But she didn’t dispute him. She merely stared into the flames and watched the sparks rise into the ever-blackening sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Reggie Stout
“I have clients who changed their names before our firm started representing them—at least three or four. You know who they are,” Stout said. “But I never asked anyone to change his name. I told people how I thought they should dress, but I never bought anyone the ‘right’ clothes. I try to treat my clients like grown-ups. Let’s face it: you may not lose an adult when you talk to him like a child, but you’re certainly not winning him over. Lord, even children know when you’re condescending to them. There are people in this world who will sell their soul to be in the movie business, and the last thing I want to do is exploit that desperation or make someone beholden to me.”
—Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1962
Carmen shrieked when she saw him, and then she was yelling, her voice so uncharacteristically frenzied and irrational that for a second Reggie feared she was going to fall from the baobab.
“I told you, I had to pee. I was no more than forty feet away,” he said quickly but calmly when he was standing below her, trying to comfort and reassure her. He pointed at the spot where he had been standing. He could see her in the moonlight now that he was back at the base of the tree, and the terror in her poor, bruised face—and in her one open eye—was evident.
“No, you didn’t, you didn’t!” she wailed.
He wasn’t going to argue with her. He had told her. She must have dozed off and he hadn’t known. He took comfort from the idea that she hadn’t shot him with that pistol when he’d emerged from the other side of the tree. God, his desire for a moment of privacy had nearly resulted in a bullet in his abdomen or his chest, when he’d supposed the big risk was getting eaten.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here, you’re here. And soon the sun will be up.”
“It’s not even three thirty in the morning!” she argued. “The sun won’t be up for hours.”
“Shhhhhhhh,” he said. “We’re fine.”
And they were. More or less. His leg had stiffened up from sitting beneath the tree, but he had been able to walk and felt a little better now that he had been up and around. He’d popped some more aspirin. There really were only a few more hours of darkness, and that idea gave him hope. Perhaps at sunrise he could shoot them something for breakfast. A gazelle or a dik-dik. He’d find enough wood to restart the fire, and in his mind, he saw Carmen sitting across him, pulling meat from the antelope’s leg. A cavewoman, he thought, and he smiled ever so slightly. Carmen Tedesco, smarty-pants cavewoman.
“How long were you gone?” she asked.
“Two minutes. Maybe three. Not much more.”
“You could have been killed.”
“True. But I could have been killed sitting beneath the tree, too. And I didn’t really feel like peeing in my pants. Also? I was getting sleepy. I needed to walk around. Wake myself up.”
“I might have shot you. By accident.”
“Well, I’m grateful you didn’t. Thank you.”
He was just about to sit down when she said, “Now I have to go to the bathroom.”
He considered making a joke about the way she had chosen such a modest euphemism for three thirty in the morning in the Serengeti—observing, perhaps, that the nearest bathroom was really very far away. But he knew that wouldn’t go over well. Nor would that old joke about how she should have thought of that before they got in the car. And so instead he leaned the rifle against the tree and said, “Let me help you down.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just be careful with the pistol.”
“The safety’s on.”
“Good.”
Her feet had just touched the ground, and she was smiling at him sheepishly when her face, still streaked with her tears, changed in a heartbeat, her one good eye growing wide and her mouth opening into an O, a rictus of teeth and terror, and he felt the animal—whatever it was—jumping onto him, onto his back, throwing the two of them into the thick trunk of the tree, just as she started, once more, to scream.
* * *
.?.?.
There were four of them sitting around the folding table after lunch: Reggie and Katie and Juma and Charlie. The porters were starting to pack everything up and haul it back into the lorry. They were talking about jackals because they’d seen a pair sunning themselves in the dirt tracks carved into the dirt by countless vehicles that summer and fall. The animals had black backs and reminded some of the Californians of German shepherds.