But still the animal wasn’t retreating. Blind and hungry and now very angry, it lunged at him, and he brought his good arm in front of his face.
Which was when he heard the crack of the pistol at his side, and the animal dropped to the ground. The gunshot was loud, but not so close or near to his head that his ears were ringing, and so he was aware of the hyena whimpering at his feet, taking in great gulps of air. It sounded like a sick dog. He glanced back and saw Carmen had now extended both her arms, her right wrist in her left hand and the pistol in her right hand aimed at the second hyena. The beast took a step back, eyeing the humans warily, and Carmen fired once more. She missed the animal completely this time, and Reggie expected it would turn and run, retreating into the dark and the brush.
“Shoot again,” he said, and she did. Once more, she missed.
And still the hyena held its ground as its mate or its sibling or whatever bled out at his feet.
She fired a third time, but now there was only an ineffectual click. The pistol was empty.
He reached behind him for the rifle with his one good arm, not taking his eyes off the animal that was watching these two humans, assessing whether it was safe to attack. He ran his fingers over the baobab bark until he found the barrel of the weapon and then the forestock. He grabbed it and was pulling it into the air when the hyena charged, and so reflexively he poked it as hard as he could with the tip, using the muzzle and sight as a spear, jabbing it, but the creature was so strong it was like using a matchstick against a wild dog. It sent Reggie sprawling back into Carmen and the two of them into the trunk of the tree, half on and half off the dying hyena, too weak now to protest. When the animal charged again, Reggie swung the rifle like a club, but with one arm the blow registered only enough to cause the creature to bounce away like a boxer who was barely grazed by a failed uppercut. Carmen took the pistol by the barrel and slammed the grip into the animal’s head, once, twice, and then a third time, as it ducked and growled, but it didn’t turn away.
Still, Carmen’s frenzied beating had given Reggie the second he needed to get the rifle butt against his shoulder and a finger on the trigger. He got off the shot just as the hyena was meeting the tip of the weapon, and at point-blank range he blew a hole in the animal’s side big enough to kill it instantly.
Or close enough to instantly.
It fell almost on top of the other hyena, and for a moment he stared at the two animals, one dead and one nearly dead. He was breathing heavily, as was Carmen.
“You saved our lives,” he said to her, after a moment. “That was a good shot.”
“I kept missing,” she said, whimpering.
“No. You got off the shot that mattered. That first one. And then you bought us time when you were conking him with the pistol. Are you hurt?”
“I’m not. At least I don’t think I am.”
“Good.”
She opened the backpack and started rummaging inside it for the medical supplies he’d taken from the Land Rover. But he realized how weak he was, how fast he was fading now that they had defeated the hyenas and his adrenaline was dissipating, and he slid to the ground against the base of the tree and sat beside the pair of dead animals. He couldn’t believe how big they were. Beside them was his hat with the broken chinstrap. Only then did he grit his teeth and yank up the sleeve of his shirt to look at the ruin of his arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Billy Stepanov
“Oh, Katie and I probably fought like all brothers and sisters growing up,” Billy told us, laughing. “She knew just how to push my buttons as my kid sister, and I’d wager I was a pretty typical know-it-all older brother. Our childhood was as run-of-the-mill as most people’s. Yes, we grew up with Broadway in our blood—Katie sure did—but otherwise our parents were just like yours. Just like anyone’s.”
—Movie Star Confidential, December 1962
Billy was unsure which hurt more: his nose or his back. His kidney. Both were throbbing like hell. And while his back had prevented him from getting comfortable, his nose was forcing him to breathe largely through his mouth. He supposed, if he lived, his nose would get better. The bones, if they were broken, would stitch. Oh, he’d be disfigured, but the damage wasn’t permanent. He was less sure about his back. His kidney.
The dark night of the soul.
The words came to him.
The poem didn’t really have a name. St. John of the Cross had written it in the sixteenth century, and that was the title that scholars and theologians had attached to it. Billy had read it in a course on faith and mythology, and it interested him because of his own fear of the dark—that closet, the closet that was his childhood jail cell—and the journeys the mind took when confronted by such utter blackness. Imagination was toxic in the dark, a poison that likely spared no one. Certainly, it spared no child. In his last year of college, when he knew he was going to become a therapist, he had tried to decipher the links between psychiatric darkness and literal darkness, and had written his thesis, in part, about that. St. John of the Cross’s poem was, in Billy’s opinion, about the search for God, and because God existed for the writer in the firmament, Billy had wanted to title his thesis—with great import and pretentiousness—The Oubliette. Even his thesis adviser had had to ask him what the hell an oubliette was.