Dark Memory

by Jonathan Latimer

  Why shouldn’t Bill have run? He was out of a city. He was not used to lions. He didn’t particularly want to kill one. His emotions hadn’t been hardened for such an emergency. And he had no faith in rifles. Too much was made of courage, Jay thought. If you said someone was brave, most people took it for granted he was a good man, too. This did not follow. There were brave men who were careless with other people’s money, who cheated at cards and welched on bets, who were sullen and unpleasant companions.

  Someone with a lantern came over to Jay. It was Lew Cable. He had taken Eve to her tent. “Go to bed,” he said. “We start early tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  Cable started on, then paused. “Boy Scout.”

  “Yes.”

  “About the lion. I don’t object at all. I don’t give a damn if you get killed. But be careful of Eve.”

  Jay was silent.

  “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. Not for anything. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Jay said.

  He went to his tent. To hell with Cable. He wondered how many times he had thought that. A great many. He undressed and got in bed. Bill sounded as though he was asleep. The blankets were cold, but Jay’s body warmed them. It was good to be in bed. It was fine to think they would be in Lubero tomorrow. He did not want to come between Lew Cable and Eve. If Cable only knew. He thought of Eve’s fine eyes and soft skin and hair that was not blond, but not brown either. She was lovely, but he had finished with her. A five-letter word had finished him. He thought of Linda. She would have liked the lion. He had never known her to be afraid of anything. It was too bad she was not along. He fell asleep thinking of her.

  “Jay!” Bill called. “Jay!”

  “What?”

  “You were having a nightmare.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He could not remember what he had been dreaming about. During the night he woke again and heard crickets, and in the morning it was clear. Eve spoke to him at breakfast, but she was very formal. Lew Cable went with her in the station wagon. They were going to try to make Lubero by lunch. The trucks, because of the gorillas, were to go more slowly.

  All morning the road wound up into the mountains, the Citroën losing power as it climbed. The sun was bright, but the air turned cold when the truck was in the shadow of a cloud. This part of Africa was like Switzerland. There were flowers and fast streams with stone bridges and valleys of grass and clean native villages. In the valleys the long-horned cattle watched them pass. The air smelled faintly of iodine. On a long grade the Citroën overheated and they stopped and sat on the running board and drank beer while they waited for the engine to cool.

  “This is swell,” Bill said.

  “Too bad the okapis don’t live up here.”

  “Maybe the forest won’t be so bad.”

  “Maybe,” Jay said.

  Later they stopped for lunch. After that Jay drove as rapidly as he dared along the mountain road. He wanted to make Lubero before dark. He wondered where the other truck was. They hadn’t seen it all day.

  “What’s the matter with Eve?” Bill asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “I don’t know what.”

  “Why won’t she talk to you?”

  “I can’t imagine.” Jay grinned. “Unless it’s because I called her a bitch.”

  Bill did not think it was funny. “You shouldn’t have. She was right. I was a damned coward.”

  Jay said, “You’re crazy.”

  “No. She was right.”

  “Let’s forget it,” Jay said.

  “Sure,” Bill said. “That’s so easy to do.”

  Lubero was a clean town with red brick houses and a two-story stone hotel with a wooden veranda. It was called the Hôtel de la Poste. At five minutes past five they parked the Citroën. It had already begun to turn cold. A Belgian porter carried their bags into the hotel, took a key from the rack and led them upstairs to their room. It was a big corner room with two mahogany beds, an armoire and a washstand with an enameled pitcher and basin on it. There was a grass mat on the floor.

  “Have you a bath?” Jay asked the porter.

  “Out, monsieur.”

  “We would both like baths.”

  “Oui.” The porter put down their bags and went into the hall.

  “You want the first bath?” Jay asked.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll dig out some clean clothes.”

  The porter came with towels and soap. There was a sound of running water. “One enters the bath from the hall,” the porter told Jay.

  Jay gave him five francs. “Does Monsieur desire anything else?”

  “Let’s have some whisky,” Bill said.

  Jay told the porter to bring up a bottle of Haig & Haig and some soda. The porter showed Bill the bath and then brought the whisky. Jay paid him and mixed a drink. He drank it sitting on the bed. Something about the porter and hotel reminded him of Quebec. Only he should be drinking champagne instead of scotch. That was what he and Linda drank. It was funny he should think of that in Africa.

  CHAPTER 14

  BILL HAD FALLEN ASLEEP on his bed when Jay came back from the bath. He looked tired, sleeping with one hand over his face, and Jay put a quilt over him and dressed and went downstairs. He found Mr. Palmer drinking scotch and soda in a small bar off the dining room. A native in a white coat stood behind the bar. Mr. Palmer had a copy of Punch, but he looked up and smiled at Jay.

  “Have a spot?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  A wood fire was burning in a stone fireplace at one end of the bar. There were three tables in the room, covered with red-and-white checkered cloths. Chairs with wooden seats and wire backs stood around the tables. There was a clock over the fireplace. The floor of the barroom was made of flat stones set in cement.

  “Whisky and soda,” Jay told the native barman.

  He sat beside Mr. Palmer on a stool, turning his back to the fire. The heat felt good. The barman put a pony glass and a bottle of scotch on the bar. He put ice in a tall glass and waited with the soda siphon. Jay took two ponies of whisky and had the barman fill the glass with soda.

  “Where’s Bill?” Mr. Palmer asked.

  “Asleep.” Jay stirred his drink with a barspoon. “He’s tired. I am, too. Are we going on tomorrow?”

  “Don’t know,” Mr. Palmer said. “Cable didn’t say.”

  “Did he ride all the way with Mrs. Salles?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t care if we never get to the Ituri,” Jay said.

  “I don’t look forward to it myself.”

  “Not without the professor.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Palmer. “Quite.”

  They drank. This was Jay’s third whisky and he was feeling better. The clean barroom with the open fire helped. It was a cheerful room. It was no place to think of Linda. He saw the wood surface of the bar was shiny from being wiped. The native barman was squeezing lemons. He had squeezed more than a dozen. Jay wondered what they were for.

  “Other people in the hotel?” he asked Mr. Palmer.

  “Yes. An English party.”

  “That’s nice for you.”

  “No,” Mr. Palmer said. “I don’t believe so.”

  A blond man with a pleasant round face and blue eyes came to the bar. He wore a gray tweed suit and a plum-colored tie. He saw Mr. Palmer. “Oh, there you are,” he said.

  The man’s name was Helge Holmstrom. He was the white hunter with the English safari. He was a Swede. He smiled at Jay, showing beautiful teeth. “Saw your two gorillas,” he said.

  “They’re not mine,” Jay said.

  “No?” Holmstrom did not understand what Jay meant. He looked at Mr. Palmer, then back to Jay. “You didn’t go?”

  “Yes, I went.”

  “Should have seen the shot this lad made on the female,” Mr. Palmer said. “A bloody miracle.”

  �
��A bloody accident,” Jay said.

  The barman, without being told, made Holmstrom a whisky sour. Mr. Palmer tossed a ten-franc note on the bar. “My round,” he said when Holmstrom reached for his money. They drank together.

  “I’ve never killed a gorilla,” Holmstrom said. “Did cither rush you?”

  “The male put up a show,” said Mr. Palmer. “Don’t know how serious he was, though.”

  “Big fellow?”

  “Around four fifty.”

  “That’s quite good.” Holmstrom nodded jerkily. He spoke very good English, but his mannerisms seemed foreign. “What will be done with them?”

  “They’re to be trucked to Stanleyville,” Mr. Palmer said. “Then shipped to the States.”

  “And there?”

  “Something scientific. I’m not clear just what.”

  Holmstrom looked at Jay. “I’m not clear either,” Jay said.

  They had another round of drinks. Jay paid for it. Some people came into the dining room. Jay could not see them, but he caught a few English words. The people were noisy.

  “Your party, Helge?” Mr. Palmer asked.

  “I am afraid so.”

  “Not going well?”

  Holmstrom said, “I still drink their whisky.”

  “As bad as that?”

  “Yes.” Holmstrom finished his drink. “I am eating alone after the second day. One drink and then I go to my tent. I won’t bore you with the story.”

  “Do,” said Mr. Palmer. “They look bloody awful.”

  “They are the worst in fifteen years.” Holmstrom motioned to the barman to fill the glasses. “They are like the Chicago gangsters of the cinema. Exactly. They shoot at everything, from five hundred or a thousand yards by preference. They wound some animal, but they will not go after it. ‘Your job, Helge,’ they say. ‘That’s why we pay you.’ Hundreds of miles I have walked tracking and dispatching wounded beasts.”

  “What bastards!” Mr. Palmer said.

  “But that is nothing,” Holmstrom said. “Absolutely nothing. I can stand that. It is only walking. But the lions.”

  “They made you kill ’em?”

  “They would not let me. We must kill them from a boma. I say it is not sporting. I swear there will be no danger in the open. My business, you know.” He smiled at Jay. “But they will have no lions in the open. ‘You will prepare a boma, Helge.’ So I prepare a boma. In three days we slaughter seven lions.”

  Mr. Palmer said, “You’d better not let that get back to Nairobi.”

  “It is all right. This is all in Belgian territory. But that is not the worst. Oh, no. The worst is the two women. One, certainly, and perhaps both wish to sleep with me.”

  Mr. Palmer and Jay laughed at the expression on his face.

  “Oh, it is funny,” Holmstrom said bitterly. “I can see that it is funny. But I am married only a year. I do not wish an affair. So I am forced to share my tent with my native gunbearer.”

  “How much longer?” asked Mr. Palmer.

  “A week, or less, I hope. We have killed everything on the license except a sable and a klippspringer. It may be we will pass them up.”

  “What about buffs?” Mr. Palmer asked. “You couldn’t build a boma for them.”

  “I killed them myself.”

  “No ivory?”

  “No, thank God!”

  The hotel was built around a cobblestone court. Through a window in the barroom Jay could see two dim electric lights on the far wall of the hotel. Some natives were in the court and one of them was playing a small pianolike instrument that tinkled softly. Jay had seen one in Bukavu. It was called a lukimbe. The other blacks were whispering and laughing and watching the people in the dining room.

  Mr. Palmer finished his drink. “Shall we eat?”

  “I am very hungry.” Holmstrom smiled at Jay. “You will eat with us?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jay said. “I must wait for a friend.”

  “We’ll have a drink later,” Holmstrom said.

  “Yes,” Jay said. Holmstrom was very polite. He liked him. “After dinner.”

  “Fine,” Holmstrom said.

  He followed Mr. Palmer into the dining room. Jay leaned against the bar. He had not finished his drink. He could hear the English greeting Holmstrom in the dining room. He wondered what the women looked like. The English were a damn queer race. Or maybe it was women that were queer. He drank and decided that he had had just enough whisky to be philosophical about women. He thought that women were queer only as long as you tried to set up a special standard for them. If you could think of them just as you thought of men, nothing about them could surprise you. You were never surprised at immorality in men. You could hear of a man murdering his best friend, or stealing from the blind, or committing sodomy without being surprised. It was only when you thought of women as you had been taught to, as superior morally, that you got into trouble. There was a great deal of muddled thinking about women. Sometime he would sit down and clear it all up. He drank the whisky slowly. The tinkle of the lukimbe was very pleasant. It was a clear night and through one of the windows in the bar he could see stars. He took his drink to the window and looked at the sky. It was a deep purple. He smelled a faint lilac scent and turned around and saw Eve.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  “The evening. It’s so still.”

  “I noticed how nice it was. It’s like fall in Canada. It made me homesick.”

  She looked nice in a gray wool suit. She wore a French-blue sweater under the coat and a string of pearls. Her skin was brown. She looked like one of the women in the Yardley advertisements.

  “Will you have a drink?” Jay asked.

  “A martini.”

  “A martini,” Jay told the barman.

  “See,” she said to the barman. Then, to Jay, “Aren’t you having anything?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll get tight.”

  “Do.”

  “All right. Encore whisky.”

  “I’d like to get tight myself,” Eve said.

  “Why?”

  “Things are so messy.”

  “Things are always messy.”

  “No. Not always.” She looked at him. “I’m so sorry about yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “No. I was a bitch.”

  “You were nice in camp.”

  “Was I?”

  “I was afraid you’d tell the others.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I simply lost my temper that time.”

  The black boy gave them the drinks.

  “You should have seen Bill when you didn’t tell,” Jay said.

  “I couldn’t look. His face is so revealing. Why did he have to run?”

  “He couldn’t help it.”

  “It’s so tragic, not measuring up.”

  “That’s your English education,” Jay said. “It really shouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Doesn’t it to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It does to him,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I do feel sorry.”

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “What shall I say to him?”

  “Don’t say anything.”

  She leaned towards him. “I’ve wished, more than everything I’ve ever wished for, that I could take it back.”

  “He understands.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Sure.”

  As they were finishing the drinks Lew Cable and Bill came into the bar. “I’ve been hunting for you,” Cable said to Eve. He looked very large in a white linen suit. His face was a healthy pink. He did not speak to Jay.

  “How about Cable buying dinner?” Bill asked. His eyes were a little glazed and Jay knew he had been drinking. “How about it, Lew?”

  “I’m eating with Eve,” Cable said.

  “Come on,” Bill said.

  “We can eat with Mr. Palmer,” Jay told
Bill.

  “No. Let’s all eat together,” Eve said. “It’s more fun.”

  “You want to?” Cable asked. He had expected to eat alone with Eve.

  “Yes,” Eve said. “I’ll even buy the wine.”

  Cable looked sullenly at Bill. “I have to pay for the Boy Scouts anyway. I suppose it’s just the same if they eat with us.”

  “Better,” Bill said. “You can make sure we don’t eat too much.”

  Bill’s hostility surprised Jay. He wondered what Cable had done. “Shall we have a drink here?” Eve asked.

  “No,” Cable said. “Let’s get dinner over with.”

  He went into the dining room with her. Jay gave the barman a note to change. “Down with Cable,” Bill said.

  “What’s he done now?”

  “He’s been trying to pump me about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he wants to queer you with Eve. He said he heard you were married.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “I told him nothing.”

  “Go ahead,” Jay said. “I don’t mind.”

  “It’s none of his damned business.”

  “He’ll get sore at you.”

  “He doesn’t dare. I’m his scientist. Where would he find another?”

  “Well, it’s your funeral.” Jay put a franc of the change on the bar.

  “Merci” the barman said.

  Madame Chambord, a plump Belgian woman, owned the Hôtel de la Poste. She was showing Eve and Lew Cable to a table by a big window. “Madame can hear the music from here,” she said, pulling back a chair.

  “Thank you,” Eve said.

  They sat at the table. Some of the natives were singing in the court. Their soft voices sounded well with the tinkling lukimbe. Only the men were singing.

  “The table was a favorite of poor Monsieur Salles,” Madame Chambord told Eve.