Rhinoceros Summer

by Jamie Thornton

  “Of course.”

  “Can’t get a tourist killed without an inquiry.”

  “Of course,” Paul said again. “How come you out here to find us anyway?”

  Mark motioned for Allen to load Claire into the back of the jeep. He covered her with a blanket, and then motioned for Paul to lay the leopard down.

  “Caleb radioed,” Mark said. “I have instructions.”

  “These instructions couldn’t wait until we got back?”

  “No.”

  3

  He could see this man’s thoughts, plain as day, how he planned to pull Paul in for questioning and strip him of his PH license, his bloc, his resort, his freedom.

  He knew at that moment, sitting in the backseat of the game officer’s jeep, as they quagmired in the mud, he’d never hunt in Tanzania again.

  That old rebellion rose up in him. He’d never let them lock him up. They could shut him out, just as his parents had done, or when the military had discharged him, or when the college expelled him. No skin off his back to add Tanzania to the list.

  Paul noticed the coils of rope in the back of the jeep. It was rope normally used for hanging bait or tying down boxes. His whole world consisted of two people who wanted nothing more to do with him. The next most important thing was his freedom. As they passed a small group of trees, he reached between the front seats and pulled out Mark’s handgun, then pressed it against the man’s head.

  “Stop the jeep.”

  “Paul?” Allen shielded his face with his arms but came too close to the barrel. Paul clocked him on the temple. It didn’t knock him unconscious, only forced him into painful silence.

  “Stop the car over there, by those trees on the left.”

  “You know what this means?” Mark slowed the jeep down but didn’t stop.

  “You’re the one got a gun pointed to his head and not listening to instructions. You know what that means?” Paul took the safety off and cocked the gun. He didn’t believe in killing humans, only animals, but this guy needed to buy his bluff.

  “Okay.” Mark slowed the jeep to a stop.

  “Get out. You too, Allen. Get the rope.” He patted Mark down for additional weapons. It was quick work to tie him to a tree—he even got Allen to help. The stupid bastard.

  “What are we doing, Paul?’

  Paul shifted the gun’s direction. “There is no we.”

  Allen looked like a child in a grocery store just realizing he’d wandered far away from his mother—or maybe realizing his mother had left him behind on purpose.

  Paul tied Allen to a different tree, and then returned to the game officer. “Allen killed his wife out of spite. I’m not taking the heat for that.”

  “You tying us up and leaving—that won’t make your case.”

  Paul wasn’t taking the chance. Any coroner worth his salt would tease apart the truth. He’d lost everything except the ability to wield a gun. “Ask Allen how much he loves his wife.”

  Allen slumped against the wet tree bark.

  Paul took his GPS unit from his pocket and made some notations. “I’ll give the Game Office your coordinates once I’m away. The rain should keep any predators in hiding until then.”

  He walked away from Allen’s protests and Mark’s threats. He pulled the two bodies out of the back. The weight would slow him down. A glimmer of an idea surfaced. He needed his passport, his photos, and then he needed to put in a call to Jack Hellerman.

  CHAPTER 23

  Lydia

  Lydia woke to the sound of voices above her. Darkness and dizziness wrapped her in a thick layer of confusion.

  “When did Paul come?” Caleb’s voice. It sounded haggard, as if hoarse from too much yelling.

  “Two days, but—”

  “I wasn’t listening to anyone until I knew she would make it.”

  Lydia tried to move her hands to her face, to pull back whatever covered her sight. Her arms wouldn’t move. She tried again, commanding her brain to control her arms, but there was a deadness to her body she could not cut through.

  “What did he take?”

  “The passport.” Abiba’s voice again.

  “And?”

  A long pause.

  “Abiba?” Caleb said, in a voice that reminded Lydia of when he’d kissed her. She held onto the tenderness in that voice as the darkness thickened, tried to stay conscious.

  “Her camera. The pictures.”

  But she had already fallen too far.

  2

  Something still covered Lydia’s face. The darkness muddled her thinking, but she knew she was awake now. She tried to move her hands to her face. One came. The other was restrained. She fingered the material over her eyes. Gauze.

  “Caleb!”

  Abiba’s voice startled her. She thought she was alone.

  A shuffling of feet signaled someone’s entrance into the room.

  “Lydia?” Caleb’s voice. That tenderness again. It felt like giving in to a craving for chocolate ice cream. The first spoonful, the first word, always tasted the best.

  She croaked a response. No words of her own, just noise.

  “It’s okay. You’re okay.” He paused. “You’ll be okay.”

  She made another croaking sound and struggled to sit up. The effort helped clear her mind. Sheets crinkled in her left hand as she used it for leverage.

  “Stop it, Lydia!”

  She wanted to laugh but only managed another croak, exhausted now. This was the Caleb she knew. The Caleb whose ego had lashed out at her at the airport, ready with his gun to protect her, quick with his words to injure her. The Caleb who had so many reasons to be angry with his father.

  Paul.

  She struggled to remember Abiba’s words. “Picsssss,” she forced out.

  “Oh god, you heard that? You weren’t supposed to be awake. It was the tube, Lydia. You can’t talk because you had a breathing tube down your throat. You had to have surgery after…after the leopard.”

  She touched the gauze with her left hand again and tried to remember.

  Caleb sighed. “You had some head trauma. The fangs…didn’t…enter the eye area, but the doctors think there’s been some damage anyway.”

  She fingered the edge of the gauze, ready to tear it off.

  “No!” Caleb said. A hand touched hers and brought it down to the bed. “The doctors said your eyes have the best chance…if they stay covered for another two days. Keeps them clean from infection.”

  She moved her left hand to touch her right arm and felt along it until Caleb grabbed her again.

  “Stop, Lydia.”

  She shook off his grip and continued exploring down her right arm.

  “Lydia.” Fear in his voice.

  She struggled harder.

  “I’ll tell you everything if you stop, okay?”

  She stopped but prepared herself to start again if he kept silent for too long.

  “You can’t move your right arm because the doctors have it strapped down to the bed. They strapped it down to the bed because of the surgery.” He paused and then said, “Some of your fingers are missing.”

  Dizziness overtook her again. This time she was determined not to give in, not when Caleb was explaining how her life was never going to be the same.

  So much of the blood on her, Caleb explained, the blood that caused M’soko and Caleb to run with her body as if the leopard snapped at their heels, hadn’t been hers. It must have been Claire’s or the leopard’s.

  She had cuts on her head from the leopard’s teeth. She’d lost almost all of her right fourth and fifth fingers, sheared off at the same level. The doctors had cut down the fingertip bones to stitch the skin over. A deep gash in her left thigh from the leopard’s hind claws required several dozen stitches. They’d covered her eyes, not because of a direct wound, but because of the trauma her head received from the leopard’s smashing force.

  A miracle she was alive and an even bigger miracle she would be well enough to l
eave the hospital in another day or two. She was lucky, the doctors said. Lucky that Caleb had poured the antiseptic bucket over her wounds. Lucky that Caleb drove the eight hours to the Arusha hospital like a crazy person.

  Very lucky, Abiba and Muna said when they came to visit.

  Lucky, Caleb said while squeezing her uninjured hand.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Since the leopard? Four days,” Caleb said.

  Four days. She could remember only bits and pieces. The doctors kept her sedated because of the pain. Other than a dull throb in her right hand and a sinking heaviness throughout her body, she couldn’t feel much. Didn’t want to feel much.

  Today they’d eased up on the painkillers, which increased the throbbing. She moved her left hand over her eyes. “I don’t want to wait for the doctors.” She fiddled with the edge of the bandages.

  “Just wait, Lydia.”

  She sighed and returned her arm to the bedside. “How are Allen and Claire?”

  “Lydia.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember me telling you about Claire? What happened?”

  “I…” she thought for a moment. “Claire’s dead.” This had happened several times over the last few days. She was fighting back the darkness covering both her eyes and mind.

  “And Paul took the shot that did it, though the authorities can’t prove it yet, but it’s only a matter of time. They haven’t charged him with anything yet, but they will.”

  “Caleb?”

  “All your pictures are gone. Paul took your camera bag, took the memory cards from Owl Camp, came to the resort for his passport, and then searched your room.”

  Oh yes, she remembered that. She felt panic at the thought of those pictures, now maybe the only ones she would ever take, gone.

  “I’m going to get them back,” Caleb said.

  The abyss in front of her eyes allowed her to freely imagine what her injuries must look like. Her missing fingers, her swollen, cotton-wrapped hand bulging in size. The hand that had taken all those pictures for a man who planned to do no good with them.

  But she’d taken them, showed them to him, as if begging him to steal them. Had kept the rhino secret from Caleb when she should have known better than to give Paul a chance to make things right. Should have done better. Her injured hand loomed three, four, ten times larger than normal in the gulf before her eyes. Accusing her with its size, its swollen monstrous size, incapable of functioning or doing anything but balloon larger in her mind, the throbbing growing stronger, the judgment impossible to deny. She had not expected to find the M’s here.

  She’d broken the rules. The missing fingers were her punishment. Maybe her eyes too.

  She was an outsider, a stranger. She had not thought, she had not known her life before was an imaginary one that didn’t believe in elephants and leopards and buffalo. Animals that could not be stowed away in a doghouse, or cat bed, or eight-by-ten-foot bedroom. She did not want to be an outcast pet, disdained for its helplessness, for its size and ignorance. For its tameness.

  Caleb shifted in his seat next to her bed. “I waited until the doctors knew you were going to be okay, but I changed your flight and called your parents and told them you were coming come early. They know you were injured, but not any details, other than you’re okay, but you wanted to get to your U.S. doctors. I didn’t know what to say to them over the phone.”

  She could picture her parents’ faces. Her dad’s turtle-ducking head, her mom’s large eyes and thin determined lips. She had been so naïve and foolish. Her choices had sucked her into a swamp, the thick mud of ambition catching at each faulty step.

  “I told them not to fly out because you were going back anyway.”

  Back to balancing on that tightrope of arguments between her parents? Doing what she was told, returning to her act as a good pastor’s kid, her job at the bookstore, hanging out with the M’s like nothing had happened? She might as well hang a big ‘guilty’ sign on her forehead. “I don’t want to go back.”

  She wasn’t ready to deal with all of this. Hadn’t she been punished enough? But to go back now and act like none of this happened? She felt sickened by the thought. She tried to push away the guilt creeping in on her, whispering that her injuries were her fault, she hadn’t listened to her parents, she’d walked away from home, from church, from everything she was before, and what did she expect would happen? That she would be rewarded? Two fingers lost, scars, concussion, and maybe eye damage.

  “How am I going to get my pictures if I’m back home?” She wasn’t ready to give up. She wasn’t ready to crawl home and beg forgiveness.

  “I don’t…Lydia, you need to go home and let me take care of Paul.”

  She wanted to spit like Caleb or Paul or Mr. Compton did to push out some bit of dirt or insect. Wanted to push those people, that world, out of her mouth and let them evaporate. She wasn’t going back like this, broken and guilty so her parents could shake their heads in worry and pack her off to some private Christian college. “No.” The word still felt strange in her mouth. “I’m going to find my pictures.”

  She heard the whoosh of the door opening, the swish of coats, and the soft patter of shoes. “How are you today, Lydia?” the doctor asked in unaccented English.

  Lydia turned her head toward the voice of the doctor. “I just want these off.” She touched the bandages.

  “That’s the plan,” a male doctor said. “We need to check over your hand first.”

  Caleb released her good hand.

  She sat up in bed. The doctor cradled her wrist and began peeling off the bandages. The air in the room stung her unwrapped skin. “How is the pain?”

  “Better than yesterday,” she said.

  “Losing a part of a finger is a very common injury. No signs of infection. Relatively straightforward suture. You’ll be in pain for a while but give it six to eight weeks and you’ll be fine. Really very minor compared to what might have happened. We let finger amputations out usually the same day they come in. You stayed because of your eyes and the concussion you sustained.”

  The doctor re-wrapped her hand.

  “What about my eyes?”

  “Yes, well. That’s next.”

  A subtle smell of antiseptic entered her nostrils, a minty breath washed over her. The doctor must be leaning over her. The bandages unwound. She tried to concentrate on those bandages, to concentrate on the increase of light she should see with every layer removed.

  “Now. The world will seem fuzzy to you for a few hours, maybe as much as a day, but that should pass.” The doctor took off the last layer of bandage. “You can open your eyes now, Lydia.”

  She kept them closed for another moment, holding herself at the edge of the unknown.

  She took a deep breath.

  At first, she couldn’t figure out why her cheeks were wet. Not until Caleb said in an alarmed voice, “Why are you crying? Can you see?”

  “Lydia, what can you see?” the doctor asked.

  “I see…” Her eyes darted around the room—the white walls, the small window where sun streamed through. Only some slight blurriness. She took in the three doctors standing around the end of her bed, one holding the bandages. She looked into Caleb’s blue eyes, saw the worry that etched his forehead into wrinkles, the unshaved face she wanted to place her hand against, “…everything.”

  3

  Lydia asked for a mirror. The doctors brought one in.

  Before taking a look, she cleared the room. “I would like to be alone.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Caleb said.

  She ignored him and looked at the doctor who still held the bandages in his hand. “That’s fine,” he said, giving her an encouraging smile.

  Not until she heard the click of the door latch did she bring up the mirror. Now that her eyesight was okay, she wanted to know everything.

  Small lines of stitches crisscrossed her scalp. The doctors had not shaved her
head, but bald spots marked where the leopard grazed her with its teeth. She tried to switch the mirror to her right hand so she could touch the stitches with her left, but fumbled the mirror into her lap.

  She wiggled each finger and her thumb, struggling a bit against the bandages.

  “At least it wasn’t my whole hand,” she said to the empty room. Maybe if she said it enough times she’d begin to believe it.

  Lydia returned to the mirror and fiddled with her hair until it disguised most of the scalp wounds. Bruises and small scratches covered her face, nothing that would leave scars, though her skin would look very colorful for a while. The other major wound was the deep gash on her left thigh. The leopard had barely missed her stomach.

  She carefully swung her legs around to rest her bare feet on the cold tile floor. Her skin sweated from the exertion.

  The door creaked open. “Done yet?”

  Caleb’s voice left her cold. How could he stand to look at her? She thought about his tenderness these last few days. Four days of staring at scars, bruises and bald patches of skin on her head. Four days to think about how she’d lied to him and had acted no better than his father.

  “You’re not trying to stand, are you?”

  Lydia pursed her lips. “I was thinking about it.”

  “Just wait. You need to rest.”

  She saw how his jeans and T-shirt, his slightly wild hair, his unshaven, bruise-free face all contrasted with her image in the mirror. She turned her face from him. “I don’t want you here while I’m like this.”

  “I’m not leaving.” He entered the room and stood by her bed.

  The laugh that came out of her mouth sounded bitter even to herself. “This wasn’t your fault, so you don’t have to stay.” She tried to swallow over the lump rising in her throat. “I know I’m not pleasant to look at.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Caleb leaned over and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead, bringing his earthy scent to her nose.

  She tried to lean away from him. If she could smell his earthy scent, what could he smell? “Caleb, I’m so sorry.”

  “You look like you got a bad haircut and you don’t know how to put on makeup. It’s not that bad, Lydia.”