American Hippo

by Sarah Gailey

  “I just don’t know if we can believe what he says,” Hero said. “What’s to keep him from steering us wrong?”

  Adelia looked from Hero to the man on the ground. “Are you going to lie to me, Doug Feeney?” she asked. “Are you going to ‘steer me wrong’?”

  He shook his head vehemently, then spat blood onto the ground. It wasn’t that much blood—he was being dramatic. Adelia tutted. “In my pocket,” Feeney said. “Just look in my pocket, it’s right—no, not that one—” Adelia had already shoved him hard, forcing him to lie down. She began to turn his pockets inside out with the quick efficiency of a woman who had searched more than her fair share of unconscious men for information. A folding knife fell to the ground, and she placed it in the center of Feeney’s chest along with a pocket watch, a handful of peanut shells, and a smooth rock. Oh, and Feeney’s teeth. Those went on his chest too, right where he could see them. Finally, she found a crumpled paper, limp with the humid sweat of the man’s pockets.

  She handed the paper off to Hero for safekeeping, then picked up the smooth rock. “What’s this for?” she asked.

  Feeney stammered and tried to sit up. Adelia pressed the tip of her index finger to his forehead, keeping him supine. She liked him better that way. “I, uh, I—it’s a souvenir.” The tip of his tongue poked out to wet his lower lip where it had split under Adelia’s slap. “I’m not from around here, and whenever I travel I try to bring a little something home for my boy.”

  “How old is your boy?” Adelia asked. Her eyes were locked on the man’s dilated pupils. He seemed unable to look away from her, even at the sound of Hero tearing open the letter. His breath came fast and shallow. They sent a lamb, Adelia thought. They sent prey to hunt me down. She returned the rock to Feeney’s chest and picked up the pocket knife. She opened it, examined the blade.

  “He’s five,” Feeney whispered. “Please don’t kill me. He’s five.”

  Please don’t kill me. How many times had Adelia heard those words? She had always been very good at ignoring them, but something was different now.

  It wasn’t Ysabel. Ysabel was … “symptom” wasn’t the right word. She was a by-product of this softening, a piece of the emerging puzzle that was life after retirement. The desire to have Ysabel had come after Adelia had decided that she was done killing, after her last job in California had gone so wrong, nearly a year before.

  Not wrong. Right. It had gone perfectly, and five men had been dead before she’d so much as blinked. Five men dead, and her heartbeat hadn’t so much as stuttered. That had begun the shift—a feeling that she needed to stop the work she’d spent a lifetime perfecting. A certainty that it was time for a change.

  She still wasn’t sure that she liked the change.

  “I wasn’t going to kill you,” she murmured, still examining the man’s knife. “But thank you for asking so nicely.”

  Feeney started to sob as Adelia took up Hero’s kukri—a fat, heavy knife, better suited to hacking through underbrush or dislocating joints than to the fine grade of work Adelia preferred—and began honing the blade of the folding knife against it. She used short, quick strokes. The Adelia of a year ago would have used long strokes, theatrically long ones, slow and grating. She would have watched with detached satisfaction as Feeney grew hypnotized with terrified anticipation. But it wasn’t a year ago, and Adelia wasn’t interested in Feeney’s terror. The adrenal hunger of knowing that this man had helped steal Ysabel hadn’t worn off, but its edge was gone, and now Adelia just felt tired. It was the same fatigue she’d felt throughout the hippo caper on the Harriet, as Travers had endlessly wheedled her and blackmailed her and threatened her.

  She was so tired.

  “Adelia, you should read this,” Hero was saying, but Adelia shook her head.

  “Momento,” she said. “I’m almost finished.” She sheathed her fat knife and picked up the smooth stone from Feeney’s chest, then rose from her crouch to face Hero. “Qué onda?”

  “This is a letter for you,” Hero said. They held out the paper, but Adelia didn’t take it. Her hands were occupied; she scratched at the smooth stone with the folding knife, not looking up.

  “And?”

  “It, um.” Hero faltered. “It’s a ransom letter, sort of. It says that if you want Ysabel back you have to go to Baton Rouge and get her.”

  Adelia glanced at Feeney, whose face had taken on the glazed look of a man who couldn’t process any more fear. She nudged him with her foot. “Feeney. If I go to this place, will I be ambushed and killed?”

  “No,” he breathed. “Not that they told me, anyway. They just said to get the baby and leave the letter, though, so … maybe.”

  “Hmph.” Adelia turned back to her etching on the smooth stone. “Alright, so, we’ll go there.” She paused. “I’ll go there. My apologies, Hero. I did not mean to presume.”

  Hero remained silent, and Adelia allowed herself a small internal sigh as she dropped the stone into her shirt pocket. She had no right to expect Hero’s forgiveness. Even if it had been a coup to make the injuries seem grave while avoiding any mortal wounds, she’d still stabbed Hero. She’d still made them feel pain and fear and the terrible loneliness that comes with waking up in a strange place with strange injuries.

  It had been nice to have company, though. While it had lasted.

  Adelia crouched beside Feeney and held the blade of his folding knife where he could see it, very close to his eyes. The glazed look on his face gave way to renewed fear, and he began to blubber again. Adelia tapped the flat of the blade against his lips.

  “Shhh,” she said. “Listen.” He went silent as she held the blade up in front of his eyes again. “You need to take better care of your knives. Whet the blade every so often, especially if you’re going to leave it folded up all the time in your sweaty pocket. And oil this hinge, sí?” She turned the knife so he could see the little flakes of rust building on the place where the knife folded. “This is a good blade and it could last you a long time. You could pass it down to your son someday, if you take good care of it.”

  Feeney didn’t nod—smart of him, with the tip of the knife so very close to his eyes. But he licked his lips and whispered, “I will. I’ll take better care of it.”

  “Good,” Adelia said. She folded the blade and tucked it back into the pocket it had fallen out of. Then she did the same with the other detritus on Feeney’s chest—even the peanut shells. She held up his teeth, examining them, and then put one into his shirt pocket. The other she dropped into her own shirt pocket, winking at the horrified man as it clicked against the stone that was in there. “Just in case,” she said. “If that letter is a trick, I’ll come back to get the matching one.”

  Finally, Adelia untied the rope from Feeney’s wrists and coiled it, hanging it on her belt. She could have simply cut him loose, but it wouldn’t do to waste good rope.

  Don’t kill me, he’d said. It kept echoing in Adelia’s mind. Please don’t kill me.

  Feeney scrambled to his feet, and Adelia grabbed his arm, preventing him from running away. He so clearly wanted to run away.

  “Here,” she said, pulling the smooth stone from her shirt pocket and putting it in Feeney’s hand. “This will be a better souvenir for your son than a plain stone. Now, he’ll always know where it came from. He’ll prefer that, don’t you think?”

  The man turned the stone over in his hand to see Adelia’s etching of a hippopotamus. Its mouth gaped to show fearsome fangs, and a little bird was perched on its nose. Adelia thought it was quite good.

  Feeney didn’t say anything. He closed his fist around the stone, looked between Hero and Adelia, and then bolted into the trees.

  Adelia sighed. The boy would like the stone, especially if his father told him the story of its provenance. He would probably carry it around in his pocket until the day he died.

  She nodded at Hero, then took the letter from them and studied it. Hero hadn’t left out anything but the signature line—Wh
elan Parrish, a name Adelia had hoped she’d never have to hear again. She quickly committed his words to memory before folding the paper and tucking it into the sheath of the knife on her thigh for safekeeping. She rested a hand on Hero’s shoulder as she passed them.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” Hero asked, glancing down at Adelia’s hand.

  “For trying to help,” Adelia said. “You could have run, but you didn’t. I know you’re not a fighter—I’m sure that it was very frightening to run into the middle of that fight. I…” Adelia realized that she’d started journeying through her thanks without a destination in mind. “Thank you for trying,” she finished clumsily. She walked away before Hero could answer.

  As Adelia headed to the pond to begin preparing Zahra for the trip to Baton Rouge, she took a mental inventory. It would be a one-week ride at the minimum. She had her bedroll and supplies, and a bag of Ysabel’s swaddling cloths, but only enough food to ride for a few days without stopping for provisions. She considered her options: the food might last just long enough if she cut herself down to half rations, but she had been ravenous since Ysabel was born. She made a mental note to buy more food at the earliest opportunity, although it would mean spending the last of her money. She cursed herself for not stealing anything from Houndstooth or Travers before fleeing the Harriet. She had her weapons—mostly small blades, since those had been easiest to wield during her pregnancy, but she’d hung on to her best machete just in case. She wondered if perhaps she should sell it, just to give herself a bigger financial cushion for the journey.

  Some distant part of Adelia’s mind raised concerns about her priorities. She should be wailing and tearing her hair out and then lying on the floor for weeks, refusing food and water, mute with unspeakable grief. She should be nurturing the beginnings of a lifetime of wounded rage—not mentally cataloguing which of her knives was the most valuable. Mama would be so disappointed in me, Adelia thought, remembering the many times that her mother had slapped her tearless face.

  And yet, as she waded into the water up to her waist and began checking Zahra’s teeth and feet and underbelly, making sure that she was prepared for the long journey ahead, Adelia could not find anger within herself. She had never been able to find anger—not the kind of anger her mother had specialized in, anyway. Adelia could be angry at a distance; she could feel the nagging discomfort of wrongness, and the desire to fix it. She could be angry in the moment, when a flush of adrenaline drove her at her opponent. But she could not find within herself the sustained outrage that she was certain she ought to feel. She was not angry that Ysabel had been taken; it was simply a problem.

  A problem that she was going to fix.

  When she was satisfied that Zahra was in good shape for a long ride, Adelia sprinkled the hippo’s broad grey back and sides with white resin, to keep the padded underside of the saddle from slipping around and giving Zahra blisters. She heaved her kneeling saddle up onto Zahra’s back with a grunt—she had always been strong, but something had slipped out of place during her long labor, and lifting the heavy saddle wasn’t as easy as it used to be. She secured the saddle over Zahra’s back and patted her girl on the flank. “I’ll be right back, Zita.” Zahra grumbled a little, and Adelia rolled her eyes as the hippo presented her broad, flat nose insistently. “I have spoiled you,” she said, scratching under Zahra’s chin. The hippo grumbled again and pushed at Adelia with her nose until Adelia planted a kiss on the tip of it. This finally satisfied the beast, and Adelia was allowed to leave the pond without comment.

  She dripped her way back through the trees to the camp. When she emerged from the treeline, she saw immediately that Hero’s bedroll and saddlebags were gone. That was fast, she thought with dismay. She found Stasia settled under a tree, eyes half lidded. She wondered how Hero was planning to haul the saddlebags without a hippo to ride. She had known, from a few comments that Hero had made and from the way their eyes watched the horizon, that they had been planning to leave her soon. Still … it stung her. I would have given them Stasia, she thought. If they had just asked.

  Adelia pulled up short as she walked farther into the little clearing and saw that her own bedroll was gone as well. And her saddlebags—everything. All of it was gone.

  She reached for the knife at her side and turned in a slow circle, shifting her weight onto the balls of her feet and bending her knees into a familiar defensive stance. There was a rustle at the treeline a few feet from her, and she twisted, pulling her arm back to throw her knife at the figure that was emerging there—

  “I think I’ve got everything packed up,” Hero said, wiping their hands on their trousers, “but you’ll probably want to take one last look around before we—” They looked up, and their eyes went round as they took in Adelia, who had frozen in the instant before releasing her knife. They looked over their shoulder, then back at Adelia. “What are you doing?” they asked slowly.

  As she lowered her throwing arm, all Adelia could think to say in reply was, “What are you doing?”

  “Breaking camp,” Hero said. “I … I assumed that you were saddling up Zahra and Stasia, right? I thought that if I packed for both of us, we could head out sooner, maybe make it to Larto by nightfall.” Their eyes were on Adelia’s knife, which was still unsheathed. “Would you mind putting that away? You’re making me kind of nervous here.” They lifted one hand toward their belly in an abrupt, abortive movement, and Adelia was sure that they were remembering the last time they’d watched her throw a knife in their direction.

  Adelia sheathed the knife without taking her eyes off Hero. “You’re—you said we as if—are you coming with me?” She felt very small, asking that. She didn’t know how to do this. She didn’t know how to be a person who would ask that question.

  “Yes,” Hero replied levelly, and Adelia respected that they hadn’t said “of course” or something equally dishonest. “I was going to leave. I was actually … even before this all happened, I was going to tell you that it was time for me to go.”

  “I know,” Adelia said.

  Hero rubbed the back of their neck and appeared to find something important to study in the treeline. “But you were right, before. When you said that I tried to stop those men. I tried. But I failed. I didn’t keep them from taking Ysabel. And it wouldn’t be right for me to leave you on your own to get her back. Where I’m from, we … we don’t leave people alone like that.” They looked at Adelia, clenching their jaw. Their voice went stern. “I’ll help you find her. And then I’m gone, understand? We get Ysabel back, and then that’s the end of the line.”

  They didn’t say more, and Adelia didn’t press them. But as she led Stasia back to the pond to be saddled, she found herself swallowing around a peach pit of unspeakable words that had appeared in her throat. She pressed her face to Stasia’s flank and breathed in the hippo’s musty clay-smell, and gave herself permission to be relieved. She’d be alone again soon—Hero was leaving her. But not yet. Not while her baby was missing.

  This, at least, she would not have to face alone.

  Chapter 4

  Houndstooth stared down at his map, twirling his grease pencil between two fingers. His left hand was smudged with black, and he was sure that he had similar marks on his face. Even as he thought it, he reached up with his smeary hand and rubbed his forehead.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, “where are you, Hero?”

  “Houndstooth?” Archie’s contralto fluted through the trees. He looked up—he didn’t think he’d been gone long enough yet for her to notice and come looking for him. She’d been watching him like a hawk all day, and now—just when he’d been getting somewhere, she was interrupting him again.

  His mouth twisted into a grimace as Archie’s voice reached him once more. “Houndstooth! Dinner is ready. Come eat it before I give your share to Ruby!”

  “Dinner?” Houndstooth looked around, blinking. Surely it wasn’t time for dinner yet—he’d only told Archie that h
e needed to stretch his legs a few minutes after breakfast. He would surely be hungry if he’d missed lunch—but, no. The thought of food only made his stomach clench.

  His legs ached and tingled painfully as he stood up and stretched. He’d been hunched over his maps for—well, for however long it had been. Hours, evidently. Archie would be worried—she’d try to convince him to eat and sleep and bathe, as if those things mattered when Hero was missing. As if they hadn’t already wasted enough time.

  Walking back through the trees, Houndstooth allowed himself to think for just an instant the thought he’d been fighting to keep at bay: Archie is slowing you down. He knew it wasn’t true—knew that Archie was probably the only thing keeping him alive—but some small sinister part of him insisted on bringing up the idea of leaving Archie behind to focus on finding Hero.

  As always, he pushed the thought away as soon as it arose—but this time, it didn’t leave him easily. It was insistent: Archie is in the way. She’s a distraction.

  Houndstooth pushed his hands through his hair as he reached the sandbar where they’d made camp. It sloped down into a long, shallow bank of clear, ankle-deep water. The deeper waters that Houndstooth’s inky Ruby and Archie’s bone-white Rosa preferred were less than a quarter mile away, flush with the water hyacinth the hippos adored. Even now, Houndstooth could hear Ruby’s pleased grunting as she grazed. He’d be fishing purple flower petals from between her teeth for days.

  Archie sat on a long, weathered log that stuck out over the water on one end. It was a huge fallen tree, complete with a tangle of roots that propped it up above the water. Tadpoles and tiny fish hid in the shadows of the old, dead roots in the water, and Houndstooth couldn’t help smiling at them. Between the little fish and the pristine water hyacinth, he and Archie both knew that they’d found an oasis: this place was untouched by the ravenous, terrifying scourge of the ferals.