Die Again Page 5

  Vivian turns and throws up into the bushes.

  I am too numb to move. Even as Sylvia whimpers and hyperventilates beside me, I am studying the various bones scattered in that flattened area of grass, feeling strangely remote, as if I am inhabiting someone else’s body. A scientist’s, perhaps. An anatomist, who looks at bones and feels compelled to fit them together, to announce: This is the right fibula and that is the ulna and that is from the fifth right toe. Yes, definitely the right toe. Although in truth I can identify almost nothing of what I’m looking at, because there is so little left, and it is all in pieces. All I can be sure of is that there is a rib, because it looks like ribs that I have eaten, slathered in sauce. But this is not a pork rib, oh no, this gnawed and splintered bone is human, and it belonged to someone I knew, someone I spoke to not nine hours ago.

  “Oh Jesus,” groans Elliot. “What happened? What the fuck happened?”

  Johnny’s voice booms out: “Get back. Everyone get back.”

  I turn to see Johnny pushing into our circle. We are all here now—Vivian and Sylvia, Elliot and Richard, the Matsunagas. Only one person is missing, but not really, because here is his rib and a clump of Clarence’s hair. The smell of death is in the air, the smell of fear and fresh meat and Africa.

  Johnny crouches down over the bones and for a moment does not speak. No one does. Even the birds are quiet, rattled by this human disturbance, and all I hear is the grass rustling in the wind and the faint rush of the river.

  “Did any of you see anything last night? Hear anything?” Johnny asks. He looks up, and I notice that his shirt is unbuttoned, his face unshaven. His eyes lock on mine. All I can do is shake my head.

  “Anyone?” Johnny scans our faces.

  “I slept like a rock,” says Elliot. “I didn’t hear—”

  “We didn’t, either,” says Richard. Answering, in his usual annoying way, for both of us.

  “Who found him?”

  Vivian’s answer comes out barely a whisper. “We did. Sylvia and I. We both had to use the toilet. It was already getting light, and we thought it would be safe to come out. Clarence usually has the fire started by now, and …” She stops, looking sick that she has said his name. Clarence.

  Johnny rises to his feet. I am standing closest to him, and I take in every detail, from his sleep-fluffed hair to the thickly knotted scar on his abdomen, a scar I’m seeing for the first time. He has no interest in us now, because we can’t tell him anything. Instead his attention is focused on the ground, on the scattered remnants of the kill. He glances first toward the camp perimeter, where the wire is strung. “The bells didn’t ring,” he says. “I would have heard it. Clarence would have heard it.”

  “So it—whatever it was—didn’t come into camp?” Richard says.

  Johnny ignores him. He begins to pace an ever-expanding circle, impatiently pushing aside anyone who stands in his path. There is no bare earth, only grass, and no footprints or animal tracks to offer any clues. “He took over watch at two A.M., and I went straight to sleep. The fire’s almost dead, so no wood’s been added for hours. Why would he leave it? Why would he step out of the perimeter?” He glances around. “And where’s the rifle?”

  “The rifle is there,” says Mr. Matsunaga, and he points toward the ring of stones where the campfire has now gone out. “I saw it, lying on the ground.”

  “He just left it there?” says Richard. “He walks away from the fire and wanders into the dark without his gun? Why would Clarence do that?”

  “He wouldn’t” is Johnny’s quietly chilling answer. He is circling again, scanning the grass. Finding scraps of cloth, a shoe, but little else. He moves farther away, toward the river. Suddenly he drops to his knees, and over the grass I can just see the top of his blond head. His stillness makes us all uneasy. No one is eager to find out what he’s now staring at; we have already seen more than enough. But his silence calls to me with a gravitational force that pulls me toward him.

  He looks up at me. “Hyenas.”

  “How do you know they did it?”

  He points to grayish clumps on the ground. “That’s spotted hyena scat. You see the animal hair, the bits of bone mixed in?”

  “Oh God. It’s not his, is it?”

  “No, this scat is a few days old. But we know hyenas are here.” He points to a tattered piece of bloody fabric. “And they found him.”

  “But I thought hyenas were only scavengers.”

  “I can’t prove they took him down. But I think it’s clear they fed on him.”

  “There’s so little of him left,” I murmur, looking at the fragments of cloth. “It’s as if he just … disappeared.”

  “Scavengers waste nothing, leave nothing behind. They probably dragged the rest of him to their den. I don’t understand why Clarence died without making a sound. Why I didn’t hear the kill.” Johnny stays crouched over those gray lumps of scat, but his eyes are scanning the area, seeing things that I’m not even aware of. His stillness unnerves me; he is like no other man I’ve met, so in tune with his environment that he seems a part of it, as rooted to this land as the trees and the gently waving grasses. He is not at all like Richard, whose eternal dissatisfaction with life keeps him searching the Internet for a better flat, a better holiday spot, maybe even a better girlfriend. Richard doesn’t know what he wants or where he belongs, the way Johnny does. Johnny, whose prolonged silence makes me want to rush into the gap with some inane comment, as if it is my duty to keep up the conversation. But the discomfort is solely my own, not Johnny’s.

  He says, quietly: “We need to gather up everything we can find.”

  “You mean … Clarence?”

  “For his family. They’ll want it for the funeral. Something tangible, something for them to mourn over.”

  I look down in horror at the bloody scrap of clothing. I don’t want to touch it; I certainly don’t want to pick up those scattered bits of bone and hair. But I nod and say, “I’ll help you. We can use one of the burlap sacks in the truck.”

  He rises and looks at me. “You’re not like the others.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t even want to be here, do you? In the bush.”

  I hug myself. “No. This was Richard’s idea of a holiday.”

  “And your idea of a holiday?”

  “Hot showers. Flush toilets, maybe a massage. But here I am, always the good sport.”

  “You are a good sport, Millie. You know that, don’t you?” He looks into the distance and says, so softly that I almost miss it: “Better than he deserves.”

  I wonder if he intended for me to hear that. Or maybe he’s been in the bush so long that he regularly talks aloud to himself out here, because no one is usually around to hear him.

  I try to read his face, but he bends down to pick up something. When he rises again, he has it in his hand.

  A bone.

  “You all understand, this expedition is at an end,” says Johnny. “I need everyone to pitch in so we can break camp by noon and be on our way.”

  “On our way where?” says Richard. “The plane isn’t due back at the airstrip for another week.”

  Johnny has gathered us around the cold campfire, to tell us what happens next. I look at the other members of our safari, tourists who signed up for a wildlife adventure and got more than they bargained for. A real kill, a dead man. Not exactly the jolly thrills you see on television nature programs. Instead there is a sad burlap sack containing pitifully few bones and shreds of clothing and torn pieces of scalp, all the mortal remains we could find of our tracker Clarence. The rest of him, Johnny says, is lost forever. This is how it is in the bush, where every creature that’s born will ultimately be eaten, digested, and recycled into scat, into soil, into grass. Grazed upon and reborn as yet another animal. It seems beautiful in principle, but when you come face-to-face with the hard reality, that bag of Clarence’s bones, you understand that the circle of life is also a circle of death. We are
here to eat and be eaten, and we are nothing but meat. Eight of us left now, meat on the bone, surrounded by carnivores.

  “If we drive back to the landing strip now,” says Richard, “we’ll just have to sit there and wait days for the plane. How is that better than continuing the trip as planned?”

  “I’m not taking you any deeper into the bush,” says Johnny.

  “What about using the radio?” Vivian asks. “You could call the pilot to pick us up early.”

  Johnny shakes his head. “We’re beyond radio range here. There’s no way to contact him until we get back to the airstrip, and that’s a three-day drive to the west. Which is why we’ll head east instead. Two days’ hard drive, no stops for sightseeing, and we’ll reach one of the game lodges. They have a telephone, and there’s a road out. I’ll arrange to have you driven back to Maun.”

  “Why?” asks Richard. “I hate to sound callous, but there’s not a thing we can do for Clarence now. I don’t see the point of rushing back.”

  “You’ll get a refund, Mr. Renwick.”

  “It’s not the money. It’s just that Millie and I came all this way from London. Elliot had to come from Boston. Not to mention how far the Matsunagas had to fly.”

  “Jesus, Richard,” Elliot cuts in. “The man’s dead.”

  “I know, but we’re already here. We might as well carry on.”

  “I can’t do that,” says Johnny.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t guarantee your safety, much less your comfort. I can’t stay alert twenty-four hours a day. It takes two of us to stand watch overnight and to keep the fire burning. To break camp and set it up again. Clarence didn’t just cook your meals; he was another set of eyes and ears. I need a second man when I’m hauling around people who don’t know a rifle from a walking stick.”

  “So teach me. I’ll help you stand watch.” Richard looks around at the rest of us, as if to confirm that he’s the only one who’s man enough for the task.

  Mr. Matsunaga says, “I know how to shoot. I can take watch, too.”

  We all look at the Japanese banker, whose only shooting skills we’ve witnessed so far have been with his mile-long telephoto lens.

  Richard can’t suppress a disbelieving laugh. “You do mean real guns, Isao?”

  “I belong to the Tokyo shooting club,” says Mr. Matsunaga, unruffled by Richard’s snide tone. He points to his wife and adds, to our astonishment, “Keiko, she belongs, too.”

  “I’m glad that lets me off the hook,” says Elliot. “ ’Cause I don’t even want to touch the damn thing.”

  “So you see, we have enough hands on deck,” Richard says to Johnny. “We can take turns on watch and keep the fire going all night. This is what a real safari’s all about, isn’t it? Rising to the occasion. Proving our mettle.”

  Oh yes, Richard the expert, who spends his year sitting so heroically at his computer, spinning testosterone-fueled fantasies. Now those fantasies have come true, and he can play the hero of his own thriller. Best of all, he has an audience that includes two gorgeous blondes, who are the ones he’s really playing to, because I’m past the point of being impressed by him, and he knows it.

  “A pretty speech, but it changes nothing. Pack up your things, we’re headed east.” Johnny walks away to take down his tent.

  “Thank God he’s ending this,” says Elliot.

  “He has to.” Richard snorts. “Now that he’s bloody well botched it.”

  “You can’t blame him for what happened to Clarence.”

  “Who’s ultimately responsible? He hired a tracker he’s never worked with before.” Richard turns to me. “That’s what Clarence told you. Said he’d never worked with Johnny until this trip.”

  “But they had connections,” I point out. “And Clarence worked as a tracker before. Johnny wouldn’t have hired him if he wasn’t experienced.”

  “That’s what you’d think, but look what happened. Our so-called experienced tracker puts down his rifle and walks into a pack of hyenas. Does that sound like someone who knew what he was doing?”

  “What’s the point of all this, Richard?” Elliot asks wearily.

  “The point is, we can’t trust his judgment. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Well, I think Johnny’s right. We can’t just carry on, as you put it. A dead man kind of ruins the mood, you know?” Elliot turns toward his tent. “It’s time to get out of here and go home.”

  Home. As I stuff clothes and toiletries into my duffel bag, I think about London and gray skies and cappuccino. In ten days, Africa will seem like a golden-hued dream, a place of heat and glaring sunlight, life and death in all its vivid colors. Yesterday I wanted nothing more than to be back home in our flat, in the land of hot showers. But now that we’re leaving the bush, I feel it holding on to me, its tendrils winding around my ankles, threatening to root me to this soil. I zip up my knapsack, which contains the “essentials,” all the things I thought I absolutely needed to survive in the wild: PowerBars and toilet paper, pre-moistened hand wipes and sunscreen, tampons and my mobile. How different the word essential seems when you’re beyond the reach of any phone tower.

  By the time Richard and I have packed up our tent, Johnny has already loaded up the truck with his own gear as well as the cooking equipment and camp chairs. We’ve all been amazingly quick, even Elliot, who struggled to dismantle his tent and needed Vivian and Sylvia to help him fold it. Clarence’s death hangs over us, stifling idle chatter, making us focus on our tasks. When I load our tent into the back of the truck, I notice the burlap bag with Clarence’s remains tucked beside Johnny’s backpack. It unnerves me to see it stowed there, with the rest of our gear. Tents, check. Stove, check. Dead man, check.

  I climb into the truck and sit down beside Richard. Clarence’s empty seat is in view, a stark reminder that he’s gone, his bones scattered, flesh digested. Johnny is the last one to climb into the truck, and as his door slams shut I look around at our now cleared campsite, thinking: Soon there’ll be no trace that we were ever here. We’ll have moved on, but Clarence never will.

  Suddenly Johnny swears and climbs out of the driver’s seat. Something is wrong.

  He stalks to the front and lifts the truck bonnet to inspect the engine. Moments tick by. His head is hidden by the raised bonnet, so we can’t see his face, but his silence alarms me. He offers no reassuring It’s just a loose wire or Yes, I see the problem.

  “Now what?” mutters Richard. He, too, climbs out of the truck, although I don’t know what advice he can possibly offer. Beyond reading the petrol gauge, he knows nothing about cars. I hear him offering suggestions. Battery? Spark plugs? Loose connection? Johnny answers in barely audible monosyllables, which only alarms me more, because I’ve learned that the more dire the situation, the quieter Johnny becomes.

  It is hot in the open truck, almost noon, with the sun beating down. The rest of us climb out and move into the shade of the trees. I see Johnny’s head pop up as he orders: “Don’t wander too far!” Not that anyone intends to; we’ve seen what can happen when you do. Mr. Matsunaga and Elliot join Richard at the truck, to offer their advice, because of course all men, even men who never get their hands greasy, understand machinery. Or think they do.

  We women wait in the shade, swatting away bugs, continually searching for any telltale trembling in the grass, which could be our only warning that a predator approaches. Even in the shade, it is hot, and I settle onto the ground. Through the branches above I see vultures circling, watching us. They are strangely beautiful, black wings sketching lazy loops in the sky as they wait to feast. On what?

  Richard stalks toward us, muttering: “Well, this is a brilliant development. Bloody thing won’t start. Won’t even turn over.”

  I sit up straight. “It was fine yesterday.”

  “Everything was fine yesterday.” Richard huffs out a breath. “We’re stranded.”

  The blondes give simultaneous gasps of alarm. “We can’t be stranded,” b
lurts Sylvia. “I’m due back at work next Thursday!”

  “Me, too!” says Vivian.

  Mrs. Matsunaga shakes her head in disbelief. “How can this be? It is not possible!”

  As their voices blend into a chorus of rising agitation, I can’t help noticing that the vultures overhead are tracing tighter and tighter circles, as if homing in on our distress.

  “Listen. All of you, listen,” Johnny commands.

  We turn to look at him.

  “This is not the time to panic,” he says. “There’s absolutely no reason to. We’re next to the river, so we have plenty of water. We have shelter. We have ammunition and a ready supply of game for food.”

  Elliot gives a laugh that’s thin with fear. “So … what? We hang around out here and go all Stone Age?”

  “The plane is scheduled to meet you at the landing strip in a week. When we don’t show up as expected, there’ll be a search. They’ll find us soon enough. It’s what you all signed up for, isn’t it? An authentic experience in the bush?” He regards us one by one, taking our measure, deciding if we’re up to the challenge. Searching for which one of us will crumble, which one he can count on. “I’ll keep working on the truck. Maybe I can fix it, maybe I can’t.”

  “Do you even know what’s wrong with it?” Elliot asks.

  Johnny pins him with a hard glare. “It’s never broken down before. I can’t explain it.” He scans our circle, as if searching for the answer in our faces. “In the meantime, we need to pitch camp again. Get out the tents. This is where we stay.”

  Six

  Boston

  Psychologists call it resistance when a patient fails to turn up on time because he doesn’t really want to address his problems. It also explained why Jane was late walking out her front door that morning; she really didn’t want to view Leon Gott’s autopsy. She took her time dressing her daughter in the same Red Sox T-shirt and grass-stained overalls that Regina had insisted on wearing for the past five days. They lingered too long over their breakfast of Lucky Charms and toast, which made them twenty minutes late walking out the apartment door. Add a traffic-choked drive to Revere where Jane’s mother lived, and by the time she pulled up outside Angela’s house, Jane was a full half hour behind schedule.