Thirty Girls (5 page)

What about you? she said to Harry. You have a girlfriend?

His shoulders rose in a slow shrug. Sometimes, he said. Sort of. His face was placid.

Does she have a name?

He turned and smiled at Jane. Nope.

Open aluminum gates marked the entrance to the Massai Mara and a soft red road led them down a steep hill to the game reserve. They drove onto a flat green plain striped with thin shadows. In the distance a wall-like cliff rose on the western side.

They drove along the eastern edge among leafy trees. There she is, Harry said. To the south an escarpment curled like a giant wave about to break, dwindling off to the west and ending in a hazy bluff.

Harry pointed to some thornbushes which on closer examination turned out to be zebra sitting with ears up in a striped shade. Jane stared fascinated, feeling she was in a storybook, though she was to learn that zebra were not particularly impressive to Africans. Elephant, on the other hand, were by all standards worth driving off track for, as Harry did when he spotted a small herd low in a riverbank. The truck wove its tires through lumpy grasses and stopped, motor off and ticking, giving them a clear view of enormous wrinkled creatures, legs darkened by mud, swaying and bumping against one another. One lifted a trunk like a whip in slow motion and sprayed water. When a large female started flapping her ears, staring directly at the truck and making a throaty trumpet sound, Harry knew to start the engine and back up.

They passed the entrance to a safari camp and its wooden sign hanging on rope with the yellow recessed words
Kichwa Tembo
. Elephant Head. There were a number of commercial camps in the Mara, but Harry was taking her to a private house, owned by an anthropologist who’d married her Maasai translator and so had claims on the land. At the southern corner of the plain the red road tilted up, turning pale and chunky with white rocks. They lurched up a short vertical hill then hugged the side in diagonal slashes of switchbacks. Harry gripped the steering wheel as if he were wrestling something wild. They passed Maasai encampments he told her were called bomas, circular walls of tangled branches containing
small huts and cattle which had to be protected from wildlife. On a day’s notice the boma would be dismantled and reassembled somewhere else where there was fresh grass.

Are we close? she said. But she wasn’t impatient. She felt happy and free. The land was majestic and riding beside him she had the feeling she was where she ought to be. It was not a feeling Jane had often.

Just up here, Harry said, and Jane didn’t care if they ever got there or ever stopped.

The white road ran along a naturally terraced area of the escarpment. Down to the right was a tunnel of greenery inside which flowed the Mara River. There was no road at all when Harry turned right down a slope of flattened grass strewn with hulking boulders at the end of which sat a stone house with a tin roof.

They got out. The air was loud with the sound of water rushing by in the river. They went to a door surrounded by a wrought-iron cage with a large padlock on it. No one appeared to be home. Jane sat for a moment in a chair left outside at a green painted table. The river surged by below, the color of café au lait, battering low branches that bounced against the white waves. Above the river a woolly ridge dark as a rain forest rose up against a yellowish sky. It was late afternoon. On the table a wineglass held a coin of red liquid and a dish had the last bits of a tart crust. Harry was digging around in the back of the truck, hauling out the backpack.

They walked straight up, first in the shade then passing the line into the sun. Jane followed Harry’s large backpack. They came to a narrow footpath. Halfway up they passed a thin woman, chest wrapped in a plaid red and blue shuka, walking down. Her head was shaved and her long earlobes hung with loops and beads. She was barefoot, probably around eighty, walking without hesitation. Jambo, they said and she nodded, passing by.

It didn’t take long to reach the top, and it felt as if they’d gone higher when they did. Soft wind blew and looking over the valley Jane had the sensation she’d never been able to see so far. Perhaps it was true.

Harry dumped out the sack and harness. He took off his shirt and put
it back in the sack. As he unrolled the parachute it swelled out like foam. He shook it, then stepped into the harness attached to the thin ropes. His helmet was round and white, making his head look too big for his body. He stood a short distance from the edge with feet planted apart. Past the tall grass at the edge, the plain stretched miles below, brownish green but bleached of color. Behind Harry on the ground the chute flowed out like a wedding train. He pulled at it to free it from twigs and thorns, shaking at a dozen thin lines which all branched out into shorter lines attached to the chute. The likelihood of a tangle seemed immense. A harness of black straps fit over his shoulders and chest and wrapped around his thighs, arranged so that airborne he’d be seated. He stood for a while, staring out, listening. He looked at the clouds, gazing overhead, waiting for a gust. A white mist blew over them, dimming the sun and dampening Jane’s face, a low cloud whitening everything. The wind puffed the sheet behind him. His arm kept reaching back to fluff the light fabric, while he stayed face-forward. Wind filled the sail, lifting it, seeming to push him forward. He took a few quick steps. Jane was aware of the absence of the motor roar that usually accompanies a liftoff as Harry stepped off the edge onto air.

The fabric snapped behind him like a boat sail filling with a gust and he shot backward up over her head. He hovered there for a moment then swung back out over the escarpment drop. Jane heard a satisfied sort of whoop. She watched him, holding her hair away from her eyes, as his feet dangled past her and she learned that the person remaining on the ground could also receive a lifting sensation at takeoff. That is, she did. The flying was totally silent. In the air, Harry had said, you didn’t hear the sound of wind because you were moving at its speed. You were the wind.

The thermals wound in the invisible shape of corkscrews. She watched his figure soar out over the giant bowl of the world, soon catching the spiral in a wide slow circle as if up a spiral staircase. His sail was long and narrow, puckered like a giant earthworm. Very quickly his figure was quite far away.

To the west clouds were stacked with sculptural definition beside the lowering sun. The clouds, the clouds, she thought. Piled and beautiful,
they were both indifferent and inviting. They had that paradox of nature you saw also in the sea, a thing appearing eternal even as it changed every second. Harry was now a miniature action figure under a sideways parenthesis. For a while longer she watched him sail, feeling weightless herself, floating by proxy. She didn’t need to fly to feel she was floating. She had a knack for channeling other people’s experiences. You left yourself behind and there was relief.

Harry was a white dot.

The vastness of the savannah below reminded her how tiny a speck she was too and yet at the same time offered her the illusion that she could reach across and touch the bluff miles away. Warm wind blew in small gusts against her and the dot seemed to pull her toward it into the sky. In dreams when she was flying she could never make out exactly how it was working. She swooped through doorways, looped over trees, but felt that at any moment the miracle might stop and down she’d plummet. She’d think in the dream, I better concentrate on staying up, but that wasn’t necessary. You just stayed up. You didn’t know what was keeping you up. It wasn’t in your control. It just happened. Like life. She thought how in her dreams she too flew in loops the way Harry was now, riding the thermals, following the shape of DNA.

A white sun perched on the western ridge. When it dropped behind, the light would go. Harry had told her to walk down before dark. Nighttime was the kingdom of the animals. You didn’t want to be out there then with them. She entered into the shadow sloped across the hill, taking steps sideways, sliding a little, going down and yet still having the buoyant feeling of drifting over a vast plain. What had taken them thirty minutes to climb took her ten minutes to descend.

On the way down she kept the corrugated roof of the house in sight with the white truck beside it, the lightest thing in the gathering dusk. Darker vehicles were also parked there now. She reached the bottom and walked quickly on a dark road. When she saw a bright little fire going in front of the house it showed how dark it was. Closer she saw piled branches crackling inside a circle of stones. In front of the fire was the round table where two men and a woman were sitting with bottles and a crossed pair of army boots. She was greeted by the people with no surprise
at seeing a strange woman emerge out of the dark. A fellow with a thin ponytail stood up and offered her his chair of twisted saplings. Karibu, he said. It was Andy. She sat.

Tusker? Jane was handed a bottle and introduced. The fire was warm on her legs.

The girl named Julia worked at a nearby tourist camp. The one with the boots on the table was Cyril from England.

They asked her where she was from and she asked them and soon they were talking about the baby leopard that had fallen through a torn patch in the roof last week. It landed on Annabel’s mother in her bed. Inside the stone house Jane could see more people crossing back and forth making dinner.

It was looking for food, said the girl, her white teeth glowing in the dusk. She wore a safari shirt and a short skirt. But it did freak her mum out a bit.

A bit, Jane said.

What did she do with it? said the fellow with the boots.

Shooed it out the window, said the girl, blowing cigarette smoke toward the fire. Poor thing didn’t want to be there either.

Maybe I better go get Harry, Andy said.

He’s not back? Jane said. Beyond the fire was blackness and the rushing of the river.

Well, Joss went to meet the plane, he said vaguely. I’ll go see. He gently moved off to be engulfed by blackness after which they heard the sputtering of a motor.

Inside Jane met their hostess. Annabel wore a ripped green evening gown and had red hair arranged in a loose triangle on her head. A long table was being set among rocks and feathers and bones. Jane was given the job of picking wax from Moroccan candlesticks and pouring salt into oyster shells, fossils from the river.

Hours later the table was crowded with plates of grilled meat and glistening bottles and candle flames. There were stories of men falling out of the sky, of cars breaking down crossing streams, of mothers running off with young lovers. A steady rain drummed on the roof above them. Jane
sat beside a man in a polo shirt who was pointing out the absurdity of monogamy. Look at the animals, he said. Need I say more?

Annabel stood, pouring wine into everyone’s glasses, her smile showing wine-stained teeth.

You have someone back home? he asked her.

Kind of, she lied. She thought of the painter she’d liked lately though nothing had gone on between them.

Don’t let a man put you in a cage, he said. Ever.

Julia mentioned that it was her birthday as if she’d just remembered it, and everyone shouted and gave her toasts. Some time later Annabel handed her a present wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with a brown Hermès ribbon.

Much later Jane found herself outside in a pitch dark pouring with rain beside strangers pushing a car stuck in the muddy hillside. She gripped the door handle, her bare feet sunk in mud. The car would rev in a great burst, roll forward an inch then rock back down, inert. Try it again! they yelled. Another rev, another group shove, and it wasn’t budging an inch. People shouted, insulting each other, laughing. The rain was loud, slapping on the slick grass, but still Jane could hear the low constant roar of the river. The jaunty thump of music played from a tape inside where lanterns shone from yellow windows, casting dim smudges. Otherwise everything was black.

Jane could hardly see her hands. The shirt of the person beside her showed because it was light-colored. They kept heaving and shoving against the car. Suddenly it jerked forward, pulling out from everyone. Jane stumbled, managing somehow not to fall. A headless figure with a white shirt slid by as if on skis and grabbed her upper arm. Harry pulled her along so she skated at his side for a moment on the slick ground before they both toppled over into spattering mud. His arms were cupped around her, and they rolled in this clasp down the slope, somersaulting. The face was close and dark with darker spots where the eyes were and when its mouth came near she kissed it, kissing water and rain and bits of grit on his lips, thinking,
I’m kissing Harry
. She felt his chest warm through his soaked shirt. In her mind were images of the dinner and the faces around the candlelit table, of driving that day on the red snaking road, then of Harry lifting up into the orange air over her. They’d had
a lot of wine and her thinking was far off and hazy but one thought did come—this is the way you found a person, crashing into him in the dark, without decision, without knowing where you were going—and even in that abandon she still managed to locate little worn areas of worry pulsing, but with no words to them. Worry didn’t stand a chance against this sliding and this person she was holding. The slope of the hill evened out and they stopped rolling and kept kissing and she had a laugh in the back of her throat with the thought,
I’m kissing Harry
. She kept thinking it as worry faded. She saw his hands on the steering wheel, his profile and his placid masklike face.

Wet hair plastered her forehead and his cheeks and their bodies pressed against the length of each other on the wet ground. She felt triply alive, as if delivered from an austere place where it was now apparent she’d been for a long time. How had she stayed there so long? Now she had his warm arms and her back was chilled. The rain kept streaming over them and behind in the deeper darkness the sound of the river was rushing and thundering. Harry was a close new thing which she knew very little about and yet at this moment found it seemed to offer her everything.