Wild Meat (15 page)

He got out of his Land Rover and followed the path into the forest on foot, not precisely knowing why, but at the same time feeling absolutely purposeful about it. There was meaning in the air here, and it was immense. The smell, the texture of the surfaces, and the sounds: rustling, fluttering, chirps, caws – and his own footfalls somehow louder than all else. He scuffed his Italian shoes and his pant legs brushed against green shoots bursting with sap.

This reminded him of another green trail, somewhere else. He could not think of where that other path had been, but knew that it had spoken to him. Thinking back, he felt that it must have had a connection with both the source of his new hyper clarity and his ticket to freedom from William. That experience had been at night, in near total darkness.

Now, in the bright light of day, this path was speaking to him, too, its voice so clear that he could
not believe he’d never discerned the words before.

No, not words, but a message, bold and unmistakable.

He closed his eyes and listened hard, and heard the path –
saw
the path – speak to him about William. 

William and the little creep from marketing had been presenting him with updates on their PR strategy. All along, however, Hugh had known it would be up to him to take that strategy and convert it to something with much greater life than those two could ever give it. They were barely alive themselves, while Hugh was more alive than ever.

And the flow of understanding that the green path had introduced him to – that flow had grown, become stronger and more varied. Now every particle, every neutrino and photon of that flow spoke in relation to every other, and did so in the most complex and sublimely perfect equations that ever a human mind could understand.

The vision, the plan, came to him in such a way that he could see all of its parts at once. There were two essential elements: the descent and the ascent. They must happen simultaneously.

The descent would be into the hellish valleys of smoke and blood where Lou Burr resided, and when Hugh Sanderson ventured into such places, he would have to wear his own cloak of smoke and blood, like an astronaut walking on a poison planet. He had a fleeting but clear vision of himself in suspenders and dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, using a yard-long piece of two-by-four to punish a faceless figure on a carpeted floor.

The ascent would be his transformation of the company’s plans for the green campaign. The best persona William’s man had been able to come up with for Hugh was an anemic facsimile of the late Australian crocodile wrangler – costume and all. But Hugh Sanderson could, with the subtlest of alterations, transform the safari getup into the majestic rags of a holy man. 

The latest script called for the Sanderson brothers to recount publicly how Hugh had won William over during a trip to Africa. Hugh, according to the story, had threatened to leave the company unless the company started giving back to Mother Nature as much as it was taking. William had acquiesced because he remembered the promise they’d made to Dad that they would always stick together. And Dad had loved animals, too…etc.

That would work, but Hugh now saw that he
must infuse the script with language borrowed from the pseudo-Hindu cults that had come around to popularity again.

Soon the world would see Hugh Sanderson as a beacon of planet love, shining bravely in the darkness of worldwide corporate culture. A visionary
who radiated truth so mightily that his own family had been moved to reject greed and embrace the sacred heart of the earth mother. An evangelist calling on other corporate entities to cast off worldly things, or at least two percent of the purchase price thereof, and join him in a new monastic order. Male prophet of an amorphous Earth deity encompassing every face of the Exalted Feminine that anyone cared to spot in it: Gaia, Virgin Mary, Diana the Huntress, Dian Fossey or the Little Mermaid.

He would appear as a mighty, fearsome devil down in the valleys, and the most pristine of angels when he strode the airy peaks of public relations.

The visual, tactile, audible chatter of the forest suddenly swelled in volume, as though a DJ somewhere had pushed up all the sliding controls on a vast and complicated mixer.

Then the spirit of the green path showed him another vision: it was the mud-covered woman he’d seen on the mountain pass on his way to the logging camp. She stood where the path ended at the main road, blocking his way back to the Land Rover like a demon guarding some magnificent treasure. Just beyond her stood an enormous, curly-bearded guy, about thirty years old, one of the handful of groupies that his eco-celebrity status had gained him. He’d always made Hugh think of a mildly retarded version of Bluto from the Popeye cartoons.
The guy had shown up at every one of Hugh’s speaking engagements, sitting there with an unlit cigarette in his hand, his lumpy wet lips agape in what seemed like awe or drunkenness, but which was probably just his default expression. Hugh had just recently seen him at Free Forest Campground, which probably accounted for his imagining the guy now.

Looking in the direction of those apparitions, Hugh emptied his bladder on the red and white flowers of a new liana that was just beginning its long climb up to the canopy. He walked back to the Land Rover and passed through the vision of Bluto and the mud woman without so much as a shiver.

He changed into the spare set of clothing he kept hanging in the back of the vehicle, and threw his ruined shoes and trousers out the window.

The new
minister of the interior was moderately miffed that Sanderson was late. In the course of their meeting, Sanderson offered cash outright in exchange for a no-hassle concession in the southeastern part of the country. No polite dancing around the subject. The minister was taken aback at the American’s bluntness, perhaps even offended, but only showed it for a moment. He was also clearly pleased, and promised to herd any remaining members of bush tribes out of the region by the time the company was ready to harvest.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Amy opened the front door of her foothills bungalow and found her neighbor Rita looking like a giant muscular rag doll, with rivers of red hair backlit by early morning sun. Amy was five-foot-
nine, but when Rita hugged her hello, it was like an adult reaching down to pick up a nine-year-old. It had been Rita who had gotten Amy into triathlons and yoga after she bought the little house. Amy had moved here shortly after Andre’s death in a freak boating accident, and her new neighbor had been like a spiritual nurse to her.

Rita followed Amy inside and handed her a UPS package that she’d signed for the previous day. It was about the size of a phone book. Amy got a knife from her desk to cut the layers of tape on the package. “All my plants look happy,” she sang. “Thank you thank you thank you.” She was in a bathrobe, full of jetlag, with no gut sense of whether she needed to be asleep or awake.

“I wouldn’t have come over so early,” Rita said, “except your lights were on and I thought I saw you moving around.”

“I got in about two last night, but I didn’t sleep long. Over in Senegal it’s still…I don’t know. I can’t think yet.”

“Does that mean you’ll have coffee with me?” Rita held up a glossy bag with a regal-looking label.

Amy sat on the sofa and poked a knife point under the tape. Stephen
Stokes had revealed his full name and his location a few emails back, and she’d done the same. His return address was printed on the kind of sticker that charities give out whole sheets of in order to say thanks for a donation. He’d apparently given some spare change to an animal rescue organization in the Bay Area. Even without his name, Amy could have guessed who’d sent the package; her own address had been neatly handwritten in the medieval script that Stephen had identified in one email as “Gothic textura.” She didn’t realize she was smiling until Rita spoke.

“Who’s this Stephen that’s got you all lit up? Did you stop in Oakland on the way home?”

“Going there next.”

“Tell me about him,” Rita commanded on her way into the kitchen. “What’s he look like? When do I meet him?”

“He’s got a nice voice,” Amy said. “Kind of a nerdy edge to it when he gets excited, but nice.” She sliced away at the tape and brown packing paper, being careful not to tear the part with the writing.  “I haven’t even met him.”

Inside the package was an aging primatology textbook with a yellow sticker on the binding that
read,
USED
. The rigid cover had worn edges, and there were half a dozen purple Post-its sticking out of the top.

Amy flipped through the tagged pages. There were photos of various prosimians, and Stephen had made notes about them in the margins. One page had front and side views of a tarsier skull. The eye sockets were so huge that, from the front, they looked like big white Mickey Mouse ears stuck over a row of upper teeth that included two long incisors in the very middle. Stephen’s note pointed out that the fangs of the mystery animal in his medieval pictures were positioned just like the tarsier’s long incisors, but were three times longer proportionally.

He had also highlighted a sentence in the textbook explaining that the reason for the name ‘tarsier’ was the animal’s long ankles, or tarsal bones, which gave it fantastic leaping powers. Although generally no more than six inches tall, some tarsiers could leap about ten feet horizontally and six vertically. In the margin was a sketch of the bones of a Philippine tarsier’s feet and lower legs.
Of course there are no tarsiers in Africa today,
he had written,
but fifteen million years ago there were. And they were slightly larger than modern ones. Maybe what you saw is more related to tarsiers than to other prosimians.

Rita came in from the kitchen with two steaming mugs. Amy sipped for a while, staring at the pictures, wondering about the difference between her animals and Stephen’s medieval ones. Were they different but closely related species, like chimpanzees and bonobos? Or just different subspecies of the same thing, like highland and lowland gorillas?

Rita’s voice broke off that train of thought, “You pretty much woken up yet?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Amy said. “I guess I’m about there. I don’t think I’m ready to go running up on the trails with you, though. Maybe in a day or two.”

“No, it’s not that. I wanted you to be awake so I could ask you something.”

“Yeah?”

Rita said, “Well, you didn’t happen to hire a private security company to watch your place while you were gone, did you?”

“I thought I hired you. For the price of dinner this Friday, remember?”

“I remember. But…nothing was missing when you got back, right?”

Amy set the book on an end table, still open to the tarsier pictures. “I haven’t really looked around all that closely, but nothing seems wrong to me.”

She hardly kept anything in the place. All of the expensive gifts Andre had given her over the years were now in a safe deposit box, and she had accumulated nothing else of real value. She traveled too much for that.

“Uh huh.” Rita paused. She looked troubled now. “
Well, there were these two guys in green rent-a-cop uniforms when I got back from my run yesterday morning. They didn’t see me coming because I was walking through the back yard from the hiking trail.  One guy was right by your front door, and the other was heading down your driveway. I asked what was going on, and they said you hired them to watch the house while you were in Africa.”

“No way!”

“I don’t know how they knew you were over there, but I was damn sure you didn’t hire them. Maybe they looked in
my
mailbox and saw one of the postcards you wrote me.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Girl, these guys were
soooo
creepy. One was a big, pink-faced bulldog with a brush cut, like an old-time professional wrestler. He didn’t say a word. The shorter one that did all the talking was this, like…too-big leprechaun, with a pointy beard all twirled together at the end, so it made a kind of a hook about two inches long. It would have just been geeky on anyone else, but this guy looked scary. I ran back inside my place and got on the phone to the sheriff’s department before those guys even made it back to their van. It was way down the street, and I couldn’t see it that well from my window. All I could tell the cops was that it was dark green and looked like it used to have some kind of round logo on the door. The cops said thieves do this kind of thing all the time. They pretend to be protecting the place they’re ripping off.”

“Oh, my God.” Amy was standing up now, holding onto Rita’s long upper arm. “Thanks for taking care of it.”

“I got your back, darling.” Rita squeezed Amy’s shoulder with a big, reassuring hand. “Tried to call and tell you about it, but it went right to voicemail, so I figured you were in the air. Didn’t see any point in leaving a message and getting you all stressed out before you got home and got some sleep.”

Amy’s fatigue and jetlag weren’t helping her sort things out. She thought for a few minutes and said, “I guess there’s not much the cops can do except tell people in the neighborhood to be on the lookout. I mean, since there’s no report of a crime actually being committed.”

“You’re right,” Rita said. “But we might get a little extra attention. I kind of got to know one of the deputies who came. His name’s Phil. I’m meeting him for dinner tomorrow, and if that goes well, you’ll meet him soon enough.” She stood up. “I’m going back to my place to shower. You want to have breakfast in a little while? Try out my new waffle iron?”