Disposition of Remains (21 page)

Waiting for us in the morning was yet another nightmarishly minuscule airplane, this one ready to take us to Zambia. When Carol asked if it would be all right if she rode shotgun instead of babysitting me, I tried not to look profoundly relieved as I nodded my approval. The tradeoff was that Clifford plowed his behind down next to me, once again encroaching upon my personal space.

As we rolled down the runway, I recognized that I should have prepared for the inevitable. Luckily, Edison was way ahead of me. He had a barf bag in hand and held it in front of my face just as my stomach began to turn. I was grateful to not have to subject Wilbur to the unpleasant task.

“You don’t travel very well, do ya?” Clifford asked.

He had a knack for offensively stating the obvious.

“I didn’t know there were planes this small. Or that we’d be on so god
damn many of them.”

“Didn’t y’all read the brochure?”

“No, this trip was sort of a spontaneous decision.”

“That’s kin
da weird, ’cause they told me I got the las’ spot six months ago.”

“That
is
weird. Guess there must have been a last-minute cancellation,” I responded, carefully avoiding eye contact.

Lying wasn’t
permitted in my “being a good person” credo, but I didn’t want to rat out Wilbur. Instead, I decided to change the subject altogether.

“What did you do for a living before you retired, Clifford?”

“I was a cop.”

That made perfect sense. He even had the cop mustache, complete with crumbs.

“They use ta’ call me ‘The Dog’
at the station.”

“You mean after
Clifford the Big Red Dog?
”
“Naw. Whaddaya mean?”

“Oh, it’s a…never mind. Go on.”

“I was a detective. They called me ‘The Dog’
because I could sniff out the bad guys. Speakin’a dogs, lemme show you my princess.”

He reached into his pocket and extracted one of those accordion-style plastic holders containing what seemed like hundreds of pictures of his cutesy little purse dog. He wasn’t satisfied until I had admired and complimented every last one.

At least when Carol blathered on, she was oblivious to my apathy. Clifford was insistent upon my complete engrossment in his nonsense. Truth be told, they would have made a perfect couple, Clifford and Carol, if only they hadn’t despised one another so much. They both just needed someone to listen to them, and right then I made the conscious decision that it was my duty to become that someone.

When the flight reached its destination, I was verging on tears of joy to have solid ground beneath me once again.
Terra firm
a. As I reveled in the lack of motion under my feet, I walked as far away from Clifford as possible. I’d had enough of his particular brand of torture for the moment. I contemplated how good people do it. How do they remain so patient with people who are so irritating? Or are the “good people” the ones who eventually snap, bursting into their place of business with an assault rifle and taking out all of their coworkers? Being a good person was going to take a lot of practice, and I was starting to doubt whether I had enough time to master the art.

Edison walked us to the main convergence area and began to explain that the camp in Zambia offered mostly water activities.
Water activities equal boats
. I disliked boats as much as, or even more than, flying contraptions. I had psychosomatic motion sickness just imagining myself on a boat. To add insult to injury, the tented cabins were situated right on the water. Rather than focusing on that every time I looked at the water in Zambia, I tried to recall the naked conversation I had with Wilbur while bathing in the river in Sedona. Sadly, we were not going to relive the adventure in Zambia, as the Kafue River was infested by crocodiles, hippos, and various other predatory creatures. I loved having a view of the river, as long as it remained a safe distance from me, and vice-versa.

To my pleasant surprise, the actual pontoon boats were nothing like the motion-laden, nausea-inducing demons that I had conjured up in my addled brain. As it turned out, the movement of the boat agreed with my stomach just fine. In fact, the wind felt invigorating. Despite this, I still managed to vomit in Zambia on a somewhat regular basis.

Zambia has issues with the tsetse, a large biting fly that causes trypanosomiasis, or “sleeping sickness.” The symptoms include fever, joint pain, headaches, itching, swollen lymph nodes, confusion, complete organ failure, and eventually death—basically, every unimaginably horrible symptom possible. The parasite produces tryptophol, a chemical in the body that induces sleep. The sufferer experiences alternating bouts of extreme fatigue and fits of wakefulness.

We were all against getting the sleeping sickness—especially the “eventual death” aspect of it. As if the sleeping sickness didn’t make the tsetse flies scary enough, the little bastards were completely immune to insect repellant.

Some brilliant local had discovered that burning elephant dung caused the tsetse flies to stay away. That is what I remember most about Zambia: the revoltingly pungent smoke of burning elephant feces—hence my vomiting. We all spent the majority of our time there with bandanas over our mouths and noses like bandits in the Old West. There were a few times I would have opted for the organ failure over that wretched smell. Every time I complained to Wilbur about the smoldering elephant dung, he just shrugged his shoulders in bemusement. It seemed Wilbur, Edison, and all of the rest of the staff were immune to the fumes.

Just hours after we arrived in Zambia I found myself with the group on a pontoon boat with the multitalented Edison at the helm, piloting us down the Kafue River. Within minutes, the boat was surrounded by hippos and crocodiles. Everyone spotted them immediately—everyone except Carol, that is.

“Can we swim here?” Carol asked. “I wore my suit.”

She felt the need to traumatize us with the sight of her neon-yellow bikini under a white shirt, which she lifted up for our viewing displeasure.

Sure. Go ahead
…I thought in my less than charitable brain before reigning myself back into “good girl” mode.

“Um, no. The crocodiles may ignore you, but hippos are actually very
dangerous,” Edison replied with more composure than I could have mustered. Everyone else muffled snickers.

“Huh?” Carol questioned.

Then, as she scanned her surroundings, her eyes bulged at the sight of a crocodile basking in the sunlight on the shore. It registered in her pea brain that she wasn’t on the Lido deck of the Love Boat.

As Carol collected herself from her perceived near-death experience, Edison drew our attention to various species of birds and some water monitors, which looked like miniature dinosaurs. Then he pointed to a hippo on the shore eating grass, with red streaks
running down his face and back.

“Over there,” Edison announced, “is a hippo out of the water. Hippos don’t usually like to be out of the water during the
day. Their skin is very sensitive, but that oily substance it is secreting contains a red pigment that protects the hippo’s delicate skin from the sun. Humans have been trying to replicate it for years. It is a natural sunscreen, antiseptic, and insect repellent all in one.”

Edison chuckled. To me, it appeared as though the hippo was bleeding from every pore on his body. It was one of the oddest things I had ever seen.

After leaving the majesty of the hippo, we spent a few hours traveling slowly down the Kafue. As the day wore on and the sun began to set, Wilbur put his arm around me. No sunset I had ever beheld before was as beautiful as an African sunset. It was almost as stunning as the lovely man next to me, into whose chest I instinctively nuzzled my face.

One cloudy
day in Zambia, Edison took us fishing. I had never really understood the concept of catching something for sport, but I played along anyway. We were back out on the pontoon boat, but this time with worms and reels. Edison went over the basics of fishing, mostly for the sake of the women, or possibly just for the sake of Carol. He explained to us that there were large catfish in the water, and if one took hold of our hook, we should let it take the line and swim for awhile, then wait for the catfish to tire in order to keep it from snapping our line.

Almost immediately Carol threw her line back, hooking Clifford’s hat in the process. Unaware, she cast her line into the water, sending Clifford’s hat with it and exposing his mostly bald head. Edison attempted to fish the hat out of the water with his pole, while concealing his “
OMG: white people
!”
smile.

Clifford barked at Carol, “Do ya
try
to be that stupid?”

B
ut Carol, who had selective hearing in addition to an intellectual handicap, was already busy casting her line again.

Immediately, I felt a tug on my own line.

“I think I got one!” I squealed.

Somehow, at that moment, the senseless murder of a defenseless, vulnerable fish became an exciting prospect. Wilbur rushed over to help me reel in my bubble fish.

“I got one too!” Carol shouted, as she began to reel in her own catch.

“It’s a big one! Give it a little line,” Edison cautioned
her.

Carol’s selective hearing button was in the “off” position, so
she completely ignored him, opting instead to continue trying to fight the fish into the boat. In the process, she backed up into Clifford who gave her a less-than-gentle shove in the opposite direction.

Edison was making his way across the boat to Carol but before he could intervene, the fish took off and, in the process, jerked suddenly on her fishing pole. Instead of just letting go, Carol stubbornly followed her pole right into the pre
dator-infested water. She was able to take that swim after all—the hard way. Carol began flailing and screaming like a lunatic despite Edison’s pleading admonitions otherwise.

“You must calm down, Carol. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself.”

But Carol was just too berserk and too
Carol
to listen.

Edison grabbed the life preserver and tossed it in her direction. It clubbed her right in the head, but didn’t stun her enough to stifle her frenzy. Instead, what had started as a shrill roar then accelerated into full-blown hysteria. Clifford stared at her with crossed arms as if he hoped to finally see his first African kill. Wilbur and Edison exchanged dumbfounded looks of
what in the hell do we do now?

I don’t know what mystical force possessed me; maybe it was the fact that I was already grappling with my mortality, or maybe it was my need to stare death in the face. Whatever it was, it caused me to spontaneously jump in after Carol.

As I hit the water I heard Wilbur scream, “Stacia, no!” But it was too late for second thoughts.

I swam to Carol and tried to get her to take hold of the life preserver, but she couldn’t be reasoned with. I decided just to grab her, but she continued to scream and flail wildly, threatening to pull me down under the murky water with her. Hysteria dictates a good slap in the face, and upon realizing that I didn’t want to die right then and there, I saw no other option. I held onto her with one hand, drew back the other, and slapped the stupid bitch as hard as I could.

For the first time since I met her, Carol was suddenly and delightfully speechless. The shock of my blow subdued her long enough to push her close to the boat so Edison, David, and John could grab her and reel her in. Meanwhile, Clifford had returned to fishing.

I then realized what a moronic thing I had done.

Wilbur reached out for me as he exclaimed à la Paul Revere, “The hippos are coming!”

I reached for Wilbur, but I slipped out of his grasp as he tried to grab hold of me. Clifford rolled his eyes and set his fishing pole back down to assist Wilbur in pulling me back into the boat. Had their timing been off by a millisecond, there would’ve been six fewer hungry hippos in the world. When Carol and I were both safely aboard, Edison started the engine and sped away for fear that the hippos would try to overturn the boat.

“Yer jus’ as stupid as she is,” Clifford growled, shaking his head.

“That’s kind of unnecessary, don’t you think?” Wilbur
shot back in response, his face reddening with uncharacteristic anger. “She just saved Carol’s life.”

“Yeah, thanks for that one,” Clifford replied sarcastically.

“It’s all right, Wilbur. It was pretty stupid,” I said, trying to diffuse the situation.

I could tell Wilbur was ready to throw some punches with the old coot and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. Not just because of my silly plan to be a good person and save my own skin, but also because Wilbur would have hated himself later if he’d let Clifford push him over the edge into violence—even if Clifford more than deserved it. It was because I genuinely cared about Wilbur. I cared about him more than I cared about myself.

For a brief moment I even cared about Carol more than myself. I had accomplished something. I had committed a selfless act. I had actually saved someone’s life, even if it wasn’t a life that Clifford or anyone else on the boat thought worth saving. My life meant something in a small way. I had made a permanent impression on someone’s world. My being there was the butterfly effect that saved a life. Maybe it was all right that I was going to die. Maybe I had fulfilled my sole purpose on Earth.