Garden of Eden (25 page)

He
went back to the room and read and drank his whiskey and Perrier very slowly
and he had undressed and turned the light off and was almost asleep when he
heard Catherine come in to the bedroom. It seemed to him that she was gone a
long time in the bathroom before he felt her come to bed and he lay still and
breathed steadily and hoped he might really go to sleep.

"Are
you awake, David?" she asked.

"I
think so."

"Don't
wake up," she said. "Thank you for sleeping here."

"I
usually do."

"You
don't have to."

"Yes
I do."

"I'm
glad you did. Good night."

"Good
night."

"Would
you kiss me good night?"

"Sure,"
he said.

He
kissed her and it was Catherine as she had been before when she had seemed to
come back to him for a while.

"I'm
sorry I was such a failure again."

"Let's
not talk about things."

"Do
you hate me?"

"Can
we start again the way I'd planned things?"

"I
don't think so.

"Then
why did you come in here?"

"This
is where I belong."

"No
other reason?"

"I
thought you might be lonely." "I was." "Everybody's
lonely," David said. "It's terrible to be in bed together and be
lonely." "There isn't any solution," David said. "All your
plans and schemes are worthless." "I didn't give it a chance."
"It was all crazy anyway. I'm sick of crazy things. You're not the only
one gets broken up. "I know. But can't we try it again just once more and
I really be good? I can. I nearly was. "I'm sick of all of it, Devil. Sick
all the way through me." "Wouldn't you try it just once more for her
and for me both?" "It doesn't work and I'm sick of it."
"She said you had a fine day and that you were really cheerful and not
depressed. Won't you try it once more for both of us? I want it so much."
"You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't
give a damn." "I was just overconfident this time and then I get
insufferable. Please can we try it again?" "Let's go to sleep, Devil,
and not talk about it. "Kiss me again please," Catherine said.
"I'll go to sleep because I know you'll do it. You always do everything I
want because you really want to do it too." "You only want things for
you, Devil." "That's not true, David. Anyway I am you and her. That's
what I did it for. I'm everybody. You know about that don't you?" "Go
to sleep, Devil." "I will. But would you please kiss me again first
so that we won't be lonely?"

IN
THE MORNING he was on the far slope of the mountain again. The elephant was no
longer travelling as he had been but was moving aimlessly now, feeding
occasionally and David had known they were getting dose to him. He tried to
remember how he had felt. He had no love for the elephant yet. He must remember
that. He had only a sorrow that had come from his own tiredness that had
brought an understanding of age. Though being too young, he had learned how it
must be to be too old. He was lonesome for Kibo and thinking of Juma killing
the elephant's friend had turned him against Juma and made the elephant his
brother. He knew then how much it meant to him to have seen the elephant in the
moonlight and for him to have followed him with Kibo and come close to him in
the clearing so that he had seen both of the great tusks. But he did not know
that nothing would ever be as good as that again. Now he knew they would kill
the elephant and there was nothing he could do about it. He had betrayed the
elephant when he had gone back to tell them at the shamba. They would kill me
and they would kill Kibo too if we had ivory, he had thought and known it was
untrue. Probably the elephant is going to find where he was born now and
they'll kill him there. That's all they'd need to make it perfect. They'd like
to have killed him where they killed his friend. That would be a big joke. That
would have pleased them. The god damned friend killers.

They
had moved to the edge of thick cover now and the elephant was close ahead.
David could smell him and they could all hear him pulling down branches and the
snapping that they made. His father put his hand on David's shoulder to move
him back and have him wait outside and then he took a big pinch of ashes from
the pouch in his pocket and tossed it in the air. The ash barely slanted toward
them as it fell and his father nodded at Juma and bent down to follow him into
the thick cover. David watched their backs and their asses go in and out of
sight. He could not hear them move.

David
had stood still and listened to the elephant feeding. He could smell him as
strongly as he had the night in the moonlight when he had worked up close to him
and had seen his wonderful tusks. Then as he stood there it was silent and he
could not smell the elephant. Then there had been a high squealing and smashing
and a shot by the .303 then the heavy rocking double report of his father's .450,
then the smashing and crashing had gone on going steadily away and he had gone
into the heavy growth and found Juma standing shaken and bleeding from his
forehead all down over his face and his father white and angry.

"He
went for Juma and knocked him over," his father had said. "Juma hit
him in the head."

"Where
did you hit him?"

"Where
I fucking well could," his father had said. "Get on the fucking blood
spoor."

There
was plenty of blood. One stream as high as David's head that had squirted
bright on trunks and leaves and vines and another much lower that was dark and
foul with stomach content.

"Lung
and gut shot," his father said. "We'll find him down or anchored—I
hope the hell," he added.

They
found him anchored, in such suffering and despair that he could no longer move.
He had crashed through the heavy cover where he had been feeding and crossed a
path of open forest and David and his father had run along the heavily splashed
blood trail. Then the elephant had gone on into thick forest and David had seen
him ahead standing gray and huge against the trunk of a tree. David could only
see his stern and then his father moved ahead of him and he followed and they
came alongside the elephant as though he was a ship and David saw the blood
coming from his Ranks and running down his sides and then his father raised his
rifle and fired and the elephant turned his head with the great tusks moving
heavy and slow and looked at them and when his father fired the second barrel
the elephant seemed to sway like a felled tree and came smashing down toward
them. But he was not dead. He had been anchored and now he was down with his
shoulder broken. He did not move but his eye was alive and looked at David. He
had very long eyelashes and his eye was the most alive thing David had ever
seen.

"Shoot
him in the ear hole with the three oh three," his father said. "Go
on."

"You
shoot him," David had said.

Juma
had come up limping and bloody, the skin of his fore head hanging down over his
left eye, the bone of his nose showing and one ear torn and had taken the rifle
from David without speaking and pushed the muzzle almost into the ear hole and
fired twice jerking the bolt and driving it forward angrily. The eye of the
elephant had opened wide on the first shot and then started to glaze and blood
came out of the ear and ran in two bright streams down the wrinkled gray hide.
It was a different colored blood and David had thought I must remember that and
he had but it had never been of any use to him. Now all the dignity and majesty
and all the beauty was gone from the elephant and he was a huge wrinkled pile.

"Well
we got him, Davey, thanks to you," his father had said. "Now we'd
better get a fire going so I can put Juma back together again. Come here you
bloody Humpty Dumpty. Those tusks will keep."

Juma
had come to him grinning bringing the tail of the elephant that had no hairs on
it at all. They had made a dirty joke and then his father had begun to speak
rapidly in Swahili:

How
far to water? How far will you have to go to get people to get those tusks out
of here? How are you, you worthless old pig fucker? What have you broken?

Then
with the answers known his father had said, "You and I will go back to get
the packs where we dropped them when we went in after him. Juma can get wood
and have the fire ready. The medical kit is in my pack. We have to get the
packs before it's dark. He won't infect. It's not like claw wounds. Let's
go."

His
father had known how he had felt about the elephant and that night and in the
next few days he had tried if not to convert him to bring him back to the boy
he had been before he had come to the knowledge that he hated elephant hunting.
David had put no statement of his father's intention, which had never been
stated, in the story but had only used the happenings, the disgusts, the events
and feelings of the butchering, and the work of chopping out the tusks and of
the rough surgery on Juma disguised by mockery and railery to keep the pain in contempt
and reduce its stature since there were no drugs. The added responsibility
David was given and the trust that was offered him and not accepted he had put
in the story without pointing their significance. He had tried to make the
elephant alive beneath the tree anchored in his final anguish and drowning in
the blood that had flowed so many times before but always staunched and now was
rising in him so he could not breathe, the great heart pumping it to drown him
as he watched the man who came to finish him. David had been so proud the
elephant had scented Juma and charged him instantly. He would have killed Juma
if his father had not fired into him so that he had thrown Juma into the trees
with his trunk and charged on with the death in him, feeling it as only another
wound until the blood welled up and he could not breathe against it. That
evening as David had sat by the fire he had looked at Juma with his stitched up
face and his broken ribs that he tried to breathe without and wondered if the
elephant had recognized him when he had tried to kill him. He hoped he had. The
elephant was his hero now as his father had been for a long time and he had
thought, I did not believe he could do it when he was so old and tired. He
would have killed Juma too. But he didn't look at me as though he wanted to
kill me. He only looked sad the same way I felt. He visited his old friend on
the day he died.

It
was a very young boy's story, he knew, when he had finished it. He read it over
and saw the gaps he must fill in to make it so that whoever read it would feel
it was truly happening as it was read and he marked the gaps in the margin.

He
remembered how the elephant lost all dignity as soon as his eye had ceased to
be alive and how when his father and he had returned with the packs the
elephant had already started to swell even in the cool evening. There was no
more true elephant, only the gray wrinkled swelling dead body and the huge
great mottled brown and yellow tusks that they had killed him for. The tusks
were stained with the dried blood and he scraped some of it off with his
thumbnail like a dried piece of sealing wax and put it in the pocket of his
shirt. That was all he took from the elephant except the beginning of the
knowledge of loneliness.

After
the butchery his father tried to talk to him that night by the fire.

"He
was a murderer you know, Davey," he had said. "Juma says nobody knows
how many people he has killed."

"They
were all trying to kill him weren't they?"

"Naturally,"
his father had said, "with that pair of tusks."

"How
could he be a murderer then?"

"Just
as you like," his father had said. "I'm sorry you got so mixed up
about him."