Larger Than Life (Novella) (9 page)

“Did you know which bull they wanted to find?” Neo asks.

“Yes. He had a sprinkling of freckles behind his right ear. That’s how I had identified
him, before the scar on his forehead, anyway.” I shrug. “But that bull might not have
been so aggressive if there had been older males in his herd to teach him how to behave.
He didn’t deserve to die because humans had fucked up in the first place.” I tuck
my hair behind my ear. “I broke the rules. The game warden knew it. My colleagues
knew it. The rangers, hell, they refused to drive into the bush with me, since to
them it looked like I was standing up for an animal that had killed one of their own.
And a month later that same bull killed a bush vet and was shot by the ranger who’d
been driving him. After that, my boss suggested—firmly—that I might be more welcome
at a different
reserve.” I finish my third drink, and set the glass down so hard it rings against
the table. “So yes, Neo, I should have known better.”

He stares at me, but his eyes are unreadable. I do not know if he thinks that at Madikwe,
by taking a stand, I was wearing the white hat of a hero or the black one of the villain.
“Do you know of Pilanesberg?” he asks.

Of course I do. I even did some of my doctoral research there. It is—like Madikwe—a
reserve for the juvenile elephants that were spared in the South African culls to
control the overpopulation of elephants, which was threatening biodiversity. And just
like at Madikwe, they have had their fair share of behavioral problems at Pilanesberg.
“I heard a story about the young bulls that were sent there after the culls,” Neo
says. “They were herded into a
boma
, one surrounded by a fence with fifty-nine electrified poles. The sixtieth pole,
that’s where the wires were joined, so that one wasn’t electrified. The idea was to
keep the elephants overnight, so that they could be released into the reserve officially
with the press watching. That way the government would look heroic, for successfully
dealing with the elephant population problem. But the next morning, the bulls went
straight to the one pole that wasn’t hot-wired, and in three minutes knocked it over
and disappeared into the reserve before the press even had a chance to arrive.”

“The moral of this story is that male elephants don’t like photo ops?”

“No. The moral of the story is that if a rule is flimsy enough to be broken, perhaps
it was meant to be.” Neo reaches across the table, lifts my hand, turns it over. I
think of those electrified poles, of the shocks that the elephants would have received
that long night when they tested each one. Neo keeps his eyes on mine as he presses
a kiss into the center of my palm.

My fingers curl, as if I might be able to hold on to it.

I straddle Neo’s lap and touch the planes of his face, the muscles of his shoulders,
the question on his lips. We tumble hard onto the floor, skinning my knee as he rolls
me beneath him. His shirt comes off and then mine; my legs tangle with his as we push
away the stiff canvas of our shorts. We are a family, and this is what has been missing.

I cannot stop staring at the seam between our skin, silhouette and shadow. As Neo
moves in me, I look out the window, at the stars sewn like sequins on velvet. I think
about the moon, which is always in the sky, but only comes to life when she is wrapped
in the arms of the night.

The Hindi word for intoxicated is
musth
. This is also the term used to describe the heightened sexual state a bull elephant
comes into once a year for an average of three months. During this period, the bull
is driving by hormones, not brains. He doesn’t think. He acts—and then reacts—when
he realizes what he’s done.

When I was working on my doctorate in South Africa, there was an elephant-back safari
at a game reserve not far from Madikwe. Each of the elephants was trained and ridden
by a mahout, a person who had grown up with and worked with that particular animal
for years. They had one young bull in the group who came into premature musth. During
one of the bush walks with the elephants, the mahout must have done something to set
the animal off. The previously placid bull went wild, grabbing the mahout with his
trunk and smacking the man against the ground as if he weighed no more than a twig.
He did not stop until the mahout’s spine was shattered. The female elephants knew
immediately that something was grievously wrong. By the time the bull could control
himself, and looked down to see the dead body at his feet, the females were dusting
the mahout. They covered him with broken branches. They stood guard over him till
the owners of the elephant-back safari arrived to find the mahout who had never returned
to camp.

When it comes to musth behavior, a male elephant is like a guy who wakes up in Vegas
with no recollection of the previous night, looking down at the lipstick on his collar
and the tattoo on his arm and the Mardi Gras beads around his neck as if to say,
What the hell happened?

The female elephants would never find themselves in that situation—they know better,
all along.

I wake up to the sound of scratching.

Leaping out of bed, I throw open the door to find Lesego shuffling on the porch. The
gash on her forehead is still raw and red, but it is no longer bleeding. And as she
reaches out her trunk to touch my face, I stroke her trunk. “I won’t leave you behind,”
I promise, thinking of the wide hips of Mpho as she swayed over the hill, her herd
in tow. From what I have gleaned of the memory of elephants, I know that Lesego can
recall those bulls charging her. The question is: Will it make her shy away from attempting
to blend with any other herd, or will it be buried so deep that she forgets it ever
happened?

“Neo,” I say over my shoulder. “She’s up.” Just the taste of his name in my throat
feels like I have swallowed sunlight. I turn when he doesn’t respond and realize that
the narrow bed is empty. At some point, while I slept, he abandoned me.

Better get used to it
.

The thought hits me like a sucker punch, and then another bursts into my mind:
He thinks this was a mistake
.

A third fear blooms, like a Hydra:
He is afraid he will lose his job
.

And a fourth:
He thinks I’ll be embarrassed
.

Shaking my head to clear it, I force myself to focus like a scientist would, instead
of relying on gut instinct. It is possible that Neo did not leave me. That perhaps
he only went to get coffee or to shower and is returning. It is possible that Neo
is waiting for me to make the first move, out of courtesy.

When I weigh all these other possibilities, I feel much less threatened. I look at
Lesego and smile. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go find him.”

The calf lags behind me, dragging a stick through the dirt as if she is leaving a
trail to find our way back home. It is a truly beautiful day—warm without being too
humid, the sky a startling electric blue. Walking toward the rangers’ village, I feel
the way I did the first time I looked at a slide beneath a microscope—as if I had
been blind, until now.

I will find Neo and tell him that I have no regrets. That if it makes him more comfortable
I will tell Grant I instigated this relationship. I will repeat to Neo the secrets
he whispered against my throat and my belly last night, passwords in a language no
one else can speak. I will slip my hand into his and I will not let go.

But all of my plans scatter when I hear children playing in the courtyard. This is
startling, because it’s so rare. Then I realize it is Saturday, the day when the families
of the rangers may come to visit. One of the boys—all angles and arms and legs—kicks
a soccer ball that smacks me in the thigh.
“Tshwarelo,”
he says. Sorry.

He looks terrified, as if he expects me to punish him. I smile instead.
“Dumêla,”
I say. Hello.

I don’t know a lot of the Setswana language yet, but you have to pick up some words
here and there when you spend all day with rangers. The boy’s little brother is staring
at Lesego, his mouth a perfect O, the soccer game forgotten.
“O mang?”
I ask his name, crouching down to his level, as Lesego curls her trunk over my shoulder.

“Leina la me ke Khumo,”
the toddler says. My name is Khumo.

Suddenly there is a flurry of activity, and a woman comes out of one of the huts,
balancing a baby on her hip. Like many other Tswana women, she is beautiful—tall and
willowy, with bone structure usually found on the pages of fashion magazines. Her
hair is wrapped in a colorful scarf that makes me think of a sunset. I wonder if she
is the woman who left behind the coconut oil that saved Lesego from starving.

She rattles off a stream of Tswana so fast and furious that I cannot follow along,
but I can tell from the slope of the boys’ shoulders and the way they are drawn to
her, as if to a magnetic pole, that they are being reprimanded for hitting the white
woman with the soccer ball. “No,” I say, trying to make her understand that the boys
have done nothing wrong.
“Go siame,”
I tell her. It’s fine. Then I point to the little girl she is holding.
“Bontle,”
I say, the only word I know in her language for
beautiful
.

The little boys peek from behind their mother, chattering about Lesego—or so I assume
from the way they are pantomiming her trunk and her ears. “Do you speak English?”
I ask. “I am trying to find Neo.”

Before she can respond, Neo steps through the doorway and freezes.

I am trying to make sense of the picture in front of my eyes when the littlest boy
wraps his arms around Neo’s leg, as if it is a tree to climb.

It is family visiting day in the rangers’ village, and this is Neo’s family.

My body feels like a block of ice. “I … I have to go,” I force out, and I run down
the path that leads from the rangers’ village, with the calf hurrying behind me.

Neo catches up to me when I can just see the open door of my cottage, the bed
inside where we made love the night before, when I did not know that he was married.
“Alice,” he calls out. “Stop.”

I turn on him, shoving so hard at his shoulders that he stumbles backward. “You didn’t
tell me,” I yell. I am angry at him for hiding this. I am angrier at myself for not
asking.

The truth is, I didn’t look closely enough. Neo had been there when I needed him;
he had told me what I wanted to hear; he had touched me like a match strikes wood.
I was the fool for burning.

Sensing that something isn’t right, Lesego roars. Neo grasps me by the wrist, a shackle.
“You don’t understand,” he says softly.

But he is wrong. I hadn’t
wanted
to. There’s a difference.

As I pull away from Neo, as I walk to my hut, I can feel his eyes on me. I start counting
the steps. Fifty, and I will be okay. Forty-nine, until I close the door behind me.
Forty-eight. Forty-seven.

“Alice.”

The sound of my name being called cracks the shell of my composure. I look up to find
Grant waiting on the front steps of my hut. Seeing Lesego, he purses his lips. “She’s
bounced back fast.”

I nod, and he hands me a piece of paper. I hesitate, expecting another yellow slip
from Western Union, but this is a piece of camp stationery with a name scrawled across
it. “Who’s Karen Trendler?” I ask.

“She runs a sanctuary in South Africa. She’s very active in the fight against poaching
elephants and rhinos.” He hesitates. “Your girl isn’t ever going back to the bush,”
Grant says. “I think you and I both know that.”