Rhinoceros Summer Page 9

  “Are we done here?” He knew his dismissal would stoke the fires of their anger, but it would shut them up, maybe for the rest of the night. His mind was already on other matters, trying to work out the conversation with Lydia he knew was inevitable.

  But they were not done. They continued to argue, Abiba’s hand restraining Caleb’s arm.

  Too close. The two of them were too damn close. Like conspirators. He would have to end that somehow, that closeness between them. Thought he had ended it.

  He would have to choose his words to Lydia with care. A woman was a powerful creature—able to lead a man into the gravest of sins. Abby had taught him that. But he’d also learned that a woman was almost always willing to try and lead a man out of it.

  2

  Breakfast was a morning buffet of coffee and pastries, laid out on a clean white tablecloth with scratched silver platters and crystal glasses not yet cracked. It was a Friday morning in Tanzania and the small resort busied itself in preparation for Jack Hellerman’s arrival on Saturday.

  Paul’s handful of staff dressed in freshly ironed jumpsuits, like a mechanic’s uniform, all one piece with a zipper down the front. They talked quietly in Swahili as they accomplished their tasks. Paul stood in the dining area next to the platter of tea cakes, sipping coffee, watching Lydia.

  Like the drumming hoof beats of wildebeests on the move, Paul believed his will, once focused, could not be denied. He’d lived in that feeling before, while doing his tour the last year of the Vietnam War. He’d lived in it again after Abby died and Walter Fritz had brought him Abiba. And then again when he’d started his own hunting outfit and envisioned Caleb growing up and running it with him.

  He came to the breakfast table, red-eyed from lack of sleep, but invigorated. Lydia was the one who looked beaten. Already her sense of how the world worked was breaking down, ready for Paul to reshape it, like Walter Fritz had reshaped Paul’s long ago.

  Except for the staff, the two of them were alone. Paul moved into her line of vision. “Lydia,” he called, trying not to startle her.

  The look in her eyes was like that of a little dik-dik—her antelope pupils wide and frozen, searching for danger, her breathing a rhythmic whistle of fright. At that moment, Paul’s heart softened towards her as it did towards any animal in fear of its life.

  Not that it ever kept him from pulling the trigger.

  “Glad to finally meet you. I’m Paul,” he held out his hand. “Did my staff make you comfortable?”

  Lydia blinked. He knew she’d judge him on every little detail this morning. He had pressed his own khaki collared shirt and pants, wore nice shoes, combed his hair back, shaved his face, wore a regular belt instead of his belt of bullets. He smiled, encouraging her to shake his hand.

  “Are you Paul Hunter, or Paul Besly?”

  His smile remained pasted on while he considered what his next words should be. He brought his hand down to his side. “Both.”

  She titled her head. “My parents think you’re Paul Besly.”

  “I am.”

  “No one here knows you by that name. They said your name is Hunter.”

  “Yes, it is that too.”

  “Why?”

  He paused before answering. Lydia was doing a good job of controlling her anxiety. She was still very much afraid, and yet that did not stop her from challenging him with questions. He adjusted his judgment of her; she was not a fragile dik-dik, but something vulnerable with a streak of fight in her. He remembered her mother, Gloria, she’d been like that too. Very feminine, someone who could fit the mold and appearance of a submissive and compliant woman when she felt like but would reveal at odd moments something much deeper. A stubbornness that would come out when she saw injustice, whether it was how a professor graded a paper, or how she’d demanded explanations for why expectations were made of women and not men at the college.

  Paul gestured to a cushioned sofa against the dining room wall. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Lydia looked as if ready to protest, but he sat before she could say a word. She joined him and balanced a tea cup on her lap.

  “I believe there is some explaining to be done. Do your parents know you arrived safely?”

  “I…No. I wasn’t sure what to tell them.” She looked down at her cup. “I didn’t know if it would be a lie to say I’d arrived safely.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way. Truly, I never wanted to lie.” He sighed. She seemed ready to sniff out any new lie he might tell. He decided to stun her with the truth.

  “When I was growing up, my parents and I lived on a five-acre ranch in the Midwest. It backed up to a golf course. A creek split the golf course down the middle and I used to make five cents for every golf ball I could fish out of that creek.” Working along, and in, that creek had felt private, wild, even as he listened for the low whistle of golf balls. “Even as a kid I got such a kick out of hunting for those little white treasures. I liked being outside. I liked finding something no one else could.” Walter Fritz had recognized that itch. Paul thought he could see a little bit of that same itch now in Lydia. Why else would she have considered traveling to Tanzania in the first place if it wasn’t to escape from something else?

  “Is the man who picked me up…is Caleb your son?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Are you a hunter?”

  “Lydia,” he said in a soothing voice, “before you ask any more questions, and I promise I will answer them all, let me first explain.”

  She lapsed into silence.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “When I was your age, just after I turned eighteen. One day I came home, I…” He pulled himself back from the memories, he did not want to feel them, just spit them out like a story from the newspaper. “My mother was sick for many years and it wore on my father. They both died the year I turned eighteen.”

  They had committed suicide together but he did not want to say that out loud. Bad enough to think it, to trudge up the old memories he’d spent twenty years burying. He would not go into detail. He would not tell her about the day he found them dead on the couch together. Let it be enough to stick to the facts. Yet, he knew of no better way to bring Lydia to his side of things than to touch upon the streak of stubborn compassion she’d inherited from Gloria.

  He watched Lydia’s eyes widen and concentrated on the rhythm of her breathing in order to ignore his own. “I joined the military but couldn’t find my peace there, so when I was a few years older than you I came to Tanzania for a summer mission trip.”

  She gave him a slight nod.

  “Well, I was young and I made some mistakes. I grieved for my parents and made some mistakes. I sinned and it resulted in a baby. And I, Abby and I, were both ashamed. I hid it from your parents because I didn’t want them to be disappointed in me. Do you understand?”

  She nodded her head.

  Paul didn’t think she meant it.

  No way could she understand living poor, watching your mother go crazy, finding your parents dead, joining up at eighteen to fight in Vietnam, going through jungle school, then doing things that won him bravery medals. Bullets whizzing by his ears like the golf balls he’d grown up with. How none of that had scared him. How he’d come back to the U.S. for college and then left on a mission trip to Tanzania. He had wanted to become someone who knew that right and wrong never overlapped, never got all mixed up, never turned in on itself.

  Paul had thought to be the one doing the converting, but Walter Fritz had turned it all around, and Paul had never come back.

  “I did what I thought was necessary to survive. Sometimes that meant making hard decisions other people don’t like. But I have only done what was necessary. That’s all. I changed my name to escape what had happened with my parents.”

  He thought he glimpsed concern and maybe a bit of sympathy in Lydia’s face. Abby had been like that at first. “Lydia.” He tried to infuse her name with compassion. “I
do take clients out to hunt trophies. For that omission I need to ask your forgiveness.”

  He paused to give his next lines the appropriate dramatic effect.

  “I use my hunting outfit, this resort, to fund nonprofit organizations that help people. But the government wants to take all that away. To keep the right to make a living, I need your help. I need something only you can provide. Exposure.”

  Paul spotted Caleb walking through the main lodge room and saw him freeze as he noticed Paul and Lydia sitting together on the sofa. Paul hurried to finish before Caleb ruined the edge he had set Lydia upon.

  “I have lied to you and your parents. You would be right to fly back and leave me with the consequences of my sins. Go home to where it’s safe. Go back to being normal. Go back to everything you’ve ever known. Forget about this wild place.”

  He saw a muscle twitch in her cheek.

  Victory surged through him. It was subtle, but she had it—that haunted-shadow look of need. A willingness to believe him because she wanted something more than whatever waited for her back home. He concentrated on that instead of the old feelings of pain and inadequacy that crept up at the mention of his parents.

  “I do not know what Caleb told you. I do not want to know. I am trying to fix my relationship with him—there’s a long history there, but I love my son and would never dare call him a liar even if he’s happened to mislead you about me. I have good intentions, though sometimes they are poorly executed.”

  He knelt on the planked floor so that Lydia sat elevated above him. “I appeal to your sense of duty as a Christian woman. I am ashamed of myself, but I’m asking you to give me a chance, to go out with one client and take some pictures. I ask for your forgiveness and compassion. I ask you to try and save this wretched man.”

  Caleb gave Paul no time to extract a response from Lydia—he busted up toward them. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, then made an excuse about needing to call her parents.

  Paul told her the phone was on its shelf near the fireplace.

  She skittered away like a frightened antelope.

  “What was that about?”

  Paul didn’t answer Caleb. He took his son in, drank him up like a man long gone thirsty. His son. Back at Blue Nile Safari, his hair skewed out like a man who didn’t care about looking nice because there was hard work to be done.

  “She shouldn’t be here.”

  “Look.” Paul shrugged even while knowing that nonchalant, easygoing motion might stir up his son’s anger. Caleb had never been able to just let things roll off his back. “We’ve already gone over this. I want her to stay. She wants to stay—”

  “She said that?”

  “Yep,” Paul said, keeping his voice neutral.

  “You wouldn’t be lying?”

  Paul let out a gruff laugh. “If you don’t know by now, nothing I can say is gonna make you believe it.”

  “She shouldn’t be here.”

  “You gonna force her against her will to go back?”

  Caleb flinched. Paul knew what this was about. Neela again. Neela and Abiba. He almost started in on it—berating Caleb for leaving in the first place, for all these years of silence, for coming back to work for his father only because the government had called him to it.

  He held off for a moment too long, giving too much room for Abiba to intrude on their conversation. It seemed like every time he had a moment alone with his son, Abiba wiggled her way in and turned Caleb to anger instead of understanding. Paul couldn’t reason with the two of them together. Couldn’t do more than respond with anger to the wall they put up to block him out of their little twosome.

  Abiba didn’t look at him. Just placed a possessive hand on Caleb’s shoulder and whispered something to him that made the muscles in his face harden and contract.

  He watched them like he would watch a dangerous animal he was hunting. He remembered the years when he hadn’t needed to take those kinds of precautions. From the very beginning, he had been an excellent shot. Because of his Vietnam experience. Walter said wars usually created a new crop of professional hunters. War was a natural pipeline for a man who couldn’t dare go back to civilization. Paul suspected a new crop of young hunters would get spit out of Iraq too.

  Abiba had been a young woman with a baby at her breast, trailing behind Walter Fritz one morning. She’d showed up at the resort looking to nurse Caleb and Walter had encouraged her to fill another kind of role with Paul. He remembered her young body and milk heavy breasts. Remembered how shy she’d acted, how willing to please.

  Walter had made that first introduction and laughed at the wonder he’d seen on Paul’s face.

  “Just like that?” Paul had said. “She’s mine just like that?”

  Walter slapped Paul on the back and said, “You’re welcome. Though maybe you won’t be thanking me all that much after a few years.”

  Paul had drunk up the sight of his new family. These three little people suddenly dependent on him for everything they needed.

  Abiba had been Paul’s woman once. He’d cared for Neela as his own, at least at first. Paul would tell Caleb right now about the square-lipped rhino if he had even a doubt about Caleb turning right back around and giving Paul over to the authorities.

  But there wasn’t any doubt. “You gotta stop hating yourself, son. You gotta let go.”

  Abiba stared at Paul with eyes like two pieces of coal.

  “You don’t know anything about who I hate,” Caleb said.The two of them walked away as if he were nothing. His parents had done that, taken themselves both away as if he did not matter. Well, he would find a way to change their minds, no matter what it took.

  CHAPTER 12

  Lydia

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Lydia! I thought it would be you. How was the plane ride? Did the camera equipment make it through okay?”

  She took a deep breath. The room smelled musty, like wood trapped for too long in the dark. Dust seemed to settle on her tongue, drying out her mouth as if someone had thrown sawdust in it. She tried to shake off the bad night of sleep, the weird conversation with Paul, the despising looks Caleb had thrown at her all morning. She hadn’t felt this unsettled since before Grandpa died, when her family still went out for their weekly Saturday lunch. Grandpa had been deaf in one ear, wore thick glasses he squinted through, and his hands shook with a tremor, like he endured a continuous rollercoaster, the tracks bumpy and ready to shake the teeth right out of his head. “Everything’s fine. Wish you were here,” she pushed out.

  “I’m excited for you, honey. Hold on while I get your mom on the phone. We’ve been waiting up for your call.”

  Lydia stared at the stone fireplace near the little shelf that held the phone. She heard her dad shuffle through the house, probably in his pajamas and slippers, calling Mom’s name. She brushed her hand over the rough stone and kept her back to the rest of the room—a holdover from childhood, thinking no one would find you if you couldn’t see them see you.

  “Hi, honey, we’re both on the phone now.”

  Her mom’s soft voice almost made Lydia cry. “Hi Mom, were you sleeping?”

  “Oh no, just finishing my devotional, but we’ll be going to bed soon. How was your plane ride?”

  “Long.” She kept her hand on the rocks but shifted her gaze to the old, knotted-wood floor. It was clean, but full of grooves and deep scratches. The phone attached to the wall with a cord too short to reach the nearest chair, tethering her to the wall like a dog leash.

  “How are you? Feeling okay? You sound kind of stressed.”

  Lydia bit her lip. She should tell her parents everything that had happened since getting off the plane but didn’t know where to start. “It’s already been a long morning, but—”

  “I’m sure she’s just tired,” Dad said.

  “Well, actually…” Lydia paused and let her hand slip from the fireplace. How could she tell her parents what had happ
ened since arriving in Tanzania? First the airport mess and then her conversation with Paul. His words had touched her but not in the way Paul hoped. He was too slick, like the TV evangelists Dad spoke against as religious hoaxers. She’d felt the act as he kneeled on the floor before her, felt the carefully placed words, as if he were following stage directions.

  “What’s wrong?” Mom said, her voice rising in pitch.

  “Whatever it is,” Dad said, “just remember, Lydia, people are like tea bags, you have to put them in hot water before you know how strong they are.”

  Mom groaned.

  “Lydia didn’t think that one was so bad, did you?”

  “Aaron.”

  “Well, it’s true,” he said in a defensive tone. “You never really know a person until they’ve hit tough times. Lydia just got there, things must seem strange. Tanzania isn’t what you expected it to be, right?”

  “Not really,” Lydia said. She closed her eyes. The smell of burnt wood from some previous fire filled her nose. The ash reminded her of car exhaust fumes and Grandpa’s old feet shuffling across the cement driveway to the driver’s seat of his Cadillac. Strange, all of it strange and uncomfortable and dangerous.

  “You’re the lucky one,” Mom said. “You know your dad’s starting a new campaign?”

  Lydia tried to force some enthusiasm into her words. “You are?”

  “I was thinking I should put together a book of my sayings. I want to call it Gibb’s Quips for Enhanced Spiritual Living. It would be a resource material for other pastors. Something any church could use to jumpstart their sermons.”

  “Which means,” Mom interjected, “I have to endure all the ones that won’t make it into the book.”

  Lydia said, “Oh,” almost as an afterthought.

  “Lydia?” Mom prompted.

  “I was just thinking about Grandpa.” Lydia paused. Grandpa insisted on driving them all to lunch, every Saturday, every time. He’d back out his old white Cadillac from the garage, paint shiny and dented, presenting her with a distorted self-reflection. He never looked behind him and always ran over the garbage can he forgot to take in from Friday’s pickup.