Zoo Read online

  It began with a photograph of a primitive painting from the famous Lascaux caves in France that clearly showed a guy being killed by a bison. Next was Rubens’s Chained Prometheus. In the painting, the torment in the upside-down Titan’s face is pretty damn visceral as an eagle tears into his, well, viscera. The Rubens was followed quickly by Nicolas Poussin’s haunting Renaissance painting The Plague at Ashdod, depicting a scene in which God has sent a plague of disease and mice onto the Philistines for disobeying him.

  Next came stranger, darker, lesser-known images.

  I felt my pulse skip a little when an ancient sculpture of a reclining jaguar appeared. It was found in an Aztec temple along with an apocalyptic prophecy of animals devouring all humanity.

  The jaguar was followed by an eerie illustration from the Toggenburg Bible. It shows a man and a woman dying of bubonic plague. There’s something about its bright, static flatness—a characteristic of medieval art—that makes it particularly disturbing. The naked figures lie stiffly in bed like paper dolls, their pale bodies polka-dotted with protruding buboes. The Black Death, which killed 40 percent of the known world’s population, had been started by marmots and carried throughout Europe by rats.

  I looked out the window again. As I stared out at the clouds thousands of feet below me, and the ocean below that, I had a strange sensation. It was a sinking, chilling feeling. For a moment, hurtling six hundred miles an hour toward Africa, I felt suddenly very tiny and very alone. I wasn’t religious, but as I sat there, I started wondering about the inexplicable nature of these things.

  It was as though I could actually feel the apocalyptic shift that was occurring. I thought of horses, birds, snakes. I thought of the curse God puts on the snake in Genesis: he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel…

  The wrath of God?

  Or maybe it was just my jet lag, I thought, rubbing the gunk out of my eyes. There was no doubt that I’d become obsessed with HAC. I thought about all the sleepless nights; the quitting school. And now I was actually on a plane to Africa. Maybe I would finally find the answers I was looking for. Or maybe I was delusional. I was beginning to doubt my own sanity.

  I glanced down at my laptop and saw that I had another e-mail from Natalie. This one was a real picker-upper.

  Oz, I know this is probably a bad time to say this…

  Oh, boy. I knew what was coming. I almost quit reading then and there. The same way I looked at my bank statements in those days. Just flick my eyes over it, knowing I don’t want to see it. Anyway. I read the rest quickly:

  …but I’ve been thinking about everything, and I guess, bottom line, I just can’t do all this anymore. At least not now. I just got back my immunology midterm. I flunked it. I’ll be lucky if I get a C now. It’s not just that. I’m distracted, and I have to concentrate on school and my career. I know I shouldn’t e-mail all this. We’ll talk when you get back. And you need to get someone else to check on Attila. I’m too swamped.

  Okay, then, I thought. Whoopee. I’m back on the market.

  I considered replying to her e-mail, but then decided to just ignore it, leave things alone. I couldn’t turn back now. Natalie knew that, and I knew Natalie’s priority was to become a doctor. She’d always been clear about that. Maybe we did need a break.

  I’d just have to call the other woman in my life. I left a message for Mrs. Abreu on her machine, begging her to feed Attila for me until I came back. She wouldn’t let me down.

  I closed my laptop and stretched. I had twelve hours to go before I reached Johannesburg for my stopover. I reached into my laptop bag for my iPod, put in my earbuds, cranked some Black Sabbath, and headed down the aisle of the speeding plane in search of the stewardess and some Red Bull.

  Book Two

  INTO AFRICA

  Chapter 13

  MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Africa, twelve hours later, was actually sort of a letdown. Johannesburg, beyond the massive windows of the airport, was just a bunch of nondescript buildings; it could have been Cleveland.

  An hour later, when we took off northbound for Botswana, my mood lifted considerably. The green-and-tan expanse of seemingly endless landscape looked the way the little kid in me wanted Africa to look. Hot, wild, secluded.

  As we were beginning our final descent into Maun, I saw there were some modern buildings, but most of the structures were cinder-block and tin. Coming down the steps onto the tarmac, I saw that, beyond the flimsy chain-link fence along the airport’s perimeter, there were donkeys everywhere. There were also rondavels, the traditional African thatch-roofed round huts built of stone and cow dung. The feel of the place—the heat, the sweetish smell of manure and diesel, even the sharp, blinding yellow light—was pleasantly strange.

  After I made it through customs, Abraham Bindix took off his tattered straw hat and greeted me with a bear hug inside the run-down terminal. Abraham was a boiler tank of a man. Broad-shouldered and blocky, the fiftyish, weather-beaten man reminded me a Sun Belt college football coach. His face was as hard and creased as an old work glove, with a mustache fading into the scruff on his cheeks. A shag carpet of chest hair burst from the unbuttoned neck of his sweat-dampened linen shirt. Some faded blue tattoos on the furry wine barrels he called his arms were reminders of his navy days. It was good to see his loopy, gap-toothed smile. The last time I’d seen him was in Paris. We’d sat at the hotel bar and gotten drunk as swine after I’d been booed off the convention stage.

  He seemed heavier than I remembered him in Paris. He also seemed noticeably older, and a little slower on his feet. I wondered if he was ill.

  “Thank you for coming, my friend, but I have bad news,” he said as I scooped up my bags from the pile of luggage beside the plane. I liked Abraham, but took him with a grain of salt. Like a lot of Afrikaners, he was crude as oil and casually racist in a way that can make a white American dude a touch uncomfortable. Still, there was something almost grandfatherly about him, something Papa Bear.

  “Unfortunately, a problem has arisen,” he said. “A family thing. Is it possible for you to wait a day before I can take you up to the village near Zimbabwe?”

  “Of course. What’s up, Abe? Can I help?” I said.

  “No, no. It is a family thing,” he said. Abe had a warm, brassy honk of a voice, like a muted trumpet. “My little brother, Phillip, the pacifist, is the manager at a game-spotting lodge over in the bush near the Namibian border. I take rich American tourists out to kill animals, but he takes them out just to look at them, take pictures. Lions, actually—two huge prides of them that eat the Cape buffalo up there in the Okavango Delta.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Don’t know, man. His lodge has been out of radio contact for over twenty-four hours, and me mum is worried. It is probably nothing, but with all the craziness going on I need to make sure the wanker is okay.”

  “So let’s head out,” I said. “You said the lodge has lions, right? Lions are what I just came eight thousand miles to see.”

  My enthusiasm seemed to brighten Abe’s spirit.

  “Right, man,” he said, slapping my shoulder. It hurt a little. “I knew you were a friend, Oz. I tried to get my trackers to come with me, but the superstitious boogies are still completely spooked by the slaughtered village we came across. The pagan bastards said they wanted nothing to do with lions until, quote, the spirits are calmer, unquote.”

  Uncalm spirits; lions. I thought about my sinking feeling on the plane, the feeling of God’s wrath in the air. Then I dismissed it. I wadded up my uneasiness and tossed it over my shoulder.

  “Which way to Okavango?” I said, hefting my camera case.

  Chapter 14

  INSTEAD OF HEADING out of the airport, Abe and I walked south, inside the terminal, and made a right into a narrow, dingy corridor.

  “What are we doing? I thought we were going to your brother’s lodge,” I said.

  “Right, man, we are. In the northern delta, there are no roads, only airstrips,
” Abe explained. Walking, he dug a tin of chewing tobacco out of one of the pockets of his khaki utility vest, scooped some of it into his fingers, and put a wad under his lip. “We need to rent a plane.”

  “Rent a plane?” I said. “I hope you know how to fly one, because I only know how to jump out of them.”

  “That skill might come in handy,” Abe said. His jaw was working, moistening the chaw. He winked. “I have a license, but I have not flown in some time.”

  We went through a door and walked right back out onto the tarmac beside the plane I’d just exited. I noticed they were a little more lax with security here on the Dark Continent. No one even asked me to take off my shoes.

  We turned a corner into a hangar. A half-black, half-Asian man in a greasy fedora sat behind a desk eating some kind of barbecued meat with his fingers. Another African, who looked like a soldier or policeman, judging by his soiled gray uniform and gray beret, sat next to him and wore a flat black AK-47 over his shoulder. They both had their feet up and were watching a movie on a portable DVD player. I peeked over the policeman’s shoulder: it was Happy Gilmore, the Adam Sandler movie. They weren’t laughing. Granted, it wasn’t very funny, but they didn’t seem to get that it was a comedy.

  Abe spent about ten minutes bellowing like a bull at the two of them in a language I soon learned was Setswana. In the end, Abraham, his face sweaty, red, and puffy with heat, fished around in the pouches of his utility vest and handed the guy at the desk a folded wad of bills. The man thumbed through them with hands that were still sticky from the meat he’d been eating, seemed satisfied, and directed us outside with a Mafia tough’s chin jerk that he’d probably learned from American movies.

  We walked outside and down a lane between two rows of small bush planes. Abe threw open the door of a rust-flaked red-and-white Piper Super Cub that had cartoonishly oversize tundra tires and squeezed my bags behind the seats.

  “Wait here, man,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Abe went back into the hangar. When he returned a moment later, he was coming from the other end of the airport, riding in a battered Range Rover. Two dogs, sleek red-brown Rhodesian ridgebacks, tumbled out when he opened his door. They hopped into the plane as though they’d done so plenty of times before. Then Abe heaved two large gun cases from the truck and packed them into the plane as well.

  He caught me looking at the guns.

  “Better to have and not need than need and not have, right, man?” he said, giving my cheek an avuncular pinch.

  Soon my ears were nestled in squishy radio headphones and we were taxiing onto the runway. On the other side of the airport’s dusty service road, I spotted a fenced field that had stones and strange striped tents in it.

  “What’s that, Abe?” I shouted over the gathering roar of propeller chop, pointing.

  “That’s a graveyard,” Abe shouted back. He opened the plane’s throttle and we began bouncing down the tarmac.

  “So many dead from AIDS around here, they cannot dig fast enough. So they pile the coffins under tents. What’s the American joke about cemeteries?”

  “People are dying to get in?” I offered.

  “Right, man. That’s the one.” Abe gave me a sardonic smile. His teeth were jumbly-crooked and tobacco-stained. He pulled back the throttle and our tiny plane left terra firma. “Welcome to Africa, man.”

  Chapter 15

  EVEN WITH MY jet lag, the claustrophobic confinement of the plane, and a dog panting fragrantly in each ear, that thirty-minute plane ride was the most exhilarating of my life.

  Flying over the Okavango Delta was like going back in time. I half expected to see dinosaurs walking around below us. There wasn’t a single building, not a house or even a rondavel, on the endless brown plain rippling along beneath us. I watched the shadow of the aircraft glide over white islands dotted between clear blue ribbons of water. On them were palm trees and giant lumps of earth that Abe told me were termite mounds.

  Now that it was July—one of the winter months, Abe explained—the delta dried up and swelled to three times its normal size, attracting one of the greatest concentrations of wildlife on the planet. We flew over hippos, hyenas, a herd of massive Cape buffalo, horned and black, which Abe told me were considered by some professional hunters to be more dangerous than lions. There were river birds, seemingly in the millions, scattering from the dry marshes at the sound of our plane. The first humans we saw were a couple of African fishermen in a hand-cut dugout. Who needs the Discovery Channel? I thought.

  “This is it,” Abe said a few minutes later, his voice crackling over my headphones. We lowered our speed and altitude as we banked down toward some thatched roofs beside the faint white scar of an airstrip. I was expecting the landing to be as bumpy as the takeoff, so I was surprised when Abe laid the Piper down as smooth as silk. I pulled off my headphones, and in the wake of the noise, the silence was almost ghostly. My ears rang a bit.

  “That is funny,” Abe said as we climbed out of the plane and into the heat. “Not funny ha-ha.”

  “What?” I said.

  “The staff—when they see a plane landing, they are usually waiting here, clapping, singing their silly folk songs and holding a stiff drink and a hot towel. I do not see or hear anything. Do you? Not even any animals.”

  He was right. The only sound was the thrumming drone of insects under the glaring sky. The thatch-roofed buildings in the distance, which we could see at the end of a dusty path lined with brittle brown reeds and papyrus, all seemed empty, deserted. A silvery band of light shimmered on the horizon, vague, shaking with heat.

  Abe whistled and the two sleek red dogs broke into a trot, scouting ahead, heads scanning, their sense of smell going into overdrive. The camp we followed them into was as bustling as a graveyard. We searched all six platform tents, along with the dining area. We found clothes, luggage, safari gear, tourist stuff—pith helmets and khaki utility vests—open portmanteaus spewing socks and underwear onto unmade beds. But no tourists and no staff.

  There was what looked like a shipping container—a giant red box of corrugated metal—behind the kitchen. Alongside it we found a Land Rover with two extra rows of raised seats to accommodate wildlife watchers.

  Abe half coughed and half cursed in a language I didn’t recognize. He spat a jet of shit-brown tobacco juice into the grass and wiped his mouth with his shirt.

  “Two of the trucks are missing. Besides the guides, there are another half dozen maids and cooks. This is very strange, Oz. Where the devil is everyone? Where’s my little brother? I have a bad feeling.”

  Abe put his fingers to his lips and pierced the air with a whistle, and the dogs came running. He hopped into the Rover, found the keys, and started the engine. After we drove back to the plane and retrieved his rifles, we drove north from the camp over a badly rutted car path. Pebbles popped and crunched under the tires, and the car rattled and shuddered over the washboard-like waves in the road. When the car path petered out, we hit an even bumpier field of tall dry grass. Around a stand of ebony trees, some baby hyenas were wading in the shallow river water, fat gloves of reeking mud on their paws. I couldn’t help but gawk as though I were on safari, but if Abe noticed them or the family of giraffes drinking in the shallows a hundred feet south of them downriver, he didn’t say anything.

  We were steering around a stand of fig trees when we finally saw people. A group of Africans stood milling around by a dock at the river’s edge. It was two men and a pudgy boy, all in chef’s whites, and they were preparing to get into some dugouts. Abe pulled hard on the wheel, piloted the Rover over to the men, and brought it to a jerky stop. He shouted something quick at them in Setswana. The men yelled something back. They seemed to be arguing. The conversation took a few minutes. At the end of it, the three kitchen workers reluctantly got out of the canoe and climbed into the back of the car. I turned around and looked at them. Their faces were stolid and blank, hard to read. They didn’t acknowledge me.

&
nbsp; “What’s the story?” I said to Abe as we pulled away. Abe tucked another pinch of tobacco into his cheek.

  “It’s worse than I thought, man. Two groups went out day before yesterday—twenty people, including my brother. Haven’t heard from them since. Not only that, they said lions were actually in the camp last night. Roaming around like stray kittens, picking at scraps. These bozos back there hid themselves in the shipping container. When they woke up, the radio transmitter had been broken, smashed somehow. Just now, they were going to try to go downstream to get help.”

  “Why were you arguing?”

  Abe took off his straw hat and wiped sweat off his sunburned brow. Abe perspired like a leaky faucet.

  “I told them to come with us to help find the tourists and guides, but, like my trackers, they’re terrified. They said something is wrong with the lions. The same superstitious boogie shit. The gods are angry. There’s black magic about. Ooga booga booga!”

  Behind us, the cooks started singing some sort of chant.

  “Ah, here they go,” said Abe, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at them. “Ooh, ee, ooh ah ah, ting, tang, walla walla bing-bang!”

  Abe stomped the brake and brought the Rover to a sudden stop. He hopped out, went into his bag in the back, and took out one of the hunting rifles. It was a Winchester Model 70 bored for a massive .458 cartridge. He loaded a magazine with the huge brass shells and slapped it home with a clack. He climbed up into the back, maneuvering around the men, bags, and dogs, and strapped it into the truck’s gun rack.

  “You bozos want black magic? I’ll show you some black magic,” he called back at them as he revved the engine and threw the truck into gear.

  Chapter 16

  A LITTLE LESS than a mile northeast of the safari camp’s river dock, two massive male lions lounge on the highest rocks in their pride area. They lie on their stomachs, still as golden rugs, panting, catching the breeze. Their impassive amber eyes lazily scan the horizon.