The Laugh
Neal had believed all the myths about hyenas. He believed they were cowards until he saw them fight, scavengers until he saw them kill; and after the first time they cornered him in the Jeep, he began to take more notice of the local stories: their big-eyed curiosity, their unnerving persistence, the relative ease with which they let themselves into gated villages.
They were talking about the funeral when the lights went out. They had been sitting on the porch for almost two hours, and Neal, still on his first gin-and-tonic, was telling Roland about the priest he had found in Longido to do the services. He was telling Roland about how the priest, Father Abasi, had once been watering the garden in shorts and clogs when a man came by from the village and asked to see his boss, and how Father Abasi said "I'll go get him," and turned off the hose and went inside and changed into his cassock and came back out and then went to bury the man's daughter.
Neal was talking, and Roland had his hat on his knees and was pouring himself another gin. They had brought Femi's coffin back from Longido around noon, and Roland had been drinking steadily since then, except for the 20 minutes before dinner when he had gone upstairs to bottle-feed Nyah and put her to bed.
"I think Femi would have liked this priest," Neal was saying. "I think she would have tolerated him." Then the porch went dark.
Neal needed a moment to realize what had happened. He was already turning in his seat to call for Mrs. Halima, the housekeeper, to tell her she'd turned the porch lights off by mistake, when he realized that he couldn't see the house behind him, couldn't see the tourist bungalows or the gate lamps. The generator, he realized. The generator had blown in the heat. A bright half-moon clung to the side of the main house like something unfinished, and Neal could see the fever trees that lined the drive, thick with roosting vultures, bald-headed and silent, and the rolling tilt of the hills that clustered on the horizon and then dropped off into Ngorongoro.
The darkness, the sudden crippling of his senses, brought back his awareness of the wildebeest. They had been on the move since last week, and now the smell of them on the dry wind made the air rancid and dense. He could hear them on the plain beyond the lodge gate, hundreds of stragglers from the main herd spread out on the veld, swarming the dirt trail that led down to the water hole. The light, he realized, had given him the illusion of distance, and now that it was gone the night felt crowded with soft grunts, the insistent, rubber-soled scraping of their voices. Last night, lions had brought down a bull by the water, and the screaming before the windpipes gave way had been extraordinary. In the morning, Neal had found the red domes of the rib cage swarming with vultures. In large part this was why he had relocated his tourists. He was glad, more than ever, that he had.
Roland hadn't moved at all, but now Neal heard him say, "Where's the dog?"
"Upstairs," Neal said. "With the baby."
"Where's Simon?"
"I sent him home," Neal said. "We don't have any tourists to guard." He heard Roland lower his feet from the porch railing and push the chair back. "Let's wait for the generator," Neal said. "Let's wait and see what it does." &hellip;  &hellip; Silence, then chortling from the zebras somewhere on the endless plain. Roland said, "I need a minute." And he heard Roland crouch down in the grass. Neal stood by dumbly, with his hand in his pocket, waiting for the thump of the rifle butt hitting the dirt. It didn't come.
"Are you throwing up?"
"No."
"What are you doing?" Neal said.
No answer. Neal fumbled for his flashlight. He turned it on again and found Roland with it. Roland was crouching in the trampled dirt of the trail, his bald head clenched in his hands like some kind of buffed fruit. The rifle lay across his knees. He looked up at Neal, and Neal turned the flashlight off.
"I'd want you to take Nyah," Roland said suddenly, "if anything happened."
"Don't say that," Neal said. He felt a new wave of heat on his face, and he put his fist up to his forehead and pressed it there.
"I keep thinking," Roland said. Neal heard him thrum his fingers on the rifle butt. "I keep thinking about that coffin." The sound of him dusting the hat off, putting it back on his head again. "It's light." Standing up. "The coffin -- don't you think it's light?"
Neal said, "I don't know." He didn't want to think about it.
"I keep thinking maybe I should have had her cremated," Roland said. "Maybe she would have liked that."
"Maybe," Neal said. He wanted to say something comforting, something generous, something that would have meaning. But he couldn't think of anything to say.
Suddenly Roland said: "Do you hear that?"
"No," Neal said.
"Listen."
A warthog family was rooting around in the dirt somewhere nearby, snorting softly -- the sound, like everything else in the bush, muted by a coarse layer of dust. Wildebeest grunts. Somewhere far behind them, a heron was calling from the riverbank, a strange, echoing cry that made Neal feel exposed.
"I don't hear anything," Neal said.
Roland was still listening, so Neal listened too.
The cicadas went quiet, and then came back in again, louder than ever, hissing like a current through the grass. He heard the muffled clamor of the herd, the indistinct click of hooves in the dirt. Moments later, he heard a low moaning rumble over the hills, a sound like a foghorn.
"Lions?" he said. "They're miles away."
He suddenly realized that he had underestimated his own anxiety. He wanted a cigarette, water, something to calm his nerves, anything, because Roland was saying, "No, not that -- listen," and Neal still couldn't hear what he was being told to listen for.
He closed his eyes and thought of Femi. He listened. Then he heard it, a high-pitched singsong, melancholy, almost human, almost too indistinct.
"What is that?" he said. Again. Low, then rising.
Roland's voice was quiet. "Hyena."
"Are you sure?" he said. The cry sounded like something else to him, something closer, like the creak of the porch swing at the house, or the wind, maybe, the wind whining in the branches of the jackalberry trees outside his window. He could feel the sweat gathering on his back, the coarse feel of his shirt where it clung to his skin in wet patches.
Roland's breathing in the darkness had grown fast and shallow.
"Where's it coming from?" Neal said.
"I'm not sure," Roland told him, and started walking back up the trail through the grass. He could hear Roland's boots on the dirt, and he ran to catch up. They entered the thick of the grove at the bottom of the hill and started up, through the trees, toward the gate. The smell of the wildebeest was sour. At the top of the slope, the house was still dark. He wanted to see candles, he wanted to see that Mrs. Halima had gone back inside. But now he saw nothing, and that empty feeling, the empty feeling of the house and the dark and the long drive winding up the slope, jolted him, and then he heard it -- up ahead of them, somewhere close, certain and loud: the laugh.
One late afternoon, a year after Neal had bought the lodge, while he sat on the wicker swing with a book across his knees, comfortable in the knowledge that his first group of tourists was out on safari somewhere with Roland, he had seen Baviaan stand up, apparently unprovoked, and trot out to the gate, where the dog stood perfectly still for a long time watching the plain mist over. Mrs. Halima had come out with the laundry, and she, too, noticed Baviaan there.
But she only laughed at him. "No. It means hyena," she said, and pointed. "He's standing at the gate to listen. You can't hear them, but look -- they're calling his name."
It had taken him a long time to get used to almost everything: strangled lion cubs by the gate at dawn, drowned wildebeest damming the river, baboons in the kitchen stealing dog food and granola, scattering coffee grounds, making off with cans of Pringles and, when they could get their hands on it, toilet paper, which he would afterward pick out of the acacia groves for days &hellip;  &hellip; ..
Femi had never been in a balloon before, and Neal had offered to take her up that evening -- because the wind was pleasant, because he had just brought the tourists back and the launching crew was still there to help, because Mrs. Halima had the baby and Roland had gone on a game count and wouldn't be back for days. Femi had stood aside and watched him pump up the burners before the canvas envelope filled and the blue-and-white drape lifted out of the grass, swollen with air. It was late afternoon and the sun was melting into the red haze over the savanna when he helped her into the basket and fired the jets and tossed the sandbags over the side. He wondered if she had been afraid at first, going up in that little wicker basket with the hills falling away. He wondered if the sight of the crowded rivers of wildebeest below had instilled in her the same feelings of exhilarated panic he had felt on his first visit there, that vitality of the cradle he had searched for all his life, the push and pull of the wind, the birthing grounds and killing grounds, endless and unyielding, that allowed him to somehow reassemble himself. He couldn't remember quite what had happened, but he knew he had reached for her. He had put his hand on the small of her back, or pressed himself against her where she stood holding the ropes, and she had indulged him, for a moment or two, perhaps out of kindness, or because it was unexpected and she didn't quite know how to react. But then she had stepped away with a forgiving smile, the laugh that came with it embarrassed, and she had stayed against the opposite end of the basket while they sailed on and eventually came down in a stretch of grassland where the antelope were in summer rut. She had climbed out by herself and walked home.
He finally made himself look through the window at the face outside on the porch, and when the lamplight eyes caught his look, the black lips pulled away from the teeth, grinning, and the hyena laughed. For a long time, Neal stood there thinking he would raise the empty gun, turn it in his hands, reach for a knife from the block. But the face that stilled him did not move, and the hyena did not come back inside.
He would think about it afterward, at the funeral, and then again after the service in the parlor, where Mrs. Halima would put out pictures of Femi and serve wine and tea until everyone was finished and had gone away; he would think about it that night, as he took Roland and Nyah home. He would think about the flour bags and how he had laid them there, in the coffin, and he would think about the coffin, with earth smoothed over it, lying near the church in a plot overlooking Mount Longido, with the flour bags inside. And when he set off that evening from Roland's place, the lights disappearing behind him, the gun over his shoulder, all the forward-facing eyes in the darkness coming on, pair by pair, while the moon came up over the wind-rubbed plain, the laugh -- her laugh -- would follow him all the way home.