Free A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan Page A

boy rises from the dust and walks with his father away from the fire. Twelve tents, each sleeping two safari guests, make a circle around it, along with three outhouses and a shower stall, where water warmed on the fire is released from a sack with a rope pull. Out of view, near the kitchen, are some smaller tents for the staff, and then the black, muttering expanse of the bush, where they’ve been cautioned never to go.
    “Your sister’s acting nuts,” Lou says, striding into the dark.
    “Why?” Rolph asks. He hasn’t noticed anything nutty in Charlie’s behavior. But his father hears the question differently.
    “Women are crazy,” he says. “You could spend a goddamn lifetime trying to figure out why.”
    “Mom’s not.”
    “True,” Lou reflects, calmer now. “In fact, your mother’s not crazy enough.”
    The singing and drumbeats fall suddenly away, leaving Lou and Rolph alone under a sharp moon.
    “What about Mindy?” Rolph asks. “Is she crazy?”
    “Good question,” Lou says. “What do you think?”
    “She likes to read. She brought a lot of books.”
    “Did she.”
    “I like her,” Rolph says. “But I don’t know if she’s crazy. Or what the right amount is.”
    Lou puts his arm around Rolph. If he were an introspective man, he would have understood years ago that his son is the one person in the world with the power to soothe him. And that, while he expects Rolph to be like him, what he most enjoys in his son are the many ways he is different: quiet, reflective, attuned to the natural world and the pain of others.
    “Who cares,” Lou says. “Right?”
    “Right,” Rolph agrees, and the women fall away like those drumbeats, leaving him and his father together, an invincible unit. At eleven years old, Rolph knows two clear things about himself: He belongs to his father. And his father belongs to him.
    They stand still, surrounded by the whispering bush. The sky is crammed with stars. Rolph closes his eyes and opens them again. He thinks, I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life. And he’s right.
    When they finally return to camp, the warriors have gone. Only a few die-hards from the Phoenix Faction (as Lou calls the safari members who hail from that dubious place) still sit by the fire, comparing the day’s animal sightings. Rolph creeps into his tent, pulls off his pants, and climbs onto his cot in a T-shirt and underwear. He assumes that Charlie is asleep. When she speaks, he can hear in her voice that she’s been crying.
    “Where did you go?” she says.

II. Hills
    “What on earth have you got in that backpack?”
    It’s Cora, Lou’s travel agent. She hates Mindy, but Mindy doesn’t take it personally—it’s Structural Hatred, a term she coined herself and is finding highly useful on this trip. A single woman in her forties who wears high-collared shirts to conceal the thready sinews of her neck will structurally despise the twenty-three-year-old girlfriend of a powerful male who not only employs said middle-aged female but is paying her way on this trip.
    “Anthropology books,” she tells Cora. “I’m in the Ph.D. program at Berkeley.”
    “Why don’t you read them?”
    “Carsick,” Mindy says, which is plausible, God knows, in the shuddering jeeps, though untrue. She isn’t sure why she hasn’t cracked her Boas or Malinowski or Julian Jaynes, but assumes she must be learning in other ways that will prove equally fruitful. In bold moments, fueled by the boiled black coffee they serve each morning in the meal tent, Mindy has even wondered if her insights on the link between social structure and emotional response could amount to more than a rehash of Lévi-Strauss—a refinement; a contemporary application. She’s only in her second year of coursework.
    Their jeep is last in a line of five, nosing along a dirt road through grassland whose apparent brown masks a wide internal spectrum of color: purples, greens, reds. Albert, the surly Englishman who is