Free Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) by Audrey Schulman Page B

too fearful to come to a full stop for fear the embankment would cave in, so the train was unloaded while it chuffed slowly on.
    Since the rains had commenced, the humidity had intensified. His clothes felt damp to the touch even before he pulled them on. His sweat never dried off; instead it dribbled slowly downward, gluing his underclothes to his skin, puddling along with the rain in his boots. Even without him performing any of the manual labor, he had started to develop heat rashes everywhere his body brushed against itself: under the arms, along the groin, even along the creases of his eyelids.
    The rains had also brought out the insects: scorpions, ants, termites, and beetles. Did they need the humidity to hatch or had they been here the whole time and the waterlogged earth forced them out into view? Yesterday he had watched a glistening five-inch-long millipede undulate its furry borders straight up the path toward the cooking tent, as confident as though it were the camp’s chef. The creature had weight and volume, its body thicker than his thumb. Eyeing its hard carapace, he was not certain he could crush it with his heel, even with all his weight behind it. Alan Thornton, the physician in camp, believed the bite of some millipedes poisonous. Jeremy let the insect go its own way.
    He had bites of different kinds all over his skin, on the bottoms of his feet, between his fingers, and behind his ears. He knew the Indians, with their more bared flesh and lack of shoes, must be worse off.
    Here, however, by the river, things would be different. Here they could bathe, clean their wounds, cool down. Everyone’s spirits would be raised.
    Glancing upriver, he saw, thirty yards away, a native sipping water from a cup made of a rolled leaf.
    â€œOtombe,” he yelled impulsively, then immediately worried he might be mistaken.
    The man looked behind himself as though considering disappearing into the undergrowth, paused and stepped forward instead.
    Once Otombe was closer, Jeremy called, “Will you go hunting with me again sometime?” He did not ask because he thought the N’derobbo had demonstrated great facility at the task. How difficult could it be to spot a tall animal out there on the savannah? No, this was just the first African he had met who could speak English with some ease. Jeremy wanted to know more about that moment he had sensed, standing out on the plains, grass up to his shoulders, wondering about the lion. Otombe’s expression was alert, his eyes sharp. He resided in a hut with a spear, the nyika everywhere outside, this terrible heat for most of the year followed by months of torrential rain. What was it like to be human, obviously intelligent, but living under the conditions of an animal?
    With his long gangly legs and bony arms, Jeremy knew he would not have survived childhood here. Sometimes, even now, long past the age where he could claim the excuse of growing limbs, when he tried for a burst of speed up the stairs or a fancy dismount off Patsy, his limbs twisted in some awkward way and he fell. If he had grown up here, he would have slipped into a ravine or tripped in front of a hippo, accomplishing something ungraceful and immutable.
    Otombe stood in front of him, thin and still, balanced in his dark body. “What do you search for?” he asked, his voice quiet.
    For a moment, Jeremy thought he was being asked about the aims of his life and he opened his mouth fearful of what might emerge. Then recalling his original request, he played for time, glancing up and down the river as though searching for an animal right now. Actually, when he thought back to the hunt he felt a twinge of shame at the ease with which the eland had fallen and the paltry number of steaks they had cut from the giant body, leaving the rest for the two natives and the hyenas. He had given pounds of the meat away to each of his jemadars and still he was eating it, by now in stews and sun-dried as