Without a Hero

BIG GAME

YOU COULD SHOOT ANYTHING you wanted, for a price, even the elephant, but Bernard tended to discourage the practice. It made an awful mess, for one thing, and when all was said and done it was the big animals — the elephant, the rhino, the water buff and giraffe — that gave the place its credibility, not to mention ambiance. They weren’t exactly easy to come by, either. He still regretted the time he’d let the kid from the heavy-metal band pot one of the giraffes — even though he’d taken a cool twelve thousand dollars to the bank on that one. And then there was the idiot from MGM who opened up on a herd of zebra and managed to decapitate two ostriches and lame the Abyssinian ass in the process, Well, it came with the territory, he supposed, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t carry enough insurance on the big stuff to buy out half the L.A. Zoo if he had to. He was just lucky nobody had shot himself in the foot yet. Or the head. Of course, he was insured for that, too.

Bernard Puff pushed himself up from the big mahogany table and flung the dregs of his coffee down the drain. He wasn’t exactly overwrought, but he was edgy, his stomach sour and clenched round the impermeable lump of his breakfast cruller, his hands afflicted with the little starts and tremors of the coffee shakes. He lit a cigarette to calm himself and gazed out the kitchen window on the dromedary pen, where one of the moth-eaten Arabians was methodically peeling the bark from an elm tree. He looked at the thing in amazement, as if he’d never seen it before — the flexible lip and stupid eyes, the dully working jaw — and made a mental note to offer a special on camels. The cigarette tasted like tin, like death. Somewhere a catbird began to call out in its harsh mewling tones.

The new people were due any minute now, and the prospect of new people always set him off — there were just too many things that could go wrong. Half of them didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other, they expected brunch at noon and a massage an hour later, and they bitched about everything, from the heat to the flies to the roaring of the lions at night. Worse: they didn’t seem to know what to make of him, the men regarding him as a subspecies of the blue-collar buddy, regaling him with a nonstop barrage of lickerish grins, dirty jokes and fractured grammar, and the women treating him like a cross between a maître d’ and a water carrier. Dudes and greenhorns, all of them. Parvenus. Moneygrubbers. The kind of people who wouldn’t know class if it bit them.

Savagely snubbing out the cigarette in the depths of the coffee mug, Bernard wheeled round on the balls of his feet and plunged through the swinging doors and out into the high dark hallway that gave onto the foyer. It was stifling already, the overhead fans chopping uselessly at the dead air round his ears and the sweat prickling at his new-shaven jowls as he stomped down the hall, a big man in desert boots and khaki shorts, with too much belly and something overeager and graceless in his stride. There was no one in the foyer and no one at the registration desk. (Espinoza was out feeding the animals — Bernard could hear the hyenas whooping in the distance — and the new girl — what was her name? — hadn’t made it to work on time yet. Not once.) The place seemed deserted, though he knew Orbalina would be making up the beds and Roland sneaking a drink somewhere — probably out behind the lion cages.

For a long moment Bernard stood there in the foyer, framed against a bristling backdrop of kudu and oryx heads, as he checked the reservation card for the tenth time that morning:

Mike and Nicole Bender

Bender Realty

15125 Ventura Blvd.

Encino, California

Real estate people. Jesus. He’d always preferred the movie crowd — or even the rock-and-rollers, with their spiked wristbands and pouf hairdos. At least they were willing to buy into the illusion that Puff’s African Game Ranch, situated on twenty-five hundred acres just outside Bakersfield, was the real thing — the Great Rift Valley, the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti — but the real estate people saw every crack in the plaster. And all they wanted to know was how much he’d paid for the place and was the land subdividable.

He looked up into the yellow-toothed grin of the sable mounted on the wall behind him — the sable his father had taken in British East Africa back in the thirties — and let out a sigh. Business was business, and in the long run it didn’t matter a whit who perforated his lions and gazelles — just as long as they paid. And they always paid, up front and in full. Bernard saw to that.

“What was it, Nik, six months ago when we went to Gino Parducci’s for dinner? It was six months, wasn’t it? And didn’t I say we’d do the African thing in six months? Didn’t I?”

Nicole Bender was curled up in the passenger seat of the white Jaguar XJS her husband had given her for Valentine’s Day. A pile of knitting magazines lay scattered in her lap, atop a set of bamboo needles trailing an embryonic garment in a shade so pale it defied categorization. She was twenty-seven, blond, a former actress/model/poet/singer whose trainer had told her just two days earlier that she had perhaps the most perfectly sculpted physique of any woman he’d ever worked with. Of course, he was paid to say things like that, but in her heart she suspected they were true, and she needed to hear them. She turned to her husband. “Yes,” she said. “You did. But I pictured us in Kenya or Tanzania, to tell the truth.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he fired back impatiently, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” the words coming so fast they might have been bullets squeezed from one of the glistening new big-bore rifles in the trunk, “but you know I can’t take six weeks off from work, not now when the new Beverly Hills office is about to open up and the Montemoretto deal is all but in the bag…and besides, it’s dangerous over there, what with the next revolution or war or whatever coming down every six minutes, and who do you think they’re going to blame when the roof caves in? White people, right? And where do you think you’ll want to be then?”

Mike Bender was a barely contained factory of energy, a steamroller of a man who had risen from receptionist to king and despot of his own real estate empire in the space of twelve short years. He was given to speechifying, the precious words dropping from his lips like coins from a slot machine, his fingertips alighting on his tongue, his hair, his ears, the crotch of his pants and his elbows as he spoke, writhing with the nervous energy that had made him rich. “And plus you’ve got your tsetse flies and black mambas and beriberi and the plague and god knows what all over there — I mean, picture Mexico, only a hundred times worse. No, listen, trust me — Gino swore this place is as close as it gets to the real thing, only without the hassles.” He lowered his sunglasses to give her a look. “You’re telling me you really want to get your ass chewed off in some lopsided tent in, in”—he couldn’t seem to think of a place sufficiently grim, so he improvised—“Zambeziland?”

Nicole shrugged, giving him a glimpse of the pouty little half-smile she used to work up for the photographers when she was nineteen and doing the summerwear ads for JCPenney.

“You’ll get your zebra-skin rug yet, you wait and see,” Mike assured her, “and a couple lions’ heads and gazelles or whatever for the wall in the den, okay?”

The Jaguar shot across the desert like a beam of light. Nicole lifted the knitting needles from her lap, thought better of it, and set them down again. “Okay,” she said in a breathy little whisper, “but I just hope this place isn’t too, you know, tacky.”

A sudden harsh laugh erupted from the back seat, where Mike Bender’s twelve-year-old daughter, Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Bender, was stretched out supine with the last ten issues of Bop and a sixpack of New York Seltzer. “Get real, will you? I mean like shooting lions in Bakersfield? Tacky city. Tacky, tacky, tacky.”

Up front, behind the wheel, his buttocks caressed by the supple kid leather of the seat and visions of bontebok leaping before his eyes, Mike Bender was mildly annoyed. He’d had an itch to hunt lion and elephant and rhino since he was a kid and first read Confessions of a White Hunter and the Classic Comics version of King Solomon’s Mines. And this was his chance. So maybe it wasn’t Africa, but who had the time to go on safari? If he could spare three days he was lucky. And you couldn’t shoot anything over there anyway. Not anymore. Everything was a preserve now, a game park, a conservancy. There were no more white hunters. Just photographers.

He wanted to say “Give me a break, will you?” in his most imperious voice, the voice that sent his sales force scurrying for cover and his competitors into shock, but he held his peace. Nothing was going to ruin this for him. Nothing.

It was midafternoon. The sun hung overhead like an egg shirred in a cup. The thermometer in the feed shed was pushing a hundred and fifteen degrees, nothing was moving but for the vultures aloft in the poor bleached expanse of the sky, and the whole world seemed to have gone to sleep. Except for Bernard. Bernard was beside himself — the Benders had been due at 10:00 A.M. and here it was quarter past two and still they hadn’t arrived. He’d had Espinoza let the Tommies and eland out of their pens at nine, but he was afraid they’d all be lying up in the heat, and by noon he’d sent him out to round them up again. The giraffes were nowhere to be seen, and the elephant, tethered to a live oak Bernard had pruned to resemble an umbrella thorn, was looking as rumpled and dusty as a heap of Taiwanese luggage abandoned at the airport.

Bernard stood in the glare of the dried-up yard, squinting out on the screen of elephant grass and euphorbia he’d planted to hide the oil rig (if you knew it was there you could just detect the faintest motion of the big steel arm as it rose and fell and rose and fell again). He felt hopeless. For all the effort he’d put into it, the place looked like a circus camp, the bombed-out remains of a zoo, a dusty flat baking former almond ranch in the sun-blasted southeast corner of the San Joaquin Valley — which is exactly what it was. What would the Benders think? More important, what would they think at six hundred dollars a day, payable in advance, plus prices that ranged from a thousand a pop on the gazelles on up to twelve thousand for a lion and “priced as available” for the elephant? Real estate people had balked on him before, and business hadn’t exactly been booming lately.

The vultures wheeled overhead. He was running sweat. The sun felt like a firm hand steering him toward the cool of the kitchen and a tall glass of quinine water (which he drank for effect rather than therapeutic value: there wasn’t a malarial mosquito within a thousand miles). He was just about to pack it in when he caught the distant glint of sun on safety glass and saw the Benders’ car throwing up dust clouds at the far end of the drive.

“Roland!” he bellowed, and every mortal ounce of him was in motion now, “Let the monkeys out. into the trees! And the parrots!” Suddenly he was jogging across the dusty lot and up the path to where the elephant lay collapsed beneath the tree. He was working at the slip of the tether to set her loose and wondering if Roland would have the sense to stir up the lions and hyenas for the sake of sound effects, when suddenly she rose to her feet with a great blowing snort and gave a feeble trumpet.

Well. And that was a break — at least now he wouldn’t have to use the ivory goad.

Bernard looked up at the old elephant in wonder — she still had a bit of showmanship in her, after all. Either that, or it was senile dementia. She was old — Bernard didn’t know quite how old, though he did know she was a veteran of thirty-eight years with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus who’d performed under the name “Bessie Bee” and responded to “Shamba”—that is, if you happened to have the ivory goad in your hand. Bernard shot a glance up the drive, where a white Jaguar sedan was beginning to define itself against a billowing backdrop of dust, and then he heard the screech of the monkeys as they shot out of their cages and up into the trees, and he began to compose himself. He forced a smile, all red-cheeked and long-toothed, cinched the leopard-skin belt, squared his pith helmet and marched forward to greet his guests.

By the time the Benders rolled up to the veranda, the parrots were in the trees, the marabou stork was pecking at a spot of offal in the dirt, and the lions were roaring lustily from their hidden pens out back. Roland, decked out in his Masai toga and lion’s-tooth necklace, bounded down the steps with alacrity to hold open the door for Bender, while Bessie Bee shambled around in the near distance, flapping her ears and blowing about in the dust. “Mr. Bender,” Bernard cried, extending his hand to a fortyish man in sunglasses and polo shirt, “welcome to Africa.”

Bender sprang out of the car like a child at the zoo. He was tall, lean, tanned — why did they all have to look like tennis pros? Bernard wondered — and stood there twitching a moment in the heat. He pumped Bernard’s hand professionally and then launched into a lip-jerking, ear-tugging, foot-thumping apology: “Sorry we’re late, Bernard, but my wife — have you met my wife? — my wife just had to get a couple rolls of film and we wound up buying out half of Reynoso’s Camera in Bakersfield — you know it? — good prices. Real good prices. Hell, we needed a new video camera anyway, especially with”—he gestured to take in the house, the outbuildings, the elephant, the monkeys in the trees and the sun-blasted plains beyond—“all this.”

Bernard was nodding, smiling, murmuring agreement, but he was on autopilot — his attention was fixed on the wife, whom Roland was fussing over now on the far side of the car. She raised her lovely white arms to fluff her hair and imprison her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses and Bernard called out a greeting in his best British-colonial accent (though he was British by ancestry only and had never in his life been east of Reno). The second wife, of course, he was thinking as she returned his greeting with a vague little pouting smile.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Bernard said in response to some further idiocy from the husband’s lips, his watery blue eyes shifting to the daughter now — as black-headed as an Indian, and nearly as dark — and he saw right away that she was trouble, the sort of child who cultivates ugliness as a weapon.

Nicole Bender gave him a long slow appraisal over the hood of the car, and in the next moment he was ducking round the grille to squeeze her hand as if he were trying on a glove for size. “Beastly day,” he said, proud of the Britishism, and then he was leading her up the broad stone steps and into the house, while her husband fumbled with an armload of guns and the daughter slouched along behind, already complaining about something in a nagging querulous little whine of a voice.

“I’m not saying that, Mike — you’re not listening to me. I said the gazelles are very nice and they’ll be perfect for the office, but I wanted something, well, bigger for the front hall and at least three of the zebra — two for the den, I thought, and we’re going to need one for the ski lodge…you know, to hide that ugly paneling behind the bar?”

Mike Bender was deep into his fourth gin and tonic. Already the elation he’d felt over his first kill had begun to dissipate, replaced now by a gnawing sense of frustration and anger — why couldn’t Nikki shut her face, even for a second? No sooner had they changed clothes and got out there on the savannah or veldt or whatever you wanted to call it, than she’d started in. He’d squeezed off a clean shot at a Thomson’s gazelle at two hundred yards and before the thing’s head had hit the ground, she was running it down. Oh, she gasped, as if she’d been surprised on the toilet, but it’s so small, isn’t it? And then she struck a pose for Puff and the colored guy who carried the guns and skinned out the carcasses. Almost like a rabbit with horns.

And now the great white hunter was leaning across the table to reassure her, his gut drawn tight against the khaki safari shirt, his accent so phony it was like something out of a Monty Python routine. “Mrs. Bender, Nicole,” he began, mopping his blood blister of a face with a big checked handkerchief, “we’ll go out for zebra in the morning, when it’s cool, and if it’s three you want, we’ll get them, there’s no problem with that. Four, if you like. Five. If you’ve got the bullets, we’ve got the game.”

Mike watched as the canny crewcut head swiveled toward him. “And Mike,” Puff said, as amenable as any tour guide but with just the right hint of stagery in his voice, “in the evening, it’s the big stuff, the man-maker, old Simba himself.”

As if in response, there was a cough and roar from somewhere out beyond the darkened windows, and Mike Bender could feel the wildness of it on the thin night air — lion, the lion he’d dreamed about since his aunt had taken him to the Central Park Zoo as a boy and the roar of the great shaggy yellow-eyed things had shaken him to his primordial root. To be out there, in that African night that was haunted with predators, big-headed and thick-skinned, the pounce, the slash, the crack of sinew and bone — it was at once terrifying and wonderful. But what was that smell of oil?

“What do you say, old man? Are you game?” Puff was leering at him now, and behind Puff’s blocky leonine figure, the faces of his wife and daughter, arrayed like tribal masks.

Nothing fazed Mike Bender, the King of Encino. No seller could hold out against him, no buyer hope for more. His contracts were vises, his promotions sledgehammers, his holdings as solid as a mountain of iron. “I’m game,” he said, touching his lips, running his fingers through his hair, jabbing at his elbows and underarms in a rising plume of metabolic excess. “Just oil up my H&H Magnum and point me toward ‘em; it’s what I’ve wanted all my life—”

There was a silence and his words seemed to hang in the air, empty of conviction. His daughter crouched over her plate, looking as if she were sucking on something rotten; his wife had that alert, let’s-go-shopping look in her glittering little eyes. “Really. I mean, ever since I was a kid, and — how many are out there, anyway? Or do you keep count?”

Puff stroked the graying stubble of his head. There was another roar, muted this time, followed by the stabbed-in-the-belly whoop of the hyena. “Oh, we’ve got a good-sized pride out there — twelve or fourteen, I’d say, and a few rogue males.”

“Are there any big ones, with manes? That’s what we want.” He shifted his gaze to Nicole. “Maybe the whole thing, stuffed, standing up on its hind legs, what do you think, Nik? For maybe the reception room at the Beverly Hills office?” And then he made a joke of it: “Hey, if Prudential can get away with it—”

Nicole looked satisfied. So did Puff. But his daughter wasn’t about to let him off so easily. She let out a snort of contempt, and the three of them turned toward her. “And so you go and kill some poor lion that isn’t hurting anybody, and what’s that supposed to prove?”

Puff exchanged a look with him, as if to say, Now isn’t that adorable?

Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose pushed aside her salad plate. Her hair hung in her eyes in greasy black coils. She’d eaten nothing, having separated the tomatoes from the greens and the greens from the croutons and the croutons from the garbanzo beans. “Sting,” she spat, “Brigitte Bardot, the New Kids, all of them say it’s like animal death camps, like Hitler, and they’re doing this special concert to save the animals in France, in Paris—”

“One lion more or less isn’t going to hurt anybody,” Nicole said, cutting the child off, and her mouth was drawn tight against the swell of her collagen-enhanced lips. “And I think your father’s idea is super. An erect lion standing there as people come in the door — it’s, it’s symbolic is what it is.”

Mike Bender couldn’t tell if he was being ribbed or not. “Listen, Jasmine,” he began, and his leg started to thump under the table as he tugged at his ear and fooled with his cutlery.

“Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose,” she fired back.

Mike knew she’d always hated her name, an inspiration of her mother, the sort of crackbrained woman who saw spirits in the sunset and believed that he was the reincarnation of John D. Rockefeller. To throw it up to him, and to remind him of his ex-wife and all the mistakes he’d ever made or contemplated, his daughter insisted on her full name. Always.

“Okay: Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose,” he said, “listen to me. All of this hippie-dippy save-the-environment crap might be all right if you’re twelve, but you’ve got to realize hunting is as natural a part of man as, as—”

“Eating or drinking,” Puff put in, rounding off the participle with a pseudo-Etonian ring.

“Right!” Jasmine cried, on her feet now, her eyes like sinkholes, her mouth twitching at the corners. “And so’s shitting, farting and, and fucking!” And then she was gone, stamping down the trophy-hung hallway to her room, where she flung the door to with a thunderous crash.

A moment of silence descended on the table. Puff’s eyes lingered on Nicole as she raised her arms to stretch and show off her breasts and the prim white pockets of shaved flesh under her arms. “Cute kid, huh?” he said. There was no mistaking the sarcasm this time.

“Real cute,” Nicole said, and they were in league.

Turning to Mike as the colored guy came through the door with a platter of gazelle steaks and mesquite-roasted ears of corn, Puff let his voice grow warm and confidential. “Zebra in the morning, Mike,” he said. “You’ll like that.” He leveled his watery gaze on him. “And then”—the gazelle steaks hitting the table, little dollops of blood-running flesh—“and then we load up for lion.”

It wasn’t that he bolted, actually — Bernard had seen worse, much worse — but he was on the verge of it. Either that or he was about to pass out. Any way you sliced it, it was a bad situation, the kind of encounter that made Bernard wish he’d never heard of Africa, lions, game parks or real estate people.

They’d come on the lion in the old almond grove. The trees there were like twisted antlers, leafless and dead, set out in rows as far as you could see, and the ground beneath them was littered with fallen branches. “Not too close now,” Bernard had warned, but Bender wanted to be sure of the shot, and he got himself in a bind. In the next moment he was standing there knee-deep in the litter, jerking and shrugging like a spastic, the gun to his shoulder and nowhere to go, and the lion was coming at him with as much pure malice as Bernard had seen in his fourteen years as proprietor of Puff’s African Game Ranch. And while Bernard didn’t like to intervene — it always caused hard feelings after the fact — Mrs. Bender was a heartbeat away from being an aggrieved widow and his own insurance rates were about to go through the roof, never mind the lawsuits. It was a moment, no doubt about it,

The night before, after the Benders had gone off to bed, Bernard had had Espinoza go out and stir up the lions a bit and then set them loose — without their supper. That always put them in a mood, no matter how old, toothless and gimpy they might be. Let them go a night without horse meat and they were as savage as anything you’d encounter anywhere on earth. For Bernard, it was standard practice. Give the guests their money’s worth, that was his motto. If they suspected that the lions were penned up ninety-nine percent of the time, none of them let on — for all they knew the beasts lived out there among the drought-ravaged almond trees and camouflaged oil rigs. And besides, it wasn’t as if they had anywhere to go — the entire property was circumscribed by a twenty-foot-deep dry moat with a twelve-foot-high electrified fence rising up behind it. The ones the guests didn’t put holes in would just wander back to their cages in a day or so, roaring their bellies out for horse meat and offal.

In the morning, after a breakfast of kippers and eggs and while the daughter slept in, Bernard had taken the Benders out after their zebra. They’d driven out to the water hole — an abandoned Olympic-sized swimming pool Bernard had planted up to look natural — and, after some discussion of price, the Benders — or, rather, the wife — decided on five. She was something, the wife. As good-looking a woman as Bernard had ever laid eyes on, and a better shot than her husband. She took two of the zebra at a hundred and fifty yards, barely a mark on the hides. “You can shoot, little lady,” Bernard said as they sauntered up to the nearest of the fallen zebra.

The zebra lay there on its side beneath the knifing sun, and already the first flies had begun to gather. Bender was crouched over one of the carcasses in the near distance, inspecting it for bullet holes, and Roland was back in the Jeep, whetting his skinning knife. From the hills beyond, one of the starved lions let loose with an irascible roar.

Nicole smiled at him, pretty — awfully pretty — in her Banana Republic shorts and safari shirt. “I try,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt to reveal a peach-colored halter top decorated with a gold pin in the shape of a rifle. He had to bend close to read the inscription: Nicole Bender, Supermarksman Award, N.R.A., 1989.

Then it was lunch and siesta, followed by gin and bitters and a few hands at canasta to while away the waning hours of the afternoon. Bernard did everything he could to amuse the lady, and not just in the interest of business — there was something there, something beating hot and hard beneath the mask of blusher and eyeliner and the puffed-up lips, and he couldn’t help feeling the tug of it. It had been tough since Stella Rae had left him, and he took his tumbles where he could find them — after all, that came with the territory too.

At any rate, they took the Jeep Wrangler, a cooler of beer, Bender’s.375 Holland & Holland, the lady’s Winchester.458 Mag and his own stopper — the.600 Nitro — and headed out to where the twisted black branches of the orchard raked the flanks of the hills in the far corner of the ranch. It was where the lions always went when you set them loose. There was a little brook there — it was a torrent in season, but now it wasn’t much more than a trickle. Still, they could lap up some water and roll in the grass and find a poor striped shade beneath the naked branches of the trees.

From the start, even when they were still on the gin and bitters and waiting out the heat, Bender had seemed edgy. The man couldn’t sit still, rattling on about escrows and titles and whatnot, all the while tugging at his lips and ears and tongue like a third-base coach taking signals from the dugout. It was nerves, that’s what it was: Bernard had taken enough dudes out there to recognize a fellow measuring out his own manhood against that big tawny thing stalking his imagination. One guy — he was a TV actor; maybe a fag, even — had got himself so worked up he’d overloaded on the gin and pissed his pants before they got the Jeep started. Bernard had seen him a hundred times since on the flickering tube, a hulking muscular character with a cleft chin and flashing eyes who was forever smashing crooks in the face and snaring women by the waist, but he could never forget the way the guy’s eyes had vanished in his head as the piss stain spread from his crotch to his thighs and beyond. He took one look at Bender and knew there was trouble on the horizon.

They’d agreed on $11,500 for a big male with a mane, Bernard knocking off the odd five hundred because they’d taken the two extra zebra and he figured he’d give them a break. The only male he had of any size was Claude, who must have been something in his day but was now the leonine equivalent of a nonagenarian living on a diet of mush in a nursing home. Bernard had picked him up for a song at a flea-bitten circus in Guadalajara, and he must have been twenty-five years old if he was a day. He was half-blind, he stank like one of the walking dead and the molars on the lower left side of his jaw were so rotten he howled through his food when he ate. But he looked the part, especially at a distance, and he still carried some of the flesh he’d put on in his youth — and the pain in his jaw made him cranky; savage, even. He would do, Bernard had thought. He would do just fine.

But there was Bender, stuck in a morass of dead black branches, trembling all over like a man in an ice bath, and the lion coming at him. The first shot skipped in the dirt at two hundred feet and took Claude’s left hind paw off at the joint, and he gave out with a roar of such pure raging claw-gutting bone-crunching nastiness that the idiot nearly dropped his rifle. Or so it seemed from where Bernard was standing with the Mrs. and Roland, fifteen yards back and with the angle to the right. Claude was a surprise. Instead of folding up into himself and skittering for the bushes, he came on, tearing up the dirt and roaring as if he’d been set afire — and Bender was jerking and twitching and twittering so much he couldn’t have hit the side of a beer truck. Bernard could feel his own heart going as he lifted the Nitro to his shoulder, and then there was the head-thumping blast of the gun and old Claude suddenly looked like a balled-up carpet with a basket of ground meat spread on top of it.

Bender turned to him with a white face. “What the—?” he stammered, and he was jerking at his fingers and flailing his arms. “What do you think you’re doing?”

It was Bernard’s moment. A jetliner rode high overhead, bound for the northwest, a silver rivet in the sky. There was an absolute, unutterable silence. The wife held her peace, the remaining lions cowered somewhere in the grass and every bird on the ranch was holding its breath in the dying wake of that rolling cannonade. “Saving your bloody life,” Bernard snarled, hot and disgusted and royally pissed off, but proud, as always, of the Britishism.

Mike Bender was angry — too angry to eat his kippered whatever and the deep-fried toast and runny eggs. And where was the coffee, for god’s sake? They were in Bakersfield, after all, and not some canvas tent in Uganda. He barked at the colored guy — all tricked up to look like a native, but with an accent right out of Compton — and told him he wanted coffee, black and strong, even if he had to drive to Oildale for it. Nicole sat across the table and watched him with mocking eyes. Her zebra had been perfect, but he’d fouled up two of the three he’d shot: But Mike, she’d said, we can’t hang these — they’ll look like colanders. And then the business with the lion. He’d looked bad on that one, and what was worse, he was out eleven and a half thousand bucks and there was nothing to show for it. Not after Puff blew the thing away. It was just meat and bone, that’s all. Shit, the thing didn’t even have a head after the great white hunter got done with it.

“C’mon, Mike,” Nicole said, and she reached out to pat his hand but he snatched it away in a rage. “C’mon, baby, it’s not the end of the world.” He looked at her in that moment, the triumph shining in her eyes, and he wanted to slap her, choke her, get up from the table, snatch a rifle from the rack and pump a couple slugs into her.

He was about to snap back at her when the swinging doors to the kitchen parted and the colored guy came in with a pot of coffee and set it on the table. Roland, that was his name. He was surprised they didn’t call him Zulu or Jambo or something to go along with the silly skirts that were supposed to make him look like a native. Christ, he’d like to get up and drill him too, for that matter. About the only break he’d had on this trip was that Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose had taken to sleeping till noon.

“Mike,” Nicole pleaded, but he wouldn’t hear her. Brooding, burning, plotting his revenge on every lender, shopkeeper and homeowner from the San Fernando Valley to Hancock Park, Mike Bender sipped moodily at his tepid instant coffee and awaited the great white hunter.

Puff was late to breakfast, but he looked rejuvenated — had he dyed his hair, was that it? — beaming, a fountain of energy, as if he’d stolen the flame from the King of Encino himself. “Good morning,” he boomed in his phony West End accent, practically inhaling his mustache, and then he gave Nicole a look that was unmistakable and Mike felt it all pouring out of him, like lava from a volcano.

“No more lions, right?” Mike said, his voice low and choked.

“Afraid not,” Puff answered, sitting himself down at the head of the table and smearing a slab of toast with Marmite. “As I told you yesterday, we’ve got all the females you want, but the males are juveniles, no manes at all to speak of.”

“That stinks.”

Bernard regarded Bender for a long moment and saw the child who’d never grown up, the rich kid, the perennial hacker and duffer, the parvenu stifled. He looked from Bender to the wife and back again — what was she doing with a clown like that? — and had a fleeting but powerful vision of her stretched out beside him in bed, breasts, thighs, puffy lips and all. “Listen, Mike,” he said, “forget it. It happens to everybody. I thought we’d go for eland today—”

“Eland. Shit on eland.”

“All right, then — water buff. A lot of them say Mbogo is the most dangerous animal in Africa, bar none.”

The sunny eyes went dark with rage. “This isn’t Africa,” Bender spat. “It’s Bakersfield.”

Bernard had tried hard, and he hated it when they did that, when they punctured the illusion he so carefully nurtured. It was the illusion he was selling, after all — close your eyes and you’re in Africa — and in a way he’d wanted the place to be Africa, wanted to make the old stories come alive, wanted to bring back the thrill of the great days, if only for a moment at a time. But it was more than that, too: Puff’s African Came Ranch stood as a testament and memorial to the towering figure of Bernard’s father.

Bernard Puff, Sr., had been one of the last great white hunters of East Africa — friend and compatriot of Percival and Ionides, host to some of the biggest names of American cinema and European aristocracy. He married an American heiress and they built a place in the White Highlands, dined with Isak Dinesen, ate game the year round. And then the war turned the place on its head and he sought refuge in America, losing himself in the vastness of the Southwest and the pockets of his in-laws. As a boy, Bernard had thrilled to the stories of the old days, fingering the ragged white scar a bush pig’s tusks had left on his father’s forearm, cleaning and oiling the ancient weapons that had stopped rhino, elephant, leopard and lion, gazing for hours into the bright glass eyes of the trophies mounted on the wall in the den, the very names — sable, kudu, bushbuck, kongoni — playing like an incantation in his head. He’d tried to do it justice, had devoted his life to it, and now here was this sorehead, this condominium peddler, running it all down.

“All right,” he said. “Granted. What do you want me to do? I’ve got more lions coming in at the end of the month, prime cats they’ve trapped and relocated from Tsavo East…” (He was fudging here: actually, he had an emaciated sack of bones lined up at the San Francisco Zoo, a cat so old the public was offended by it, and another that had broken its leg three times jumping through a hoop with a West German circus.) “Eland we have, water buff, oryx, gazelle, hyena — I’ve even got a couple ostrich for you. But unless you want a female, no lion. I’m sorry.”

And then, a light shining up from the depths, the glitter came back into the dealmaker’s eyes, the smile widened, the tennis pro and backyard swimmer climbed out from behind the mask of the petulant real estate wonder boy. Bender was grinning. He leaned forward. “What about the elephant?”

“What about it?” Bernard lifted the toast to his lips, then set it down carefully again on the edge of his plate. The wife was watching him now, and Roland, refilling the coffee mugs, paused to give him a look.

“I want it.”

Bernard stared down at the plate and fussed a moment with the coffeepot, the sugar, the cream. He hated to part with her, though he was pretty sure he could replace her — and the feed bills were killing him. Even in her dotage, Bessie Bee could put away more in an afternoon than a herd of Guernseys would go through in a winter. He gave the wife a cool glance, then shot his eyes at Bender. “Eighteen grand,” he said.

Bender looked uncertain, his eyes glittering still, but sunk in on themselves, as if in awe at the enormity of the deal. “I’ll want the head,” he said finally, “the whole thing, stuffed and mounted — and yes, I know it’s big, but I can deal with that, I’ve got the space, believe me…and the feet, I want the feet, for those, uh, what do you call them, umbrella stands?”

They found her in a brushy ravine, just beyond the swimming-pool-cum-water-hole. She was having a dust bath, powdering her pitted hide with fine pale dirt till she looked like an enormous wad of dough rolled in flour. Bernard could see where she’d trampled the high grass that hid the blue lip of the pool and uprooted half a ton of water lily and cattail, which she’d mounded up in a festering heap on the coping. He cursed under his breath when he saw the stand of eucalyptus she’d reduced to splinters and the imported fever tree she’d stripped of bark. It was his policy to keep her tethered — precisely to avoid this sort of wholesale destruction — but when there were guests on the ranch, he let her roam. He was regretting it now, and thinking he’d have to remember to get Espinoza to call the landscaping company first thing in the morning, when Bender’s voice brought him back to the moment. The voice was harsh, petulant, a rising squawk of protest: “But it’s only got one tusk!”

Bernard sighed. It was true — she’d broken off half her left tusk somewhere along the line, but he’d gotten so used to her he hardly noticed. But there was Bender, sitting beside him in the Jeep, the wife in the back, the guns stacked up and the cooler full, and Bender was going to try to gouge him on the price, he could see it coming.

“When we said eighteen, I assumed we were talking a trophy animal,” Bender said, and Bernard turned to him. “But now, I don’t know.”

Bernard just wanted it over with. Something told him he was making a mistake in going after Bessie Bee — the place wouldn’t seem the same without her — but he was committed at this point, and he didn’t want any arguments. “Okay,” he sighed, shifting the weight of his paunch from left to right. “Seventeen.”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen-five, and that’s as low as I’m going to go. You don’t know what it’s like to skin out something like this, let alone disposing of the carcass.”

“You’re on,” Bender said, swiveling his head to give the wife a look, and then they were out of the Jeep and checking their weapons. Bender had a.470 Rigby elephant rifle and Bernard his Nitro — just in case the morning brought a reprise of the lion fiasco. The wife, who wasn’t doing any shooting, had brought along a video camera. Roland was back at the house with a truck, a chain saw and a crew of Mexicans to clean up the mess once the deed was done.

It was still early, and the heat hadn’t come up full yet — Bernard guessed it must have been eighty, eighty-five or so — but he was sweating already. He was always a little edgy on a hunt — especially with a clown like Bender twitching at his elbow, and most especially after what had happened with the lion. Bender was writhing and stamping up a storm, but his eyes were cool and focused as they strolled through the mesquite and tumbleweed and down into the ravine.

Bessie Bee was white with dust, flapping her ears and blowing up great clouds of it with her trunk. From a hundred yards you couldn’t see much more than flying dirt, as if a tornado had touched down; at fifty, the rucked and seamed head of the old elephant began to take on shape. Though there was little more risk involved than in potting a cow in its stall, Bernard was habitually cautious, and he stopped Bender there, at fifty yards. A pair of vultures drifted overhead, attracted by the Jeep, which they knew as the purveyor of bleeding flesh and carrion. The elephant sneezed. A crow called out somewhere behind them. “This is as far as we go,” Bernard said.

Bender gaped at him, popping his joints and bugging his eyes like a fraternity boy thwarted by the ID checker at the door of a bar full of sorority girls. “All I can see is dust,” he said.

Bernard was deep inside himself now. He checked the bolt on the big gun and flipped back the safety. “Just wait,” he said. “Find a spot — here, right here; you can use this rock to steady your aim — and just wait a minute, that’s all. Shell tire of this in a minute or so, and when the dust settles you’ll have your shot.”

And so they crouched in the dirt, hunter and guide, and propped their guns up on a coarse red table of sandstone and waited for the dust to clear and the heat to rise and the vultures to sink down out of the sky in great ragged swoops.

For her part, Bessie Bee was more than a little suspicious. Though her eyes were poor, the Jeep was something she could see, and she could smell the hominids half a mile away. She should have been matriarch of a fine wild herd of elephants at Amboseli or Tsavo or the great Bahi swamp, but she’d lived all her fifty-two years on this strange and unnatural continent, amid the stink and confusion of man. She’d been goaded, beaten, tethered, taught to dance and stand on one leg and grasp the sorry wisp of a tail that hung from the sorry flanks of another sorry elephant like herself as they paraded before the teeming monkey masses in one forbidding arena after another. And then there was this, a place that stank of the oily secrets of the earth, and another tether and more men. She heard the thunder of the guns and she smelled the blood on the air and she knew they were killing. She knew, too, that the Jeep was there for her.

The dust settled round her, sifting down in a maelstrom of fine white motes. She flared her ears and trumpeted and lifted the standing timber of her right front foot from the ground and let it sway before her. She was tired of the goad, the tether, the brittle dry tasteless straw and cattle feed, tired of the sun and the air and the night and the morning: she charged.

She let her nose guide her till the guns crashed, once, twice, three times, and a new sort of goad tore into her, invasive and hot, but it just made her angry, made her come on all the harder, invincible, unstoppable, twelve feet at the shoulder and eight standing tons, no more circuses, no more palanquins, no more goads. And then she saw them, two pitiful sticklike figures springing up from behind a rock she could swallow and spit up three times over.

It wasn’t panic exactly, not at first. Bender shot wide, and the heavy shock of the gun seemed to stun him. Bessie Bee came straight for them, homing in on them, and Bernard bit down on his mustache and shouted, “Shoot! Shoot, you idiot!”

He got his wish. Bender fired again, finally, but all he managed to do was blow some hair off the thing’s back. Bernard stood then, the rifle to his shoulder, and though he remembered the lion and could already hear the nagging whining mealy-mouthed voice of Bender complaining over lunch of being denied this trophy too, the situation was critical; desperate, even — who would have thought it of Bessie Bee? — and he squeezed the trigger to the jerk and roar of the big gun.

Nothing. Had he missed? But then all at once he felt himself caught up in a landslide, the, rush of air, the reek of elephant, and he was flying, actually flying, high out over the plain and into the blue.

When he landed, he sat up and found that his shoulder had come loose from the socket and that there was some sort of fluid — blood, his own blood — obscuring the vision in his right eye. He was in shock, he told himself, repeating it aloud, over and over: “I’m in shock, I’m in shock.” Everything seemed hazy, and the arm didn’t hurt much, though it should have, nor the gash in his scalp either. But didn’t he have a gun? And where was it?

He looked up at the noise, a shriek of great conviction, and saw Bessie Bee rubbing her foot thoughtfully, almost tenderly, over Mike Bender’s prostrate form. Bender seemed to be naked — or no, he didn’t seem to be wearing any skin, either — and his head had been vastly transformed, so much more compact now. But there was something else going on too, something the insurance company wouldn’t be able to rectify, of that he was sure, if only in a vague way—“I’m in shock,” he repeated. This something was a shriek too, definitely human, but it rose and caught hold of the tail of the preceding shriek and climbed atop it, and before the vacuum of silence could close in there was another shriek, and another, until even the screams of the elephant were a whisper beside it.

It was Mrs. Bender, the wife, Nicole, one of the finest expressions of her species, and she was running from the Jeep and exercising her lungs. The Jeep seemed to be lying on its side — such an odd angle to see it from — and Mrs. Bender’s reedy form was in that moment engulfed by a moving wall of flesh, the big flanks blotting the scene from view, all that movement and weight closing out the little aria of screams with a final elephantine roll of the drums.

It might have been seconds later, or an hour — Bernard didn’t know. He sat there, an arm dangling from the shoulder, idly wiping the blood from his eye with his good hand while the naked black vultures drifted down on him with an air of professional interest. And then all at once, strange phenomenon, the sun was gone, and the vultures, and a great black shadow fell over him. He looked up dimly into the canvas of that colossal face framed in a riot of ears. “Bessie Bee?” he said. “Bessie Bee? Shamba?”

Half a mile away, fanned by the gentle breeze of the air conditioner, Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Bender, two months short of her thirteenth birthday and sated with chocolate and dreams of lean spike-haired adolescents with guitars and leather jackets, shifted her head on the pillow and opened her eyes. She was, in that waking moment, sole inheritor of the Bender real estate empire, and all the monies and houses and stocks and bonds and properties that accrued to it, not to mention the beach house and the Ferrari Testarossa, but she wasn’t yet aware of it. Something had awakened her, some ripple on the great pond of life. For just a moment there, over the drone of the air conditioner, she thought she’d heard a scream.

But no. It was probably just some peacock or baboon or whatever. Or that pitiful excuse for an elephant. She sat up, reached into her cooler for a root beer and shook her head. Tacky, she thought. Tacky, tacky, tacky.