“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,