We let her and the Widow, who had been very happy between Ngui and Pop’s gun bearer in the red-and-yellow shirts and with the black arms and the delicate legs, open the tins of kipper snacks and the two tins of false salmon from Holland. They could not open them properly and one key was broken but Mthuka used a pliers to bend the tin back exposing the false smoked salmon that was Holland’s glory in Africa and we all ate, exchanging knives, and drinking from the same bottles. Debba wiped the neck of the bottle and its lips the first time she drank using her head cloth but I told her that one man’s chancre was every man’s chancre and after that we drank without ceremony. The beer was warmer than it was cool but at eight thousand feet and with the country we looked back over and the places we could see now as though we were eagles, it was lovely beer and we finished it with the cold meat. We kept the bottles to trade in and piled the tins together, removing the keys, and left them under a heather bush close to the trunk of the tree.
There were no Game Scouts along so there were no people who had sold their Wakamba heritage to denounce their brothers and no worship of Miss Mary and the hangman or the puppies of the police so that we were free in a way and we looked back at the country where no white woman had ever been, including Miss Mary, unless it counted when we had taken her, unwillingly but with the excitement of children, onto the deck where she had never belonged nor known how its penalties equalized its small glories.
So we looked back at our country and at the Chulu hills which were as blue and strange as ever and we were all happy that Miss Mary had never been there and then we went back into the car and I said to Debba, stupidly, “You will be an intelligent wife,” and she, intelligently, took hold of my place and of the well-loved holster and said, “I am as good a wife now as I will ever be.”
I kissed her on the crinkly head and we went on up the beautiful road that swung strangely and curved up the Mountain. The tin-roofed town was still glistening in the sun and as we came closer we could see the eucalyptus trees and the formal road that, heavily shaded and with Britannic might, ran up to the small fort and jail and the rest houses where the people who participate in the administration of British justice and paperwork come to take their rest when they are too poor to return to their home country. We were not going up to disturb their rest even though it meant missing the sight of the rock gardens and the tumbling stream that, much later, became the river.
It had been a long hunt for Miss Mary’s lion and all except fanatics, converts and true believers in Miss Mary had been tired of it for a long time. Charo, who was none of these, had said to me, “Shoot the lion when she shoots and get it over with.” I had shaken my head because I was not a believer but a follower and had made the pilgrimage to Campostella and it had been worth it. But Charo shook his head in disgust. He was a Moslem and there were no Moslems with us today. We needed no one to cut the throats of anything and we were all looking for our new religion which had its first station of whatever cross there was to be outside of Benji’s General Store. This station was a gas pump and it was inside the store that Debba and the Widow would select the cloth to make their dresses for the Birthday of the Baby Jesus.
It was not proper for me to go in with her although I loved the different cloths and the smells of the place and the Masai that we knew, the wanawaki, eager and unbuying with their cuckolded husbands up the street drinking Golden Jeep sherry from South Africa with a spear in one hand and the bottle of Golden Jeep in the other. They were cuckolded standing on one leg or on two and I knew where they would be and walked down the right side of the narrow tree-shaded street that was still wider than our wingtips as everyone who lived on it or walked it knew and I walked hurt footed and, I hoped, not insolent nor pistol proud down to the Masai drinking place where I said, “Sopa,” and shook a few cold hands and went out without drinking. Eight paces to the right, I turned into Mr. Singh’s. Mr. Singh and I embraced and Mrs. Singh and I shook hands and then I kissed her hand, which always pleased her since she was a Turkana and I had learned to kiss hands quite well and it was like a voyage to Paris which she had never heard of but would have ornamented on the clearest day Paris ever had. Then I sent for the Mission-trained Interpreter.
“How are you Singh?” I asked with the Interpreter.
“Not bad. Here. Doing business.”
“And beautiful Madame Singh?”
“Four months until the baby.”
“Felicidades,” I said and kissed Madame Singh’s hand again using the style of Alvarito Caro then Marques of Villamayor, a town we had once entered but been forced out of.
“All young Singhs are well I hope?”