I had been told to keep away from Laitokitok but this visit for petrol and supplies and Arap Meina’s news of the lions made our visit completely normal and necessary and I was sure G.C. would have approved of it. I wouldn’t see the police boy but I would stop in for a drink with Mr. Singh and to buy some beer and Coca-Cola for camp since I always did that. I told Arap Meina to go over to the Masai stores and tell what lion news he had and pick up any news there was and to do the same at the other Masai hangouts.
At Mr. Singh’s there were several Masai elders that I knew and I greeted them all and made my compliments to Mrs. Singh. Mr. Singh and I conversed in my phrase book Swahili. The elders needed a bottle of beer badly and I bought it and drank a symbolic gulp from my own bottle.
Peter came in to say the car would be down immediately and I sent him to look for Arap Meina. The car came down the road with the drum roped and three Masai women in the back. Miss Mary was talking happily to Charo. Ngui came in to get the cases with Mwengi. I handed my bottle of beer to them and between them they drained it. Mwengi’s eyes shone with absolute delight as he drank beer. Ngui drank it like a racing driver quenching his thirst at a pit stop. He saved half for Mwengi. Ngui took a bottle out for Mthuka and me to share and opened up a Coca-Cola for Charo.
Arap Meina came up with Peter and climbed into the back with the Masai women. They all had boxes to sit on. Ngui sat in front with me and Mary sat with Charo and Mwengi behind the gun rack. I said good-bye to Peter and we started up the road to turn to the west into the sunlight.
“Did you get everything you wanted, honey?”
“There’s really nothing to buy. But I found a few things we needed.”
I thought of the last time I had been there shopping but there was no use thinking about that and Miss Mary had been in Nairobi then and that is a better shopping town than Laitokitok. But then I had just begun to learn to shop in Laitokitok and I liked it because it was like the general store and post office in Cooke City, Montana.
In Laitokitok they did not have the cardboard boxes of obsolete calibers that the old-timers bought two to four cartridges from each season in the late fall when they wanted to get their winter meat. They sold spears instead. But it was a home-feeling place to buy things and almost everything on the shelves and in the bins you could have found a use for if you lived around there.
But today was the end of another day and tomorrow would be a new one and there were no people walking on my grave yet. No one that I could see looking into the sun or ahead over the country and watching the country as we came down the Mountain, I had forgotten that Mthuka would be thirsty and as I opened the bottle of beer and wiped its neck and lips, Miss Mary asked, very justly, “Aren’t wives ever thirsty?”
“I’m sorry, honey. Ngui can get you a full bottle, if you like.”
“No. I want just one drink of that.”
I passed it to her and she drank what she wished and passed it to me.
I thought how nice it was that there was no African word for I’m sorry, then I thought I’d better not think that or it would come between us and I took a drink of the beer to purify it from Miss Mary and wiped the neck and the lip of the bottle with my good clean handkerchief and handed it to Mthuka.
Charo didn’t approve of any of this and would have liked to see us drink properly with glasses. But we were drinking as we drank and I did not want to think anything that would make a thing between Charo and me either.
“I think I will have another swallow of beer,” Miss Mary said. I told Ngui to open a bottle for her. I would share it with her and Mthuka could pass his to Ngui and Mwengi when he had quenched his thirst. I had not said any of this aloud.
“I don’t know why you have to be so complicated about the beer,” Mary said.
“I’ll bring cups for us the next time.”
“Don’t try to make it more complicated. I don’t want a cup if I drink with you.”
“It’s just tribal,” I said. “I’m truly not trying to make things any more complicated than they are.”
“Why did you have to wipe the bottle so carefully after I drank and then wipe it after you drank before you passed it on?”
“Tribal.”
“But why different today?”
“Phases of the moon.”
“You get too tribal for your own good.”
“Very possibly.”
“You believe all this.”
“No. I just practice it.”
“You don’t know enough about it to practice it.”
“I learn a little every day.”
“I’m tired of it.”