A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [27]
In the last row, beside Mindy, Lou thrusts his torso from the open roof and takes pictures, ignoring the rule to stay seated while the jeep is moving. Albert swerves suddenly, and Lou is knocked back into his seat, camera smacking his forehead. He swears at Albert, but the words are lost in the jeep’s wobbly jostle through tall grass. They’ve left the road. Chronos leans out his open window, and Mindy realizes that Albert must be taking this detour for him, giving Chronos a chance to advance against his rivals. Or was the temptation to knock Lou down too sweet to resist?
After a minute or two of chaotic driving, the jeep emerges a few feet from a pride of lions. Everyone gawks in startled silence—it’s the closest they’ve been to any animal on this trip. The motor is still running, Albert’s hand tentatively on the wheel, but the lions appear so relaxed, so indifferent, that he kills the engine. In the ticking-motor silence they can hear the lions breathe: two females, one male, three cubs. The cubs and one of the females are gorging on a bloody zebra carcass. The others are dozing.
“They’re eating,” says Dean.
Chronos’s hands shake as he spools film into his camera. “Fuck,” he keeps muttering. “Fuck.”
Albert lights a cigarette—forbidden in the brush—and waits, as indifferent to the scene as if he’d paused outside a restroom.
“Can we stand?” the children ask. “Is it safe?”
“I’m sure as hell going to,” Lou says.
Lou, Charlie, Rolph, Chronos, and Dean all climb on top of their seats and jam their upper halves through the open roof. Mindy is now effectively alone inside the jeep with Albert, Cora, and Mildred, who peers at the lions through her bird-watching binoculars.
“How did you know?” Mindy asks, after a silence.
Albert swivels around to look at her down the length of the jeep. He has unruly hair and a soft brown mustache. There is a suggestion of humor in his face. “Just a guess.”
“From half a mile away?”
“He probably has a sixth sense,” Cora says, “after so many years here.”
Albert turns back around and blows smoke through his open window.
“Did you see something?” Mindy persists.
She expects Albert not to turn again, but he does, leaning over the back of his seat, his eyes meeting hers between the children’s bare legs. Mindy feels a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist. She understands now that it’s mutual; she sees this in Albert’s face.
“Broken bushes,” he says, resting his eyes on her. “Like something got chased. It could have been nothing.”
Cora, sensing her exclusion, sighs wearily. “Can someone come down so I can look too?” she calls to those above the roof.
“Coming,” Lou says, but Chronos is faster, ducking back into the front seat and then leaning out his window. Cora rises in her big print skirt. Mindy’s face pounds with blood. Her own window, like Albert’s, is on the jeep’s left side, facing away from the lions. Mindy watches him wet his fingers and snuff out his cigarette. They sit in silence, hands dangling separately from their windows, a warm breeze stirring the hair on their arms, ignoring the most spectacular animal sighting of the safari.
“You’re driving me crazy,” Albert says, very softly. The sound seems to travel out his window and back in through Mindy’s, like one of those whispering tubes. “You must know that.”
“I didn’t,” she murmurs back.
“Well, you are.”
“My hands are tied.”
“Forever?”
She smiles. “Please. An interlude.”
“Then?”
“Grad school. Berkeley.”
Albert chuckles. Mindy isn’t sure what that chuckle means—is it funny that she’s in graduate school, or that Berkeley and Mombasa, where he lives, are irreconcilable locations?
“Chronos, you crazy fuck, get back in here.”
It’s Lou’s voice, from overhead. But Mindy feels sluggish, almost drugged, and reacts only when she hears the change in Albert’s