A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [28]
Mindy swivels toward the window on her other side. Chronos is skulking among the lions, holding his camera close to the faces of the sleeping male and female, taking pictures.
“Walk backward,” Albert says, with hushed urgency. “Backward, Chronos, gently.”
Movement comes from a direction no one is expecting: the female gnawing at the zebra. She vaults at Chronos in an agile, gravity-defying spring that anyone with a house cat would recognize. She lands on his head, flattening him instantly. There are screams, a gunshot, and those overhead tumble back into their seats so violently that at first Mindy thinks they’ve been shot. But it’s the lioness; Albert has killed her with a rifle he’d secreted somewhere, maybe under his seat. The other lions have run away; all that’s left is the zebra carcass and the body of the lioness, Chronos’s legs splayed beneath her.
Albert, Lou, Dean, and Cora bolt from the jeep. Mindy starts to follow, but Lou pushes her back, and she realizes that he wants her to stay with his children. She leans over the back of their seat and puts an arm around each of them. As they stare through the open windows, a wave of nausea rolls through Mindy; she feels in danger of passing out. Mildred is still in her spot beside the children, and it occurs to Mindy, vaguely, that the elderly bird-watcher was inside the jeep the whole time that she and Albert were talking.
“Is Chronos dead?” Rolph asks flatly.
“I’m sure he’s not,” Mindy says.
“Why isn’t he moving?”
“The lion is on top of him. See, they’re trying to pull her off. He’s probably fine under there.”
“There’s blood on the lion’s mouth,” Charlie says.
“That’s from the zebra. Remember, she was eating a zebra?” It takes enormous effort to keep her teeth from chattering, but Mindy knows that she must hide her terror from the children—her belief that whatever turns out to have happened is her fault.
They wait in pulsing isolation, surrounded by the hot, blank day. Mildred rests a knobby hand on Mindy’s shoulder, and Mindy feels her eyes fill with tears.
“He’ll be fine,” the old woman says gently. “You watch.”
By the time the group throngs the bar of the mountain hotel after dinner, everyone seems to have gained something. Chronos has gained a blistering victory over his bandmate and both girlfriends, at the cost of thirty-two stitches on his left cheek that you could argue are also a gain (he’s a rock star, after all) and several huge antibiotic pills administered by an English surgeon with hooded eyes and beery breath—an old friend of Albert’s whom he unearthed in a cinder-block town about an hour away from the lions.
Albert has gained the status of a hero, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He gulps a bourbon and mutters his responses to the giddy queries of the Phoenix Faction. No one has yet confronted him on the damning basics: Why were you in the bush? How did you get so close to the lions? Why didn’t you stop Chronos from getting out of the jeep? But Albert knows that Ramsey, his boss, will ask these questions, and that they will likely lead to his being fired: the latest in a series of failures brought on by what his mother, back in Minehead, calls his “self-destructive tendencies.”
The members of Ramsey’s safari have gained a story they’ll tell for the rest of their lives. It will prompt some of them, years from now, to search for each other on Google and Facebook, unable to resist the wish-fulfillment fantasy these portals offer: What ever happened to…? In a few cases, they’ll meet again to reminisce and marvel at one another’s physical transformations, which will seem to melt away with the minutes. Dean, whose success will elude him until middle age, when he’ll land the role of a paunchy, outspoken plumber in a popular sitcom, will meet for an espresso with Louise (now a chubby twelve-year-old from the Phoenix Faction), who will Google him after her divorce. Postcoffee, they’ll repair to a Days Inn off San Vicente for some unexpectedly moving sex, then to Palm Springs for a golf weekend,