A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [30]
“Why not?”
The three of them ascend the stairs, sounds of merriment jingling up from the bar. Rolph feels an odd pressure to make conversation. “Is your room up here, too?” he asks.
“Down the hall,” Albert says. “Number three.”
Mindy unlocks the door to Rolph’s room and steps inside, leaving Albert in the hall. Rolph is suddenly angry with her.
“Want to see my room?” he asks Albert. “Mine and Charlie’s?”
Mindy emits a single syllable of laughter—the way his mother laughs when things have annoyed her to a point of absurdity. Albert steps into his room. It’s plain, with wood furniture and dusty flowered curtains, but after ten nights in tents it feels lavish.
“Very nice,” Albert says. With his longish brown hair and mustache, he looks like a real explorer, Rolph thinks. Mindy crosses her arms and stares out the window. There is a feeling in the room that Rolph can’t identify. He’s angry with Mindy and thinks that Albert must be too. Women are crazy. Mindy’s body is slender and elastic; she could slip through a keyhole, or under a door. Her thin purple sweater rises and falls quickly as she breathes. Rolph is surprised by how angry he is.
Albert taps a cigarette from his pack, but doesn’t light it. It is unfiltered, tobacco emerging at both ends. “Well,” he says, “good night, you two.”
Rolph had imagined Mindy tucking him into bed, her arm around him again as it was in the jeep. Now this seems out of the question. He can’t change into his pajamas with Mindy there; he doesn’t even want her to see his pajamas, which have small blue elves all over them. “I’m fine,” he tells her, hearing the coldness in his voice. “You can go back.”
“Okay,” she says. She turns down his bed, plumps the pillow, adjusts the open window. Rolph senses her finding reasons not to leave the room.
“Your dad and I will be just next door,” Mindy says. “You know that, right?”
“Duh,” he mutters. Then, chastened, he says, “I know.”
III. Sand
Five days later, they take a long, very old train overnight to Mombasa. Every few minutes, it slows down just enough for people to leap from the doors, bundles clutched to their chests, and for others to scramble on. Lou’s group and the Phoenix Faction install themselves in the cramped bar car, which they share with African men in suits and bowler hats. Charlie is allowed to drink one beer, but she sneaks two more with the help of handsome Dean, who stands beside her narrow bar stool. “You’re sunburned,” he says, pressing a finger to Charlie’s cheek. “The African sun is strong.”
“True,” Charlie says, grinning as she swigs her beer. Now that Mindy has pointed out Dean’s platitudes, Charlie finds him hilarious.
“You have to wear sunscreen,” he says.
“I know—I did.”
“Once isn’t enough. You have to reapply.”
Charlie catches Mindy’s eye and succumbs to giggles. Her father moves close. “What’s so funny?”
“Life,” Charlie says, leaning against him.
“Life!” Lou snorts. “How old are you?”
He hugs her to him. When Charlie was little he did this all the time, but as she grows older it happens less. Her father is warm, almost hot, his heartbeat like someone banging on a heavy door.
“Ow,” Lou says. “Your quill is stabbing me.” It’s a black-and-white porcupine quill—she found it in the hills and uses it to pin up her long hair. Her father slides it out, and the golden, tangled mass of Charlie’s hair collapses onto her shoulders like a shattered window. She’s aware of Dean watching.
“I like this,” Lou says, squinting at the quill’s translucent point. “It’s a dangerous weapon.”
“Weapons are necessary,” Dean says.
By the next afternoon, the safarigoers have settled into a hotel a half hour up the coast from Mombasa. On a white beach traversed by knobby-chested men selling beads and gourds, Mildred and Fiona gamely appear in floral-print swimsuits, binoculars still at their necks. The livid Medusa tattoo on Chronos’s chest is less startling than his small potbelly—a disillusioning trait he shares