Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [74]
“What?” asked K.
“The fucking widow didn’t even thank me. And she’s still got my fucking cold box. It was a bloody good cold box and now she has it.” Mapenga shook his head and pressed the throttle forward. The boat reared slightly in the water and then began to pulse and smack on the little waves, farther and farther from mainland toward his little speck of island. His island was flatter than some of the other chunks of land that poked up into the air, sloping on the west side into steep cliffs.
“I tell you something,” said Mapenga to me, when we had skirted the cliffs with which his island faced the world and arrived at a sandbar upon which the boat was dragged, “you come out here—it’s all mad bastards out here. They’re reasonably mad on the mainland, but they’re madder out here in the middle. The more remote you are, the madder the bastards get.”
K jumped out of the boat and tied it to a post. Mapenga said to me, “They call this island Nyama Musha—‘ village of meat.’ It must have been a poacher’s camp after the hondo. I’ve found the odd shell lying around.”
WE WALKED UP to Mapenga’s house from the boat, past his prehistoric-looking fishing boats with their long, kapenta-reaching arms, past the workshops with their rows of chalk-boards giving instructions for the day to the laborers, and onto a wide patch of lawn. Suddenly a lion, who had been crouching behind a stand of lemongrass, came barreling out from his cover, ducked behind Mapenga’s legs, and made straight for me, pouncing from a flat-out run into a soaring attack. I was aware only of something massive and tawny spread-eagled in flight behind me. Before the lion could land on my back, K had caught him with a block to the throat.
The lion was a ten-month-old male, he weighed at least 160 pounds, and every inch of his body was muscle. His paws were bigger, with an inch to spare all around, than the span of my hands. K dropped the lion, and held his foot on the creature’s throat, then he grabbed the lion’s tail and forced it into his mouth, like a bit. The lion lay panting, its mouth hanging wide to avoid biting his own tail. He grunted in protest and flattened his ears and made a low, snarling noise in the back of his throat.
“None of that, my boy,” said K, turning the lion’s tail around in his fist, like a rope, and smacking the animal on the nose. The lion looked away. K waited a beat and then stood up. The lion, watching him warily, edged his haunches under him and his tail flicked back and forth. K stood, shoulders square to the lion, facing him in an unequivocal challenge. The lion looked away again and gave itself an embarrassed lick.
“Sheeee-it!” said Mapenga. “I’ve never seen anyone do that to Mambo before. Ha! And did you see the way my lion is such a clever boy? He went straight for the weakest link,” he said, turning to me. “How do you like that? He sensed you were the wee-wee in the group and you were going to be snuffed,” and he laughed.
I attached myself as closely as I could to K and we negotiated the rest of the journey to the house. The lion tried again and again to insinuate his way past K’s legs and launch himself on me, but K roared at him and gave him a hefty kick in the chest and the lion backed down. Mapenga appeared to find the whole episode amusing, chuckling to himself in a high, mad cackle each time the lion attempted an attack.
Mapenga’s house consisted of a kitchen and bathroom surrounded by a caged-in veranda. “I have to put cages up,” Mapenga explained, “or the lion gets in and chews everything to shreds.” He turned to me. “So you’d better sleep in here, or he’ll eat you in the night,” and again the choke of laughter.
The lion followed us onto the veranda. He was damp and, having played strenuously with his meal that day, he reeked, not only of his own, raucous cat pungency, but also of less-than-fresh catch-of-the-day. Mambo’s diet consisted of chunks of whole,