The Brightest Sun

He smiled up at her as she clicked and cried. He said in a voice so calm it made Jane want to kill him, “Anger will not bring Twiga back to life, Miss Jane.”

Then he stuffed the end of his cigarette into an anthill and stood up. “If you have finished with the work, we can go now.”

Jane watched the body as they drove away. The vultures and the storks slipped back through the sky and began their feast. There would be nothing left soon, Jane thought. “Take me home again, Muthega,” she said. “I need to deal with the samples.” She wanted to be alone now; she didn’t want to have to talk to Muthega or watch him sucking on his cigarettes. She didn’t want him to see her crying.

That night she climbed into her little wooden bed early. She wanted sleep to blot out the day. It was late when the smell of them woke her, the African smell of wood fire and meat, dust and sweat. She kept her body still but cracked one eye. Her front door was open and she could see the sky, a shade lighter than the dark of her room. She heard the low murmur of their voices through the dark. They’d come for the cameras, she thought. She kept them in a tin trunk locked with a padlock. Her heart choked her and panic took over. She wished she had Muthega’s gun.

In a single movement, Jane pulled herself from under her sheets and ran. She had no desire to fight or to defend the few things she kept in the house; even the cameras weren’t worth her life. She made for the open space beneath the sky. She thought the air might save her, or the land. The wall around her garden was tall and too smooth to climb. She turned and ran for the gate.

Jane was halfway across the bare yard before she was caught. Dry, calloused hands jerked her forearm and she fell. The voice attached to the hands grunted and spoke rapid-fire Swahili, and then she felt fingers around the back of her neck, pressing her face into the ground. She couldn’t understand the Swahili. It was too fast and her vocabulary too small. Jane thought there was a familiarity to one voice, though, a growl, a shudder of smoke in the throat.

It seemed like hours before they were gone. She heard them rummaging through her little house, going through her things. She heard the smashing of glass—the outdoor elephant cameras, she knew—on her concrete floor. But why had they broken them? The thought occurred to her that they’d be of no value to sell now. So, what did they want? There was nothing else to steal. Even her little digital camera, which would bring the men a couple of hundred dollars in the market, wasn’t in the house. It was in the truck. Jane kept it in the glove compartment so she’d have it if she ever needed it. Finally, they crossed the yard to leave. One voice spoke to Jane in halting English. “Next time we kill you, too.” Jane lay there for a long time. She was terrified that if she moved they would come back, or that if she looked up, she would see nothing but the flash of a blade slicing toward her.

The light came in the Kenyan way—quickly, like a shade pulled up. Jane finally sat up. Her whole body hurt. She wondered if she was bleeding. There was a puddle of her own saliva in the dirt where the men had pressed her face. Jane felt bits of dirt on her tongue.

Jane pulled herself up, knees cracking as she bent them straight. She focused only on her next step. She thought of nothing else. She was frozen and terrified that, if she stirred her mind in any direction, what had happened would crush her.

Luckily, there was space on the afternoon flight from Narok to Nairobi. When the plane landed, Jane took a taxi from the airport directly to the Elephant Foundation’s main office on Wayaki Way. She focused on reporting Muthega to the regional director, a large Kenyan man called Johnno, famous for his lifelong dedication to elephants and his harsh indictment of poachers.

Jane hated that she cried, again, when she told Johnno the story.

“Muthega and his friends, they were the ones,” Jane sobbed.

She described the smell of the bodies, the rough hands and the familiar phlegmy voice. She showed them the photos on the tiny screen of her camera. There was Muthega, how guilty he was! Just sitting there.

“It had to have been him,” Jane said. “He obviously doesn’t care about the elephants and he is in league with the poachers. He wanted the cameras destroyed.”

Johnno answered, “We cannot have criminals working for us like that. Sorry, so sorry we had to learn this way.”

Jane thought she would feel stronger when she reported Muthega, when she set in motion the wheels that would punish him for what he did to her, to the elephants. Johnno told Jane it had happened before—poachers bribing protectors to look the other way. Ivory was a lucrative trade, and it paid to hand out bribes for easier access to the animals.

“But Muthega,” he said, “Muthega surprises me. He’s been an excellent, trustworthy employee for years. We’ve only recently given him a substantial raise. This drought, though... Everyone is desperate. People’s children are dying.”

He shook his head, disappointed, as betrayed as Jane was.

Later that afternoon Johnno drove Jane to the US Embassy to file a report. The marine who inspected her passport looked like a boy from home. The carpeted hallways, the smiling portraits of the president and the familiar accents Jane heard around her made her dizzy with longing—how she wanted to go home.

It was a man about her age who helped her fill out the paperwork to lodge a criminal complaint. He was tall with dark hair, and when she told him what happened, his brow furrowed and he winced. Jane thought she heard him curse under his breath. When the paper was filled out, he pulled a business card from inside his desk and reached over to hand it to Jane. Under the seal of the United States was his name in gold letters—Paul O’Reilly.

“I don’t know if you were planning to go back to Narok to work, or back to the States, but you’ll have to stay around Kenya for a few weeks, maybe a few months,” he said. “Authorities will want to question you. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. Call me.” He smiled and Jane felt dizzy again. She slipped the card into her backpack.

Jane stayed in a hotel in Nairobi that night. She showered until the water turned cold, scrubbing and scrubbing and wishing to turn herself inside out to be able to clean every part of her of the memory of those men. Then she crawled into bed and she slept and dreamed about her mother. In the dream, Jane was an elephant and her mother was chasing her, and every time Jane turned around to see if her elephant mother was there, she saw the flash of a machete through the dust she’d kicked up behind her as she ran.

The hotel phone woke her.

“Muthega,” Johnno said immediately. “Are you sure he was among the men who assaulted you? Did you absolutely see him?”

“I heard him,” Jane said. “I thought I did.”

Jane remembered the smell of the men, meaty and smoky. She wondered if Johnno ever smelled that way.

“Is there any way, any way at all—” he said this gently, apologetically “—that you could be mistaken? You see,” he went on, “the Narok police have found a body. They think it may be him, but it’s too maimed to tell. Hacked with a machete the same way the poachers hack apart the elephants—face and feet and hands.”