CRISIS IN MT. ELGON
Catching fish is as incidental to fishing as making babies is to fucking.
William Humphrey
The rains fell with few breaks in the Mahale Mountains bordering Lake Tanganyika. Lightening ripped across the sky, occasionally touching down and scorching a tree or two on the steep slopes behind Betty’s small chalet. The lake consisted of high chop, murkiness from feeding river waters and was decidedly unfriendly for fishing. Betty sat watching the drizzle from her porch. The electricity was quite iffy in the face of such severe storms so the computer sat useless for much of those miserable days after Solly left with Shane. She smoked cigarettes, drank coffee in the morning and Scotch at night. The pebble strewn beach was devoid of the local fishermen, their boats pulled on shore. For Betty, still reeling from the effects of Shane’s confession, it was a gloomy four days in which she slept fitfully haunted by dreams of him.
Depressed as well, Shane Simba had to revive quickly. Land feuds had broken out to a worse degree in the Mt. Elgon region, causing Kenyan’s to cross the Ugandan border to avoid the pillaging and burning of their farms. Jane Leoparde lost no time in apprising her boss at the Masai Mara Daily that she would be covering this major story with the President. The couple flew on one of the smaller government planes to the stricken area, taking up residence in their retreat that Shane had purchased in that same district.
displaced citizens of the Mt. Elgon district receive food aid from the Kenyan Red Cross.
The sun was beginning its rise over the horizon when Betty took her early coffee to the porch and gazed toward the lake. Birds were beginning to awaken and sing - a signal that the day would be a brighter one. A rooster crowed in the distance. She lit a cigarette and noticed a tall muscular figure loading his boat. It was Tarzan. Betty’s tattered soul was soothed at the sight of him. She grabbed a second cup of coffee. She watched until Tarzan disappeared from view headed for deeper fishing waters. The sun continued its climb, few clouds to obliterate or shade it….no seeming threat of rain. Betty took a shower and actually hummed.
sunrise over Lake Tanganyika...
Johanna broods, alone in the mansion.....
Johanna Delacroix was alone in the mansion. She dressed and walked aimlessly about. The houseboy brought the herbal tea that seemed to take the edge off her early pregnancy nausea. She went to the nursery where Shane’s cubs with Betty held sway. Young Tarek and Jalil were playing on the floor. They ran to Johanna and nipped her delicate ankles. She let out a yelp of pain. The nannies took the cubs in tow but failed to acknowledge Johanna. She walked out, seeing Solly being taken to play soccer by one of the Masai guards. He waved at her but continued on his way, tagging behind the tall red clad, ochre painted warrior. She sat in the library which served as the main family room. She placed a call to Shane’s cell phone. He answered.
“Shane, I’m so lonely when are you coming home, darling?”
In the middle of walking about a burned out farm with the distressed owner, his wife and children, Shane was long on frustration and short on patience.
“For God’s sake, Johanna, I am here in the midst of real misery. Find something to do….shop for new nail polish or some damn thing,” he roared, clicking off.
Jane, trudging along behind the group with her camera and digital recorder, just had to smile a bit at her lover’s latest predicament.
Police Chief, Bubba Simba at your service.....
The day before Shane had left for the crisis in Mt. Elgon, he had placed a personal call to the Masai Mara police department headed by his brother, Chief Bubba Simba. Bubba was sitting in his office, feet on the desk, picking his teeth after a meal of seventeen pounds of barbecued pork delivered by a newly hired deputy. He was surprised to hear the voice of his presidential kid brother. He saw little of Shane these days.
“Yeah, Bro?” responded Bubba, merrily.
“I need a personal favor. Strictly confidential and hand delivered to my office and given to me only, got that Bubba?”
“Sure Shane, uh, Sir…..uh Mr. President, Sir,” bumbled the rattled Bubba.
“Just plain Shane, Bubba. We’re still brothers.”
Betty walked down the stairs to meet Tarzan who held two hefty fish in her direction.
“You look pretty rugged,” he noticed.
“I know. You’ve got some beer left here. Do you want to come up?”
“I smell like fish.”
“Who cares?”
Once again, he dwarfed her living area with his massive build and height. He extracted two beers from the case he had brought and took them to the porch where he sat in a chair that was comically undersized for his frame.
“Why do you look so bad?” he asked, pulling the cap off the bottle and taking a lengthy swill.
“Rough week, I guess,” she said almost inaudibly.
“Why? Because of him?”
“Yes, because of Shane.”
“I could understand if you missed your cub, but not that arrogant puffed up dad of his.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“No, and I don’t intend to be. That baloney, as I have already expressed, is a bunch of nonsense that humans invented.”
“I know plenty of animals that are genuinely in love, Tarzan.”
“In crazy Kenya?”
“All over,” she said. “You must have felt something to want to take over a lion pride and claim it for your own.”
“I sure did, Betty. I felt the urge to spread my seed and procreate. Place my own bloodline on this earth while I’m here.”
“That’s all it was about? And by the way, did you accomplish that once you left Kenya?”
He sat back, cracked another beer and began to smile slightly in that way lions have of lowering their jaw in order to appear affable. She smiled as well.
“I went to the Serengeti plains after Kenya. There were plenty of lion prides there, ripe for the taking. I was a strapping thing, in the peak of health – strong as a bloody ox. I was scouting one with two aging pride males, twelve lionesses and ten cubs.”
“Were you going to kill the cubs?”
“Of course, that’s what we do when we take over another dude’s pride. I scouted those lions for six days, trailing from a distance, roaring my ass off and making a general spectacle of myself. I could see that the lionesses with no litters, fancied me. The mothers all had their knickers in a twist. I checked out the two males, both of them feeble and not quite with the ticket. You could tell they were wearing down. And then - SUDDENLY I had an epiphany - I came to my senses.”
“Meaning?”
“I thought of the fact that I would head that pride, if luck held, maybe two years at the most. Then some asshole of a male lion would come roaring down the pike, flexing his muscles, and depose me. He would kill all my kids, my lionesses would come into estrus again and start screwing him. What was the point? I wandered further and found this place. Now I fish for a living – no muss, no fuss.”
Betty threw back her head and laughed so hard tears rolled once again, but these were good ones. He laughed back.
“”So why isn’t Ralph Lyon’s way better? You wouldn’t have had the threat of being deposed and could have seen your cubs grow up,” she argued, still stifling errant giggles.
“Ralph Lyon’s approach is not the natural way for lions to act, Betty. We are still who we are, even that fancy suited up Romeo you married. You can scratch just below his manicured surface and find the same garden variety predotor that I am - vicious, canny, opportunistic and on the prowl. You can take the lion out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the lion. We top the food chain wherever we are. They don’t refer to us as king of the beasts for no reason. Lions are violent animals and strong as hell, capable of bringing down and dragging prey that is three times our weight and size. You don’t tamp all that down with some naive, idealistic statute. Why do you think those human fishermen park their boats so damn far from mine? They are wary of me because I can pull my boat to shore with almost no effort in addition to the obvious fact of my being a lion,” he stated, rising from his chair that creaked mightily at the insult to its fragility. “I think I may have paraphrased something or other in that diatribe. Thanks for the beer. See you tomorrow.”
"One more question," she giggled. "If you're so set against being civilized, why do you wear clothes?"
"Damn Betty, those humans I fish near are scared enough of me as if is, without me walking around naked with my pecker and family jewels on display," he explained, sending her into another round of laughter.
He raised a paw in farewell and left, walking down the stairs and to the beach where he eventually turned left at the same scrub hedge and was lost from sight. She stood at the railing gently laughing to herself. He had made her feel good again.
Luke Leoparde, with Jane being away in Mt. Elgon, invited Staci Simba to dinner. She hadn’t seen him in a while and missed his company. She accepted.
Klip n’ Dodi’s was crowded but Kerri Klipspringer led Luke and Staci to a secluded table behind a large potted orange tree.
“I miss you, Luke.”
“As I do you, Staci. I’m sure you know Janie is pregnant with my litter. We’re such great friends though, it’s working for us.”
“I heard that. I’m happy if you and Jane are, Luke.”
“How are things with you and Mnyama these days?”
“We still work and sleep together,” she admitted, smiling sheepishly.
In another quarter, Bertram Baboon and I were having one of our luncheons. Ours wasn’t quite as congenial. When Bertram is grieved about something, he takes on the mantle of a martyred archbishop. The object of his angst surfaced soon enough - upon my being seated at the table.
“I simply cannot believe that you have visited Betty and failed to tell my dear wife, Gloria, her physical address nor paid a visit to tell her concerned sister of her current condition.”
I accepted a martini from the gloved waiter. We were in OKAPI’S, that bastion of pretentious dining.
“Well let me attempt to explain myself, Bertram. For starters, Betty issued the invitation through Lachlan, not me. I didn’t speak with her until we arrived there. I am an animal, as you well know, that respects other animal’s right to privacy and disclosures of a personal nature. If Betty wanted your ‘dear wife Gloria’ to know her whereabouts, she is certainly free to take care of that matter herself.
I was peeved and it showed. We glared at each other across the linen table cloth and froufrou flower arrangement. Bertram and I are perfectly capable of engaging in competitions of which one can be the most ‘prudish and magisterial'. We once lived together for a long period and know each other’s proclivities like firing range targets. He blinked first.
"You're quite right, Maurice. I hope Betty was well and comparatively content," he acquiesced, taking a loud swizzle from his martini.
I went on to describe Betty's home, and seemingly peaceful countenance, omitting the Tarzan section. We ended pleasantly with Bertram issuing an invitation for Lachlan and me to dine with them the following weekend.
Having three relationships going simultaneously has never been a recipe for successful maintenance if one is prone to peptic ulcers which bleed. Such was the case with our young lion president. When he arrived in the Mara from his troubleshooting session in the Mt. Elgon region, he was struck late at night with severe stomach pains. The ever hovering Johanna served a good purpose. She called the hotline that connects the State House and mansion to the Exotic Animal Clinic. An ambulance came and took Shane to the private suite at the clinic enjoyed by our leaders. Johanna had rushed to ride in the ambulance with him. She had either forgotten or didn’t care, that she was still dressed in a peignoir designed more for frolics of a sexual nature than an appearance at the head of state's sick bed. Being told of the costume by an outraged nurse, I hastened to drape my jacket around her tall shoulders, having been called in the middle of the night to attend the emergency. Fortunately, Shane had not reached the critical point and the Tigeres brothers recommended IV drips and enforced hospital bed rest for the stressed lion.
Since Betty was out of the area with little contact with the outside world, she failed to show up. Jane, thinking to pay a visit one afternoon, was given a dirty look and shooed off by the vigilant Johanna. Shane, under sedation never even saw what transpired. Staci Simba felt that Johanna didn’t really want her in the room either, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass. This was her dearly loved dad and she was going to be there no matter what. Shane, zonked and oblivious, snoozed away in comparative peace, missing details of the fashion show that Johanna engaged in each day. She kept sexy negligees and scanty sleep wear in the hospital closet. She had her own queen size bed placed next to his hospital deluxe number. Each day, she would slip out for an hour and go to the mansion where she had gathered her extensive wardrobe. She would shower and dress for the day, spraying costly perfumes behind her ears and in her heavy locks. Then, she would be taken by official Rolls to where her lover lay in a state of semi stupor.
Vice President Daniel Lyon, Justice Minister Sloane Simba and I kept the State House fires burning in our leader’s absence. I, with the help of press secretary, Amy Chui, conducted daily press conferences announcing the medical progress of President Shane Simba.