[ - ]
Table of Contents [Report This]
Printer Chapter or Story Microsoft Word Chapter or Story
- Text Size +
Rhino Attack



Nick

I woke up with a ridiculous amount of pain in my back. I groaned and stretched and heard several of my vertebrates popping and cracking as I moved. I could see the sunlight coming through the flimsy side of the tent and I grabbed the zipper and yanked it down to open the tent and let some air in. It was humid already and even hotter in the tent with the sunlight on it. I kicked the sweatshirt I’d used as a pillow away and stuck my head out of the tent.

Outside, everyone was already up and moving around. There was a large fire already going, around which Nanny and Kat and a bunch of women sat. It looked like they were cooking. I saw Mosi and Nyo run by carrying twigs while Azizi and Taji were moving stacks of larger pieces of wood. Some men were moving building supplies into the space next to Nanny’s house and setting it all up.

I realized I had to pee like nobody’s business.

I climbed out of the tent, bent awkwardly because of the height of it and the height of me and I managed to catch my foot on the lip of the door and sent myself to the dusty reddish ground, knocking the wind out of myself. “Fuck,” I groaned. One of the guys passing by paused and offered me a hand up, which I took. “Asante,” I muttered, embarrassed he’d seen me fall down like that.

When I turned, the smirk on Kat’s face told me she’d seen it, too.

I flushed.

“Wewe ni sawa?” the guy asked me.

I had no idea what he said. “I’m a’ight,” I replied, assuming he wanted to know if I was okay.

That must’ve been it, because he turned and walked away.

“Habari za asubuhi,” Kat greeted me when I walked up to her by the fireside.

“Hi?” I said.

She smiled, “It means good morning.” Azizi was unloading his armful of wood into the fire and it cause the flames to flare up behind her, giving her an orange aura that contrasted her bright blue hair so nicely... She was actually a beautiful girl, I thought, caught off guard by how pretty that orange aura made her look. She had the kind of face that plastic surgeons try to create in LA, with a sweet little nose and bright eyes. The piercing on her chin gave her a classic Hollywood look.

“Well… Good morning,” I replied. I wasn’t even gonna try to repeat what she said. I’d hack it.

Nanny looked up and held up a bowl that contained what looked like a white brick. I looked at Kat. “It’s ungali,” she said. “It’s a corn rice. Sort of tastes like bland grits. Maybe a little thicker. If you like grits, you won’t mind it. It’s boring, but it’s definitely a staple.”

Bland grits sounded safe enough. But before I ate I had to pee.

“Asante,” I said, “But before I eat… is there a bathroom ‘round here?”

Kat looked at the woods.

“Oh. Right. I’ll be right back.”

As I dashed off, I heard Kat explaining to Nanny that I’d be right back. I jogged quickly up the hill and down the path that we’d taken from the shore the day before. I didn’t want anybody to see me taking a whiz. I mean I’ve peed outside before. Sometimes when the tour bus breaks down all five of us Backstreet Boys have had to go outside in the woods. I trudged a way in and paused, looking up at the trees. I thought I’d heard something. I didn’t see any monkeys anywhere. But I was on edge. These weren’t the woods on the edge of some highway just outside of Chicago or St. Louis or whatever. These were truly wild woods and there could be anything in here. There could be voodoo witches lurking in the trees or a lion or something. I shivered and it took all my strength to step off the path and start moving through the dense trees to find myself a pee spot.

I didn’t go far. I didn’t dare to. I was jumpy and looking around wildly, spooked by my own damn imagination. Finally, I came to a halt and opened my fly and set to my business.

That’s when I heard it.

A grunting in the woods to my left.

My stomach flipped. I was midstream, there wasn’t anything I could do but stand and stare in the direction I’d heard the noise, my heart thundering in my chest. I was sure I was about to pee through my own death.

I never pushed pee so hard in my life. I shook myself off and started running before I’d even got all tucked away. Heavy footfalls and the sound of crashing branches followed me.

“Motherfucker!” I cried, and I ran harder. Harder than I’ve ever run in my life. Branches were slapping me in the face, I could feel them scratching my skin and my shirt got caught on one especially nasty branch and, in a fluid motion I only knew from having to escape from four “older brothers” all my life on the tour bus, I wrangled out of it and left it for dead. There was a rhino behind me. I could almost feel his dirty nasty breath on my neck for crying out loud, who the fuck needed a shirt when they were about to be gored on the face of a prehistoric demon animal?

I ran all the way back to the village, so hard my shins ached as I moved and my heart thumped against my ribcage wildly as I choked for breath. People looked up as I pelted down the hill, hitting some loose rock part way down and skidding the rest of the way, like some kind of crazy ass surfer. I hit the bottom abruptly and stumbled, only now looking back over my shoulder.

The rhino must've gave up because nothing was following me now.

"What the hell happened?" Kat asked in a panic, having leaped up from the log she was sitting on with Nanny. The other women were all nervously staring at me and several of the men nearby were staring up at the tree line.

"There was -- it was chasing me -- I was pissing and --" I couldn't breathe. My chest seared with the pain of oxygen moving through my lungs.

"What was chasing you?" Kat questioned, her brows furrowing. She turned toward the hill and I caught her wrist, shaking my head violently, not wanting her to die the tragic death I'd envisioned for myself.

"Bloodthirsty rhino," I gasped.

Taji had bound past us and up the hill before I could get the air to yell for him to stop and he disappeared. I closed my eyes, not wanting to hear or somehow see the gore that was certain to follow. But nothing happened. I opened my eyes and we all waited with baited breath.

Several minutes passed and then Taji returned and in his fist was my abandoned shirt and in the other a handful of Azizi's hair as he pulled the boy along. "Here is your rhino," he called.





Kat


I wasn't sure whether to laugh or get angry. Azizi looked guilty as hell as Taji pulled him down the hill to the village, where his mother, Zuwena, was standing up with an angered expression on her face. It was rare that Zuwena paid much attention to Azizi, we all knew Nanny was the one who gave Azizi his talkings to when he was in trouble because of his mother's detachment. But Nanny sat still.

Nick's face was a mixture of shock and devastation. "But it was a HUGE sound," he argued. "A kid couldn't have made that much racket and it - it chased me -"

"Azizi was smashing the earth with a log," explained Taji, "Mosi and Nyo were helping him. I did not catch them, they've run into the forest. They were trying to scare you."

Their mothers exchanged looks.

"But - but - but I’m - it - I -" Nick looked helpless.

Nick's sputtering was silenced as Zuwena began shouting in Swahili in loud, sharp tones that echoed through the village. She spoke so quickly that even being fluent Swahili couldn't help me to keep up with her shouts. Azizi looked increasingly more guilty and his half laughing expression of amusement slowly faded into one of guarded anger. The words I did catch chilled me for Zuwena was screaming about Azizi's father..

Nanny stood abruptly. "KUACHA!”

The word rung through the air, silencing Zuwena and making Azizi's eyes shift from anger to nervousness. Nick stared around too and although I hadn't taught him that kuacha meant stop, I could tell by his eyes that he knew what Nanny had bellowed the same as all of the rest of us did.

Nanny walked slowly to Azizi. In Swahili, she asked him gently, "Why have you done this?"

Azizi swallowed. "I was just trying to make fun."

"Making fear is not making fun," Nanny scolded. "You do not like Nick."

Azizi's eyes narrowed.

"Why?" Nanny asked.

Azizi shook his head. "Leave me be." He turned and in the greatest act of insolence I'd seen from any of the children in Kiwayuu, he stormed away, leaving Nanny staring after him.

Jaws were dropped all around them, nobody could believe what they'd seen.

Nanny turned to Nick and put her palms on his face. "You are... Safe." Her English was awful, jagged and poorly timed, but Nick's eyes relaxed at her words. "Now eat," she added, and she pulled him to the log by the fire, grabbing the bowl of ungali and pushing it into his hands.

Slowly the people went back to what they were doing, except Zuwena, who looked tired and went to her tent and zipped it closed behind her. We could hear her crying from inside.

Nick sat down on the log beside Nanny and started eating the bowl of ungali she had given him.

“I’ll go for Azizi,” Taji said.

I shook my head, “I’ll go.”

“Are you sure?” Taji asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I replied. I glanced over at the work site. “If I’m not back by then, if you could help Nick out when it’s time to start building, that’d be great. I’ll be back before then hopefully, but you know Azizi.”

Taji nodded.

I jogged off onto the path to the ocean, leaving the village behind quickly. Azizi was known for running off like this when he was upset and he always went to the ocean to sulk when he did. I could only assume it was a habit that he had learned from years of his mother attempting to run away from his father before she finally succeeded. Back in Uganda, Zuwena and Azizi had lived a hard life. He trusted very few people when he ran off and I happened to be one of them.

I didn’t find him until I got all the way to the shore. Azizi was sitting on a rock by the water with his long stick, drawing on the sand and hugging his knees. He didn’t even look up as I walked across the beach and sat down next to him on the rock. We sat in silence for a long time.

“So how come you wanted to scare Nick?” I asked him.

Azizi shrugged. “I didn’t think everyone would get so angry,” he said. Azizi’s English was the best of all of the people in the village besides my own. He had gone to a Christian missionary’s school back in Uganda for the first several years of his life, where they taught him English as a standard. It was easy to forget sometimes that English was his second language.

“I think it’s just because he was really, really scared,” I said.

Azizi shrugged. “It was just a joke.”

I paused, trying to decide how to play my hand at this. Finally, I admitted, “It was pretty funny when he came running down the hill into the village like that.” Azizi smiled a tiny little smile that only just barely counted as one at all. “How did you know to play the rhino card? He’s been asking me about rhinos since he got off the plane,” I said, smirking at him.

“I heard him ask you a couple times,” Azizi replied.

“Good detective work, master Holmes,” I said. Azizi was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. Well, not the real Sherlock Holmes, but these made up stories about him that I had made up over the years, telling the kids about him, making Holmes out to be more 007 than detective.

Azizi’s smile didn’t widen.

I nudged him, “Is something bothering you?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Azizi nodded.

“Well,” I said, “If you decide there is something bothering you, then you know you can talk to me, right?”

Azizi nodded again.

I looked down at the pattern he was drawing and I got up and grabbed my own stick. “Do you know how to play tic-tac-toe?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“C’mon, come play me.” I drew out the cross hatch gameboard and Azizi followed me and we started to play.