T. Boyle: Without a Hero

YOU COULD SHOOT ANYTHING you wanted, for a price, even the elephant, but Bernard tended to discourage the practice. It made an awful mess, for one thing, and when all was said and done it was the big animals — the elephant, the rhino, the water buff and giraffe — that gave the place its credibility, not to mention ambiance. They weren’t exactly easy to come by, either. He still regretted the time he’d let the kid from the heavy-metal band pot one of the giraffes — even though he’d taken a cool twelve thousand dollars to the bank on that one. And then there was the idiot from MGM who opened up on a herd of zebra and managed to decapitate two ostriches and lame the Abyssinian ass in the process, Well, it came with the territory, he supposed, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t carry enough insurance on the big stuff to buy out half the L.A. Zoo if he had to. He was just lucky nobody had shot himself in the foot yet. Or the head. Of course, he was insured for that, too.

Bernard Puff pushed himself up from the big mahogany table and flung the dregs of his coffee down the drain. He wasn’t exactly overwrought, but he was edgy, his stomach sour and clenched round the impermeable lump of his breakfast cruller, his hands afflicted with the little starts and tremors of the coffee shakes. He lit a cigarette to calm himself and gazed out the kitchen window on the dromedary pen, where one of the moth-eaten Arabians was methodically peeling the bark from an elm tree. He looked at the thing in amazement, as if he’d never seen it before — the flexible lip and stupid eyes, the dully working jaw — and made a mental note to offer a special on camels. The cigarette tasted like tin, like death. Somewhere a catbird began to call out in its harsh mewling tones.

The new people were due any minute now, and the prospect of new people always set him off — there were just too many things that could go wrong. Half of them didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other, they expected brunch at noon and a massage an hour later, and they bitched about everything, from the heat to the flies to the roaring of the lions at night. Worse: they didn’t seem to know what to make of him, the men regarding him as a subspecies of the blue-collar buddy, regaling him with a nonstop barrage of lickerish grins, dirty jokes and fractured grammar, and the women treating him like a cross between a maître d’ and a water carrier. Dudes and greenhorns, all of them. Parvenus. Moneygrubbers. The kind of people who wouldn’t know class if it bit them.

Savagely snubbing out the cigarette in the depths of the coffee mug, Bernard wheeled round on the balls of his feet and plunged through the swinging doors and out into the high dark hallway that gave onto the foyer. It was stifling already, the overhead fans chopping uselessly at the dead air round his ears and the sweat prickling at his new-shaven jowls as he stomped down the hall, a big man in desert boots and khaki shorts, with too much belly and something overeager and graceless in his stride. There was no one in the foyer and no one at the registration desk. (Espinoza was out feeding the animals — Bernard could hear the hyenas whooping in the distance — and the new girl — what was her name? — hadn’t made it to work on time yet. Not once.) The place seemed deserted, though he knew Orbalina would be making up the beds and Roland sneaking a drink somewhere — probably out behind the lion cages.

For a long moment Bernard stood there in the foyer, framed against a bristling backdrop of kudu and oryx heads, as he checked the reservation card for the tenth time that morning:

Mike and Nicole Bender

Bender Realty

15125 Ventura Blvd.

Encino, California

Real estate people. Jesus. He’d always preferred the movie crowd — or even the rock-and-rollers, with their spiked wristbands and pouf hairdos. At least they were willing to buy into the illusion that Puff’s African Game Ranch, situated on twenty-five hundred acres just outside Bakersfield, was the real thing — the Great Rift Valley, the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti — but the real estate people saw every crack in the plaster. And all they wanted to know was how much he’d paid for the place and was the land subdividable.

He looked up into the yellow-toothed grin of the sable mounted on the wall behind him — the sable his father had taken in British East Africa back in the thirties — and let out a sigh. Business was business, and in the long run it didn’t matter a whit who perforated his lions and gazelles — just as long as they paid. And they always paid, up front and in full. Bernard saw to that.

“What was it, Nik, six months ago when we went to Gino Parducci’s for dinner? It was six months, wasn’t it? And didn’t I say we’d do the African thing in six months? Didn’t I?”

Nicole Bender was curled up in the passenger seat of the white Jaguar XJS her husband had given her for Valentine’s Day. A pile of knitting magazines lay scattered in her lap, atop a set of bamboo needles trailing an embryonic garment in a shade so pale it defied categorization. She was twenty-seven, blond, a former actress/model/poet/singer whose trainer had told her just two days earlier that she had perhaps the most perfectly sculpted physique of any woman he’d ever worked with. Of course, he was paid to say things like that, but in her heart she suspected they were true, and she needed to hear them. She turned to her husband. “Yes,” she said. “You did. But I pictured us in Kenya or Tanzania, to tell the truth.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he fired back impatiently, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” the words coming so fast they might have been bullets squeezed from one of the glistening new big-bore rifles in the trunk, “but you know I can’t take six weeks off from work, not now when the new Beverly Hills office is about to open up and the Montemoretto deal is all but in the bag…and besides, it’s dangerous over there, what with the next revolution or war or whatever coming down every six minutes, and who do you think they’re going to blame when the roof caves in? White people, right? And where do you think you’ll want to be then?”

Mike Bender was a barely contained factory of energy, a steamroller of a man who had risen from receptionist to king and despot of his own real estate empire in the space of twelve short years. He was given to speechifying, the precious words dropping from his lips like coins from a slot machine, his fingertips alighting on his tongue, his hair, his ears, the crotch of his pants and his elbows as he spoke, writhing with the nervous energy that had made him rich. “And plus you’ve got your tsetse flies and black mambas and beriberi and the plague and god knows what all over there — I mean, picture Mexico, only a hundred times worse. No, listen, trust me — Gino swore this place is as close as it gets to the real thing, only without the hassles.” He lowered his sunglasses to give her a look. “You’re telling me you really want to get your ass chewed off in some lopsided tent in, in”—he couldn’t seem to think of a place sufficiently grim, so he improvised—“Zambeziland?”