finally on the land and cried. They told him Toom sold her body to feed her children, sleeping with drivers at the ferry landing as they waited in their trucks to cross north to Kazungula. Sometimes they waited for days. They had time to visit with local women. She contracted AIDS quickly and died slowly. Her children lived in the village until it couldn’t support them any longer, and then they lived along the roadside. They starved there, or were eaten by the wild dogs, the lion, the leopard, any of the larger predators. They would have run to the river, and tried to protect each other there. They might have drowned in the strong current. “Toom is dead,” he told Jillian. “All of them are dead. I have dreamed it so many times it must be true.” “Who is Toom?” He stood alone the next morning under the African sun. Hot thermals lifted the vultures from their broken perch. “Heaven will be a sad place for me,” he said to himself. God heard him say this, along the roadside, and agreed. . . After the snowfall on Bayard Avenue, the night sky cleared again and Michael followed the coyote tracks to the ravine and saw small disturbances along the fence tops where the crows had landed to complain. The imprint of coyote paws in the snow reminded him of the fresh tracks he once showed Jillian at the tourist camp, clear and clean, in the mud leading up to the watering hole. “Jackal,” he told her. “They follow the lions and wait their turn.” The next morning, he took her out and they found a lion with its dead-calm yellow eyes looking back at them, eating a large kudu male it had taken down overnight, and she took pictures of the jackals sitting nearby like family dogs waiting for scraps at the barbeque. “I love this place,” she told him, and, turning, she kissed him on the cheek. “I’m afraid I might love you as well,” she said. Their eyes met, as past and future meet on every day’s horizon. “I love this place, too,” he told her, “but you must work very, very hard to stay alive here.” Then he willed himself awake. . . “Michael! Oh my God, you’re back!” “Jillian.” She took his hand. “You were hit, walking on the road, do you remember?” A side-mirror on a truck. A blow to the back of the head. “Yes.” “Michael.” Her hand holding his. “Toom is here.” Or so it might go. 24 theMeadow
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