“Somewhere between two thousand and three thousand days, split half a day, give or take an hour, borrow or loan a minute, haggle over a second,” I said.
“You really talk,” he said.
“Compulsive,” I said.
“You’d make a lousy writer,” he said. “I never knew a writer yet was a good talker.”
“That’s my albatross,” I said.
“Back?” He weighed the word.
“I’m turning the car around,” I said. “And I’m going back down the road.”
“Not miles but days?”
“Not miles but days.”
“Is it that kind of car?”
“That’s how it’s built.”
“You’re an inventor then?”
“A reader who happens to invent.”
“If the car works, that’s some car you got there.”
“At your service,” I said.
“And when you get where you’re going,” said the old man, putting his hand on the door and leaning and then, seeing what he had done, taking his hand away and standing taller to speak to me, “where will you be?”
“January 10, 1954.”
“That’s quite a date,” he said.
“It is, it was. It can be more of a date.”
Without moving, his eyes took another step out into fuller light.
“And where will you be on that day?”
“Africa,” I said.
He was silent. His mouth did not work. His eyes did not shift.
“Not far from Nairobi,” I said.
He nodded, once, slowly.
“Africa, not far from Nairobi.”
I waited.
“And when we get there, if we go?” he said.
“I leave you there.”
“And then?”
“You stay there.”
“And then?”
“That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Forever,” I said.
The old man breathed out and in, and ran his hand over the edge of the doorsill.
“This car,” he said, “somewhere along the way does it turn into a plane?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Somewhere along the way do you turn into my pilot?”
“It could be. I’ve never done this before.”
“But you’re willing to try?”
I nodded.
“Why?” he said, and leaned in and stared me directly in the face with a terrible, quietly wild intensity. “Why?”
Old man, I thought, I can’t tell you why. Don’t ask me.
He withdrew, sensing he had gone too far.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“You didn’t say it,” I said.
“And when you bring the plane in for a forced landing,” he said, “will you land a little differently this time?”
“Different, yes.”
“A little harder?”
“I’ll see what can be done.”
“And will I be thrown out but the rest of you okay?”
“The odds are in favor.”
He looked up at the hill where there was no grave. I looked at the same hill. And maybe he guessed the digging of it there.
He gazed back down the road at the mountains and the sea that could not be seen beyond the mountains and a continent beyond the sea. “That’s a good day you’re talking about.”
“The best.”
“And a good hour and a good second.”
“Really, nothing better.”
“Worth thinking about.”
His hand lay on the doorsill, not leaning, but testing, feeling, touching, tremulous, undecided. But his eyes came full into the light of African noon.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” I said.
“I think,” he said, “I’ll grab a lift with you.”
I waited one heartbeat, then reached over and opened the door.
Silently he got in the front seat and sat there and quietly shut the door without slamming it. He sat there, very old and very tired. I waited. “Start her up,” he said.
I started the engine and gentled it.
“Turn her around,” he said.
I turned the car so it was going back on the road.
“Is this really,” he said, “that kind of car?”
“Really, that kind of car.”
He looked out at the land and the mountains and the distant house.
I waited, idling the motor.
“When we get there,” he said, “will you remember something…?”
“I’ll try.”
“There’s a mountain,” he said, and stopped and sat there, his mouth quiet, and he didn’t go on.
But I went on for him. There is a mountain in Africa named Kilimanjaro, I thought. And on the western slope of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
We
