“I’m sorry I was such a failure again.”
“Let’s not talk about things.”
“Do you hate me?”
“Can we start again the way I’d planned things?”
“I don’t think so.
“Then why did you come in here?”
“This is where I belong.”
“No other reason?”
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.
“I thought you might be lonely.”
“I was.”
“Everybody’s lonely,” David said.
“It’s terrible to be in bed together and be lonely.”
“There isn’t any solution,” David said. “All your plans and schemes are worthless.”
“I didn’t give it a chance.”
“It was all crazy anyway. I’m sick of crazy things. You’re not the only one gets broken up.
“I know. But can’t we try it again just once more and I really be good? I can. I nearly was.
“I’m sick of all of it, Devil. Sick all the way through me.”
“Wouldn’t you try it just once more for her and for me both?”
“It doesn’t work and I’m sick of it.”
“She said you had a fine day and that you were really cheerful and not depressed. Won’t you try it once more for both of us? I want it so much.”
“You want everything so much and when you get it it’s over and you don’t give a damn.”
“I was just overconfident this time and then I get insufferable. Please can we try it again?”
“Let’s go to sleep, Devil, and not talk about it.
“Kiss me again please,” Catherine said. “I’ll go to sleep because I know you’ll do it. You always do everything I want because you really want to do it too.”
“You only want things for you, Devil.”
“That’s not true, David. Anyway I am you and her. That’s what I did it for. I’m everybody. You know about that don’t you?”
“Go to sleep, Devil.”
“I will. But would you please kiss me again first so that we won’t be lonely?”
Chapter Twenty- four
IN THE MORNING he was on the far slope of the mountain again. The elephant was no longer travelling as he had been but was moving aimlessly now, feeding occasionally and David had known they were getting dose to him. He tried to remember how he had felt. He had no love for the elephant yet. He must remember that. He had only a sorrow that had come from his own tiredness that had brought an understanding of age. Though being too young, he had learned how it must be to be too old. He was lonesome for Kibo and thinking of Juma killing the elephant’s friend had turned him against Juma and made the elephant his brother. He knew then how much it meant to him to have seen the elephant in the moonlight and for him to have followed him with Kibo and come close to him in the clearing so that he had seen both of the great tusks. But he did not know that nothing would ever be as good as that again. Now he knew they would kill the elephant and there was nothing he could do about it. He had betrayed the elephant when he had gone back to tell them at the shamba. They would kill me and they would kill Kibo too
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if we had ivory, he had thought and known it was untrue. Prob ably the elephant is going to find where he was born now and they’ll kill him there. That’s all they’d need to make it perfect. They’d like to have killed him where they killed his friend. That would be a big joke. That would have pleased them. The god damned friend killers.
They had moved to the edge of thick cover now and the elephant was close ahead. David could smell him and they could all hear him pulling down branches and the snapping that they made. His father put his hand on David’s shoulder to move him back and have him wait outside and then he took a big pinch of ashes from the pouch in his pocket and tossed it in the air. The ash barely slanted toward them as it fell and his father nodded at Juma and bent down to follow him into the thick cover. David watched their backs and their asses go in and out of sight. He could not hear them move.