Ahmed's Revenge Read Online Free Page B

was that the bicep appeared to be bloodless now, like a piece of thick shoe leather or the lolling tongue of a dead cow. I could see the plain white expanse of my husband’s humerus behind his bicep, desolate-looking and thin, like the handle of an unpainted hoe.
    â€œOh dear God!” I moaned, grabbing my own arm and turning my head away. But it was up to me to pick that bicep up and tuck it back in next to the bone. After that I took the cleanest piece of terry-cloth and wrapped everything tight, from my husband’s shoulder to his elbow and below.
    I think I forgot the hole in Jules’s shoulder in order to deal with his arm, but once I got him turned over I could see that though the bullet had entered neatly, where it came out, the wound looked bad. Jules’s right breast, the far right side of his chest, was like a crater on soft ground, so I simply placed layers of folded terry-cloth over it and pushed down.
    â€œCan you help me now?” I shouted at the Maasai. “Can we carry him inside?”
    I was speaking English but the Maasai came right away, and when we lifted Julius up he turned himself under my husband in such a way that Jules’s chest bandage was pressed tightly between them, held in place by the warrior’s back. And when I tried to help he motioned me away and carried my husband into the house, where the other Maasai or one of our field hands had made a makeshift bed on the floor.
    I am trying to let my telling of the story embrace all of the horror that the night contained, though when I remember it now, I think of myself as having been calm. I was doing my best to hold my emotions at bay until I had stopped the bleeding and done the work that needed to be done. Even inside the house with the door closed, I worked as I might had I been tending to a stranger or to a member of our crew. I found blankets to keep Jules warm, and I got on our radio, quickly calling the ranger in charge of the Narok branch of the Ministry of Wildlife and asking that he find a helicopter to send. For once the radio worked well, and in a matter of minutes I had everything arranged. I even went into the kitchen for a bottle of Irish whiskey, poured some of it into a tablespoon, and dripped it down over my husband’s lips and tongue.
    I had forgotten to ask where the helicopter was, whether it was in Narok or Nairobi, but it was too late to radio back by then, for I had begun to shake, I think because everything was done. I asked the Maasai to go out and look into the sky, to listen and watch for the helicopter, and then I got down next to Jules, laying myself along the length of him, so that he could make me stop shaking and I could make him warm. “Dear God, keep him alive!” I whispered. “Don’t let him die!”
    When I heard the helicopter not much time had passed, and when I’d collected myself, getting some money from our desk and calling a couple of the farm workers in from the porch, my shaking was gone. We had a stretcher on the farm, and after the helicopter landed, beating its blades frantically, like wings against our door, we moved Jules out and got him settled on a platform built for such things, on a pontoon just outside the cab.
    The helicopter pilot was a man I knew, an old park ranger who had long ago worked for my father. “Francis,” I said, “quick, get him to Nairobi Hospital. Please, Francis, make us get there now.”
    I got into the helicopter, taking the seat nearest Jules, and as we lifted off I saw my husband’s hair move in the wind and I saw the two Maasai point their spears up and I saw the farm workers all standing together like a choir, their mouths forming zeros as they watched us fall upward into the sky. As we flew over the pond I saw the dead elephant calf, his trunk severed but beside him on the hideous ground, and when we banked into the somehow purple night, I looked down into the Great Rift Valley, then up toward