Problems with People by David Guterson

I’ll help you with your problem, Nelson. We’ll deal with your employment situation.”
    “There is nothing I can do.” Nelson looked exasperated. “I said to you before, you have to wait.”
    His sister sighed. “Nelson,” she said, “this is no way to act. This is unacceptable. You’re going to pay for this.” She turned a circle in the headlights, turned back to the gate, pressed against it, and again shoved the money through. “Take it,” she said. “You have to. I’m telling you to.”
    “No money.”
    “What a bad job you have here, Nelson,” his sister said. “Don’t you want something better paying? Aren’t you scared out here, all alone?”
    “This is why I have no key,” said Nelson. “Trust. There is no trust of me.”
    “But aren’t you scared of robbers? They’ll cut your throat, robbers. For two rand.”
    “No,” answered Nelson. “I’m scared of lions. Because when the power is gone, there is no electric fence to stop them from coming right here.” He pointed at his feet.
    “Great,” his sister said. “Where does that leave us?”
    Nelson explained that behind them, right behind them, twenty meters wide, was an electric grate. “Don’t go there,” he added. “It’s very bad.”
    “Now you tell us,” his sister said. “Nelson,” she added. “You should be fired from your job. I’m going to see to it that you’re fired.”
    But Nelson didn’t answer. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully,then his neck, then his forehead. “Okay,” he said. “You wait here.” He marched into the guardhouse, shut the door, and didn’t come back.
    They sat in the car for an hour with the sunroof open, the headlights and the motor off, looking at the Southern Hemisphere stars, and he didn’t feel impatient. If they weren’t here, they’d be somewhere else, so what difference did it make? Here or back at their little chalet, looking at stars from there? “You know what?” he said. “I think we’re trapped here. I think we have to make the best of it.”
    His sister adjusted her seat back farther, the better to take in the stars. This caused her wig to unseat a little, and now, while she spoke, she readjusted it. “Make the best of it,” she said, as though it were a novel idea.
    “Yes.”
    “Okay,” she said. “We’ll make the best of it, then, because what choice do we have? We have none.”
    At nine, a convoy of open-air minibuses rumbled up behind them, each full of guests who had paid extra for nocturnal sightseeing, through night-vision binoculars, of wildlife. He took pictures of a man wearing complicated goggles with straps and a chin buckle. This was the kind of subject he liked, and he snapped away at it with interest. Then the ranger in the lead minibus leapt out and unlocked the gate, and everybody drove through, including them, while Nelson saluted each driver. When they were abreast of him, his sister opened her window and said, “Sorry, Nelson!” before following the convoy to the Golden Leopard. In their chalet, they freshened up, then went for a celebratory late dinner—celebratoryof their liberation from Pilanesberg—on the resort’s terrace, which was lit by kerosene torches. But his sister couldn’t eat anything and drank water and watched with a hand against her gut while he tucked into a carpaccio of impala served with sliced melon and chilled cottage cheese, followed by an impala T-bone steak, rare, with mushrooms, onions, carrots, and courgettes, and, for dessert, two scones with cream, jam, and a snifter of port. This meal tired him out so completely that in the thatch-roofed hut he could do nothing but sit while his sister lay with a damp towel across her forehead and her wig on a side table.
    At dawn, he went out onto the porch with his camera. He liked dawn now, in the middle of his life. There were strange noises in the distance, reverberating thuds that turned out to be baboons knocking over rubbish bins. He watched through his telephoto