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with the FN rifle, he held in his gift the seeming power of life and death. I worshipped him.

MR. ADVENTURE’S IMMUNITY
    I had always thought it would be an impossibly tricky sideways maneuver to slip just far enough out of my father’s haphazard but indisputable jurisdiction and under the influence of some other calmer control without eddying out of my life altogether. But Charlie seemed the perfect escort for such a move. He was capable and unflappable, and most important of all, he seemed naïve enough not to know whom he was truly up against. Or perhaps he was above it all. In either case, I was saved.
    For starters, Charlie didn’t appear enthralled or impressed by my father’s suicide mission of a deliberately disordered life. While Charlie had a degree in international business and liked to discuss global finance and economic theory, Dad seemed so bored by money that he kept only mental accounts. “It’ll come out in the wash,” he said, by which I knew he meant he expected to be paid—just as he expected to pay—what was reasonable. Anything more than that didn’t make sense, in part because having a theory about economics was predicated on a certain belief that the world wasn’t a chaotic and surprising place. “You win some, you lose some,” Dad always said, and didn’t seem to mind on which side of that equation he landed.
    Then the strong-arming to drink more than the sensible amount—a couple of beers, an aperitif, a glass of wine with supper—didn’t impress Charlie at all. “What’s the matter with you?” my father asked. “The Muslims get to you?” To which Charlie only smiled and walked away, his left shoulder cocked in a way that I later recognized as an attitude of irritated self-righteousness. “Bloody teetotalers should be shot at dawn,” Dad muttered. “Anyway, half of them, turn your back for three seconds and they’ve siphoned you dry.”
    “Never trust anyone who doesn’t drink,” my mother said.
    But in our very first evening alone together, Charlie defied my parents’ fears and offered me a kamikaze. “Vodka with lime,” he explained. “And there’s supposed to be Triple Sec, but since this is Zambia, we’ll have to make do with a splash of brandy and some orange peel.” It was as if he was speaking an exotic foreign language. I wanted to shut my eyes and listen to him reeling off the ingredients of cocktails for the rest of the evening. Whisky and water was about as sophisticated as we got at the Mkushi Country Club unless it was Greek night. In that case, we always hoped for ouzo. This we drank weakly diluted with Coke until even my mother could understand the logic of lesbianism and the working-class lyricism of Nikos Kazantzakis. “Bouboulina,” she called me then, to show not only her literary prowess but also to demonstrate that all was forgiven.
    I said, “Sounds wonderful.”
    So Charlie mixed two drinks, scraping the skin of a fresh orange over the top of the oily concoctions, and led me into the garden. It was a bachelor setup, a couple of wire lawn chairs, a rickety table, a few straggling plants in pots straining against the enthusiastic but uneven watering regime of his employee, Mr. Sinazongwe. Charlie’s Labrador retriever lay at our feet, panting in the heavy way of a large dog in the tropics. It was a good sign, I thought, that Charlie had brought Tank with him from Wyoming. It demonstrated he was committed to staying in Zambia, because whatever else I knew about him, I chose to believe he was someone who would never leave a dog behind. “I’ll call all my Labradors Tank,” Charlie said. “My grandmother always named her Labrador retrievers Sam.”
    “What if she had more than one dog at a time?” I asked, thinking of our pile of animals.
    “She didn’t.”
    “Oh.” I let this demonstration of heroic restraint settle for a moment.
    Charlie raised his glass, “Nostrovia,” he said.
    “Mud in your eye,” I replied.
    Then I