He sensed that he was not alone. Were they both there? No, not both: it was inconceivable that Aminata would quietly abide the presence of her enemy. Except in dream; in his dream they had coexisted as happily as the wives of Pa Bangura, though now he could not remember in what circumstance. He stared up into darkness, recalling fragments of the dream. The rustling distracted him. What was going on? Which one of them was there in the darkness? Or was it both of them, and why were they hiding? He said Aminata’s name, then Marie’s. The rustling stopped.
“Marie.” He said her name again; and again; and yet again; louder each time, the sound of her name reminding him of their last day together, at River Number Two: a day of truce after that infamous evening at Farrah’s, which had started as a farewell party full of happiness and had ended in exhausting, night-long battle.
Marie kneeling in the sand over the black woman, then looking up and ordering Kevin to bring the doublecab around. Robert leaning into his crutches, saying nothing. Kevin and Farrah helping Marie drag the black woman to the Land Rover. The somber drive, first to Victoria’s ruined shit-stinking house where they poured her drunk onto the gray mattress, then to the Tropic. Kevin’s and Rachel’s restrained good-byes, leaving the two of them alone to end their week of skirmishing with the real fighting. The lovemaking a rambunctious culmination of battle—interludes of armistice coming out of exhaustion, not resolution. He said her name again: “Marie!” No answer.
But no answer was the answer. That was what she’d said, that there was no answer to this problem. He was an African man. And she would not let herself love an African man. “That’s not going to happen to me, I’m not going to be wife number one, or wife number anything.” Raising his head in surprise, he had looked down into her face, which had been ghostly in first light. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you love too many women.”
“I love you.”
“Well then, you fuck too many women. How many do I not know about?”
“None.”
Silence. Lowering his head, he’d kissed her neck and she’d stroked his back.
“I’m not going to let myself love you,” she’d said.
“You just said you loved me.”
Running her hands down over his buttocks: “When you’re inside me I can’t help it.”
“I’m gonna stay inside you.” He’d moved his hips a little, to get another I-love-you out of her, but he was spent, utterly and completely spent, and the movement caused him to slip limply out. He told her again that he loved her, but this time it had sounded more like a capitulation than a protestation of love, and she had laughed at the unintended appropriateness of timing and tone; drew him down, kissed him, moved her hands over his back: “I know—and I love you.” Then, more gently: “But after a while I won’t. I’m not going to let it happen.”
“You can’t just turn it off.”
“I can do anything I want.”
“Okay, you can, but you shouldn’t want to. If you love me you should want to be with me.”
“Be with you? As one of your wives? What kind would I be? Maybe an African version of Rachel? To compete with the little-titi version of Aminata? Or the whore version of that creature at Farrah’s?”
“Goddamn it! Where are you getting this African shit? I’m not an African. And what the hell’s Rachel got to do with this?”
Angrily now: “Two or three wives like that little titi from Bonthe—that’s what you deserve—not me.” She’d pushed him off of her and the battle had started again.
That presence, that unsettling, rustling presence: still there—like someone attending him. Someone watching him when he couldn’t watch back. It made him nervous. Marie? Why was she hiding from him? Why didn’t she say something? Why didn’t she turn on the lights? From all around him that rustling. “What are you doing?” he asked irritably. He blinked up at blackness, moved his hand, felt a cool hard thing. The telephone. He was not as confused as he was beginning to think. “Never mind,” he said amiably. “I found it.” He moved his fingers over it. What the hell kind of telephone is this? Hard things, sticking out, wiggling. Wiggling things on a telephone? A wave of revulsion brought him fully awake. What the fucking hell is going on? He hauled himself incautiously to a sitting position. And paid for it: he’d forgotten Pain; had wakened Pain, who roared his anger up through Robert’s leg and belly and chest and head. Robert yelled, fell back, struggled up against the roaring: “Oh fuck!—what the fuck is—oh, sonofabitch—oh shit oh shit—” He fumbled for the flashlight, found it, switched it on, discovered them everywhere, dancing on the sand as far as the beam of his flashlight reached, on his blanket, poking at his bandaged foot, dancing between his legs, scratching the sand where he had vomited: come to clean up his vomit, and him too—if he was as dead as he smelled. Hundreds of them, now in a panic, skittering pell-mell down the face of the beach and into the surf.
When he could control his hands he opened the bottle of codeine and swallowed some pills. He got the crutch that Alusine had made for him, and still as naked as when he’d emerged from the sea hours before, slung his knapsack over his back and swung himself across the sand, like those hundreds and hundreds of polio-crippled Freetown beggars. Away from the beach he spread his blanket, put on his long sleeved shirt, and struggled into the long pants. He stretched himself out and looked up into the darkness. No stars. No moon. Nothing. Just him and the rumble and the swash of surf, muted now. And an onshore wind that had the palms talking to him with their chattery, cheerful, papery murmur and kept the mosquitoes hunkered down in their sheltering mangroves. It was a stiff breeze, but it was warm, soft, even tender. And transient: it would die out soon and spring up again in the morning, from the east, bringing the mosquitoes from the swamp. He thought about putting the net up, went so far as to think through the geometry of lines he would string between a couple of the palms, decided he couldn’t manage it. Instead, he put some repellent on his face and pulled the sheet up under his chin.
He stared, trying to see the shape of the nothingness above him, trying to find perspective in something near going out to something far, the close converging on the distant, but the blackness was impregnable: a vast impenetrable secret with no near, no far, no past, no future. He switched the flashlight on to convince himself he was not blind. A reassuring beam of white shot out into space; he directed it around until it found the top of a coconut palm, held it there for a moment, switched it off.
Above him darkness, beneath him yellow sand. On one side the sea, on the other side the mangrove swamp. Dread squeezed his chest when he thought about the dense thickets of the swamp, going on endlessly; farther than he had imagined—for miles, for days, for weeks. Forever. And the ocean: also dark, also going on farther than he could imagine, all the way to the place he came from. But the place he came from was no longer his place. He was an African now. This place was his place. He smiled, grateful for the size and the blackness and the wildness of the ocean that separated his place from the place he came from, grateful even for the soldier crabs that guarded its boundaries and ate its enemies.
The codeine gradually calmed Pain, persuaded Pain to settle down. He drifted in and out of sleep.
It was full light when his thirst and his bladder woke him: the priest’s water, wanting in and wanting out. Reminding him of the sulfadiazine. He tossed the sheet off, sat up carefully, stretched against the soreness he felt throughout his body; moving slowly so that he did not awaken Pain. Using the crutch he got himself to his feet, limped off a few paces and urinated. He looked around. Palm trees and patches of gray grass and coarse yellow sand and white sky. He went back to the blanket and lowered himself to a sitting position and dragged the knapsack to him and opened it and withdrew the khaki shorts and shirt. He got into the clothes, which were stiff from the salt of his sweat and the sea, and drank some water with a handful of the sulfadiazine tablets, then dug into his knapsack and got a tin of sardines and his last piece of bread. He made himself eat all of the sardines, even dipping the bread in the oil as he usually did, washing down each bite with gulps of water. When he finished he packed his knapsack and hobbled across the sand toward the mangroves, following the gouges back to the dugout.
By the time he had fought his way through the mud and the tangle of mangrove runners to the dugout Pain was awake. Awake and pissed. He pleaded with Pain to accept what had to be, explained that all of this was necessary. But Pain wasn’t listening. Pain was pissed and Pain let him know about it. Sweat streamed off his face and arms, soaking his clothes, and the black slime climbed his legs. When he finally got himself situated in the dugout—breathless and quivering and still pleading with rampaging Pain—he swallowed more of the codeine and splashed the swamp water over his legs until the muck was gone, then cut the blackened bandage off, and with shaking hands gingerly spread the antiseptic salve over his wound. His toes poked weirdly out of the red, drum-tight roundness of his foot. Meandering cracks showed in the skin, seeping a brownish liquid. The swelling was up past his ankle now, and the skin of his puffed-up toes bubbled over with gas blisters. Burdened as he was with lassitude and a clotted-up thickness of thought, he was nonetheless rational, and being rational, he knew what he was looking at, understood what it meant, forced himself to look at it and think about it. But the reality was too harsh to comprehend: he escaped into his heady disorientation; the priest’s sulfadiazine would hold it off until he got to Bonthe, where he would call Mike on the radio and Mike would send a helicopter for him, and when he got to Mike’s basement clinic he would be okay. Mike would fix him like he had fixed him before. He opened the plastic bottle and got some more sulfadiazine.
He had no sense of time passing nor of movement along the narrow, turning waterway. The clumsiness of his canoe handling on the first day was no longer evident. He maneuvered the dugout effortlessly and naturally. For a while he was quite disciplined about it, stopping at every confluence of channels to drop a leaf. But this tiresome business took more concentration than he could muster. His mind wandered and he began to rely on intuition.
As long as he kept his blood loaded with the codeine and his foot undisturbed the lassitude brought on by the fever was tolerable; indeed, it was almost pleasant. The heady laziness was rather like being high, though he certainly didn’t have the sense of pleasurable expectancy that came from being jamba high. Notwithstanding that, he rather liked the indiscipline of his thoughts. As soon as one idea settled in, another one appeared and shoved it aside. At one moment he was arguing with Kevin, loudly and quite vehemently, with gestures of the paddle to emphasize his point, and something Kevin said introduced Julie Bush, and his fever-damaged Thought Priority Control System, his TPCS—which he visualized as a lump of brain matter as big and wrinkly as a walnut—let Julie shove Kevin completely off the edge of his consciousness, in mid-sentence, and come to him and lean solicitously down and take his hand, and then his TPCS unplugged her and Marie was there on her knees again in front of that chair in the hotel giving him that amazing blowjob—the first one, which so surprised him; blew him away, actually, when she’d pulled his shorts down and pushed him back in the chair. The plastic had felt just like the icy sofa in Max’s office, which was always so cold you had to wear a coat; and then he was listening to Max bitching as usual about Neggie, and he was pissed at Max—Max had interrupted something extremely pleasurable, but he couldn’t remember what it was—and then it came to him that he’d left Marie in mid-blowjob, and he cursed his TPCS for admitting all these distractions. He tried to think only about Marie, but his TPCS lost control again, synapses snapping and popping, circuits flopping open and closed, kaleidoscopically flashing unpredictable images that had nothing to do with her. By an extreme exertion of will he managed to get her face in front of him, but in a second she was gone again and he was looking at Aminata’s skinny, bony shoulders and those little cups of tit on either side of her chest (his interest in which endlessly amused her), and just as suddenly a vague, faceless David was telling him solemnly that it was time.
He woke, his face and arms itching like hell from mosquito bites. He struggled slowly to an upright position, found the canoe hung up across a channel, laboriously freed it, continued on. His distance from himself seemed to have increased, but that didn’t feel so bad; indeed, except for an occasional ill-tempered growl from Pain he felt almost okay. The sulfadiazine, he thought hazily. It was working. More, he thought. Take more. He put the paddle in the dugout and rummaged in his knapsack, found the bottle of tablets.
He did not see the change in the character of the river—the channels growing wider and the flow of water increasing, the waterways coalescing. A river was forming and he did not see it. Sometime late in the afternoon he came around a curve in a channel and found himself paddling slowly into a long body of silvery water. Ahead of him the water seemed to split into two bodies, both widening into the distance, both guarded by walls of mangroves. When he realized that the body on the right had to be the Sewa River, he stopped paddling and stared, only half believing, not really trusting his TPCS to sort out what was illusion and what was real. When he became convinced it was real he turned to the priest and said, “See, you fucker, I told you.”
Gbap showed up on only the most detailed maps of Sierra Leone. A residual dot, representing a residue of colonialism. At one time it possessed the only pier between Bonthe and Liberia, to which a small river steamer came and tied up once a week, bringing mail, beer, wine, and other comforts for the white owners who supervised scores of blacks toiling in the rice plantation.
In every way the body of water had the characteristics of a lake, in no way the characteristics of a river. And yet, because it was so much longer than it was wide, and because rivers entered and left it, and because, like the rivers that fed and drained it (its course meandered northwestward, always within a mile or two of the ocean) it was called a river. The Kitammi.
Robert nudged his dugout ashore at Gbap, in darkness, guided the last couple of miles by the glimmer of cooking fires, and was discovered, after he climbed stiffly out of the dugout, by a child who had come down to the lake to defecate, and upon seeing him ran howling back to the huts and the cooking fires with yellow shit dribbling down his legs. The child knew Robert—had sat in Robert’s lap a dozen times. But the child did not see Robert inside the lionmaned, shaggy-faced bush devil walking toward him over the blackness of the lake.
A fisherman came warily down the muddy slope to investigate. He immediately recognized Robert inside the shadowy devil, and greeted him with delight, yelled for his wife and for the others to come, grabbed Robert’s hand, and pumping it, jabbered questions. Soon a dozen adults and a bee hive of children buzzed about him, laughing and chattering familiarly. Was Robert back in the Bonthe Station? Why did he come in a dugout? Where was Hassan and the sea car? And his foot—had he injured himself? Was he all right?
He slept that night among friends—the fisherwomen and fishermen, rice farmers and market women. They had taken over the land abandoned two generations before by the colonial rice farmers, who had carried their bags aboard the steamer one morning and never looked back, leaving houses and sheds to fall down in ruins and fences to sink into the marsh and iron-wheeled steam-powered tractors to rust and become drift fences for blowing sand and shelter for bamboo that rooted in the sand and collected more sand, and over a long time would make an anomalous, mysterious little mound around and over each tractor, rather like the siliceous material that accumulates over millions of years around a chunk of shit to form a thunder egg. But this thunder egg was still unfinished. Now it was rusty steel showing through the lushness of bamboo.
Behind a pair of these nascent hillocks was a banda. Nearby a double line of carious stumps ran out into the water: the ruin of the white man’s pier. Women reached over the banda’s waist-high drying platform through wisps of smoke to gather stiff, leathery little carcasses of fish, some three inches long, some as big as a hand. They packed the still-warm smoke-mummies one by one into spherical baskets that would be heavy headloads even for the sturdiest woman. The baskets would join others that had been accumulating near the ruined pier, some brought by the women of Gbap, some by women from villages with similar names but no dot on the map.
While the women cleared the banda and packed the baskets, the men sat talking worriedly with Robert. They were disturbed because they had smelled and seen the wounded foot. It had cracked open across the top, the skin beginning to peel back like the skin of a roasted chicken, and a foul-smelling brown and gray liquid came from the wound. They pleaded with him to let them carry him to a famous herbalist who lived a few miles up the Sewa River. Robert had dreamily said no, the foot would be all right, he was taking sulfadiazine for it. That was better than the medicine of native doctors. He even opened the knapsack and showed them the bottle of yellow tablets. They had looked doubtfully at the tablets, then started in on him again. This had been going on all morning, while the women listened from a distance, concerned, but busy packing the hundreds of dozens of tiny dried fish.
They heard the pampam coming through the haze before they saw it, the faint tut-tut-tut-tut-tut coming strong and then waning as a fitful mid-afternoon breeze came and went. It was a quarter-mile away when they saw it materialize, a long, dark, high-prowed vessel that was too narrow and too top-heavy to be seaworthy. The diesel engine stopped when the fifty-foot craft was still two boat-lengths off shore, the boat’s momentum nosing it into the mud near the stumps of the pier. Several men dropped over the side into the waist-deep water. The women, some with babies slung on their backs, made their way forward between benches lining the gunwales and at the place where the gunwales rose sharply to meet the prow climbed over the side and down a ladder into the shallows and waded ashore, holding their lappas up out of the mud. The captain’s two apprentice boys clambered up onto the deck above and passed down baskets, plastic tubs, string-tied boxes, cloth-wrapped bundles, and ties of firewood. In the stern the captain—young Ibrahim Turay—had the cover off the engine housing, and though the engine was too hot to touch, was tinkering with a hose that carried water into the cooling jacket. The problem had plagued him for two years. The engine would overheat and quit, and only after it had cooled could it be restarted. The engine had quit the afternoon before, in the worst possible place: the middle of Sherbro Strait on an ebbing tide. The tide had carried the pampam past the river mouth and out the Strait into the sea. The vessel had drifted with the current five miles up the seaward side of Bonthe Island before the captain got the engine started. By then the craft, which was loaded too high and too heavily to be in any sea, rolled so extremely that the passengers sobbed and groaned and held one another or hung their heads over the side, puking; knowing they were as good as dead, that it was only a matter of minutes before the sea capsized the pampam and swallowed them as it had swallowed the passengers of that pampam that had run up on the rock just a few miles away, on the north side of the island. Darkness was closing in when they came pitching and rolling through the ferocious rip of longshore current and tidal ebb at the mouth of the Strait and entered the quiet water of the river mouth. They tied up to mangroves in the darkness, giddily happy to be ashore and alive, congratulating one another on the miracle of their survival and excitedly telling and retelling the story of the unlucky pampam killed by the angry rock, discovering in the retelling the underlying logic of those fifty deaths and their own survival: the rock, they said, had once occupied an honorable place on an island beach, and it had been angered when children of a nearby village began using it as a place to shit and had gone to sea to wash itself; there it had seen the pampam and had gotten its revenge by moving cunningly into the path of the pampam, killing everyone—except of course the white man from Bonthe whose juju magic enabled him to simply walk ashore on top of the water.
That white man dazedly watched the unloading and the reloading of this pampam, Shebar II, and when it was done got his crutch and with the help of some fishermen made his way back to the hut of the headman, where he had slept. He thanked the headman’s wife and gave her a gift of money. He realized he would not need the long pants and the long-sleeved shirt any more, so he gave the shirt to one fisherman, the pants to another. They thanked him profusely. Looking into the knapsack, he thought he might as well give the rest of it away. He gave the net to the headman, the sheet to his wife, the pan, the tins of sardines, and the plastic bottle to whomever was closest. He turned from the murmurings of thanks and some young fishermen helped him down the slope past the banda where the women still worked hurriedly to fill the last basket with the dried fish. One of the fisherman waded to the side of the pampam and handed the knapsack—empty now except for the medical kit and the sulfadiazine—to one of the captain’s bobos, who tossed it up on the deck above the benches that lined the gunwale. The captain stepped up behind the boy and blind-sided him with a resounding slap across the side of his head. The boy yelped in much greater voice than pain, which earned him a kick from the captain and the sniggers of the other boy, who scrambled up on the deck, retrieved the knapsack, and passed it down to the captain, who carried it back to the seat of honor next to his own in the stern.
The headman said something and two sturdy fishermen sprang forward and made a seat behind Robert with their crossed arms. Robert sat, put his arms over their shoulders, and they carried him into the water. Their skin was dusty and strong-smelling and tight and smooth and black and hot, and ridged and rounded by hard muscles that moved smoothly beneath the tight skin. The captain helped lift Robert over the gunwale, then helped him make his way back between the benches to the captain’s seat in the stern. Robert preferred to be in the bow, as far as possible from the rattle and the heat and the smell of the diesel engine, but he knew the young boat captain, and it would be insulting to decline to sit with him.
When the last of the baskets had been stowed on the deck above the rows of benches the passengers climbed aboard. Villagers waded out and shoved the bow of the pampam off the mud and the captain started the engine. He turned the craft toward the northern end of the long meandering lake, and the thirty market women and fishermen and children settled themselves to pass the time eating dried fish and mangos and bananas and oranges, and laughing, and telling stories, and sleeping, as the mixed shoreline of sand dunes, impenetrable mangrove, and marshy grass slid by.
The air was a hot and livid pink from the fire that lingered in the western sky. As the pampam approached the landing beach its engine stopped; it slowed and its prow eased into the soft mud, coming to a stop fifty feet from the crumbling retaining wall.
The trip was uneventful. The engine had quit a couple of times, but not in situations that brought complication: once in the long lake, when young Ibrahim Turay had simply taken the engine cover off, sat back for an hour with his cap pulled down on his nose, and slept while the air cooled the engine; the second time at the river mouth, where the flow of the river and the flow of the flooding tide carried the drifting craft toward York Island. But that was the direction of their travel anyway, so no one minded.
The passengers were clambering over the side of the pampam into the muddy shallows when someone in the crowd shouted, “Mistah Robaht!”
Robert raised his head and turned toward the sound, but the darkness had thickened and he could not see who had shouted his name.
“Mistah Robaht!”
He looked again. Hassan? What would he be doing here? There was a murmur from the dozen villagers who had gathered to greet the passengers, but it was too dark to see who was there. The only light now came from the smear of deep red that lingered in the sky over the mangroves beyond the village, and from a couple of kerosene lanterns on traders’ tables. He was perplexed—he seemed to know this place, had a feeling that he knew it well, but that intimate knowledge of this place was somehow not available to him: his fucked-up TPCS again. His gaze roamed down the beach, searching for something that would bring the knowledge back. When his gaze came to the familiar blocky grayness looming like a ghost against the black of trees his mouth dropped open. The image short-circuited his failing TPCS, connected the disconnected synapses, liberated a flood of recollection. The station—his village—home. He turned his wondering gaze back to the beach. That ripple of dark movement: he knew these people. Their calls had died down to a worried murmur as passengers moved with their headloads through the mud and then among them, telling them about their sick white man.
He looked back up the beach at the white station building with its balcony overhanging the porch and the heavy wooden doors that opened into the store. A faint glow of yellow came from beyond the French doors on the second floor. Aminata was home. She would help him. He would rest and take the sulfadiazine and Pain would leave his leg forever and soon he would be running the path again, as he had every morning for years.
Something on his shoulder. He looked up into Ibrahim Turay’s face, in lantern light. Young. Worried. Smelling overpoweringly of stale sweat and tobacco and fish and diesel oil; teeth, sharpened in adolescence to ferocious spikes behind fat lips; cheeks and forehead tight with youth and well marked with ridges of decorative scars that made a lovely fearsome pattern that he envied very much. He wanted scars like that.
“Sah,” the captain said, “we go carry you go upsai.”
Robert gave himself to the many hands lifting him up and over the side, trusting these hands to carry him safely ashore and up the gravel walk and up the familiar wide concrete staircase and across the fruit salad tile of the airy high-ceilinged flat and put him into his bed, where Aminata waited.
Pain had subsided into a growling, suspicious quiet. Robert let his gaze roam over the netting top, noted the tiny droppings of the bats that came at night and competed with the geckoes for insects. Aminata had rolled the sides of the netting and neatly tied them so that the net would come down with a simple pull of the string. He had taught her that.
The oily scent of kerosene, from the cooking stove. The soft air of a bright yellow morning. Rustling. Murmurs. Words of Krio, words of Sherbro. Clicking: the palms talking to the wind beyond the open window. Alexander looking down at him, face close and wet, eyes squinting—as if Pain had burrowed down into him as well.
“Can you understand me?”
Robert nodded slowly, rolling his eyes over to Aminata’s face, which was all knotted up and wet. And another face, that of a frightened old man he did not know. Gray hair, wrinkled and dusty skin, dirty white shirt under a clownish remnant of black dinner jacket. All he needed was a top hat and he’d be ready to hit the town. Hat! Of course—he had never seen the old herbalist without his battered bowler. He nodded at the face of old Mister Benga, who acknowledged his nod with a solemn blink of eyes.
“—says we must.” Alexander’s face all screwed up like he was going to cry.
What’s the matter with him now? Him and his tantrums. What a royal pain in the ass. And yet—and yet, you had to admit he got it done. You had to admit he got results. And he was no hypocrite about what he expected. He told you who he was and what he wanted—which was other people’s things. Taking things from people who already don’t have a thing except their skins—but what the fuck, that’s the way life is, isn’t it? That’s all life is. A lot of people who don’t have a thing giving what they have to a few who have everything already. That’s what Robert had been doing all those years in Njala and then Bonthe: getting it. While piously believing he was giving. A white man needs to do that. Believe he is giving while he is taking. The African man doesn’t. That was the difference between him and his brother, Alexander. What is his brother saying?
“Minister Kargbo has taken the radio—there’s no way we can call—”
Robert lost the thread. Where the hell was Alexander taking this? And why so many words?
“Do you understand?”
He shook his head, still looking up into Alexander’s strangely anguished face.
“There is no radio. We cannot call.”
This seemed important, so he tried hard to understand, managed to capture the idea of no radio, held it tenaciously while his TPCS labored to reconnect enough of the frayed synapses for him to understand how that fact related to his present situation. “Okay,” he croaked, “the sea car, Hassan can take me—”
“Minister Kargbo keeps the sea car in Freetown. And the engine of the pampam is spoiled. We have tried to make it, Hassan and Mister Turay are still working—”
Too many words!
“We cannot wait. Do you understand?”
The old herbalist’s big eyes blinking down at him.
“Mister Benga says we cannot wait.”
Hearing his name, the old man nodded soberly.
Robert’s TPCS was doing a great job: he was beginning to understand, and the shock of what he understood left him breathless. “No,” he croaked, his heart pounding, “no, no—the sea car—call Kargbo, make him—”
Mister Benga understood “no” and “sea car” and “Kargbo.” He looked at Alexander.
Alexander withdrew. Mister Benga followed. Good. Jesus Christ—Robert’s heart pounding so hugely that the sound of it blocked out the murmurs and shuffles and the clicking of the palms—Jesus Christ on a crutch, what the hell are they thinking! And then Robert’s TPCS lost it again, let it all come unraveled, and he didn’t have any idea what had excited him, knew only that a bubble of terror was swelling in his chest, crowding his heart. He looked anxiously for Aminata, saw her wet face across the room staring at him like he was a leper.
The night sky glowed with stars. It was a rainy season sky, a sky swarming with life, the life evident in its busyness. The stately drift of satellites; occasional streaks of meteoric suicides so breathlessly quick they were gone before his brain knew his eye had captured them; the sky alive and swinging majestically one way, then another, reminding him of the way the blanket of lights had swept up Signal Hill that night so long ago, when he had dined with Kevin and Rachel.
Though he had awakened only minutes before, he knew where he was. The diesel and dried fish smells, the cargo deck above, the iodine scent of seawater, the rattly tut-tut-tut-tut, the languorous roll: these observations informed him that the long port side bench of Shebar II was under him, and the ocean was under Shebar II. And that bulky blackness on the starboard bench, silhouetted against the glow of the Milky Way—that was Alexander’s profile. He wondered what could possibly bring Alexander out here?
“Mister Alexander,” Robert whispered through paper dry lips. “I de want watah. Duya, I beg, make I get watah.”
The silhouette jerked and there was a sound of sucking air. “Mister Kelley! My God! You are awake. Yes. Water.” He jumped up, shouted: “Mister Benga, bring water! Quickly!”
A clatter from the stern; and voices: Alexander’s, then Mister Benga’s. Robert raised his right shoulder, got his elbow under him; tried to raise himself, but couldn’t manage it. He fell back on something soft, felt a surly stab of pain from his foot, steeled himself for the rest of it, for Pain’s onslaught. And there was pain, all right, sharp and penetrating pain. But not Pain. He waited tensely. Pain did not appear.
Alexander, all bulked out by his orange life vest, hanging a lantern. Bowler-hatted Mister Benga. Ibrahim Turay, his spiked teeth showing in a grin. Hassan, all eyes. Alexander kneeled, lifted Robert’s head, held a cup to his lips. Robert sipped the fragrant liquid, followed its soothing coolness all the way to his stomach. The liquid grabbed at his mouth astringently, pleasantly. A familiar texture—what was it? He remembered: the juice of crushed pawpaw leaves in water. Aminata had given him that remedy more than once. For fever, even—ineffectively—for malaria. He drained the cup. And then another. And tried to drink more, but his stomach was full.
Alexander lowered Robert’s head to the mattress.
“How mos time?” Robert croaked.
“It will soon be morning,” Alexander said. “You have slept through two days.”
Robert tried to comprehend sleeping for two days. He couldn’t. “Usai we dey? Yawri Bay?”
“Mister Turay says we are through the bay. I think we have passed the Banana Islands.” Alexander fell silent for several seconds, then spoke again, hesitantly. “Do you know—what has happened?”
Robert looked past Alexander’s face and the lantern’s glare to the night sky, which was not so beautiful now. The lantern ruined its richness, hid the best part of it, which was the glow of it’s life. He wanted Alexander to kill the lantern.
“Do you know?” Alexander asked again.
Robert was looking for the life in the night sky.
“You were dying.”
Robert looked sharply at Alexander, then Mister Benga, his heart suddenly pounding, his head light. “No—”
“You were dying—”
Robert seemed not to notice that it was day; seemed uncaring that two miles to starboard the sun was spilling its light gloriously through a tumult of cloud down green mountain sides; seemed unaware that the warm morning breeze from off those mountains had in an hour’s time strengthened to a near gale; seemed oblivious of Shebar II’s struggle against an increasingly choppy whitecapped sea, which put the boat into a continuous pattern of extreme corkscrew rolls—snappy, whippy rolls that forced Ibrahim Turay to wedge himself into his seat beside the engine housing where he puffed his pipe and ate dried fish, and which had Alexander clinging in a death grip to one of the baggage deck supports and hanging his head over the side, puking, while Mister Benga and Hassan sat side by side on the deck at midships, their feet against the starboard bench, their backs against the port bench, stoically awaiting their fates.
An hour before, when the wind picked up, Mister Benga had helped Hassan jury rig a bulwark on the open side of the seat to contain Robert. They had wedged him in with blankets and life jackets—except Alexander’s, which he refused to give up—and covered him with a plastic sheet to keep him dry. Shebar II had fought her way northwestward as far as Whale Bay before the wind began its late morning moderation. By the time they had motored another ten miles the whitecaps were gone and the sea was an oily smooth swell that was so long and low that you could not see it unless you looked toward the shore, a mile to starboard, and saw that the shoaling bottom crowded it up into a surf that spilled over white sand.
“Ree-vah Numbah Two,” Ibrahim Turay said. He had come forward to check on Robert and Alexander had asked him where they were.
Robert stiffened. He turned his head but couldn’t see over the bulwark. He tried to raise himself.
Alexander appeared and looked down at Robert, his face anxious. “What do you want, Mister Kelley? Water? Mister Benga, bring water!”
“I want to see.”
Alexander took his hands and pulled him to a sitting position.
Robert looked down at his lap and his legs, which were under the sheet. His right leg ended at the tent of his foot. The sheet flattened out below his left knee. He stared at the place where his left leg should be. He moved the stump, flinched when it answered with a surge of pain. “My foot—I feel it,” he murmured wonderingly. “I can even move my toes—I’ve been doing it all morning—moving my toes.”
“We had to do it,” Alexander said earnestly. “Please believe me, we had to do it—you were dying. It was very bad.” He had said these words many times since Robert woke in the middle of the night but Robert never showed that he heard.
“Yes, I know.”
Robert looked across the water. He knew this stretch of beach. He and Marie had spent many days together on that beach. She always got him to bring her here when she visited Salone; had even gotten to know some of the women who lived in the half-dozen huts back in the trees; had begun to regard them as friends and clients, these wives and mothers of families that managed to scratch a life out of fishing and cultivating patches of sweet potatoes and cassava and guarding the cars and motorcycles of weekending Freetown expats. But neither Marie nor Robert had seen River Number Two from the sea. Now he looked across a mile of flat green water to a low line of surf breaking on white beach. Tall ragged-topped palms lined the beach and inland of the palms the green sides of mountains slanted gradually upward, then more sharply up into rocky talus slopes and cliffs. From a mile offshore the river itself was invisible, though he could discern its location by the presence of the river valley and the patch of mangroves that flanked the estuary. There, where the whiteness of beach yielded to encroaching palms, were the sorry little beach baffas the villagers had erected to shelter the delicate skins of Freetown expats. A long time ago he and Marie had sheltered from a storm in one of them, and they had heard the rain rattling the palm thatch roof, heard it trickling through in rivulets that spilled down, almost warm, on his bare back and into her face as he moved in her, heard the little boys come to the entrance and stand there in the rain and giggle and beg for money.
He watched the mangroves and the valley and the baffas slide slowly behind, until they disappeared, replaced by a black rocky shoreline that was marked by white patches of sandy inlets.
Robert drank more of the astringent water and fell, exhausted, back on the mattress. He let his mind wander; dreamily remembered the miles from River Number Two to Freetown; calculated that Shebar II’s seven knots would bring them to the King Jimmi landing in four hours—in the middle of the day, when the market would be hot and noisy and teeming with market women and customers and boats coming and going. He thought about the things he would do when they got to the landing. First he would send Hassan up the hill to the Zimi office to get Kevin, and then to the embassy for Mike, and before Mike took charge of him and carried him off to his basement hospital—where he would do God knows what to him, maybe cut some more off his leg—he would tell Kevin what he knew about Daniel and Prince and Pa Bangura, and he’d find out if Gunter and Rex and Ladipor had gotten out okay, and if there was fighting in Pujehun. And of course Marie: he would ask Kevin to send her a cable telling her about his leg. But no—not a cable: a cable would open more questions than it answered. Receiving a cable like that, not hearing the details from him—no, he would not send a cable, he’d call.
He made that call in his head as he looked up at the underside of the cargo deck, heard himself tell her that they had cut off his leg, heard her response—in several versions. The one that he liked best had her saying she was coming to Freetown immediately. She would come to Freetown and it would be just like before, only this time she would not say no to Kevin, this time there would be no anger, no quarreling; this time she was coming to stay. He played that version of their conversation several times as he watched clouds coalescing along the mountain tops. But his erratic TPCS did not let him think about it for very long. Soon Daniel and Prince and Pa Bangura were in his thoughts again.
“Mister Alexander. What happened in Pujehun? Was it Minah’s people?”
“I know nothing. When Mister Wagner left me at Matruh, on the last day, it was quiet. We had no problems.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“I don’t know. I think it started in Freetown. Mister Turay was in Freetown when some soldiers and some Lebanese tried to seize the government. He said loyal soldiers killed some of them and captured the rest.”
“But what about Daniel and Prince and Pa Bangura and Gunter and—”
Alexander shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Mike’s khaki legs appeared on the stone jetty among the many black legs. He squatted and looked in under the cargo deck. “They’re bringing the litter down the stairs. We’ll have you out of here in a minute.”
Robert did not respond. He was staring at the underside of the cargo deck.
“You still with us?” Mike asked.
Robert looked over at him and watched him climb down into the boat.
“That morphine do it for you?” Mike asked.
Robert nodded sleepily.
“So as soon as he heard about Prince and Daniel and the driver he went upline,” Max said. He had been telling Robert where Kevin was. “To take care of Daniel’s family and to get the bodies. He and Gunter and an escort of soldiers went to Pujehun yesterday.”
“It’s confirmed then—” Robert murmured.
“Yes. Some farmers found Bangura and Prince on a sand bar. Daniel was shot. Don’t know the circumstances, but it appears he was approaching some soldiers at a road block.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, bum deal.”
“Was it Minah?”
“Yes. And the usual Lebs. They even had an Englishmen in with them, which really fueled the mercenary rumors. Turns out he was just an accountant who worked for one of the Lebs. It wasn’t much of a coup. Even by African standards it was a cluster fuck. We heard rumors of it for days before it happened. I think Momoh knew all about it from the start, and waited until Minah had committed himself so he could nail him for treason. It was over in two hours. Except in Pujehun. Momoh’s people have scores to settle there, so the killing there went on for three or four days. Grimes is there now, looking for his PCVs. You feel like telling us what happened to you?”
“No, he doesn’t,” Mike said. “Later.” He had pulled the sheet off Robert’s legs and was bending over the stump. “These red streaks—septicemia. But not bad. Could have been a lot worse.”
“It was the priest’s sulfadiazine,” Robert said sleepily.
“What?”
“The priest at Sama—”
“Father Meagan. You saw him?”
“He gave me sulfadiazine.”
“Useless in this situation. We’ll get you going on antibiotics.” He inspected the bandage. “Mister Benga told me about the amputation. A most interesting procedure. And a most interesting old man. Incredible knowledge of plants and herbs.”
“Fuck, they shot him,” Robert murmured. His mind had drifted back to what Max told him about Daniel. “It was because he was with me. They thought I was a mercenary.”
“His instruments and technique are right out of the eighteenth century,” Mike was saying. “He’s a time capsule. Reminded me of something I read in medical school, an article by a Royal Navy surgeon about amputating legs and arms at Trafalgar. Tubs and tubs of them. The old man knew what he was doing—explained where he made the incision, how he tied off the artery, how he sawed the bone back so he’d have enough meat to make a stump.” He looked into Robert’s face, pulled one of his eyelids up and studied his eye, then put his hand on Robert’s forehead. “He even showed me how he tied off the artery. You leave about three inches of the string coming out the stump. I’ll show you later. Most interesting—the string closes the artery until it heals, and while it heals the body’s rejecting it. By the time the wound has healed all you have to do is tug on the string and out it comes, with a little piece of rotted artery. Pretty slick, eh?” He grinned down at Robert.
Robert was looking up at Mike, but he was thinking about Daniel and Prince and Pa Bangura, and about that last morning at the resthouse in Pujehun.
“He said you were conscious,” Mike said. “They had you tied down. Do you remember any of it?”
“It was my decision,” Robert murmured. “But I didn’t make it, I let the group decide. I shouldn’t have let anybody go out, we should have stayed in the resthouse until we knew what was happening out there.”
They heard the porters yelling for people to get out of the way, saw black legs shuffle, saw lappas swaying one way or another, saw children scuttling between legs, trying to get a better look down into Shebar II. And then the porters put the litter on the jetty and two of them climbed down into the boat. Mike and Max helped them hand Robert over the side to the other porters. They strapped him to the litter and the crowd parted as they carried him the length of the jetty to the stone stairs and then up the long flight in the hot sun to Lightfoot Boston Street where Mike’s long van waited.
“Mike, I want to call Marie,” Robert murmured as they approached the van.
“Max can call her.”
Two of the porters climbed into the back of the van and lifted the front of the litter and drew it into the van.
“No, I have to.”
“You’re in no shape—”
“Please—Mike, I need to talk to her.”
Mike hesitated, then shrugged.
They drove down Lightfoot Boston, past the abandoned Bata store and the crumbling City Hotel and the Tropic and stopped in front of SLET. The porters carried him into the waiting room, which was as hot as a sauna. The young clerk took the money from Max and went in the back with the yellow slip of paper. They waited with several Africans and a couple of Lebs, who sat on benches along the wall sweating and staring at Robert until the clerk called out a booth number and Robert’s name. The porters carried him down the hall to a booth and stood patiently holding the litter off the floor so that Robert could reach the handset. The connection was bright and clear. When he heard her voice his heart quickened and he felt momentarily light-headed.
“Sweetheart! Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice. How was your trip? Any problems?” His voice unnatural, nervous.
For several seconds there was no sound. Then, coolly, distantly: “It was okay. How’re things there? We heard about the coup attempt.”
“It was over in a couple of hours.” His TPCS had organized the things he would say to her, had lined them up neatly in his head, but now he couldn’t remember which came first. His leg? No, not yet—it didn’t fit yet. And then it came to him. “You remember Daniel and Prince—they were killed in the coup. With Pa Bangura. All three of them.”
“My God! What happened?”
“It was at a road block. The soldiers panicked—”
“Jesus—Daniel’s got kids—”
“Kevin’s up in Bo, now. Taking care of things.” His voice sounding distant, thick, unnatural, the nervousness coming through. Another pause, then: “Marie, what we talked about—”
“Let’s not start—”
“Don’t say anything. What we talked about, you coming to Salone and working for the project—”
“I’m staying in Mopti.”
“I know, I know. But you said you loved—”
“Robert, it’s finished.”
“I don’t understand—you said—” Robert fell silent. He knew he wasn’t making sense. His head was clogged with the heat, his mouth thick with thirst. The morphine sleepiness seemed to be caving in on him. His TPCS was losing control again and things were getting discontinuous, like seeing someone dancing in a sequence of strobe flashes separated by longer and longer intervals of darkness. He was beginning to think he was missing some very important parts.
“You sound strange, Robert. Are you okay? Is your leg infected again?”
He formed the words in his head: “No, they cut it off.” But he wasn’t ready to tell her about his leg, he wanted to talk about something else first. But he couldn’t remember what. “I’m okay,” he said. Laying on the litter, staring at the ceiling, he noted for the first time in all the scores of times he had come to SLET, how dust and greasy residue from tobacco smoke had, over four decades, given the ceiling a dark, furry coat of brown. “I just wanted—” The words trailed off. He couldn’t remember what he wanted.
“Robert, this is just making it harder. Don’t call me any more. This is too hard.”
His TPCS had let things get completely fucked up. Thoughts were bouncing all over the place. “Well—”
“I need for you to be out of my life.”
“I love you.” That was the only thought he could get hold of, so he said it again: “I love you.”
A sigh, then, “I have to go. Goodbye, Robert.”
“They cut it off,” Robert said abruptly. He’d remembered one of the things he was going to tell her. “Alexander and Mister Benga and Aminata. They cut it off at Bonthe.” He listened for her response, but the line was silent. He stared at the furry brown ceiling with the handset still at his ear, while he waited for his TPCS to regain control of his head. And it did, valiantly, one piece at a time: he figured out that he was at SLET, that Mike had brought him there, that Marie had just hung up on him, that Mike waited down the hall to take him to his basement clinic where he would probably cut his own piece off of him. All that information he managed to organize and store in his head. The hard part was hoisting in what Marie had said. His TPCS just couldn’t get around that one; just wouldn’t accept it. No way. A minute passed; two minutes. He gave the handset to one of the porters, who returned it to its cradle. The porters carried him into the waiting room where Max and Mike stood talking.
His voice, even in his own ear, sounded distant and soft. “Okay, Mike.”
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s Marie?” Max asked. “She make it back okay?”
“Yeah.”
Mike held the door open and the porters carried Robert out to the van. They loaded him and got in the back with him.
“I gotta get back to the embassy, Robert,” Max said, “but I’ll come see you this evening. I’ll bring a bottle of whiskey and some women.”
“You do that,” Mike said. “He ought to be ready for a party by then.”
“Max, is Lungi open yet?” Robert’s voice ever so soft and distant, like he was walking down the street, away from himself.
“What?”
“Lungi—”
“You’re not going any place,” Mike said. “Not for a long time.” He slammed the door.
“Max, find out about Lungi,” Robert murmured at the closed door. “And book me to Bamako. Marie’s waiting.”