A shiver runs down my back as I peer through the car window at the stained and crumbling walls of the old prison. Choking on fear and loathing, I step out of the car. Before I take more than a couple of steps toward the gate, a wave of panic steers me back to the car. I lean in through the window toward Samuel, the embsasy-assigned driver I get when on official business. “For God's sake, keep the engine running. I may want out of here in a hurry.”
Taking this for a joke, Samuel giggles and turns the ignition off. “I’ll be right here, Monsieur Knott.”
For a couple of reasons, there’s no point getting sore at him. First, he’s Malagasy and regards almost everything in a different light. I wonder what he sees in this situation. Whatever it is, he clearly thinks it’s funnier than hell. Second, he’s my only way out of here.
Muttering under my breath, I show my credentials to the guard, and the iron gate, groaning like the damned, slowly slides aside.
I step into the stone-walled compound and nearly retch at the overwhelming stench of sweat, shit, wood smoke, and death. Before leaving on vacation, Don Schiff, the consular officer, who normally handles stuff like this, told me what to do. “Just walk across the courtyard to the main guardroom and ask to see the American.” Sure. Just take a stroll across the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Memo to self: Kill Don Schiff when he comes back from vacation.
From the barred windows of the wooden cell blocks, clusters of brown faces peer down at me, their eyes aglow, their mouths murmuring, “vazaha, vazaha”—“stranger,” “foreigner”—weighty words on this island-planet. In the eyes of the Malagasy an air of potent yet erratic magic clings to the unknowable vazaha—powerful, foolish people unable to distinguish good from bad, right from wrong, bringing fortune to the undeserving and disaster to the virtuous.
Prisoners idling in the courtyard stop talking to stare at me as I walk past. Most of them are bird-thin, their bodies wasted to bare essence, their souls protruding through thin layers of flesh. Yet a handful of them look startlingly healthy, round-faced, their clothes washed and patched. These are the prisoners whose families take care of them. A Malagasy prison, besides denying its inmates sanitation or medical care, clothes or dignity, gives them no food. The men live—or die—off whatever their relatives can provide. For many families, the inmate was their sole breadwinner. Without him they can give only enough to facilitate a prolonged starvation.
While I’m watching them watching me, I nearly trip over a man lying in the meager shade of a dying tree. His closed, sunken eyes, his shallow rapid breaths testify that he’s preparing to slip over the threshold and become one of the ancestors.
I quicken my step, crossing the courtyard as quickly as dignity allows. On the far side of the prison’s dusty square I find the unpainted wooden door of the guardroom and push it open.
Inside, a dozen prisoners fill the small room. Some, their heads bandaged, wear bloodstained clothes and slump against those chained to them.
Two guards in faded cotton uniforms look up from their work of checking in the prisoners. The older of the two, a man with a graying mustache and large watery eyes, steps away from the line of newly matriculating inmates, takes me by the arm and hustles me back outside, shutting the door behind him.
He asks me my business.
“I’m here to see the American prisoner.”
“Oh, yes, the American prisoner.” He smiles. “Certainly.”
Walt Sackett’s cell smells of filthy clothes and unwashed bodies, of the slop bucket in the corner, and of a despair so profound as to render speech difficult.
“You’re getting your mail?” I ask him. His face is gray and he slumps on the edge of his mattress as if he might fold up and die right in front of me.
“Beats me.” Sackett hunches his sagging shoulders and lets them drop. “I don’t s’pose they’d tell me if they was holding something back.”
The American’s flesh hangs off him in folds like something he’s about to slough off. From Don’s description, Sackett had, only a few months earlier, carried the vital heft of a guy who liked the long hours and hard work of a cattleman, one who knew how to reward himself at the end of the day with a fat steak and a couple of beers. Now, sitting in his dark cell, he seems hollowed out, as if it were the idleness killing him, not the uncertain diet and the filth of a Malagasy prison.
“You have any letters for me to take, Mr. Sackett?”
He grinned awkwardly. “Just call me Walt.” He’s from eastern Oregon, but his voice carries the twang of Oklahoma or Texas.
“Okay. I’m Robert.” I sit across from him on the cell’s other mattress. Like Sackett’s, it rests on the floor and I talk over the top of my knees.
“Yeah, got a couple letters here.” Sackett reaches under his mattress and pulls out two stained envelopes. “They’re for—my wife.”
I wonder about the catch in Sackett’s voice. Estrangement? Shame? Or simply the loneliness and regret of living in a prison on the far side of the world?
The aging cattleman waves the envelopes and forces a half-smile. “I don’t seem to have a stamp. I’ll pay you back when …” He forces a thin smile.
“Forget it. We’re good for a couple of stamps,” I tell him. “I’m afraid I haven’t got any mail for you. You telling everyone to write you in care of the embassy?”
“I sure am.” Sackett takes a pencil from his shirt pocket and addresses the envelopes. “I ‘preciate you taking care of these.” He clears his throat but doesn’t look at me. “Any chance I’ll be getting outta here anytime soon?” He adds hurriedly, “I know you fellas have a lot more important things to do than get a broken-down cowboy out of prison.”
“There’s nothing more important to us than springing you out of here,” I tell him. He knows I mean it.
The close air of the wooden cell makes me shiver even on this warm January morning, summer in Madagascar, where everything seems the opposite of what it should be. “How they treating you?”
“Oh, all right I guess.” Sackett wheezes while he talks. Allergies? Bronchitis? Tuberculosis? It could be anything. “I dunno. I guess maybe most of the other fellas here have committed some kinda crime. Done something to land themselves in jail. But no one deserves this.” He attempts a gesture to take in the prison and its inmates and the despair in which they lived. But there is no gesture for hell and he gives it up. “I seen ’em rot and die just waiting to come to trial. Me, I was stupid and ignorant. Maybe that’s worse than being a criminal.”
When I’d first heard of Sackett I figured I knew the type; one of those guys who seems tough and smart and determined, yet always needs to catch one more break to make it all happen. Frustrated at home, they think they can find that break in a foreign country, where they figure the rules that hold them back in the States don’t apply. They never understood that they’re going up against an entirely different set of rules, rules they know nothing about until they’ve broken them. I remember the American in Morocco, a sharp-eyed former ag exec from Missouri. He planned to grow aloe for skin lotion, but nothing went right, and he gradually spiraled into trafficking in kif, the local cannabis, and, like Sackett, ended up in prison. Or the guy from Louisiana I met in Mozambique, determined to make himself a player in the as-yet nonexistent ‘oil bidness,’ dropping names of men he knew with Amarada Hess and Shell and BP, walking with a swagger and standing with his hands on his hips. He started out sharing cigars with ministers in fine restaurants and ended up three months later filling out the embassy forms to borrow the eleven hundred bucks to get back home.
Sackett is different. For one thing, he’s older. Sixty-four. I’d read his file and wondered what the old guy could be looking for so far from home. What was lacking in his life that he thought he could find here? The others I’d known were essentially con men. Not Sackett. He came here from a cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, ready to work hard. He’d done enough homework to know that Madagascar’s central plateau has good grazing land and hardy cattle. He even had enough sense to pay “fees” to a powerful minister for permission to buy livestock and two thousand hectares—about four thousand acres—of good, well-watered land.
His run lasted six months. The ministry waited until he got his ranch up and running, with a few hundred head of the humped-back zebu cattle and his grassland in good shape before starting to send him notices for previously unmentioned taxes.
When he got the first bill Sackett drove the thirty miles into town to visit his friend the ag minister, a short man who wore cologne thick as a smokescreen. I can see him, picking at some imaginary lint on his lapel while he assures Sackett that “these little fees are nothing more than a bureaucratic inconvenience.” He instructed Sackett to remit the taxes through him, in cash. After a couple of months of this Sackett told the minister that he couldn’t get any more money until he sold some calves the following spring. A few days after that, three policemen and an official in a white shirt came out to his ranch with an arrest warrant for trespass and illegal importation of cattle. In his broken French, Sackett tried to explain that he had a deed for the land and that the cattle weren’t foreign, he’d bought them locally. The man in the white shirt smiled. “But monsieur is a foreigner, so it is really the same thing.”
The embassy first heard of Sackett when the Malagasy government transmitted the required notification that an American citizen was being held in one of its prisons. After hearing his story, the embassy lodged a formal protest with the Foreign Ministry. But the American aid program was too small to demand respect or afford us the leverage to get him out of jail.
Sitting on his thin prison mattress, Sackett shifts his weight from one tired haunch to the other. “When’s Don coming back?” he asks.
“He’s on home leave. A kind of extended vacation. It’ll be another six weeks or so,” I tell him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me until then.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“It’s all right.”
On the floor of the cell someone has used a piece of charcoal to lay out the lines for a local game called “cops and robbers.”
Sackett sees what I’m looking at. “Funny game, Robert. You ever play it?”
I’ve seen the rune-like patterns drawn in the dirt along the side of the road near my home, the guards playing it by the hour while keeping half an eye on the houses they’re hired to protect.
“No, never played it myself.”
With the toe of his shoe, Walt Sackett traces the lines of the playing board. “It’s kinda like checkers. You take the other guy’s pieces by moving toward them, or—now here’s the real Malagasy thing about it—or by moving away from them.” He laughs his broken laugh. “Just right for people who don’t know whether they’re coming or going. I figure—” The clanking of the cell door interrupts his thought.
A young Malagasy stands in the doorway, dressed in a ragged shirt and poorly patched trousers. He cocks his head to one side when he sees a stranger in the cell.
Sackett waves him in, and for the first time since I’d been there smiles naturally. “Speedy, how ya’ doin’?” He grins at me. “My cellmate. I call him Speedy. Like Speedy Gonzalez.”
“He’s quick on his feet?”
“Nah. He just knows how to get around the cat.”
The young man—I’d guess he isn’t over twenty—nods at the guard holding the door open as if the officer were a bellboy and he, Speedy, has decided he’ll take the room.
Despite his scarecrow appearance he bounces into the room like a man blessed by fortune. He offers me a smile and an outstretched hand. “I’m Dokoby Rakoto. Speedy. Enchanté.”
Enchanté? I can’t keep from laughing with pleasure at this ragged kid with the manners of Fred Astaire. He laughs with me.
Sackett beams like a proud father. “My cellmate’s all right, ain’t he?”
I shake the young man’s hand. “That he is.”
Remembering something, Speedy snaps his fingers and in a sort of pidgin English says, “Ah, Monsieur Walt. Cigarette.” From his shirt pocket he takes a pack of the cheap Pieter Stuyvesants favored by most Malagasy and tosses it into Sackett’s lap. Then, with the smile of a magician performing his favorite trick, he pulls a mango from his pants pocket and hands it to his cellmate.
Sackett grins. “Speedy, you’re o-kay.”
Dokoby Rakoto flashes a smile at Walt then crawls onto the mattress behind me and lies down. “No, monsieur, don’t get up,” he tells me in French, then turns on his side to sleep.
Sackett says, “Speedy’s just coming back from a long night’s work.”
“Work?”
“Yeah.” Sackett chuckles and nods vaguely toward the guardroom. “How much do you figure the government pays those guys to keep an eye on us? Not much, that’s what. So the guards have to find a way to make a little something on the side.”
“And Speedy has something to do with that?”
Sackett indicates the young man curled up behind me. “Speedy’s a burglar. Lot of burglars here. And the guards figure what’s the use of all that talent goin’ to waste? So they let ‘em out at night to do what comes natural. When they come back in the morning, the guards take their cut. Speedy, he drops half what he takes with his momma and his sisters before coming back, and gives the other half to the guards.” He juggles the mango in his hand. “Looks after me a little too.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
The cowboy holds up a hand as if taking an oath. “God’s own truth.”
“Why don’t the burglars just run away once they’re out?”
Walt squints at Speedy. “The police’d track ‘em down again. And the guards know where their families live. They’d just be buying trouble.”
“So most of the guys I saw in the guardroom are burglars?”
“In the guard room?”
“A bunch of prisoners, all chained together. Guards acted like they didn’t want me to see them.”
Walt Sackett frowns and shakes his head. “Funny thing. They been bringin’ in lots of prisoners from the countryside. If I understand it rightly, they’re havin’ some sort of riots or something.”
“Riots?”
“Something like that. Must be in the papers.”
I give him the truth. “The chance of something making the papers in this country is in exact inverse to its importance.”
Sackett squints uncertainly. “Well, my French ain’t much. Maybe I’m not hearin’ it exactly right.”
“What part of the countryside are they coming from?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe from the coast. Some town there. Tommy-something.”
“Tamatave?”
“Maybe that’s it. But I think some of these fellas are from other places too.”
Like a jack-in-the-box, Speedy pops his head over my shoulder and again uses his broken English, “Mister Walt. I see your woman at gate. I tell guard, let her come here.” He points at his eye then toward the gate then, with his hands, suggests a set of curves.
The old cattleman glances at me, tosses his head a little too casually. “Just … She’s just a friend. She’s the one keeps me fed. Nirina.” There’s something in the way he says her name.
“Nirina,” Speedy echoes with a smile and lies down again.
The silence that follows tells me it’s time to leave. I look at my watch. “I’ll be back in a few days,” I tell him. “I’ve got a meeting at the Foreign Ministry, then I have to—” I feel a worm of guilt squirming in my gut. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to …”
“It’s okay. Probably good for me to remember there’s a world out there.”
“I’ll see that your letters get in the mail this afternoon.” I get up from the mattress and look at the envelopes. “You don’t have the return address on these. You want me to—?”
“Nah.” Sackett avoids my eyes. “Just send ‘em the way they are.”
If Sackett doesn’t want his wife to know he’s in prison, it’s none of my business.
“I’ll be back in a few days, Walt.”
“Okay, Robert.” Again, that half-smile. “I ‘spect I’ll be here.”
I force a laugh and tap on the cell door. When the guard opens up, I find myself facing a tall young woman with long black hair. Her impossibly dark eyes look all the deeper against the sandalwood hue of her skin. I stand back in surprise. I wish I could coin the word “beautiful” right here, as if it had been waiting for her to appear.
In one hand, she carries a cloth-covered basket. Walt Sackett’s lunch—and probably dinner. Likely breakfast too.
The old cowboy struggles to his feet. “Hello, darlin’,” Sackett says. He has a hard time taking his eyes off her long enough to glance at me. “This is Nirina.”
But I already know her, at least by sight. I can see by a slight widening of her eyes that she recognizes me too. A mask lowers over her features, demanding—assuming—my silence.
I try to remember if I’ve ever heard her name before. I’ve seen her occasionally with the party crowd in the bar at the Continental. In the midst of the laughing and drinking, she sits at the bar with a distant smile on her face—with the others, but somehow not of them. For a few months she’d been a frequent guest at the parties thrown by the embassy’s Marine guards. Yet even there, the center of attention for a bunch of love-starved Marines, she gave the impression of being by herself.
About a year ago one of the Marines, a skinny redhead named Bud, had talked about marrying her. The gunny—gunnery officer, a sergeant—in charge of the six-man detachment sat him down and told Bud that he’d known lots of girls like her and Bud had better get wise. She just wanted the visa to the United States that came with being his bride, and would leave him as soon as she had her feet on the ground. He hadn’t added, “Besides, she has way too much class for a guy like you,” but everyone except Bud could see that.
I try to remember the last time I saw her. It had been about nine months. Yeah, about the time Walt Sackett came to the island.
For a moment we stand facing each other in the doorway—the American diplomat and the Malagasy party girl—then I step aside and, with a slight bow, let her into the cell, feeling her sexual gravity bend the light around me as she passes.
The girl allows Sackett a chaste embrace, offering her cheek to him while casting a sidelong glance at me. Behind her back, Sackett makes a gesture, indicating that I shouldn’t let her see the letters.
Now maybe I understand the catch in Sackett’s voice when he mentioned his wife. I tell myself that this, too, is none of my business. But, outside as I step into the sunshine, I can still feel the warmth of her breath on my ear, where she whispered as she passed, “Please. I need to see you.”