PEOPLE FILLED THE ROAD AGAIN, SLOWING THEM. BUT BY MID-AFTERNOON THE THREE MEN were at the airport.
On a rise near the sea they saw the rows of white tents, white vehicles, and white transport helicopters. A compound. A large compound with high fences topped by razor wire, with guard towers at the corners and along its length. Then they saw the army barracks—long rectangular cement block buildings with tiny windows. Soldiers with machine guns stood in the guard towers, looking down on the throng of people walking and driving on the seacoast road. A sign on the largest building said A med Forc s of Li eria. First Ba talion. The Lone Star flag was flying. But so was the UN flag, as well as a few flags they didn’t recognize, and at the end of a role of flagpoles was the flag of the good old USA.
The UN was at the army barracks and the airport, along with a small American marine encampment. UN and U.S. vehicles drove too fast back and forth on the airport road. There were naked children in the yards of the houses and compounds across the street from the barracks, naked children who wandered onto the busiest road in the country. The ruins of cement block houses stood across the street from the barracks. New jungle was already growing in their foundations.
Progress, Carl thought. Almost half way to Buchanan. Maybe two days. Maybe a day. Not a week.
Army, Terrance thought. No easy escape. Good to have the flags and the men beside him. He sat straight up in his seat. There was a bead of sweat on his upper lip.
Order, Levin thought. We can come here if we need help. Americans. The UN. Stability. Strength. Good old American imperialism saving the day again.
They turned just after the airport. There was a UN checkpoint there manned by Thais, who stood in front of a sandbagged machine gun emplacement and waved them through. Americans, maybe. But no threat.
Then they found themselves driving through a rubber plantation where the road was paved and smooth, though still jammed with people. There were straight rows of trees on both sides of the road, tall slim trees with smooth green bark and branches or leaves only at the treetops, so you could see the rows of trees lining the hillside and far into the distance. The trees had spiral grooves cut into the bark that ended about three feet above the ground, where small white buckets hung from the trunk of each tree. They were driving through the Firestone plantation, one of the largest producers of the sap used to make natural rubber in the world. A million acres of Liberia leased for ninety-nine years to a U.S. corporation for six cents an acre.
The line of people on the road walked five and six deep on each side, strangely silent. The road itself was straight and level with a white line painted down the middle. At the top of the hill was a green concrete block warehouse, and just below it a row of oblong black tanks laying sideways, each as large as a house. A huge white letter was painted on the end of each tank, spelling out F-I-R-E-S-T-O-N-E.
The road forked at Harbel. They turned south and east again.
The road surface disintegrated once more.
Their moment to moment existence became bouncing and jerking again. Terrance steered them around the potholes, zigzagging from one side of the road to the other to make use of the short stretches of good pavement, and then braking so as not to bottom out when the pavement suddenly disappeared.
But the potholes were the easy part.
The endless sea of people everywhere made the going dead slow. Dusty walkers, carrying everything they owned on their backs and heads.
“Woodstock,” Levin said, though neither Carl nor Terrance knew what he was talking about. But not Woodstock. Not people going to. People running from.
Where they going? Terrance thought. Same-same all over. No place to run. No way to hide.
An airplane or helicopter would fly over every few hours, and then all the people on the road dove for cover. Then you might make five or ten miles an hour for a moment. When the people came back and covered the road again, you were back to dead slow.
It was amazing, despite the chaos, how easy it was to eat and drink as they traveled. Women and old men carrying woven trays or baskets of food and drink for sale walked among the throng, sometimes shouting out but mostly just walking, sad-eyed and without hope or energy, but always able to drop the tray or bin from the heads and negotiate a deal. Plastic bags of water or ground nuts, oranges that were much more green than orange but still had a sweet taste and enough moisture to wet your mouth, overripe mangoes, dried river fish, and roast field corn that tasted like cardboard or paste. The vendors quoted prices in Liberian Dollars, but came flocking when Levin or Carl made a purchase in U.S. currency, one single dollar at a time. What they bought wasn’t good, and it probably wasn’t really safe to eat, but it kept them alive and gave them a little fluid to sweat out as the RAV nosed its way toward Buchanan.
They slept the third night in the car. They parked the RAV just far enough off the road so it wouldn’t be hit by a bus or a goods lorry. Terrance put the passenger seat back as far as it would go and slept curled on his side, a rolled up pair of Carl’s jeans under his head for a pillow. Levin and Carl slept side by side in the back, the rear seat dropped to make a flat cargo space, their knees drawn up almost to their chests.
It wasn’t a good sleep. Levin snored. The RAV rocked whenever Levin or Carl shifted, so it was easy to imagine yourself sleeping on a boat, rocked and lifted by the waves and rubbing against the dock, again and again.
Terrance lay on his back, listening to the others breathing. He drifted in and out of sleep. There were birds calling before dawn. Then it was morning and footsteps in the gravel and voices, cars, trucks, and buses moved on the road.
And light. Glorious light.
It took two more days to make St. John’s River, a trip you can do in under an hour when there is no war on. They were thrown from side to side, jolted again and again under the hot bright sun. They arrived in the late afternoon.
At St. John’s River there is a village of twenty huts and a roadside market on a hill overlooking the river. The market is tiny in peacetime—perhaps ten stalls, stretched out along the road, where old women sell mangoes, dried tilapia, and bags of charcoal, oranges, bananas, and red and yellow oil palm nuts. The air is kept fresh by the breezes that follow the river, but the charred woody smell of the cooking fires, as thick as coffee, percolates amongst the thatched huts, the women with babies on their backs, the boys playing in front of the village pump, and a few toothless squatting old men.
Now thousands of people camped on the hilly clearing above the river—a mass of human bodies as far as the eye could see—and the air was full of human noises, of murmurs, chatter, grunts, and children’s squeals, of the thump and thud of running footsteps, of the crackle of the cooking fires and the clang of pots; a herd that had been brought to a river to bed down for the night.
It was late afternoon. The sun was moving behind dark rainclouds.
Home now. My place. Ma’s people, Terrance thought. My people. We almost Buchanan. My boys close.
The afternoon rain began, pouring down in sheets.
Terrance parked near the gnarled trunk of a huge mango tree, under a canopy of waxy, broad, dark green leaves. The three men opened their windows a little so they could breathe in cool air while they were waiting for the rain to pass. Then they all fell asleep where they sat, their heads angled on their necks and their sweating arms akimbo.
It was almost dark when Terrance awoke.
They were in the middle of a sea of people. There were coals glowing red in the tiny handmade sheet metal cook stoves that sat in middle of the clusters of bodies. The air was thick with charcoal smoke. Carl stretched, the RAV rocked, and before he knew where he was or what day or time it was, Terrance raised his flopped-over head and turned to look at the back seat.
“No Levin,” Terrance said.
“Shoot. Where are the keys?” Carl said. Carl sat up. Terrance turned to look.
“Keys heah in ashtray. Levin no’ far, na ru way.” The keys are here, in the ashtray. Levin isn’t far. He didn’t run away.
“He shouldn’t be out alone,” Carl said.
Terrance turned and scanned the clearing. They could see the little market from where the RAV was parked and a sea of bodies between them and the market.
“He gou. He fine. Na trouble.” He’s good. He’s fine. There is no trouble.
“Let’s find him. He’s walking alone with cash in his pocket.”
They locked the RAV and began to pick their way across the clearing, steering around people scattered on the ground and their bulging cheap suitcases, around their bags and bundles.
Terrance’s memory flashed with each step. He had lived here with his mother’s people on the river before the war found him. He had run on this field and climbed the mango trees at its edge. He remembered being a boy who played in front of the village pump. He remembered the fishy smell of the drying tilapia, suspended on drying nets in the sun next to the river and the flies that buzzed over the fish until they dried. Each step was a different memory.
Terrance searched the crowd, but he did not see people or faces he knew. Those people, if they still lived, would be in the houses he was approaching.
He was different now. Older, taller, calmer, fleshier from sleeping late on his mother’s couch and from the four weeks on that ship, sleeping late and doing nothing. It was not possible to know anything about these people in rain-soaked lapas, torn tee shirts, and mud encrusted torn designer jeans who squatted or lay on the ground, spread out over a clearing on a hillside over a river in the waning light near sunset. It was not possible to know who was kin and who was not kin, who had once been friend and who had once been enemy, or if anyone remembered him as the schoolboy who walked to school in a white shirt, brown pants, and yellow sweater, the primary school uniform that his ma sent money for from America when she paid his school fees, or if anyone else remembered him as the hopped up boy-soldier he had been, raging through the compounds, the marketplaces, and the villages.
He was walking with Carl. They were looking for Levin. They were here together. Everything else was long ago.
They were thirty yards from the market stalls and perhaps forty yards from the village pump when Terrance saw Levin’s back. Levin was squatting next to the pump with a crowd of five- and six-year-olds in front of him.
“There’s Levin” Carl said. “I know that pump. It’s got my handprint in concrete at its base. But watch it. Trouble. Damn it, Levin.”
Terrance then saw what Carl saw. Two men in fatigues were picking their way through the crowd, headed toward the pump and toward Levin. They were naked from the waist up, with ammunition belts crisscrossing their glistening dark brown chests.
The two men carried AK-47s. Levin’s back was turned to them. They weren’t rushing. They walked confidently, ready to check this strange thing out, this white man in their midst, ready for anything and everything, the way Terrance had once been.
Then Carl saw a flash of sudden movement to his right. Terrance. Terrance was moving. Moving fast. He hop-scotched through the sea of people, headed for those two men.
Two battered white pickups were parked to the right of the market stalls, nearer the river.
A cluster of fighters milled about the trucks. The fighters were thin and muscular but not fully grown. Most were stripped to the waist and had AK-47s and Uzis slung across their backs or held in one in their hand. They had shaved heads or wore baseball caps backward and held their fatigues up with cartridge belts, most of which had bones, the heads of chickens, or yellow and blue feathers hanging by strings from the belts, as well as knives and pistols.
“Muthafuckas!” Terrance yelled, and the men near the truck turned to look at him as he ran toward them. Some of the men raised their guns. Others squinted. Still another put his hand to his brow, so he could block out the glare of the last sunlight.
“Ti-Bone,” a man yelled.
The men walking toward Levin turned. Then both men spun and began to move fast, weaving through the crowd, almost running toward Terrance. Levin, hearing the voices, stood and turned toward the running men.