THEIR LITTLE CONVOY TURNED INTO THE ROAD TO THE CLUB.
“I know this place,” Carl said. “Sundays. We’d come here Sundays.”
The palms of Carl’s hands got cold and wet, and then his neck and brow and the small of his back got cold and wet as well.
They passed the wrecked guardhouse. All that was left was a burned-out shell. The shards of glass that used to be windows were streaked with dried brown blood.
The convoy slipped through groves of rubber trees planted in straight rows. The sky had grown dark with the late afternoon rain, which started to fall hard as they climbed a gentle ridge. There was a field that had been cleared of trees, the stumps in rows like gravestones. In one place a bulldozer had uprooted the stumps and created a huge mound of stumps and roots waiting to be burned. The plantation managers had been getting the field ready to be replanted, which is what you do after rubber trees reach a certain age and stop making sap. But the managers ran away when the war started up again.
There was a fenced green field off to the right and a distant red barn where the concessionaires once raised cattle. The land was open and quiet. The only sounds they heard were the drumming rain and the hiss of tires on wet pavement.
They turned left and climbed a hill. The little sign that said “Members Only” remained where it had always been, stuck near the ground, the words formed in a proper, precise cursive font in a place that was anything but proper or precise.
“It was a funny kind of place,” Carl said. “Mixed crowd. Hustlers, do-gooders, smart Liberians, everyone together. We’d drive out on a Sunday afternoon. There was a pool out back and a great view of the hills to the north and west. We’d swim or sit by the pool or play ping-pong. People would sit at the bar and watch football on TV.”
Carl suddenly realized he remembered every word Julia had said to him and every moment they had spent together.
He was the one who held back, who disappeared in the morning, who would go days or a week without making contact. He was the one who needed space, who kept a part of himself closed off. Now he remembered the pores on her skin as the red light of the setting sun showed each angle, curve, and shadow of her face—her eyes and her cheekbones, her nose and the two ridges below it, and the rising up of her skin to make the redness of her lips. He remembered her green eyes and the jet-black hair that fell on both sides of her face, and he even remembered the clean smell of being near her, as though she had just showered after playing tennis.
Julia had been there. Carl could feel her. But she had moved away from Carl. Close and far at once. That was who they were. Not ever an item. Close but no cigar. Thirty-five days. A swing and a miss.
The first truck stopped at the checkpoint at the top of the hill. They waited for just a few seconds, as voices called out to one another. There wasn’t any hurry in the voices. No urgency. They knew and were known. Part of the crew. Okay to pass.
There were two helicopters on a flat area of tarmac to the left, one blue and one camouflage green. The parking lot in front of the clubhouse was crowded with trucks, SUVs, and Land Cruisers. There was a white UN truck, the letters UN blue and as big as the lettering on a billboard, simple and clear on the white doors and on top of the cab, so it could be identified from the air. You can’t tell who is who, Carl thought. You aren’t meant to. There were two tan troop carriers parked on the edge of the tarmac and a number of pickups with mounts for machine guns rising from the middle of each bed.
The clubhouse was filled with young men—perhaps 50, perhaps 100, perhaps 150—who had come in seeking shelter from the driving rain. The men were standing at the bar, sitting on the floor, and squatting against the walls. Some were stretched out on the couches that were grouped together in front of the huge bay windows, which looked out on the swimming pool and the vistas to the north, east, and west.
She had been here. She was close.
Carl and Levin and Terrance heard the din of voices, the guttural talk of men needling one another and the booming of their confident laughter, but mostly they smelled the stink of men’s sweat, sharp, sweet, and insistent, like the smell of old wet leather, as they came into the room.
No one looked at them. They walked in with the men from the trucks. Just one more band. One crew. Fighters. There was light in the clubhouse, fluorescent light, and you could hear the low puttering of the generator just outside.
One of the men from the trucks and Terrance walked across the room to where a thin dark man with large bright eyes was sitting on a desk that was set up surrounded by chairs in a way that suggested an office.
Terrance and the man on the desk high fived. They hugged. Then they talked.
Terrance came back alone.
“She wa he,” he said. “She gab na. Tree o fo da, mabe we. Mabe to. Ga na. Drop a into de bush. Drop a da bi moon.” She was here. She’s gone now. She’s been gone a few days, maybe a week, maybe two. She drove off into the bush. Drove off with the big man who runs this unit.
“They tell us where to find her?” Levin said.
“He na wa be found. Bi mon ca in. He na say whe.” He doesn’t want to be found. The big man calls in. He doesn’t say where he is.
“Goddamn,” Carl said.
“She’s alive,” Levin said. “And close.”
“What kind of shape is she in?” Carl said.
“She woman,” Terrance said. “She strong.”
“We’re not going to find her tonight,” Levin said.
“We need to stop for the night. The roads up here are no good at night,” Carl said.
He looked around the room.
“We sleep here,” Terrance said.
“Tomorrow we go north,” Carl said. “I know these roads. Not as well as I should, but at least I’ve been here before. I may not know where to find her, but I know where to look. There are a couple of health centers north and west of here. We’ll start with those in the morning.”
They settled in a spot near the bar, near the door that led from the bar to where the kitchen used to be.
The rain stopped. The cloud that had enveloped the hill blew off to the southeast. The setting sun emerged above the mountains in the west as it dropped, and its light slipped between the cloud cover and the earth, illuminating the grand sweep of plain and mountain, of lime green farmland and dark green forest beyond, the light spreading over the land the way honey or maple syrup spreads over a slice of toast, just before the sun sank behind the mountains.
Then it was dusk, and the land, the mountains, the plain, the farmland, and the forest slipped into the dark blue of the early evening, and then it all disappeared.
The three men lay down, their heads next to the wall, their feet pointed into the middle of the room, and in a few moments all three fell asleep.