In the sun, next to the Land Cruiser, Carl could still see Julia, the sunlight catching wisps of hair that had shaken loose from her ponytail.
It was better for Carl Goldman to be in Africa, better for him to fade into the background and let boundaries dissolve, better for him to become part of what is great and pulsing than to let the eyes of America cut Carl into a hundred thousand pieces. It was better to be in Africa than to be broken apart by false ideas about who he was and what he was. It was better to be here, despite the war, the danger, the poverty, and the madness, than to allow those eyes to reduce him to dust, to be just a shadow wearing clothing and not really a man. Africa was freedom, despite the war, the danger, the poverty, and the madness; the freedom to experience the world in all its complexity, the freedom to be whatever and whomever Carl wanted to be and to become whatever and whomever he wanted to become. Despite the madness and its chaos, Africa was life itself, while home sucks away your soul.
At home, they judge you and pigeonhole you the moment they see you, at the same time as they are studying your every move, recording everything you’ve ever bought or thought, so they can predict what you will want and maximize profit by selling you what they want you to buy. In Africa, Carl was part of a great complex human wave that pulled him under but that also lifted him. The wave spun him about but also carried him, part of a whole that was much greater than the sum of its parts.
In America, Carl Goldman was a black man and thus too often a mugger, a thief, a rapist, or a rapper or a pimp, though when they saw his name on paper they thought he was a Jew. In Africa he was just a man who was hard to place. In Liberia his cream-colored skin said he was not a countryman, but that he might be a Congoman or a South African, a Ghanaian or a Zimbabwean, or even perhaps an Arab. When they saw his name on paper in Africa before they saw his skin they thought he was a European, by which the Liberians meant anyone from Europe or America or Australia or Canada.
Carl Goldman was a thin man with cream-colored skin and dark wavy hair whose father was Jewish and whose mother came from Martinique, so what he looked like and what he was were not entirely the same. He was young, just twenty-seven, articulate, and well educated, despite what had happened long ago. He came to Africa to try his luck and to see if there might be freedom for him anywhere. He had a history that was complicated, but no one would know about that here. Wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t ask. Didn’t matter. Here he could just be who he was and make a life for himself without thinking, knowing, or remembering. In America there was only one person Carl could trust. In Africa it was every man for himself, and the person you are is the person who acts, so the issue of trust or love was just never on the table.
Like every other expat in Buchanan Town, Carl Goldman lived in a compound. The Water for Power compound had walls made of bamboo poles that supported woven bamboo mats, each eight feet tall and eight feet long and so densely woven you couldn’t see through them, so they looked like walls indeed. You couldn’t see through those walls, but you could hear everything that was happening around the compound. You could hear the women walking on the lane that ran behind the compound on their way to the village pump. You could hear the boys teasing one another as they walked or ran in the gravel on their way to school, and you could hear the crunch of the gravel if and when a car inched its way down the dirt lane, but you couldn’t see the women or the boys or the occasional dust-covered dented car—and the cars and the people walking couldn’t see you.
The compound wall was topped with coils of razor wire, which marked it as an expat place. A massive motor-driven sliding solid metal gate kept everyone inside apart from the world outside. You could hear the power come on, a hum and a crunch, and then a clang, as the gate opened or closed whenever anyone came in or went out.
Walls made of bamboo weren’t good for anything aside from shielding what was inside from local eyes. The walls wouldn’t stop a bullet and provided no protection whatsoever from a tank or half-track. So when anarchy roamed the streets, when ten- and twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys high on uppers, riding in used four-wheel-drive trucks and SUVs and firing AK-47s swarmed over Buchanan like a runaway hive of bees, the compound didn’t work as a place to hide. But they were between wars, or at least between battles, and for the moment Carl and his crew couldn’t be seen and no one passing by knew what was waiting inside the bamboo walls under the razor wire. There could have been firepower, machetes, and hundreds of men hiding behind the bamboo and wire. You couldn’t tell they were few, unarmed, and harmless.
Buchanan Town is the third largest city in Liberia, but there is nothing city-like about it. It is a just place with a port on the road from Monrovia to Maryland County; a place that is mainly Bassa-speaking, though there was plenty of Pele and Kru—a place of thirty thousand souls near the sea. The people of Buchanan Town live in small, one-story houses made of brick, with corrugated iron roofs, plastered with concrete that is painted in brilliant primary colors: white, red, blue, yellow, or green. The houses are all jumbled together. On the backstreets are solitary outdoor stalls that sell neighborhood essentials: phone cards, handmade brooms, gasoline and palm oil in jars by the liter, and spices wrapped in tiny plastic bags that hang from poles as if they were teardrops or dew.
Buchanan has a tiny port where Ghanaian fisherman landed their catch and a main street, Thomas Street, a dusty rutted road lined by shops that sell boldly-colored lapa cloth, pots and pans, machetes, palm nuts, big white canvas bags of charcoal, green, yellow, and red plastic bins and bowls of all sizes, and motorbikes. All the open spaces are filled with tiny market stalls where women in lapas sit on the ground selling pots and pans, handmade rusty metal charcoal stoves, corn roasted on a stick, pineapples and bananas, eggs, bush meat, dried fish, and spices. The air is filled with the smell of diesel fumes, charcoal smoke, and roasting corn.
Carl went into the bush every morning in a Land Cruiser, sometimes with a driver and sometimes with a team of four, to plan, build, and check on the village pumps that brought clean water to people who lived in the bush. Carl made the schedule. David, his driver, knew the roads and the villages, even the villages that were a three-hour walk into the bush from the nearest road. David also knew the rutted one-track roads that crossed streams on log bridges and ran twenty kilometers through nowhere, and he knew the villages that you could only get to on the river, on the slow diesel paddleboat upstream.
In the compound, Carl was in charge. He had a mission, vision, values, and goals. In the bush, Carl was a passenger, an observer, with no way to exist or survive on his own, but he was also closer to the earth than he had ever been before. In the compound, Carl was all command and control. In the bush, they were just one wrong turn, one clogged fuel pump, or one broken axle away from the munching insects, the calling birds, the dark, and the undefined danger that lurked after dark. You live by your wits in the bush. You live each moment, each turn, each rut, and each bottoming out of the truck.
The road flattened as they drove north, which meant better going. They were not allowed to carry passengers.
“No change in plan,” Carl said. “This is a dump and run. We got to be quick. In and out. Fifteen minutes. No more.”
Carl looked at his passengers. He could see the baby on its mother’s lap. The mother and the other women sat on one side of the Land Cruiser. Sister Martha nodded. The baby’s chest was still moving in and out, in and out.
It did not look like word of the coming war had reached Godeh. Women and girls stood or sat together at the village pump, holding multicolored plastic tubs and basins or carrying buckets and tubs on their heads. Insects swarmed around the pump and around the women in the sunlight, and young boys, wearing only short pants or no pants, ran about in the yard in front of the pump, flitting like flies around the women and girls.
The pump master was waiting for them. He had kept good records, in pencil, in a notebook that was dog-eared and floppy because the pages had gotten wet and had dried, but which Carl could
read when he needed to. David went to check the pump. Then Carl and David unloaded the chlorine and the water purification kits into a locked cabinet that was in a small cement block building with a thatched roof.
They turned and headed back south on the Bong County Road.
They were about a mile away from the District #4 Health Center turnoff when they saw smoke. A thin plume of black smoke no wider than a flag. Seconds later, they smelled the burning rubber and the fumes of spilled gasoline. The stink burned their eyes and into their nostrils, injecting itself under their cheekbones and into the back of their throats.
The Merlin Land Cruiser lay on fire on its left side enveloped in thick black smoke. The left wheel was in the red dirt, and the once white body of the truck was blackening, so you could only just make out the green Merlin insignia and the stenciled red silhouette of a machine gun with a blackening red circle over it.
Torwon lay on the grassy embankment where the two women had been sitting with the baby less than an hour before, his face and half his head blown off.
Charles lay in the red dust next to the wheel in a pool of blood larger than his body, a line of red and white flesh open from his thigh to his neck where a line of bullets had raked across him, his clothing and skin on fire, encased in flames from the truck.
No Julia.
“Stop or go, boss?” David said.
“Stop,” Carl said.
“No time to stop. Dr. Richmond in Buchanan or Dr. Richmond dead. Stop now and we all dead if they close,” David said.
“Go,” Carl said. “Go fast.”
Carl looked into the burning truck, and looked at the dry grasses on the side of the road. No more bodies.
“Go,” Carl said. “Pedal to the metal.”
Sister Martha started to speak, to beg them to stop and look for Julia. She stopped speaking when she saw what Carl and David saw.
No Julia. Julia was gone.
There was a checkpoint a mile down the road that hadn’t been there when they came north that morning. A checkpoint and three soldier-boys standing in the middle of the road.
The soldier-boys had dropped two trees, one from each side of the road. The trees lay most of the way across the road and about five yards apart. The only way you could pass was to swing to the left to get around the tree that lay over the right side of the road, and then swing to the right to get around the tree that lay over the left side of the road.
The soldier-boys stood in between the trees, three man-boys dressed in fatigues, wearing red berets, smoking cigarettes, and carrying AK-47s. An RPG leaned against each tree loaded and ready so the boys could lift the RPG onto a fallen trunk, take aim at anything they didn’t like, and fire; a nice clean shot at anything that came down the road.
A dented blue Ford Ranger, its rear window shot out, stood between the trees.
Carl knew the drill. Stop and search. Which meant anything and everything but not stop and search this far back in the bush.
Two hundred yards in front of the first dropped tree, David slowed to a crawl. Run up fast and you’re RPG bait. Run up too slow and they start shooting, just for sport. Stop and get out and everyone dies after they rape the women. Carl was grateful that David drove quickly enough so it looked like they had a purpose, but not so quickly that they looked like they were coming for a fight.
David rolled his window down.
The soldier-boys grinned. They were smoking cigarettes as if waiting for target practice to start.
David began speaking as soon as they were in earshot. He spoke in Kreyol, and he spoke so simply that even Carl understood him.
“Si babi,” David said as they rolled forward, his voice as loud as he could make it without shouting. Sick baby.
The truck rolled forward, faster than a quick walk, but not as quickly as a run.
“Docta he. Ta babi hospital. Baby dying. Ca stop,” David said. “There is a doctor in the car. We are taking a baby to the hospital. The baby is dying. I can’t stop.”
The soldier-boys could see Carl who they took for a doctor in front, and the woman with the baby in the back. The Land Cruiser moved too quickly for them to ask any questions, or even give any commands. The Land Cruiser swung left, past the first tree. By the time the first fighter, the one who had actually thought to raise his gun, had taken his cigarette out of his mouth, the Land Cruiser passed him, and Carl could not hear whatever it was the soldier said.
Then the Land Cruiser swung right past the second tree. They were looking at open road.
For an instant or more, perhaps as much as a full minute, the Land Cruiser stayed in range of the guns and the RPGs. In that moment no one in the Land Cruiser knew whether they were going to live or die. They did not look back and did not listen for the ta-dump-dump of machine-gun fire or the crack and whoosh of the RPG. They were trying with every ounce of strength in their bodies not to hear anything at all.
And then they were out of range, alive and driving on the open road.
The few villages they had passed earlier that morning were now deserted or burning. Lines of bullet holes pockmarked the red and yellow mud-walled huts. The bodies of people who didn’t get out of the way soon enough lay bleeding out by the cooking fires and the roadside.
“Taylor’s boys,” David said.
“The good guys,” Carl said.
They saw smoke rising over Buchanan before they heard and felt the boom and the shake of explosions. As they got closer, they heard the bursts and rattle of small-arms fire.
“Coast road junction coming up,” David said.
“Buckle your seatbelts people. It might get ugly for a while,” Carl said. “I hope like hell Julia got back before Taylor’s boys got to her. Sister Martha? You have any ideas?”
“She will be waiting at Buchanan Hospital for this child,” Sister Martha said.
“She better be. This is no time for a nature walk,” Carl said.
At the junction, there were three cars and two trucks on fire by the side of the road. There were more bodies in the market, and the torn blue and silver tarps that had covered the stalls flapped in the wind near the road where the market stalls used to be; where a truck or a half-track had driven through, crushing the stalls, the soldier-boys shooting everything that moved.
They heard sirens coming from Thomas Street. The sky was darkening with the late afternoon rain.
The earth rumbled again.
“Na thunder,” David said. “That’s not thunder.” He jerked the steering wheel. The Land Cruiser turned suddenly onto a narrow dirt road that ran toward the sea. They were off the main road, driving through backstreets and neighborhoods built around one-lane roads that few people knew. Safer here, Carl thought, in the communities. The pickups and SUVs will go to the port, to Thomas Street, and to rail line and smelter at Mittal, and then to the road coming in from the east and south. They won’t come here. Maybe we won’t get shot at. Now. Today. For a few minutes.
The air boomed and the earth rocked as they drove. “Heavy shit,” David said. “I don’t see planes.”
“Taylor has friends all over,” Carl said. “And enemies. You see planes and that means Nigeria or Europe or the U.S. is in. Or that Taylor’s buddies have arrived—the boy scouts from South Africa, Russia, Israel, or France, the arms dealers and the mercenaries, the guys who drop barrel bombs from unmarked planes.”
Carl looked back. Sister Martha nodded. The baby was still alive.
“David knows back roads through the communities,” Carl said. “We’ll get to the hospital quick-quick.”
“MODEL in Buchanan now,” David said.
“Live from Buchanan, it’s Saturday night,” Carl said. “Taylor must be pooping his pants. You get us in quick-quick?”
“Quick-quick,” said David. “We float like butterfly, sting like bee.”
The truck jerked and rocked as David steered around and through the potholes and the ruts. The ocean was on the other side of a single row of shanties and palm trees, each
wave marking another moment that they weren’t at the hospital yet, another moment that the baby was alive but still not treated, and another moment that they were still alive.
“They coming for Taylor,” David said. “He bad before, but he strong and bad. Now he just bad. He kill anyone and everyone in his way, that Taylor.”
“He kill my ma. He kill my pa. I will vote for him,” Carl said. “That’s what they’re out there thinking, the guys with machetes and with guns. He’s killing them and they’re fighting for him. That’s what we have to deal with.”
A shell whistled overhead, fell into the sea, and exploded. The spray it sent up splashed onto the windshield.
People were gone from the neighborhood markets, the stalls, and the street. Carl didn’t see men or boys with guns. The men and boys would choose one side or the other, which meant choosing one big man or the other, because this wasn’t about ideas or freedom. This was about how big one big man could be, about who was strong and who was weak, about who would survive to hold ground for a little while and whose people would be slaughtered like sheep. The men and boys had already slipped away to the beach or into the bush where their guns and rusting hand grenades were hidden in boxes in the red dirt or in the sand, waiting to be dug up, wiped off, greased, and reloaded.
The hospital gate was jammed with bodies, with people standing, people being carried, people walking supported, and people with the hurt part wrapped in towels or bandages or just old shirts, holding the bad place that was oozing blood. Men and women squatted or lay on the grassy embankment across the road and milled about the courtyard, which was so thick with people that you couldn’t walk from place to place without colliding with some part of someone else.
A line of trucks stood outside the closed gate.
“There,” Carl said. He gestured to a bare spot of ground across the street; a place to stop the Land Cruiser. David pulled into the open place.
“Let’s get this kid in. Dr. Richmond?” Carl said.
Abundance Page 3