Julia had looked away, thinking to sit on the side of the road and wait for the relief truck from Buchanan. Then the pickup was on them. There were three boys in the front and five or six in the bed. The boy on the passenger side leaned out the window with a gun and began firing.
“No weapons!” Julia shouted, but all she could hear was the ripping and rattling of gunfire.
“Oh blessed God!” Torwon screamed. Blood burst from the right side of his head. He covered his face with his hands. Then he staggered to the side of the road and fell.
The boy in front kept firing until the blue pickup was next to their truck. The music from the pickup sizzled and whomped.
Charles, who had been squatting next to the rear wheel, stood as a line of redness crossed his belly and chest, and then he groaned and fell slowly into the road, face down.
Then the boys in the back started firing into the Land Cruiser. The bullets crunched and rang in the metal and the glass. The shattered windows collapsed, the shards hissing as they fell into the skeleton of the truck. Then there was a bright yellow flare, a roar, a hot wave, and then thick black smoke as the gas tank exploded. Suddenly there was acid in Julia’s eyes. She felt her eyebrows sizzle and turn to ash. The stink of burning rubber choked her. Julia’s throat closed. All she could see was orange and black, and all she could feel was burning. She bent under the smoke and backed away to find air she could breathe as her hair started to burn.
The boys in the back of the truck laughed and hooted. Then they jumped from the truck and surrounded her, all touching her at once. They touched Julia’s breasts and butt and neck and crotch and face.
“Get the fuck off me,” she said. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
She stepped forward, swatting their hands with her hands. Someone grabbed her from behind, a sweaty arm around her neck, and sets of hands grabbed her thighs. They lifted her into the air as they spread her thighs apart. It felt like they were ripping her body in two.
Then one who was wearing a yellow bandanna and whose bare chest was crisscrossed by ammunition belts came and swatted the others away with the butt of his gun. They lowered her so she was standing. The man-boy wearing the yellow bandanna couldn’t have been more than seventeen. He had dark skin, small red eyes, and a dark, humped up scar that ran from the right side of his face half way through his right nostril.
One of the others, off to Julia’s right, shoved a gun barrel against her temple. And then the man-boy in the yellow bandanna slowly reached his hand behind Julia’s neck, pulled her to him, and pushed his mouth and then his tongue into hers.
Then he jumped back, hit Julia across the face with the back of his hand, and put his hand on his bleeding tongue.
“Fock you!” he said. He swatted her away and yelled something in Kpelle that she didn’t understand. He hit her face with the back of one hand again and punched her with the other, one-two. Julia’s head snapped backward, the bones of her neck crunching together, and her nose began to bleed.
They bound her hands with a bloody rag and shoved her into the cab next to the driver, with two others—the one with the yellow bandanna right next to her, his gun resting on her thigh and pelvis, the steel from the stock pressing into her flank and its barrel under her breast. The beat of the music throbbed in the air, shaking Julia’s thighs and back and keeping her from thinking.
She wasn’t dead, and she hadn’t been raped. Charles and Torwon were dead. They hadn’t shot her when it would have been easy to, and they hadn’t raped her right there in the road beside the truck.
Two blue police Land Cruisers were waiting for them at a road junction a mile or two toward Buchanan, where a road came in from the east. The truck carrying Julia slowed. One of the thin men-boys in the uniforms, who had RPGs standing in the red dust next to their dusty but pale blue vehicles, half lifted a rifle onto his shoulder, but it was not a serious threat or challenge. The driver stopped and the men talked in Kpelle, not Kreyol. Then some of the men-boys got into their Land Cruiser, and one of the Land Cruisers followed the pickup south.
The cold barrel of the gun jutted into the soft part of Julia’s belly, just under her ribs. It jammed into her flesh and bone every time they hit a rut or the truck swerved, and it hurt her every time she took a breath. Carl will see the burning truck, Julia thought. He’ll be back from Godeh soon. He’ll see the truck on fire and see Charles and Torwon dead on the road in the dirt. Whatever was true or not true about who we are to each other, Carl will get help.
But there wasn’t going to be any help. Carl would hit this checkpoint. Then Carl would also die. They carried no weapons. Carl and the kiddo and Sister Martha and Carl’s driver and the mother and the mother’s mother. They would all die. And there was nothing Julia could do to stop it. And then it would be hours or days before anyone knew that Charles and Torwon were dead and that Julia was gone.
The pickup turned onto a road that ran east and north. So they weren’t going to Buchanan. They were taking her somewhere but not back to the hospital. To a place she didn’t know. Where no one would ever be able to find her.
There is no privacy for NGO expats in Buchanan, so Carl and Julia met at Sparks Hotel. For a drink and dinner.
It was a Lebanese place that was trying to look American, so they had hung football jerseys on the walls. It had a jukebox that didn’t take money that played disco and top ten music from the ’80s and ’90s, over and over. The rest of NGO life reminded Julia of the world of graduate students in a university town, where everyone goes to potlucks and drones on and on about their professors, their work, and about who is sleeping with whom. In Buchanan NGO staff ate at one another’s compounds most nights. They had Liberian housekeepers and cooks to make the food and clean up afterward, but each NGO made a great show of using food they grew in the compound garden, of cooking together and helping to clean up, and of recycling the paper and the organic waste. The bedrooms in the compound houses were like dorm rooms at college only the walls were thinner, so you could hear the person in the next room as they walked, snored, or turned over in bed. In each bathroom were sheets of neatly typed rules about cleaning up after use and about the disposal of feminine hygiene products. The sheets of rules sat inside clear plastic envelopes and hung from the mirrors. The rules had lots of capital letters and exclamation points for emphasis.
They met at Sparks after the evening rain. They had their drivers drop them at the hotel. The drivers went back to the compounds and would return when they were texted. They could have come over in the same van, but they came separately, and the plan was for them to return separately, each to their own compound.
It was a hotel and restaurant. The customers were mostly white and Middle Eastern but anyone was welcome. Near the little harbor. The white South Africans and Rhodesians (because that was how they still thought of themselves, as Rhodesians, and not Zimbabweans) came with their girls or picked up Liberian girls at the bar—girls who made themselves up and sometimes dyed their hair blond or green or pink and sat on the laps of the white men while the fake jukebox cranked out the same music, over and over. Those white men looked like rugby players, stocky and blond, although there were also Ukrainians and Poles and Bulgarians—thin, very pale men in cheap suits who often brought made-up white women with big blond or platinum hair and bigger eyelashes.
Carl bought the first round. “Glad you could come,” he said. “I wanted a place where we could talk.”
“Thank you for asking,” Julia said. “You never get a moment to yourself here.”
“We can talk about Rhode Island,” Carl said.
“Little place,” Julia said. “Not much to say.”
“Wait, I’m from there,” Carl said.
“And I spent four years there. I still have friends there. My mentor is there. My car is there. Like I said, not much to say. I didn’t like it much. I like you, though.”
“You want to talk about your work?”
“Not really. Does your work matter?
”
“It matters some. We get clean water to about one village a week. Keeps people from getting cholera and other dread diseases. Gets one person in each village a job. It matters more than anything I could do at home. Does anything in the U.S. matter?” Carl said.
“Not much. How many of your pumps are still working five years out?” Julia said.
“Not many, unless we swing by to check on them once a month. Supportive participatory development. Participatory development doesn’t work. People aren’t ready. Incremental cultural development. New development model. Whatever all that means,” Carl said. “You take care of these cool little kids. Fun, no?”
“The kids are fun, yes,” Julia said. “I love being in charge, being the one person who can fix it. Sounds strange, but I even love it when they call me in at 2:00 a.m. for a kid with a fever who needs a spinal tap. This won’t mean anything to you, but I love being able to prance in half asleep, look at a baby, roll the kid over, and do a quick spinal tap. There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you put a needle into the spine between the vertebrae at exactly the right place, feel the membrane around the spinal cord ‘pop’ as the needle goes through that membrane, and then see drops of crystal clear fluid come out through the hub of the needle. And then I start the kid on antibiotics, and sometimes I even get to save a life. At home, I might do two spinal taps a year, and then the kid goes to the Pediatric Mobile Intensive Care Unit, and I never see that kid again. Here, I do two or three taps a day. I do the tap, start the antibiotic, see the kid on rounds every day, get to know the mother and her sisters, and sometimes even the father and the other kids, and then I get to see the kid when she’s better, when I’m out in the bush doing clinics at the health centers. As long as the kiddo doesn’t die. So not very often, to tell the truth.”
“So you do the bush as well,” Carl said. “The bush is different. People at home will never understand it.”
“I love the bush, the country places far away, where they need everything,” Julia said. “You’re right. No one in the U.S. knows or understands what goes on out there—the women with twenty children, all those complex relationships, different fathers, different mothers, kinship, the sharing and the control and the violence, the rituals, and the secret societies. Women in the bush die in childbirth all the time. That almost never happens at home.”
“You miss being home?” Carl said.
“Naw,” Julia said. “I don’t miss the self-important fluffery. We have these great important lives in which nothing else matters besides work, while most of what we actually do is work ten hours a day, watch TV, wait in line, and fill out one stupid form after the next. I do miss having people I know and who know me to talk to. Don’t get me wrong. I like my colleagues and all that. But talking to people about medicine and even the countries they come from is different. It’s not personal. No one here knows anything about Stanley’s Burgers in Central Falls or Ray’s Pizza on Sixth Avenue in the Village or the Talking Heads or Will.i.am, and I’m betting you know all that stuff without even thinking about it. I miss people to talk to and people to be with. See? You can tell. I’m talking too much.”
She wanted him to say, no, you’re not, or something, but instead he just shrugged. She drained her gin and mostly tonic. “So what about you? You miss home?”
“It’s different for me,” Carl said. “I fit in here. Sort of. I’m not from here, but nobody knows that instantly just by looking at me. I miss Stanley’s a little but not so much. Home is a hard place for me. Tough history. I can’t see that ever changing. Here no one will ever know who I am, but at least here not everyone has already decided that I am who I’m not. I can make my own life here. Yeah, it’s a little lonely from time to time, but things here will change. Have to change. No place to go but up.”
“You—we—won’t change things here, though,” Julia said. “People have to want to change it, and they don’t. At least not yet. They could learn how to make their world safer and cleaner, but they don’t want to. They live the only life they know, and in its own way, it works for them. They live hard, and they die young, but they don’t worry the way we worry, and they don’t ever feel worthless or struggle with self-doubt. I’m trying to keep kids alive one at a time, when I can, but the odds are tiny, and it’s a huge uphill battle. I could save a lot more kids if their mothers brought them in as soon as they got sick. Hell, I could save even more if everyone slept under a bed net. But I lose a lot of kids, and that’s all on me. It really sucks to lose even one. I guess I hope to keep a few of these kids alive long enough so that they can grow up and change things. Bill Levin, my friend and teacher in Providence, has all this stuff about if you save one life, you save the world, about how each life brings the lost light back to the world. My work is nothing like that. Not much light. Too many kids dying in the bush. Sometimes we get lucky, that’s all.”
Julia put her hand on Carl’s hand, which was holding his glass.
“You want dinner?” Carl said.
“Not necessarily. We can eat any time.”
“I’m getting a room,” Carl said, and he ran the inside of his calf against the inside of Julia’s calf as he stood up.
One of the white Rhodesian guys sat down in Carl’s chair as soon as he was out of sight. He must have been six foot three and 250 pounds. He had blond curls that hung down the back of his neck.
“You look lonely,” the Rhodesian guy said.
“That chair is taken,” Julia said.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” the Rhodesian guy said. And he stood up and went away.
The room was a cheap room that claimed to have a view of the harbor. It had a bed with a mattress that sagged in the middle and a desk next to the window that had a chair in front of it and a bureau that didn’t match on a far wall, a ceiling fixture with a bare bulb, and no television. The window had a blind but no curtains. An air-conditioner in the window rumbled and hummed. It produced a moist breeze but no cold air. Out the window you could see the floodlights from the steel plant floating over the blackness where the sea likely was and the headlights from occasional cars but nothing else.
Carl put his hands on Julia’s hips as he kissed her after they came into the room. They were standing just at the point where the narrow entryway opened before the bed, and Carl hadn’t closed the window blind yet. He knew how to kiss, and Julia discovered that she did too. She thought she had forgotten, but it was like remembering something she had never really known. He knew how to unbutton her. Carl was strong and he smelled like burnt orange—strong and sweet.
He undressed her in the light. She sat down on the bed. “Wait,” she said.
“I can’t wait,” Carl said.
“We have to wait,” Julia said. “I’m a doctor, remember? Always ready. Though maybe that makes me a marine.” She reached for her shoulder bag and rummaged in it. Carl, sensing what she was about, reached for the wallet in his pants.
“I have one as well,” Carl said. He took her hand and pulled her up and off the bed so he could pull off the bedspread and they could have cool sheets for their bodies. “And that puts you in the coast guard not that marines. Semper paratus. Always ready. The marines are semper fi, semper fidelis, always faithful, which does not appear the subject of our discussion of the moment.”
He knew how to fuck too. As well. Better than that. Long and slow. Then deep, hot, everlasting, and explosive.
They made love a second time. Then they lay together side by side as they caught their breath.
“It doesn’t get much better than that,” Julia said. “Kind of a grand slam.”
“A grand slam is four runs, three men on,” Carl said. “That was just batting practice. Wake me in a few minutes if you’re still awake.” And he fell asleep.
Julia lay awake, staring at the ceiling. She hadn’t fucked anyone in a long time, and this was better than she expected. He was sweet, and he was smart, and he was good in bed. Damn, she thought, I’m falling for thi
s guy. Not good. He would find out, over time, how little she had to offer, how vapid and boring she was, and he would move on to someone hotter, or smarter, or richer, or famous. It had happened before.
She closed her eyes, looking for sleep. And it found her.
He woke her with an embrace, and they made love again. It was later, but how late there was no way to tell. He got up to look for his watch, but she pulled him back into bed.
“Hey,” Julia said. “Talk to me.”
“Oh, now you want to talk,” Carl said. “What do you want to talk about? You probably also want dinner in a nice restaurant. And wine. Probably a fancy California Chardonnay.”
“Stop. Just talk,” Julia said. “Tell me stories about growing up. And I like good French wine not California crap. California wine is for Californians. Which I was, once. Now it’s Côtes du Rhône. Dry, deep, and full of body.”
“Stories about my youth,” Carl said. “Back home in little Rhody, hot summer days, getting up when the rooster crows, feeding the cows before breakfast, working hard all day in the hayfields, fishin’ in the fishin’ hole, swimming in the swimming hole, that kind of stuff?” Carl lay flat on his back, looking at the ceiling.
“That kind of stuff,” Julia said.
“It wasn’t like that,” Carl said. “I’m looking forward, not back. How about you?”
“How about me what? You’re ducking the question.”
“Not ducking. Just skillfully evading,” Carl said. “My life is the opposite of an open book. Closed, sealed, and put away. What’s past is past. That’s a quote from a great ancient sage of my people.”
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