Abundance

by Fine, Michael;

  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.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Terrance, Carl, and Levin. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. August 20, 2003

  THE WROUGHT IRON BRIDGE OVER ST. JOHN’S RIVER IS OLD AND RUSTED. IT IS NARROW and long. From the air it looks like a wheat straw between the trunks of two fallen logs—not like anything meant to carry weight. But when you get close to it, you see the heft of the iron from which it was made, many years ago. You can see the tresses and the girders and the bolts, as thick as a man’s wrist, that hold the bridge together. The roadway itself is half-inch steel plate, laid unfastened on those girders and tresses. The steel plates clatter when your car or truck goes from plate to plate. But the bridge itself doesn�
��t shift or move when your car, or even a goods lorry, drives over it. And so you learn this is a bridge that will withstand both man and nature; a bridge that has seen storm, flood, and war and still stands.

  They were the last vehicle in a three-vehicle caravan that crossed the bridge at daylight—two battered white pickup trucks and their green RAV. The first pickup truck was filled with booty—bananas, pineapple, dried fish, and gasoline in five-gallon glass jars. The second truck carried six armed young men sitting on benches in the bed. Both pickups had gun racks with guns hanging from them silhouetted across their rear windows, and both had bed-mounted heavy machine guns. There were no other vehicles on the bridge yet, and the people walking on it were walking alone or in groups of two or three people. The women walked single file and carried big multicolored plastic tubs on their heads.

  The road on the far side of the bridge was better than the road leading from Harbel to St. John’s. The country was flat there, and the road decently wide, and though the pavement was as often broken as it was smooth, there were no washouts and no ravines, so you could drive twenty-five or thirty miles an hour for minutes at a time, and the plain on the other side of the bridge was broad enough so that the crowd of walking people could walk next to the road. A good number of the cement block houses that stood next to the road were still standing, and a number of those houses had big garden plots. The few compounds of mud houses were well cared for, with whitewash handprints carefully arrayed on the red mud walls and roofs that had been recently thatched and looked able to withstand the hardest evening rain. The yards of red earth between the houses were swept every day so a person walking would not surprise snakes, because the brush had been cleared away.

  They weren’t even ten miles from Buchanan.

  Then they were on the outskirts of Buchanan, and the road was lined by empty shops, ruined houses, and burned-out churches; the air smelled of burned rubber and rotting flesh and the sky was filled with smoke. They came to the Y-junction that Carl had driven through just thirty-five days earlier, when he had come in with David and the two women and the sick kid stuck in the back, just after they had seen Julia’s Land Cruiser on its side on fire.

  The trucks turned north, not south, into the country where Julia had disappeared.

  After a few minutes, the lead truck dropped back, and the second truck shot in front of it. The second truck ran fast for half a minute, and then spun to the left, raising a cloud of orange dust as it stopped short.

  “Down-down,” Terrance said. “Quick-quick. Now.”

  Then the guns exploded. The pop, boom, and rattle of gunfire was right there. They were in it. The men and boys jumped from the back to take cover behind the truck. The other truck spun around and stopped, and the RAV took cover behind that truck. The men in the truck in front of them popped out of the cab and crouched as they ran with an RPG, taking cover behind the first truck.

  With gunfire came the whizz and plink, plink, plink, plink of bullets into the truck in front of them. The air hissed as bullets flew by them.

  There was more gunfire. They heard a short burst, and then four long rumbling bursts. Metal crunched. Bullets sprayed the dirt and whizzed through the trees. They whopped into cardboard and fruit in the bed of the first truck. They sizzled into flesh and cracked bone. A man called out. Another cursed and grunted.

  Terrance saw a gun on the rack on the rear window of the pickup they took cover behind. In case. Just in case. I’m ready, he thought. Alive again. Tastes good. My boys can carry this one. I’m backup. Levin and Carl don’t know how to fight enemy. I’m with them. Until I’m not. I ready.

  Carl kept down. We’re close, Carl thought.

  Their guys got off another burst. Machine guns pounded and rattled, low-pitched and high-pitched at once. Three times there was a sizzle, a pop, and then a boom that shook and rattled the earth. Three RPGs shells whooshed and exploded. Carl felt the heat before he saw the flame and smelled the fire.

  The firing stopped. The air was filled with shell smoke and smelled of burning rubber.

  “Clear,” Terrance said. He started the engine.

  Then the little convoy of three vehicles rolled through the roadblock, which was a downed tree. There were three dead men on the other side of the tree, the blood soaking their fatigues and pooling in the red dirt of the rutted road. Their truck was on fire.

  Terrance looked at Levin and Carl. Terrance was boss here. They are in a war now. No theory here. Kill or be killed. No world to repair. Only firefights to survive, one at a time. His boys had become their boys, wilding down thunder road, playing for keeps.

  “Where the hell are we?” Levin asked.

  “We’re on our way to where Julia is,” Carl said. “We just finished the easy part.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Carl, Levin, and Terrance. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. August 20, 2003

  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.