Gladys and Yvonne opened their doors and Naomi came out of her car.
“This is my home,” Yvonne said. “I have to stop for a few minutes. I won’t be long. We need to be in Buchanan by nightfall. We will come back in a few days, and I’ll have you meet my family then.”
Yvonne walked between two houses. She took Gladys’ arm to steady herself. Two old women waited in the yard of a house Yvonne remembered as she walked toward the river. Old women in green and blue lapas, their withered brown skin hanging on their faces. Trudi and Henri, hiding in the bodies of these old women, their voices now deeper and subdued.
We are old, Yvonne thought as she embraced these women who were hiding the young girls who were her sisters. So old. Life has come and is going away.
Then they were on the bridge and rattling over the iron plates. There was still light but no sun, so the countryside was blue and hushed. The road was better on the far side of the bridge, and they passed concrete houses with neat yards on both sides of the road.
Levin remembered the sensation of speed as they flew through that place behind the two militia pick-up trucks, before they all turned north. He remembered that they thought Julia was close, was almost in their grasp. He listened to the murmuring of the women’s voices in the seat behind him. He kept one hand on the dashboard in front of him to brace himself as the car lurched side to side and bottomed out, and to protect himself from what he was feeling and would feel.
It had all seemed so simple. They would come to Liberia, find Julia, and bring her back. Get in, get out, and get gone. They did what appeared impossible. They got to Liberia while there was a war on. They drove through its streets. They got into and talked themselves out of trouble. They were close to Julia, about to find her. They had become one, the three of them. You live together. You die together. You do what needs to be done.
And then disaster. And then nothing. This endless, empty, painful nothing.
Lord only knew what Julia saw, felt, knew, or understood.
You save one life, you save the world. What kind of idea was that? What does it mean, to save a life? What arrogance! To decide who needs saving and what life means. Repair the world? Who says the world is broken, and who asked anyone to fix it?
But Levin was obsessing again. Back to living only in his own head. Endless obsession. No action. No justice. No peace. No change.
So the hell with all the degrees and the certificates on the wall, Levin thought. Forget meetings and movements. There is no purpose in this. I’m just one incredibly stupid, lonely old man.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Yvonne, Naomi, Levin, and John. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. May 2007
THE JUNGLE HAD GROWN BACK THROUGH THE BLACKENED GROUND. THERE WAS GREEN everywhere, green underbrush, green saplings, and dense green vines. Some of the saplings were six, seven, even nine feet high, so eager is the jungle to regain its ground.
Trees are different than men. A man’s arms are spread farthest high up, so that he can pick the fruit of the trees. Most of the greenery was at knee- and thigh-level, broadleaf plants with bold, wide, undulating leaves to catch every photon of available light. Lithe grasses that reached upward are different yet, thrusting themselves as high as their green skeletons allow and then bending to catch more light. The broad leaves of the young trees each looked like the map of a great virgin country with an irregular shore and rivers. The spiked grasses bent over from their own weight as they grew tall and waved and swayed in the gentle midday heat. Men bend over as we age. Trees stand up and insert their narrow tops into the sky as high as they can get, where the air is clear and the sun in strongest.
They had come out from Buchanan that morning in one car. John driving, Levin in the passenger seat again—men in the front and the women in the back. They drove to the plantation. There was still a sign, but there was no guard station anymore. They drove through the rubber trees, and then turned left at the road to the country club.
Some of the walls of The Club were still standing, but there was now a green and yellow thicket where the floor had once been. The wrecked grey-black cement block walls were covered with mosses and molds that snaked through the greenery as if it were camouflage, meant to blend into the shadows and streaming light. The burned-out trucks lay on their sides and were now brown-red, as they rusted. You could still see slivers of chrome as you walked from place to place.
The walls of the swimming pool had started to collapse. Where there had once been smooth pale blue tiles there was now a falling-in mound crusted with blue-green algae, and though there was still water in the pool, it had blackened, and there were water plants and marsh grasses growing in the water that had once been clear and sparkling.
The black tarmac in the parking lot and the cement of the helicopter landing pad had cracked, and there were weeds and grasses and even a few small saplings growing out of each crack. It would be many years before the asphalt and concrete could be digested by the earth, but the earth had begun the slow process of returning the asphalt to dust and allowing bush and jungle to replace that dust.
Levin didn’t see the brass shell casings at first. He could feel them under his feet as he walked. Half buried in the red earth, under the grasses and the moss, they crunched and clinked as he walked from place to place and made the footing tricky, like walking on clam shells left on a rocky beach by the retreating tide. There were still weaver birds making mud nest colonies in the ironwood tree, just beyond where the changing rooms had been.
There really wasn’t much to see. There was a place under a mango tree where the earth rose a little and another place on the other side of the swimming pool where a depression had become marshy with time. Perhaps the dead were buried in those places.
John stayed in the car.
Yvonne and Naomi picked their way across the site. Perhaps it gave them some comfort to be there. To walk where Carl and Terrance had walked. To stand where Terrance and Carl had died.
For Levin there was no comfort. No comfort now. No comfort ever. They had been one body—Carl, Terrance, and Levin—and for one brief moment, once in his life, he had been part of something bigger than himself, however doomed. This was the place where it ended.
Levin walked inside the ruins of the clubhouse. Was this the wall they slept next to? Were the cement blocks on the ground the cement blocks that had buried Carl and Terrance? The women followed Levin as he walked, even though he wasn’t able to say what he was thinking. The bar had been over there. The hallway here. The toilet, down the hall where the kitchen once was. What we should remember? How we should feel? What do we know? How can we ever get back what we have lost?
There is no proper trinket, Levin thought. No souvenir. No appropriate memento. They did not find a keychain or a pocket knife or a wallet or a necklace or a hat. There were the shell casings, of course, but they left the shell casings alone, and ground them deeper into the earth as they walked. There was just the thicket, the jungle, the undergrowth Levin felt around him, the dense green carpet that digests hopes, courage, dreams, sins, and failures; inhaling the people we are, the people we’ve been, and the people we love, after we stand up together to love and then lay down together under this warm green crust. Our bones, our carcasses—they are the only souvenirs, but who needs them? The green earth, the thicket, the jungle, growing back through the cracks in the asphalt is enough, is what we together become.
Then the women were in the car, waiting for him. John started the engine. It was time to go.
One foot after the next. One step at a time.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Yvonne, Naomi, Levin, and John. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. May, 2007
THE DUSTY SIGN POST ON THE BONG COUNTY ROAD WAS BENT AT THE TOP. THE SIGN THAT had once been white looked like it was had been left behind, marking a place that had closed long ago. You could make out the blue and green lettering if you stopped the car and got out to look. The sign marked a rutted one-track road that led into the bush.
John turned onto that road.
The forest was empty there. No people walking. No huts or villages. No animal scat in the road. Nothing moving—no birds, no dogs, no goats, no chickens, no lizards or even any snakes sunning themselves on rocks. Only the huge trees with smooth bark and trunks so tall that the first branches were too high to cast any shade on the road.
The road was difficult, but John kept going even after it felt like the jungle had swallowed them whole. The car skidded as John fought his way from place to place, dodging potholes, some of which were filled knee-deep with red water from the previous night’s rain, or jolting through them, speeding up and stopping, lurching from side to side. Levin, Yvonne, and Naomi were thrown about the inside of the car, their heads grazing the roof and their shoulders banging against the doors.
They should have turned back. If the car broke down, there was no one they could look to for help.
They stopped at a little log bridge. John and Levin got out of the car.
The bridge was just wide enough for a car but it didn’t look at all reliable. Thick black logs lay between two steel girders, bridging a fifty-foot drop. The logs were wet and had lime green moss growing in the grooves between them. There were open places between some of the logs, and if you looked down you could see rays of sunlight playing on the rippling water far below, and you could hear the water murmur and gurgle.
You could walk across the bridge if you kept one foot on each of two logs, as long as you stayed in the middle so there was a place to fall if you stumbled.
There was a bad list to the bridge, which tilted down and to the left. There were enough spaces between the logs for the tires of a car to get wedged between them. But the tire tracks on the near side of the bridge, on the black timbers, and cut into the embankment on the far side proved that people drove across this bridge.
The men returned to the car.
“John can get over the bridge,” Levin said. “We’ll walk across. The bridge is actually pretty good.”
“Doesn’t look like a bridge to me,” Yvonne said.
“Tire tracks,” Levin said. “You’ll see. Looks like people are driving on it all the time.”
Yvonne looked at him over her glasses.
“People drive on it. See for yourself,” Levin said.
Yvonne and Naomi got out. They walked to the embankment. They saw the tire tracks, and that strengthened them some. Then they walked onto the bridge and crossed to the other side.
Levin stood next to the car on the near side of the embankment. John let the car creep forward. He gave the car a little gas, so the front end rose onto the bridge, like a boat next to a dock rising with an incoming wave. The bridge itself was only five car lengths long and wouldn’t take long to cross.
Then the car was on the bridge. The bridge sank a little with the car’s weight, and the tires thumped on the roadbed timbers as the car began to cross the ravine.
As the car inched forward, the rear end slipped on the wet logs. Then the rear wheel on the driver’s side, the driving wheel, wedged between two timbers and began to spin.
The car stopped.
The front end slipped down, leftward, toward the gorge. John hit the gas. The rear wheel hissed as it spun in place.
Then John threw the car into reverse. It leaned backward, but the left rear tire remained caught between two logs.
John threw it into drive again and turned the front wheels to the right, away from the edge and the drop into the gorge. Now both rear wheels spun, sizzling and hissing as the car snaked forward a few inches, then stopped again. The burning rubber stank.
The bright morning sun became hotter. John turned the engine off and opened his door. “Stuck, boss,” John said.
“Don’t call me boss,” Levin said.
Levin came onto the bridge and stood behind the car.
“Give it a little gas,” Levin said, “and turn the wheel.”
John started the car. Levin put his weight behind the rear bumper and pushed as the engine revved. The rear wheel shrieked in its new home, smoking and stinking as it turned.
Yvonne and Naomi came onto the bridge and stood at the front of the car.
“You men push the car, and I’ll run it,” Yvonne said.
“I’ll help push,” Naomi said.
“Your call,” Levin said, sweating.
Yvonne and John changed places. John stood behind the car, his back and right shoulder against the rear fender. Levin opened the passenger side door and window so he could push on the doorpost and talk to Yvonne at the same time. Naomi stood next to John.
“Ready?” Levin said.
Yvonne nodded and stepped on the gas. The engine roared. The rear wheel edged forward a quarter turn.
“Push!” Levin yelled.
The car slid forward a few more inches in the groove between the wet black logs.
The engine revved. There was more white smoke from the tail pipe. They all pushed together. Then the tire came out of the groove. The rear end of the car rose and rested, for an instant, on the top of the log that made the groove, just two fat logs and a steel girder over from the drop into the ravine.
Then Yvonne, feeling the car lift, came off the gas.
“Gas! Gas! Gas!” Levin yelled, as the left rear tire started to slip to the left, toward the edge of the bridge.
Yvonne pushed the accelerator hard. Both rear wheels spun and slipped off the bridge together which lifted the front end into the air. The passenger side front wheel was a few inches off the surface of the bridge. The car tipped toward the gorge, hanging in the air.
Yvonne was thrown against the driver’s side door. That tilted the unbalanced car more.
The passenger side rear wheel came off the bridge.
Yvonne looked out on the drop. She saw the darkness and could just make out the stream far below. Had there been luggage on a rooftop carrier, its weight would have flipped the car into the ravine.
Naomi threw her whole weight into the bumper and prayed.
“No gas!” Levin shouted. “Come off the gas! Stay calm!” he shouted.
John pushed and pulled as hard as he could on the open window of the passenger side door, using his dead weight as ballast to pull the car away from the drop.
Yvonne tried her door. The latch clicked but the door barely moved. It was wedged closed, stuck against a log.
Levin pulled on the passenger side rear tire, hoping against hope they could keep the car from tipping over.
The car didn’t move. Then John reached into the car with his right hand.
Yvonne grabbed John’s wrist and pulled on it, lifting herself out of her seat. She climbed, one of her hands clasped to John’s hand, the other first on the steering wheel, then on the rearview mirror, then on the glove compartment door, and then on the window itself; one foot on the steering wheel and then the other foot on the console between the seats, where people in Europe and the U.S. put the hot drinks that they buy from fast-food restaurants so they can have hot coffee and fancy lattes as they drive to work in the morning. The car shook as Yvonne’s weight shifted from one side to the other.
Soon she was standing inside the car, her feet on the driver’s side door, and her head now out the passenger side window.
Yvonne was a strong woman, but she was not thin. As she climbed through the passenger side window, Levin and Naomi felt the passenger side rear wheel and the rear back part of the car shift back toward righting itself. They pushed even harder, feeling the shift, hoping they could flip the car back onto four wheels.
“John!” said Levin.
John did not turn or speak. He let go of Yvonne’s hand, grabbed the window, dropped his bottom and grunted again, pulling the car back toward the bridge with every ounce of strength in his thin body, still trying with Naomi and Levin to tip the car back toward the bridge.
Yvonne’s head came through the window. Then her arms and shoulders came through.
The car wavered back and fort
h around its tipping point, uncertain which way it would fall.
Then Yvonne put her left foot onto the dashboard, her right foot onto the passenger side head rest, and pushed her chest through the window.
The car shuddered. Yvonne twisted. Her hips came through the window. She bent her body at the waist, lunging for the ground. John let go of the window-sill and grabbed for Yvonne as she grabbed for him. They locked arms around one another’s chests.
Yvonne’s center of gravity shifted from the car to John.
The passenger side of the car rose as Yvonne’s legs came through the window, and Yvonne and John fell onto the bridge.
But the center of gravity of the car shifted backward, away from Yvonne and John and back toward the ravine the instant Yvonne was free of the car.
There was a crunch as the car tipped toward the ravine and its weight collapsed the sheet metal of the driver’s side doors. For a moment all the wheels were off the ground, facing away from the drop.
Then the wheels rose higher.
The car rolled onto its roof, collapsing it. Then the car hesitated again. The wheels pointed into the air like the four paws of a dog scratching its back in the gravel. Then the wheels drifted to the left, leaning into the drop.
And then the car disappeared. A moment later there was a crash, which was not as loud or long-lasting as you might have expected.
And then there was quiet. Water gurgled in the brook, making sounds like a happy baby makes.
Only Naomi was still standing, her face smudged with the black soot from the undercarriage of the car.
Yvonne and John rolled onto their hands and knees. They stood slowly, holding on to each other a few feet from the edge of the bridge. Yvonne’s shoes had come off, and the back of her legs were bleeding.
Levin was on his back. He rolled onto his side and stood up.
Chapter Thirty-Four
District #4 Health Center. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. May 2007
BUT FOR THE WHITE MAN, THEY LOOKED LIKE LIBERIANS. WITH HIS CLOTHING TORN AND baggy and his skin thick with red dust, even the white man fit in. They were four people walking down the road.
Abundance Page 30