by Dave Eggers
As the tiny waves came to wet the sand with long hisses, I picked up my Churchill. Now he was at the Admiralty, whipping everything into shape, trying to increase the production of ships, honing his speechmaking skills, having the first of his children, writing beautiful letters to his Clementine. I’d never written a beautiful letter to anyone, and I had never fought the Boers, had never righted a derailed military train at Frere, never faced their artillery fire while loading wounded onto the cab and tender—
—Churchill what would you have done?
—When?
—In Oconomowoc.
—What? What are you talking about?
—I was beaten. They hit me with bats. I was in a storage unit, gathering Jack’s stuff, just going through it, I guess I was lost a bit and Hand was gone—
—Where was Hand?
—He went off, up the hill.
—Hand should have been there.
—I know. But if I allow myself to know that I’ll leave him, and I don’t want that. I do want it, so often, but I’m stuck with him, worse off without him, if you can believe it.
—I can.
—So what would you have done?
—I can’t say. The odds sound difficult.
—I would have fought next to you, Churchill. Anywhere. Did I tell you that? In India, I would have been there, leaping into musket fire. In Egypt, surveying the Dervish army at Surgham Hill, I would have been there. Cavalry, infantry, whatever—
“We should leave,” I said.
“Right,” Hand said.
We dressed quickly so we could drive through the countryside and tape money to donkeys. We’d been in Senegal for twenty hours and hadn’t given away anything.
I drove. I drove fast. The road was dry, passing through scrubland and the occasional farm, the roadside spotted with small villages of huts and crooked toothpick fences. The terrain was dry, the grass amber. We passed more blue buses bursting with passengers, staring at us, at nothing.
The donkey plan was Hand’s. As we drove, hair still wet, we looked for donkeys standing alone so we could tape money to their sides for their owners to find. We wondered what the donkey-owners would think. What would they think? We had no idea. Money taped to a donkey? It was a great idea, we knew this. The money would be within a pouch we’d make from the pad of graph paper we’d brought, bound with medical tape. On the paper Hand, getting Sharpie all over his fingers, wrote a note of greeting and explanation. That message:
We saw many donkeys. But each time we saw a donkey, there was someone standing nearby.
“We have to find one alone, so the owner will be surprised,” Hand said.
“Right.”
We drove.
“This looks like Arizona,” Hand said.
“It was pretty lush in the resort, though.”
“Watch it.”
I had driven off the road for a second, with a whoosh of gravel and a tilt of the passenger side, then back on, level and straight.
“Dumbfuck,” Hand said.
“I’ve got it. No problem.”
“Stupid. Listen.”
There was a flopping sound.
“Pull over,” he said.
We had a flat.
We stopped. When we got out, all was very quiet. The earth was flat and the savannah was broken only by large leafless trees, bulbous at their trunks and muscled throughout. A bright blue crazily painted bus, full, drove by; everyone stared. The sun was directly above.
We got the spare and the tools and jacked the car up. We started on the lug nuts, but they were rusted and weren’t budging. We pounded them with the wrench with no results. We sat on the highway next to the car, suddenly both very tired. The pavement was so warm I wanted to rest my face on it. I imagined what lay ahead: hitchhiking to the next town, maybe catching the bus, then finding our way to some kind of garage, then negotiations with the mechanics, a tow truck back, then, hours later, the fixing of the flat. We’d waste the day. We’d already wasted too much.
A man appeared behind the car. In a purple-black dashiki, easily seventy, with a small square jaw and eyes small and black and set deep under his brows. He said nothing.
He inserted himself between me and Hand and, without a word, took over. He first placed a rock behind the back tire, to prevent rolling. We had forgotten that. Then, crouching, with hands that hadn’t, it seemed, seen moisture in decades, wrinkles white like cobwebs, he lowered the jack so the wheel rested on the road. He stood and with his sandaled old foot he kicked the wrench; the lug nut turned. He kicked again for each nut, and in a minute the tire was off.
“Leverage,” Hand said to the man, touching his shoulder. He was bursting and was about to say something stupid. “You are very good man!” he said, now patting the man on the back.
I put the new tire on, and the man allowed me to tighten the lug nuts myself. When the job was done the old man turned and looked at my face and smiled and walked away. He still hadn’t said anything.
“Give him something,” Hand said.
“You think?”
“Of course.”
The man was now across the street, heading down the embankment and into the tall grass.
“You think it’s an insult?” I said.
“No. Go.”
I grabbed a bunch of bills from my thigh pocket.
I ran after the man and when I descended the embankment I realized I was barefoot. The rough earth scratched my soles but I caught him fifty feet into the opposite field.
“Excuse me!” I said, knowing he wouldn’t understand the word, but knowing I had to say something, and then settling on the words I would have said had he been able to understand. He turned to me.
I smiled and handed him a stack of bills. He stared at my nose. I smiled harder and rolled my eyes.
“Long story,” I said.
He waved the money off. I took his hand and put the bills in his palm and closed his fingers, dry and ringed like birch twigs, around them. I smiled and nodded in an eager and anxious way, like I was taking his money, not giving him mine.
He said nothing. He took the bills and walked off. I jogged back to the car, my feet slapping the pavement in a happy way; a boy was there, about six years old, though there wasn’t a house or hut in sight.
“Where’d he come from?” I asked.
“He just showed up,” said Hand.
The boy, barefoot and wearing Magnum P.I. shorts, was leaning against the side of the car, looking inside, his hands cupped around his eyes and set against the window, reflecting the endless fields, newly tilled and dry, behind him.
“What’s he want?”
“I think he was here to help.”
“We have anything for him?”
“Money.”
“No. He’ll get robbed.”
We gave him a package of white cream cookies and a liter of water, full and in the sun seeming heavy, like mercury.
We got in the car but the car wouldn’t move. The boy, at the side of the car, yelled something, waving his tiny bony arms.
“The rock,” said Hand.
“Oh,” I said.
While watching us, carefully, holding his hand up in a gesture begging us not to run him over, the boy bent down and removed the rock. We thanked him and waved and honked and drove away, down the coast.
There were beaches being used as dumps. The sand was white and duned, and the water clear beyond, but the beach overwhelmed with garbage, great heaps of it, and broken boats. Periodically we’d pass through a village, the buildings, squat and of clay, abutting the road, kids running out of open doorways. We drove around more blue buses, and a few carts driven by horses nodding, but no donkeys. We couldn’t find a fucking donkey. Cows would be just as good, we thought, but every time we stopped and approached a cow on foot, a car would come down the road, or a bright blue bus, or a farmer or a cart or child, and we’d abort. At one point, when we really thought we were going to do it, had the money in a pouch and the tape
all around it and a cow picked out and were only a few feet away, it wasn’t a car that came but a whole caravan of men, French we guessed, on four-wheel ATVs, eleven of them, in a row, half with white girlfriends strapped around their waists, all with aviator glasses, a few with scarves.
“Good lord God no,” Hand said.
The image was unsettling and indelible.
We gave up on taping money to animals. We were now looking for people. Anyone to unload the money on. But choosing just who was a strange kind of task. We found a group of boys working in a field, raking hay and throwing it into a large wooden wagon attached to a mule. Five boys—
“Brothers, probably,” said Hand. We stopped and parked on the side of the road.
“They’re gonna see us,” I said.
“Then get out and give em some money, idiot.”
“Not yet. I gotta make sure.”
“Here,” Hand said, spreading a map between us. “This is like a fucking stakeout or something.”
—working together, without pause. They were perfect. But I couldn’t get my nerve up. All I had to do was get out of the car, walk a hundred feet and hand them part of the $1,400 we had left. We had to get rid of this money. Tomorrow we would cash more checks—swoop! swoop!—and start over. We were already so far behind. But I couldn’t do it.
“That one guy looks like a dad,” I said.
“No, he’s just a little older than the others.”
“I can’t give it to them if the dad’s there.”
“Why?”
“Because the dad won’t take it, or let them.”
“Bullshit,” Hand said. “Of course he’d take it.”
“No he wouldn’t. It’s a pride thing. He won’t take the money in front of his sons.”
“Not here, stupid. These guys know they need it and that we can afford it. They’re not taking it from a neighbor, they’re taking it from people who it means, you know, next to nothing to. They know this.”
“You do it.”
“No, you. It’s your money.”
“No it’s not. That’s the point.”
“Just go.”
“I can’t. Maybe we wait. The dad’ll go get some water or something. Or you could create a diversion.”
We sat, watching.
“This is predatory,” I said.
“Yeah but it’s okay.”
“Let’s go. We’ll find someone better.”
We drove, though I wasn’t sure it would ever feel right. I would have given them $400, $500, but now we were gone. It was so wrong to stalk them, and even more wrong not to give them the money, a life-changing amount of money here, where the average yearly earnings were, we’d read, about $1,600. It was all so wrong and now we were a mile away and heading down the coast. To the right, beyond the fields and a thin row of trees, the Atlantic—wait; right, the Atlantic—shimmered like a dime.
The sun was low in a white-blue sky and the air was cooling. We approached a huge warehouse in a field. The place, a gallery of some kind, was immense, and shuttered, the parking lot covered in grass. There were no other buildings for miles.
We parked. We’d look around.
A flock of small black birds came across the building in a desperate way. They weren’t in any kind of formation, just fifty of them, all flying in the same direction, each with its own path. Not every one with its own path, I guess, but so many of them, which struck me. I don’t know why it struck me then but had never struck me before. When we see birds flying in a flock, we expect them in formation. We expect neat V’s of birds. But these, they were flying in more of a swooping swarm, a group fifty feet left to right, twenty feet top to bottom. Within that area they were swerving up and down, swinging to and fro, overlapping, like a group of sixth graders riding bikes home from school. Which would imply not only free will but a sense of fun, of caprice. I mean, I want to know what this bird:
is thinking. How does he feel his flight? Does he know the difference between stasis and swooping? Birds were so much better in flight. My bird feeder, now empty in Chicago, taught me how nervous and jittery birds were when they stood and hopped and ducked their heads into the glass for their miserable little seeds. But tearing in and out of formation, there was proof of—
And then they were gone.
“This is a good place to walk around,” said Hand.
I agreed to walk around.
We parked the car behind the building, hiding it from the road. Though we had no evidence of anything like it, we imagined the possibility of roaming marauders who would stop, strip our car bare and move on. So the car was hidden; we could walk through the fields and head to the ocean, less than a mile west.
“You got some sun today,” I said.
“You too,” Hand said.
“Let’s go that way,” he said, vaguely indicating a small farm in the distance, three small huts and a fence of sticks. This would be the first walking we’d done. The field was quiet. We walked toward the huts, over rough savannah breached by the huge and common bulbous leafless trees—their bark smooth and knotted. Closer now, there were figures under and around one of the farm’s largest huts, and around the hut a fence and within the fence ten or twelve sheep, all a dirty grey. Four young kids ran from the fence and toward us, still very small in the distance.
“Bonjour!” one of them yelled, the word sailing to us through the thin late-afternoon air with the strong voice of a girl of eight or nine. Then another one, “Bonjour!” this time from a boy. Then they both said it as they skipped toward us: “Bonjour!”
Hand yelled back: “Bonjour!”
“Hello!” I yelled.
It had to be those kids. Only the most blessed of little people yells hello across an empty field to strangers with dirty clothes.
“We have to give them some,” I said.
A man emerged from another nearby hut and faced us.
“Shit,” Hand said. We only wanted the kids. This man would be suspicious.
“I liked it better when it was just the kids,” I said.
“Who cares?”
“Look at him. He’s carrying a scythe or something.”
Hand squinted. “You’re right.”
“I am?” The man was standing now, hand shielding his eyes, and the kids had gone inside.
“We’ll come back,” Hand said. “We’ll swim and come back.”
We walked toward the ocean; we knew it wasn’t far. We’d been watching the ocean peek between towns and trees the whole drive down. We tramped through a growing thicket and toward the weakening sun.
“Fuck,” said Hand.
“What?”
“Mosquitos. That’s how we get malaria.”
He was right.
“You bring block?” he asked.
“No.”
“Fuck. This is stupid. I don’t want malaria.”
“I wouldn’t mind it,” I said. I had a distant and untested fascination with sickness like that, that would bring you to the brink but not over, if you were strong.
We debated. Continuing on meant an unknown risk—the place could be swarmed with mosquitos any second—but going back to the car meant that we’d truly done nothing, and we would never do anything. If we couldn’t pull off the road and walk through a field to the ocean then we were worth nothing.
We walked on. The ground was hard and brown and dotted with seashells. There were shells all the way back to the highway, the road lined with them, white and broken.
“You see all the shells?” Hand asked.
“I know.”
“This whole area was underwater.”
After a few minutes we could see the ocean. It was the lightest blue, a dry and sun-faded blue. We walked closer, a few hundred yards from the shore, and saw a group of small houses, all of the same design and standing in formation—some kind of development, between us and the water. About fifteen of them, cottage-sized and neatly arrayed, on a sort of plateau, separated from us and from the beach beyond by a m
oat, sixteen feet down and filled with what seemed to be—
“Sewage,” Hand said.
The builders had run out of money. It was a resort-to-be, but without any sign of recent work. There were no vehicles or trailers. Only these small homes, well-built, windowless and sturdy. Each one big enough for one bedroom, a sitting room and a small porch. We got as close as we could before the moat asserted itself without solution. The water in the moat was too deep and dirty to wade through, and too wide to jump.
“There is no reason for this moat,” said Hand.
There was a man. He walked into view on the other side of the moat, among the houses. He was Senegalese, bone-thin and holding in his hand some kind of electric device, black and with a long antenna. He stared our way.
“Security,” Hand said. “They’ve got someone guarding the whole place.”
“We should leave.”
“No.”
We were watching the man and he was watching us.
“Let’s pretend we’re leaving and see if he leaves,” I said.
“Fine,” Hand said.
We turned and shuffled away. Was he armed? He could shoot us if he wanted to and no one would ever know. We sat behind a pair of thick shrubs.
“Pilar looked thin,” I said.
“She did?” Hand said, trying to balance a thin stick between his nose and upper lip. “I thought she looked normal.”
“You’re blind.”
I dug a small hole and put a scallop-shaped shell inside, and buried it. Then I retrieved it, and set it back in the exact spot I’d found it.
“This is slower than I thought it would be,” I said.
“Let’s go,” Hand said.
We stood and the man was gone. We walked alongside the moat, hoping to find a narrow place to cross, to get closer to the homes and then to the beach beyond. We soon saw a clothesline threaded between one porch and its adjacent tree. Shirts and pants hung from it, and on the porch towels and an Indiana University umbrella.
“Jesus,” I said. “Someone’s living here.”
“Makes sense.”