No Heaven for Good Boys

by Keisha Bush

  When Idrissa gets in later that evening, her bandaged arm is the first thing he notices. Maimouna waves her hand. “I’m fine, just a small accident while cooking. Marabout Ahmed will be in Saloulou this evening.”

  “I know,” he says, placing his hat onto the dresser.

  “Did you hear about the Talibé that returned back to his village?”

  “I did.”

  “It’s time for Marabout Ahmed to return Ibrahimah home,” Maimouna says. “The year is almost up. He should send him back early. Wouldn’t that be nice? Ibrahimah reunited with his sisters. He is too young to be a Talibé.”

  Idrissa runs his hands along the length of Maimouna’s back in a soft caress. After dinner he visits the N’Diaye house while Maimouna waits for him at home.

  She braces herself for the joy she’ll feel when Ibrahimah comes bounding through the door into her outstretched arms, in the same manner she did when she and her mother were finally reunited after her years in Dakar. She wonders why Idrissa is taking so long. Unable to busy her mind any longer, she retreats to bed, where she lies awake praying, her body trembling with nervous anticipation. Hours pass before Idrissa returns. When she hears his footsteps, she pops up from the bed.

  “So,” she says, searching his face, “when is our son coming home?”

  “My love”—Idrissa takes a deep breath—“he’s not.”

  “What?”

  “Ahmed says Ibrahimah is his best student and there’s no way he can relinquish custody of him now.”

  “But it’s been a year!”

  “I reminded him of our agreement, but he says Allah cannot allow such a travesty to happen.”

  “What does that mean? Ibrahimah can never come home?”

  Idrissa sighs loudly. “When Ibrahimah is fifteen, he’ll let him go.”

  Idrissa sits on the edge of the bed and drops his head into his hands.

  Maimouna throws the pillow across the room.

  “No!” she shouts, dashing from their bedroom, through the house and out the door. Her feet sink into the thick, soft sand, but she doesn’t feel anything except the thunder inside. Rage boils within her stomach, rises up through her chest, and explodes into the back of her throat. Shocked by her outburst, Idrissa lags behind her; he calls to her as she runs toward Madame N’Diaye’s house.

  Bursting through the front door, Maimouna heads straight into the living room.

  Ahmed looks up from the chair, where he is eating his second dinner. Madame N’Diaye sits to his left, her husband to his right. Without a moment’s hesitation Maimouna rushes across the room, flinging herself at Ahmed. The table tips to the side against the force of her body and the food flies across Ahmed’s lap. Maimouna’s arms flail in attack.

  Madame N’Diaye’s husband stumbles to the floor as Ahmed tries to push Maimouna off to no avail. She digs her fingers into his face and eyes.

  “Give me my son back!”

  He screams out in pain. She spits in his face, clawing deep red valleys into his black skin.

  “Get. Off. Me. You wretch!”

  “I’ll kill you.” Maimouna bites his face. Ahmed’s scream morphs into a shrill wail as he struggles beneath the weight of her anger. Maimouna feels hands grabbing, pulling at her but she clings to Ahmed and digs her nails into his skin. Scratching. Tearing. He will feel the pain she does. She will not let go.

  The effort to pull her away creates a small space between herself and Ahmed. He takes this opportunity to free his arms and pulls his left hand back, fingers balled into a fist. He punches Maimouna dead center in the face. Pain screams through her eyes and nose. He punches her again. Maimouna’s grip on his neck loosens. She screams and flails her arms blindly in front of her, unwilling to give up, to be defeated once again. The two men behind her lift her up and away. Ahmed now takes this opportunity to get up and hits her again.

  “Stop hitting my wife!”

  Idrissa pushes Maimouna to the side, and rushes up to Ahmed with balled fists. Madame N’Diaye and her husband stand in his way.

  “Go home, my brother. Help your wife calm down!”

  “Give me my son back. Give him back to me!” Maimouna screams from behind Idrissa. Blood gushes from her nose and mouth. Idrissa pushes past Madame N’Diaye and shoves Ahmed back down into his chair. Ahmed throws his arms up above his head in fear.

  Madame N’Diaye and her husband overpower Idrissa and pull him away before he can take another step forward.

  “This is uncalled for! How dare you come to my house behaving like an animal!” Madame N’Diaye screams.

  “Animal? He’s the animal. He’s a liar!” Maimouna shouts.

  “You will never get your son back. You hear? You crazy whore! The day he returns to you, he’ll be wrapped in muslin cloth. I’ll make sure of it. Get these wicked people out of my sight!” Ahmed growls. He raises his hand to his face and winces in pain when his fingers land on the bleeding rivers etched across his face.

  “Ibrahimah is my child! He doesn’t belong to you!” Maimouna sobs.

  “Do as I say! Get them out!” Ahmed barks at his hosts.

  “Brother Idrissa, please go home. I don’t want to have to call the police. You have other children to think about. Please. Go.”

  Madame N’Diaye starts toward Maimouna, but her husband holds her back. Idrissa turns around, gathers Maimouna into the fold of his arms, and walks her out of the house.

  The rain is falling so hard that Ibrahimah can’t keep his eyes open. It comes in thick sheets and his eyelids are not strong enough to bear the weight of the downpour. So, he walks with his eyes closed, opening them every few seconds to gauge where they are walking. The streets of Point E are flooded up to the middle of his calf, the water rushing in the direction he and Étienne are walking, insisting on getting there faster than them. The sky is dark, making it seem as if night has fallen, but Ibrahimah knows that it’s not even lunchtime yet. The intensity of his hunger pains marks the time of day. Étienne taps his shoulder and motions for Ibrahimah to follow him. The streets are empty, its middle-class inhabitants tucked inside warm houses. Not even a taxi passes by, the weather is so bad. Ibrahimah shivers as rivulets of rain fall down his face.

  “At least we get a bath,” Ibrahimah chatters.

  They go inside a computer café, and Étienne approaches the young guy at a small desk in the empty shop, dripping the whole way. The man walks out back for a moment, returning with a small frayed towel that has been cut from a larger one. Étienne dries himself off as best he can and then hands the towel to Ibrahimah, who follows suit.

  “Come over here,” the young man instructs the two boys.

  They cross the room to find a small heater on behind his desk and huddle near it. Ibrahimah looks over at the three phone booths lined up on the opposite side of the store. His family does not have a phone, and he does not remember seeing his neighbors with phones. He has only seen one in Moustapha’s house and in his village’s telecentre, where his mother would go to call his Maam sometimes.

  “How would I call my village?” Ibrahimah asks the shopkeeper.

  “Do you have a phone number?”

  “No.”

  “You need a phone number to call anywhere, little Talibé. Where do you live?”

  “Saloulou.”

  “Is that in the south?”

  Ibrahimah pauses a moment; does he live in the south? He knows he lives farther from Dakar than he had ever traveled before. His Maam came and visited them once, but he has never gone to visit her in Guinea. He always wished she would stay and live with them in Saloulou but his mama said Maam liked her own home too much to leave.

  “Yes, we are from the south,” Étienne says.

  “How do you know?” Ibrahimah asks. Étienne always knows the answer to everything, like Fatou.

  “Because I as
ked Marabout one day and he told me.”

  “When was this?” Ibrahimah asks, surprised that a boy could have an actual conversation with Marabout.

  “This is before you came. I would sometimes come home early and Marabout would let me pray with him in the evenings,” Étienne says, looking away.

  Ibrahimah’s mind races trying to make sense of what his cousin is saying. This was not the marabout he knew at all.

  “Marabout used to be nice?” Ibrahimah asks.

  “Not all marabouts are bad, little one,” the shopkeeper says.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” Étienne says, answering Ibrahimah’s question with a shrug.

  The shopkeeper looks at Étienne and then back to Ibrahimah.

  “Well, sometimes there is a price to pay for kindness, little one. Do you bring gifts for your marabout?”

  “I give him all my money. Why am I supposed to also give him gifts?”

  The door of the shop flies open and a gust of wind brings a rough spray of rain. The young man hops up to shut the door. Ibrahimah shivers at the thought of going back outside. His clothes are still wet and uncomfortable.

  “What is your name?” Étienne asks the shopkeeper.

  “Baba. And yours, little Talibé, what are your names?”

  “Étienne.”

  “Ibrahimah,” he says, and looks out the door. “How long do you think the rain will last?”

  Étienne looks at Baba, curious to see what he thinks.

  Baba pauses a moment. “I think most of the day. Look at how heavy and steady the rain is. This is not a passing storm. It’s here till evening.”

  Ibrahimah’s shoulders drop. He is pleased to be inside from the rain but to lose the entire afternoon is not what he had hoped to hear. He looks down into his red tin can and sees only two small coins. He needs big coins. The shopkeeper does not look rich enough to give him what he needs, and the rain is too assaulting to get over to Moustapha’s house. Plus, if his friend is not home, they’d be stuck farther away from everything with no refuge. He looks at his cousin and finds Étienne quiet, more than likely calculating what it is they need to do to make this day successful. But the spirits must have heard Ibrahimah’s wishes, because after two hours the rain halts, to their amazement. Within minutes Baba receives several customers needing to make phone calls.

  “Local calls are twenty-five francs a minute,” he tells a girl, pointing to the sign above the booth. “International calls are more. Where are you calling?”

  “Mali,” the girl says. She turns to Ibrahimah and sees his hand open. “After,” she tells him.

  “Okay, that is fifty francs a minute.”

  “Okay, give me twenty minutes,” she says, handing the young man five hundred francs.

  Baba looks over at the boys.

  “If you want, I can look to see if I can find a telecentre in your village. Some villages only have one. If that is the case, you could call it and talk to your parents.”

  Ibrahimah never thought talking to his mother or father was possible. Baba walks over to his desk, opens the large plastic binder, and flips through it for several moments. He scours a page, flips to another, and then flips back to the page he looked at before. He shakes his head in disappointment.

  “This binder has numbers for many villages across Senegal, but usually just the most frequently called villages. I don’t see yours on here. Do you know any of the villages nearby?”

  The boys shake their heads no.

  “Well, if you ever do, come back and we can try to see if the nearby village has a telecentre.”

  Ibrahimah’s shoulders drop.

  “It would have been too easy,” Étienne says.

  “Yeah,” Ibrahimah says.

  “Boy,” the young woman says, tapping his shoulder.

  Ibrahimah looks up and she hands him a coin. Étienne looks into his can. Sitting in the shop was worth something. If they were not so hungry, they would stay at the shop longer, but instead they head out to find food. Walking along the side streets in Point E, the city feels cleaner, the trees appear greener, and the air is fresher. Ibrahimah takes a deep breath and wonders what his sisters are doing.

  “Let’s go to the ocean,” he says. The sea always makes Ibrahimah feel closer to his village. He is aware that, at some point, the ocean meets the shore of his home. All of the ocean is connected, and so he really is not that far away from his family.

  They walk over to the On the Run parking lot and find Fatik and their other Talibé brothers. It’s the magic that happens after a monsoon: the humidity is gone, it’s cooler outside, people pour out of their homes, traffic magically reappears, and everyone is in good spirits. They take advantage of this short window of opportunity.

  “Boy,” Étienne says, turning to Fatik. “You coming?”

  “Where?”

  “La Corniche.”

  “Aye,” Fatik shouts over to Caca and the others. “La Corniche!”

  They walk down the Rue de Ouakam and take a right, toward the coast. La Corniche is the westernmost tip of Senegal. Open land and beach greet both traffic and pedestrians traveling down the smooth paved road from Ngor, the northern tip of Dakar. Cliffs tumble onto narrow sandy beaches below; rough ocean waters kiss the rocky shores that dominate the coastline. Only a few scattered beaches are swimmable.

  The boys walk over to the edge of the cliff and sit down amongst a smattering of boulders. It’s a clear hundred-foot drop onto the narrow strip of rocky black sand below, and the incoming tide crashes violently against the bowels of the cliff. Salty sprays of ocean water ride the determined winds and brush against Ibrahimah’s face. He looks across the water, arms open wide, and leans against the never-ending gusts of wind.

  “Look at me! I fly. Brrrrrrrr! Brrrrrrrrr!”

  Étienne laughs.

  “What sounds like brrrrrrr?” Fatik asks, frowning in confusion.

  “Airplane! Brrrrrrr! Boom!”

  “What goes boom?”

  “Look! Airplane there! Listen. Brrrrr­rrrrr­. Boom!”

  The sound of Ibrahimah’s voice is overtaken by the low-flying Air France jetliner heading toward the airport in Yoff, less than three miles away.

  “I go to Paradise in the sky with Abdoulaye!”

  Ibrahimah’s lips are moving rapidly but no one can hear him. He can’t even hear his own voice. The ground vibrates beneath his feet. He’s sure he will take off into the skies any moment now. Two minutes later Fatik concedes the “brrrrrrr” is the ground shaking and the “boom” is the airplane’s engine.

  Étienne searches the ground for rocks and begins tossing them out into the sea. Ibrahimah abandons his game of airplane and follows suit, his small arms barely clearing his rocks off the edge of the cliff.

  “I can throw more far than you,” Scarface challenges. When he smiles, the scar across his cheek becomes more pronounced. Ibrahimah always has to look twice to make sure he’s smiling and not grimacing in anger.

  “Let’s have a contest,” Étienne suggests.

  All six boys line up side by side.

  “Together, we throw rocks and see who can throw the best,” Étienne instructs.

  Ibrahimah is excited to be included.

  “One, two, three, go!”

  The rocks glide through the air.

  Ibrahimah pouts as his rock hits the edge of the cliff and tumbles down along the sloping wall, never making it down to the water.

  “Mine wins!” Fatik shouts.

  “Let’s go again!”

  The boys move a bit closer to the edge of the cliff to get a better look at the distance of their rocks. Again, and again, the boys search out stones around their feet, count to three, and fling them as hard as they can. Twice, Ibrahimah’s stones make it into the water, making him feel like one of the big boys.
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  Down at the other end of the beach they spot wrestlers running with an entourage of twenty-five to thirty dusty-looking boys and girls. Wrestling is the second-biggest sport in Senegal, after football. The matches bring men, boys, and women alike to the stadium and the large athletes are regarded with much admiration. They train on the beach, next to the natural air conditioning of the ocean, and scores of children and adults will watch them and sometimes join in on the exercises. A few glances are exchanged and Étienne offers a simple “Let’s go,” and the group seeks out a manageable path down to the water.

  Once they hit the sand, the wrestlers are quite far down the coast. Instead of trying to catch up they begin their own wrestling match. Fatik grabs Ibrahimah and slips him into an easy headlock, then flings him onto the sand. The group cheers for Fatik as he raises his fists in victory. Grinning from ear to ear, Ibrahimah stands with sand stuck to the side of his face and takes off full-speed toward Fatik, catching him from behind and mowing him down face-first.

  “Ohhhhhh!” the group shouts as the underdog takes the champion down.

  Ibrahimah does a little victory dance, swaying his narrow hips from side to side.

  “Aye! Boys. Get off the beach! The tide is too dangerous to swim here. See that sign?” A man appears and points to the small sign.

  XXX PAS DE BAIGNADE XXX

  “We’re not swimming,” Fatik yells back.

  “Well, it’s too dangerous. The tide is coming in quick, off the beach.”

  As the man approaches, Ibrahimah can see that he is a lifeguard. Ibrahimah remembers the last time he was at the ocean too late in the day. Marabout found him. He grabs his can and starts marching off the beach and back up the hill without a word. Noticing he is leaving, the others follow suit. They spend the next two hours searching for more money and food before heading to Ouakam. When Marabout is traveling, they come home earlier than usual and hang out in the neighborhood with the local kids.

  “Étienne, will you tell me a story like you did last night?” Ibrahimah asks, approaching the stairs to Marabout’s house.

  “What story do you want to hear?”