by David Masiel
Freetown was still two kilometers to the west, and a sign displayed the Sierra Leonean coat of arms. It stood painted on a wooden frame, the outline of a lion and the regal ribbons that displayed the country’s motto: UNITY, FREEDOM, JUSTICE.
“It should be their motto,” said Snow. “It’s the three things they ain’t got.”
The bush taxi cut up past an enormous cottonwood tree, turned at a sign that read Free Street, and dropped them at a corner cab stand where two other four-wheelers waited, muddied from up-country journeys. Standing on the dirt street, Bracelin nudged Snow to indicate one of the drivers, a narrow-faced young man, Somali or maybe Mauritanian by the look of him, his face black as night and his features fine and angular. He wore a machete tucked into his belt, and stood there staring at Snow, and finally lifted his chin in some kind of distant recognition. Snow smiled back, gave a discreet wave, then mumbled toward Bracelin. “I know that guy,” he said. “He gets near me, you kill his ass.”
“Quietly,” Bracelin said.
From there they set out on foot. Government soldiers, awkward in their tiger suits and steel helmets, toted AKs and wore aviator glasses. The crew was stopped by two military policemen asking for papers. Snow talked, and they passed their Z-cards to the military men. Snow caught the look on Beth’s face, like it always looked when she had to present her fake card, which looked damned good, well laminated by a forger in London. Snow sensed the soldiers glaring from behind shades, like highway patrolmen on a routine traffic stop, bored and inhuman, but a little excited too, to be stopping white Americans, to eye Beth and sense their kinship with her, though as always there was that lurking question of what she was doing with a pack of white men.
“Shoulda brought Kairos,” was all Snow said.
“How else we gonna get use out of the worthless old nigger?” said Bracelin quietly.
“Why don’t you shut your idiotic mouth?” Beth said.
The cop eyed Beth and Bracelin with rising interest.
Bracelin turned to her without a word. Then he leaned close. Snow could hear him, in a voice just above a whisper: “You little cunt. I want to talk, I talk. I want to bend your black ass over an H-bitt, I’ll bend your black ass over an H-bitt.”
Beth didn’t flinch. She turned and eyed the mate, who touched the bare skin of her arm with his finger.
Leeds’s gnarled hand came to a rest on Bracelin’s tattooed forearm. Bracelin jerked his arm away. “Get that shit off me!” he barked.
Leeds smiled, his gums pink and wide. “Maybe we all gotta keep our hands to ourselves,” he said.
Snow kept his face trained on the cop, like all this was just banter and nothing he should concern himself with, but he could hear Beth breathing heavily.
The cop nudged his partner and nodded toward the conflict.
“We’re moored over at Kissy,” he said to the cop in English. “Discharging base chemicals, and we got just a few hours for a drink. Been a long time since we had a drink shoreside. Been since Panama.”
“Not so good time to be out tonight, we got curfew, think about that,” the tall one said. “SLPP backers come around nights, try to make trouble for OAU.”
“I’m gonna guess you for Nigerian,” Snow said. “Ogoni?”
The cop eyed Snow, taken aback. “That is right. How you know Ogoni?”
“Ran rig tenders for Shell operations down in the delta. I got people down there too, at Brass Island.”
“I know Brass Island.”
“So how is Shagari’s government setting with people down delta?”
“Shagari is all right,” he said, diplomatically.
“I got a half brother at Brass Island. Name of Saro.”
“Not Saro-Wiwa,” said the cop. “The writer?”
“Naw, not Saro-Wiwa. I know his books—fiction, right? Me, I like history.”
The cop seemed to like this answer. He nodded. “You be careful Freetown.”
“We’ll head back before dark,” said Snow.
When the soldiers waved them on, they walked in a line down a dirt road that jutted past a series of dusty shanties, an aspect of sadness and excitement all at once—the vacant faces of parents completely belying the joy in the children as they looked out and followed the strange group with their eyes.
They went down the hill until they hit Circular Road, into Victoria Park, where Beth walked spinning circles, looking at landmarks. It was a place she used to play. Lived nearby. A small white house along Garrison Street. “It’s all changed so much,” she said. She pointed to a house. She used to run away from the boys by climbing onto its roof. “They thought it great sport to reach inside my shirt and pants. But I could always outclimb them.”
They walked past the multistoried houses showing painted walls chipped down to ancient coats of colonial whitewash. Once-regal balconies and wraparound porches clinging to facades. Freetown soaked itself in heat and humanity. Cooking smoke fluttered out of an old house, pouring from an upstairs window where somebody had built a fire in what had once been a bedroom. A three-story blockhouse structure stuck up, walls leaning in four directions, all of them inward, a dark brown wood weathered by rain and leaching back into the ground it had arisen from. Snow heard the echo of prayer, in Krio:
Papa God we de na evin
mek olman respekt yu oli nem
mek yu rul kam
mek wetin yu want bi na dis wol
leke aw i de bi na evin
He heard it drifting up over the park and saw the wonder on the kid’s face trying to place it, wondering why the familiarity, why the rhythm and cadence made young Maciel’s face flush with something lost—until Snow told him. “Don’t you know what that is? Hell, even I know what that is. That’s the Lord’s Prayer. Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name and all that crap.”
Maciel’s ears searched the air for the incantation of prayer, but instead saw only poster boards advertising King Blue Washing Powder, Crown Mayonnaise, and Reynolds Ball Point Pens. Beneath them sat a young man, holding crutches tight to his chest, his amputated leg reaching barely to the end of the bus stop bench. Farther on, a girl sat on a street corner where a dirt road intersected a paved one, alongside a Mercedes sedan that looked like a giant creature had thrown a medicine ball through the hood. The girl wore gauze wraps on each of her wrists where her hands had once been, her face wide and disconsolate in the afternoon dust that ringed her eyes.
“Some sick tribal shit going down around here,” said Bracelin.
Snow led the group down a narrow paved street, hugging close by a concrete retaining wall that oozed water. They came to a stairway that led upward toward a structure sitting upon the hill, which Snow first took to be a hotel of some sort but soon realized was a Catholic church. As they cut through the grounds, he saw Maciel pause. “I’m gonna go in here for a minute,” he said.
“Like fuck you’re gonna stop here,” said Bracelin.
“I am,” said the kid, and marched up the stone steps and pulled on the large oaken door—heavy, by the strain in his arm—and disappeared inside.
“What the fuck is this?” said Bracelin.
“Let him be,” said Snow.
“I ain’t waiting for him.”
“Well, I am. You go on if you want, save me a seat.”
Snow could see this work on Bracelin. Hardcore as the man was, there wasn’t freshwater’s chance on a lifeboat he’d be going alone to the Snap Trap. “I been to some sore-ass shit lockers in the world, Snow. But this place takes the red-eye award. A-freak-ah.”
Snow was glad for the kid’s moxie. He even wondered what the hell he was doing in there. So he climbed up the steps and pulled open the door himself and stepped inside. It was cool inside the church, and he found the kid kneeling before a statue of the Blessed Virgin, lighting one of them candles with his old Zippo, burning his fingers in the process. He rubbed his fingers and got the candle going, then settled in to pray. Snow could see his mouth moving. Snow couldn’
t take his eyes from the scene. The kid was gone from everything then—everything earthly, anyhow—and even as Snow felt the warm air from the door behind him, and caught the smell of the girl as she moved up alongside, a strange sensation overcame him. He felt his face flush. He wanted to laugh or cry—he wasn’t sure which. It was both. They were alone in there, just the three of them. The kid crossed himself, moved to the center of the church and genuflected before the altar of the grand crucifix. Snow wanted more than anything to know what he’d been praying about, but on the stone steps outside, the kid had a half grin on his face and said nothing at all when Snow asked. He’d been praying for dead relatives to come rescue his ass, Snow figured, or for the Good Lord to bring him a bountiful harvest in the flesh of a girl.
PART TWO
THE DANGEROUS SEMICIRCLE
FOR AS THIS APPALLING OCEAN SURROUNDS THE VERDANT LAND, SO IN THE SOUL OF MEN THERE LIES ONE INSULAR TAHITI, FULL OF PEACE AND JOY, BUT ENCOMPASSED BY ALL THE HORRORS OF THE HALF KNOWN LIFE.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
SNAP TRAP
The bar called Snap Trap was housed in an old hospital, built by the British before the war, and had a wide concrete veranda and tall windows that once held glass. But no longer; the room was open to the street with only shutters to keep out the weather. The building had been damaged by apparent street fighting that left behind not only bullet holes but the occasional chuckhole brought on by something more explosive. What it didn’t have was a sign, yet it was known by anybody who’d spent half a day in Freetown.
The smell of chicken simmering in pepper sauce lingered in the hazy air, and the bar brimmed with its own brand of home brews: palm wine and distilled spirits called boiled wine, or omorlay, and a local beer called Star, served warm with cassava and yam roll-ups, or flat bread baked in pit ovens dug from the ground out back. Overhead a ceiling fan turned slowly, creaking from a bent fan blade that scraped the wilting plaster overhead, digging out a circular trough.
The eyes of locals cast toward the five as they entered and found a table on the far left wall, as far from the bar as they could get. Right off, Snow saw Favor seated with his back turned to the room. Snow made no move to greet him, though he knew Favor had seen him enter. Snow moved past tables to the bar and ordered drinks for the table, bottles of Star and homemade palm wine brought up from plastic petrol cans behind the bar to refill quart-size Pepsi bottles, the spiral ribbed glass like a swirling ribbon.
“Best is two hour ol’,” said the bartender, whose brow glowed with the sweat of afternoon labor indoors without air-conditioning.
Bracelin moved up next to Snow. “Just covering your backside, old man.”
“Keep it calm,” said Snow.
The beer was served about five degrees below room temp, which wasn’t even slightly cool. Somebody put on Otis Redding singing “Dock of the Bay,” and Snow felt a ringing in his bad ear, then knocked back a cup of boiled wine like an old veteran, the sweet easy vocal running through him like cool water.
Bracelin slugged down a cup and made a face. “Jesus.” He spat out a mosquito and wiped his tongue with his shirt.
“Better you eating them than them eating you.”
The ceiling fan fell without warning like a whirling chopper blade, crashing half onto a table and clipping a soldier on the side of the head before it landed on the floor. The soldier turned around and shot it once with his pistol. The entire room went dead quiet for about a half count, hands to their weapons, gazing at the crippled fan. Then they went back to their drinking.
Snow checked down the bar, four bodies down, where he spied the arms of Buck Favor clutching a pair of brews. “Gimme six more just like that one,” Snow said to the bartender.
“Omorlay,” said the bartender. “Dis kick like de bucking mule bronco,” and he pointed at his own tee shirt, which bore pictures of two football helmets butting together, one the Denver Broncos, the other the Dallas Cowboys. Underneath it read SUPER BOWL XII.
“Cowboys won that game,” said Bracelin.
The bartender paused from his pouring. “Yah? Dat is right ah? Member too: inch no in masta, kabasloht no in misis. Dat tree quid.” And he pointed at the drinks.
Bracelin paid the three quid with five American dollars, which further irritated the man, though he accepted them grudgingly, waving the mate back to the tables as if shooing a fly. Snow looked down and saw four dead gnats floating in his own cup. “Protein!” he said, as soldiers eyed them all the way across the room, even after they pulled up chairs to join the others.
“This is one rank-ass bar,” said Bracelin.
“I like it,” said Leeds. “Reminds me of the war.”
“Not this again for chrissakes.”
“It’s the W.A.,” said Snow. “Like they say, if you don’t want a monkey’s tail to touch you, don’t go to a monkey dance.”
Bracelin glared around like he was waiting for somebody to give him a reason to tear their head off. “They’d know, bunch of fucking monkeys.”
Omorlay definitely managed its “boiled wine” moniker without boiling out any of the alcohol; it made Snow’s face burn and the back of his neck itch. He kept his eyes moving around the room, to see if anybody was watching Favor, anybody who had the dull stupid glare of a cop. He eyed two men at the bar wearing revolvers on their belts, and one old black two stools down had a bolt action Remington .306, a goddamned deer rifle, leaning between his legs. A fourth had an Israeli Desert Eagle semi-auto.357 in one hand and a cup of boiled wine in the other. From the bar’s end, he heard the easy lilt of an Aussie accent—New South Wales by the sound of it—though he didn’t see which man it was coming from and wasn’t even sure he heard correctly, what with all the chatter in five languages and the popping inside his bad ear.
“We got something like mercenary central here,” Leeds said.
“Fuck ’em, what I say,” Bracelin chimed in. “Kinda faggots need a gun to fuck with you. Get me naked with one of them in the hold of a tank ship, and I’ll have him sucking ammonium disulfide in about ten seconds.”
“That what comes outa your pole, mate? Ammonium disulfide?”
“Fuck off.”
Snow finally stood up and moved again through the room, around chairs where smoking soldiers turned to peer up at him with a dull, muted violence. He moved past the ceiling fan lying on the floor with bullet holes in its carcass, and came to the bar again, nodding for another boiled wine, then turning toward Favor. “Hey, Bucky. What’s shakin’.”
“Your dick from the look of you, you old bastard!” Favor reached out for a hard handshake, his fist red, white, and freckled. “I seen you over there checking things out. You ain’t changed that way.” Favor was a round-faced jowly man with a boil of red hair growing off his head, and twin shocks of it coming out his ears. “So we set for up-country?”
“Be on Goodhouse Hill in two days.”
Snow looked to the end of the bar, down the faces of Anglo security guns. The guy on the last stool, his voice rising, that Aussie voice. Just then the guy glanced toward Snow and got up to move out the back toward the head. The turn and set of his jaw rang familiar, not to say the twin humps of his trapezius muscles, taut and defined like ten-inch hawsers between his neck and shoulders. He wore a green military tee shirt soaked through with sweat; as he turned, Snow caught sight of an earring hole in his right lobe. Not scarred over, but open and clean like he’d been wearing an earring just yesterday. Then Snow remembered him, from the Rojo in Panama City—the Aussie at the bar.
He shook his head as if to ward off the boiled wine and turned back to Favor.
Somehow he knew that the last thing he needed was more drink, but he knocked back another cup of boiled wine anyway, bad old days in Vietnam brought into close focus seeing Favor, so close Snow could touch and smell the time. Then his mind snapped to the present, out there in the back with that Aussie, wondering what the hell he was up to and what the raw chance was of seeing the same man on opp
osite ends of the ocean in less than two weeks’ time. A minute later, the kid made his way semi-wobbly toward the bar and then past, out the back toward the head. Snow waited while Roberta Flack sang “Killing Me Softly” over the house hi-fi, and Buck Favor droned on about the Lebs and how he was sure to frag the man he worked for if he fucked with him even one more time.
“You know this Aussie was sitting down here on the end a bit ago?” Snow said. “You ever seen him before?”
“Aussies are criminals and drunks,” said Favor, gulping back half a beer. “I avoid them.”
When the kid came back into the bar, Snow watched his face for a hint of something, saw his dark eyes roam the bar like he was surveying some great risk. He lit on Beth, held held his gaze for a long count. Snow moved over to the bar to pick up four drinks for the table. “How’s it going, Georgie?”
“Going okay, Harold. You?”
“Going okay. So tell me, George, you happen to see that dude there at the end of the bar earlier?”
He looked down the end. “That guy?”
“No, guy from earlier. He went out back just ahead of you.”
“I didn’t see him.” The kid shook his head while Snow stared him down. Drunk as he was, Snow could read the lie like he could read a woman’s face and know if she did or didn’t want him. Some things a man just knew.
“George Maciel, Buck Favor, old comrade in arms thereabouts Vietnam—he fought and I fucked. Heh! This here’s the grandson of Joaquin Maciel.”
“Who the fuck’s that?” Favor stuck out a meaty paw, lifted his chin. “I don’t know grandpa from Adam, but good to meet ya, kid.”
Snow excused himself to go to the head, stepping to the rear entrance. Eyes followed him, and he thought he might kick-start a chain reaction just by walking past. He glanced back once to see the kid talking to Favor. In the alley, he paused to wait for the toilet to open up, at first thinking himself alone. Then he saw a sober-faced African man standing down the alley a ways, in tribal dress, like he was shot in from the bush. Snow closed his eyes, and felt the instant swirl of his brain around a spinning earth. Pagan stuff, but he could feel it.