by David Masiel
When he opened his eyes the man was gone. Snow wasn’t quite sure he’d been there to begin with. He could see down an alley to the back of a residence, where a chicken ran past followed by a small child, naked and notable primarily because he still had all his limbs intact. The air back here had the strong odor of sewage mixed with baking bread. Inside, the Turkish toilet functioned mercifully well. No shit piled up inside the hole, at least. “Turkish tobacco and Turkish toilets,” Snow said aloud, as he stood on the foot pads and peed.
He blinked back the burning at his eyes, the wood smoke and the booze, and the salted sweat of people. Above the sink hung a discolored mirror, its backing paint flaked off, blotting his image as if by skin cancer.
Snow staggered out into the alley, where he saw the Aussie making his way into the bar again. He hurried to follow, came through the swinging screen door into the bar to find him just exiting the front balcony and stepping down to the street, headed east. Along the bar he found Maciel standing before Favor, getting an earful of the old days, which at that moment meant claiming status as one of Snow’s oldest friends. Buck had a cheekful of Red Man chewing tobacco and drank from two beers held in one hand, the longneck bottles laced in his fingers as if they were permanently woven into his knuckles. He called Sierra Leone “Salone” and tipped both bottles up, swallowed down the double shot, then spat tobacco juice on the floor, drawing a shout from the bartender. “Spit juice outside!”
“Gotcha, Gid,” he said to the bartender, hoisting his brews as if making a toast, then immediately spitting again on the broken concrete floor. He called all Africans Gid, short for gidda-gidda—a term used in Arab North Africa to refer to all sub-Saharan Africans. Simply translated, it meant nigger. “White man can have his way in this land if he knows what he’s about, ain’t that right, Snow?”
Favor slapped him hard on the back. Snow winced. Favor was fifteen years Snow’s junior. He had always worn a crazy recklessness that Snow had once found useful if not amusing. Now it set him on edge. Come to think of it, everything in the Snap Trap set him on edge. He stared hard at the kid, who kept his attention on Favor. Snow guessed it was easier that way.
“This here’s the greatest bear hunter in the entire Pacific rim,” Favor announced, clapping Snow on the back yet again.
“Truth is, Bucky, that goddamned hurts when you do that.”
“Hah! Harold Snow hurt!”
Favor launched into a story about how Snow once killed a black bear with his own hands. It was a true story, but to hear Favor tell it you’d have thought he was making it up as he went. Snow had shot the thing and put it down over a creek bed, hiked across river rocks and bent over with a skinning knife, set to put it to the bear, when the thing rose up like a brush fire and slammed him into the stream. Favor told the story with great animation and drunken glee. In the story, Snow rolled into the water and came up with a river rock and bashed the bear on the side of the head. The sensation was something like hitting a rock with another rock. Then the bear bit into his left shoulder. Favor said he heard the cracking and crunching as he ran down off the hillside and started screaming, and still the bear was working his teeth into Snow’s shoulder. Finally the old man came up with his boot knife and opened up the bear’s neck with it. Snow knew if he pulled away the bear would take a chunk of his shoulder with him, so he hugged the animal tight to keep him from working those teeth around until he bled out.
Now Snow caught sight of Beth over at the table. She had a worried look. She motioned with her eyes outside—the sun was going down.
“That’s pretty wild,” said the kid.
“Wild! You got no idea, kid. This old fuck has lived through shit that you only imagine in nightmares. Hell, he’s done shit that’d curdle your blood.”
Snow stared at Favor now, frowning down his nose. “I ain’t done nothing, what are you talking about? Had shit done to me. I absorbed twenty times the radiation of anybody at Bikini.”
“Yeah, you’re a victim all right. Maybe you’ll bank with them lawsuits.”
“Ah, fuck that. I don’t collect no unemployment and I don’t suck off no lawsuits. I’m sixty in about two weeks and I could out-hike and out-hunt any man in here. All these pussies who survived the war come to find out it killed them after all. So what if it did? Fuck ’em, they’re lucky they had the forty years. I seen kids eighteen get their heads blown off and land on my goddamned lap.”
“It’s bound to have an impact on you,” said the kid.
“Sure. Shit like that changes a man,” Favor said, downing yet another foaming gulp of Star beer.
“Didn’t have no effect on me at all. I think all that’s just bullshit excuses. It’s prissy shit, complaining all the time.”
“No effect my eye,” said Favor. “I ain’t judging, I’m just saying.”
Maciel downed a cup of firewater, then stared into the cup as if reading tea leaves. “Is there room for God?”
Favor looked at the kid like he’d just crapped on his boot. “You got God worries? That your thing?”
“He’s definitely got God worries.” Snow looked at him. “You do.”
“Get Snow to tell you about his drinking days in Nam. You can get by that, you won’t ever have a God worry again in your life.”
Favor knocked down both beers, then reached back to rap the empties on the bar and nod for two more. “’Member that one little Viet chippie, what was her name? Mi Lang? Snow loved them Viet girls. You should have heard him: ‘They got the tiniest little pussies, just the tiniest little pussies.’ He’s got movies of all his girls, you should get him to show you. Skin flicks from back in the fifties!”
Snow had never wished for a man to shut up more. Now he was the one avoiding eye contact with the kid, sensing the judgment in his gaze and somehow the twisted betrayal of Favor’s storytelling, masquerading as wild nostalgia but feeling a whole lot more like a mind-fuck. Snow glanced toward the table where Beth sat with Leeds and Bracelin and wished he could fly off on one of the science-fiction jet packs, just lift right off and fly away to sea.
“So what about that night in Saigon? When you come home with all that blood on you not remembering nothing? What about that? I ever tell you I had a CID man coming around asking me questions about that night?”
“No.”
“You cut up that hooker, didn’t you? Just to see what it’s like to play God, I’m gonna bet. Or’d you just get outa hand with the rough stuff?”
Snow felt the back of his neck tighten. He felt the kid’s eyes on him. He was glad Beth wasn’t in earshot. “Outside of war, I never killed nobody, that’s bullshit. For one thing I didn’t have that blackout in Saigon, I had it in Da Nang, aboard the steamship Saigon. So get your story straight if you’re gonna tell stories.”
Favor held up his hands, and the bartender thrust two beers at them. “You’re the one can’t remember what happened. You’re the one’s gotta live with it. Crawling around the world searching for snatch.”
“Well, if it ain’t Buck the Fuck. Haven’t seen you in years. This is what booze does to a man, Georgie. Why I quit drinking ten years ago.”
Favor chuckled as he downed another swallow. “Yeah, you look like you quit drinking! You keep going like you are and you’ll be needing old Buck the Fuck to bail your ancient ass out of the Negro sling. Hey, kid, why don’t you ask him why he can’t go back to Index, Washington? Get him to tell you about the little retarded girl he was fucking before her uncle found out about it!” Favor let out a drunken laugh.
Snow set a bill down on the bar, nodded to the bartender. “I got some business to take care of. Now shut your trap and get to work. No more bullshit.”
“I gotta hit the head,” said Buck. “See you up Nimba county in a few days.”
“I need water,” the kid said, after Favor had gone. “A glass of cold fresh water.”
“Don’t listen to that guy.”
Maciel nodded unconvincingly, his gaze falling and holding to Snow’
s eyes until the old man saw movies playing there, regular skin flicks and horror stories. Snow took him by the arm, harder than he meant to. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” The kid spoke it firm, even hard, like his gramps. He had that moral judge in him. Snow could feel it. He hated a goddamned moralist.
“Like you believe that cocksucker.”
The kid tried to roll his arm free and Snow felt himself resist it, like if he let him go he’d never get to say something he wanted to say—except he didn’t want to say anything. He didn’t want anybody to. He wanted quiet.
“I don’t know Buck Favor from anybody,” the kid said then. “He seems like an asshole to me.”
“He’s a racist prick is what he is. He thinks he knows what I’m about, but he don’t know shit. Just ’cause we do business with each other, he thinks I’m like him. Well I ain’t. Hell, during the times he’s talking about, the VC were coming out of the woodwork in Da Nang, and who the hell knows whose blood was all over me anyhow? Who the hell knows? I could have saved five lives for all anybody knows—and here, well, here these people been screwed by one group or another, missionaries and capitalists and you name it—first the Christians here to save their bacon from the Devil and then the Muslims with their Koran-or-the-sword business—Favor’s just another in line.”
The kid eyed Snow evenly. “You know it doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t matter what Buck Favor thinks, Harold.” The kid looked calmly at him, wobbled slightly to show he was drunk. “He’s right, though. You’re the one has to live with yourself. It only matters what you think.”
“Jesus Christ.” Snow wished he could have felt better about that. “I gotta go see a guy. Tell Bracelin to wait a half hour, then get a cab and meet me at the corner of George and Boston Lightfoot.” Then he stepped out through the front door into the glowing, muggy dusk. He wished he knew why it mattered what the kid thought of his life, but there were practical matters here, like why the lie about the Aussie, if it was a lie. Snow tried to focus on that, tried to understand the here and now and not to care what the kid knew about Index, or what he himself remembered about Da Nang and Viet bar girls.
Evening was settling with no cooling of smoky air as he turned down Howe Street, past the street vendors closing up shop, a stooped man gathering cassava, and a fat girl of twenty wearing a flowered dress selling the last pieces of grilled fish and chicken from an open barbecue. Within two hundred yards there stood five dozen men who would as soon kill Snow as let him pass, but let him pass they did, for despite his age he knew where he was going and carried himself as such. He ticked through his mental list: get the contracts into Churchill’s hands, hope the unscrupulous bastard didn’t fuck him over completely, and set sail.
He longed for something simple. He wished to God he could go back to the Cascades, felt tightness in his chest when he remembered the clean air of the mountains, the cool-aired mist of home in Washington. And the girl from Index. He quickened his pace, as if getting to Churchill to nail everything down would somehow stave her off; Favor had a way of dredging up the shit. Snow hated when people called her retarded. For his taste in younger women, he pled guilty. There was something about youthful womanhood, how it never censored or angled but flung itself headlong into life and love and bed with a complete lack of guile, got its heart broken, swirled, and ached for its loss. Women were complicated, girls were simple. Like he was simple.
He had never been with anybody who gave herself so completely to him as Carly. Carly. He had tried a long time not to think of her name and how he’d say it while they were together, urging her, inside her, staring at that twisted ecstatic face. He tried to blot out how utterly she craved him, and the ways she came to him, stealing away to scratch at his door after midnight. He hadn’t used her. He cared for her, showed her affection. He never thought of himself as a user. He wanted to protect her. But then the endgame hovered and goaded him. They sent her to some home. Some “managed care facility” or whatever they called it. Twelve years ago now. She’d be twenty-nine and still a girl in her mind. For him there was only the banishing. If he believed in confession he would have to admit this was the gravest pain of all. He could still remember how they descended on his house, Elks Club elders, men he’d played cards with, chased women with, hunted with, sitting him down and leaning into him, stern and clear: We all got our vices, but you have crossed a line. There are two kinds of people in this world and you are the wrong kind, Snow. You are the wrong kind.
Snow walked in short quick steps. In a strange way he wished for a sterner reprisal, wished the girl’s uncle had hit him in the jaw, wished he could have pulled himself up off the ground to explain instead of being driven off like a wild animal. He couldn’t have lived with prison, but he craved the judgment of a day in court. Let his accusers face him. Let them cry and strike out and maim him. Now he wished he could run right out of his body. He doubled his fists, brought his knuckles to his temples, and began to rub. The pain ran into his skull and lodged there. He kept hearing that Krio Lord’s Prayer. He looked around wondering where the hell it was coming from, his dead ear ringing and popping like gunfire.
Two men on a bus stop bench eyed him as he rounded the corner up past a big gray mansion off Boston Lightfoot, and for ten steps he thought they might be cops, and he sensed his backside, waiting for them to follow. But they didn’t follow. He found himself looking for the Australian, wondering, really, how was it you could see the same man in PC and Freetown on the same trip without assuming he was following you? He turned up George Street, making him think of the kid and all his understated moralizing. He walked past St. George’s Cathedral, where he saw a priest standing at the door, a black man in a black robe, one of those Jesuits. He felt his pace slow. He stared as he walked along, jamming his toe on a rise in the concrete walk and stumbling forward. He regained his balance and stopped there, wondered what he might say to such a man if he were to walk up those steps, something like fuck me father for I have sinned it’s been fifty years since my last confession so how about you order up a bolt from Zeus and get it all over with? He stared slack-jawed at the priest, lowered his head and let out a tiny whining sound, like a small two-stroke motor climbing a hill. He threw off confession worries and started moving again, shaking out his hands, feeling his steps down inside his boots. A block later he climbed the front steps of the wooden cop house.
Inside he went to a counter enclosed by glass two inches thick. He put his mouth to the rounded vent. “I need to see Mr. Churchill,” he said. “He’s expecting me.” And he sat back to wait. A long-necked man stuck his head out the door and waved him in, drawing looks from others, and he was led down a short, warped-wood hallway to the end office, where Churchill came out from behind his desk with a big smile and his hand stuck out. He wasn’t alone, though. There on the settee by the window overlooking the garden sat a strangely familiar guy, damned near Snow’s own age, with speckled white hair. He couldn’t place him, and got no help from Churchill, who didn’t bother with introductions.
“I got the paperwork here,” Snow said.
“I think that we are not going to worry about paperwork,” said Churchill.
Churchill had round massive eyes with languid lids, and a tight, knurled scar that interrupted his left eyebrow where some cop had whacked him back in ’67, before he became a cop himself and started doing the whacking.
Snow turned to the older man, trying to place him. “We met? Name’s Harold Snow.”
“Excuse me,” said Churchill. “This is Mr. Johnson.”
“I do believe we’ve met,” said Snow. “You’re from Lofa county, Liberia, that right?”
“You have a good memory.”
“I tried to buy some land up there. Tried to set myself up in business in Lofa county.”
“I gather it did not work out.”
“No, sir. Own a small piece up in the mountains.”
“Near the border.”
“Tha
t’s right.” Snow paused and looked over at Churchill, his head bobbing a bit as he turned back to Mr. Johnson. “Now how is it you know that?”
“It is the preferable location. A deduction.”
“What is it that you Americans say about real estate?” said Churchill. “Location location location! Three locations!”
Snow felt unnerved. He gave a casual glance to the door. He felt a sudden need to get to Goodhouse Creek. He stared over at Mr. Johnson. Snow had a nearly photographic memory for people. This one eluded him still, in part because the man gave nothing away, not about Lofa county, or the Mandingoes Snow had known there, or their ties to the military down in Liberia.
He put the contracts on the desk.
“We both know how you have acquired these cargoes,” Churchill said. “It is obvious to everybody.” He held up his hand. “Don’t worry, we won’t be exercising legal authority over you. But it does change the reality of our arrangement.”
“We got contracts here for bulk chemicals,” Snow said. “My assumption is you still want to do business. So I don’t see how reality’s changed.”
“It is a matter of options and aspects,” Churchill said. His police uniform looked two sizes too small. He’d been a tough man in his time, but he was growing fat here.
“Options and aspects? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“We need part of the cargo to be delivered to Monrovia, so we will only be able to off-load half of your shipment of chemicals here. First aspect, then, is that we have no capacity, you have already seen that our tank farm is filled to capacity and we are running trucks into downtown storage facilities.”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“The second aspect is that there are some people of Mr. Johnson’s who need transportation to the Liberian capital.”