by David Masiel
Then the radio crackled. Finally, the pilot boat. Bracelin answered the call saying, “It’s about time!” into the mike, then shoved the throttle forward, activating a bell and sending a readout to the engine room, where Leeds or maybe Kairos or maybe Beth would push the throttle to half ahead. The ship powered forward to where the pilot boat came alongside.
“There’s one more thing, Brace,” he said. “I’m thinking we should delay our discharge here. I gotta be honest. I think Churchill’s gonna fuck us all the way on this. He just wants delivery here because that’s where he’s resold the cargoes. Plus whatever shit those men in the forepeak are here for.”
“So why stop here at all? Let’s kill the fucks in the forepeak and dump them in the Gulf on our way to Lagos. Let’s sell this shit in Lagos.”
“I gotta go up-country, I told you that.”
“For your rocks.”
“That’s right. Plus I want to find Yasa. Churchill and this guy there, they were talking like they knew my house. Plus I got something I need to do for Beth.”
Bracelin let out a snort and shook his head—pathetic. “She don’t love you, Snow. You’re doing all this love shit, and she’s not into fucking geriatric cases.”
“Oh, why don’t you just fuck off.”
Bracelin let out a hissing snake-laugh, through his teeth. “I’ll ride up-country with you for half of what you get from Favor.”
Snow stared. “A third. I gotta pay off Paynor too.”
“Fine, a third then.”
“We’ll know by the time we get back if Churchill’s gonna renege. If the first half of the wire transfer ain’t gone through by then, we just go. If it has, we finish the deal here.”
“So we gotta delay the agents here in Monro,” Bracelin said, his mind in it now. “Tell them we’re short on crew and we have to wait to off-load.”
“We’ll take Kairos with us. No pump operation without the pumpman. I’ll take the skiff in and hit Congotown for an up-country vehicle.”
“Okay,” said Bracelin, and slapped him on the shoulder, a friendly slap that only hurt a little bit. Snow moved down the inner ladder, holding tight to the railing, careful not to slip.
As he launched the skiff off the seaward side of the ship, Snow felt like he’d been on the short end of a fight with a man fond of low blows. The pain felt like it might be in his back, except that he couldn’t get comfortable, no matter how he shifted. He ran the skiff in to the port, tied it up alongside the quay, and removed the spark plug. Riding a cab toward Congotown, he imagined letting the impulse ferry him through Monrovia and Congotown toward Roberts airport, wondering how much energy it would really take to lean forward and say Robertsfield, where he’d catch a plane for Abidjan, Lagos, and London—with thirty grand in his backpack—just go, even if he didn’t know where in the end. He sensed that need, to let it all go—the money, dreams of the girl, realities of the life.
He tried to put his worries about Churchill out of his head. The bridge tracked over the southeast end of Providence Island, where American slaves had first landed 150 years ago. The cabbie swung north up Water Street past the Waterside Market, where the good smells of barbecue rose up off the waterfront and a swarm of people crowded the stalls to buy hot peppers, yams, fish, and cassava. He watched the vegetable vendors selling sweet potato greens and bitter tomatoes.
He took UN Drive around the loop, past the U.S. Embassy and Papa Dee’s, feeding into the coast road, past the executive mansion, which Tubman had built back in the sixties. It looked like a multi-deck parking garage, with deep recesses and overhangs, giving it a gloomy, paranoid facade. The Temple of Justice was just as bad, like a cheap concrete high-rise hotel. On the broad upright section it read TEMPLE OF JUSTICE: LET JUSTICE BE DONE TO ALL MEN.
Snow had always liked that one—justice being done to people rather than for them or with them, like Justice was a stick somebody was hitting you with. Since Tolbert that’s the direction things had gone. Snow had made his contacts in ’69, visited three times that year on dry-cargo freighters, met Yasa at Papa Dee’s, got addicted—to the woman, to the cool air up-country. In ’74 he built the house on Goodhouse Creek, lured Yasa away from a longshoreman she’d taken up with out of Freeport, moved her into the house with her kids, and only then did he realize how far things had gone with Tolbert’s crew.
One of the reasons he’d built out there was the influence of the iron mine at Nimba Mountain, which was operated by a Swedish outfit with their own security force and promised protection. But that turned on him, when the head security prick grew a snake up his ass for a white man with a black mistress, and got some locals into the act, and the harassments started. Like everything else in his life he’d figured the politics too late. Now he thought maybe the only thing separating him from disaster was a single bag of uncut stones buried under that two-story slave colonial on Goodhouse Creek—and maybe a miner at Nimba Mountain, an old miner to shake Bethy’s tree.
He felt his heart race just thinking about that, spinning off until he felt it leaping out his throat. He realized he was slipping in the seat some, lifting his chest, pain now radiating upward from his lower abdomen. The cabbie was watching him. “You sure you want hire car?” the cabbie said, eyeing the rearview. “You no look good, friend. I can take you where you want go.”
“I’m just having what you call a heart attack,” said Snow, and laughed.
“Dat no good. You want to go JFK?” he asked, meaning the hospital.
“No thanks,” Snow said. “Hotel Congo.”
“Dat all the way Congotown.”
“I told you, I want go Congotown.”
“Ah right, my friend. But you look like you go die.”
“I not go die,” he said. “I ain’t having a heart attack, I’m having a frigging gas attack.”
“You mean de mustard gas?” And he laughed.
“Never mind,” Snow said, and the cabbie mercifully shut his mouth all the way to Congotown, probably figuring Snow was more trouble than he was worth. He pulled the car in front of the Hotel Congo.
Snow tossed the guy a five, then pushed out of the cab and went in through the weathered swinging doors. Standing at the front desk, waiting to hire a car, Snow watched the white suits hang loosely on the Liberian waiters moving past, oversized gloves with trays perched in delivery to the two dozen tables. The place looked like something out of Casablanca, except that every inch of it, lath and plaster and wood-frame construction, was melting away in the heat. He’d heard that Said, the Lebanese owner, was floating the hotel for sale, had heard a lot of that kind of activity going on, like those in the know were anticipating wholesale change of a different type.
Snow rented a big old bush cab, a Toyota Land Cruiser with mud on the fenders and dents in the doors, driving it back up through the hot dry streets of Monrovia until he located a truck driver who could handle the trek up-country with some drums of fuel for the return trip. He drove around the downtown until he found one, paid him half now, promised half on delivery, and told him where to pick up six drums of gasoline and where to meet him in Nimba county.
Liberia had enjoyed 136 years as America’s only African colony, and while in the postmortem of true colonialism, the place was run by a dozen or so families, all of them descendants of the freed American slaves who had landed here in 1822 and promptly set about enslaving the locals as best they could. The tribal people of Liberia were nominal monotheists, Muslims and Christians to the tune of 70 percent, but you never had to explore far before you saw the fetishes or heard the juju or the invocation of ancestral spirits good and bad. They were good pagans here, like Snow aspired to on some level, something down and human about paganism. Animists wandering the land of the Forest Devil. And among the people, the family divisions and the clans and the tribal underscoring. Tribalism ruled the world, Snow thought.
At Freeport he found the crew waiting, the ship behind them sitting high, with Paynor looking on from the bridge deck. Kairos s
tood with Bracelin, Beth, and Maciel on the wooden dock. “Did you have any idea there was men in our forward hold?” Kairos said. “I saw them myself. They marched out of here ten minutes after we arrived.”
“Who were they?” Snow asked. As if any of them knew.
“They were some shifty-looking characters.”
“Let’s go for a little R and R, Stephen. You’ve earned it.”
“You’re right, bos’n.” He grinned. “I have too. I damned well have.”
Getting Kairos off the ship was only one reason Snow wanted him along. Having a black man up-country couldn’t be a bad thing, even if he was from East St. Louis. At least they wouldn’t look like a pack of wild white men kidnapping Beth and hauling her into the forest.
A canopied military truck sat idling on the opposite side of the dock area, up the hill some, and inside were two government soldiers. Snow could only assume that more men sat there in the covered bed, concealed. He kept his eye on the truck as he ground gears out of the parking area, giving a wave to the men in green and heading back toward town. “What you know about these soldiers?” Kairos asked.
“I know they got guns,” said Snow.
Snow angled over and ushered Beth into the front seat where she could ride unmolested, despite Bracelin’s protest that he should ride shotgun. They looped south of the city and headed east up the coal tar between Monrovia and Ganta. Into the night Snow saw a fire erupt down through a valley in upper Bong county, reaching toward Nimba county, in the clan of Ganta, and after that came more fires, flickering behind the forest canopy and up between the thatched roofs of roundhouses and the corrugated angular roofs of concrete construction. He heard it then, the even rhythm of rolling drums, like giant heartbeats in the night. If they were bonfires of celebration or acts of arson, Snow couldn’t quite tell.
“Tell me it’s some holiday I ain’t heard of,” Bracelin said from behind him, and only then did Snow realize that somebody besides himself was awake.
“No holiday I know of,” Snow said.
At Ganta they saw four military trucks rush past headed west, toward Monrovia. The soldiers wore green tiger suits and helmets and held their M-16s upright, their jaws set and their cheeks jiggling in the flashing lights of the roadway. These were the only vehicles they’d passed, and Snow felt mild surprise that they’d not been stopped, but the trucks seemed in a hurry. Through the town, dawn felt half a lifetime away, and Bracelin wondered out loud where the hell they were going, as the road went from coal tar to red dirt and on into the dry scars of a distant rainfall, flickering in the headlights of the Land Cruiser. They came to a bridge over a wash, made of a dozen round logs with the bark all worn off, stretched from dirt to dirt. Snow pulled forward slowly until he was confident he’d lined up the tires to the logs; then all at once he punched it hard and bounded and powered over the bridge.
“You taking the long way for a reason?” Bracelin asked.
“Told you I got me a surprise for Bethy.”
“You’re so fucked up, Snow.”
Snow cast a long look to where Beth lay asleep with her head bouncing on the window. She shifted her position, then opened her eyes and sat up. “I need a cigarette,” she said, and searched the leg pocket of her fatigues before bringing out a bag of Drum. As they bounced along, she rolled one. “By the way”—she touched a match to the end of the hand-rolled smoke—“I truly loathe surprises.”
In the cool period before dawn they pushed on four-wheel drive out of the rainforest of the western slopes, the roadsides choked by bamboo tracts and mahogany trees, ironwood and raffia palm giving way to the sparse canopy of the elevated plateau. Snow had always felt at home here, from his first visit back in ’69, and now once again he drove straight east toward Nimba Mountain, a monolithic cone of iron ore that jutted dark blue in the moonlight. Snow pulled slowly down the gravel and cinder road of the mining operation, checking a letter he held in one hand, finally matching it to a house number, and pulled in alongside a boxy-tall Land Rover.
They had decent digs up here at the mines. The neat, orderly rows of rectangular concrete houses, interspersed with shade trees, and cars parked out front—all of it made him feel like this was some corporate colonial town, not even Africa: the mountains, the calm cool air, mining for iron with Swedes in charge. He’d only been here on two other occasions and hadn’t seen Thorson since early ’77; now, when the man answered the door, wearing his canvas pants and a work shirt, he held a cup of tea and peered out the cracked door. “Thorson. It’s Harold Snow. Long time no see.”
“What in hell you doing here so early?” He had a rolling Swedish voice that reminded Snow of his maternal grandfather.
“Just drove up from Monro.”
“Who is that with you?” he asked, glancing past to the vehicle.
“My crew. They’re okay.”
“Park the vehicle parallel to mine and bring them inside. We can’t attract any attention, not now.”
Snow stepped back to the Land Cruiser, which he’d pulled off the side of the road, and climbed in behind the wheel. Only Beth was awake, still smoking in the front passenger seat. In the back, Bracelin had finally fallen asleep, along with the other two, whose heads were tipped back with their mouths wide open.
“Thorson’s got a little spooky,” Snow said.
“Spooky about what?” she said, hunkered down now, looking moody and sleepy and puffing away on her smoke. “My surprise?”
“No, no, he ain’t your surprise, he just knows where to find it.”
She glanced toward the front of the house, where a dim light glowed in the window. “Listen, Harold. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this surprise and all that.” Snow started the motor, not sure he wanted to hear this. He worked the Land Cruiser in parallel to Thorson’s Rover. “I don’t want you doing anything like give me a big sack of rocks, okay? I really really don’t want into that business. And I definitely don’t want to end up playing somebody’s mule.”
Snow felt something like air go out of his belly, and he thought for a second he’d lost control of his bladder. “Mule’s a sexless creature,” Snow said, forcing out a laugh. He thought he’d shown her more of himself than that. “Anyway, I got a sack of rocks all right, but it ain’t for you! You should know by now I got a girlfriend in these parts. I been seeing her coming on six years now.” He turned and stared, serious now. “The world don’t revolve around you.”
She let out a short little breath, like half a snort. “I know that.”
“Let’s get inside before Thorson has a fit.”
Inside, Thorson had a fit anyway. He wanted to know why in hell everybody didn’t come inside as he’d asked. “I’d have had you park out back if I knew they were going to stay in the vehicle,” he said, checking through the curtains.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Thorson? This area’s secure.”
“What is the matter with me? How about what is the matter with this country? It is many things, but secure is not one of them.” He sipped from his teacup two or three times, fast. “It has been all over the radio the last half of an hour,” he said. “There has been a coup. They found Tolbert this morning. He was disemboweled, Snow. In his bed.”
Snow felt a strange swirl come to his head, dizzy for a split second, like maybe his fever had returned, or was about to return. He thought of the soldiers at the dock, and the trucks they’d passed in Gomba City. “We saw fires all the way up,” he said.
“Dear God,” said Thorson. He went over to a cabinet and pulled open the door, brought out a bottle of vodka, and poured some into his teacup.
“Mind if I have some of that?” said Beth.
Thorson pulled open a different cabinet and came out with two more teacups, handing one to Beth and one to Snow, then poured them each a cup, said “Skoal,” and downed his own in a single shot. “They are sure to be coming through here this morning, I would guess,” he said. “The new county administration. I have heard the coup i
s well executed, very surgical. Word by radio was that they ‘executed’ ninety last night. Traitors, of course.”
“Ninety?” Snow was surprised.
“I suppose we will just keep on. There is ore to mine, correct? They will want to keep the mine going, one would think.”
“There’s a lot to mine. The government’s gone for at least a few days—how are people reacting?”
“Those fires you saw, probably celebrating. But you know how celebrations can go. Sometimes it is happy fire from five miles off that crowns you.”
The thought of happy fire and all that went with it, cane juice and revolutionary euphoria, gave Snow a sudden need to get to Yasa’s house. He imagined driving outside of Likepa toward the Guinea border, the rise of Goodhouse Hill. Suddenly he remembered he’d arranged for the trucker to meet him in Likepa, so they could drive the last ten clicks together.
The vodka burned in his stomach and seemed to spread into an acid-induced bellyache that made a beeline for that spot under his ribs.
“So you got that information we talked about?”
“One moment,” he said, and went into the living room, opened a rolltop desk, and brought over a folded paper. “Here is the one. He is up at Nimba Road number four. Just one crossroad beyond.”
“Got it.”
“You tried to sell your house three years back?”
“Never tried to sell. I wanted Yasa to have it.”
Beth looked at him in a queer way then, and he hoped she’d see his goodness in that, and part of him hoped she’d be just a little jealous.
“Let us pray they don’t decide to kill white people around here. From what I understand, Likepa is for the coup,” Thorson said. “Might not be a bad place for you. On the other hand, it could be worse.”