by David Masiel
“She’s all right,” said Snow, but the local man seemed unconvinced.
“She got the juju on her, maybe.”
Snow decided it might be best to wait on the outside of town to the east, where they parked in the shade for thirty minutes before a flatbed Toyota pickup four-by-four came chugging around the corner from the western road, carrying six 55-gallon drums of gasoline lashed to the back bed. At least now they’d be able to get back down the mountain to Monrovia. “I hope nothing’s happened to the ship with all this coup business,” he said. “You know we can’t expect anything.”
“Great, Snow,” said Bracelin. “You’re on the job, that’s for fucking sure.”
“You can expect madness, is what you can expect,” said Kairos.
Snow started the Land Cruiser, and with an easy wave of his hand, as if nothing at all had happened there, he lurched onto the red-dirt road, powering north in four-wheel-drive low, the big engine groaning as it bore them along a road marked by rivulet scars that hadn’t seen water for months.
They drove slowly toward a wood-and-wire automobile gate, swung open and half broken. When Snow saw the broken gate, he said, “Tolbert’s people,” and turned in quickly, waving the truck to follow. There they came to a two-story house, with a shuttered balcony on the top floor and a wide porch stretching across the bottom. It looked old and broken, several shutters hanging from a single hinge, and the corrugated roof peeled back where winds had caught it.
“Ah, Jesus,” said Snow, his voice cracking as he pulled forward. “What the hell’s happened here?”
Both vehicles swung up around to the front of the house and parked, the truck bearing the fuel drums pulling up behind. The driver stepped out and up to Snow, shaking his head, laughing. “Yu bra elephant!” He laughed with nervous energy. “I thought I no make Gomba City, forget here! You hear what happen night last? They kill go’ment! They cut Bill Tolbert gut out. All the way up, people go mad, say they overthrow Americos. Overthrow True Whig Party! Kill the Americos!”
It meant kill the Americo-Liberians, but somehow Snow felt it sounded a little too close to killing him. He immediately started pulling out money, specifically American dollars in tens and twenties. “This here’s the real deal for your time,” he said, snapping a twenty-dollar bill in the driver’s hand.
The guy took the cash and looked at one corner of the house, where a fire scar licked out the window like a giant tongue of black, as if someone had built a campfire in the living room. “Dat go’ment right there. Dat Bill Tolbert. Bill Tolbert gutless!”
More ways than one, Snow thought.
The drums served a dual purpose: fuel for the Land Cruiser on the return trip to Monrovia and bribe materials for same. But the number of possible problems had skyrocketed. Snow had seen it before. A top-down coup in a precarious state brought out the clan boundaries. In a normal day you might pass through fifteen clan villages, all wanting to know who you were and why you were here before they’d let you pass—for a fee. It was like hoofing it through gang turf in the barrio.
Snow promised the cabbie food and drink and a bonus if he’d stay over. Then he leaned toward Maciel. “I want him to lead our butts outa here,” he said in a whisper, then spoke up to the cabbie. “If we go somewhere else, we can negotiate the fee then, how’s that?”
“Well, that sound okay,” said the driver, looking up at the afternoon light. “Lest now, anyways. I go stay.”
Bracelin frowned. “Which is it? Go or stay?”
“Go stay,” said the driver, nodding to settle the matter.
Bracelin’s mouth curled in disgust, and he looked around as if for help. “Don’t fuck with me, bub, or I’ll cut your black heart out.”
The driver flinched and stepped backward. He looked over at Snow with a stark-eyed fear fluttering over his face, like he knew of such things, and didn’t take such threats casually at all, certainly not as casually as Bracelin had offered it.
“You go fuck you,” he said. “Get him de way away from me,” he said to Snow.
“Charlie,” said Snow. “Don’t go threatening things like that. Not here.”
“No fucking threat, promise!” Bracelin boomed, barking at the driver, who flinched as Bracelin managed to spit all over the place.
“Just leave him alone!”
“Suck my pole, old man,” said Bracelin.
“He means he will stay!”
“Then why don’t he just say so?”
“What the fuck you on?”
“Not enough of anything, too much of the stuff that don’t help,” Bracelin said.
“You look cranky to me. You got Leeds brewing up crank for you?”
Bracelin grinned. “He couldn’t make speed if his life depended on it. Lisa got me some bennies in PC. Flash from the past, good old cross tops.”
“That’s just great, Brace. And you say my mind’s not in it.”
As they turned, two young men stepped from the house and nodded toward Snow, while Bracelin reached inside his pants for whatever small weapon he carried there.
“Them are Yasa’s cousins,” Snow said, waving Bracelin off. “You guard house? Where go Yasa and family?”
“They go refugee Bo Waterside. Soldiers come take house.”
“How long?”
“Three months. Yesterday soldiers run back to Monro. We hear some bad shit happen there.”
Snow turned a circle and let out a grunt that sounded like he was passing a kidney stone. “Three months! Son of a bitch. She go okay you hear?”
“No hear nothing,” said the first cousin. “Go’ment not like this area much. Don’t know what it be now.”
Both young men had fetishes around their necks—monkey-figure talismans—and one wore a crucifix underneath the wooden charm. Maciel was staring at them: the monkey with its mouth wide, threatening; the Christ figure, neck tilted in crucified death. An unsettled sensation ran through Snow. Then the kid reached into his pants pocket and came up with a set of black rosary beads and started playing with them in his fingers. He could just imagine the kid’s grandmother that way, beads wrapped around her wrist as she worked her way through the rosary saying all those Our Fathers and Hail Marys until it sounded like an ancient chant. They were all just rituals, he thought, rainforest rituals, idols dangling from leather necklaces, the beads of ancestral spirits, forces in the world with gods to match. The kid reached out and handed the rosary to one of the cousins. He took it, lifted his chin to acknowledge the gift, and stuffed it into his pocket.
Up-country Liberia had a tense stillness about it—until they all took the seven dilapidated steps into the house. As they did, Kairos tapped Maciel on the arm, lifted his chin to him. “You don’t give up your God here, son,” he said. “Keep your head.”
Maciel gave a little nod, smiling up at the taller Kairos. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.”
Inside, the part of the house that wasn’t burned made Snow nearly break down and fall to his knees. A broken vision of his past, a step backward in time, half burned by war and abandoned by people.
“No go live here, people say it cursed,” said one of the guards.
“It is cursed,” Snow said, feeling his eyeballs burn. “And I cursed it.”
He looked around, waiting for someone to burst from the bush and attack them, and already he was looking for escape routes. Then he took the crew through the grand entrance like a defeated tour guide. A wood-constructed house, it was built from red ironwood and teak. Built solid, but a wooden castle nonetheless. The house both inside and out showed the effects of humidity and weathering, inside paint peeling, the smells of mildew and mold mixing with the burnt-out smell of old fire. The staircase led upward dead center, and on both sides the foyer opened to sitting rooms, and behind on the left, the kitchen, and to the right a room with empty bookshelves and a pile of a hundred or more African masks jumbled about the center of the room. “I used to have them hanging on the walls,” Snow said.
He had one for e
very conceivable ritual. He even had a World War I gas mask. Maciel moved over and put on a dark sliver-eyed mask of polished ebony wood that glistened and smelled of the forest. “Dan masks,” Snow said. “That one there represents female fertility.”
Snow ran his fingers over the burnished wood—hard black and gemlike to the touch. Maciel held it up to his face again and moved slowly, turning his face with an unreal, dreamy silence. The boy guards came into the room then, pausing to look at the kid wearing the mask.
Beth frowned, watching him. “That’s mad,” she said. “Stop.”
Maciel put the mask back down on the pile and picked up another one.
This one had leather straps across the back and wide-open eyes. It represented initiation into manhood and the cult of a warrior god.
“These Dan masks aren’t just about hiding yourself, they’re considered like gods themselves, you know, and some of them tell the history of the village, and some you gotta consult before you do anything important,” Snow said. “Like them oracles in ancient Greece.”
The guards lifted their brows and fondled their necklaces, then marched on through the house to the back, where they started drinking from a wood pitcher without benefit of glasses.
Kairos put a different mask on, one with a tied leather chin strap. “Hmmm.” Then he took it off and frowned at the mask, tossing it back onto the pile looking disgusted with himself. “That’s some sick paganism,” he said.
“You can’t judge these people,” said Snow. “Not from your world. Besides, I don’t see how all that Father, Son, Holy Ghost stuff is any different.”
“I just thought of something,” Kairos said, staring at the pile of masks. “These people sold my ancestors into slavery.”
“Oh, Christ, not this again. So fucking what?” Bracelin said. “We all got pain. My ancestors were sold into slavery by the fucking Romans.”
“Just pointing it out—makes you think,” said Kairos. “How much family history floats in our veins, you know?”
“I’ve thought a lot about that too,” said Maciel.
“So point it out, but what are you complaining about?” Bracelin said. “Let’s face facts. Slavery’s the best thing ever happened to you. Weren’t for your ancestors takin’ it up the ass, you’d be living in some West African hellhole with plates in your lips.”
“That’s one way to think about it. Other way is maybe I could use a little plate in my lips.”
“Yeah? What the fuck for?”
Kairos paused, just stared Bracelin in the face. “The Lord’s work is a mystery, Charles. You can’t tell how the flesh might respond to such manipulation.”
“I can bet it fucking hurts,” said Snow. “You’d know about that, right, Georgie?”
“In a weird way, it feels good. You go beyond pain and then nothing can hurt you.”
“You’re a fucking perv,” said Bracelin.
They stepped out the rear, through wooden French-style doors made from ironwood, to the torn and battered screened porch with a swinging door dead center that led down stairs to a series of wooden terraces that overlooked the creek bed. The boys were tipping up the wood pitcher and grinning wildly. “This is not good cane juice,” they said, and laughed.
“See that there?” said Snow. “On the other bank of that creek is Guinea. Nothing between you and freedom but puff adders and black mambas!”
Truth was, as Churchill and Mr. Johnson had suggested, the house was built precisely for its proximity to the border. In the middle of up-country forestland, any need to flee offered two countries within twenty miles.
“How about we think about getting out of here,” said Maciel.
“Used to be I had plans for this house,” said Snow, glancing over at Beth and feeling more morose than ever. He didn’t much care for the feeling. He wished Maciel would stop looking at him.
Beth looked away, toward the drinking guards, and shook her head—she saw oppression in every glance, he thought, and it occurred to him that she lived on a different plane from all of them, where words were not only unnecessary but an outright misdirection of truth. Nothing could express her connection to this place.
Just then a white face stepped up the creek trail, followed by a dozen Africans, all wearing jungle fatigues and looking well-funded if not well-fed. “Looking for the Snowman!” called the white man.
“That Buck the Fuck?” Snow called back.
The soldiers following Buck Favor eyed the scene warily, staring toward the boy caretakers, who traded sensible if semi-drunken looks, realizing they were outgunned. These were Buck Favor’s own trained soldiers, who had traded tribal loyalties for more lucrative ones. They scanned the perimeter with discipline, wearing tiger suits and holding their Kalashnikovs at the ready.
Favor climbed the last few steps up from the stream and reached out to shake hands vigorously. Somehow they felt like the best of old friends now. It was like hearing the “Star-Spangled Banner” at home and finding it the most awkward national anthem on the planet. But hear it on a foreign shore—by God you couldn’t hold the shivers back.
“Let’s do this fast, I got a rendezvous down the mountain in four hours,” Favor said.
“You hear what happened to Tolbert?” Snow said.
“We just crossed overland, haven’t heard anything.”
“They assassinated him last night. We saw fires all the way up the Ganta Road coming here. Couldn’t tell what they were about. Now we hear the army’s taken over.”
“I guess it was coming,” said Favor. “You’re getting out just in time.”
Snow glanced back into the house to where Bracelin had gone. He stepped left and saw through a dirty window into the library, and through the front room and out an equally dirty front window to where Bracelin was carrying the nylon knapsack up the front steps. As he hit the porch, he pulled from the pack a semi-automatic handgun, flat black, and a Tyvek envelope. He pulled the slide back to cock it, then stuffed it into his jeans. Maciel saw it all too, looking like he was about ready to flee into the woods and never come out again. Buck Favor—he wore fatigues and carried a short-barreled machine gun with a looping wire stock.
“Let’s get down to business,” said Favor.
In a strange way, Snow wished business could wait. He somehow wanted to pretend he’d managed some exotic post-colonial retirement, that his screened porch in the midst of mountain-jungle Liberia was actually safe. But this would never happen, and he motioned Buck Favor through the house toward Bracelin on the other side. Favor paused long enough to bark at his troops in Krio to get their black asses around the house and not track mud inside—what’d they think this was, some mud-floor shanty in Salone?
His troops eyed him oddly, blinking at the insult, as the boy caretakers followed them around the side of the house to the front. Snow stood in the back room, waiting for the kids to follow, then saw that one of Favor’s men had stayed behind and moved up to Maciel like he might take out his frustration toward Buck Favor on the kid personally, if only because he was this innocuous-looking white male maybe, or perhaps because he was standing with Beth. Ever since that mefloquine horror flick, Snow thought, he’d shoved himself right up to the edge of it, and Maciel had a hair trigger now. The soldier smiled and threw a quick glance toward Favor, who marched through the mask room and out the front door to where Bracelin stood with the knapsack.
“That de cane juice?” the soldier pointed at the wood pitcher sitting on a little end table.
“That’s what the other guy said,” Maciel told him.
The guy picked it up, sniffed it and recoiled slightly, then tasted. “Bad,” he said, shaking his head. Then he tasted some more. Sweat glistened off his face. “Good cane juice get you going,” he said, gazing at Beth. “Favor no go live tomorrow.” He pulled a small bag out of his pocket and produced a kola nut.
“Why is that?” Beth asked.
“’Cause I go kill him.” He popped a pod into his mouth and chewed, then put the r
est back in the pouch. “I kid,” he said, and winked unconvincingly.
Snow wasn’t sure if he meant he was kidding or if he was a kid, a child.
In the living room, Buck Favor took possession of the Tyvek envelope full of cash and in exchange gave Snow a dark-blue athletic bag. Snow shook his hand, firm, and they nodded like they might actually miss each other. Then Favor struck out, down the drive and out across the road, climbed a red embankment, and disappeared overland with the mercenaries close behind. The mercenaries had somehow induced the two boys to join them, perhaps for promise of better weapons, and together they angled up the dirt road and followed Favor off into the bush like a trail of army ants.
“We’ll stay the night here,” Snow said. “Go down-mountain in the morning.” He stepped through the living room, surveying the house. Kairos came up alongside him and together they walked to the back screened porch. “You get the feeling you’re being watched?” Kairos asked.
Beth took another shot of cane juice. “Try a nip, that feeling goes.”
“Not sure I want it to go. You catch my meaning?”
“Of course. Two nips, that feeling goes as well.”
Kairos reached over for the pitcher, took a shot, and nearly lost his breath. “Holy firewater,” he said. He caught his breath and tried another. “Savages.”
Beth blinked her eyes rapidly, as if gnats had flown into them. “We have to get the hell out of here.”
“We will,” said Snow. “But tomorrow. I’m not going to try traveling down-mountain at night. It’s too risky.”
“Why?” said Maciel. “People are sleeping; it seems riskier in the day.”
“Because the people we got to worry about work at night.”
Beth looked straight at Snow and now he saw himself reflected in her eyes, like he was the ultimate shadowy kind of evil, like he’d manipulated this whole thing from start to finish. He frightened her, and her fear knifed at him. He smiled gently, and reached out a hand, and just as he touched her shoulder she turned and walked down the wooden steps to the back path, moving slowly at first until she hit the trail, where her pace quickened.