by David Masiel
“Where are you going?” the kid called.
“You better go get her,” Snow said. “I would, but I’m afraid she’d outpace me even on a good day, and I ain’t having a good day.”
“Beth!” The kid called after her, but his words seemed to drive straight down into her feet like fuel, and her steps grew faster. Then she was running, her work boots hitting red dirt methodically down the natural staircase to the streambed, sprinting now, strong-legged, like she knew where she was going, down the hill from where Favor had come. She could cross the river and be in Guinea and just keep going, without a pause or a glance back. She stepped into a wet spot on the creek’s edge, sinking to mid calf in river mud. Only after the kid caught up to her did Snow relax some, even as he saw them start back toward the house, holding each other close through a flurry of mosquitoes.
On the porch, Kairos reached for the wooden jug and tipped it up to his lips. “It grows on you after a couple,” he said. “I think I’m gonna pass out, bos’n.”
“Me too,” said Snow, watching the kids make their way up the earthen path, staring Snow’s way, like they thought he was as much the enemy as the night forest, like even if they were coming back, it was no bargain.
FLINCHING HEART
When Snow heard the fate of William Tolbert, erstwhile president of the Republic of Liberia, he couldn’t keep from imagining how it would feel to have your guts pulled out. He imagined a sharp bowel pain like a knife in the lower abdomen, and then the emptying. He couldn’t get that kamikaze pilot out of his mind either, how he’d broken up as he hit the ship’s edge, his bowels spilling out, the smell of barbecued flesh like funeral day in India. An old Hindu woman once told him of the irony that weighed on cremation: that first a body smelled bad as it decayed but then, once set atop the coals along the holy river for a slow burn, it smelled good, like barbecue that would go unconsumed except by fire itself.
After the others had gone to sleep, curling in their clothes on the high ground, incapacitated by cane juice cocktails, Snow swore he heard the upstairs bed doing the fuck squeak. He couldn’t not see them in his mind, how it would look. On the main floor he opened the warped wooden door that hung askew on its hinges, descended the basement stairs to the soft red earth below, pointed his flashlight toward the northeast corner, and saw two giant millipedes engaged in their curling writhing sex. They were each about eight inches long and big around as nickels. Snow nudged them aside with the muzzle of his flashlight, but in their passion they barely noticed. Then he dug in the soft red earth until he came to the bag he’d buried three years before.
Sweating, his gut feeling like he’d swallowed a sack of diamonds rather than dug them up, Snow sat breathing the dank air under the house and opened the nylon bag to slip his fingers into the raw ragged stones. Almost a quarter million on the wholesale market, he figured. Along with Favor’s bag he had twice that. If Churchill really and truly fucked them over, he’d at least have something—all he’d have to do is figure a way to keep Bracelin from demanding the whole thing.
He climbed out of the basement to the first floor, pushed through the door, and there a flashlight shone on his face an instant, then pointed down to reveal the black outline of Bracelin, wearing only his boxer shorts, his knife at the ready and the flashlight showing his white hairy legs. “What you doing down there?” he asked, flicking the light at the door.
“Just getting these,” Snow said, holding up the bag. But he was thinking about Yasa, the taste of her skin, the memory of it glistening beneath his white hand. “I’m thinking I need to go to Bo Waterside.”
“Oh, fuck that, Snow. Don’t go all fucking sentimental on me now. You leave them for three-year stretches, shit’s bound to happen.”
“Yasa was always special. I built her this house. She’s family.”
“I doubt anybody ever said you had to leave them here.”
“This was her home. She loved this house. Having me here made it harder on her. That’s why I left.”
“Anybody calls this place home deserves what they get.”
Snow ignored this too, as if anybody had a goddamned choice of where they were born and where they called home. It just happened; home just happened to you. If you were lucky. “If we left now we could make Bo Waterside and still have time to get to the ship before our customers have a shit fit.”
“You fucking with me?” Bracelin asked, with suspicion in his voice.
“I ain’t fucking with anybody. I ain’t got the energy to fuck with anybody. I just need to find Yasa.”
“Yasa? You’re feeling bad because of Yasa? You’re feeling bad ’cause of this one.” Bracelin nodded his head upstairs. “I heard them up there. He’s dicking her right now. Fuck her, forget her.”
“That’s what I was trying to do.”
“Oh, yeah, I know. You’re in fucking love. Love never did much for me.”
“Just let it be. Keep our eye on the ball.”
“Keeping our eye on the ball means traveling light and alone, and you got all these goddamned side treks lined up. And why? ’Cause of women. Women are your fucking undoing, Snow.”
Snow leaned toward Bracelin. He wanted to explain to him. Why in hell he wanted to explain to Bracelin was beyond him, and he almost whispered it. “The thing is—her old man. I kept looking at him, thinking if maybe I hadn’t seen him somewhere. Maybe he used to come out to the house with some locals. But then I kept looking at him and damned if he didn’t start looking like my old man. But he looked just like Beth, just the spittin’ image. I don’t know now. Every time I think of him he changes in my mind. For all I know, my mind just conjured it.”
“Yeah,” Bracelin said, nodding in a rare moment of compassion. “It’s almost like you’re fucking out of your mind. Who knows and who cares if he looks like your old man?”
Snow stared at the shadow of the door, slashing across the broken room where you could look up through the burned half of a roof and see the canopy and even a star if you moved around enough. “Time was, I just figured I’d go to hell.”
“Go to hell? You’re in hell. Now we gotta figure our way out, and it don’t involve Bo Waterside. I say we go straight to Monro at first light and pay off militias as much as we have to, and we get our sweet asses out of country. You got what, an extra half mil in rocks? We got five times that on the ship, Snow. We can still pull this off, but you gotta think real.”
When Snow thought real he kept seeing that figure talking to Maciel in the pipeline. He knew how Beth looked in covies and a work vest now. With time and distance from the ship, his mind felt clearer, and he just didn’t think it was her. He kept seeing that reflection of the Aussie in the mirror at the Rojo and then his broad Oz accent in the Snap Trap, and that neck, those god-awful trapezius muscles as he moved away toward the head. And then Maciel following. Snow knew he ought to tell Bracelin what he thought he saw in the pipeline. He wondered if he could tell him without getting the kid killed. He kept thinking how this deal—his deal—might just manage to get a whole lot of people killed.
“Listen. Brace. I think we might have a security problem.”
Bracelin stared straight ahead and worked his lips in a bitter way like he’d just eaten kola. “What kind of security problem?”
“I don’t know yet. I saw a guy at the Rojo and then in the Snap Trap. Same guy, I’m sure of it. I’ve put my skull around it every which way and I just can’t imagine it being a coincidence.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Aussie. Five-ten. Two hundred pounds, wrestler build. Brown hair cut short. His dress was different. PC he looked like a sailor, Freetown he looked like a merc.”
“You see him in Monro?”
“No.” Snow left out what he thought about the kid, and about the pipeline. He didn’t need Bracelin going off on the kid. He couldn’t stomach the thought.
“You think he’s got something to do with this Churchill cat?”
“I don’t know. If I had
to guess I’d say private security. Could work for Petrochem. Outfits specialize in the maritime angle; could be that.”
“Well, we gotta find out. We can’t just cower from it, Snow. We’ll head down-mountain first light.”
“Okay.” Snow rolled his neck around as if to work out a kink.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
“I wasn’t sure. I don’t know. That fever, fucked with my head.”
“You got a boatload fucking with your head, Snow.” Bracelin stood tall and scanned around. “Goddamned fucking place gives me the creeps. Whatever else happens, you better not ever let any of them tribesmen get ahold of me, or I swear I’ll get my revenge on the lot of you. To your dying day, Snow, I’ll haunt your ass from the spirit world.”
Snow didn’t believe in the spirit world, but somehow like old Joaquin he feared it, feared he might be wrong about it after all. Back on the second story he heard only snoring now—Kairos, he thought—but pausing at the door to the kids’ room, half opened to allow a little air movement through the house, he saw them lying together. He stepped toward the far bedroom, the one he’d once shared with Yasa, using a penlight to find the backpack, too paranoid to use anything bigger in case somebody was watching the house.
Jesus, he hated thinking somebody was watching the house. He imagined rousting everybody and getting their asses safely down the mountain and back aboard ship, but he thought they’d do better in daylight—not even whacked-out revolutionaries were as far gone first thing in the morning. He lay on the bed for a half hour listening to the night, and somewhere in all of it, like a miracle, he slept, dreamed he had a regular family and lived in the mountains, kiddos running around like muskrats, getting into everything, and laughing.
Sometime beyond midnight Snow awakened to the sound of rain slapping on the corrugated metal roof, and the moisture of rain over his arms as the entire house came alive in wetness. He turned over on the bed, still wearing his clothes. The room was too dark to make out anything, no moonlight or starlight to give even a haze of gray outline. Absent vision, he came to sound: the drumming of rain, the rattle of wind on the window shutters across the house’s front balcony, the humming trickle of water feeding down toward the St. Paul River in Bong county, the rhythm of her breath, slow and even next to him, drifting toward dreams. But she wasn’t next to him, she was sleeping with the kid now. But he could smell: her skin, her hair, her breath. He shook his head, tried to gain his bearings.
He climbed out of bed, clicked on a flashlight, and shined it briefly through the open door to his room, and then down the hallway. Stepping down the main stairs, he scanned left into the front room where water was dripping along a broken ragged line of the roof, and the wind blew into the house and made the loose boards overhead creak. And there, in the front room, just out of the rain, sat a man in a wicker chair.
Snow stopped cold, his limbs heavy. He felt in his pants for his knife and pulled it out, ready to flick it open if he had to. The man sat upright, fully clothed in a plain gray shirt, short-sleeved, and loose slacks—the driver of the truck. “Whatcha doing there?” Snow asked.
The man didn’t answer. He was wearing a mask. In the bounced light of the broad flashlight beam, Snow saw his eyes move behind the dark holes of the ebony wood, wide and open, mouth a round hole. The driver sat with his arms on the armrests of an overstuffed chair. He waited there as if waiting for Snow to move, and Snow felt a sudden need to pee. He went down and out the back door with the hair on his neck itching. He stepped down the rickety wooden steps to the forest path behind. He listened to the beating of rainfall on the metal roof behind and added his own water to the downpour of the forest.
When he went back inside, the man was gone, the chair empty. Snow blinked and rubbed his eyes like he might come into focus and reappear. Snow felt like somebody or something was curling around his feet. He shined his light down, but there was nothing, not a snake as he suspected, not even a bug. He ran his flashlight around the room, then out the back. Still nothing. Snow climbed the stairs as quietly as he could. In the big bedroom up front, he looked through the window to the balcony. Then came the sudden eruption of the truck outside—the flatbed, he thought, turning over and over and finally starting. The beam from the headlights disturbed no sleep but crept out, slowly in the rain, onto the river road.
Snow had no memory of lying back down; his entire body simply gave in to the enormous fatigue, and when he next awakened it was not to rain but to its absence. Vague drippings, then silence. Then silence shattered: the sudden rise of fighting as it rolled down the mountainside and echoed along the banks of the creek. Cries came on the heels of gunfire, bursts terrific and sudden and short-lived, and then the inexplicable sound of hysteria, of laughter rocking the forest.
The crew gathered in the main foyer, flashlights bouncing off the buckled floorboards of a rain-rotted house, careful not to shine in faces, leaving eyes peering out from the shadows of cheekbones. The sounds and shouts from outside came again, the smatter of automatic weapons, and instinctively the flashlights flicked off. Snow popped his own light on for just an instant and checked the drive, where he saw that the truck was gone. He’d not been hearing things, at any rate.
“Any idea who they are?” Kairos said.
“Nope.”
“We have any weapons?” Kairos’s mind was kicking into a different mode. A resignation to violence, maybe. He’d been here before, in the jungle at night, facing battle.
“I got a 9 mm semi-auto,” said Bracelin.
“Just stay calm, gents. The two of you, no jumping the gun—I mean it. They’re gonna be way more armed than we are.”
Snow stood watching from the porch as they all reflexively followed him, milled their way as a group to the exterior, which had cooled in the night, and now in the rainless dark all five could hear the bluntness of hand-to-hand fighting, then again the cries, the horrible sounds of pain and desire and hatred all mixing in a mass.
“Bloody shite,” said Beth. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait—wait,” said Snow.
They waited, in the same way one rides out an electrical storm while exposed to the elements: counting time between flashes and sounds. Estimating distance, flicking a light to give an image of the driveway before the forest swallowed the afterglow and left nothing.
“A click southeast, maybe two,” Kairos said.
Snow flicked his light into the forest, then off again. “Wish them two boys hadn’t joined up with Favor.”
“Where’s our driver?” Bracelin asked.
“He run out in the middle of the night,” Snow said. “He took our extra gas, or most of it.”
Flick. Snow saw Kairos grip a blade in his cupped right hand, running back up behind his wrist. Snow felt a simmering in his chest and his eyes fought to adjust to the darkness, to find a patch of sky with at least a few stars.
“Should we try in the Land Cruiser?” Bracelin asked.
“I ain’t gassed it. I took two drums off before dark. We maybe could make Ganta or a little beyond, but that’s it.”
“So whatta we do?”
“Hunker down, stay quiet,” Snow said. “Be ready. We don’t want to overreact.” He whispered now. “Remember, mostly this area’s been hit hard by Tolbert, so these are probably celebrating locals, nothing more. But if they think we got ties to the government, we’re gonna be in for a fight.”
A metallic click came from his right, and the buzzes and clicks of insects fell silent. Snow smelled Bracelin, heard the slide of the ambidextrous safety on the 9mm.
“I may know these people—I may not—been three years,” Snow said. “Harsh truth—probably not.”
Snow wished they could stay unseen in the night, just let this crew pass on by, but he figured they’d know of the house and its being abandoned. Sometimes your best hope was facing it. “Beth and George stay here—no lights. Kairos and Brace, you come with me.”
And he we
nt off into the black. As he stepped down the cinder drive, he heard Beth’s voice in a desperate whisper, “I told you we should have left.”
“We’re better off with Snow.”
“What, stay and fight it out?” she whispered. “Remember the Alamo and all that? I don’t think we ought to stay in the house. They know we’re here, Harold—”
Her voice begged Snow, but Snow was twenty feet away now, in the darkness of the drive. He didn’t look back but instead flicked his own light, catching glimpses of Bracelin and Kairos on either side of him as the fighting rose up and over the hill to the south and seemed now to be across the road, perhaps two hundred yards over the hillside.
The flare of flames rose up over the trees, wrapping them in the silhouetted glow of a fire that had broken out beyond the river road. They could hear running, the panting and shouts of those being caught, the clacking of rifles and machetes. On the drive, Snow flicked his flashlight on and off and saw the woods and drive light up, then blacken, leaving only the afterimage. The three men stepped another fifty feet closer to the road, and the images of five or six men came over the hill, carrying flashlights of their own, duct-taped to the barrels of their weapons, and flying down the road to join them came a green Toyota pickup truck with two men in back, the headlights bouncing and lighting the under foliage.
When Snow turned his light on this time, it brought a chorus of shouts in an African language, and the ramming cocking of automatic weapons. Their words came like a barrage. Snow flicked the light off—then offered them smokes from a red pack of Marlboros, flicking his lighter to light their smokes, talking gently to them in his easy voice, a voice that could soothe strangers. “I just live here, this is my home,” he said. Their faces reflected in the bobbing incandescence of the Bic.
“Home here?” came a voice, flashing through a cloud of Marlboro smoke. “You stupid white man.”
And everybody laughed.
“Way things are going, I couldn’t agree more,” Snow said, which brought out another laugh, this one a little less tense than the previous.