by David Masiel
Only then did he light his own cigarette.
Snow had no personal knowledge of these men—they were boys, really—Krahn tribesmen, the oldest one maybe eighteen. One of them called himself the Colonel, and he held in his left hand the lower half of a human arm, held it as if he’d been shaking some guy’s hand and somehow managed to pull his arm off at the elbow. Snow couldn’t help noticing it was the arm of a white man, and even in the dim scattered light of periodic flashlights and lanterns, he knew the red freckles and boiling red hair of that arm.
Snow stood there thinking the only reason they didn’t kill him on the spot was that they were coming down off of whatever chemical had driven them into the fight to begin with—ganja plus cane juice. And now, maybe, they’d been stunned to superstitious silence to see a white man stumble out of the darkness. Snow remembered one religious group from back in ’77 that called themselves the Cherubim and Seraphim Society, with a military arm known as the Army of God’s Peace. He knew how it flew around here—the awkward twists of religion and war. Liberia was known for its secret societies, and mostly they did a lot of good, but he could imagine that same impulse carrying people into a whacked-out realm of redemption and violence: the PRC—People’s Redemption Council. He didn’t know the individuals here, but he recognized their wide-pupiled attention to the night, the nervous flutter of satisfaction after battle. If this was redemption, they’d all pay a steep price for it.
“I’ve got fuel,” Snow said. “For your truck. Two drums around side. More down-mountain, bush taxi.”
He felt a tension building on either side of him. Bracelin and Kairos stood there like twins of opposite stripe, poised and all too ready to fight—one for the pleasure of it, the other for the simple necessity.
The one they called the Colonel, the senior officer at eighteen, motioned for two of his fighters to follow Snow around the side and load up the only two drums left. Snow wondered what he would do now to make it back to Monrovia. They might have to walk the ten miles to Ganta and catch a bush taxi from there. He should have filled the Land Cruiser when they arrived—should have taken care of practical matters first. He felt mentally deficient, sloppy, and weak. Awkwardly the two militia boys tried to lift the drums over, but couldn’t manage it, so they shoved it over on its side and rolled it to the back of the Toyota pickup. Then they couldn’t get it back upright, at which point Bracelin snorted and said, “You want me to get that for you?”
The Colonel stared, apparently uncertain what to say. He finally nodded almost imperceptibly, and the mate walked over to the truck, licked his fingers, and grabbed the steel lip of the 55-gallon drum. He put one foot on the base and stood up, throwing his free leg backward. The thing popped upright. Bracelin wore a white tee shirt that showed every inch of his arms, and his curling tattoos, that analemma now sideways and looking like the symbol for infinity as he bear-hugged the drum and lifted it up to the tailgate. He shoved it straight back into the bed, alongside some gear covered by a tarp. Then he went for the second drum and did the same thing, with no noticeable strain whatever.
Bracelin held the Colonel’s gaze and stepped back over to Kairos and Snow. Every man in the Army of God’s Peace stared at the mate as if he were a god himself, or a night devil, and Snow thought they might kill him on the spot, out of fear, or just to prove he wasn’t anything but human.
Then Snow saw inside the truck bed, noticing that the tarp had been dragged backward as Bracelin had pushed the drums in, and beneath the tarp was obviously the body of a man, a man in name only for his arms and legs had been cut off, sharply by machete, and aside from the one held by the Colonel, lay in a pile atop the body’s chest and stomach. As the Army of God’s Peace climbed back aboard, a flashlight illuminated the truck bed in flashing angles of light and shadow. Snow saw that the hacked man’s face was that of Buck Favor. He absorbed the sight without reaction; it only confirmed what he already knew.
The Colonel looked up at the house and swung his flashlight up there, his weapon trained, and there on the porch Beth and Maciel stood like two mannequins. The Colonel looked at Snow and lifted his chin as if making an accusation. “You got women!” he said.
“One woman,” he said. “Wife.”
The Colonel stared at Snow then, hard and long. No laughter verged now. Snow’s face remained like ancient stone, with Bracelin to his left, dead as ever, Kairos to his right. Some unspoken territoriality hovered between the lot of them, as if some contest were being played out on an otherworldly plane and the men inhabiting these bodies were simply waiting to find out the result. Snow himself felt it. He wondered about that world. He wondered about how it would fit with the world he knew now. Finally, the Colonel looked away, defeated. He was a boy, and he glanced then at Kairos, and perhaps because he’d retreated from a battle with Snow, he latched onto Kairos as if to a new mark, and the fact that he was black somehow made it easier. As he climbed into the rear bed of the four-by-four pickup and thumped the side to signal it was time to go, the Colonel watched Kairos. They accelerated away down the night road; their flashlights swept sideways and illuminated trees and people—the face of Kairos. The weapon tapped, bullet snapping past, streaking in the flashlight and tearing into Kairos at the chest. He fell like a sack. Snow and Bracelin dropped to their bellies alongside, Snow reaching toward the lanky form of the fallen man.
Against the whine of the disappearing Toyota motor, the red lights streaked down the road, the stoned howling of its occupants receding behind the canopy of the night forest.
“Fuck!” said Bracelin, when it was apparent they weren’t going to shoot anybody else. “I swear to Christ I’m gonna get one of those fuckers by the time we’re out of here. I swear to Christ, Snow, I’m gonna kill me two or three of them junked-out tar babies.”
Snow rose up and shined his flashlight onto the blank face of Kairos, his eyes black, pupils wide and fixed.
Snow turned and said, “Let’s go. Time to get out of here.”
He felt his own heartbeat high in his throat, could feel a pulse against his own thumb, watched as Beth and Maciel came into the light of his flashlight, and he saw Beth there, holding both hands on her head and saying, “Oh, goddamn you, I told you, I told you damnit!” And he got the idea that she was talking to the kid, and strangely enough it made Snow want to hold her, his face close to her mouth, wanted to breathe her breath like oxygen, staring down toward where Kairos lay motionless on the dark drive.
Snow tried to clear his mind. He realized now that he could make no trip to Bo Waterside, that he’d have to leave Yasa and her children to whatever fate awaited them since fleeing Nimba county. Snow thought of his father, how this was precisely what he had done, dodging fidelity, evading family, and never once missing his ship as it sailed off. In the end he had passed on genes and little else.
It began to rain again as they wrapped Kairos’s body in a bedsheet and loaded it into the back of the Land Cruiser. Snow took a last look at the house—remembered its raising with a palpable yearning and a hopeless sense of loss. In the last flashes of light they pulled out, slogging on four wheels down the wet mountainside with a bag of diamonds, leaving behind a mad romantic dream, the ghosts of Yasa and her children, whatever they looked like now, and that house of unreality, a mansion in the rainforest, half burned and leaching into the soil, prey to throngs of ganjamad boys gone berserk with machine guns. And Beth alongside him, brooding and silent and wanting nothing more than to get back to sea. Beth who so obviously hated him now, for giving her back to her father, for somehow violating her with the insinuation of ancestry.
His thoughts drifted on the wheels of the Land Cruiser, the road sliding and flooding out from under him, like a boat on a waterfall. They hit a turn ten clicks east of Ganta and saw, flickering in the headlights, the bush taxi stopped, the cabbie lying face down on the roadside with an AK-47 at the back of his head, and the faces of men turning toward him, shining an instant in his headlights before he flicked them off
, their gunmetal arms flashing toward him in the rain.
He turned right, off-road, instinct driving him into the depths. The road fell away and he tried powering down it, the embankment falling, sliding in a mud torrent into the streambed below, a tree there between them and the bottom. He debated in an instant whether he wanted to run headlong into that tree in hopes it would stop them—knowing then he’d have to face the men back up the road—and he powered past to take his chances in the gully below.
“Ah, God!” cried Maciel from the backseat.
And their voices and breaths all drew inward, their own death-fear that Snow felt only distantly, vicariously, for others. Snow did what instinct and experience told him to do: he punched the gas.
They hit hard in a shuddering slam he thought must have exploded all their tires on river rocks. The impact bolted through all of them, and for a moment Snow thought he’d been driven into unconsciousness. Then he felt the four wheels bite into the creek bed, powering on, his body rippling in his seat, not unlike that moment in the Coral Sea when he was blown from his shoes. He kept seeing the face of that healer when he pressed the hot machete to the hand of the girl, even as his own head hit the roof for the third time. He winced and looked to his right, wondering about Beth in the seat beside him, her body jerking and her head flopping at the impact on stones, and the grinding of their bottom until he felt sure he’d tear the engine from its mounts. Then a wizened African man sat there between them, wearing a monkey fetish that looked to be holding a crucifix. Snow turned back to the road and saw the creek bed unfolding before him, as if his own foot pressing the gas was hardly connected to his brain. He was only vaguely aware of the choice he’d made to press on. Snow was not one to consider suffering. He had never responded to images of the nailed Christ. But from the lips of the old man, dried by dirt and dirty water, came an incantation, that Lord’s prayer in Krio: Papa God we de na evin, mek olmen respekt yu oli nem—
“Get the hell away from me,” Snow said.
He smelled the scent of violet and cut-stone church walls. He felt for the kid back there in the rear of the Land Cruiser, that boy left behind on the porch, abandoned by his father. That lost boy. Floating, flying along the river bottom, riding a crested wave to the sea.
Snow drove down the mountain on logging roads, his foot pressing as hard as he dared on his way to the coast, bounding over log bridges, not pausing for the possibility of being stuck in the mud or stopped by men with guns. Along the Monrovia road they found a boy of ten with a 55-gallon drum of gas and Snow paid him a hundred dollars for ten gallons of it, standing in the rain looking forlorn and weak under the hood of his rain suit, rain pouring down all around him as he watched the gauge and Maciel worked the barrel pump. “You’re damned good at that business.”
“I think a chimp could probably do this business.” His arms strained, and Snow laughed and clapped him on the back.
“But you’re a smart chimp!” Snow looked up and through the raindrops where they fell straight down and clung in droplets to the tip of his nose.
“I don’t want to be on board that ship anymore,” Maciel said.
“Ain’t obvious from the way you work, buddy.”
“I’ll do my job, but I gotta get out of here, Harold.”
“We all do,” Snow said, and dug down into his pocket, his hand appearing from the sleeve of his rain suit. “You ever seen a raw diamond?” He pressed his palm into Maciel’s, passing on the lumpy round stone with crystalline edges. “Now you don’t want to be showing that around. Fetch you a grand in Lagos.”
Snow went to the back, took the athletic bag of diamonds where he’d stuffed it alongside the stiffened form of Kairos, and pulled the thin nylon sack out, stuffing it down the front of his pants. When he turned around there was the kid, finished with his pumping and staring there through the wet air at Kairos. He could see the heartbreak in the kid, the limp muscles and fixed eyeballs. You could see it all play out there: about his granddad and his dad and priests who could read minds.
“It’s the nature of the place,” Snow said. “Things happen here.”
“He was a good man,” said Maciel. “Whatever you got going here killed him, Harold. You gotta face that.”
“Now wait a second—that’s bullshit, what that is.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Don’t get all fucking sanctimonious on me. You think I don’t know he was a good man or that I ain’t sorry he got hit by that hopped-out freak? Of course I know; of course I’m sorry it happened. You think I didn’t like him? You think you got a corner on feelings for others?”
“Sometimes I get that feeling, yeah.” He said it sad, though, not like sanctimonious, and Snow shut the rear gate.
“You think I’m some kinda evil guy, like I’ve done all this evil shit in my life. Well maybe I haven’t been Padre Pure, but I’ll say one thing. I never rat-fucked a friend of mine. Not ever. You gotta start thinking about who you’re listening to and who you’re talking to, George. ’Cause the thing is, I don’t think I was hallucinating when I saw you on the bow. I think you’re telling me you were with Beth because you knew I’d choke on that one alone. Best lie is closest to the truth, Georgie. You selling me down the river? That what you’re doing?”
“No, Harold. I wouldn’t do that.”
“I hope not, Georgie. I surely hope not. You wouldn’t happen to know if we can expect company when we return to that ship, would you?”
“How am I supposed to know that? Of course I don’t know that.”
Snow stared at him. Damned if he couldn’t tell. Damned if he couldn’t quite be sure one way or the other where the kid stood. He hadn’t just become a better seaman, he’d become a better liar too.
Snow moved back around to the driver’s side. “We gotta go.”
“I think you knew he’d be the one to draw the fire,” said the kid. “That’s why you wanted him along.”
“Get over your goddamned self why don’t you? I didn’t know any such thing. Jesus Christ!”
But back in the driver’s seat, he did know it. With gears grinding and engine rising, Snow’s thick hands gripped the wheel, his mind spinning through retribution and responsibility, concepts he hated and mistrusted. “This here is what I call fundamental realities.” But he couldn’t shake the hellishness of goading guilt, no matter how high he wound the engine to drown his thoughts.
Bracelin groaned. “You and your goddamned fundamental realities.”
Down the mountain, the air warmed toward the muggy seaside of dry-season Monrovia, and Snow knew they had experienced little more than mountain showers up-country. The air lay still despite the threat of showers to the ocean side, and Snow felt all those diamonds stuffed around his balls growing hotter and sweatier the closer they got. Diverting north to cruise an empty dirt road along the St. John’s River, they dropped down through the flats along the lower gathering of water and saw the Monrovia Peninsula like a multicolored finger sliding through orange alpenglow.
The tanker now called Elisabeth lay alongside the number-two berth, and immediately Snow saw she was sitting higher in the water than when they’d left. He let out a crackling groan, his throat raspy, as Bracelin burst out, “I’m gonna kill that second’s ass!”
Paynor paced the bridge wing as the crew approached and mounted the gangway, leaving the Land Cruiser there in the asphalt parking area. Three Liberian men stood along the railing at the weather deck, eyeing the crew as they came aboard bearing Kairos’s body.
“Who are you?” boomed Bracelin.
“We are the sailors,” said one. “He is the cook.”
They stood with seabags at their feet and obviously had only just arrived on board themselves. “Good time to get the hell from here,” said the cook.
“Stay the fuck out of my way and don’t unpack your bags.” Bracelin mounted the steps two at a time toward the bridge. They could hear him up there, demanding from Paynor what happened, and even below they go
t the story of soldiers with M-16s and a middle-aged man who was said to be a chemical engineer who oversaw the off-loading.
“I told them to be careful, that some of them would blow up if they mixed them. They went ahead anyway. I couldn’t stop them.”
The chemical engineer had tested each tank and off-loaded all the gasoline, av gas, and benzene, leaving behind a tank of chlorinated solvent, one of sulfuric acid, and the monomers. Six tanks left.
“There was something else,” Paynor said then. “A guy showed up here. I don’t know where he came from, but all the sudden he’s on board. Right after the Liberians showed up. He starts claiming he represents the ship’s owners. This Liberian army guy is in my face; he’s in my face; he’s in the Liberian’s face. Soldiers finally ran him off, sent him to the maritime authority. But all we heard all night was fighting from over on the peninsula. I haven’t seen him since.”
“Was he Aussie?”
“Might have been. Maybe South African, I don’t know. They all sound alike to me.”
Snow looked over at Bracelin and traded heavy glares. “At least that coup was good for something,” Bracelin said. “Maybe they arrested his ass.”
“Maybe,” said Snow.
The afternoon sun, muted through the red-brown haze, played on the surface of the deckhouse and pipeline network, flickering in orange tones that might have meant something romantic, save for the olfactory reality that the ship empty didn’t smell any better than the ship full. In fact, to Snow it smelled worse, perhaps because he hadn’t smelled it in a day and a half, like a rancid piss pot, the mugging hard ammonia smell of liquid urea lingering despite being long gone. All the same, Snow reached into his pants and came up with the sack of diamonds, wanting little more than to get to sea as soon as possible.
They weighed anchor thirty minutes later, swinging the bow out on their own, not waiting for an escort tug. The going was slow, with Bracelin at the helm, steering the ship manually out of the harbor like a very big boat and somehow managing to do it without running into anything. They steamed out of Monrovia just as the sky flashed with lightning in the languid dusk, with flashing tracers and shouts rising off the beach. Their work done for now, Snow and the rest of the crew lined the port railing, watching the Monrovia peninsula slide past, the two Liberian sailors, Maciel, and Beth standing on the side deck, watching the commotion along the ocean side of the city, hearing gunfire crackling from the beach.