His father’s words sparked something inside him. Blood rushed through his toes and fingertips. His eyes took in the beach around him, but unlike the boy with the rock, Mor could find nothing to throw.
Then he saw it. On the other side of the crumbling wall a massive baobab tree stood with a trunk as thick as a rhinoceros’s hide and bark as tough as crocodile skin. Pods dangled down from its branches. On the ground under the tree a few rotting pods lay on the path. Even as they decayed, their outer shells were hard as stone. Mor’s eyes swung between the tree, the ground, and the boy.
“Ahh-eck,” screeched one of the older boys. He vaulted off the squirming boy’s legs.
“What’s the matter with you?” The boy with the orange cap knocked the rock into his friend’s shoulder. “Who told you to get up?”
“Come on, Papis. This little badola peed on my—”
“So?” Papis, the boy with the rock, took a half step away from the frightened child. The corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.
“Man, I’m not holding him anymore. He stinks.”
“You let go when I say let go, Diallo,” Papis warned. “Now hold his legs.”
While they argued, Mor scrambled over the wall and headed to the foot of the tree. He knew he didn’t have much time. The first pod he grabbed was broken in half. His hand shook as he reached for another discarded pod, then another. They were all smashed. He clawed the ground for a rock, but it was littered only with the flaky white monkey-bread seeds from the pods. Then his hand landed on a sturdy vine, and when he yanked it, a pod the shape of an oversize caterpillar cocoon slid across the dirt. It was as hard as a coconut shell. Perfect.
“Hold him still,” Papis demanded again. The rock was high over his head as his words rambled over the beach.
The captured boy bucked and twisted. His eyes locked on to the rock aimed at his head.
“Make him stop.” Papis cut his friend with his eyes. “Or the next blow will be for you.”
Mor raced back toward the wall and threw himself over it. He ran as close to them as he dared, probably appearing like another nosy child excited to witness something gruesome. He held the baobab fruit by its vine and swung it over his head. When Papis was about to let the rock strike the young boy’s head, Mor let the pod sail.
But instead of slicing through the air, knocking Papis over, it whipped across the open space and crashed inches away from Papis’s feet. It landed like a glop of millet porridge. Only a tiny shower of sand flung up when it hit the beach.
It might not have struck where Mor wanted, but it had an effect. Everyone stopped. And Mor was immediately aware that he had gained all the attention. Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought past making them stop.
The young boy quit writhing as well. His mouth formed a perfect circle.
But he was also the first to react. In that split second of disbelief he shoved against the other boys’ loosened grips. He shot up faster than a bamboo firecracker, knocking the boys off balance. He hurtled toward Mor, cradling his limp hand. For a second, time slowed. They stared at each other. Mor saw panic on the boy’s face as he passed. In a flash the boy was over the wall and gone. Mor’s stomach plummeted to his knees. He knew the boy’s panic was for him.
He was a tree standing alone in the plains. He was exposed. And he was now the target.
HAVE you so soon forgotten that beetle? You are it, and it is now you. Get off this python’s path.
Despite his father’s advice, Mor still could not move.
Papis stared at the pod lying undamaged near the tip of his sandal. His eyes traveled between it and Mor. His eyelids twitched, but he did not blink.
Mor turned to follow the boy just as Papis and the others lunged.
A high-pitched scream that sounded identical to the voice of his sister echoed around him, coming from his own throat. Mor was too scared to be embarrassed, and his feet were frightened into moving. Papis clawed for Mor, but Mor took off across the beach, parallel to the wall, toward the bridge and hopefully more people. His legs sank in the deep sand under his crashing weight, making it difficult to gain distance. His feet slid against the thongs of his sandals, and with every step he lifted a kilo of sand up with them.
He nearly collided with a woman drying laundry on the beach. She sucked her teeth and yelled after him. He couldn’t stop to apologize. But when he turned his head back to shout “Sorry,” he saw her sprawled on top of her dried clothes. Papis and his friends had charged past her.
Mor ducked under taut boat strings and hopped over iron stakes, rocks, and broken paddles. When he swerved to avoid a plastic gasoline container, one of his feet caught in a broken wicker basket and ripped away from his sandal. He kept running.
A group of boys sitting on the back of a floating gaal, eating fried fish, stared. His eyes darted their way, but he kept going, not sure they would help him. Then Papis shouted down the beach.
“Dankas!”
The sounds of splashing water and the trampling of sand met Mor’s ears. Dread propelled him on as he looked over his shoulder and saw the boys from the resting gaal taking up the chase.
Mor’s heart slammed against his breastbone. Breathing stung. But his soccer legs refused to let him fall. He was smaller but also faster. By the time he made it under the one-lane bridge, he had widened his distance. Tiny waves lapped against the shore, pushing garbage farther up in the sand. On the other side of the bridge seven or eight old boats towered before Mor, with fishermen hanging about. With all the commotion and bodies, he was able to slip behind the end of a boat and squeeze between the tips of two others. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled. He did not make a sound as sharp shards of cut cans and glass hidden in the shifting sand dug into his skin. He kept moving. Then panic rose inside him, slamming at his temples.
The beach lay open before him.
There was no place left to hide. Only foaming surf and sand.
Then, as if the fish had asked the sea to spit the gaals from the water to aid him, the sand began to fill. Boats and men came from the ocean, while women with huge, empty tubs came from every direction. The sun scorched Senegal, calling all the fishermen in with midmorning market catches. Sensing his chance, Mor hopped to his feet and weaved through the crowding beach. When his toes dug into the fiery sand, he realized he had lost his other sandal. He turned, frightened by what he might find. He saw nothing but footprints, fishermen, women with multicolored tubs brimming with fish, and the boats that hid his escape. He welcomed the commotion.
The crumbling beach wall and the curving roadway were almost upon him. A few old gaals with dry, cracking paint that hadn’t touched the water lay around him. He pressed close to the side of the nearest one. Splintered wood poked his cheeks, palms, and knees. He waited, trying to listen beyond his own heartbeat. Once his breathing slowed, he heard men talking in the distance. But then he heard Papis’s gravelly voice.
“Did you see a runt-size saccee?”
Mor leaned forward, straining to hear. He must have heard wrong. The clobbering of his heart erupted in his throat.
“A thief, you say?” one fisherman asked. “We’ve seen many boys. But who has time to tell an aimless child from a saccee? We are working men, not children playing at it.”
“What did he steal?” came a voice closer to Mor’s hiding place.
He could not hear Papis’s response, but he knew whatever it was, it was a lie.
Scared, Mor hoisted himself into the gaal. It was almost double his height. Sweat dripped off his forehead, and ant-size shards of wood burrowed into his skin. He buried himself under the pile of netting that sat jumbled in the boat’s hull. He was completely still. Not even flinching when a tiny fish trapped in the net gave a final flap against his bare leg. The netting smelled of sea salt, fish, and heat.
Mor closed his eyes and tried to be anywhere but where he was.
Then he heard a thump and a sharp bang. Someone was throwing rocks at the boat he was in.
> “Come out of there,” Papis shouted.
Mor tried to swallow, but there was no saliva in his throat.
“Did you hear me? Come out now!”
Mor sucked in his breath. His body went rigid. Even if he had wanted to move, his arms and legs were anchored where he lay. But his heartbeat was so loud he was sure Papis could hear it. What now? There was nowhere to go. He was caught.
Without warning, someone yanked at the fishing net. He threaded his fingers in the netting and pulled it close. As the person tugged, Mor clenched as much of it as he could in his fists. The netting spread open, but not all the way. Half of it still hid him. The silhouette of the person heaving the net became visible through the plastic strings. But the sun shining from behind the person’s head left his features in shadow. Mor thrust his back hard against the hull of the boat. He felt the boy’s eyes ferreting him out. And for a second Mor thought he knew him. Then, when he was sure the boy would give another tug, certain to reveal all of him, the weight of the netting fell back on Mor.
“He’s not here, man,” a voice Mor couldn’t place called out. “He must’ve found another way.”
“There is no other way,” grunted Papis, out of breath.
“I don’t know, man. But he isn’t here. If you doubt me, check yourself.” The shadow stayed in front of Mor’s hiding place.
“Let’s look this way. That runt can’t be far.”
The shadow left and so did Mor’s breath.
They did not know where he was. But how could that be? Mor wondered. If I could see that boy’s outline, shouldn’t he have been able to see me? Mor could not shake the idea that he knew the boy. He lay like a mummy for what felt like his full eleven years. When the backs of his legs started to tingle, he ignored them. When his neck locked up and he thought it would snap, he endured it. And when a piece of wood that had been pinching him in his side cracked, wedging a sliver against his hip bone, he did not turn. But when he pressed his hands hard against his sides, his body almost rocketed up.
The little pouch wasn’t in his pocket.
The only possession of value he and his sisters had, besides the family goat, was gone. The week his father lay in the clinic, Mor had studied his yaay’s treasures inside that rusted Dieg Bou Diar tomato can so long and so often, they had clouded his vision, becoming a muddle of shapes. Though each time he’d taken the can down from the shelf, he’d always felt better seeing them. He wanted to leap up and tear every piece of trash from the beach to find them. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember everything that had happened, but it was useless. He did not know when he had lost the pouch. Or his family’s money.
He pushed back a corner of the netting and listened. The distant shouts of the fishermen, the rumbling of churning motors switching off, and the squawks of seagulls rang out around him. Lifting his head slightly, he peeked over the lip of the gaal. A small bug marched across the wood and then took flight. Mor watched it fly, wishing he could sprout wings of his own.
There was no sign of Papis or the other boys. But even though he thought he had heard them go, he worried they could be hiding as he was. The afternoon sky filled with the chants for the call of the midday prayer, and the faint voice of a woman singing came to him from a static-filled radio. The water’s constant tap against the shore was the nearest noise. Although he heard nothing else, he was still nervous when he poked his head up. He pushed the rest of the netting off anyway and sat up, ready to crawl down from the gaal.
“Jërëjëf,” came a quiet voice, thanking him.
Mor fell back, almost tumbling over the boat’s edge. Behind him, a few feet from where he’d hidden, the injured boy from earlier perched on an old gaal at the edge of the beach. Shaken, Mor darted his eyes around, worried someone might see or hear. The beach was nearly deserted, except for people sitting in the shade near the bridge. Having carted the fish away, most people had turned their focus to the market. The boy’s hand was wrapped in a dirty red T-shirt with a big knot in the space between his thumb and finger.
“Does it hurt?” Mor asked. He double- and triple-checked that no one was approaching and then hopped out of the boat, squinting toward the ground, searching for his mother’s old cloth pouch.
“Not much.” The little boy looked down at his hand. “They’ve done worse.” He pointed to a healed gash that started at the top of his knee and wrapped around to the back, like a sucking slug.
“What have you done to anger them that much?” Mor nudged a plastic bag aside with his toes, hoping the pouch was underneath it.
The boy looked at him, confused. “You don’t have to do anything. . . . They’re the Danka Boys. They wake ready to harm, whether you get in their way or not. They enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it?” Mor asked, disbelieving. “To be so cruel when you’ve done nothing? That isn’t fair. But my friend Oumar has whispered stories like this.”
The boy shrugged. “I’d believe him, and I wouldn’t wander over there right now if I were you.” He tilted his chin across the bridge. “They took over an abandoned barak there. Papis, the one who did this”—he lifted his wrapped arm—“and two others came back here from Dakar a couple months ago. I think one might be from Lat Mata, and another from Jamma. A few others have joined them here, and now you can go nowhere without seeing them, or hearing their name if you’re young. They race around like rats turning everything upside down. Not to mention their name is painted on walls all over.”
“Lat Mata? That’s where I’m from. But there are no boys there like that.”
“Then you are lucky,” the boy replied. “My yaay says groups like that are all over the cities, and that now some of the evil is coming back home. So I should stay away. But as you can see, it does not always work.” He glanced at his hand.
Mor found it hard to concentrate on what the boy said. Now that the Danka Boys, as he called them, were gone, Mor was more concerned with finding his mother’s pouch and his family’s remaining khaliss. Even though his aunt was coming to help them, he still did not want to go back home and confess that he’d lost all the money they had. And he’d never be able to meet Amina’s eyes when he admitted he’d lost their mother’s treasures, too.
“I should have listened,” Mor grumbled. “I should have left it in the can.”
“What?”
Mor lifted his head but not his eyes. His feet scrunched up, pawing the sand. “Nothing . . . I better go, though.”
“Thanks again.” The boy pushed his elbow forward, then swung his legs over the back of the boat, jumping down. “Remember, if you see them, go the other way.” The boy ran up to the crumbling wall and was gone.
Mor did not waste a second thinking about the boy’s warning. Instead he got back on his knees and turned over each piece of trash he saw. Rotting watermelon rinds, shredded plastic bags, and squished bottles flew through the air. The sand was littered, and Mor tossed it all. The thongs of ripped sandals, the fabric of a worn-out school sack, and the limb of a long-forgotten doll were all noticed by Mor. He saw and touched everything, except what he truly hoped to find.
FOUR days after the burial, the ndiaga ndiaye bringing their aunt to them slowed to a rattling crawl in a cloud of gray-brown smoke. One of the men bracing himself on the ladder at the back of the bus threw a large orange fabric bag down to Mor. It smashed against Mor’s face as he caught it, the weight of it almost toppling him forward. Mor was about to place it on the ground and greet his aunt, when she snapped at him.
“Hold it up!” Her flowing boubou spilled out of the back door, a sea of blue trimmed with emerald green. It sailed around her like a wave as she hopped down from the still-rolling bus, which immediately picked up speed once her feet had left its back-end platform. “It is too dusty out here. Don’t put it in the dirt.” As soon as her sandaled feet, with polished red toes poking from the front, touched the ground, she was off in the direction of their home.
“Yes, Auntie. Welcome,” Mor rushed to say as she passe
d by him. Amina curtsied, shuffling alongside her, as Fatima just stood and watched.
“She is nothing like she is supposed to be,” Fatima said, hanging on Mor, causing him to shift before the bag slipped.
“And how would you know?” Mor looped the bag’s shoulder straps over his arm. “You were three the last time she was here.”
“So?” replied Fatima. “She does not even say hello, and Baay said only selfish people do that.”
“She is just tired after her daylong journey from one bus to another. And Baay also said it could mean someone was busy with thoughts in their head.” Mor took a step forward, nearly tripping over his own feet in his father’s sandals. They were much too big for him but the only choice he had since losing his own. “She could be thinking the same about you. Maybe she is waiting for you to greet her first.”
Fatima gave him a look that said she didn’t believe him.
“Come now,” their aunt shouted over her shoulder, her hand raised high. Gold bracelets clanked around her wrist. “No messing about. The night will be here before the day has truly begun.”
“See?” Fatima whispered as Mor stopped to wiggle his toes back into his father’s sandal, which had shot off his foot. “How come you have Baay’s shoes?”
“Tima, I told you. I lost mine.”
“I know.” Fatima leaned on him, holding his wrist. “But they look funny,” she giggled. “You should just go barefoot. Your feet are getting all dusty and covered with sand anyway.”
“Like yours often are.” Mor clinched his toes around the leather that divided his big toe from the others. He could never have met his bàjjan with no shoes. “Now go and greet Auntie. Do not bring more distance between us.”
Fatima dragged her feet.
“Hurry up now,” their aunt demanded again. “We have much to do before the ndiaga ndiaye returns.”
Something about those words didn’t settle right with Mor as he picked up his pace, pulling Fatima along. He had hoped that when Tanta Coumba said their aunt would come to care for them, as she had when their baay was young, she’d meant in Lat Mata. Mor had forgotten why she never came anymore. As his aunt charged down the road in front of him, sucking her teeth and batting at flies, he remembered how she’d only sent presents and money from time to time since their yaay’s death three years before, but she never came home. Worry started to tumble inside him as he thought about her complaints about flies, the absence of a cool breeze, the long, hot day of travel, and no running water. She acted as if her childhood village had a stink she wanted to wash off forever. And that the village well was too far away to do so. Her life was in the city, with running water and, he guessed, no flies, while theirs was in Lat Mata. “Why should we be concerned with the bus’s return already, Bàjjan? That is just two days from now,” he asked cautiously. Even though she had been brisk since she stepped off the bus, Mor did not want to ruffle her headdress any more. Besides, their father had left the barak to Mor, as the only son. It was his responsibility to see to its care.
One Shadow on the Wall Page 3