by T. C. Boyle
Miriam wanted the cloth as soon as she saw it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone wanted to be the first to appear in the streets or at the disco dance in a kanga cut from this scintillating and enticing cloth. But it was expensive. Very expensive. And exclusive to William Wamala. Who proved ultimately to be a very understanding and affectionate young man, willing to barter and trade if shillings were unavailable, accepting pots of honey, dried dagaa, beer, whiskey, and cigarettes in payment, and especially, when it came to the beauties of the town, exchanging his Juliana cloth for what might be considered their most precious commodity, a commodity that cost them nothing but pleasure in the trading.
When Miriam stopped in the market two mornings later, he was there still, but the crowd around him was smaller and the bolts of cloth much depleted. He sat back now in a new cane chair, his splayed feet crossed at the ankles and looming large over the scrap-strewn table, his smile a bit haggard, a beer pressed like a jewel to his lips. “Hello, Little Miss,” he crooned in a booming basso when he saw her standing there with her satchel between two fat-armed women wrapped in kangas that were as ancient as dust and not much prettier.
She looked him in the eye. There was nothing to be afraid of: Beryl Obote, fifteen and resplendent in Juliana cloth, had told her all about him, how he hummed and sang while removing a girl’s clothes and how insatiable he was, as if that very day were his last on earth. “Hello,” Miriam said, smiling widely. “I was just wondering how much the Juliana cloth is today?”
“For you?” He never even bothered to remove his feet from the table, and she could see the faintest glimmer of interest rising from the deeps of his eyes like a lonely fish, only to sink back down again into the murk. He was satiated, bloated with drink and drugs and rich food, rubbed so raw between his legs he could scarcely walk, and she was no beauty, she knew that. She made her eyes big. She held her breath. Finally, while the fat-armed women bickered over something in thin piping voices and the sun vaulted through the trees to take hold of her face, he quoted her a price. In shillings.
The first to fall ill was Gladys Makuma, Uncle Milton Metembe’s special friend. It was during the long rains in April, and many people were sick with one thing or another, and no one thought much about it at first. “Let her rest,” Miriam’s mother insisted from her long slab of an aristocrat’s face. “Give her tea with lemon and honey and an herbal broth in the evenings, and she’ll soon be on her feet again.” But Miriam’s mother was wrong.
Miriam went with Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton to Gladys Makuma’s neat mud-and-clapboard house to bring her beef tea and what comfort they could, and when they stepped into the yard there was Lucy Mawenzi, doyenne of the local healers, coming gray and shaken through the door. Inside was a wake, though Gladys Makuma wasn’t dead yet. Surrounded by her children, her husband, and his stone-faced sisters, she had shrunk into herself like some artifact in the dirt. All you could see of her face was nostrils and teeth, no flesh but the flesh of a mummy, and her hands on the sheets like claws. There would be no more disco-dancing for her, no more sharing a pint of whiskey with Uncle Milton Metembe in a dark boat on the dark, pitching lake. Even an optimist could see that, and Miriam was an optimist—her mother insisted on it.
With Beryl Obote, it was even worse, because Beryl was her coeval, a girl with skinny legs and saucer eyes who wore her hair untamed and had a laugh so infectious she could bring chaos to a classroom merely by opening her mouth. Miriam was coming back from the market one afternoon, the streets a soup of mud and an army of beetles crawling over every fixed surface, when she spotted Beryl in the crowd ahead of her, the Juliana cloth like the ocean come to life and her hair a dark storm brooding over it. But something was wrong. She was lurching from side to side, taking little circumscribed steps, and people were making way for her as if she were drunk. She wasn’t drunk, though when she fell to the ground, subsiding into the mud as if her legs had dissolved beneath her, Miriam saw that her eyes were as red as any drunkard’s. Miriam tried to help her up—never mind the yellow tub of matoke, rice and beans her mother had sent her for—but Beryl couldn’t find her feet, and there was a terrible smell about her. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said, and if you couldn’t smell it you could see it, the diarrhea and the blood seeping through the deep blue cloth into the fetid trodden mud.
After that everyone fell sick: the women who’d bought the Juliana cloth with their favors, their husbands, and their husbands’ special friends, not to mention all the men who had consorted with a certain barmaid at the disco—the one who wore a kanga in the blue, red, and papaya of decay. It was a hex, that was what people believed at first, a spell put on them by William Wamala, who had come all the way across the lake from the homeland of their ancestral enemies—he was a sorcerer, a practitioner of the black arts, an evil spirit in the guise of a handsome and affectionate young man. But it soon became apparent that no hex, no matter how potent and far-reaching, could affect so many. No, this was a disease, one among a host of diseases in a region surfeited with them, and it seemed only natural that they call it Juliana’s disease, after the cloth that had brought it to them.
Typically, it began with a headache and chills; then there was the loosening of the bowels and the progressive wasting. It could have been malaria or tuberculosis or marasmus, but it wasn’t. It was something new. Something no one had ever seen before, and all who caught it—women and men in their prime, girls like Beryl Obote—were eventually wrapped up in bark cloth and sent to the grave before the breath of two months’ time had been exhausted.
Uncle Milton Metembe and Aunt Abusaga contracted it at the same time, almost to the day, and Miriam moved into their house to tend them, afraid in her heart that the taint would spread to her. She cooked them soup and rice through the reek of their excrement, which flowed like stained water; she swept the house and changed their soiled sheets and read to them from the comic papers and the Bible. At night, the rats rustled in the thatch, and the things of the dark raised their voices in an unholy howl, and Miriam fell away deep into herself and listened to her aunt and uncle’s tortured breathing.
The doctors came then from America, France, and England, white people in white coats, and a few who were almost white and even stranger for that, as if they’d been incompletely dipped into the milk of white life. They drew blood like vampires, vial after vial, till the sick and weary trembled at the sight of them, and still there was no cause or cure in sight, the corpses mounting, the orphans wailing; then one day the doctors went away and the government made an announcement over the radio and in the newspapers. Juliana’s disease, the government said, was something new indeed, very virulent and always fatal, and it was transmitted not through cloth or hexes but through sexual contact. Distribution of condoms was being made possible by immediate implementation in every town and village, through the strenuous efforts of the government, and every man and woman, every wife and girl and special friend, should be sure of them every time sexual union was achieved. There was no other way and no other hope, short of monkhood, spinsterhood, or abstinence.
The news rocked the village. It was unthinkable. They were poor people who didn’t have theaters or supermarkets or shiny big cars for diversion—they had only a plate of dagaa, a glass of beer, and sex, and every special friend had a special friend and there was no stopping it, even on pain of death. Besides which, the promised condoms never arrived, as if any true man or sensitive woman would allow a cold loop of latex rubber to come between them and pleasure in any event. People went on, almost defiantly, tempting fate, challenging it, unshakable in their conviction that though the whole world might wilt and die at their feet, they themselves would remain inviolate. The disco was as crowded as ever, the sales of beer and palm wine skyrocketed, and the corpses were shunted in a steady procession from sickbed to grave. Whatever else it might have been, it was a time of denial.
Miriam’s mother was outraged. To her mind, the town’s reaction was nothing short of suicidal. Through h
er position at the government office she had been put in charge of the local campaign for safe sex, and it was her job to disseminate the unwelcome news. Though the condoms remained forever only forthcoming because of logistical problems in the capital, Miriam’s mother typed a sheet of warning and reproduced it a thousand times, and a facsimile of this original soon sagged damply from every tree and post and hoarding in town. “Love Carefully,” it advised, and “Zero Grazing,” a somewhat confusing command borrowed from one of the innumerable local agricultural campaigns. In fine print, it described the ravages of this very small and very dangerous thing, this virus (an entity for which there was no name in the local dialect), and what it was doing to the people of the village, the countryside, and even the capital. No one could have missed these ubiquitous sheets of warning and exhortation, and they would have had to be blind in any case to remain unaware of the plague in their midst. And deaf, too. Because the chorus of lament never ceased, day or night, and you could hear it from any corner of the village and even out in the mists of the lake—a thin, steady insectile wail broken only by the desperate beat of the disco.
“Suicide,” Miriam’s mother snarled over breakfast one morning, while Miriam, back now from her aunt and uncle’s because there was no longer any reason to be there, tried to bury her eyes in her porridge. “Irresponsible, filthy behavior. You’d think everybody in town had gone mad.” The day was still fresh, standing fully revealed in the lacy limbs of the yellow-bark acacia in the front yard. Miriam’s dog looked up guiltily from the mat in the corner. Somewhere a cock crowed.
A long minute ticked by, punctuated by the scrape of spoon and bowl, and then her mother rose angrily from the table and slammed her cup into the wash-up tub. All her fury was directed at Miriam, as if fury alone could erect a wall between an adolescent girl and James Kariango of the nicotine-stained fingers. “No better than animals in the bush,” she hissed, stamping across the floorboards with hunched shoulders and ricocheting eyes, talking to the walls, to the dense, mosquito-hung air, “and no shred of self-restraint or respect even.”
Miriam wasn’t listening. Her mother’s rhetoric was as empty as a bucket in a dry well. What did she know? Sex to her mother was a memory. “That itch,” she called it, as if it were something you caught from a poisonous leaf or a clump of nettles, but she never itched and as far as Miriam could see she’d as soon have a hyena in the house as a special friend. Miriam understood what her mother was telling her, she heard the fear seeping through the fierceness of that repetitive and concussive voice, and she knew how immortally lucky she was that William Wamala hadn’t found her pretty enough to bother with. She understood all that and she was scared, the pleading eyes of Beryl Obote, Aunt Abusaga, Uncle Milton Metembe, and all the rest unsettling her dreams and quickening her pace through the market, but when James Kariango crept around back of the house fifteen minutes later and raised two yellowed fingers to his lips and whistled like an innocuous little bird, she was out the door before the sweat had time to sprout under her arms.
The first time he’d come around, indestructible with his new shoulders, jaunty and confident and fingering a thin silver chain at his throat, Miriam’s mother had chased him down the front steps at the point of a paring knife, cursing into the trees till every head in the neighborhood was turned and every ear attuned. Tending Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe had in its way been Miriam’s penance for attracting such a boy—any boy—and she’d been safe there among the walking dead and the weight of their sorrows. But now she was home and the months had gone by and James Kariango, that perfect specimen, was irresistible.
Her mother had gone off to work. Her dog was asleep. The eyes of the world were turned to the market and the laundry and a hundred other things. It was very, very early, and the taste of James Kariango’s lips was like the taste of the sweetest fruit, mango and papaya and the sweet dripping syrup of fresh-cut pineapple. She kissed him there, behind the house, where the flowers grew thick and the lizards scuttered through the dirt and held their tails high in sign of some fleeting triumph. And then, after a long while, every pore of her body opening up like a desert plant at the first hint of rain, she led him inside.
He was very solemn. Very gentle. Every touch was electric, his fingers plugged into some internal socket, his face glowing like the ball at the disco. She let him strip off her clothes and she watched in fear and anticipation as he stepped out of his shorts and revealed himself to her. The fear was real. It was palpable. It meant the whole world and all of life. But then he laid her down in the familiar cradle of her bed and hovered over her in all of his glory, and, oh, it felt so good.
(1997)
II
Death
BIG GAME
The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal.
—Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
You could shoot anything you wanted, for a price, even the elephant, but Bernard tended to discourage the practice. It made an awful mess, for one thing, and when all was said and done it was the big animals—the elephant, the rhino, the water buff and giraffe—that gave the place its credibility, not to mention ambiance. They weren’t exactly easy to come by, either. He still regretted the time he’d let the kid from the heavy-metal band pot one of the giraffes—even though he’d taken a cool twelve thousand dollars to the bank on that one. And then there was the idiot from MGM who opened up on a herd of zebra and managed to decapitate two ostriches and lame the Abyssinian ass in the process. Well, it came with the territory, he supposed, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t carry enough insurance on the big stuff to buy out half the L.A. Zoo if he had to. He was just lucky nobody had shot himself in the foot yet. Or the head. Of course, he was insured for that, too.
Bernard Puff pushed himself up from the big mahogany table and flung the dregs of his coffee down the drain. He wasn’t exactly overwrought, but he was edgy, his stomach sour and clenched round the impermeable lump of his breakfast cruller, his hands afflicted with the little starts and tremors of the coffee shakes. He lit a cigarette to calm himself and gazed out the kitchen window on the dromedary pen, where one of the moth-eaten Arabians was methodically peeling the bark from an elm tree. He looked at the thing in amazement, as if he’d never seen it before—the flexible lip and stupid eyes, the dully working jaw—and made a mental note to offer a special on camels. The cigarette tasted like tin, like death. Somewhere a catbird began to call out in its harsh mewling tones.
The new people were due any minute now, and the prospect of new people always set him off—there were just too many things that could go wrong. Half of them didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other, they expected brunch at noon and a massage an hour later, and they bitched about everything, from the heat to the flies to the roaring of the lions at night. Worse: they didn’t seem to know what to make of him, the men regarding him as a subspecies of the blue-collar buddy, regaling him with a nonstop barrage of lickerish grins, dirty jokes and fractured grammar, and the women treating him like a cross between a maître d’ and a water carrier. Dudes and greenhorns, all of them. Parvenus. Moneygrubbers. The kind of people who wouldn’t know class if it bit them.
Savagely snubbing out the cigarette in the depths of the coffee mug, Bernard wheeled round on the balls of his feet and plunged through the swinging doors and out into the high dark hallway that gave onto the foyer. It was stifling already, the overhead fans chopping uselessly at the dead air round his ears and the sweat prickling at his new-shaven jowls as he stomped down the hall, a big man in desert boots and khaki shorts, with too much belly and something overeager and graceless in his stride. There was no one in the foyer and no one at the registration desk. (Espinoza was out feeding the animals—Bernard could hear the hyenas whooping in the distance—and the new girl—what was her name?—hadn’t made it to work on time yet. Not once.) The place seemed deserted, though he knew Orbalina would be making up the beds and Roland sneaking a drink
somewhere—probably out behind the lion cages.
For a long moment Bernard stood there in the foyer, framed against a bristling backdrop of kudu and oryx heads, as he checked the reservation card for the tenth time that morning:
Mike and Nicole Bender
BENDER REALTY
15125 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, California
Real estate people. Jesus. He’d always preferred the movie crowd—or even the rock-and-rollers, with their spiked wristbands and pouf hairdos. At least they were willing to buy into the illusion that Puff’s African Game Ranch, situated on twenty-five hundred acres just outside Bakersfield, was the real thing—the Great Rift Valley, the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti—but the real estate people saw every crack in the plaster. And all they wanted to know was how much he’d paid for the place and was the land subdividable.
He looked up into the yellow-toothed grin of the sable mounted on the wall behind him—the sable his father had taken in British East Africa back in the thirties—and let out a sigh. Business was business, and in the long run it didn’t matter a whit who perforated his lions and gazelles—just as long as they paid. And they always paid, up front and in full. Bernard saw to that.
“What was it, Nik, six months ago when we went to Gino Parducci’s for dinner? It was six months, wasn’t it? And didn’t I say we’d do the African thing in six months? Didn’t I?”