The Nicotine Chronicles

by Lee Child

  “I am an old man,” Kaara responded.

  “You guys must have a drink!” Wacera ordered. “I’m not going to drown myself in liquor telling you tall tales as you sit here and stare . . .” Our sodas were finished.

  “Let’s smoke first,” Kaara said. “I personally can’t drink without smoking . . .”

  Wacera looked at each of us suspiciously. The new SM pack was delivered and she handed a stick to each of us, then repeated the ritual of lighting them with her own.

  Our smoking was much smoother, without any coughing at all.

  “So, what did you do with your twenty grand . . . ?” Kaara pursued. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Why do you want to know?” Wacera teased.

  “I’m just curious.”

  After a moment, Wacera said thoughtfully, “I was only eighteen, just as old as you two. How would you have spent the money?” she asked Kaara, before turning to me.

  Kaara said he would buy a music system and hold a big party. I said I would travel to Mombasa for holiday.

  “Foolish boys,” Wacera scoffed. “I had better sense than you both. I invested in my future. Rented a place for myself, bought lots of clothes and shoes and handbags and perfumes. My tools of the trade, you know. And I learned how to drink and smoke . . .”

  “Really?” Kaara said.

  Wacera pulled on her cigarette and knocked some ash into the overflowing ashtray. “There is a style to it,” she answered. “It’s a moment to show off your polished nails. Same with the holding of a glass,” she added, illustrating as she took a swig. “As for you and your clan who drink from the bottle . . .”

  Kaara and I laughed.

  “What happened to the baby?” Kaara asked.

  “What baby?”

  “The one you were carrying?”

  “Ooh, that was sorted immediately.”

  “Sorted?” Kaara said.

  “When you are eighteen and living with an improvident man, how else do you sort it? I was about to say you try getting pregnant, but I realize you luckily cannot. Trust me, I sorted it, once and for all. I never allowed myself to fall pregnant again.”

  Wacera took a few sips in quick succession, as though trying to drown the memories, then smoked even more rapidly, lighting one stick with another. “That first year in the streets was the most turbulent,” she said wistfully. “I heard babies crying in the night. I could not stand the sight of a toddler, let alone hold one in my own hands. I turned to drinking for solace.”

  Wacera held her face in her hands. When she looked up, her eyes were moist. “Here’s the thing: I was supposed to be a carefree, fun-loving girl, but I was falling apart inside. And men would line up waiting to be comforted by me. I drank even more. Strange as it might sound, accepting money was the hardest part of the bargain. I felt really humiliated that I, Wacera, daughter of Maitu, had ended up in the streets.

  “The tragedy is that the streets can be addictive. It is empowering when a woman knows that a swing of her hip will have a man on his knees, literally begging for you.” Wacera rose from her seat suddenly. She took one wobbly step and Kaara rushed to steady her. I hesitantly followed suit.

  “I will be fine,” she assured. “Kuteleza si kuanguka. I am happy to see that you will catch me if I fall. Please take me home.” She was steady on her feet now, though she leaned lightly on both of us.

  * * *

  As we walked home, Wacera narrated her journey from one side of town to another. The western part of the city was peopled by the flashiest of prostitutes. They were the youngest and prettiest. Within a year or two, new arrivals with fresher and prettier face would dislodge the older women to the backstreets of the central business district. Pimps were there to ensure every prostitute stayed in her lane. By the time Wacera hit River Road, she said, she knew that was her endgame.

  “I had done all there was to be done: blacks, whites, Indians, Arabs, Chinese—the United Nations of the world,” she told us, adding that in her first two years, she had served as an escort to exotic destinations on the coast and Zanzibar.

  “I grew up very quickly,” she confessed. “I realized as soon as I landed in the city that a woman’s beauty is like a flowering plant. Seasons come and go. Just like the hair that I cherished in my teens. I think that foolish master’s cutting off my hair was the rite of passage that emboldened me to fend for myself. For no one defended me in the village when he scarred me before so many witnesses.”

  Wacera stopped in her tracks. “Boys, please walk ahead.”

  Kaara hesitated.

  “I want to pass water, stupid cow!” she snapped.

  We did as instructed. Pitch darkness had enveloped the land.

  Wacera soon caught up with us. Kaara and I were carrying her luggage. She hoisted her arms around each of us.

  “See, I have been places, from the so-called massage parlors of Kilimani, which is a sophisticated term for brothel, to the cars of penniless men. Pimps, who ensured I got paid by stingy men, got me out of police cells—by the way, even police will accept a little something to secure your release . . .

  “But each year, I would be pushed to the backstreets by younger and fresher faces. Village girls with more juices for the city men to squeeze and draw from. When River Road beckoned, I knew it was time to leave the scene. From there, one knows the next destination is the village pub and, ultimately, the grave.”

  Wacera’s turning point, she went on, was not triggered by her street life, but by a middle-aged man who had fallen on hard times. “His name was Zakayo. A short, quiet, old man who I thought was graying prematurely, but when I found his other bodily hairs had grayed, I knew I was dealing with the rock of ages. Zakayo was a retiree who chose to squander his pension in the city. Actually, squander is the wrong term. Spent.

  “Because I spent part of it. Zakayo would order a meal and summon me to his table: ‘Wacera wa Maitu,’ he would call out, ‘how can I eat alone as though I am a witch?’ He never failed to invite me, and always addressed me as ‘daughter of my mother.’

  “That was the measure of Zakayo’s generosity. I reciprocated in kind. He was among the few people who got laid for free—when I was in the mood.

  “Then something happened and Zakayo’s pension stopped flowing. Maybe the account ran dry, maybe his wife went to court or to his employer and ordered it stopped. I really don’t know what happened and neither did Zakayo. All he mumbled was that his lawyer would deal with the matter promptly. One week grew into two weeks, one month, two months . . . In the fourth month, the landlord threw him out of his bedsit in Ngara. Soon Reke Mone, his regular haunt for thirty-five years, vowed that he would not be served any more meals before he cleared his debt. Before we knew it, Zakayo was scavenging in the streets.”

  Wacera stopped in her tracks again. “Where are we now?” she asked, out of breath.

  “We’re close to home,” Kaara answered.

  “Really? I can hardly see in the dark. Okay, let me finish this story here and now,” Wacera said urgently. “One evening, the patrons at Reke Mone conducted a fundraiser. It was not to settle Zakayo’s debts or to buy him food. It was to send him home. Somebody reported that Zakayo had told him he hailed from Murang’a. So, he was put in a Murang’a-bound matatu. The driver was instructed to dump Zakayo at a local market where some villagers were likely to identify him and deliver him home. He was sent off like a sack of potatoes, to be delivered to some address where someone was bound to identify the parcel. That’s when I decided to come home, while I was still on my feet.”

  Wacera went quiet again.

  Kaara and I looked at each other in the dark.

  “I’m sure folks at home have lots of questions,” Kaara said.

  “I’m coming home, no questions asked,” Wacera replied calmly. We had arrived at Maitu’s.

  Kaara knocked gently. “Hoooodiiii?”

  “Tonyai,” somebody welcomed us in.

  I could feel Wacera fumbling for her cigarett
es. The door opened as she lit her stick; the blaze illuminated her face for a moment.

  I don’t know what alarmed Maitu the most—the face of her long-lost daughter or the sight of her smoking a cigarette. She unleashed a massive wail that soon brought her closest neighbors to her doorstep.

  Wacera smoked furiously as more villagers arrived.

  I reached for a cigarette and so did Kaara. Wacera obliged, leaning forward to light our sticks from her blazing one.

  Part IV

  Inhale To Your Heart’s Content

  Smoke Break

  by David L. Ulin

  I’m just starting to lay the PVC pipe into the ditch when Bugler comes around the side of the outhouse buttoning up his pants, that big belly popping out over his belt, a whiskery half sneer cut across his open wound of a face. The sun is hot, high in the sky and glaring, but across the plains I can see rain clouds gathering, picking up speed.

  “You almost done yet?” Bugler whines, fitting a toothpick into the corner of his mouth. “Christ, you Northern boys are so damn slow. When I was your age, I’da had this thing dug and fitted and covered up again in all the time it’s taken you . . .”

  I don’t look up, just keep fitting lengths of tubing together and laying them into the ground. Bugler is the boss, but he’s never got anything to say, just the same shit spilling out of his mouth like the spare tire spilling over the top of his pants. He’s a man of excess, is Bugler, and he doesn’t like me. He doesn’t even expect me to listen, just prattles to get on my nerves, and mostly I ignore him. Although every now and then I nod or make some small response, to keep him off his guard.

  “You don’t seem to have the knack for laying pipe,” he’s saying now. “’Course, it’s a man’s job. Only reason I give it to you is I thought you was a man.”

  He takes a step toward me and sticks his full-moon face into mine, leer cracked wide. “You know what I mean by laying pipe, don’t you?” he asks now, breath hot, an assault, smelling of stale coffee and Winston cigarettes, lips stretched nasty and thin.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Didn’t know if they still did that stuff up north. Thought they might have some kind of machine for it by now . . .”

  It’d be nice if they had some kind of machine for this, I think, screwing another piece of plastic pipe together and laying it into the ground. I’ve been out here all day, and my back is coated with sweat that runs in rivulets down my pants and plasters them to the skin of my legs. There used to be a work crew to do this stuff, me and four other people, but, one by one, Bugler has transferred the others during the last few weeks, until now there is only me. And, of course, him, standing around and picking at me while I do whatever dirty work he can think up. Yesterday, I dug out the foundation for a concrete platform—twelve feet square and two feet deep—and today . . .

  Well, today, I’m hoping, it’s going to rain before I get done putting this pipe together, before I have to cover up this ditch. Even in the couple of minutes that Bugler’s been standing here, the horizon has moved several miles closer, and I can see the first long lashes of water lacing the ground in the distance. I slow up on the pipe just a fraction, working the weather like a tired baseball pitcher who’s lost his best stuff, trying to weasel a delay.

  The rain is the only thing I like about Texas, the way it looks as it moves across the brown, scrubbed plains. Out here, you really get a sense of the force of nature, the way the sky can change so suddenly, the way a storm will come on out of nowhere and sweep past you in a matter of minutes, with a strength that can sometimes level houses. It’s because there’s nothing to stop it, no points of resistance. The plains are so wide, so empty, and anything that gets thrown up in their way is so damn small . . .

  No wonder Bugler’s who he is. Me, I’m from Manhattan, where nature has ceased to be a factor anymore.

  Bugler keeps chattering, toothpick bouncing in his mouth like a taxi dancer, face a shifting storm of moods. The only constant is the beady black pinpricks of his piggish eyes, like buttons encased in dough then baked beneath the heat of the Texas sun. He’s about forty, his skin lined like old leather, and although I’ve never touched him, my guess is that it feels that way too.

  “You know what?” he says. “Let me give you some advice. You know what I was doing last night?”

  This time, I don’t nod, just thread some more of the pipe through my hands and slide it along the length of the ditch. A wind picks up and blows against my back, drying it in spots. The air is heavy now, smells like water, but the sun is still high and undeterred.

  Bugler stops for a second, as if he is waiting for a response. He spits the toothpick at my feet, fishes a Winston from the soft pack in his breast pocket, and lights it. I watch him, calculating, before pulling out a Marlboro.

  Smoke break. Most days, this is just about the only rest I get. When I first started, we would smoke together, all of us on the crew. Once an hour, once every forty-five minutes, whenever we could work it in. It’s not that we were friends, or had anything to say to one another. But the work is mindless and relentless, almost as mindless and relentless as Bugler’s voice. And smoking, it breaks the tedium, it divvies up the day. Those times, they are as close as I have felt here to fitting in.

  For a moment, we stand in silence, pulling on our cigarettes. I feel the aching in my muscles, the tension in my lower back. Then it’s like Bugler gets tired of waiting. He’s a man who needs to hear the sound of his own voice.

  “I was with a woman,” he says, and takes another drag. I can see him leer, the hot stench of his breath filling the air like he’s an animal stalking prey. Every week or so, he tells me about some new sexual conquest, dressing it up like a story from Penthouse when you can tell just from looking at him that it was probably a frantic little fuck at best, him huffing and puffing like a rabbit, scared to lose his hard-on before it came time to jam.

  “She was fine,” he goes on. “Couldn’t have been much more than nineteen. One of them little girls, real pretty—looked like she’d hardly know how to do it. But she did.” His cowboy-style snap-button shirt fits him kind of tight, and it’s come untucked at the bottom so that a patch of hairy belly peeks out like a kid playing hide-and-seek. “She was married too,” he says, grinning though the smoke.

  A lot of people marry young in Texas. Not like in New York. Here, everyone I meet seems to be nineteen and matched for life, with a kid and a late-model car, and a twenty-eight-year mortgage on a brand-new tract house with a view of the setting sun. Even Bugler, ugly as he is, has a wife somewhere, although no one I know has ever seen her, and he isn’t exactly what you’d call young.

  Bugler exhales a cloud and scratches the ground with the toe of his boot. As he does, his smile starts to fade. I watch him while I finish my cigarette, squash it underneath the sole of my boot. In the ditch, the PVC pipe is almost all in place, and pretty soon I’ll have to get to work connecting it, unless the rain arrives before then. I check the horizon, slow my work to a crawl. Bugler’ll never notice anyway.

  Now the wind picks up again, a pushing wind that whistles all around us. It’s not a friendly sound. Underneath it, Bugler coughs, starts to talk again. His voice is soft, and although I don’t want to, there’s something in his tone—an edge, an insistence—that makes me strain to hear him through the rushing air.

  “I got a lot more than I bargained for with this one,” he says. “You want to know what happened?”

  No.

  “I got shot at last night.” He takes a last drag on his Winston and flicks the butt. For a moment, we just stand there, while the wind takes hold of the cigarette and rips it apart, casting shards of glowing ember everywhere. Then he continues.

  “We were at her place. It was just as cozy as you please. But when we get down to it, right in the middle, I hear this screeching sound, like a door on rusty hinges. I stop for a second, ask her where’s her husband. She tells me not to worry, he’s working the night shift, won’t be home fo
r hours, and I say unh-hunh, and then the bedroom door slams open and what do I see but the barrel of a gun . . .”

  Bugler’s got me interested now, I hate to admit it, but I’m looking at him pretty hard, waiting for the next part of the story. The rain keeps advancing, and now I’m hoping it’ll hold off for a while so he can get to the end. He’s not even noticing me, those hard eyes gone all dreamy now, as if he’s trying to see something that’s not really there, something that if he could just concentrate hard enough he might be able to conjure, but which he’ll never be able to reach out and touch.

  “The gun goes off,” he goes on, “and the whole side wall of the room explodes. And I’m moving—I ain’t never moved that fast, not even when I was a boy. I’m reaching down to the floor for my pants, gathering up my boots, my shirt, whatever I can get ahold of, ’cause there’s no time to be choosy, and meantime, this guy’s standing in the door yelling what the hell is going on here, and the girl is in the bed, hiding under the covers, and screaming. The funniest part, too, is I’m still thinking about that girl . . .

  “But her husband is blocking the door. He raises the gun again, and I know this is it. Then I see that his first shot has really taken out that wall—I mean, you can see moonlight through the holes, all it is is Sheetrock and plywood, one of these home-construction jobs—so I put my shoulder down and plow right into it, and the gun goes off . . .

  “I hear that shell whistle by my ear, except I’m already outside. Then another shot when I’m getting in my truck. As I drive away, I can see him in the rear-view, waving that gun like he knew how to use it. But look”—and his eyes return to focus, his lips twisting back into their cynical sneer—“not a mark on me.” He turns a slow, ponderous pirouette, arms extended and belly jiggling beneath the taut fabric of his shirt. “What a hero, huh? Shoots his own house to kingdom come, and I get away without a scratch.”

  Bugler laughs: a short, yapping bark like that of a lapdog. He reaches for another Winston, and I wonder how that hulk of a body managed to evade the shots.