‘Right,’ she said.
‘All the women like you in California?’
She laughed, nudged me again. ‘Some day you come out there, and I’ll show you.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Some day.’ But I sure as hell wasn’t going to hold my breath.
Miriam came out from our parked vehicles and gave me a bemused smile. Karen raised her voice. ‘Hey, Peter! How much longer? I’m tired of roughing it.’
‘Not too long, hon, not too long,’ he said. ‘Besides, this has been a marvelous trek, quite marvelous. You want to talk roughing it? Think of Rwanda. That was roughing it. Heavy jungle, roads of red mud, and the hundreds of bodies along the road, butchered with machetes and sharpened sticks… At least this place is relatively clean, and we’ve got good roads. Not like Rwanda.’
Miriam was unpacking some of the metal dishes. ‘Or Fiji. Nothing like Fiji, either. A Pacific paradise, filled with smoke and shallow graves and reefs with broken boats on them, bodies floating around in the lagoons. Too hot in the day, too stifling at night.’
Jean-Paul said something that I couldn’t quite hear, something about the Congo being even worse. As they discussed such things among themselves I kept quiet and let the fire warm the base of my boots. This was my first assignment working for the UN so I didn’t have any clever stories to offer. What few stories I had dealt with university in Toronto and a former newspaper reporting job, and it seemed just too damn silly to bring it up. So I didn’t.
Our dinner was a kind of stew from rations donated by the Americans—how nice of them, we all agreed—and was made somewhat more palatable by heavy seasoning. Peter looked thrilled at having successfully heated it up and I let him have that victory. We huddled in a circle around the fire and there was the talk of the mission, of Site A and of what we would find in the morning. While we talked and discussed and raised points about the search, the Marine, Charlie Banner, just kept quiet, eating his own meal, the firelight making his dark skin seem smooth and flawless. He was as big as Jean-Paul but while Jean-Paul was expansive in his movements and talk and actions, like he was always on stage, acting for us, Charlie was the exact opposite, moving slowly and methodically, trying to keep in the background. I always kept looking at his eyes. They seemed to have witnessed a lot of experiences, none of which Charlie had shared with us.
With dinner over I joined the dishwashing crew, bringing over buckets of hot water from one of the motel rooms, letting it drain from a tub spout into white plastic buckets with metal handles. Peter, apparently exhausted by his cooking efforts, sat on the fender of one of the Land Cruisers, smoking a cigarette. Sanjay joined me on one of the trips to get water. ‘You doing all right, Sam?’
‘Samuel,’ I said automatically.
‘Excuse me?’ he asked politely.
‘Samuel,’ I said. ‘My full name. Samuel Roth Simpson.’ I picked up a full bucket in the small motel bathroom, looked at his cheerful face with its thick black mustache, and then said, ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to bark at you like that. When I was a kid I kept on being called Sammy or Sam or Sammy Simp. No good reason to keep pissing me off, but when I could, I just wanted to be called Samuel. OK?’
He smiled, picked up the water bucket. ‘OK. So. Are you doing all right?’
‘No complaints yet,’ I said. But then again, the evening was young.
‘May I ask a question?’
‘Go ahead.’
Sanjay walked with me to the door of the empty room, walking carefully, not wanting to spill the precious cargo of hot water. ‘It’s about Karen.’
‘All right.’
He turned, now looking sheepish. ‘I noted you talking to her earlier. Is there anything going on between the two of you?’
‘Not a thing,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Let’s just say… I have an interest, that’s all. And I don’t want to interrupt anything you may be having. The gentlemanly way, you understand.’
‘Sure,’ I said, walking out to the parking lot. ‘But I thought you were married, Sanjay.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘But New Delhi is quite far away.’
‘It sure the hell is,’ I agreed.
As I finished wiping down the metal cookware I had an odd sense of satisfaction, that I was providing some type of service to the group. When I had first joined up with the team most of them had been in-country for months and were wary of me and what few skills I apparently had to offer. The worst offender was Peter, who though he was exceedingly polite and gracious always gave me the impression that nothing would make him happier than to see me on the next chartered flight back to Canada. I had tried to say something about it earlier but he had said, ‘No, no, you get me wrong. No doubt the High Commissioner thinks you’re important, and so you’re here. It’s just that I would much rather have a more, shall we say, traditionally skilled field worker with us. That’s all. Now, excuse me, will you? I have real work to do.’
Tonight, after the dishes had been put away and we were sitting around the dying fire, Peter was talking animatedly with Jean-Paul. Miriam leaned over to me—her hair not tickling me, I’m disappointed to report—and said, ‘I think Peter wants Jean-Paul’s job.’
‘I think Jean-Paul wants Peter’s stones,’ I said.
‘Stones? Excuse me?’
My face warmed up some. ‘Sorry, stones. Slang for testicles.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That was good. I’ll have to remember that.’
Then she left to get some firewood from the pile that had been set up near one of the Land Cruisers. Sanjay was saying something in a low voice to Karen that was making her laugh. Charlie was on his haunches by the fire, idly stirring the embers with a stick, and I was about to get up from the cold plastic chair—night dew was already beginning to form on the slick sides—when there were noises in the distance.
It went quiet all around the fire as every head swung round to face the dark horizon off to the west. Faint popping noises, like firecrackers in an ashcan, and streams of red and orange light, arcing up and then back down into the darkness. Jean-Paul cleared his throat. ‘Tracer fire—am I correct, Charlie?’
Charlie stood up slowly, stick still in his hand with a glowing ember at the end, a faint trail of smoke following behind. He stood there for a long moment, staring out into the distance. His body shifted and I sensed a change in his attitude, of a warrior sensing a far-off battle and wishing he was there instead of escorting a group of UN workers who sometimes needed their hands held and their noses wiped. He cleared his throat.
‘Yep, tracer fire,’ he finally said.
Peter spoke up. ‘So, chum, who’s doing the shooting over there?’
Charlie dropped the stick into the flickering flames. ‘Hard to tell. Rogue militia units up in the hills, maybe, dropping some harassing fire. Or maybe one of the UN front-line peacekeeper units that got spooked and now they’re shooting at shadows.’
Now it was Sanjay’s turn. ‘Are we safe enough?’
Jean-Paul laughed. ‘Where in this cursed place is anybody safe? But at least you’re safe enough here, right, Charlie? All the maps say this is a pacified area, and if trouble does erupt, our bon ami Charlie gets on his radio and calls in help. Right?’
Charlie nodded slowly, just staring some more out at the horizon where the faint red and orange of the tracers rose and fell. I crossed my legs and looked into the fire. ‘The maps say this is pacified, right?’ I asked.
Peter said, ‘That’s what the man said, or didn’t you hear him?’
‘Oh, I heard him,’ I said. ‘I’m just wondering if the militia units are using the same maps as we are, that’s all.’