The second stewardess reappeared, looked at Pami, assessed the situation, and soothingly said, “Having trouble finding your seat? May I see your boarding pass?”
Pami showed it. She felt like a little girl handing a flower to her mama.
“Oh, yes, you’re right here,” the stewardess said, returning the pass and gently touching Pami’s elbow to move her on down the aisle. “The middle seat right there, next to that gentleman.”
Pami’s heart leaped when she saw the blond man in the aisle seat. He looked so like the Danish man! But, of course, he wasn’t, he couldn’t be, and when the man looked up she saw that he was probably twenty years younger than the Danish man, and was in much better physical condition.
Oh, could he be the Danish man’s son? That would be so bad, so bad...
But then the man smiled and got to his feet, saying, “This seat yours?” and he was absolutely an American. And he didn’t really look like the Danish man at all. Just the blond hair and the smooth white face, that’s all, and being tall and big-shouldered.
Pami took her place, between the blond man on the aisle and a small dark man in a turban in the window seat, and the stewardess went away, satisfied. Pami sat with knees together, plastic bag clutched in her arms, looking straight ahead, and after a minute the blond man said, “Excuse me, but they’ll want you to put your seat belt on.”
“What?”
He repeated the statement, then showed her how to fasten the seat belt, demonstrating by unfastening and refastening his own. She watched carefully, found the ends of the two straps somewhere beneath herself, and clicked them together. But apparently a huge fat person had sat in this seat last; laughing, the blond man showed her how to tighten the belt. Doing so, she confessed, “I never been in a plane before.”
“Don’t worry, your part is easy,” he assured her. “The pilot has the tough job.”
He was so pleasant and calm that she began to be calm herself. It didn’t even bother her too much when the stewardess came by again and said she couldn’t keep her bag on her lap during takeoff, but had to put it on the floor under the seat in front of her. She did it because she had to, but she kept her eyes and one foot on the bag, because it contained sixty dollars in green American bills, and eight hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, all that was left of the Danish man’s money.
The three weeks since the talk on the roof had been frightening, bewildering, exhilarating. At every step, she was unsure what she was about, afraid she’d be caught somehow, that by actually doing something with the Danish man’s money instead of keeping it as a kind of fetish, a magic keepsake, the law would find out and suddenly throw her in jail for murder. She was scared the whole time, every step of the way, but after that talk on the roof she’d known she had to make the try, she couldn’t just go on living as before.
I don’t want to kill myself, she kept telling herself during that time. I know I won’t live many more years anyway, but I want them, I want every day I got coming. I don’t want my life to get so bad I’ll want to throw it away.
So she had to make the attempt. She had to at least try. And the thing was, every place she went, to a dress store, or a suitcase store, or a bank, or the American embassy on Wabera Street, everywhere, somebody always turned up that was helpful, that knew the ropes and could give her advice or keep her from making stupid up-country mistakes. It was as though somebody was watching over her, holding her hand as she went about doing all these things. She believed in the spirits of the air and the spirits of the water and the spirits of the trees, and one of these spirits must be near her, protecting her, that’s what it had to be. Maybe the Danish man had been a very evil man, and when she killed him she made a spirit happy, and it was repaying her. Or maybe some relative from home had died and was now a spirit, and was seeing the world through her. Something was with her now on her journey through life, something that had never been there before. She could feel it.
When the plane began to move, she became extremely nervous and felt she had to relieve herself right away, but she was hemmed in by the blond man and the man with the turban, and the seat belt was around her middle, and nobody was supposed to stand up in the airplane at this time, and she was still afraid of drawing attention to herself. She clenched all her muscles, she held everything in, and the plane moved, stopped, moved, stopped, moved, rushed, and took off! Openmouthed, she stared past the sullen-looking man in the turban and watched the tan ground fall away, and then saw nothing but sky. “Ohhhh,” she said, and lost her nervousness, and didn’t have to relieve herself any more.
After a while, wonderful food was brought around, a separate tray for everybody. Far too much food for Pami to eat; she did her best, and then put in her bag the cake wrapped in clear plastic. Then she napped a little while, coming down off the high of three weeks of tension, and when she woke up, feeling a little stiff and cramped, there was a movie starting to be shown on the front wall of the cabin. It was called Angels Unawares, and you could buy earphones to listen to it, but Pami didn’t need to listen to it. She watched the people move on the wall, and dozed, and felt Kenya fall away behind her. All up over Africa the plane would fly, and sail high above the Mediterranean Sea, and soar over France, and glide, and turn, and come down at Heathrow Airport in London in England. There she would get on another plane that would take her over the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. Great huge strides across the world!
The movie ended, and she slept some more, and awoke because something was wrong. Something tense was in the air, near her. She looked around, tasting the badness in her mouth, and beside her the blond man was frowning, gripping the armrests, looking surprised and angry. “So that’s it,” he said.
Pami looked up at him like a mouse peering out of a grainsack. “What? Mister?”
He didn’t answer; he was waiting for something. She waited, too, and suddenly from somewhere near the front of the plane came a burst of screams, men and women screaming. Wide-eyed, Pami cowered in her seat. The screams stopped abruptly, as though a switch had been turned off, and then a voice came over the loudspeaker:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Cathcart again. I’m instructed to inform you that this aircraft is now in the control of representatives of the International League of the Oppressed. I’m instructed to inform you that all passengers should remain quietly in their seats and no harm will befall them.”
The pilot’s voice went on, sounding flat, all emotion rigidly suppressed, and Pami saw the man come striding down the aisle. His head and face were wrapped in an olive-and-black-patterned scarf, and he wore dark sunglasses as well. He was dressed in boots and blue jeans and a black shirt and a brown leather jacket, and he carried a machine pistol. He looked exactly like the photos on the magazine covers, showing the terrorists.
The pilot went on with two or three more sentences of what he had been instructed to say, and the terrorist came down the aisle and stopped next to the blond man. Ignoring the blond man, holding the machine pistol with its barrel aimed upward, he pointed with his other hand at Pami and said, “You come with me.”
Pami shrank back into the seat, smaller and smaller. The blond man, sounding very strong, said, “You can’t have her.”
The terrorist looked at him with scorn: “Do you know who I am?”
“I know what you are,” the blond man said.
X
I don’t have to explain myself.
The instant I saw it there, sitting with the woman, I knew what it was. The stench of God was all over it, like dried roots, like stored apples. Laughing! And a servant.