“Well, mister,” the fireman said, “sometimes in Uganda the truth is not so important.”
“It was our train,” the engineer said. “They might be very angry, and they would want someone to blame, and perhaps they would blame us.”
“We like Kenya,” the fireman said. “It’s a very much better country completely.”
“I have cousins there,” the engineer said. “You say that? ‘Cousins’?”
“Sure.”
“We used to like very much when the railway went to Kenya,” the fireman said. “We still have friends on the railway there.”
“We get jobs,” the engineer said, “and tell everybody the story about this train.”
“They will buy us beer,” the fireman said, and laughed.
“We will never have to buy our own beer again ever completely,” the engineer said, and they both laughed.
“Then climb into the truck,” Lew told them, and went over to tell Isaac he was off, adding, “When you leave, don’t forget Young Mr. Balim up by the road.”
“Oh, I won’t.” Isaac smiled in the near-darkness. “Can you imagine returning to Mr. Balim without his son?”
“No,” Lew said, and left.
He probably should have stayed, but he just didn’t want to anymore. The fun was going out of it. Night was falling, the lugging of coffee sacks was merely manual labor, the repetition of falling freight cars (with or without human sacrifices) had begun to pall, and he kept being given uncomfortable things to think about. First, that his idea of himself as hero might merely be self-aggrandizement; and second, that he didn’t love Ellen enough to jump off a cliff because of her. It was enough to bring anybody down.
ELLEN’S ROAD said the sign on the way out. “Shit,” said Lew.
57
Young Mr. Balim had been made very uneasy by the falling men. He himself was a man who had never known firm ground beneath his feet, so these reminders of how easily he too could drop away and cease to exist, never to matter again, never having mattered in the first place, troubled him and gave him a nervous sensitivity to his own frailty, surrounded by dangers. He tramped back and forth at the level crossing where the access road humped over the track, trying in the physical movements to reassure himself of his own reality, but the thud of his feet sounded hollow in the night, his determined movements the empty gesture of a substanceless shadow.
For who was he anyway but a half-solid ghost, with little more existence than the insects that whined and buzzed around him? He was a ghost of the British imperial era, which had brought both his grandfathers from India to work on this very railroad, leaving behind both the railroad and the men, like a half loaf of bread and a shopping list abandoned on the kitchen counter after the family has moved. Beyond that he was a ghost of Uganda; in this nation of his birth he was under a death sentence for the simple crime of having lived. And he was the ghost of his father’s dream of security and continuity, there was no security, and this age was the enemy of continuity. Every man stands on the freight-car roof. We fall and fall, our feet planted on the solid surface, and the only question is how long before we hit.
Lights. It was fully dark now, and lights were suddenly winking at him through the trees from farther up the hill. At first he thought it was lanterns carried by people clambering their way through the undergrowth, but as they came closer he realized they were headlights. Some sort of vehicle was jouncing very slowly down the access road.
Who? The headlights were yellow, as though the battery were poor, but it could still be police; or Army. Particularly considering those trucks Isaac had borrowed.
As the yellow light touched him, Young Mr. Balim slid away from the level crossing into the tangle of trees and brush just downhill from the track. Nothing showed behind those slow-moving bouncing headlights. A faintly coughing engine could be indistinctly heard. Crouched down low, Young Mr. Balim watched and waited as the headlights reached the crossing, angled upward for the hump… and stopped.
Young Mr. Balim waited, staring. The yellow lights gleamed dimly on the upper branches of trees and the engine continued its weak cough, but nothing at all happened. The vehicle refused to move.
The wait was interminable. From feeling himself an almost incorporeal ghost, Young Mr. Balim now found himself too real by half; his crouched position was becoming distinctly uncomfortable, with shooting pains in his knees and calves, a growing ache in his neck, a heavy muscular cramp spreading across his back. When he could stand it no more, when he was certain ten minutes had gone by—ninety seconds had passed—he shifted position, but then immediately moved again, brush crackling around him.
Why had his father permitted him to come along on this expedition? Mazar Balim was supposed to be the strong one, so much stronger and more self-assured than his son; why had he allowed Bathar to browbeat him into giving way? And what was Bathar’s own nonsense of derring-do, of wresting some wonderful new fantasy life from the jaws of danger? He had come here as though to an initiation, a long-delayed ritual of manhood, never thinking he might fail and fall and not have mattered. Those two men who had gone over the cliff; neither of them had known their stories would end like that when they left Kenya yesterday.
He could wait no longer. He had to move, take the chance, go see for himself what was happening up there. Maybe after all it was nothing more than a couple using this abandoned road for a lover’s lane.
Still, do couples on lovers’ lanes keep their headlights burning? With great caution Young Mr. Balim worked his way through the brush, flitted quickly across the track at a point ten feet east of the crossing, and paused again amid the hedges on the other side.
From this angle, behind and to the left of the vehicle, he could see it silhouetted against the yellow light. It was an old small pickup truck, battered and dark. He couldn’t make out who was in the cab.
Slowly, slowly, inching forward, he stalked the truck. The frail cough of the engine reassured him, suggesting there was no great strength here to contend against. In a last little nearly silent dash he reached the left rear corner of the truck and paused, his hand on the fender, feeling it vibrate from the wheezing engine.
Faint light reflected back from the tree branches. In that illumination, as he was about to move forward along the side of the truck, Young Mr. Balim saw a person lying on his side in the open truckbed. Asleep? Curious, he leaned down closer, saw the black face and the white clerical collar, smelled the caked blood before seeing it all over the man’s head, recognized that he was looking at a corpse, heard a faint sound behind himself, spun round in terror, and saw the swinging tire iron for less than a second before it smashed into the side of his skull.
58
Chase tossed the tire iron away onto the ground, stepped over the fallen sentry, and went forward to switch off the truck’s engine and lights; they had finished their work. Then, while his eyes grew used to the dark, he went back to the sentry, searched him, and was both surprised and annoyed to find the man had no weapons.
What sort of operation was Frank running here? An unarmed sentry was a real snag in Chase’s plans. He himself had been stripped of weapons back at the Rwanda border, and of course the minister, former owner of this truck, had not been carrying any guns. Chase’s primary purpose in luring this fellow forward had been to rearm himself at the sentry’s expense.
All right; it wasn’t the end of the world. Chase looked up at the velvet-gray sky, down at the black undergrowth. His eyes had adjusted as much as they would. Leaving the truck, he stepped over the level crossing, moving slowly, his body still very stiff from his time as a captive.