“They should have banned everybody.”
“They almost did. One of the provincial commissioners here then, a guy named John Ainsworth, he said, ‘Kisumu is not a place for a melancholy man.’”
“Did he say who it was for?”
“Jokers and jollies, I guess. Same as today.”
“Jolly Rogers, you mean.”
“That, too. Is this our plane?”
It came in from the north, a twin-engine Cessna inching along under the clouds like a fly walking on a ceiling. The breeze at ground level, damp and warm, came out of the west over the lake, so the small plane turned away to its left before reaching them and spiraled down some invisible banister in the sky, touching the ground far away at the eastern end of the runway.
Ellen and Frank walked out across the field, the dead grass crackling under their feet. The plane approached, throttling back; it passed them, went on to the other end of the runway, turned off onto the taxiway, and slowly trundled back, wing tips gently bouncing. On both doors was a stylized drawing of a leaping impala and the name “Uganda Skytours.”
“There he is!” Ellen pointed at Lew, identifiable in the copilot’s seat. He and the pilot were the only ones aboard. Ellen waved, then felt silly about it, then waved again, defiantly.
Both men climbed down from the plane once it had come to a stop. The pilot was middle-aged and white and very worried-looking. He carried a manila envelope.
Lew looked a mess. His clothes were torn and filthy, and his face showed recent bruises and cuts that had been given no more than hasty first aid. His look was drawn, as though he hadn’t slept much, but more than that, he looked as though he were thinking hard about something, like an inventor just before the breakthrough.
Ellen went to him, feeling oddly awkward, as though they were strangers. Touching his arm, she said, “Lew?”
He looked at her from miles away, then grinned and said, “I am in Heaven.” But the light touch was forced.
So was hers. “Welcome to cloud nine,” she said.
He gazed at her as though his mind had gone blank, then abruptly pulled her close, wrapping his arms tightly around her, bending her back, his face pushed into the angle of her throat, the lines of his body pressed against her. “Jesus Christ,” he said, his lips moving against her skin, “but you feel good.”
“Ahhh,” she said, closing her eyes, going limp, feeling him hold her. “So do you, so do you, so do you.”
The fretful pilot said, “Frank Lanigan?”
“That’s me.”
“Envelope for you. For somebody named Balim.” He had an American accent.
“Right.”
“I have to get back,” the pilot said. “I can’t be—My wife is—I want to beat the rains if I can.”
“Have a good flight,” Frank told him.
Lew finally released Ellen and, one arm still around her waist, turned to the pilot, saying, “Thanks.”
“My pleasure. I needed the work.”
“You ought to get out of there,” Lew said.
The pilot ducked his head, like someone who is used to being beaten. Gesturing almost with hatred at the plane, he said, “That’s all I’ve got. Things will get better. And I keep her gassed up and ready to go.”
“Sure,” Lew said.
Startled, the pilot looked skyward. “The rain!” he said, as Ellen felt a fat drop of water hit her arm. “Good-bye!” the pilot cried, scurrying back to his plane. “Good-bye!”
Frank, holding the manila envelope, said, “Glad you got back, Lew.”
“Me, too. I didn’t like it there.”
“Come on,” Frank said. “It’s gonna rain like shit in a minute.”
They walked back across the field, which now lay dry and expectant, strangely gleaming with pearl-gray light, awaiting its lover, the rain. Lew walked in the middle, the others unconsciously guarding him, protecting him. Frank said, “I’m sorry I sent you there. You know?”
“I don’t blame you,” Lew told him. His arm around Ellen’s waist was nervously fidgeting. “I really don’t. You didn’t bring me all this way to lose me.”
“That’s right.”
“The car’s gone,” Lew said. “So’s the camera. Chase says forget them. I got my own stuff back, though.”
“Balim’ll cope,” Frank said. “Are there any pictures in the camera?”
“No. I didn’t get that far before they grabbed me.”
Ellen said, “What happened? What went wrong?”
“A few years ago I worked for an army in the Sudan, backed by Libya. I quit, and they put my name on some enemies’ list. Libya and Uganda are very tight these days, so on the Ugandan border they’ve got Libya’s lists.”
“Christ on a crutch,” Frank said. “You go along and go along, and all of a sudden your past comes up and kicks you in the nuts.”
The storm broke just before they reached the house. Before, there had been the occasional lone fat drop on the windshield, but all at once it seemed there was no windshield at all, just a massive waterfall, and they were behind it.
Or inside it. With the abruptness of a bucket’s being upended, the world was suddenly nothing but falling water, splashing, ricocheting, thundering, drenching everything in sight. “Good Lord!” Ellen cried, her voice lost in the barrage. The long rains had arrived.
But Frank could be heard, storm or no storm. “Shit!” he yelled, flinging the wheel back and forth as though trying to shake the rain off the car. “Goddam son of a bitch!” he shouted, as the Land-Rover slued and slid forward into the unknown; not a thing could be seen through that streaming windshield. “You could have waited an hour, you filthy bastard!” he brayed at the sky, shaking his fist, and stuck his head out into the storm so he could see something of where they were going. And, “You’re here!” he roared at them a few seconds later, as the Land-Rover sideswiped a parked Datsun and came to a stop in front of the house. Frank’s head, out in the rain for half a minute, looked like something found four hundred years later in a sunken Spanish galleon.
“Come in for a minute!” Ellen shouted, not wanting him at all but thinking she should be polite.
He shook his head, spraying them with water. “I’m going home! And get drunk!”
Lew waved his hand at Frank and clambered out of the Land-Rover. Ellen followed, stepping directly into a lukewarm shower with the taps turned on too full. She ran through it, drenched to the skin before she’d taken a step, and tumbled with Lew into the house.
Standing in the living room, the roar of the rain all around them, they struggled with their sopping clothes, peeling the layers off their rubbery skin, just throwing the soaked stuff onto the floor. Ellen looked at Lew, and his tanned flesh was pitted and scarred all over, as though he’d been rolling in gravel. “Lew! What happened? What is that?”
He looked down at himself with apparent dislike. “Bites,” he said. “I think I got rid of them all, but I’ll keep washing.”
“Got rid of what?”
“Lice. Ellen,” he said with great weariness, “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine. Fine. What I think we ought to do is borrow Frank’s suggestion and get drunk.”
“Maybe so.”
But the house was almost as wet as the outer world, and it took awhile to make a nest for themselves. Open windows had to be shut. Lew found a length of rope and rigged it up in the living room while Ellen dragged the pile of clothing into the bathroom and wrung everything out. Then, with the laundry hung and their bodies scrubbed dry—using every towel in the house—and wearing dry clothes, they shut themselves in the kitchen, and Ellen turned on the stove burners to bake away some of the humidity. Then at last, with the drumfire of rain held safely at bay, with the small blue rings of gas flame, even this minimal rusty kitchen became comfortable and homelike.