22
There are spirits in the air, and in the ground, and inside trees, who make it their business to call human beings to their deaths. This is why, when a male child is born in many African tribes, he is not initially given his true name, but is lent a temporary false appellation to confuse the spirits of death. Should the child survive his first few years—and most do not, despite this subterfuge—he is given his permanent name.
But even this is not his real name. That he selects for himself at puberty, and will probably never tell anyone. Thus the African travels under an alias at all times, secure in the knowledge that nobody knows who he really is.
However, the process of naming has two further ramifications. The African may privately rename those persons who are important in his life; this secret name, which he will not tell the person thus dubbed, gives him an important power over that person. And of course when traveling among people other than one’s own tribe, one permits these strangers to cloak one with some nonsense syllable or other, to be shrugged off once the foreign travel is complete.
So Charlie’s name was not Charlie. That was merely the bark he responded to when among the animals; that is, persons who were not Kikuyu. His death-fooling temporary name was long in the past, his permanent name was spoken exclusively by members of his branch of the Kikuyu in the villages along the western scarp of the Narandarua Range, and his real name was known only to himself.
Among the animals, the only one so far honored with a name by Charlie was Frank. Charlie had named him Mguu, and it gave him secret pleasure every time he saw the man to know that he alone knew this was Mguu. The name was from the Swahili—Mguu was not worth a name from Charlie’s native Kikuyu dialect—and means “foot.” It seemed to Charlie that foot expressed Mguu very well; his stamping around like an elephant, his roaring, his rushing into situations without thought or preparation. Also, Charlie had seen in the cinema cartoons about a blind white man named Mr. Magoo, and this seemed to add a proper dimension: Mguu, the blind foot.
Late afternoon. During a pause in the rain, Mguu left his tent and crossed the clearing to where Charlie squatted, skinning a not-quite-dead gazelle. “Charlie,” Mguu said.
Charlie stood, smiling his cheeriest smile, the red knife in his red hand. Mguu pointed at it. “Put that down.”
“Oh, sure, Frank.” Negligently Charlie stuck the knife into the gazelle, which in gratitude expired. “What may I do?”
“It was only a joke,” Mguu said, his expression mean. “I know that, Charlie.”
Charlie looked alert, inquisitive, ready to help. He wiped his bloody hand on his shirtfront.
“But,” Mguu went on, “the joke’s over. So now one of two things is gonna happen. Either you’ll give me back my malaria pills, or I’ll twist your scrawny neck, leave your body here and your head over there, and drive back to Kisumu for a fresh supply of pills.”
Behind Charlie’s bland smile and gleaming eyes, the speedy brain buzzed, till all at once the smile blossomed into a tooth-baring, hearty, friendly laugh, and Charlie said, “A joke! That’s right, that’s right, Frank, I can never put anything over on you!”
“That’s right,” Mguu said.
The westward sky, over the lake and under the clouds, was gossamer-white and pale blue, descending to lavender at the watery horizon, with an undercoating of gold. Charlie and Mguu walked out across the scrubland, some distance from camp, before Charlie shinnied up a flat-topped tree, causing a white-winged bateleur eagle to rise skyward in heavy flapping irritation. Riffling through the dry ordure of the eagle’s nest, Charlie grasped what he was looking for and descended with the bottle intact, which he plunked with the pride of the successful hunter into Mguu’s palm.
In the lengthening shadows Mguu looked back toward camp, then up at the nest in the tree. “Some hiding place for a joke,” he said.
Flying insects were beginning to swarm, including no doubt some of the thirty-eight varieties of mosquito which carry malaria in this part of the world. “If a thing is worth doing,” Charlie said, “it’s worth doing well.”
Early next morning, Charlie and Mguu came down the hill in a fresh downpour, paused at the hotel construction site so Mguu could shout and puff and wave his arms at the men digging the hole for the footing, and then they gathered the drunken boatman and putt-putted across the mouth of Berkeley Bay and past Sigulu Island, and so out across Lake Victoria, now well within the territory of Uganda. The gentle rain slackened and after a while stopped; looking back, Charlie could see it still falling upon Kenya.
The last time they had come to the landfall at Macdonald Bay, Charlie and Mguu and the boatman had built a blind to conceal the two mopeds. It had not been disturbed, and the mopeds were still there, though wet and rusty. It was not raining at this moment, but it had done so recently, and everything in the woods was wet. Mguu refueled the mopeds from the can in the boat, and when they started the engines the racket seemed to shiver the raindrops off the leaves.
Yesterday afternoon, a truck carrying Michelin tires had crossed from Kenya into Uganda at Moroto, far to the north of here. The border guards who had been bribed there by the driver to permit him to bring in this illegal shipment without filling in the required forms or paying the usual taxes and fees had been led to believe this was merely a normal smuggling operation, tires bound for Masindi, a prosperous upland town to the west of Lake Kyoga. They had been unaware that in the hollow center of the stacks of tires there were seated four men, hired by Mazar Balim with the assistance of Lew Brady. The four men had track gang experience with Kenya Railways, and they were traveling with a variety of tools: shovels and prybars and wrenches and sledgehammers. They also shared their hiding place with bedrolls and several cartons of tinned or packaged food.
Last night the truck, having followed back roads southward past Lake Opeta and Mount Elgon, had eventually reached the spot on the Tororo-Kampala road where Lew had been arrested by the State Research Bureau men. There, under cover of darkness, the truck had been driven as far as possible down the old service road and the laborers had emerged from their cocoon of tires to carry their tools and provisions down to Maintenance Depot Number 4. And now this morning Charlie and Mguu were coming to the depot to give the men their instructions.
The four were lolling at their ease inside the engine shed. What work they had done so far was in the realm of housekeeping; they’d cleared some of the rusted garbage into far corners of the shed, blocked two broken windows with old sheets of corrugated metal, and created a fireplace of rocks beneath another window, which would serve as a rough-and-ready flue. They had surely heard the roar of the arriving mopeds, but they were still lying around their small fire, telling lies and laughing when Charlie and Mguu walked in.
Mguu began by carrying on about the fire. Charlie was supposed to translate—into Swahili, as only two of the men were Kikuyu, the others being animals—but instead he said to Mguu, “These men know about smoke completely, Frank. There are farms all around here; the farmers light fires in their fields; no one will think about a little smoke.”
That calmed Mguu, though he did stay grumpy. He ordered the laborers to rise and follow him outside, where, with much arm waving and kicking at the rusted rails stacked beside the shed, he explained what they were supposed to do. Charlie translated, interpolating asides that made the laborers bite their cheeks to keep from laughing.