Yes, they understood. Yes, they saw that the turntable must be moved to align with the track. Yes, they agreed that the buffer at the end of the track must be removed and the track extended with these rusty rails to the lip of the gorge. Yes, they followed the reasoning behind the idea that they must cut a hole in the thick shrubbery and hedge between the spur track and the main line, but that they then must create a removable blind of branches on some sort of framework to conceal the hole they had made. Yes, they heartily concurred that they must not be caught by the Ugandan police or Army. (If they were caught, however, it wouldn’t be a total disaster, since these four hadn’t been told the ultimate purpose for their work.) And, at long last, yes, they accepted the deadline of one week. All would be accomplished. And now let us have some beer.
“I don’t know about those birds,” Mguu said, later that afternoon, as they tromped back to the access road and their mopeds.
“Oh, they’ll do very fine,” Charlie said. “I vouch for them.”
Mguu gave him a hard look. “You vouch for them? Jesus.”
He prays a lot, Charlie thought.
The man tried to run away, but Mguu shouted him down. It was a wonderful thing to see, as effective as another man throwing a rock; Charlie much admired it.
They had come out of the woods, and there was the man, poking around their mopeds. Charlie had seen at once that he didn’t have the manner of a thief but instead the manner of curiosity. It was only that he tried to run away that made him seem like a thief. And then Mguu roared, and the man dropped, and now he crouched there beside the road, waiting, sitting on his heels, trembling slightly, his head bowed down between his knees.
Charlie and Mguu strode forward and stood over him. Charlie could see he was not Kikuyu, but possibly Luo or some other lake tribe. “Stand up!” Mguu yelled. Charlie repeated that in Swahili, not yelling, and the man slowly uncoiled and stood.
He was a very raggedy man, the kind you would see on construction projects in Nairobi pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete blocks. His torn clothing was gray; his knobby knees were gray; his bare feet were beige and cut-covered; his hands were swollen from work or disease; the leathery brown skin of his fingers ballooned up around the orange nails.
“Ask him,” Mguu said, “what he’s doing here.”
Charlie asked. The man, sullen but submissive, answered, “mfupa,” which means “bone.”
“Ah,” Charlie said. He had already decided this raggedy man meant nothing. He explained to Mguu, “He says he’s a peddler. He buys and sells bones.”
Mguu looked startled. “Bones!”
“There’s a living for a poor man in bones,” Charlie said gently. “And cloth, and other rubbish.”
“Oh,” Mguu said, in sudden understanding. “A rag-and-bone man. We used to have those in the States.”
“Used to have?” Here was another unexpected window into that other world so far away. Charlie was always interested to learn more about that place of fantasy. “Used to have, Frank?”
“Nobody does that anymore.” Mguu dismissed the idea with his typical curt hand wave, while continuing to glower at the boneman.
“Nobody?” In Charlie’s mind loomed an image of the homes of America—they looked like cinema motel rooms—with all the corners piled with unclaimed rubbish. Could that be true? He’d never seen such a thing in the films, but it was well known the cinema lied about real life. If it were really so, what an opportunity for some enterprising boneman!
But Mguu’s attention was fixed on this current boneman, who looked not enterprising at all. “There’s no bones here,” he said, angry and dangerous. “What’s he doing here?”
Charlie put the question. The boneman mumbled something imcomprehensible, which Charlie translated as “He doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t know? He damn well better know!”
Charlie rephrased the question. The boneman mumbled more nonsense. Charlie shrugged. “He just doesn’t know, Frank.”
“He’s going to know,” Mguu said, and before Charlie could blink, Mguu had punched the boneman in the face.
The boneman sat on the vine-covered ground. For an instant, as though all of creation had been startled by Mguu’s violence, nothing happened. Charlie, the boneman, Mguu, all three remained unmoving. Then Mguu, opening his punching hand as though it were stiff, said, “Ask him again, Charlie.”
Stooping in front of the boneman, Charlie could see that his eyes were turned inward, his jaw muscles were slack, his hands were at ease in his lap. Straightening, Charlie said, “He thinks now about dying.”
“A good thing to think about,” Mguu said, misunderstanding. “Tell him, he gives me a straight answer or he is dead.”
“No, Frank,” Charlie said. But how to explain what was happening? He had noticed over the years that the whites didn’t seem to have this capacity for death that was so natural in the tribal African. In a situation of hopelessness or misery the African, armed with his fatalism, could merely sink into a lassitude and then slip quietly out of existence. It was very well known, but not to the whites.
Or not to most whites; one white doctor to whom Mr. Balim had sent Charlie three years ago had said it was because the tribal Africans were all sick anyway. They all lived with malaria (which infected everybody but only killed one percent of blacks) and several other diseases, against which a certain level of immunity or accommodation had been developed over the millennia. But still their bodies were weakened, and it was easier for them to let loose their grip on the reins of life.
It was an explanation Charlie himself didn’t believe—he knew it was merely sensible at some point to die, and the African is sensible—but perhaps it was an explanation that would please Mguu.
No; it was too complicated. Charlie couldn’t go through all that. He merely said, “Frank, this is just a poor boneman, looking in the woods for what he can find. He knows no answers at all, and he thinks you’ll go on hurting him, so he is thinking about dying to be away from all this.”
“What?” Mguu hunkered down to look at that closed-in face, with the eyes like those of an animal caught for too long in a leg trap, no longer struggling, prepared now for death. “Bah,” Mguu said, and stood up, brushing his hands on his trousers, looking almost embarrassed. “What a country,” he said, and turned away and tramped back toward the mopeds.
But Charlie had kept watching the boneman—had those eyes minutely glistened when Mguu turned away? Charlie frowned, studying that ragged head.
Up the road, Mguu called, “Come on, Charlie!”
Charlie squatted, looking, and the empty eyes looked back. Did or did not something move inside there?
“Charlie!”
It occurred to Charlie he should kill this boneman right away, this instant. But he couldn’t kill coldly, like a white man; he had to build a rage first, an emotion for killing.
“Goddammit, come on!”
Toward Mguu, of course, such an emotion would be easy and very quick to build. Charlie stood, his own mind filling with the fatalism he imputed to the boneman. Either he was a boneman, and would matter to them no more, or he was something else, and would return to their lives.
Charlie rejoined Mguu, and they climbed on the mopeds and started for the lake. When Charlie looked back, just before the first curve, the boneman had not moved.
23
Walking down Greek Street at two in the morning, past the all-night sex shops with their white-painted shopwindows and glaring red-lettered signs, Baron Chase was stopped by two weaving, smiling, slender Jamaicans who seemed to be high on dope and not liquor. “Mon,” one of them said, “mon, give me a bob.”