“Oh, now, wait a minute.”
But she was inexorable. “Then we met,” she said, “and we got to be very important to each other for a long while.”
“We still are.”
He tried to take her hand, but she moved it away. “No, we aren’t. It used to be—Well, you went to Alaska to be with me. I came here to be with you. Now I’m going to the States. Will you come with me?”
“Come with—? How can I? The job—the coffee job—it’s just about to happen!”
“Lew,” she said, “the worst thing in the world is to try to hang on after something is over.”
He was finally getting used to this. He sat back in the chair, pushing his plate away, and looked at her. “For you it’s over, is that it?”
“For you, too,” she told him. “You just haven’t thought about it yet. Would you like to drive me to the airport?”
A new astonishment. “When?”
“I should leave in about fifteen minutes. I’m already half packed.”
He could feel the bitter twist in his lips when he smiled. “No long good-byes, huh?”
“That’s right. If you don’t want to drive me, that’s okay, I understand. I’ll call Bathar.”
“Young Mr. Balim? I’ll drive you.”
“Thanks, Lew.”
He watched her get to her feet, a beautiful woman, in some weird way at the center of his life. “If everything’s so goddam over,” he said, “how come I’m still jealous of that twerp Bathar?”
“Habit,” she said, smiling. She started away, to finish packing or whatever, then paused to say, “I told you where I’m going. If we were still now what we once were, I wouldn’t want to go, and you wouldn’t want to stay here without me.”
“Not that way, Ellen,” he told her. “I went to Alaska with you because I wanted to be with you, not because you were challenging me to prove myself. What you’re doing now is something else; heads you win, tails I lose.”
“Nobody wins, Lew,” she said.
By the time they reached the airport he was more or less acclimated to the idea. He would still much prefer her to stay—he had no thought, for instance, of haring off after Amarda again now that the coast was clear—but if it wasn’t right for Ellen, then he knew there was no way he could keep her. It was hard, but he knew he shouldn’t even make the attempt. The day of the caged bird is over.
Still, it was tough to have this new weight on his chest, and even tougher that the only person he could go to for comfort and solace was the cause of it. And would no longer be available. He couldn’t argue her out of her decision—at some level that he wasn’t yet ready to deal with, he even thought she might be right—but he couldn’t be as casual as she was, either. (He knew her calm was possible because she was the one making the move, and because she’d already had a while to get used to the idea.) Still, an emotional scene could only spoil their memories of one another; she wanted to go out on an easy level, and he could give her at least that much. What was roiling inside could stay there.
They’d been almost completely silent on the drive out to the airport, absorbed in their separate thoughts, Lew working his way through this new idea of what life was now going to be like, but as they walked from the car to the terminal it occurred to him to wonder about the details of her transition. “What plane are you taking? What’s the route?”
“They’re sending a charter for me from Entebbe.”
“Entebbe!”
“Yes, I’ve got a one-shot job with an American carrier called Coast Global. A little cargo ferrying to Djibouti, and then I go back to the States with the plane and look for another job after that.”
Lew had seen the truth right away. “Jesus, Ellen,” he said, “when do you do this little cargo ferrying?”
“Friday.”
“Hah!”
She stopped and stared at him, and he could see she was just about to get angry. They’d been doing very nicely, dealing with the emotional quagmire of their breaking up, and here Lew was suddenly filled with mysterious laughter, bubbling over with chipper secrets.
He explained: “It’s our coffee, honey!”
Then she got it. “For God’s sake! It has to be.”
“So we’re still in the coffee business together,” he said grinning, taking her arm, walking her into the terminal. “In fact, here’s something to think about.”
“What?”
“If the coffee actually shows up where you are, you’ll know old Lew isn’t doing too good.”
It was the same plane and pilot that had brought him back from Uganda in April. Uganda Skytours. The plane looked the same, but the middle-aged American pilot—owner, with his wife, of Uganda Skytours—looked just a little seedier, a little more desperate.
Nevertheless, Lew was glad to see him. They shook hands, and Lew said, “Ellen, this is Mike. He brought me back, remember?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And now he’s taking you away.”
She shook the pilot’s hand, saying, “How are you?”
“Can’t complain,” he said, which was patently untrue.
“Mike’ll take good care of you.” Lew was feeling extremely awkward, unable to work out how to say goodbye.
“Be ready when you are,” the pilot said, and tactfully walked back over to his plane.
“Have a good flight,” Lew said.
“Have a good robbery.”
So he took her in his arms and kissed her, and she felt just as good as ever. And she responded just as well. “Jesus,” he whispered into her hair, “can’t we—”
Her body went rigid, pulling away from him. “Don’t.”
He released her, but he had become filled now with this urge to make things become somehow different. “Listen,” he said, and in desperation he finally did bring out the dread name: “Amarda—”
“No,” Ellen said, and touched his lips with her fingertip to make him stop. “I knew about that,” she said, “and that was part of it, but it wasn’t really the main thing.”
“What was?”
She paused, as though she hadn’t really thought about it before, and with some suggestion of surprise in her voice, she said, “You know, I think it was the rain.”
There was no answer to that; he knew all at once exactly what she meant. But even though it was a perfect exit line—and they both knew that, too—he had one more thing to say. He took her arm and they walked toward the plane, and he said, “Listen, don’t get married or anything.”
“I wasn’t planning to, but why?”
“I’m likely to show up in your life again someday.”
She smiled, apparently pleased at the idea. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” she said.
PART FOUR
34
The train was made up at Tororo, on the Kenya-Uganda border, on Wednesday morning. It consisted of thirty-three enclosed freight cars with a combined carrying capacity of over nine hundred tons. (Coffee this month was selling on the commodity markets for seven thousand dollars U.S. a ton; when full, the train would carry six million dollars’ worth of coffee.)
At the head of the train was a steam locomotive of the 29 Class, originally put in service in January of 1953. On the black metal side of its tender still showed the white letters EAR, for East African Railways. On its round front face, beneath its headlight, was a brass plate with the number 2934, and on both sides of the cab, under the windows, were brass plates bearing the name Arusha. All 29 Class locomotives were named for East African tribes.
In the four years since Idi Amin had broken up East African Railways, there had been virtually no replacement of Uganda’s rolling stock. (By contrast, Kenya had in this time almost completed its transition from steam locomotives to diesel.) Uganda’s locomotives were old and tired; the freight cars were rusted and worn, many of them with broken boards and loose trucks and wheels with flat spots that needed regrinding. Maintenance was at emergency level only, new parts were hard to come by, and there was generally a disinterest in keeping the line at full efficiency. The present management, placed there by the present government, treated the railway as a found object, to be used for as long as it lasted and eventually to be thrown away and forgotten.