Frank rode as passenger in the first truck, Lew in the second. The theory was that they would look like work crews and supplies for the hotel being built at Port Victoria. Frank was generally assumed by those locals who had seen him to be an engineer or architect or some such thing, and Lew should be able to slip through under the same mantle.
The first part of the trip was relatively smooth, and Lew fell asleep before they were even out of town. He had a wonderfully healing and restful snooze for an hour and woke up when he was almost thrown through the windshield. “Yike!” he cried, and the bucking cab bounced up again, slamming him back into the seat. He clutched at the door and dashboard for handholds, while staring at the driver, who gave him a huge slant-toothed grin and said, “Sorry.”
Lew got his body under control, and the driver got the truck under control. They were now on dirt road, or rather rock road, a kind of washboard surface made by scraping away the thin topsoil. The thrown-up dust from Frank’s truck just ahead was already clogging Lew’s throat. The usual streams of pedestrians watched them drive by, and presumably then died horribly in the great cloud of orange dust the four trucks must leave in their wake.
Lew studied the driver, a youngish man with long muscular arms and protruding crooked teeth and large cheerful eyes. “You speak English?”
The driver smiled at him again and shook his head. “Some words,” he said. Then he faced front, watching men in the truck ahead hilariously try to play a game of kalah—the stones kept flying out of the cups at every bounce—while he proceeded to recite for Lew’s benefit the English words he did know: “Money. Whore. Policeman. Boss. Fuck. Beer. Dead. Pissed-off.”
It went on like that. He knew about a hundred words in all. Well, it was a kind of conversation.
Port Victoria reminded Lew of Ellen, because she’d been the one who’d described it to him, after her jaunt here that time with Frank. Without knowing its strange history—or nonhistory—it seemed to him nobody would think the place remarkable. It was just a little market village, that’s all, like hundreds of others, with some fishermen’s small houses along the steep road down to the shore. He didn’t see any aura of strangeness or loss, but maybe that was because he was once again feeling the loss of Ellen. He dismounted from the truck when they arrived at the work site, eager to have something to do to distract himself.
Frank was now very cheerful. His problem with balance seemed to be gone, so maybe he too had had some sleep in the truck. He said, “What do you think of the place?”
The hotel was truly abuilding. The concrete-block exterior walls were virtually finished to their completed height of two stories, with rectangular openings showing where doors and windows would someday be placed. To the side, some sheds made of cardboard and rusty metal housed supplies and workmen. Just beyond, Charlie was pissing on a bed of lilies.
“I can’t believe that hotel,” Lew said. “We’re actually building a goddam hotel.”
“After this is over,” Frank said, hooking his thumbs in his belt, “a couple years, maybe I’ll come back, stay in this joint, sit on the terrace up there with my vodka-and-tonic and just look out over the lake at where we did it.”
“You drink beer,” Lew reminded him meanly.
“After this caper I’ll drink vodka,” Frank assured him. “And fuck college women.”
Charlie came over, shaking the last droplets off his cock, which he then stuffed inside his disreputable pants. “All ready to go,” he said.
“Don’t tell me,” Frank snapped. “Tell those other assholes. Start unloading. Shit, man, we got our fortunes to make.”
Lew looked for the first time out over the water. He’d seen the maps, so that low green range of hills over there was Uganda. I am here, he told himself, to steal a train.
He found himself grinning.
37
For lunch, the engineer and the fireman ate sandwiches and drank beer on a pleasant sunny knoll overlooking the swift-moving Albert Nile. During the meal they were both bitten by various disease-bearing insects, but apart from the occasional itch they suffered no ill effects. They had been bitten by these creatures ever since infancy, as had their parents and their parents before them. Various low-level fevers and agues had struck them in their early childhood, and they had been among the minority in their age group to survive. They were immunized now, by nature’s method, which is wasteful of life but effective, and which leaves the body permanently weakened, like an automobile that has been in a frame-wrenching accident.
When the engineer and fireman strolled back to the Pakwach East yards, the four freight cars—which they would call “goods wagons,” in the British style—were just about filled with the sacks of coffee. They signed papers, and then phoned ahead to Lolim, their next stop, to say they were leaving Pakwach and to give an estimated time for arrival at Lolim. They had to do this by public telephone because Uganda Railways had no communication system of its own—certainly no radios in the locomotive cabs—except for hand-cranked field telephone sets at the signal boxes, whose wires were generally strung from tree to tree along the rail line, when they weren’t stolen.
By the time they had steam up, the cars were ready and sealed. It was only fifteen miles to Lolim; the fireman delayed them for a moment, but merely to go buy two more bottles of beer. Ugandan beer, brewed from bananas, is very gassy, very tasty, and very strong. The train with its four cars pulled out of the Pakwach East yards, rejoined the main track, and rolled up the slight incline northeastward toward Lolim.
Neither the engineer nor the fireman was political; nor was either particularly religious, though both had come from Christian families. The engineer was a member of the Basoga tribe, which in the old days had ruled the land just east of the Baganda and were very nearly as advanced. The fireman was a Karamojong, from one of the few families to have come south and abandoned that tribe’s traditional nomadic cattle-herding drought-plagued hand-to-mouth existence in Uganda’s far northeast. Neither of them thought of himself first in terms of tribe or religion or politics. They had been railroad men all their adult lives, and they would go on being railroad men.
Amin’s decision four years before to dismantle East African Railways had troubled them both, but only for practical and personal reasons. In practical terms, it meant their trains no longer could be serviced at the fine modern workshops in Nairobi. And in personal terms, it meant they could no longer go on jaunts to Nairobi and Mombasa, rough colorful cities they found more exciting than Kampala. But the decisions were not theirs to make; they shrugged and went on about their jobs.
Ahead, Lolim. They tossed the empty beer bottles from their moving cab into the newly green fields and sounded the whistle high and clear for the level crossing at the edge of town.
38
Idi Amin was drunk. He had become drunk at lunch, and now he was getting more drunk. Seated on a wooden chair, holding in his left fist a third-full quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch whisky, he stared blearily at the face of the colonel who—he well knew, he well knew—had schemed to bring together the entire Langi tribe in a plot against him. “You were very bad, Colonel,” Amin said, and waggled a reproving finger in the colonel’s face.
The colonel’s eyes and mouth were closed. Small clumps of dried blood under his nose had made it seem he had an imperfect moustache. The colonel had been dead for four months and his body had long ago been thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile at Owen Falls Dam, but his head was still here, in the freezer in the Botanical Room at the Old Command Post, one of Amin’s lesser dwellings in Kampala. Three other heads of former enemies were in here at the moment, plus two human hearts, but it was to the colonel that Amin directed his reproaches.