The Ugandan telephone system had last been cared for by the British sixteen years ago. Since then, there had been very little maintenance and absolutely no upgrading. Half the glass insulators were broken or stolen, and the old wires themselves were frayed. The service box was dented and rusty, but when Frank opened it the old diagrams and layout in English inside the door were still readable. Still, he had to attach the alligator clips several times before he found the direct line from the railroad office at Jinja. “My, how they chatter,” he said aloud.
Between the earphones and the alligator clips was a thirty-foot ball of wire, much more than enough to reach from here to the ground. Looking down, Frank saw Charlie directly below, gesticulating and grimacing for an appreciative audience. Taking careful aim, he dropped the earphones and was gratified to see them bounce off Charlie’s head. “Watch out below!” he called amiably, then double-checked that the alligator clips were firmly in place, shut the service-box door, and shinnied back down the pole.
Ten-fifteen. If the train could be said to have a schedule, it was running ahead. There was something about the sunniness of the morning, the clarity of the air, that made even lazy people feel like working. The one car at Okungulo and the two cars at Kumi had been attached almost before the train was completely stopped, and now the same thing was happening at Kachumbala with its one car. The train was now thirty-one freight cars in length; only the two at Mbale were left to pick up. “We’ll be in Kampala before dinner-time,” the engineer said.
“If nothing goes wrong.”
“On a day like this? What could go wrong?”
Lew had posted one sentry where the access road crossed the track, and the other fifty yards from the work site in the opposite direction, where the curve to the right sharpened. If either of them saw anything, he was to wave his arms energetically over his head. That signal would cause Young Mr. Balim to call out “Chini!” the Swahili word that means “down,” which in turn would cause the work crew, carrying their tools, to scatter off the tracks and take cover in the underbrush on either side. Lew had made them practice this maneuver twice, and believed they understood it. As for Young Mr. Balim, he took his task with utter seriousness, striding back and forth beside the track, frowning first at one sentry and then at the other.
Even with nearly thirty men at work, under the instructions of the four former railway employees, it was a long and cumbersome job. Four spikes had to be levered out of every metal sleeper over a distance of some forty yards; that was nearly a hundred sleepers. The joint plates with their rusty nuts and bolts had to be removed at the point of the break. Then, inch by painful inch, the two lengths of rail, about seven tons of metal in all, had to be pried away from their nests in the sleepers and urged toward their new alignment. To do it, twenty men would stand in a row beside one rail, holding twenty prybars angled under it; at a signal, all twenty would heave upward and the rail would move; not very far, but it would move.
Meanwhile, the rest of the work force was digging shallow trenches for logs to be used as crosspieces on the new trajectory. Not only were one hundred sleepers at seventy pounds apiece too much to move in the time they had, but at the end of the exercise, in order to hide themselves, they would have to put this goddam track back together again.
While Lew oversaw the trackwork with the help of Young Mr. Balim, Frank roamed the entire area of the depot looking for trouble to yell at. Down the track a ways Charlie, now wearing the earphones, hunkered against the telephone pole Frank had climbed, chewing sugarcane stalks as he listened contentedly to the conversations from Jinja railway station. If Frank in earphones on that pole had looked like a performing bear, Charlie in earphones drooling under the pole looked like a performing monkey in the same circus.
By ten-thirty the new spur was beginning to take shape. The southernmost rail had been pried and levered and shoved and inched and cursed into place, up on the logs, angling now leftward away from its original bed, curving over the logs and down to meet the end of the spur track, where it was over two feet too long.
“Shit,” said Lew. “All right, we have to increase the angle up at the other end.”
With several spikes driven in near the spur end to keep that part from moving, the workmen levered the other end back toward the original bed, increasing the angle of the curve. The end of the rail where it lay overlapping the rusty spur seemed to shrink, jerking backward an inch or more at each heave.
“Chini! Chini!”
Young Mr. Balim was so excited at being useful, he was actually hopping up and down, flapping his arms like the young traveler in the Indian tales who sees the djinn. Most of the men wasted a few seconds looking around for Lew, to see if this were another test, but when they saw the sentry at the access road waving his arms over his head they scattered in commendable fashion, leaving nothing behind except a very oddly splayed section of line. The sentry stopped waving and, apparently having already been seen by whoever was coming, hunkered down on his heels beside the track like any unemployed man waiting for a train; not to board it, to look at it.
From his concealment Lew could see the crossing, and what first appeared on it was a cow, ambling along with slow purposefulness as though returning from church. It was tan, tall, long-nosed, big-shouldered, bony-legged, half-wild, looking more like an ox than a cow, and nothing at all like the picture-book black-and-white cows in American fields.
Beside Lew, Young Mr. Balim giggled. Lew shook his head, and the giggling stopped.
Three more similar creatures now appeared, two of them stopping in stupid-cow fashion to graze on the crossing, where there was nothing green. The herder, a gray-brown boy of about seven wearing a crimson shirt and short brown pants and carrying a stick almost twice as long as himself, came up onto the crossing to lecture the dawdlers, his manner that of a patient but disappointed teacher in a class for slow pupils. He and the sentry nodded to one another, and two more cows stepped up onto the crossing, heads nodding as they wondered what the stopped ones had found to eat.
The boy had charge of nine cattle in all, and obviously knew them very well. And they knew him; he merely had to show the stick to get them moving. In three minutes the cattle had finished crossing the track, and a minute later the sentry waved the all clear.
As everybody came back up onto the track, Frank came stomping up the spur line and stopped to give a critical eye to their progress. “Coming along, huh?”
“Slow and unsteady,” Lew said.
Frank nodded, looking at the track. The northern rail was still part of the main line, but the southern rail was curved down to the spur. “I never saw a railroad spread her legs before,” he commented.
I’m getting too cocky, Isaac warned himself. It isn’t this easy; something could go terribly wrong.
But at the moment things were going wonderfully right. The same motor-pool sergeant was in the office, and apparently Isaac had sufficiently cowed him last time, so that today all he wanted was to show how cooperative he could be. “Twenty trucks,” he announced as Isaac walked in on the dot of eleven. “All gassed up and ready.”
“That’s fine,” Isaac said. “I told the General we could count on you.”
“You did? Thank you, that’s very good of you. And accurate, accurate.” Grabbing a clipboard off the wall, the sergeant said, “Come along and look at your trucks. Beauties, every one of them.”
The sergeant had a strange eye for beauty. The twenty trucks lined up on the tan dirt of the yard looked as though they might have taken part in the retreat to Dunkirk: battered, filthy, canvas covers ripped, headlights broken, windshields starred, bumpers missing. Mostly British Leyland, but with a few Volvos and even some Mercedes-Benz and Fiat diesels, they looked more like vehicles coming in to the motor pool for general repair than going out for regular use. But so long as the tires were sound and the engines ran, Isaac wouldn’t complain. “Many general dents and scratches,” he wrote on the form on the sergeant’s clipboard, and signed: “Captain I. Gelaya.”