At first, despite the slope, the cars didn’t want to move. Then Lew, with Young Mr. Balim acting as translator, got the watching men to come in and push. Slowly and silently, all at once losing their reluctance, the four cars rolled forward, gathering speed. The ex-railwayman stayed on the roof of the second car, laughing and waving to everybody.
Lew said, “That nut’s going with it!”
But he wasn’t. As the cars hit the temporary track, the ex-railwayman leaped the twelve feet to the ground, rolled, and sprang to his feet. The workmen gave him a huge cheer and laugh, and the four freight cars rolled out into space to tumble end-over-end down through the air, crashing into the water with a crazy series of splashes and bangs, the second car bobbing on the surface long enough to be rammed broadside by the third, then all four wriggling and collapsing downward into the water, after their leader and out of sight.
After that experience, it was obvious that everyone had to have a beer before going back to work. While the ex-railwaymen eased the rest of the train down so the next four cars were lined up with the half-full trucks, two cases of beer were brought out from the engine shed, where they were being kept relatively cool. The engineer and fireman, having sworn oaths to be on their good behavior, were untied from all those ropes and allowed to join the festivities. Beer bottles were distributed, and success was generally toasted.
Meanwhile, Frank and Charlie and the others in the first four trucks ground slowly but steadily along the access road toward Macdonald Bay, twenty miles off. The road sloped downward over the whole distance, so that gravity assisted them to some extent, but with the road so chancy and the trucks so overloaded they couldn’t average much better than fifteen miles an hour. They hadn’t yet reached the bay before the celebration back at the depot was finished, the second four trucks were fully loaded, and they too were on their way, reducing the work force back there by another four.
At last the bay appeared, sparkling and empty, the mud flat surrounded by the ungainly huge rafts covered with brush, as though a beachfront community had been flattened by a hurricane. Everybody climbed down from the trucks, and Frank bellowed the first raft into the water, with Charlie’s left-handed assistance. Then, while Frank and Charlie went to work unmounting the outboard motors and remounting them higher on the raft body, the other ten men started moving sacks.
On the twenty-foot-square surface of the raft they could lie one hundred twenty sacks, in six rows of twenty. The contents of the four trucks would fill this raft, making an unwieldy-looking monster ten layers high, crisscrossed for stability and standing nearly twelve feet tall. In theory, it wouldn’t tip over and it would float.
The first full sack was carried up the plank and onto the raft at five minutes past four.
52
The station clock read five minutes past four when Idi Amin marched into the tiny railway station at Iganga, followed by half a dozen Army officers and uniformed members of the State Research Bureau. Glaring around, Amin said, “Now you’ll tell me what this is.”
Two men were present in the uniform of Uganda Railways, both looking scared out of their skins. The fat one pointed at the thin one and said, “This is Jinja yardmaster, Mr. President. He brought me the information.”
“What information?” Glowering upon the Jinja yardmaster, Amin said, “Explain yourself.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Though terrified, the man was trying for a dignified professionalism. “Iganga station having informed me,” he began, passing the buck right back to his compatriot, “of the coffee train having gone through here at twelve-fifty-five, when it had not appeared at Jinja by two o’clock I became alarmed. Having checked again with Iganga station, Mr. President, that the train had indeed passed through here at that time—”
“Yes, yes,” Amin said, slapping the air in his impatience. “The question is, where is the train?”
“Gone, Mr. President. I’m sorry, sir, but it’s disappeared. Sir.”
“Trains do not disappear,” Amin told him reasonably. “You are a trainman, you should know such a thing. Just the size of a train, the very size of the thing, will tell you that. Then again, there are the tracks. The train cannot leave the tracks. Not and get very far,” he added, joking, looking around with a big smile to see if his entourage were laughing. They were.
The yardmaster was not. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” he said. “I rode here on my bicycle from Jinja, along the permanent way. There was no train, sir.”
Amin gazed upon this man. Would anyone have the effrontery to make Idi Amin the butt of a practical joke? Would either of these rabbits dare to lie to their president? Speaking slowly and heavily, gesturing pedagogically with one finger in the air, Amin said, “Be very careful now, you. Be very careful, the two of you.”
The Iganga stationmaster, having falsely believed himself to have been safely forgotten, gave a little jump of fear. The Jinja yardmaster stood tall against his fright and said, “Yes, Mr. President.”
“Now, you,” Amin said, pointing at the Iganga stationmaster, the weaker of the two rabbits. “You say this train passed through here at twelve-fifty-five.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“A long train full of coffee. A huge long—How many cars?” he demanded of his entourage.
“More than thirty, Your Excellency,” someone said.
“Good.” Returning to the Iganga stationmaster, Amin said, “Now, this long train of more than thirty cars passed through this station at twelve-fifty-five. And did it return?”
The Iganga stationmaster was too frightened to keep up with sudden leaps like that. “Sir? Mr. President?”
Amin was becoming irritated. “The train! Did it come back through the station?”
“No, no, of course not, Mr. President! It went through, westbound, at twelve-fifty-five, traveling very very fast—oh, more than ninety kilometers an hour—and that was the last I saw of it.”
“Good.” Amin turned to the Jinja yardmaster. “Now, you did not see this train.”
“No, Your Excellency.” A fast study, this Jinja yardmaster had needed only once to hear how the president was properly addressed by his entourage.
“You are a man who sees things,” Amin suggested. “This train could not have gone through Jinja while you were having a piss in the men’s room.”
“Your Excellency, I didn’t relieve myself at all, Your Excellency, in that hour. And the stationmaster was with me as well. Your Excellency, I swear by my life, that train did not go through Jinja.”
“Your life. Yes,” Amin said, brooding at the man, seeing the shock in his eyes.
A member of the entourage said, “Your Excellency, there are seven stations after Jinja to Luzira. Every one has been called; none has seen the train.”
Another member of the entourage said, “Your Excellency, we have checked with Kakira and Luzinga on the Mbulamuti northern branch from Jinja. The train did not go up that way.”
“It couldn’t have, Your Excellency,” the yardmaster said, “without switching through my yards. I would have seen it.”
“You bicycled,” Amin said, brooding, beginning to hate this smart fellow and all this “Excellency”-ing. “This train went through Iganga. It did not appear at Jinja. It can go nowhere but on the track, so it stands to reason it must be on the track between Iganga and Jinja! But you bicycled.”