It was the opposite of what I thought, and hearing her say that was like mockery.
She said, “And I know you want the money back.”
I shook my head, but it was too vague a way of refusing, and she could tell that I was weakening.
She took her glasses off and wiped them with a napkin. She was either smiling or else on the verge of tears — it was that same look, an expression of hers that I now knew well. She put the glasses back on and faced me.
“Someone gave me a phone number,” she said. “I called, and a man answered. He sounded grumpy, the way old people do. But he said he’d do it. I was to meet him in a certain bar in Brockton. I borrowed my aunt’s car and drove there. He was fifty or more and looked like a tramp. He wore old clothes. He hadn’t shaved. As soon as I saw him I wanted to go home and forget it. But I knew I couldn’t — it would be worse at home. He asked to see the money. But he wouldn’t leave the bar. He kept saying, ‘Just one more,’ and trying to get me to drink. I actually had one I was so nervous. And then, when I had just about given up hope, he said, ‘Let’s go.’ We went in his car. I think he had been waiting for it to get dark. It was all back roads. I lost track of where we were and I thought What if he kills me? He slowed down in the darkness and turned into a dirt road — so small I hadn’t seen it. I really felt lost but I was too frightened to cry. He stopped the car in front of a derelict house. I could see the broken windows in the headlights. He lit a candle inside. It was one of those places where kids go to start fires and smoke and scribble on the walls. There was a mattress on the floor and we had to be careful where we stepped because of the broken glass. He took my money and then said—”
There were tears running from beneath her sunglasses.
“Lucy, please,” I said.
When she saw that I wanted her to stop she set her face at me and continued.
“ ‘Take your skirt off,’ he said. And then he began swearing at me and pushed his pants down and just forced himself into me. I hated him too much to cry. He smelled, and I knew he was drunk. Now he’s going to kill me, I thought. But he didn’t. He fussed around and took some metal tools out of a paper bag. He had had that bag in the bar. I had wondered what was in it. His tools. Then he did it, flicking one of them into me. He told me that it would take about six or eight hours to work. He drove me back to my car.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. I thought she had finished. I didn’t know what to do, but I wanted to go. It was far worse than I had imagined. I turned away. On the television above the bar a man was kneeling next to a small child who was hugging a cloth doll, and he was saying Has anyone told you that you’re a very brave little girl?
In her dull determined voice, Lucy said, “As I was driving home I got a pain, like a knife in my side. I almost crashed the car, but I kept driving until the pain was unbearable. I pulled into a Jenney station and the man pumping gas pointed out back. I went into the ladies’ room and had it in the toilet. I thought I was going to bleed to death. I couldn’t move for about an hour. The man wanted to call the police, but I wouldn’t let him. When I got home my mother said, ‘You look pale — are you all right?’ And I said, ‘I’m fine. I—’ ”
It was only then that she started to sob, and she did so in a subdued and suffering way that made me want to die for having caused it. Then she saw me watching her, and she sneered.
“That’s your three hundred dollars.”
I wanted the bus to crash and for me to be burned alive — or else to keep going, past Amherst and Pittsfield and out of the state. Was it enough to leave home?
I was still reading Baudelaire, the opposite pages this time, in French. Anywhere out of this world, and a poem about his lover — naked except for her jewels, wearing makeup. Gleaming buttocks. Moorish slave. Like a captive tiger. In front of a fire with its flamboyant sigh. She was black, and she yearned for him.
Keep going, I thought. Anywhere out of this world. I didn’t want anyone to know me. I didn’t deserve to be missed. But home was too big and too hard to get away from. Every state would tell me I was a failure. How could I leave? Home was the whole country.
THREE: AFRICAN GIRLS
1
The barefoot student was being led towards my office from the clump of blue gums, where he had been hiding. But why was he smiling like that? When he came closer I could see his wild eyes did not match his crooked mouth. It was a ganja-smoker’s smile — Willy Msemba, at the hemp again. Rain was beaded on his black face.
Like an executioner, Deputy Mambo jerked the boy along. Mambo’s mud-smeared shoes flapped beside Msemba’s bare feet.
“Headmaster.” Mambo always sounded sarcastic when he said that word. He knocked and pushed open my office door in one motion.
I told them to come in, but they were already in — water and footprints and clods of mud. Whole raindrops were caught and trembled unbroken in the springs of their hair. Not many of the students had hair, not even the girls. It was a head-shaving country, because of the lice.
Willy smiled at his toes. His feet had shed what looked like smashed cake. He was shivering in his wet shirt, and still smiling.
“I found this boy smoking.”
Smoking always meant smoking ganja.
The wind shook the blue gums — shreds of stringy bark and pale fluttery leaves. It was gray cold April in Nyasaland, one of the months of blowing fog. The fog drizzled down and was so dense the country seemed tiny. It reddened the earth and made the roofs rattle.
Just then, Miss Natwick dived out of her room across the schoolyard. She was one of those small, stiff-legged women who when they hurry look as if they are going to tip over. She was a part-timer, and one of her subjects was needlework, but, even so, she could not understand why she had not been put in charge of the school after Mr. Likoni left. Another reason was that she was a white Rhodesian.
No sooner had she entered my office than Mr. Nyirongo passed by the window on the veranda. Instead of entering, or continuing on his way, he paused and began gaping at us, his tongue swelling between his lips. He was clearly interested in the sight: Willy Msemba dripping on my office floor, and on either side of him Deputy Mambo and Miss Natwick.
I was pacing behind my desk. I had only been headmaster a short time and I was still self-conscious. I hated being observed handing out punishment. I knew I was an inept disciplinarian but I hoped that the students would see me as a fair and just headmaster and not take advantage of me. It was simple logic: if they liked me they’d behave. That was the American way. My predecessor, Mr. Likoni, used the British method. He bent wrongdoers over a chair and flogged them.
“This boy is doing it every lunch break,” Deputy Mambo said. “Just sitting in the trees and smoking his ganja. I think some very severe punishment is called for.”
In Deputy Mambo’s lapel was a gleaming button with a big black face on it — Doctor Hastings Kamuzu Banda. This scowling Banda would be head of the government after independence in July, when Nyasaland became Malawi. It was not a happy face, not even a sane one, and I sometimes felt that Africans in the country wore the button to frighten non-party members or foreigners like me.
Perhaps Mambo saw me glance at the button. He said, “Doctor Banda wants firm discipline in Malawi.”