Michael collided with my back, gripped each of my elbows from behind, and propelled me along. Davidia kept pace, clawed at our clothing, at the banana fronds too, and got in front of us, then away from us, and Michael steered me off the path and hugged me, stopped me.
“You can’t outrun bullets.”
“Yes I can!” I meant it.
He pointed amid the grove and said, “Go ten meters and get down.” He watched while I obeyed, then was gone.
Multiple guns now, and many fewer voices.
I lay on my belly. A few steps from my face the grove ceased, and to the right the gumbo bog took over, and for an unquantifiable period I watched a heap of something burning out there before I understood it was our vehicle. Part of the driveshaft remained, a wheel with its tire, and around these two things only the shell, still giving out small flames, and surrounding that, the red earth steaming and smoking.
Michael came along leading Davidia by the hand.
I stood and followed them along the edge of the grove and toward a cornfield. We stopped to watch the white pickup truck charging at us, plowing down the stalks until it slid to a stop almost in our faces, a spiffy little truck with fresh gold lettering across its front windshield: ALL EYEZ ON ME. Soldiers leapt from the back of it, and the three of us walked before their guns.
We waited in front of the disco while they wrapped up the looting. Most of the villagers had escaped — no more screams, only the soldiers’ whoops, their panting and shouting, and much laughter. The young recruit responsible for us drifted some distance away, dazzled by the excitement, but rather than running, Michael and I sat Davidia on the bench and stood in front of her as camouflage because we didn’t want anybody noticing us, noticing Davidia, raping Davidia — and they raped a couple of women behind the disco, a young one and her mother, who in their terror seemed almost apathetic, almost asleep, and who afterward walked away brushing the dirt from their bare arms and the fronts of their torn shifts. It took the commander a full hour to bring his troops to order. He mustered them in front of the disco, thirty or so young men in green cammy uniforms, and went from face to face lecturing bitterly, pointing often at the shreds of our Land Cruiser out in the wasteland. Apparently rape and looting were lesser crimes than blowing up a good machine.
Michael said, “Did you see the fireball? Petrol vapors. I told you the fuel pump was ruptured.”
[OCT 16 6AM]
I know Michael’s sleeping. He’ll sleep through a barrage. I don’t know where he’s being kept, or Davidia. I hope they’re together. I’m in the main hut with the commander, along with ten or twelve other men, the number changes, they come and go. It’s a spacious hut, an open-air corral, really, with low adobe walls under a thatched roof, a cafeteria table, a tattered couch, three broken chairs.
They’ve got my pack, my extra clothes, passport, cash—4K in US twenties, fifties, and hundreds. They left me my Timex watch, out of contempt for the brand or perhaps for the concept of time itself. They stole my penlight too, but they’ve lent it back so I can write by its tiny glow.
Why take everything but the watch and the light and my ballpoint pen, and then give me this lined paper torn from a schoolroom notebook, 42 sheets of it? I’ve sat up all night scrawling on them because I’m too terrified to sleep. The liquor’s worn off and I’m going mad. When I’ve filled these pages they’ll be included, I suspect, with some sort of ransom demand.
The roosters are calling. Nobody’s stirring yet but one person out by the latrines — a young woman in a dirty linen shift, barefoot, hardly more than a girl, hacking a trough in the earth with a vicious-looking short-handled hoe, a trough in the earth shaped, I’m afraid, quite like a grave.
[OCT 16 8AM]
The commander claims to be regular Army but could easily be lying, or just confused. His cammy uniform bears no insignia. Beneath his open tunic he wears a T-shirt with the faded emblem of a bottle on it, soda or beer. He calls himself a general, won’t say his name. Drives his own little cream-colored Nissan truck, the one that says EYEZ ON ME.
He takes me for the leader, because I’m the white one.
Last night, after discovering that my bad French and his own bad English render idle conversation impossible, he nodded toward the small cassette player on his table and punched a button, and it played a song called, I believe, “Coat of Many Colors,” by Dolly Parton, over and over. Just that one song, repeating. This wasn’t psychological warfare, but a sincere attempt at hospitality.
This morning he shared with me his general’s breakfast: strips of tripe in a broth smelling pretty much like kerosene. It took me a while to get it all down and set the bowl aside. The meal came with dessert, a sugary pudding sprinkled with the legs, if not more, of some sort of insect.
[OCT 16 12 NOON]
After breakfast, when I thought everybody was still sleeping off last night’s liquor, they all jumped up on the general’s shouted orders and mustered in the clearing among the huts for the very quick court martial of the recruit who blew up our Land Cruiser.
When they’d made a circle and wrestled themselves to attention, all thirty or more of them, the general’s aide-de-camp, his main henchman, dragged the youngster out of a hut barefoot and stripped down to ragged gray shorts and stood him up before the fresh-dug grave. His hands were tied behind him with a winding of black rubber. Perhaps from a tire’s inner tube.
I made up part of this audience of dazed, half-dressed soldiers. Davidia and Michael stood across from me. They were many feet apart. Davidia looked unhurt, unmolested. The magic of her US passport must be working.
Michael, with his Ghanaian document, enjoys no immunity. He caught my eye and turned sideways — his arms were bound behind him, but I couldn’t see his hands for the press of the crowd. He smiled and shrugged.
Our general faced us taking a similar posture, hands behind his back and feet apart, and addressed the whole group briefly — in a localized French, I think — before tearing off his sunglasses and turning on the malefactor and lecturing him in the face for five or more minutes, screaming into the kid’s open mouth, right down his throat. During this harangue the general’s henchman strutted back and forth in his mirrored sunglasses and helmet, slapping his pistol against his palm, until it was time to push the kid to his knees and put the gun to his head. The youth wept and bawled while the general shouted him down to silence. When all was quiet, he counted down from trois! — deux! — un! and the henchman’s hammer snapped on a empty chamber.
The general laughed. Then the troops all laughed too.
The general pushed his henchman aside and drew his own pistol and raised it high and pulled the slide back as if demonstrating how to cock this particular weapon and pushed the barrel hard against the kid’s neck and forced him down onto his face, and bent over him like that while he sobbed into the dirt. Some of the troops exclaimed — the general would get it done!.. He stared hard one by one at each face, saying nothing, until he’d forced them all into a state of pensive sobriety. He worked his shoulders. Shifted his stance. Planted his feet. Still playing, I felt sure of it. But the pistol was cocked, and one small mistake makes a murder, and in Africa, so the old hands assure me, the first one pops some kind of cork, and they don’t quit after that.
Ten seconds passed. Once more the boy spoke out — a pitiable, wrenching sound, his face like a newborn’s — trying to direct his words backward to the man about to dispatch him.