“Don’t be afraid,” Hock said. “Just stay here. If anyone knocks on the door, don’t say anything. Turn over, don’t let them see your face. Keep the net closed.”
She raised her head a little. “You are coming back?”
“Yes. I’m coming back to get you.”
He kissed her lightly, and tasting the warmth on her lips, kissed her again, bumping her teeth in his eagerness. And for the first time in the course of making his plan he hesitated, considered abandoning it, to stay beside this pretty girl. She would have allowed him.
“Don’t move,” he said.
Zizi began to sing in her throat, a frantic murmuring, as she did when she was anxious.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
He hated his lie, but it was the only way to get her to stay in the bed, under the mosquito net. And he hated his lie, too, because he was tempted to change his plan. In a crowded vision, standing in the hut, he was confronted by images of his life with her, the flight to Boston, his proud explanations to his friends: I’m her guardian. She deserves a better life. I knew her family. The clothes he’d buy — he saw her wearing them. He saw her sitting at his kitchen table drinking a glass of milk, saw her with an armful of books on the steps of a college. A good daughter. Smiling, because she seldom smiled here.
Those thoughts made him grim as he picked up his bag and slipped into the darkness, locking the door behind him, passing behind the house, cutting through the maize patch, a roundabout way to the road. And then he walked fast, trying to make time before the sun rose.
He reached the six-hut settlement of Lutwe as the sun, just bulging at the horizon, rinsed the darkness from the sky, and the day grew light, a pinky glow behind the trees, the sky going bluer. And before the sun blazed at the level of the low bushes Hock was at the crossroads. There he waited until he heard the rapping of the motorbike, and the warble of its rise and fall on the uneven road.
Seeing him, the driver of the motorbike slowed and came clumsily to a skidding stop. The boy Simon was seated on the back.
“Father,” said the driver — Marsden, Manyenga’s nephew, who’d been at the ceremony — and then he corrected himself, “Nduna,” and, correcting further, attempted “Meeneestah.”
“I’ll take this boy to Magwero,” Hock said.
Marsden said nothing but was clearly baffled. The engine was idling. He brushed at the flies settling on his face.
“It’s all right,” Hock said. “You can walk to Magwero. Or you can wait here and I’ll pick you up on the way back.”
“Chief Manyenga said to me—”
“This is the revised plan,” Hock said. “The new plan.” His words made the boy blink, and he was still batting the flies.
“The chief said—”
“I’m the chief.”
Marsden cut the engine, and both boys got off the bike, Marsden propping it on its kickstand as he swung his leg over. When Hock mounted it and stamped on the lever to start the engine again, the boys seemed bewildered. They backed away as though in fear from a thief, their thin bodies tensed in their loose clothes, on the point of fleeing.
Hock said, “Get on, Simon, you have to catch your boat.”
The boy got onto the back seat and steadied himself by holding Hock’s hips.
“Luggages,” Marsden said, handing Hock his bag.
“Thanks — almost forgot,” Hock said, and smiled. He’d begun to believe the lie he’d told them about coming back.
“Maybe they’ll miss you at Malabo,” Marsden said. He knew it was forbidden for Hock to leave the village without supervision. Hock was theirs. The whole village knew that.
“It’s all right,” Hock said. “They won’t miss me.”
They’ll go to my house — and with this thought he saw them at the door, gingerly knocking — then see the lumped-up body under the mosquito net. They would whisper, “Sleeping,” and would go away. And not until midmorning, when Zizi got tired of lying with the sheet over her head and might be looking for Hock, would they realize that Hock had gone. By then he would be in the dugout, and the motorbike would be parked at Magwero, and the boy Marsden would be waiting under this tree at Lutwe, and in all this confusion Hock would be well into the marsh, headed downriver, passing Morrumbala into Mozambique. That was the plan.
He forgave himself for not having tried to escape before this when he saw (struggling with the bike, pulling it again and again into the deep dust of the wheel ruts) the distance to the main road and the — what? — twenty miles to Magwero, twenty sweltering miles even at seven in the morning, for as soon as the sun was up, the heat gagged him and his face was pelted by insects.
Still, the road was free of traffic, and the only people he saw were women walking to market with big cloth bundles on their heads, and men with sacks of flour or rice flopped over the crossbar of their bikes, not riding the bikes but pushing them.
He had not forgotten the mango tree and the plump smooth log under it at Magwero, and when he saw it ahead he was excited. Some men were sitting under the tree, two of whom he recognized from his first day. He called out to them as he rode past, steering the bike to the village, and beyond it to the landing.
In the morning sun, the gnat-flecked rays diffused by the tall marsh grass, eight-man canoes — wide hollow logs — were drawn up on the embankment, and the smaller dugouts and fishing canoes bobbed in the scummy water on mooring lines. At one large canoe that lay partly in the water, men were arranging sacks of meal and crates of mangoes.
Hock greeted the men and said, “This is the boy who is going downriver.”
The men loading the canoe did not react. They were already perspiring from their work, their sweat-darkened shirts clinging to their bodies. One of them glanced at Simon, but without interest.
“What time are you leaving?”
“Later.”
Hock said, “We have to go now.”
It was a meaningless sentence, because “now” never meant now. It meant soon, it meant sometime, it meant whenever. It wasn’t an urgent word; it also meant never.
Hearing it, one of the men bent over and, sweaty-faced under a dusty sack, spat onto the slimy mud of the embankment.
Hock said sharply, “Who’s the owner of this bwato?”
A man in a crushed straw hat, wearing thick-lensed glasses, peered at Hock and said in English, “It is my.”
“You know me?” Hock asked.
The old man shook his head. “But my father, he was knowing.”
Hock drew the man aside. He said, “The boy has to go right now,” and tapped his watch. “And I’m going with him. How much do you want?”
“But the cargo,” the old man said. He scratched at his knuckles, loosening skin.
“How much?” Hock could see through the trees to the nearby village, where women were ghostly in the smoke of cooking fires. Men and small children had gathered on the embankment to watch. They must have followed the motorbike, which leaned on its kickstand near the canoes.
“We were expecting the boy, but not you, father.” The old man was peeling dead skin from his knuckles.
“Five hundred,” Hock said.
The old man had two yellow upper teeth. As he worked his jaw his tongue floated around them, seeming to tickle them. His thought process was visible in his chewing. He said, “Seven hundred.”
“Tell the men to cast off,” Hock said. He handed the old man the fat sandwich of folded-over money, all small bills. And he called to Simon to get into the big canoe.