“Some of these children are having the eddsi disease as well. If they bite you, you will die.”
This the boy said slowly, becoming amused, laughing as he finished the sentence, though Hock thought only of the fatal bite of the night adder.
They left him alone the rest of the day, and the whole of the following day. He heard the children laughing — screeching. He sat in the space they had given him, hoping that they were ignoring him and not plotting against him. He had no way of telling. At intervals the children crept near to watch him. Hock took some consolation at the sight of fire finches in the branches near his hut and the metallic call of the tinkerbird, which he heard but could not see. As for the children, they were the youngest, the dirtiest, and they simply stared at him with hungry faces.
In retrospect, he was afraid of the children, and when he saw two of the big boys approach him in the dusk he felt a fluttering of fright in his heart like a trapped bird.
“Your friends are coming, this boy says.”
“What do you mean?” He backed away. He didn’t want the boy near him.
“This boy”—a lean, exhausted-looking boy in ragged shorts lurked behind him—“he says they are coming.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Who is coming?”
“Your people.”
The boy seemed at once milder, kinder, much less of a threat. He was holding bananas, a cluster of four. These he gave to Hock.
“My people?” Hock took a breath but could not calm himself. “When?”
“Just wait,” the boy said, and pointed casually at the last of the sunset — shreds of purple, layers of darkening velvet lit by glints of gold, sinking under the darkness, making Hock sadder. “We will see them.”
On the third day, the boy wearing the Dynamo Dresden cap and sunglasses kicked through the small gathering of watching children and said, “You, mzungu.”
“Don’t call me mzungu.”
“I will call you Old Man.”
Hock glared at him, then gestured to the children. “What do they want?”
“They want you to go.”
Hock took a stride to come abreast of him and said in a heated whisper, “I want to go. Let me go. You said you don’t want me here.”
But the boy wouldn’t look at him, or if he was looking at him Hock couldn’t tell, because the sunglasses did not reveal his eyes. All he saw was the sour disapproving mouth.
“That was the other day. That was previously.” He spoke the syllables separately like a whole sentence.
“I’d like to know where you learned English,” Hock asked again.
“From your people.”
“I don’t have any people.”
“Yes, yourself you are having. They are coming. That is why we want you to stay.”
“They’re coming here?”
“We will see.”
“When are they coming?”
“We will see.”
Hock had often been frustrated by Sena-speaking people, with all their euphemisms and evasions, but much worse was his trying to make sense of conversing with someone like this Sena boy, for the fact that the boy spoke English reasonably well was a barrier to any understanding and only maddened him more. There was a point where a reasonable command of English made someone like this punk in sunglasses incomprehensible.
“I’m hungry,” Hock said. “I’ll need food.”
The boy said nothing, only raised his face to the sky, seeming to listen, and in this posture, looking up, distracted, appeared disapproving of Hock, as though he were an annoyance, an inconvenient straggler, an adult alien in a village of children, on the Lower River, in the marshes that were neither Malawi nor Mozambique, without a road or a well or, as far as Hock could tell, any garden.
Keeping his hand on the flap of his bag, Hock said, “But I can’t give you any more money.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“I must have some food,” Hock said.
What was missing in this boy was any sympathy, none in his two companions, none in the children, in the entire village. Simple pity was something he had taken for granted in Malabo: the recognition that he was alone, stranded, far from home, in need of help. These children were feral and had no use for him, and that was worse than being exploited in Malabo. They were mind-blind and reckless.
In a low pitiless voice, without turning, the boy said to him, “Give your knife.”
“I don’t have a knife.”
“The knife from last night.”
Before his meal, in a feeble attempt to tidy himself, he’d sat cross-legged and clipped his fingernails, then carved the dirt from beneath what remained. He had no idea that anyone had seen him engaged in this sad little ritual of grooming with a chrome fingernail clipper.
Careful to remove it from his bag without showing any of the contents, he slid out the clipper and handed it over.
“The food,” Hock said.
“They will bring.”
Later, at the hut he had been assigned, the girl who brought him the tin plate of roasted cassava and the few bananas was one he recognized as being part of the jeering mob at the riverbank. That she was subdued, almost deferential, kneeling as she served the dish, made her seem more defiant and untrustworthy.
“Chai,” Hock said.
She sniffed to show she understood, rocked to her feet, and was away for a few minutes, returning with an enamel mug of hot water into which some tea leaves had been scattered. That it was hot satisfied Hock, who feared the foul water of the Lower River.
After he finished his meal he sat in the open doorway of the hut, and when darkness fell he listened to the sounds of the children playing discontentedly, or mildly quarreling, screeching now and then, the shouts of boys, the protests of girls. And later, in the silence of the night, afraid to sleep in the doorless hut, he sat, grieving for himself. He remembered slights that had been inflicted on him — not here or in Malabo, but in his marriage, in Medford, in his business, as he had the previous night.
Instead of brooding about Malabo, his sudden escape, the theft of his radio by Simon, or about the treachery of the boy paddlers who had delivered him here to the village of teasing children and hostile bug-eyed boys, and the heat, the dirt, his hunger and thirst — instead of this, he thought only of the injustices he had suffered in his life.
The trickery of his wife, who had foisted that expensive phone on him and used it to pry into his privacies. And then, after more than thirty years, she had demanded the family house, his father’s house in the Lawrence Estates, forcing him into a condo in the old high school. And her repeated messages on his answering machine: “You shit.” Chicky demanding that he hand over her inheritance: “I want my cut now.” When he gave her the check he said, “I doubt that I’ll be seeing much of you from now on.”
As those bad memories coursed through his mind, keeping him awake, grinding his teeth, slighter ones intruded — hurts, insults, snubs. “Four eyes,” “Fairy,” “You suck,” at school. The guidance counselor saying, “Maybe your father will give you a job, because if not, you’re not going anywhere.” A woman in college English tittering because he’d mispronounced the word “posthumous.” One of his customers saying, “You’re rounder now,” meaning that he’d put on weight — and the man who said it was fat. The new salesman who’d gotten a salary advance (“My rent’s due”) saying, “You can take it out of my first paycheck,” but he never showed up to work again. Not villains, but deadbeats, mockers, smirkers. “You’re still working for a living?” Teachers in grade school who’d singled him out—“See me after school”—and all the women who’d rejected him, batting his hands away. The lies he’d been told now came back to him, little twisted evasions that remained unresolved and niggling at him. Like his father, he’d been a trusting soul. He believed “I’ll definitely come tomorrow” and “I’ll fix it” and “That’s the best price I can offer you.” The pretty clerk who blocked the employee toilet with her sanitary pad, then denied it. The shoddy batch of socks from China, the repeated telephone message on the answering machine of the men who owed him money, or a delivery, until he called and got “This number has been disconnected and is no longer in use.”