And there was his incriminating phone, the one he’d thrown into the Mystic River because it was full of compromising emails. The thought of those emails shamed him, those whispers, those confidences, flirting and foolish. He had betrayed himself with people he’d trusted with his inner thoughts, people to whom he had confided his love of Africa. “The best years of my life,” he’d said, and they’d responded, “Cannibals and communists” or “Human life means nothing there,” in an echo of doom-doom-doom, and he’d lectured them on their peculiar folkways and pieties. “I was in Malabo, on the Lower River…”
All of this, and more, all night.
19
HE WAS CLINGING to a steep black mountainside that resembled Morrumbala. Gripping the seams of crumbling rock with his fingertips, his arms extended in an attitude of crucifixion, he had hoisted himself up the cliff face to a narrow ledge, no more than a toehold, hugging a plastic bag that bulged with a yellowish drinkable liquid, and the fat-bellied bag swelled so tight it might burst at any second. He wore boots and a harness. He pushed open a steel door in the granite wall but saw that the space was not wide enough for him and the bag to fit through. Someone was with him, a hovering figure who looked like Roy Junkins, but he was dressed in a three-piece suit and seemed doubtful, canted sideways in an ironic posture on the ledge.
“Won’t work,” Hock said to the skeptical man standing beside him.
“The bud.” That word woke him. The sun burned against his aching eyes, the light that had colored his desperate dream.
“The bud.”
No sooner had he heard the word than he saw on the hot branch behind the boy’s big shadowy head the budded protrusions, some like dark spear points and some plump swollen ones, seeming on the verge of bursting.
“What are you saying?”
“Ndege.”
“Bird,” Hock said.
“Bard,” the boy said.
“What about it?”
“Is coming.”
In Hock’s sleepy blur of confusion the words made no sense to him. He rolled over and the mat crunched with a chewing sound. He had been more content in his dark mountainside dream than here in the corrosive sunlight and damp earth of this hut in the village of children. He yearned to sleep again, to return to his dream.
“Mzungu,” the boy said.
“Don’t call me mzungu!” His own shriek startled him and made him angrier. In his rage he was also objecting to the hut, which stank of mice and sour fermented straw and spilled beer suds.
The boy stepped back, shocked by Hock’s loud shout of protest. He was not the biggest boy, but one of the three leaders, who usually sulked behind his sunglasses.
“Ndiri ndi njala!” Hock shouted, louder than the first time, encouraged by the boy’s apparent fear. Hock pounded his stomach and made an animal noise of complaint.
“And me myself I am hungry,” the boy said in a low voice.
“Bring me food,” Hock said.
“The ndege will bring food.”
Hock smiled at the word. He said, “Mbalame,” because that was the proper Sena word for bird, and ndege was — what? — Swahili?
“Tea — hot water,” Hock said, still angry at having been woken from his dream. Dreams were a refuge, and though you might be afraid, you never died or felt pain. But this village was a problem, with no path and no way out. “Don’t tell me you have no water,” Hock said to the hesitating boy. “You drink the river!”
Without saying more, the boy walked away, and after ten minutes or so a small girl brought a tin cup of hot water with a residue of broken tea leaves at the bottom.
As Hock drank he could see at the center of the clearing the biggest boy hectoring a group of children, more children than Hock had seen before, gathered together — more than had hounded him at the riverbank. And some stragglers were still joining this group that sprawled like a church congregation. It seemed a suggestion of order in a place that Hock associated with disorder and incompleteness: idle vindictive children living like bush mutts in the ruins of an adult village, where none of the basket granaries contained maize cobs and the gardens were merely wild untended clumps of cassava. The children stood in their dirty T-shirts and ragged shorts, some of them older girls wearing chitenje wraps, all of them listening impassively to the vehement speech.
In his earlier years on the Lower River, such a large gathering of children would have filled him with hope — for their attentiveness, their solemnity, and what he knew to be their strength; even hungry and tired, they worked and could be joyous. Now he saw the children as dangerous, defiant, without sympathy or sentiment or any memory. The previous day they had been on the point of pushing him into the river with the force of their small skinny bodies, laughing at his plight. They would have screamed in delight to see him thrashing in the green water.
He was still bitter but would not allow himself to hate them anymore, and only thought, Let them squirm, and wished to be away, anywhere but here.
The tall sharp-faced boy went on speaking to them in a fierce formal manner, gesturing with his fist. Hock wondered whether he was the subject of the speech — he listened for the word mzungu but did not hear it. The word ndege was repeated: bird, but what bird? He could only think that it was something to eat.
A girl in a torn T-shirt walked past Hock’s hut carrying a basket of bananas. Hock snapped his fingers and, surprised, the girl stopped and knelt in an obedient genuflection and handed him two bananas. Alone, she seemed frightened, though he recognized her — her T-shirt, rather, Minnesota Vikings—from the previous day, when she had been one of the jeering pack of children at the riverbank.
To make the moment last, Hock peeled one banana slowly with his fingertips and nibbled it, eyeing the distant crowd of children from the shade of his hut. He was impressed by the silence and concentration of the children, and fearful, too, that such a large number could be controlled by the single older boy.
And in the running commentary in his head, his narrative of the misery he’d put himself into, he thought how the worst of it was not the dirt or the heat or the thirst — though they wore him down; and not the insects or the bad-tempered children; but the uncertainty, not knowing at the beginning of each day how that day would end.
This thought was cut off by movement at the periphery of his vision, a sliding line at ground level that bunched and swelled and grew longer, through the crackling dead leaves, a bluey-green snake, a spotted bush snake from the look of it.
In the snake he saw a friend, a savior, a weapon, a creature that had come to protect him; something he could keep, something he could eat. And he smiled at the snake. He was not alone anymore.
Yanking its tail, he shook it, snapped it hard enough to slacken its coil — though he could have whipped its head off with a violent jerk. And, allowing it to strike, he caught it behind its head as it leaped full length. Holding his arm up, he let the snake coil its body around his forearm. It was a juvenile bush snake, a meter long at most, the nub of its hard tail tickling his biceps.