“Help!” Hock screamed. He felt the strain in his throat without hearing the word, because now the music was overwhelmed by the roar of the engine, the chatter of the rotor blades as they began to turn. Turning faster, they stirred more dust, and the dust engulfed the children and the field while Hock hugged his bag to his chest. Two children dropped from the skids where they had been hanging. Yak-yak-yak-yak-yak, the helicopter rose into the sun, which cast an eerie glow through the dust; it was like a beetle swallowed by a storm cloud.
The rotor’s yakking diminished, the music grew softer, and the yelps of the children grew louder as they fought over the bags and boxes strewn on the ground. Seeing that they were occupied in this free-for-all, Hock turned to go, intending to run away from the choking dust, to the margin of the field, to take his chances in the bush.
But just as he turned, he saw, emerging from the trees, fifteen or twenty motorcycles rushing toward the center of the field like a pack of one-eyed animals. Side by side, the motorcycles converged as they came closer, heading into the mass of children.
Half an hour before, Hock had been sitting cross-legged in the shade of the tall grass and shrubs at the edge of the field, the snake coiled on his arm, feeling powerful. Then the confusion — the helicopter, the loud music, the strangers at the door, the dumped boxes and bags of food, the crazed children, his own desperation. The swelling uprush of dust had slowed him, and the eruption of children quarreling over the bags and boxes, tearing them to pieces, had shocked him. The helicopter taking off had made more dust, but no sooner had its noisy rotors disappeared than the blatting of the motorcycles began.
He was in danger of being trapped by the motorcycles. Some of them were knocking children down as the riders snatched at the bags, stacking them on their handlebars, shoving the children out of the way, chasing children who were tottering with bags in their arms. He dodged a skidding bike and headed toward the emptier part of the field, and on the way managed to pick up a bag, a bulging cloth sack of what he imagined to be rice or flour or millet.
He could not run. After sprinting a few steps, he stopped, gasped for breath, then walked, his face grimy from the sweat-smeared dirt, still breathing hard in the dust cloud that hung over the field.
He half turned to see how far he had come when the boys, flailing their arms, rushed at him, shouting. Resisting, Hock felt old and feeble, unable to repel them, and afraid of the very sight of them, their angry faces, their bared teeth. One of the reaching boys grabbed at Hock’s sack of flour, another boy clung to his arm — the arm where the snake had been coiled.
“Wait — wait,” Hock said, trying to calm them, because he knew he lacked the strength to fight them off. “What do you want?”
They were two of the bigger boys from the village of children, the boys who had led him here, knowing in advance that a helicopter was going to arrive, carrying — who? celebrities? politicians? — to distribute food. One of them was the boy who had woken him that morning with the words “The bud.”
“Wait — you not go.”
“Let go of my arm,” Hock said, hating the boy’s dirty hand on him, his bony grip. “Take the bag of food — you can have it.”
“We want you,” the bigger boy said.
In spite of the long trek here, and the struggle in the field, and the confused chase, these boys were still wearing sunglasses, and one of them the black baseball hat he’d had on in the village.
“I have to go home now,” Hock said, and absurdly, with a screeching insistence and pompous formality, “Don’t you understand? I have appointments! I have issues to settle.”
“There is no need,” the boy said, holding on.
Now the other boy was clutching Hock’s shirt, his fingers hooked in the strap of Hock’s duffel bag. Although neither boy was as tall or as heavy as Hock, they hung on, dragging him back. The dust, dense and flecked with dirty sunlight, and the loud complaints and whines of the squabbling children in the middle of the field, made it all worse: the children’s protests, the braying of the motorcycles. Hock was weakened, unnerved by the shrieking, the heat, and now unable to speak, grit in his mouth, gagging on the dirty air.
Hock was pushed hard as the boy next to him was thumped aside, and in the same moment a motorcycle roared. The other boy let go of his arm and stumbled away.
“Get on, father,” the rider called out impatiently, then louder, “Get on!”
Hock swung his leg over and took hold of the man, who sped into the crowd. It was a full minute before he saw it was Manyenga, who seemed to laugh, but no, just teeth and lips set in an expression of fury, screaming for the children to back off.
20
THE MOTORCYCLE PASSED through the low wall of yellowing shrubs and parched trees on a path that was a groove hardly wider than its fat tires, but wide enough. There were no roads here, as the exultant boy had said in the children’s village, yet the stony crusted floor of this sun-heated bush was crisscrossed with tire tracks. And Hock was cooler on the speeding bike, the breeze in his face. He held on as Manyenga’s elbows slapped at the slender tree limbs and grubby leaves. He was grateful to be delivered from the chaos on the field and glad that he was with someone he knew, feeling like an impulsive runaway who’d been rescued from his foolishness by the intervention of an adult: saved. But as he sat on the motorcycle, which was rocking like a hobbyhorse on the straighter stretches and skidding on the sandy turns, this feeling of deliverance ebbed, and as his strength returned he was filled with apprehension: caught again.
His relief at being rescued turned to misery as he acknowledged that he had not been saved but snared, and by the very man he’d tried to escape from. Still, he hung on, and the awfulness of his situation did not hit him fully until they were well away from the children, who now seemed to him so skinny as to be half alive, desperate, improvisational, and reckless, living by their wits.
Manyenga meanwhile appeared to realize that he had traveled a safe enough distance and was not being followed. He slowed down, and seeing a baobab tree ahead, he stopped the bike under it and both men dismounted. Manyenga’s sweat of exertion hit him: he stank like a wet dog.
The bark of the baobab was torn, the white flesh of the wood exposed and splintered.
“Elephants like to eat this tree for its juicy wood. It has water!” Manyenga said, and he laughed. “They can destroy it!”
“There are elephants here?”
“Why not? This is bush, indeed!” Manyenga was friendly, oblique, teasing. Then he said, “What are you doing, playing with those silly children, isn’t it?”
“They gave me food,” Hock said.
“What food? They have nothing to eat, only what the ndege from the Agency brings them.”
“And you steal it from them.”
“We are hungry too.”
“They have cassava and bananas.”
“Rubbish food, famine food. Where are their chickens? They have no gardens. Are they making relish or stew? Not at all!”
“I was here only a few days,” Hock said, not knowing where this conversation was leading. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been trapped by the children.
Manyenga said, “You prefer to live there with those children, isn’t it?”