Back on the field, among the scavenging children, facing the helicopter, he had felt he was at a low point. In the days at the village of children, cowering in the abandoned hut, sleepless, watching for hyenas, he’d felt he was at his wits’ end. And on the riverbank at the frontier, looking for a passing canoe to take him downriver, he’d felt abandoned. At Malabo, too, on the night of his decision to leave, he’d felt full of despair.
But none of these episodes could compare with the way he felt now, crouching on the wrong side of this perimeter fence, filthier than he’d ever been in his life, saying thank you to the African in the uniform for a gulp of the cloudy wash water.
“It tasted like champagne,” people said at moments like this. But no, this mouthful of warm water tasted foul, and the sour aftertaste of failure lingered in Hock’s throat and nauseated him.
He knew then that he had come to the end of something. He was defeated. He could not imagine anything worse than the degradation he felt on this sunny late afternoon in no man’s land, his reflection in the shiny tank staring back at him.
Two white men walked quickly toward him on the gravel path. The slow walk of the man earlier had signaled unhelpfulness; this brisk stride indicated pure hostility.
“You’re still here?” the first one said — the man from before, in the Hawaiian shirt.
The other one wore a bush shirt, bush shorts, and heavy boots, and seemed military and almost familiar. Both men were so clean, so intimidating, their cleanliness like strength.
“I know you,” he said.
Hock said, “Please help me. Send a message.”
“You’re the guy from the field, from this morning, when we were making the drop.” He turned to the other man, saying, “He was with those kids from the villages. He was trying to score a bag for himself. It was chaos, all his fault. We had to scrub it. That’s why I came back early. He put us off schedule.” He snapped at Hock, “How’d you get here?”
“He wouldn’t tell me who he was with,” the other man said.
“I am warning you,” the man in khaki said. “Get out of here the way you came in. If we see you again, we’ll shoot.”
The African, listening, looked fearful, and when the man in khaki gestured, he went back to polishing the water tank, his eyes widened in terror.
That fear penetrated Hock. He picked up his bag, and for the sake of his dignity he said, “You’re going to hear about this from the authorities. You’ll be sorry. I’m going to report you when I get back.”
“Mister, the way you look, you’re not going to make it back.”
Hock straightened and slung the strap of his bag over his shoulder. He stepped into the bush — he was still less than six feet from the fence, staring at the men. It occurred to him from the way they watched him that these men were unfamiliar with the bush, perhaps afraid, that they traveled in and out in the helicopter and had no sense of the path. Hock looked around, wishing for a snake — a fat one, a viper — that he could seize and shake at them like a thunderbolt.
“I’ll make it,” Hock said.
But when he turned, and ducked into the bush, and saw nothing but the narrow track with the faint impression of the motorcycle’s tire marks, he felt tired; and dispirited, away from the men, he sat down on a boulder. Almost immediately he was stung by ants. He slapped at his legs, he rubbed his arms. He walked farther, crossing to the far side of the steep bowl-like valley, wondering which direction to take. Looking around, he saw movement, a human figure. Leaning forward to see better, he heard mocking laughter. He knew who it was.
PART IV: Snakes and Ladders
21
THEIR OWN LONG late-afternoon shadows floated on the path in front of them, leggy torsos in the red dust. They tramped this lengthening darkness to the whine of cicadas, and before they reached the lip of the valley the sun had dropped beneath the level of the trees, and flights of mouse-faced bats filled the air, darting like swallows. While it was light enough to gather firewood, Manyenga parked the motorbike under a tree and they went in search of dry sticks. They piled the wood but waited until dark before they lit it, because the fire was to keep animals away, hyenas or baboons or biting lizards, and to repel ants and flying insects.
“Where’s the food bag?” Hock asked, because he knew Manyenga had snatched one at the field.
“It is for my family,” Manyenga said. He had found three green coconuts in his foraging. By the light of the fire he hacked off the tops, sawing at the sinews with his pocketknife, and they took turns drinking the coconut water and eating the gelatinous flesh. Until this moment they had only muttered. “Wood” and “matches” and “You take.”
But as Hock lay near the fire on a pile of dead crackly leaves he had scraped together, his animal feeling rose up in him. He remembered the way he had looked in the shiny tank. He was not saddened by the memory of the filthy face and matted hair and stubble on his cheeks. If anything, he was encouraged now. The image of that dirty, defiant monkey face strengthened him as he lay, his head propped up by one hand so he could feel the heat of the fire.
“I hate them,” he said, suddenly aloud.
“And myself, I hate them, too much,” Manyenga said.
“Festus,” Hock said, smiling, almost with affection.
He slept with the dust of the forest in his nostrils, hearing the chirp and snapping of nighttime insects and the odd bird squawk. Once he thought he heard the whoo of a giant eagle owl, or the crack of a branch, undramatic, no louder than a matchstick snapped in half.
At first light, in a racket of insects and birdcalls, with the heat beginning to rise, Manyenga rolled over and grunted. His face was a dark medallion in the sharpness of the sun. They set off through the bush, taking a new direction — north, Hock could tell; the sun was on their right. Manyenga knew the way, and after about an hour they began to see signs of disorder, the first village, hardly a village, one of those static settlements of the bush, a few huts, a wide-eyed boy, a woman fanning a fire with a pot lid, a yapping dog. And they kept going, on a proper footpath now, with the dampness of the river seeping into it, and the elephant grass too high for them to see over it.
Then a road. It had once been a road; it was lumpy with tussocks of rough grass. Vehicles had passed here long ago; the parallel tire tracks, mostly overgrown, were still visible. Manyenga settled the motorbike into one of the ruts but traveled slowly. Hock hung on, and the morning passed, the motorbike rocking him.
At noon a familiar odor of risen dust and stagnant water and wood smoke, and a familiar glare, the heavy light pressing on his eyes, combined with heat. All that and the toasted smell of burned grass, the sight of solitary trees, most of them dead, stripped of their smaller limbs for firewood, some of them no more than crooked posts. Malabo was not far: they were approaching the back road from the south, a new direction for Hock.
When they arrived at the village, Manyenga rode in a wide circle, as though performing a victory lap to show that he’d brought Hock back. Some small boys yelled, some women yodeled. And then he rode straight to Hock’s hut.
“She will bring you tea.”
A small slight figure was seated, in a posture of resignation or fatigue, at the edge of the veranda. It was Zizi, her head on her knees. Hearing the motorbike, she looked up, and when she saw who it was she burst into tears.
She gazed at Hock with a mixture of fear and ecstasy. Her tormented face, sick with grief, was thinner. She looked haggard, her cheeks already wet with tears, and yet she was smiling. But it was also a smile of agony, as though she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing, Hock getting off the bike, slapping the dust from his bag, considering Manyenga and deciding not to thank him. Zizi put her fingers into her mouth, perhaps to stifle her sobs.