The Lower River he’d dreamed of as a happy refuge for almost forty years; the embankment of beached canoes that had been hewn from ancient fat trees; the shaded village of dried mud, of thick-walled huts with cool interiors, and of smooth swept courtyards of strutting cockerels and plump chickens; the dense foliage of low trees like parasols of green; the narrow footpaths, the half-naked women and the men in neatly patched shirts, the coherence of the tidy weeded gardens of millet and sorghum and pumpkins, and the veiled drapery of strung-up fishing nets; and most of all the welcome, the warm greeting that was without suspicion or threat; something golden in the greenery lighted by the river, the warmth that kept him hopeful for all those years — gone, gone.
What he recalled now on these days of recovery after his thwarted escape was his reluctance to leave, all those years ago, the sadness he felt, not because he was going home to be with his ailing father, but at having to uproot himself from a life he had come to love, the school flourishing, the diligent hopeful students, the self-sufficiency of the people in the village. Back in Medford, among the shelves and glass display cases of expensive clothes, he remembered how in Malabo they mended their shirts, the small picked-out stitches, the sewn-up slashes, the new knees on trousers, the thick thready darns on elbows. Nothing was thrown away, nothing wasted. He had smoked a pipe then. The flat empty tobacco cans of the Player’s Navy Cut he bought at Bhagat’s were coveted in the village and became utensils, along with his occasional cup-like cans emptied of Springbok cigarettes. He too wore patched clothes. “My grandfather was a tailor,” he told the man who worked the treadle-powered Singer sewing machine on the veranda of the Malabo grocery shop. He was proud of his patches. People stood straight, worked hard, and were grateful for the smallest kindness. They asked for nothing.
All that had vanished, and what was worse, not even a memory of it remained. The villagers hadn’t been innocent before — there’d been petty thieves in Malabo, and he’d been robbed of a knife, a pen, books, money, an alarm clock, all stolen from his hut or the school. And there had been some bad feeling over his dalliance with Gala, but nothing audible. Now the big trees had been cut down for firewood, and there was no shade in the glary place. The baobab was a stump and a snake nest. The people had seemed unusual to him before, in their gentleness, in the way they had managed the land, their obvious attachment to it. The earth is our mother, a man might say, standing in a furrow with a mattock. They weren’t corrupt now; they were changed, disillusioned, shabby, lazy, dependent, blaming, selfish; they were like most people. You didn’t have to come all this way to be maddened by them. You could meet them almost anywhere.
He could not tell how this had come about. He hardly asked, he didn’t care, and he was disappointed in himself for his indifference. Yet he did not want to care more than they themselves did. He hated their extracting the trickle of money from him, hated the lies they told him, the lies he was telling them.
And now that he’d traveled partway down the river toward Morrumbala, the humpy, steep-sided rock pile of a mountain, and seen the smaller villages and the settlements on the embankment of the wide river, the strange hideout of children, the free-for-all in the open field, the militaristic depot of the charity, L’Agence Anonyme — after this failed escape, an exposure to the hinterland around Malabo, he was more disillusioned than ever. The flourishing Lower River was gone, its very greenness faded like a plucked leaf. He was trapped in a rotting province that he had once known as promising and self-sufficient and proud. He wanted to forget it all, to leave, but they frustrated every attempt he’d made. No one had hurt him, but their sullen stares suggested to him a greater menace. He simply did not know what to do and where to go. He was broken; he was part of the chaos.
Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. Now he remembered a particular day when Roy Junkins came to the store. Roy was thinner, not pale but sallow, yellowish even, his eyes set deeper in loose ashen sockets, as though he’d been ill and was still recovering. When he smiled, Hock saw missing teeth.
Hock was straightening jackets on a display rack, shaking them to free their sleeves. “Royal — haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Been away,” the man said, and looked sheepish, because it seemed there was no more to say. And there was a gentle laugh he had, of self-deprecation.
“You feeling all right?”
“I’m Kool Moe Dee,” Roy said, one of his formulas. “I am back in the world. Heh.”
A note in his voice, of relief, suggested that a story of struggle lay behind his sudden good humor.
“You been far?”
“Very far, Ellis.” That laugh again. “Concord.”
Hock smiled at the absurdity of it — Concord wasn’t far. And then it hit him: Concord Prison.
“Why didn’t you get in touch?”
“I needed time to think about how I ended up there,” Roy said. “Not a thing you coulda done to help me. My sister visited. But the headline about being inside is, you are on your own.”
And then, in a matter-of-fact way, Roy told Hock the details, how from the first he had been picked on in prison, his dinner plate snatched from in front of him, and he’d had to fight to defend himself. He’d been hit in the face by a man (“white dude”) swinging a sock with a lump of metal inside, a steel padlock perhaps. “And that’s how I lost my grille”—his teeth missing. He’d been intermittently bullied after that, but in time had found a degree of protection with a black faction in the prison. “Imagine — me!”—because Roy had always taken pride in distancing himself from any cause, rejoicing in being a loner. “But the brothers helped me,” he said, shaking his head at the memory of it. “They were good.”
His stories were of confinement, insecurity, threat, and intimidation. He’d been hurt, he’d been robbed, his cell ransacked. Younger, weaker, fearful inmates were raped.
“You couldn’t tell the guards or — what? — the warden?”
“Guards don’t run prisons,” he said in his growly comic voice. “Prisoners run prisons. They make the rules. And they got some hard rules. If you snitch, you die. And you learn a few other things.”
“Like what?”
“Learn to say ‘sir.’ Heh.”
“How long were you inside?”
“Almost a year.” Then, rubbing his hands and moving sideways to a display case, he said, in a subject-changing tone, “Show me some shirts, man. Something fine.”
He never told Hock what the conviction was for: a year — probably drugs, a small amount. But the details stayed with Hock, the stories of being bullied, the extortion, the threats, his being alone, confined, under siege.
Malabo was a prison now, and the only strength that Hock had was bluff. Why did he not feel self-pity? He grieved for the vanished village, as Gala had done, and he thought of Chicky, but not as the selfish young woman who had demanded her share of his settlement, on the granting of his divorce, saying, “If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it.”
Chicky at her smallest and sweetest was the face he saw: at her most unsuspecting, the way she laughed, her chattering in a big chair, her bluish lighted face in front of the TV set, laughing at something silly. And to please him once — because he’d begun to smile — she lip-synched to a reggae song, hunched her shoulders and mouthed the words to “Dem Get Me Mad,” and told him the singer was someone called Yellow Man. One day, missing her, he’d leafed through her school notebook and found, in her scrawl, I want to be cool, and had to fight back tears. Another time, he watched her through a crack in the door to her room, putting on lipstick — she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. The little neat bundle of bus tickets, held by a rubber band — what urgency in her heart had made her save them? On a walk in the Fells, she was probably twelve, she saw a robin and said, “Turdus migratorius,” and blinked and pressed her lips in a kind of mild pedantry. On the same walk, pleased with herself, she took his hand and said, “When I grow up I want to live in a little cottage.”