He said, “Listen to me,” and moved his head closer to Aubrey’s. As he did so, he got a whiff of dirt — not just sweat on old clothes but illness, the doggy odor of human decay, the stink of rotting lungs. The darkness inside the van seemed to make the odor sharper and inescapable. Hock winced and went on, “I don’t have much money.”
“No matter.”
That answer surprised Hock. He said, “In fact, very little money.”
Hock wanted to make sure he wasn’t being taken away to be mugged and abandoned. But Aubrey simply nodded, accepting the fact, and faced Hock without blinking. Perhaps Aubrey didn’t really care. Perhaps he was resigned to the hundred dollars Hock had given him, and the promise of a hundred more when they got to Blantyre.
“So where are you going?”
“Where you want.”
“I want to go to Blantyre,” Hock said. And, getting no response, “Now.”
“Too much moon,” Aubrey said. He hitched himself close to the windshield and twisted his face to look at the sky, making a false smile from the effort, his teeth showing in his narrow face, the shadows of his sharp features turning his face into a mask. “But some clouds are coming.”
Hock saw a mass of purple clouds, whitened at their edges by the moon, rising from where the river entered Mozambique, like smoke swelling upward from a bush fire. He watched the clouds advance, broadening, thinning, in the same way as smoke in still air. He found himself silently urging them on, and when the first wisps flickered past the bright moon and veiled it, lifting into shadow, Hock stamped his foot as though on the accelerator.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Too slowly for Hock’s liking, Aubrey cocked his head again, then turned the key and started the engine. He held the wheel awkwardly, gripping it at the top with both hands, hanging on it like a new driver. Then they were moving again, bumping over ruts, brushing the tall grass at the side. Aubrey switched on the fog lights, and they showed the road ahead as bouldery and crusted with mud like a dry streambed.
Aubrey was nervous, he drove badly, and Hock thought, He’s going so slow I could jump out here and walk back to Malabo. He knew this bend in the road. They were passing the bank of the shallow creek that lay just past the tall grass, where the village women washed their clothes on the flat rocks and often bathed in the seclusion of the reeds.
Then Aubrey groaned. Hock heard him above the engine that was racing, then slowing, as Aubrey thumped the gas pedal, too hard, then too softly, uncoordinated, the clumsiness of a beginner — or was he as ill as he seemed?
He was moving jerkily, accelerating over each bump, braking as he faltered forward.
“What is it?” Hock said, peering through the windshield. The dirty glass distorted the road.
“You did not give him money!” Aubrey shouted.
Up ahead, in the feeble glow of the fog lights, the ragged boy stood with Manyenga.
Behind this man and boy, spectral in the dim light, a tree lay across the road. Fresh chips that had flown from the stump littered the ground — the tree had just been chopped down — and though it was slender, it was an obstacle. There was no way around it. Manyenga, looking fierce, like an executioner, held the panga he had used on the tree, and the ragged boy from twenty minutes ago, beside him, scowling.
“Back up,” Hock said.
“Cannot.” Aubrey had slowed the van to a crawl.
“It’s not my fault.”
“It is being your fault one hundred percent,” Aubrey said hoarsely. “You sent the boy away with nothing.”
“Why didn’t you give him something?”
“You are the mzungu.”
“So what?”
“You are the money!”
But by then Manyenga was at Hock’s side of the van. He snatched the door open. He was in shadow now, but Hock could smell his strong odor — a whiff of anger, the sweaty effort of hacking down the tree, his body reeking of hostility.
Manyenga spoke rapidly in Sena to Aubrey, hissing at him. It must have been insulting, because it had a physical effect on him: Aubrey slackened his grip on the steering wheel and looked beaten.
“You want to stay with him?” Manyenga said to Hock.
Aubrey had turned his face away from the men.
“You want to die?”
“I want to go to Blantyre. I want to go home,” Hock said in a whisper of fury.
Manyenga laughed so hard it brought on a coughing fit. He smacked the panga against his thigh, the big knife slapping at his dirty trousers.
“This is your home, father.”
Out of pride, seeing it was hopeless, Hock got out before Manyenga ordered him to, and he walked a few steps from the van, keeping away from the light.
“Mzungu,” the ragged boy said in two insolent grunts—zoon-goo. Now Hock understood: because he had not tipped him, the boy had run to Manyenga’s to tell him that Hock was fleeing. Malabo was only minutes from the left-hand side of the road. The boy would get something from Manyenga.
On the footpath through the tall grass, Hock picked his way in the half-dark of the cloud glow, parting the moonlit blades of grass.
“Why do you hate me?” Manyenga asked.
Hock said nothing, but Manyenga was aggrieved, or pretending to be, slashing at the grass with his bush knife.
“I have been protecting you!”
Swishing through the grass, Hock said in a small defeated voice, “I want to go.”
“You are so ungrateful,” Manyenga said. “And you are ignorant, too.”
The night was peaceful, not cool, though the heat was softened by the darkness. Hock knew without seeing any huts that they were at the perimeter of the village — he could smell the mud huts, the dead cooking fires, the human odors, old food, dead skin, dusty faces, sour feet, the stink of latrines.
“He was kidnapping you,” Manyenga said. “These people are thieves. He is a thief. I know this boy Aubrey. His father is my cousin. They think they are powerful. They work for the Agency. You don’t know!”
“How do you know so much?”
“That small boy told me everything. He knows the secrets. He was so angry. He said, ‘The mzungu gave me nothing.’”
“I should have given him something. Then I’d be free.”
“No, bwana. Don’t you see what they were going to do with you?”
“What were they going to do with me?”
Manyenga didn’t answer. Instead, he said loudly, “You are our chief, dear father.”
The talk had woken the roosters, which began to crow, unseen in the darkness. Across the clearing Hock could see a flashlight, and a length of its yellow beam wagging, coming closer, maybe Zizi.
PART V: Ghost Dance
26
ALL DAY LONG in Malabo the heat sank lower, darting its tongue at him, licking at his head, swelling, growing heavier, dropping over him, creeping closer as the day ran on, encircling him. Often there was no sky at all, nothing that matched the word, the sun just a ragged patch of muted light in a threadbare blanket overfolded above him, no blue anywhere, nothing but the fuzzy canopy of gray over the colorless village. The dimmer the sun got, the hotter it was, squeezing his eyelids shut, offering dancing mirages, like sprites flitting across his closed eyes. The heaviness stifled the last of his energy, and he thought, Never mind, and decided to stay in his chair. The heat turned him into someone else, someone he hardly knew, and in a voice he hardly recognized, he called out to Zizi for a drink.