The Dung Beetles of Liberia

by Daniel V. Jr. Meier

  I said that I did.

  “I don’t have anything for a couple of weeks,” Andre said. “But what I do need right now is a good mechanic. I’m told that you are qualified in that area too?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I thought you had a good mechanic—the boy from the Tourneau Mission, the old Texas Company.”

  “You’re right. Charles. He was good. Apparently too good.”

  “What happened?”

  “He got to be, as I said, really good. They had trained him well up at the mission and he knew what he was doing. He was a real entrepreneur, Charles was. He ended up buying a taxi and hired one employee; and he found a real nice girl he was planning to marry.

  “Well, then the military airplanes started falling apart, so what did the military do? They drafted him into their army. He was a Liberian, so they could do it. Then he changed. It was like night and day. They were paying him nothing, maybe twenty, thirty dollars a month. He lost his taxi, his girlfriend left him, and then he went AWOL. Of course they caught him. And then they would chain him up in the hangar at night and make him work on the airplanes during the day. This went on for a while until one night he went berserk. He tried to burn down the hangar and he took a sledge hammer to the airplanes. So, of course, they sent him off to prison. Never saw him again. So, as you can see, I still need a good mechanic.”

  “I understand,” I said, “but I did come here to fly.”

  “You will fly,” he said. “You’ll fly so much you’ll be begging me to stop. But no one flies if the machines are broken. I have been asking around, but for the moment, I need help.”

  “I don’t have my own tools,” I said.

  “We have tools.” He said. “Come with me. I’ll introduce you and show you what we have.”

  I followed him into the hangar. Andre looked more Vietnamese than French. He was a small man. He walked very fast, and he had coarse black hair that seemed to constantly fall into his face. He introduced me to Koto, his only working mechanic. Koto was from Sierra Leone. He was very thin and looked more like a Somali. Most of his teeth were gone but that did not affect his willingness to smile.

  “Koto,” Andre said, “this is Boss Ken. He is one of our new pilots and he is also a mechanic from the United States.” Koto looked unfazed. “He will be the boss. You do what he says.”

  Had we been in a maintenance shop in the US, this kind of speech and introduction would have caused instant resentment and led to numerous labor conflicts. Koto, however, smiled his near toothless smile, nodded his head in agreement, and said, “Yes boss, I unnastan. He know sheenery. He know sheenery mo dan me.”

  Andre rolled the shop’s tool chest over to me. One of the qualities of good mechanics is that he handles and cares for his tools like a surgeon handles and cares for his surgical instruments. These tools were a jumble of metal objects covered in dirt and grease.

  “I can’t use these,” I said. “They’re a mess. They are all going to have to be cleaned and organized according to function and size. It’ll take a day at least, maybe two.”

  “Then get one of the boys—” Andre said.

  “No,” I interrupted. “I’d better do that myself.”

  Andre nodded and started back for his office. I followed.

  “Yes?” he said, turning to face me.

  “Andre, I don’t work just for the privilege of working.”

  “Since you are a US certified A and P mechanic, I’ll pay you fifteen US an hour.” Fifteen US dollars an hour was very good money. “Koto gets three fifty. Maybe you can inspire him to get a certification.”

  I walked back into the hangar, found a large plastic sheet, spread it out on the floor next to the tool chest and dumped the tools out onto it. Koto looked at me, amazed and puzzled. “Wat you do, oh?”

  I explained my mission of cleaning and sorting. He shook his head, and walking away, he said, “I got no time fo dah.”

  I found a bucket of Varsol and spent the day cleaning, sorting and arranging the tools in the proper order. I then cleaned the tool chest inside and out and put clean lining made from tightly woven aircraft floor matting material in the bottom of each drawer.

  Toward the end of the workday Andre came out onto the hangar floor. He motioned for me to follow him. He stopped in front of a rather badly battered Cessna 185.

  “Charlie Fox has a cracked cylinder. Can you change it tomorrow?” I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t. I didn’t expect any work from Beizell for another week.

  Paterson was outside with one of his boys changing a tire on one of the airplanes. The boy looked up at me and smiled.

  “I know you from Mike’s operation,” I said. “I’m Mista Ken. Do you remember me?”

  “Oh, sho do, boss. Sho do. Ma name is Jonathan.”

  “That’s a good name. You know how Paterson got his name?”

  “Ya, ah do. Iss da name of some place in Amerika.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Paterson, New Jersey. That’s right near New York City.”

  “Oh, I heard o’ New Yor Cetty. So, boss, how bee is New Yor Cetty?”

  “Oh,” I said, “it’s huge! It’s big way past Monrovia.”

  “No!” He laughed. “It can’t be big past Monrovia!”

  “Oh yeah, it is. They have big skyscrapers.”

  “Skyscrapers. Wassa skyscraper?”

  “Skyscrapers are buildings that go up so high that you can’t see the top. They are said to touch the sky.”

  “Noooo, boss, not possible,” he whispered. “No place big past Monrovia.”

  “Okay, Jonathan, it’s big past Robertsport.”

  Jonathan smiled and exhaled.

  Belinda and Barry were both out that evening, so I sat by myself on the porch, gazing out at the ocean. I had a growing apprehension about our planned trip to Ouagadougou for the music festival. Driving to Ouagadougou in that old station wagon? Was I crazy? What if it broke down seven hundred miles short of our destination? We would be out in the middle of nowhere. We would be SOL. No, I would be SOL! Were they even who they said they were?

  I had a copy of all the keys, so I went into their room. I found their passports in a dresser drawer along with some newspaper clippings and other papers. Belinda did have a Canadian passport, and Barry had what appeared to be an Australian passport. However, tucked under the newspaper clippings, I found three other passports. Two of them were men, and another belonged to a woman. They were Dutch passports, and one of them had a large, dark brown smear all over a couple of pages. The owners of these documents all appeared to be in their twenties. I hurriedly replaced the passports and left the room, making sure to lock the door on my way out.

  I had seen all that I needed to see. I had seen old, dried blood before and didn’t need a forensic analysis to tell me what it was. I suspected that the Oldsmobile station wagon had belonged to one of the Dutch passport holders and that they were probably dead. How, or by whom? I did not want to venture a guess. I did know for certain that I didn’t want to spend any time alone with Barry and Belinda and especially not out in the bush.

  According to their passports, they had been in Morocco, Mali, and Guinea. They had then come in from Sierra Leone (a smugglers’ route), which meant that they could have been up to anything.

  When they came home that evening, I approached them. I wanted to tell them face-to-face that I wasn’t going with them. I wanted to see how they would react. They became very agitated and upset and kept asking me why. I simply told them that something important had come up, and that I couldn’t go. I thought things might get violent, so I locked the door to my room and left to go to the Gurley Street Bar. As I had suspected, they were gone when I returned, along with all their belongings.

  I thought of going to the Dutch Embassy and reporting it, but that would associate me with them, and once the police got the scent of something, they would destroy things and people for miles around trying to follow their leads—I didn’t want to be listed as collate
ral damage. I decided to push it to the back of my mind—chalk it up to experience and congratulate myself on a lucky escape. I convinced myself, naively perhaps, that if my suspicions were right, justice would eventually catch up with them.

  CHAPTER 18

  BIG PALAVER

  A little bit of maintenance for Andre, some runs for Stumpy, and the prospect of many more flights with Andre brightened my spirits considerably. Andre seemed a solid type, whether he said much or not, and I slowly began to trust him. The beach house was better now too. It was just the three of us—Deet, Tony, and me—with plenty of room and, being pilots, plenty of money.

  The isolation that the beach house provided separated me from the mayhem and occasional squalor of downtown Monrovia, which, at the end of the day, was a great relief. Lately, I had been thinking about sketching many of the interesting and beautiful sights in Liberia. I had always, since I was a child, been able to draw. By the time I was in high school I was making regular sketches of everything I saw, which included most of the members of my high school class. My mother was an artist and she had taught me the finer points of sketching and painting. She specialized in acrylics and I learned from her. Acrylics are water soluble and they dry relatively quickly—both good qualities to have in West Africa.

  On my way to the beach house one afternoon I, almost on an impulse, stopped at a small retail store in Monrovia that I knew sold art supplies, furniture, model airplanes, and hardware of all kinds, including guns. The place was owned by an elderly Dutch couple, Alida and Geert Koning, who had fled Holland a year before the German invasion. They got on the first ship they could leaving Rotterdam. It was a merchant vessel and after a rough passage, got off the ship in Monrovia and sought immigrant status. Mr. Koning was a very good business man and always said that if he didn’t have it, he could definitely get it from Holland.

  Fortunately, he had everything that I needed, and I walked out of his store happily carrying under my arms a large sketch pad with paper, charcoal and a soft lead pencil, an easel, and a set of acrylic paints with brushes. Being able to draw and paint would allow me to bask in the wild beauty of this place without being a part of the phenomenally wealthy or as one of the dirt-poor native Liberians.

  The country was growing so rapidly that infrastructure, needed to ensure prosperity, was not or could not be built fast enough. This prosperity, however vast, hardly ever seemed to touch the average, or tribal, Liberian. By the time the massive wealth that was pouring into the country from timber, iron and diamond mines, and rubber plantations got down to street level, it was a drop trickling out of the tap.

  This was a wild place. It was like the Wild West in the US, with its gold rush, money, and sense of lawlessness. I could see Monrovia as Dodge City—except for the cars and the loud, incessant sound of radios wherever I went.

  I started making regular trips to the iron mines for Stumpy, hauling pumps, huge valves, coils of wire rope, and food supplies. Madeleine was right. He was a real prick. But he paid me for my work, and because I was also a mechanic, I could make sure that the planes could fly. One thing I did like though—I was getting really good at flying. I was getting to know the geography, the weather, and the people, lots of people, seemingly just passing through.

  I had gotten to know a ferry pilot, Fred, whose only job was delivering airplanes, and considering the constant need for replacement aircraft, he was always working. He came through town around this time and had his nephew with him—a tall, good-looking young man of about twenty-one, a graduate student at Harvard. We let them stay at the house since we had the spare bedroom. They didn’t have a car, so I showed them how the taxi system worked.

  Having people stay at your house is always a risk. The last thing you want is to have any sort of run in with the locals. We explained the rules very carefully, particularly about not going to the airfield and messing with any of the women. They are local, tribal, and have families that will cause trouble, or make palaver—big palaver that just won’t go away.

  “If you want a woman,” I said, “go to the bar scene. That’s where this kind of business is done and no palaver.”

  The Beech 18 aircraft that the ferry pilot was transporting had some mechanical problem, so they planned to extend their stay about three days. Sometime late during the second night there was a loud knock on the door. This turned out to be one of the local native policemen, surrounded by a large group of locals from the airfield.

  A very tall, wiry man stepped forward and said, “Da college boy, he tay ma girl! He tay ma girl and den he go away. He no got good way. Ma girl no hobojo, oh!”

  I turned to the policeman. “What’s going on?” I asked, hoping I could glean a little more from him.

  “He say college boy play with girl tata, so he wan plenny dolla!”

  I got the general gist of the situation and ran down the hallway to the boy’s room. He was asleep, so I shook him. I woke up Fred too. I told them what was going on outside and said to both of them, “You get out there! Something has happened here, and it’s all your crap.”

  We went outside and the woman pointed to the nephew. Everyone started yelling again and I took out some money to quiet them down. I paid the woman ten dollars and gave the policeman some dash, and said, “Palaver fini!” He smiled. The others still looked insulted, but they all went away.

  It had started to rain by then. Deet had seen the whole thing. He suddenly went into their rooms, gathered up their stuff and threw it out into the road. “Get out now und find your own hotel!” Fred was appalled, and the nephew started to protest vehemently. Deet thought they needed another lesson in the rules of living in Liberia, so he went and got his gun and said to the nephew, “If you don’t get de fuck out of de house immediately, I vill shoot you!” The boy knew he meant it and said nothing more.

  They left, and I didn’t see them again. I asked Deet why he had been so harsh.

  “I’ve seen it before,” he said, “und I didn’t vant to have to put up vith it—de endless palaver. Vonce it starts, it never seems to end. It vears you down. It vrings you out. Und it can be dangerous.”

  The next night, Colin, Ozzie, and I decided to go to a movie downtown. I’d heard “Cat Ballou” with Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda was pretty funny, so I suggested it. We all need a little humor now and then. Ozzie parked his car in front of the theater and immediately a teenage boy came up to “guard” our car.

  “You hep me small, mista. You hep me small and I guard yo car.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ozzie said, “here you go, here’s twenty-five cents. You guard my car.” Then to us, he said, “Make sure you lock all the doors. I don’t want him sleeping inside the car.”

  It was starting to rain slightly, and as we walked into the theater, the boy climbed up on the hood of the car to keep watch. It was about 10:00 p.m. when we came back out; there was still a light rain. Our boy was sound asleep on the hood, looking very comfortable but hanging on to the windshield wipers so he wouldn’t fall off.

  “Hey boy!” Colin yelled. “Wake up! Your job is over!” The kid didn’t move. Ozzie got in the car and blasted the horn for a good five seconds. The kid still didn’t move. Then he told us all to get in the car and started the engine—nothing. I was beginning to feel a bit uneasy. I had gotten to know Ozzie by this time and he seemed capable of anything. Ozzie started creeping down the street with the boy on the hood—still nothing. He sped up to about 30 mph. The boy seemed to have this sleeping death grip on the windshield wipers. He wasn’t going to let go.

  Ozzie said, “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go to the airport and see if this guy can fly!”

  I was really wishing that I wasn’t in the car, but I said nothing. We got to the airfield and we went straight down the runway at probably 40 or 50 mph. At the end of the runway, Ozzie shouted, “Hang on!” and then he stomped on the brakes.

  The boy went flying off the hood and disappeared.

  Fortunately, he must have made
a soft landing because in a few moments after he disappeared from the hood, he popped up into the headlights yelling, “Boss! I’m not asleep, boss! I’m not asleep!”

  All I could think was, Holy shit!

  CHAPTER 19

  THE MAJOR

  Ozzie drove me back to the beach house. I took a rare shower and dropped into bed. I didn’t know anything until I was awakened the next morning by knocking on my door. Deet and Tony were nowhere to be seen so I told whoever it was to wait. I slipped into yesterday’s shorts and a slightly stained t-shirt and, after brushing my hair back with my hand, opened the door. It took several seconds for me to recognize Major Ahud. He was dressed in the Israeli manner—casual trousers and a short-sleeved shirt open at the collar. He was clean shaven and his hair was immaculately styled. He was carrying a larger than usual attaché case. I figured that this was it. He had come to teach me a permanent lesson about sleeping with another man’s wife.

  “Can I come in?” he said.

  I opened the door and stood back.

  “Look,” I said. “If this is about—”

  “We can talk about that later. For now, I’ve come to offer you a deal.”

  “There’s nothing like getting to the point. What kind of deal?”

  With that, he opened the attaché case and pulled out a shiny new Uzi submachine gun. I felt a stone-like paralysis sweep through my body. The first controllable thought I had after that was I would not live to see my next birthday. The second one was that it had been a mistake to sleep with his wife.

  “Nine millimeter, twenty-five round magazine, blowback operated six hundred rounds per minute, muzzle velocity of four hundred meters per second, two hundred meter effective range, weighs 3.5 kilograms and has a 10.2 inch barrel.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, “but . . .”

  “Let’s go outside. I’ll show you how it works. Bring something you don’t need or want.”