Terrance swung left, back onto Post Road above the water to his right, behind a line of condominiums and expensive-looking apartment houses, next to the railroad tracks. Then the houses started coming closer together, the sides of the road clogged with small stores and doctors’ offices, and the ocean disappeared as he climbed a hill. The road dropped into a congested place stuffed with buildings and stores, and then split, shunting him off to the right. He followed the new road, which was straight and flat and ran through miles of fast-food joints and dry cleaners—as tickytacky as the houses on the hill were polished and elegant. Then he turned off to drive among the acres of ranch houses and split-levels, some of which had RVs parked outside, on streets that all looked the same. There were school buses and crossing guards and many straight roads, but these were roads no one walked on. They were streets that had cars parked on the side of the road. You could park a car on one street, and no one would notice you if it was dark, but by day you would stand out just by walking on the street, even if it was early morning.
The streets took him back to the larger road. The larger road took him to the airport. Then he drove slowly north on the highway, nursing the car in the right-hand lane. Then home to the place with the broken screen door.
Terrance slept for an hour, maybe two.
When he woke, he put on a clean orange tee shirt, a Patriots cap turned backward, and big sunglasses with orange brown lenses, and then put headphones around his neck. Tool belt under the tee shirt. The hat and the glasses and the headphones, they made him invisible. Strong. He put the leopard’s claw in his pocket and closed the torn screen door behind him.
The man who bought the cars was off Broad near the port, in an old brick mill that had a parking lot littered with bent soda cans and used diapers, used condoms, old needles, and broken glass.
Terrance’s mother’s people were from St. John’s River. They were Bassa people who lived on the east bank of the river. They fished for tilapia, which they dried and put away in storehouses, and which kept them nourished in the rainy season. They grew bananas, cassava, pineapples, and yams. In St. John’s River mangoes grew wild and fell from the trees just before the rainy season. Or you could climb the trees and shake the mangoes down, but the trunks were fat and the bark was slimy, particularly after it rained, and once one of the cousins fell from the tree and did not get up.
He lived next to the river for four seasons. His mother finished college and had come home to Buchanan after the first man sent her away, because the first three were girls and they all died. He came to live with his mother and the new man in Buchanan. The new man had three women and twelve children, and Terrance’s mother walked proudly with him on Thomas Street when he was small, haggling with the cloth merchant and the Lebanese hardware man and the stalls where they sold pots and pans. His mother walked slowly and haggled slowly, without buying, to show him and her new belly to the world.
Then the war that killed Doe came, and his mother sent him to be with her people on the river, and she went off to America. He was on the river a few years and started school.
His mother sent money for his school fees and sent him school books and school clothes—brown pants and a bright yellow shirt. The students walked many miles to the school, so in the morning the paths and roads were dotted with brown pants and yellow shirts, as all the students walked to the school, which was painted white with blue trim and had a white and blue wall around it and a field to play football. There were many children in each form. They sat on the ground or on seats made from the trunks of rubber trees. You could see the river from the school, and you could also see the people in the dugout boats pulling in the nets that caught the fish they dried in the hot midday sun.
Then the war came back. Terrance was smaller than the others, so when they came through the school they took the others first. They came back a few months later and took him. They cut away his school clothes, and gave him pink and blue pajamas to wear. They taught him the things he needed to know to be a fighter, a man, the commander of the streets, and the ruler of the bush.
Ma was in America. Then there was no war again, and they, the people who ruled the world, had no more enemy to kill, and they were hungry. ECOMOG was running Buchanan then, and ECOMOG kept them from taking what they needed. He camped with his unit on the river delta near the iron smelter. They lived on what ECOMOG was letting the UN bring them, which was not living at all. His mother’s second man came and found him with his crew in Buchanan, between the battles, when they were hungry, laying around and waiting for more war.
One day the second man brought him jeans and a tee shirt and a thin, blue plastic grocery bag of mangoes that were bruised and soft, the kind of mangoes that the wind shakes from the trees in St. John’s River, the kind he used to leave for the insects and the skinks. But you could still eat these. His mother’s second man came back three days later and brought a cell phone. His ma said come. He was hungry, so he came. The others had started to vanish, to go back to their people in the bush. He went to his people first. They got him clothes and papers and put him on an airplane that he flew in the sky.
In America he slept all day and roamed at night, remembering. Then his ma find him a place to be at night, and then he sit at a desk wearing a blue monkey suit that was too big for him and walked the grounds with a flashlight all night.
Terrance opened the door of the Taurus, and then thought the better of it.
There was a bus into Providence and another bus that ran down Broad Street into Cranston. If he got off on Broad just past 95, no one would see him at all. Dark skin, young and thin, another kid hanging around the high school. Didn’t matter that it was summer and ninety-five degrees at 11:00 a.m. The streets over there were filled with thin black kids with backwards baseball hats, sunglasses, and lots of bling.
The thing about a bus is, you sit high over the street, like you own it, like you can fly, and if you sit in the back and stretch yourself out you stay above the earth where the bullets can’t find you. One little way to be strong and invisible in America. Almost. Not really strong. Mostly invisible.
He swung out of the second bus about an hour later. The bus hissed as he left it, the air coming out of the hydraulic system that raised and lowered the street side of the bus for people who were old and couldn’t climb the steps. The bus hissed even though Terrance was the only person getting out or coming on. He was off and walking before the side of the bus dropped to the level of the curb, only to rise again as it pulled away.
On Broad was a good place. He had trouble here once when he couldn’t see who was on the street, when that man chased him. He had outrun trouble that time. Now he was quicker, and he knew to go in the middle of the day, when he could see who was coming. He was quick-quick. Invisible. Powerful. Invincible.
There were cars in the parking lot at Classical and cars in the parking lot just across the street. One or two SUVs but mostly small old Hondas and Fords and banged up Toyota Corollas.
He walked south on Westminster. There was an old office building across the street and a restaurant supply store at street level, its windows filled with stacks of pots and pans and steam tables. The police headquarters were a few blocks away, but the police paid little attention to these streets. They seemed to think their very presence was enough to keep people like Terrance away.
Too much traffic on Westminster itself. He was quick-quick and could be in and gone in a moment but better to be in and out in a place where nobody was driving on the street.
He walked west on Westminster down a hot long block thinking to walk away from the police headquarters. Then he crossed the street and doubled back.
There was a red RAV on a side street.
He would be quick-quick. It was a cheap RAV, with nothing fancy on it—no power windows, no power seats, and no electronic locking ignition, but it had those letters. 4WD. The letters he needed. Money in the bank.
The lock was the old kind, the kind you could pull out as a
unit with a one-hand yank if you had a lever. Once the lock was out, the door opened, and you either popped the ignition off the column and crossed the wires or fished the wires under the dash and crossed them. Fishing the wires was a neater job, because then you could get keys made later once you had the car off the street. That way no one would have to rebuild the steering column, and that was the way to go if the car was staying in the U.S.
But popping the lock was okay if the car was going out of the country or was being parted out. It’s easier to pop the lock if you are working in daylight, because you can pop it while you sit in the driver’s seat. If you sit in the driver’s seat you look like you belong there. Anyone walking or driving by would think it was your car and you were just getting ready to put the key in the ignition. In order to fish the wires, you have to lay on your back under the steering wheel, so fishing the wires is better to do at night in a parking lot or a driveway where someone driving by isn’t going to see your feet hanging out in the street.
There was a car alarm though. There were always car alarms. No one pays attention to them. You can pop the hood and pull the wire of a car alarm in about ten seconds if you know what you are doing, and by then everyone thinks it is someone else’s alarm regardless of which car you hit.
He stood sideways and pressed his body against the back door, so you couldn’t see his hands if you made the right turn from Cranston Street and were driving by. The lock was out of the door in a half second, the door opened and he was inside, as the DOO-IPPP, DOOIPPP from the car alarm shattered the street. He popped the hood using the lever next to the seat, hopped out, went to the front of the car, pulled a wire cutter from his belt, and cut the wires going to the car alarm with two quick jerks.
The alarm fell silent after just five or six DOOO-IPPPs, about as much time as it takes a guy in a business suit to find his keys in his pocket and remember the right button to hit.
Then he was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door closed, and no one walking by could tell he was anyone other than a man in a car sitting in the driver’s seat.
He popped the ignition lock on the column, using a bezel, a tool that slips into the slot where the key goes, locks itself from the inside, and settles two bars against the steering column, far enough away from the key cylinder to keep from blocking its movement out of the steering column, but close enough to give you leverage. Once the bezel is in place, one hard twist of the handle and the key cylinder pops out. It’s a hard, twisting motion, all in the wrist, like gutting a fish or breaking the neck of a chicken.
There was a red and a blue wire soldered to the lock cylinder. He cut the wires with a wire cutter, stripped their ends with a flick of his wrist, crossed the wires, and hit the gas with his right foot.
The car started.
He gunned the engine and dropped it into gear, and then gunned it again as he swung it around, a quick u-ey back to Cranston Street.
The light was red, but there was no traffic going west, so he paused for just another instant and gunned the engine once more. Flying high. Invincible.
The RAV made a smooth screeching right turn onto Cranston Street, and then he hit the gas.
It hadn’t taken sixty seconds from the moment Terrance saw the car to the moment he was in it and driving west on Cranston Street. There was no one in America and no one in the world who could tell he was any different from any other black man in his twenties driving a car down a road in the middle of the day.
He was invisible. Invincible. Invulnerable. Able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound.
Chapter Eight
Carl Goldman. Lincoln and Providence, Rhode Island. July 18, 2003
THE PHONES FIRST.
Merlin was useless. They knew nothing. The compound in Buchanan had been overrun. The home office in London was trying to raise anyone who might still be in Buchanan but the cell phones weren’t working—and there had never been any landlines. The hospital had been overrun as well, and pillaged. It wasn’t clear who was in control of what. They knew it wasn’t safe to move around. They believed MODEL was the dominant force in Buchanan, but Taylor’s men—and boys—were still active in pockets across Grand Bassa and Bong Counties, fighting for territory, shooting up the villages, raping and maiming and pillaging as they went. No one knew who was where. No one knew who was alive and who was dead. No one knew what was going to happen next. There was nothing to do. Eventually one big man would emerge and quiet the countryside. Then the guns and RPGs would go back into the wooden boxes and be buried again in the bush or at the beach, ready for the next round.
Carl tried the resources he knew in country. The U.S. embassy in Monrovia was worthless. USAID, less than worthless—they’d all left with the marines. Carl tried the few cell phone numbers he had in the memory of his phone—Zig and David, a few people at the Ministry of Health, a couple at USAID in country, others at the embassy, but it was the same all over. Nothing. The person you are trying to reach is unavailable. Or the repeating buzz of a busy signal, with each pulse hitting like the shock from an electric fence. Or the sound of a ring, over and over and over again, as if there was one telephone, set on a table in the middle of a huge empty auditorium or soccer stadium—the phone ringing alone, with no one to answer.
The ocean was now a brick wall. Carl couldn’t see over it. Julia was a grain of sand on a beach in a hurricane.
Carl was sitting in Lincoln, Rhode Island, in a condominium complex, listening to the birds, the chattering of the lawnmowers, and the whine of the leaf blowers.
Julia was alone in Liberia, stranded someplace in the middle of hell.
The State Department next. Dial one if. Dial two if. He got an automated attendant at the Bureau of Consular Affairs and then got the Africa Desk. Same drill as three days ago over the satellite phone. Very different tone. She was still missing? There had been a military evacuation in that area. The Privacy Act prohibits us from sharing information about U.S. citizens. We hope she is safe and will contact you soon. You were with her in Liberia? The military operation has been successfully completed. All U.S. citizens in that area have been evacuated. I will make a note of the information you are offering for the file. One of our analysts may contact you at a later date for further information. Thank you for calling the State Department of the United States of America.
But there was a guy. Julia talked about a guy. A teacher. A mentor. Something like that. A guy who kept Julia’s car for her while she was overseas. In Providence, Rhode Island. She e-mailed with him. Maybe he had news.
He was a doctor at a hospital. Robert something. Jewish kind of name. Maybe. Julia did kids. Maybe a pediatrician. Julia did the emergency room. Maybe in the emergency room. There are hundreds of doctors in Rhode Island. Maybe a thousand or two. But not hundreds of thousands. Should be findable.
Carl sat at Naomi’s computer and opened the Yellow Pages in the phone book. He looked back and forth from one to the other. There were about ten pages of doctors in the Yellow Pages. About half a page of pediatricians. Emergency rooms. No emergency room doctors. Six Roberts in pediatricians. Four with Jewish sounding names. Pretty thin.
The hospital’s website was better. Pictures and bios and e-mail addresses. In Pediatrics, lots of women. Four Roberts. Nothing for sure. In Emergency Medicine, fewer women. Williams and Roberts, Lawrences and a Dan and a Gary and a Francis and a couple of Brians. None of the Roberts fit though. Mostly young guys or guys with Irish names. A couple of the Williams, a Gary and a Dan had Jewish names. Those were all pretty young as well. But then there was an older William; William Levin. Pediatric Emergency Medicine. Global Health. Guy in his sixties.
William Levin. Old guy with white hair. Phone number. E-mail address. Long shot. A long shot is better than no shot at all.
Carl called. Voice mail of a secretary. He left a message. Then he sent an e-mail. Maybe this Dr. William Levin had news.
Then he called Delta. And Lufthansa. Kenya Airlines and South Africa Air. No the
y weren’t flying into Liberia. Air Morocco—not flying into Liberia either. Service temporarily suspended. There were flights to Accra, Conakry, and a twice-a-week flight into Abidjan. Freetown was still too crazy, and even Conakry was a crapshoot. The roads to the border were anything goes roads. You could talk yourself to the border, and you could walk across a border. But a guy alone on that frontier is not smart. Not smart at all, even if you are desperate. Desperate does not equal stupid. Or suicidal. It didn’t add up yet.
He checked his e-mail again. You never know. Maybe the Levin guy would get back to him. Maybe Julia had found some way out.
Médecins Sans Frontières. The Doctors Without Borders guys. They were in Africa. They were in Liberia. Maybe they knew something.
Carl checked his e-mail again.
It was 7:00 p.m. in Paris. The Médecins Sans Frontières website was for fundraising—pictures of kids and villages and white people in white tee shirts with their backs to the camera. Carl knew that drill. He sent an e-mail and would call Paris in the morning.
Abundance Page 15
