“Dr. Richmond never appeared,” Carl said.
“Sorry about that. The mission …”
“… was successfully concluded. I remember. But I’m back. With reinforcements. Looks like we have to finish the job for the marines. Looks like we get to go find Dr. Richmond ourselves.”
“Good luck with that,” the woman said. “You’ll never get to Buchanan. People running from LURD are jammed on the road south. People running from MODEL are moving north and west. The already wonderful Liberian roads are blocked by people on foot. You can’t get around without a helicopter. The copters are getting shot at when they’re up. Shot at by everybody with a slingshot.”
“Happy to accept the loan of a helicopter,” Carl said.
“Only in your dreams,” the man said. “Helicopters cost money. And they break. Walk if you want. You already got the best ride of your life when we lifted you out of here.”
“You’re putting three more Americans in harm’s way,” Carl said.
“Bullshit. You are putting three more American’s in harm’s way. Or four,” the man said. “Don’t expect the cavalry to come to the rescue a second time.”
“I’m going to be absolutely clear,” the woman said. “We can’t guarantee your safety. Not even a little. Not in Monrovia, not in Buchanan, not in the bush, and not even here. Your government doesn’t think you belong anywhere near the Republic of Liberia. You’re going to get yourself and your so-called reinforcements killed, and if you don’t watch your ass, you’re going to get Dr. Richmond killed as well. Dr. Richmond is okay. You can only make things worse for her. She’s as good as she can be, given the situation. You, however, are totally fucked if you don’t turn yourself around and head home today, whichever way you got yourself here. Capiche?”
“The hell with that,” Carl said. “We’re going to Buchanan. And we can use all the help we can get.”
“Help you?” the woman said. “We don’t even know you exist. You getting yourselves killed is your problem. No one in their right mind is going to put more American lives at risk to protect this little field trip.”
“Thanks for the brass band and the red carpet. It’s nice to know the U.S. government is taking care of business,” Carl said. “I promise we’ll call only if we really need you.”
“You can call all you want.” The man said. “Nobody’s home. Mission accomplished. We’re outta here. Packing up and heading home. You oughta do the same.”
“We’ll join you when we have Dr. Richmond in tow.”
“Good luck with that too. By which I mean nice to know you. And you should live and be well. By which I mean don’t call me, I’ll call you,” the man said.
“Appreciate the warm welcome and support,” Carl said. “Semper fi.”
The man and the woman turned to face the bar. Carl and Terrance looked at Levin.
“What’s the scoop?” Levin said.
“Julia is alive,” Carl said. “And they know where she is.”
Levin wasn’t sure where he was when he awoke in the middle of the night. They had turned the generator off at midnight. There was no AC, so the room was hot and sticky, and the moist air smelled of mold and sweat. It was pitch black, inside and outside. Levin heard occasional voices calling one another in the dark; not close, blocks away, not feet away, and further off as well. Then random gunfire, single shots and short bursts in the distance, mixed in with the voices far away in the dark.
He turned over and felt the hard floor. Hard and cool.
A hotel. They were in a hotel. In Liberia. Levin remembered the plink, plink, plink, plink of the burst of machine-gun fire hitting the dumpster next to the RAV. The strutting kid with the sunglasses and gun. The red pickup parading down the street, rap booming and intestines hanging from the antenna. Levin was sleeping on the floor, on cushions from the single chair in the room. Carl and Terrance were snoring on the bed. The bathroom. Where the hell was the bathroom? How did this hotel room lay out? Damned old man bladder. This would have been a good night to sleep through. But not tonight.
He knelt, and then stood, his hand on a wall. And waited. He had a little flashlight on his key ring, but that was in the pocket of his pants, and he didn’t want to go back looking for it. Maybe there was some light that his eyes could find if he waited for them to get used to the dark. Maybe a night-light of some kind in the bathroom or the seepage of light from under the door.
But nothing. Dark as a dungeon.
Levin felt his way along the wall. Where was the damned bathroom door? A doorknob. A window. Some lights in the distance, from the few places that had generators and enough firepower to risk being seen. He felt around in the dark. The toilet. Close the door. Sit. Better.
Up to my neck in it this time, Levin thought. How does anyone let a place get like this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the usual explanations—colonialism and U.S. imperialism and globalization and consumer capitalism, all true and all lies, each in their own way. There were kids on the street with automatic weapons, shooting each other and everything in sight. Dead men whose hearts had been cut out and eaten raw. Where are the decent people who should have been able to stop this? Where were the mothers of these kids and the grandmothers who keep the world on its track?
I could die here, Levin thought. Probably will die here. That’s okay. My work is done. I had my run. Passed on some of what I learned. Julia can carry it forward if she survives. Maybe we’ll find her and get her out. Maybe she’ll survive on her own. She’s tough, that kid. She’ll probably outlive the three of us, Africa or no Africa, war or no war.
I didn’t defeat global capitalism, Levin thought. Or greed. Or stupidity. Or colonialism—all different ways of saying the same thing. But it’s been a good ride. Saw a lot. Thought a lot. Did a lot. Even fought for justice a little, but God knows we are far off that mark. And how cool it is to be here. Riding around a war zone with these two cowboys. We got this far. No one would have thought it. Everybody dies of something. Might as damn well go out in a blaze of glory. Finding Julia and getting her to Carl—that’s a story they can tell their kids. That’s more than enough glory for one man, for one lifetime. Sure beats running in a cemetery.
Levin stood. He could see his sleeping comrades now by the faint light from the window.
They weren’t snoring, Carl and Terrance. They were out deep and breathing heavy. Human beings. Good men, even Terrance, the rogue. There is goodness in people. Maybe greatness. I’m lucky to be alive. I’m lucky to be here, Levin thought.
One body. No demonstration ever sets you free. But being together does.
He found his pillows on the floor, lined them up and lay on them. And slept.
Chapter Eighteen
Terrance Evans-Smith, Carl Goldman, and William Levin. Monrovia and Samuel Kanyon Doe Stadium, Paynesville, Liberia. August 16, 2003
CARL WOKE THEM BEFORE DAWN. THERE WERE TOO MANY PEOPLE ON THE STREET TO DRIVE fast even then.
People cooked in the road, sat in the road, and slept on the street. Women with boxes and bundles. Men bent double with big fake-leather suitcases held together by belted circles of silver duct tape on their backs. Shanties made of scavenged metal roofing and blue and silver tarps, built right on the broken tarmac.
Terrance nosed through the crowd, which parted before them and closed in after them, as if people were water.
They barely made one mile an hour. Walking would have been faster, only you couldn’t get through the throng any better on foot. Carl stared out the window, tense and angry.
The throng got thicker outside JFK Hospital. Gaunt men in camouflage stood at the wrought iron fence in front of the hospital. Blue jeeps and pickups were parked inside the gates. The soldiers pointed their guns at the people in the street. People walked in front of the guns but kept their distance, ready to run for cover the moment one of the soldiers lost his nerve and started firing.
They drove up a hill that overlooked the ocean. Then they drove through Congo Town, where most of the b
uildings along the road were wrecked—a wall gone here, the windows shot out there, another building falling in on itself where a tank or half-track had pushed through it. Somebody had themselves a good little battle in here, Terrance thought. One wild time. Really messed it up. Someone cut all the telephone and electric wires off the telephone poles that ran along the street. The short wire ends looped around each pole, running every which way. Telephone poles with bad hair, but there was no wire from pole to pole. Nothing was connected any more. Everything was ruined. Life was fried. Frazzled. Gone.
Nothing moved. Nothing worked. Hope was a memory. A dream. A hallucination. A mirage.
The evening rains and dusk came. The sky became yellow, orange, purple, and red.
A crowd gathered at a soccer stadium in front of two tents flying white and red flags. One more army, Terrance thought, and turned south to get away, expecting another check-point.
But Carl pointed to the tents.
“Médecins Sans Frontières; Doctors without Borders,” Carl said. “We’ll stop here. Three goddamn miles today. Maybe four.”
Men and woman dressed in white coats and blue jeans moved through the throng, some dispensing water in tiny paper cups, others with clipboards and stethoscopes. They checked with each person on the line and sent people off to different queues.
“My crew,” Levin said. “I’ll go to parley.”
Terrance and Carl opened their doors when Levin did and stood to stretch, leaning against the RAV as Levin walked into one of the tents.
They were surrounded by Liberian people, lost inside their clothes, covered with red dust. An old man who looked something like his ma’s second man, only older and shrunken, and who couldn’t look up. Young women, some carrying babies, others standing alone, but all who looked away the second he caught their eye, the second he saw the fear and disappointment, afraid and ashamed of the lives they had and had lost, afraid of Terrance who was washed and fed, afraid for themselves and of themselves, as if they knew their bodies had betrayed them by giving birth to boys and men like Terrance, afraid of the hotness that brought men and women together. Old women, just waiting, without any hope or expectation, waiting for God in his mercy to make known his plan. Children hiding behind their mother’s lapas, confused about where they were. Terrance checked each person, looking for the eyes of someone he knew and who knew him among the shells of people who stood on line.
These were the people Terrance had raided when he was strong-strong, invisible, and flying above the earth. Here, standing on the same ground, waiting with Liberian people, Terrance discovered the war at last. He wasn’t raiding or taking what he wanted. He couldn’t fly above the earth, invisible and invincible. He also wasn’t just driving through a shapeless mass, dodging a throng of the abject and the walking dead. Now Terrance saw the war and felt the war and suddenly discovered how the war he made had reduced Liberian people to ghosts, to shells, to victims, to the weak and helpless and a people without a home or a purpose in their own country. Suddenly Terrance saw himself as a Liberian for the first time, as one more victim, even though, for Terrance, to be a victim—to be wounded or dead—was to be less than nothing, subhuman, a woman who licked your boots begging, a severed head, its mouth tasting the red dirt.
They are my people, Terrance thought.
The men and women in white coats and jeans walking among the others were different from the people they walked among. They were now the only people who appeared to be alive, who walked and talked and acted like they belonged.
Levin found Logistics.
The Médecins Sans Frontières people had been in country since May, they said—and they were up to their eyeballs. Yes, they had heard that Merlin and the County Hospital in Buchanan had been overrun. Nothing they could do about Buchanan now. They had teams in Bong, Grand Cape, Mount, Bomi, Gbarpolu, Grand Bassa, Margibi, and Grand Gedeh Counties, and those teams needed all the help they could get. The supply chain wasn’t working. MSF was trying to negotiate air drops of supplies with UNMIL, but have you ever tried to talk to anyone at the UN? Try getting a coherent answer in anything under six months. They knew about the burned-out vehicle of the Norwegian and the two Liberians who disappeared in Toe County in the spring. They had heard that Julia had disappeared north of Buchanan, her car found burned out, and that two men with her had been found dead. There was a website that listed missing and dead health workers around the world. They hadn’t heard anything else. They didn’t have a reliable internet connection yet. The three men could park the RAV next to the tents, and there were cots they could use for one night and breakfast in the morning, just tea or coffee and a hard roll wrapped in plastic.
Levin asked about who was here doing kids and emergency assessments and where they were here from. It took him two minutes to ferret out a connection. Seconds to find somebody who knew somebody else. Two degrees of separation. Global health, emergency response, and stabilization. Maybe one degree. University of Indiana folk at Eldoret. The group in Burma. Partners in Haiti. The torture assessment project run by PHR out of NYU.
They could use Levin’s help in the Pedi tent overnight. I know he isn’t properly credentialed. He’s here and he speaks kids. We know people in common. Someone had read a paper. Pedigree works. The hell with credentialing. Let’s put you to work.
The football pitch was purple and covered with bodies and tarps. It had once been green and flat with white chalk lines marking the boundaries of the playing field. Now the air above the pitch was gray from charcoal smoke and the stink of too many bodies in not enough space.
Terrance and Carl got dinner in the volunteers’ mess.
Levin reappeared at about midnight when the generators shut down and the camp quieted. He paced while Carl and Terrance slept on bedrolls next to the RAV. He was snoring at sunrise, when he awoke with a start. Then he fell back to sleep. They let him sleep and snore until the sun rose over the tree line.
Chapter Nineteen
Terrance Evans-Smith, Carl Goldman, and William Levin. Paynesville and Harbel, Liberia. August 17, 2003
THE AIR WAS ALREADY HOT IN THE SHADE WHEN THEY SET OUT THE NEXT DAY. A DULL yellow haze hung in front of the early morning sun. They were about a mile from the stadium when they hit their first stretch of open road—fewer people, no cars, and no checkpoints. Terrance got the car up to thirty miles an hour.
The cement block houses and the shops lining the road had all been destroyed. They passed groups of traditional houses made from poles with mud walls and layered palm leaf roofs arranged around outside cooking shanties. A few people sat or stood beside the fires.
They passed a bombed-out gasoline station. The pumps were gone and the bright red canopy that once stood over the pumps had collapsed. There was red dust on the bright green, blue, and red painted walls—paint and brightness that had once beckoned to travelers on this important road, which connected Monrovia, capital of the oldest democracy in Africa, to the international airport and to the Firestone plantation, the largest rubber plantation in the world.
“Check the tank,” Carl said. “Long trip. I don’t know if there’s any gas between here and Buchanan. If we get to Buchanan.”
“Ha ta,” Terrance said. Half a tank.
“Stop when you can. Next open gas station,” Carl said.
But there weren’t any open gas stations. Instead there were destroyed gas stations, one after the next.
Then Terrance noticed something. There were rickety tables in front of destroyed gas stations where the gasoline pumps used to be. On the tables sat five-gallon jugs filled with amber liquid, and next to each jug were one or two smaller bottles and sometimes a large white funnel. Terrance knew these jugs from little shops in the small villages he raided. Now the jugs were on the main airport road. Next to the table, as often as not, sat a man or a woman in a white plastic chair, holding an umbrella as a shield from the sun.
They passed one or two of these people before Terrance realized that Carl and Levin did
n’t know what they were seeing.
“Petrol,” Terrance said. “Na gas station. De se petrol ju ba ju.” These aren’t gas stations. They are selling gas by the jug.
“You’re right,” Carl said. “Those guys with jugs are all that’s left. That’s a gas station now.”
“Sure there ain’t something more solid up ahead?” Levin said. “Who knows what’s really in those jugs.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Carl said.
They passed a third and a fourth rickety table, but the large glass jug on each table was almost empty.
Then they passed a table with a full jug.
“Stop here,” Carl said. “Let us avail ourselves of what God’s provided.”
Terrance pulled the RAV off the road.
A man in an orange tee shirt and cut off jeans who was missing his left foot and ankle sat in a chair next to a table that held one of the large amber jugs, a smaller one-liter plastic soda bottle, and a white plastic funnel. The one-legged man rose on a pair of handmade crutches whittled from the branch of a tree. He hobbled over to the window of the RAV.
“Wha co?” Terrance said. How much?
“U.S.? LD?” the man said.
“U.S.,” Terrance said. “Quick-quick.”
“Two dolla liter, U.S.,” the man said.
“Wha co jug?”
“Eighty dolla U.S. jug.”
“All jug. Quick-quick,” Terrance said.
Carl handed Terrance four twenty-dollar bills, and Terrance handed them to the man on crutches.
The man balanced on his one good leg, leaned one of his crutches against the car, inspected the bills, folded them and put them into his pocket. He hobbled back to the table, put the one-liter plastic soda bottle on the ground and put the funnel in the mouth of the soda bottle. Then he lifted and tipped the large glass jug to one side so that a thin rivulet of gasoline spilled out of the jug through the funnel and into the bottle on the ground.
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