“They tell us where to find her?” Levin said.
“He na wa be found. Bi mon ca in. He na say whe.” He doesn’t want to be found. The big man calls in. He doesn’t say where he is.
“Goddamn,” Carl said.
“She’s alive,” Levin said. “And close.”
“What kind of shape is she in?” Carl said.
“She woman,” Terrance said. “She strong.”
“We’re not going to find her tonight,” Levin said.
“We need to stop for the night. The roads up here are no good at night,” Carl said.
He looked around the room.
“We sleep here,” Terrance said.
“Tomorrow we go north,” Carl said. “I know these roads. Not as well as I should, but at least I’ve been here before. I may not know where to find her, but I know where to look. There are a couple of health centers north and west of here. We’ll start with those in the morning.”
They settled in a spot near the bar, near the door that led from the bar to where the kitchen used to be.
The rain stopped. The cloud that had enveloped the hill blew off to the southeast. The setting sun emerged above the mountains in the west as it dropped, and its light slipped between the cloud cover and the earth, illuminating the grand sweep of plain and mountain, of lime green farmland and dark green forest beyond, the light spreading over the land the way honey or maple syrup spreads over a slice of toast, just before the sun sank behind the mountains.
Then it was dusk, and the land, the mountains, the plain, the farmland, and the forest slipped into the dark blue of the early evening, and then it all disappeared.
The three men lay down, their heads next to the wall, their feet pointed into the middle of the room, and in a few moments all three fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Julia Richmond and Jonathan. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. July 31–August 20, 2003
JULIA AND JONATHAN SET OUT AT NOON IN A WHITE FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE EXTENDED CAB Dodge Ram 2500 pickup in the sharp equatorial sun; a sun that was so strong you could feel it burn your skin the moment you stepped out of the shade. Knots of soldier-boys and soldier-girls squatted or sat in the shade of camouflage tarps or nestled against the clubhouse walls. The boys didn’t get up when Julia and Jonathan walked out. The boys didn’t wave, or even grin.
“Drive,” Jonathan said.
Julia drove. Jonathan sat in the passenger seat—a big sweaty man wearing mirror-lens aviator sunglasses, a khaki shirt, a white beret that made no sense to Julia at all, a handgun and a white satellite phone holstered on his right hip. Three expandable black suitcases had been placed between the driver’s and rear passenger’s seat so Jonathan could swing around while Julia was driving and get what he needed without her having to stop. There were other weapons in those suitcases, Julia knew. At least Jonathan wasn’t holding a gun on Julia as she drove, so she could pretend to keep her eyes on the road.
Julia hadn’t driven at all in seven months. You don’t think about it. In Liberia, there is always a driver. Often a guard. Didn’t matter. Driving now was no delight. There was none of the wild freedom, none of the illusion of power, of putting the top down and hitting the gas, that you get when you drive on the highways of the U.S. of A. The white Ram was big and slow-moving. Its engine spit and rumbled when Julia turned the key, resisting life. It had a heavy floor shift that was hard to move and was designed for a shoulder and an arm that was much bigger than hers.
“Down there,” was all Jonathan said.
Jonathan did not direct Julia after that. She drove out the way she knew to come in—down the hill, right, past the “Members Only” sign. The air under the rubber trees looked cool and quiet. Looking, you sensed a soft breeze even if you couldn’t feel it.
At first Julia thought that Jonathan was taking them to Buchanan, and she started to turn left after they passed the burned-out gatehouse.
“Go right,” Jonathan said, and Julia turned toward Bong County and either Guinea or Ivory Coast, depending on whether you went east or west as you drove north. The truck lugged and trembled, shaking over the road, which had become gravel and would soon be the scalloped, rutted red dirt of the government roads.
“Right,” he said, after a few miles, as they passed a village where there was a market of between twenty and thirty stalls, a village that looked deserted. “You said the health center was north.”
All the villages they passed were deserted. There was no smoke from the cooking fires. No women squatting or sitting next to the stalls. No one at the village pump.
After three or four miles the air thickened and began to stink. Julia felt the smell in her eyes, and she knew that the air would make her cough if she inhaled it, so she didn’t breathe.
Julia’s Land Cruiser lay blackened on its side. The driver’s side rear wheel was off. All you could really see was the undercarriage. It hadn’t been stripped yet—which meant people were still hiding, and there was likely still plenty of trouble on the road.
There were two bloated bodies lying on the embankment. Someone had moved Charles off the road.
Julia didn’t turn to look. She didn’t let herself feel what she felt.
The Land Cruiser was a historical marker, a sign marking the site where a battle had been, marking a road some pioneer in the distant past had traveled.
Jonathan didn’t know one burned-out truck from the next. He was just watching the road, although you couldn’t see his eyes under the sunglasses. He put a bandanna over his nose and mouth.
Julia saw and didn’t see the sign to the District #4 Health Center, a white sign with blue and green letters that was covered with a patina of red dust. Jonathan saw it.
“Left,” Jonathan said.
The road was the same bad one-track road she had come down two weeks before. Twenty kilometers through the woods. Potholes with red water from last night’s rain. Furrows, not ruts, some so deep that they would bottom out the vehicle if you slipped into one, some that were deep enough to flip you on your side if you hit it wrong.
You could call the woods jungle if you wanted, but there was nothing particularly deep or frightening about these woods, except that they were so isolated, with no sign of animals, people, or civilization. Massive trees stood right next to the road—huge white trunks with crowns that were so tall you couldn’t see them. But there was quiet in these woods, the same still and peace Julia knew from the thick woods of Northern California and the great forests of North Carolina—both places where lush vegetation overwhelms the red earth.
They drove for hours, deeper and deeper into the isolated bush, until they came to a deep ravine crossed by a bridge that that looked impassable. Julia stopped the truck and turned off the engine.
The ravine was a slash of darkness, a deep pit that cut the road in half, an abyss. The red dirt ended on the near side of the ravine and started again on the other side, five car lengths away. There was a quickly moving stream fifty feet below that Julia could hear but couldn’t see. A few black logs and two or three iron girders had been rammed into the walls of the ravine, connecting the two edges but not bringing them together. No reasonable person would ever drive on this, Julia thought, remembering that she and Sister Martha had always gotten out and walked across after Torwon had somehow gunned the engine and bounced the Land Cruiser to the other side. Even walking across was scary.
“Cross it,” Jonathan said.
“I know this bridge,” Julia said. “I’m not sure it will hold the truck.”
“You’ve crossed before,” Jonathan said.
“Local driver. It’s a long way down.”
“But you’ve crossed before. In that Land Cruiser. At least twice.”
“I’m not the world’s best driver.”
“You will be a good enough driver today,” Jonathan said. “I will be cheering from the side.”
Jonathan got out, taking the smallest black suitcase from behind his seat. The truck listed to the
side as he shifted his weight, and then it rose again as he stepped down and slammed the door. He stood off to the right of the bridge in the shade. He didn’t even say good luck.
I could leave him here, Julia thought I could just pop it into reverse, hit the gas and not stop. Until the impossibility of driving backward for miles struck her.
She started and gunned the engine once, just to hear it respond. She backed the truck up twenty feet. As Torwon had done. Then she threw it into four-wheel drive low and hit the gas.
The girders and the logs slanted down and to the left, but the near side was a few inches higher than the road. The front end rose and mounted the bridge, a rider on a skittish horse. The wheels bounced and slipped over the girders and logs. The steering wheel jerked and shimmied. The chassis shook. The rear wheels came onto the bridge. The undercarriage twisted and groaned on the uneven surface.
The bridge surface dipped sank and swayed with the truck’s weight. It grunted as the truck slipped to one side.
Julia gave the truck more gas. The front wheels headed right, while the rear wheels slipped left. More gas. Pulling left, toward the drop. Straighten it out. Fast. More gas.
Then nothing. The left rear wheel wedged against the last girder—all that was between the truck and the drop—and hissed for a moment, spinning, and the truck drifted forward and started to lean into the abyss. Then the right front wheel found the far side of the bridge and the hard red soil of the far bank. More gas. More gas.
Julia stood up in her seat. She twisted the wheel with everything she had and slammed the gas petal to the floor.
The engine roared. The front end rose. It teetered on edge for an instant. Then it came onto the bank and its weight secured the traction of the front wheels. It pulled the body of the truck onto the far side of the ravine.
The truck stopped and stood white and shimmering in the midday heat, its fenders covered with red mud, the diesel humming and rattling like the top of a pot of simmering water.
Jonathan walked slowly on the bridge over the ravine.
He opened the door and put the heavy small black suitcase he was carrying on top of his other luggage. Then he climbed in.
He closed the door and sat looking straight ahead.
“You do know how to drive,” Jonathan said.
“I could have kept going,” Julia said. “I should have left you standing there.”
“I’m sure you’ll have other opportunities to test your luck. Which appears to be holding.”
“Not even you,” Julia said.
“What did you say?” Jonathan said.
“Not even you. I don’t leave human beings stranded in the middle of the jungle,” Julia said. “Not even you.”
“Nonsense. You are talking to yourself,” Jonathan said. “You don’t leave human beings stranded in the middle of a jungle. I do what I need to do, before it gets done to me.”
“Even so,” Julia said. “I’m driving this truck.”
“You’re driving a truck I gave you because I asked you to drive it. You’re only alive because I have use for you alive. Today. Don’t forget that.”
“Fuck you,” Julia said. She shifted the truck into four-wheel drive high. The truck jolted, heaved, and shuddered down the rutted red road.
The District #4 Health Center sits at the top of a rise in a clearing of perhaps three acres and has dark green walls. It has a corrugated iron roof but no real doors—there is a dark open porch lined by rough cut wooden benches, their surfaces polished by years of use. The porch opens into dark hallways. The hallways connect to vestibules, also dark. There is no electricity at the District #4 Health Center. The only light is sunlight, filtering through the windows of some of the rooms or down the hallways from the outside.
A number of rooms open off the vestibules—examination rooms, supply rooms, and a medical record room, so-called, which holds shelf after shelf of soiled, dog-eared green folders, folders that sit on the shelving in considerable disarray. The room for laboring women has three or four beds jammed together at odd angles, as though they had been pushed from one place to another in a hurry. The infirmary room has four beds lining the walls. It is used for infants with diarrhea or for children listless or shaking with malaria. There are three examination rooms, each with a wooden desk in front of a large screened window, with a chair next to the desk.
All the rooms were empty. Julia parked the truck and checked them all. The place looked abandoned.
Jonathan looked both bigger and smaller than before when he swung down from the truck. Bigger, because he was a big man dressed in sharp clothes and carried himself as if he owned the world, and also bigger because the District #4 Health Center was a place where small people lived close to the earth, and he was so much bigger than they were. Smaller, because there was no wind in his sails. No one knew him here. Here, there weren’t people to take his orders or cluster around him. He was just a big dark man with a gun on his hip who dressed too well for the bush and was traveling in a truck with a white woman.
Julia sat on the steps of the empty health center, ignoring Jonathan. The mud houses down the hill and further back to the right and uphill were just as she remembered. There was smoke rising from kitchen fires in both compounds. She felt oddly, unexpectedly, at home.
What a strange place to hide from the ravages of a war men like Jonathan had brought on, she thought, as Jonathan climbed the steps carrying his own suitcases. Strange and logical at the same time. Men like Jonathan make wars. Women allow the wars to go on. The wars are like fires that burn as long as there is fuel, and then burn themselves out. The fuel is the extra, the fuel is the excess. As long as we have more than we need to live on, we will live to see both the good that is in us as people together and the evil that sits alongside it and that resides in each of us alone. In abundance, we see the good that has come from being together, the miracles we have made by learning from one another and working together. And out of that same abundance comes greed and violence, as some of us, the men who think themselves big, use what we have made together to try to realize their insane dreams, to satisfy insane lusts.
The people in the bush, the people the clinic served, thought they had nothing to spare, like the birds in the trees and the insects whirling in the bush. But even people in the bush have something to trade, and no one lives in isolation. Medicine comes from away. The tee shirts come from away—they were made in Bangladesh. The machetes that some men use to cut brush and other men use to cut off arms and legs come from China, as do the cheap metal pots. The marbleized plastic bowls that women use to carry water on their heads come from Nigeria, as do the soldiers who had landed in Monrovia. The trucks and guns came from Japan, Korea, Israel, Russia, the U.S., and Azerbaijan. Even in the bush, there was excess; excess that flowed out of the industrialized world and into every nook and cranny of the ancient low-to-the-ground world, like hot lava flowing down the side of a volcano. Together we make abundance, even as this abundance fuels the fires that tear us apart.
Carl is dead, Julia thought again. Lord only knows what’s left of Buchanan. Zig, Sister Martha, all dead. The hospital, Lord only knows. How I wish Carl wanted more than he wanted. How I wish he and I hadn’t been so afraid. It was good. Sweet. Real. I got him, I think, and I think he was starting to get me. He had a hard enough time stopping by once a week or thinking that being together mattered. And yet sometimes he wanted me to talk. Sometimes he wanted me to push and probe and pay attention to him and take care of him. He was starting to listen. And even to know me.
But no one is coming. Carl is dead. I’m on my own. Stuck here giving this monster cover.
Jonathan stood next to the first step, with his arms crossed on his chest. It is difficult to be in charge when there is no one to be in charge of.
We’ll be safe here for a while, for a few days or perhaps for a week, while the fires of hell are burning all around, Jonathan thought. Know when to hold them and know when to fold them. Know how to strike when
the iron is hot.
The next day some women came back to the health center. The following day even more women came, bringing with them their babies and all their problems. The doctor was back. Still no nurses, no PA, little in the way of medicines or supplies. But the doctor was back, so the people came.
Jonathan took over one of the exam rooms. He stayed out of Julia’s way, which was a good thing, because she couldn’t bear to look at him. He talked on the satellite phone until the battery ran out, and then used the battery of the truck to recharge it. Sometimes his voice was raised. Other times his voice was quiet and sounded almost contrite. Just a few days, Julia told herself. He will arrange something, mount the driver’s seat of the truck, and drive away, leaving Julia and the health center alone. No war here, Julia thought. Please God, do not let him bring the war here.
She worked as she always did, but it was more difficult without Sister Martha. She did what she could with her crappy Kreyol. She could look and feel. People could point and find a few words, whether Julia understood them or not. Everyone had plenty-plenty and small-small. It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start.
She dug a new pit for the latrine, and the PA returned and helped her move the latrine over the pit. Every morning she filled the yellow and red water coolers from Carl’s pump and brought them to the clinic before seeing patients, one after the next. They filled the water coolers when she wasn’t there, Julia told herself. They washed their hands when she wasn’t there before and after each patient. They used the latrine. Of course they did. But the water coolers weren’t filled each morning unless Julia filled them, so every morning she went out, just after she awoke.
At first there were many patients, who came because they heard the woman doctor was there, and the people in the villages were used to coming all at once every time word spread that the woman doctor was at the health center. Then word spread that the woman doctor was sleeping in the health center, not going and coming. So people came when they wished and didn’t rush, and the number of people who came each day fell off a little. And Julia would sleep for a little while in the late afternoon, when the rain came.
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