Abundance
Page 26
One day, a few weeks after they arrived, Jonathan began to shout. It was late in the afternoon, almost evening, and most of the patients were gone. His voice grew loud and echoed in the walls and the wooden floors, shaking them. Julia went to sit with the three women who remained on the porch, sitting on the benches with their children. The children suspended their playing on the porch when they heard Jonathan shouting. They came in from the garden in front of the health center, where the white truck was parked just down the steps. You could hear Jonathan’s voice in the village, Julia thought, and she was embarrassed because this was a quiet place, where the loudest sounds people ever heard were the crying of a baby, the crowing of a cock, and the evening thunder, and even that was simple, muffled, and wise.
Then the shouting stopped. Julia stood. The women on the benches raised their eyes to one another and their children began to play once more.
“Dr. Richmond,” Jonathan said, loud enough so that the whole clinic could hear and the sound carried to the village, but not as loud as his voice had been when he had been yelling.
Julia walked into the clinic. Jonathan stood at the door of the exam room he had expropriated, the room she and the others now avoided.
“There are three men at The Club with our boys,” Jonathan said. “What do you know about this?”
“I didn’t know you still had The Club,” Julia said.
“That isn’t of any concern to you. Those three men. Will they come here?” Jonathan asked.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Julia said.
“Are there people looking for you? Does anyone know you are here?” Jonathan asked.
“If I knew that, would I tell you?” Julia said.
“Thank you for answering my question,” Jonathan said. “We will send them away. And I may have found us a tunnel out to the north. I’ll know tomorrow. Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Us?” Julia said.
“Us. You’re still my ace in the hole. And I’m still in the game, as long as we’ve got the boys at The Club. Thank you for your hard work and continuing support,” Jonathan said.
“Fuck you,” Julia said, and she turned and went back to the porch.
The women and their children were gone from the benches. It had rained and the air was clean now. The ruts on the red road that came from the bush and came toward the health center were filled with water, and in the water was the reflection of an orange sky, lit by the setting sun.
Three men.
Julia went to the exam room and lifted the red and yellow water coolers from where they sat in her examination rooms. She brought them out to the porch and emptied the remaining water onto the garden she had started. Then she took the water coolers down the hill to the pump and filled them, and she cupped her hands, filled them with water, and splashed it onto her face, onto her eyes, and behind her neck.
She could not think. She could not hope. She could feel, and now there was too much feeling. There were chills and a shaking in her shoulders and in her spine coming up into her head and her eyes and a dropping pit in her pelvis and her gut. She splashed more water on her face to wash the feeling out of her eyes. Too much feeling. She didn’t know how to pray, but she was praying nonetheless in every ganglion and muscle fiber, in every cell and synapse.
He did feel what she felt. He did know what she knew. Carl was alive and he was close, and he was coming, and she was not alone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
William Levin. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. August 21, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
IT TOOK A FEW MINUTES OF WAKING AND THEN FALLING BACK TO SLEEP BEFORE LEVIN understood that the need was real and he would have to get up.
Old white man’s bladder again. Damn. Old white man’s burden.
He was alone, a white man in a room of black men with guns, in a country at war, a zillion miles from home.
But he was not alone. He was in Liberia, as distant from the rest of his life as it was possible to be. They were close to Julia. He had never been in a place like this. He was surrounded by war, guns, ammunition, and soldiers, by everything he hated. They had come together, the three of them, as different as three men could be. They had one purpose, one goal. Only that goal mattered. Levin knew how to send out a call, how to organize demonstrations, and how to go to meetings. He knew how to sink an endotracheal tube, how to throw in a chest tube, and how to run a code. But here he was just one of the boys. Bigger and smaller than himself.
Levin felt his way along the wall into the empty hallway. He tried each door that opened off the hall as he came to it, the cool metal of each door handle an island of certainty in a sea that was dark and indistinct.
The first two doors were locked. The third door was already open. He stumbled into the kitchen. Four tiny blue pilot lights burned in the darkness but cast no light, glimmering where the big cast iron cook stove had to be.
He turned and felt his way back to the hall. The next two doors were locked.
The third door was closed but opened easily when he pushed down on the cool metal handle. He saw the sign on the door in the dim reflected light as he opened it. Women’s. No reason to care.
He found a toilet and his bowel and bladder emptied. He sat longer, listening, thinking, almost wanting a cigarette, although he never smoked.
He heard the sounds of night before dawn—the whirring and humming of insects in the low branches of trees and the hooting and calling of the night birds. Then there was movement in the night, under the birds, and sound. Sudden, muffled movement. Hard metal sounds. The sticky hiss of tires moving slowly on pavement. Many tires, on trucks running without headlights, on a night with a waning three-quarter moon. Enough light to see by without being seen. The quiet groaning of springs as weight shifted in trucks that moved uphill. The low shudder of gears driving an axle. The click of doors being opened and then eased closed again, eased closed without slamming, so as not to be heard.
The soft thud of a bullet being slipped into a chamber.
The almost imperceptible click of safeties being slid off in the night.
The quiet crunch of tires on gravel as a 105mm howitzer is moved into position.
The click, click, click, click, click of targeting gears as the howitzer was aimed and locked. The squish and thud of a shell as it is jammed into the breech. The clunk of the howitzer feed door jammed shut behind a 105mm round.
The click of the firing button. The almost imperceptible thump of machinery just an instant before the powder explodes. The boom and swoosh as the shell rockets toward the wall of a building, which it will destroy. The explosion, the flash of light and hot wind and the shock wave.
The first shell to hit the front wall of The Club slammed Levin across the room and into a wall. The front wall collapsed, crushing the men beneath it. There was fire, smoke, and dust. And dark. And blindness. There was a horrific buzz, a loud ringing in his ears. Levin couldn’t hear a thing. What? So confusing. He couldn’t breathe
Carl. Terrance. Under the rubble. Gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
William Levin’s AOL. New Mail. December 31, 2003–March 2, 2006
From Julia15@gmail.com
Subject: Happy New Year
Date: December 31, 2003
Happy New Year. Alive and well.
From doctor1pumphandle@aol.com
Subject: Re: Happy New Year
Date: December 31, 2003
Julia! My God! Where are you? Are you okay?
From Julia15@gmail.com
Subject: Re:Re: Happy New Year
Date: April 27, 2004
Still in Liberia. Safe and sound. Only occasional access to e-mail. I know about Carl. Love that he got to meet you.
From dr1pumphandle@aol.com
Subject: Re:Re:Re: Happy New Year
Date: April 27, 2004
Where in Liberia? Can I call you? How much do you know? How much do you want to know? Are you safe? Do you know how much Carl loved you? How much we all
love you?
From Julia15@gmail.com
Subject Re:Re:Re:Re: Happy New Year
Date: December 31, 2004
Happy New Year again. I thought maybe. We weren’t an item yet. No cell reception where I am. Good work though. Immunization rates better. Improved infant and maternal mortality numbers. Malaria, TB, typhoid, meningitis, and HIV overwhelming. Good village pump. Clean water so little infant gastroenteritis death. Moms breast-feed! I still want to grow up to be like Carl. And you.
From dr1pumphandle@aol.com
Subject: Which Village?
Date: December 31, 2004
Tell me where you are so I can send you equipment and meds, whatever you need. There’s a boat that goes from the Port of Providence to Monrovia every two weeks. Can I send you a satellite phone? That way we can talk. I’m the one who wants to grow up to be you. Carl and I only knew each other for thirty-something days. It happens fast when it happens. There were three of us. We got to be a tough little unit. Saw Liberia, out there looking for you.
From Julia15@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Which Village?
Date: February 23, 2005
Village is about thirty kilometers from where you got jumped. We just missed. Have access to a satellite phone. But I can’t talk about it yet.
How did you meet Carl? Tell me what you remember. I want to hold on to as much as I can. Why is that? Okay to sell the car.
From dr1pumphandle@aol.com
Subject: Re:Re: Which Village?
Date: February 23, 2005
Memory is dumb luck. And the grace of God. And I don’t do God. Carl called me as soon as he got home from Liberia after the marines pulled him out. Kind of desperate to find you. We met in a Liberian restaurant. Both of us were trying to figure out a way to help. Then we spent four weeks together on a boat and another week driving through a war looking for you.
Carl said he could picture you and thought he knew what you were feeling every minute of every day. Knew without thinking about it. Just always knew. He said you had become a part of him, and didn’t realize it until you disappeared. That he had to go back, because he was looking for a part of himself.
You were lucky people. Most of us spend our lives looking for that.
The car is probably worth $8,500. Not sure I can sell it, though. It’s all I have of you. And Carl. And Terrance, who you never got to meet.
From Julia15@gmail.com
Subject: Re:Re:Re: Which Village?
Date: September 16, 2005
How did he die?
From dr1pumphandle@aol.com
Subject: Re:Re:Re:Re: Which Village?
Date: September 18, 2005
In his sleep. With his boots on. We were with a militia allied with Taylor at an old country club on a hill. Carl said you had been there together a couple of times. The boy soldiers said you’d been there and left a couple of days before we got there.
MODEL hit us in the middle of the night. Some kind of artillery. It knocked the outside wall over and buried Carl and Terrance. They were killed instantly, along with about a hundred others, mostly kids, sixteen, seventeen, fifteen, twelve. Kids. I was in the bathroom, away from where the artillery hit. Saved by an aging bladder. I think I was the only survivor. MODEL would have killed me too, but I talked American English at them until they got a look and saw I was a white guy. I was not myself for a while. Dazed. PTSD. MODEL brought me to Buchanan and then to the airport. The marines brought me home.
I should have kept looking for you. The boys said their boss was taking you to trade for arms. I didn’t think I could find you on my own. I was pretty gone.
From Julia15@gmail.com
Subject: Carl’s Sister
Date: March 2, 2006
I think Carl had a sister in Rhode Island. Does she know?
We met March 2, 2003. I guess we were something of an item after all.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Yvonne Evans-Smith. Pawtucket, Rhode Island. July, August, and September 2003
AT FIRST YVONNE THOUGHT TERRANCE WAS DEAD. THEN SHE THOUGHT HE WAS ALIVE. Then she hoped. Then she prayed. Because she knew he was alive at first. Then she knew he had died.
That’s what you think when your child isn’t home asleep on the couch or isn’t laying there sprawled out, watching the TV, the soda cans and empty Cheetos bags spread over the floor like leaves from a tree that has died. That he’s dead. Why else would he have not come home? You think he went out and did something to somebody and got himself shot. Or that somebody gave him something bad, and that he’s lying dead in a crack house, and that someone torched that house so no one ever finds out. That he took a car or someone else took a car, and they were running down I-195 at 80 miles an hour when a cop came up behind them, and they tried to outrun the cop and drove the car into a bridge abutment doing 110.
So she didn’t sleep at night.
It doesn’t make sense. Your children should bring you only peace. Your children should be good to you, every day, and you should be good to them, because your children are you and you are them. All Terrance did was lie about the house. Night watchman at night. He barely spoke. Never said anything about his days or nights, about who he hangs with or what else he did on his days free or at night when he was home. Yvonne didn’t want to know what he did when he went out. With whom. To whom. Wasn’t going to school. No one was ever going to hire him—no skills, on a visitor’s visa, never worked a day other than playing security guard. After all that time in the bush being hopped up and gun-mad, he didn’t know what work was. It still made a difference to her to have this one here, safer, sleeping under her roof each night, with a life today and, who knows, maybe a way to build a life for himself here once he figured things out; once he got tired of the couch and work at night and going who knows where during the day.
“Listen to Dr. Levin,” she told him. “Go to school. Go to learn. You can do that. At least that.”
Yvonne hadn’t ever really slept in her many years of no one. Then Terrance came, and she could sleep again sometimes once she heard the broken screen door banging on its frame, once she heard the wall shake when the house door shut, when the door lock’s tumblers clicked, snapped, and then thudded closed.
Terrance could be anywhere. The first day, unable to settle, she checked her cell phone for voice mail. She checked the answering machine at the house. She checked her voice mail at work. She checked and checked again. There was nothing.
The second day she tried to call Terrance’s father and her second man in Liberia, and then her sisters and a niece, but only got busy signals from home. She turned on the news and looked at a newspaper online. There was just chaos in the streets. It shamed her, so she turned it off. At least Terrance was here and not there.
The third day she called her pastor, who said he would ask others if they had seen Terrance. He came to her house that night to pray with her.
Yvonne cleaned under the in-boxes and the paperclip dispenser and the telephone on her blond wood desk, cleaned that desk three or four times, and she answered the telephone before it finished the first ring, every time.
On the fourth day she called her brother in Philadelphia and her half sister in Minnesota. They did not usually talk. She did not want to tell her troubles. They had lives and troubles of their own. They listened. He was not at their house either. They barely knew him. He did not remember life with them. We will call if we hear any word.
She began to look for signs, to see if he was dead or alive. The signs were small ones here, where people were well-fed and well dressed and just shuffled from place to place. The screen door stayed on its hinges. (If it had come off the frame, it would have been a sign he was dead.) The buses kept running on time. (If the buses had stopped working, it would have been a sign he was dead.) The bland pictures—of bridges and boats in the harbor, of wooden chairs set in the sand of a beach—that hung on the walls of her office were hanging square, as they always had.
Yvonne wa
s sure Terrance was alive somewhere. He had to be.
But she also couldn’t pick up the telephone and call the police. He was over on his visitor’s visa. Not a citizen. There were hard stories about back home but not hard enough to qualify him for asylum. Not persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or for being part of a particular social group. Persecuted by memories and dreams. She thought about Temporary Protected Status. Liberians could get that. But if he applied they might learn something about who he’d been and what he’d done, and then he’d be deported without question.
Terrance was the flesh of her flesh. When she left home to come to America, she intended to find a way out for all of them. When she brought him over, she thought he would be safe, and then, one by one, she could bring the others. Then the war started up again, and she couldn’t bring the others. Now home was gone. There was no way back to the home of school uniforms and swimming in the ocean or to the home of sitting with her aunts and cousins around a charcoal fire or the home of six-year-olds making trouble near the village pump. Terrance became the only home she had left. Even if all he did was sleep all day on her couch and prowl the streets at night when he wasn’t working.
On the fifth day, when she couldn’t bear it any more, she straightened the pillows on the couch and went to pick up the soda cans and the junk food wrappers from the floor and the coffee table.
Then her pastor came back to her house to pray with her again. There might be a man. The man might sell used cars. The used cars might be shipped from the Port of Providence. Three men might have left on a boat.
Six weeks later, Dr. Levin called. He wanted to come to see her. He remembered where she lived.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Naomi Goldman. Lincoln, Rhode Island. July and August 2003
IT WAS NOT LIKE CARL TO DISAPPEAR WITHOUT WARNING.
They were close. He was all she had. She was all he had. They understood one another without having to speak. Carl understood that Naomi was always afraid, and he knew what she was always afraid of. Naomi knew what Carl had seen and what he remembered.