The Canal House

by Mark Lee

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Bettencourt.” He handed the passports to one of the archangels, who returned them to Daniel and me. “Welcome, Mr. McFarland.”

  Daniel bowed his head slightly as a sign of respect. “It’s an honor to be here, Reverend Okello.”

  “I knew you would come.” Okello’s voice was clear and precise, and his English had a slight American accent. I remembered Vickery telling us that the Prophet had studied at some Texas university. “I predicted this several months ago.”

  “It’s been difficult to find you,” Daniel said.

  “No matter. You made the effort and God guided you here. I knew that once we captured these foreigners in the game park everything would change. Now the leaders of the world want to hear my message.”

  Okello didn’t sound angry and I wondered if I should take a photograph. I glanced over at Daniel, but he ignored me.

  “We’ve come a long way to interview you, Reverend Okello. Your words will be published everywhere.”

  “Are you the right messengers or were you sent by my enemies? There could be another reporter on his way. Someone who would report my words clearly.”

  “As far as I know we’re the only journalists in the area. Isn’t that right, Nicky?”

  “Yeah. We’re the only people who wanted to come here.” I gripped the lens of my camera, but I didn’t raise it up for a shot.

  Daniel reached into his shirt pocket and took out a ballpoint pen and notebook. “Reverend Okello, you are obviously a great leader. But some people have criticized you for taking children away from their families. How would you answer them?”

  “Their parents were wicked,” Okello said. “I have become a new father and mother for these children.”

  Daniel asked another question and the Prophet launched into a long answer that included a half-dozen biblical quotations. Other journalists might have softened their questions, but Daniel didn’t back down. Weren’t you whipped by the police, Reverend Okello? Didn’t you burn down a school? I wanted to shout at Daniel, That’s enough, don’t push it any further. But he kept going. I raised my camera a few times, but I didn’t have the nerve to take a picture.

  Finally, Daniel slipped the notebook back in his pocket. “We’re honored to meet you, Reverend Okello. Now that we’ve heard your story, I can repeat your words to the rest of the world.”

  “Or you could corrupt my message. Distort it.”

  “That can’t be true,” Daniel said. “You predicted our arrival. Your power has brought us here.”

  A few of the children shifted around in the dirt and Okello glared at them. If he denied that we were the correct messengers, then it might undermine his own prophecy.

  “That is correct. I did summon you here. Which is why I will allow you to leave. Speak to your government. Tell them that we will give up the hostages for food, medicine, and weapons. Contact us through the military outpost at Jubba.”

  “We need the boy to guide us back to Kosana.”

  Okello gestured with his right hand, indicating that Isaac was a trivial matter. “Take him.”

  “And we need to bring Joan Siebert as well. Her pulse is very weak. She might die if she stays here. If you release her, America and Britain will see this as the act of a powerful man. They’ll be more inclined to start negotiating for a trade.”

  The Prophet considered this argument and everyone was quiet. Slowly, I raised the camera, but I didn’t bring it up to my eye. Judging the angle by experience, I squeezed off two quick shots. The camera shutter sounded incredibly loud, but no one reacted. A bead of sweat trickled down my neck.

  Okello nodded and flicked his hand. “She may go as well.”

  The Prophet returned to his hideaway and two seraphim came out with our water bottles and blankets. They had decided to keep Daniel’s sat phone, but we weren’t going to hang around and try to get it back. Back in the thorn enclosure, the hostages weren’t happy that only Joan was leaving. “I think we should all stay together,” Ray said. “We need to show some solidarity.”

  “This is going to help everybody,” Daniel explained. “After Okello gives up the first person, he’ll want to trade the rest of the group.”

  The hostages began to argue, but I thought up a distraction. I told Joseph Henning that he should write a letter to his family and we would pass it on to the German embassy in Kampala. The moment Joseph started writing, everyone else wanted the opportunity and then they argued about who would use my pen.

  When all the notes were written, we left the enclosure with Joan and Isaac. A situation like this was a good time to take photographs. Everything is fluid, in motion, and no one concentrates on following the rules. I shot quickly. A desperate-looking girl. A half-naked little boy, clutching a rifle. And then we were out of the camp and hurrying down the trail. We followed Piramoi back to the mother tree. As we entered the dry riverbed, the archangel stood on a boulder watching us, like he wanted to come along. I figured that working for a murderous psychopath wasn’t a job with a long-term future.

  “Good journey,” he said in English.

  “Good journey to you.”

  Daniel walked with Joan while Isaac and I were a few steps behind. The boy kept looking around him. “Did you see the Prophet?” he asked.

  “Yeah. He talked a lot.”

  “Are they going to kill me?”

  “No. Everything’s okay. We’re going to go back to Kosana and see Dr. Cadell.”

  Isaac relaxed a little bit and Joan began to talk to him as if he had just wandered into her library back in Wisconsin. The boy didn’t answer her, but she pretended they were having a conversation. Joan asked Isaac if he had ever seen a lion. “They’re very beautiful animals. Don’t you think?” she said. “But the male lions are so lazy. Their wives do most of the hunting.”

  As the day went on, Joan began to get weaker. She felt dizzy and had to stop every ten minutes. Finally we reached our old campsite and opened up a can of tuna. After eating, Joan went to sleep and the rest of us sat there, staring at the flames.

  “Is Mrs. Joan going to die?” Isaac asked.

  Surprised, I looked across the fire. “No, Isaac. She’s going to be fine.”

  “But she’s very sick.”

  “Joan is tired and she needs some decent food. When we get back to Kosana, Dr. Cadell will make her feel better.”

  A few minutes later Isaac went to sleep. Daniel was concealed within the shadows, but I caught a glimpse of his face when he leaned forward to toss some wood on the fire. He didn’t look happy about getting the interview.

  “Isaac is worried about Joan,” he said. “I guess that’s a good sign.”

  “She made an effort to talk to him today.”

  He stared at the fire for a few minutes. “I pushed it too far, Nicky. I wasn’t thinking about what could happen.”

  The next day started badly. Even with sips of water and deep breathing, Joan couldn’t walk five feet without getting dizzy. Daniel and I tried to bring her along in a fireman’s carry, but I tripped on a root and almost fell. After an hour of slow progress Daniel told Joan and me to wait beside a boulder. He walked off into the bush with Isaac, then they came back with two saplings they had turned into poles. We made a stretcher with the blanket and our shoelaces and then continued toward Kosana.

  Joan was in pain, but Daniel distracted her with questions. Where were you born? What did your parents do? As we maneuvered the stretcher around rocks and bushes, Joan told stories about her teenage years. In high school, she’d dated a boy named Gordon whose family owned three lumber mills. Joan’s mother and her friends expected her to marry Gordon after he graduated from Princeton.

  “Everyone liked Gordon,” Joan said. “But he was never serious about anything. That year I was on the debate team and that’s where I met Henry.”

  Henry’s father owned a shoe store and his mother worked in the county clerk’s office. Henry drove a grocery delivery truck after school, but he read three newspapers
at the library and knew the capital of Bolivia. Joan and Henry debated against capital punishment and they won four competitions together. One morning Henry invited her to the Snow Ball, the school’s big Christmas dance, and Joan accepted. She liked the fact that Gordon was jealous and her friends were horrified. Her mother announced that Joan had just thrown her life away.

  A week before the dance Henry had an accident with the delivery truck and ended up in the hospital. Gordon appeared at Joan’s house carrying a bouquet of roses, and in a moment of weakness she agreed to go with him to the Snow Ball.

  We laid the stretcher down and rested. Isaac crouched beside Joan and listened to her story.

  “It was a beautiful dance. The decoration committee had rented one of those mirrored balls and little flashes of light whirred across the walls. I was dancing with Gordon and he was talking about how this was the best car and that was the best golf club and if anyone didn’t own the best, they were a fool. Right then I realized that Gordon was a nice boy, but that was all he was ever going to be—a boy pretending to be a man. So I said good-bye and asked one of the chaperones to drive me to the hospital. It was long past visiting hours, but I didn’t care. Wearing my white dress, I swept down the hallway and started looking for Henry.” Joan paused and drank some water.

  “Was he all right?” Isaac asked.

  “He was fine, Isaac. Just a few broken bones. Three years later we got married and we were very, very happy.”

  I WAS WORRIED that we’d miss the pathway from the riverbed to Kosana, but Isaac found it easily. Most of the Karamojong came out to meet us when we reached the camp. Richard and Billy had already flown back to Nairobi. Julia stood near the medical tent between Steve Ramsey and the two Irish nurses. She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe that we had survived, then stepped forward and took Isaac’s hand.

  “Welcome back, Isaac. It’s good to see you again.”

  “Dr. Cadell, this is Joan Siebert,” said Daniel. “Why don’t you take a look at her and make sure that she’s all right.”

  Daniel and I took turns having a bucket shower. When we dropped by the medical tent, the two Irish nurses were there with Joan. They had given her a sponge bath and she was lying on a cot with an IV tube in her arm. Isaac sat beside her, eating a bowl of oatmeal.

  “Tell them I’m all right, Daniel. They’re treating me like a feeble old lady.”

  Fiona came over and checked Joan’s pulse. “You’re not feeble, Mrs. Siebert. But you do need to rest. Dr. Cadell says that your heartbeat is irregular and you’ve got very low blood pressure.”

  “The only thing I really needed was a bath. Isaac had a bath, too.”

  The boy nodded and raised his spoon. “They gave me soap.”

  “Lavender soap. It smells quite wonderful.”

  THAT NIGHT WE HAD a celebration in the staff tent. Julia had decided to call me Nicky, but Daniel was still Mr. McFarland. She kept glancing at Daniel, waiting for him to talk about his triumph. Instead he sat quietly at the table and ate dinner. I was the one who told everybody about Samuel Okello and the hostages. Fiona touched my hand twice and said that I was intrepid. After we had eaten some freeze-dried sponge cake, the nurses and Ramsey went back to their tents.

  Julia sat down next to Daniel and began to question him about Isaac. Did he talk about his family? Were any of his friends at Okello’s camp? If I had written everything they said it would have sounded like a normal conversation. But there was an intensity between them, an awkwardness in their exchanges. Both of them had the power to make the other one nervous. I sat between them, feeling like I was in one of those mad scientist movies with a charge crackling through the air.

  When they had finished talking about Isaac, Julia went around the tent, picking up dirty plates and silverware. I was about to say good night when she put down the dishes and approached Daniel.

  “Mr. McFarland, I’d like to apologize to you.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Joan Siebert might have died if you hadn’t brought her here. She was severely dehydrated. And Isaac is talking. He still hasn’t recovered from his trauma, but he’s much improved.”

  I had the feeling that Julia didn’t apologize very often. She waited, expecting Daniel to accept her concession, but he wasn’t in a gracious mood.

  “It was wrong to risk Isaac’s life,” Daniel said. “I made a mistake using him as a guide.”

  “That’s true, Mr. McFarland. But the result was positive.”

  Daniel stood up and slipped his notebook into his pocket. “Thank you for the dinner and all your help. I think you’re doing a great job here.”

  He walked out of the tent, disappearing into the darkness. Julia looked irritated. “Mr. McFarland can be a very annoying person,” she said.

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Is he still angry with me? Is that it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How does he act back home? Is he always this rude?”

  “He doesn’t seem to have much of a personal life.”

  “Does he have any friends, Nicky? Are you his friend?”

  “Not really. But we’re working on it.”

  I TOOK A LANTERN back to our tent, loaded my cameras, and cleaned the lenses. Daniel showed up an hour later and sat on his cot. We looked at each other and smiled. Almost anyone can climb a mountain. The trick is to climb down.

  “I talked to Paul Rosen on the radio,” Daniel said. “He’s flying to Entebbe tomorrow. There are four seats in the plane so he can only take Tobias, Joan, and one other person. It’s your choice, Nicky. We can stay together or flip a coin to see who leaves. Whoever goes down first will hire a charter plane and send it back to Kosana.”

  “I’ve done my part of the job,” I said. “You’ve got to write the article and send it out from Kampala. I’ll give you the disc from the digital camera and you can transmit those photos. We’ve met Samuel Okello and freed a hostage. It’s news.”

  “Are you sure you want to stay here?”

  “I’ll take more pictures and annoy everyone.”

  PAUL FLEW IN the next morning and the staff walked out to the airstrip. Joan embraced Isaac and said that she would send him some books from America. I pulled the disc out of my pocket and gave it to Daniel.

  “I don’t know if they’re any good.”

  “You got a picture of Okello. That’s the main thing.” Daniel smiled and touched my arm. “We should do this again.”

  “No more walking,” I said. “That’s my only condition.”

  The plane raised a cloud of dust as it taxied away from us, then took off and disappeared into the blue. Julia looked relieved that Daniel was gone. “Well, that’s over,” she said in a proper British manner. “Back to work.”

  I spent most of the day in my tent, drinking water, sleeping a little and reading some old magazines I borrowed from Ramsey. An hour before nightfall, Julia came in looking worried.

  “I just got off the radio. Paul’s airplane is eight hours overdue at Entebbe. No one seems to know where they are.”

  “They crashed?”

  “It doesn’t look good, Nicky.”

  I followed her outside. One of Hand-to-Hand’s computer camps had been set up near my tent; it buzzed and clicked and panned back and forth on its little steel tower.

  I stood beside the tent with my hands in my pockets while Julia looked up at the sky. And the world expanded around us, past the tents and the grass to a dark horizon.

  6 THE CONVENT

  I stayed near the camp radio for the next twenty-four hours and listened to the news about the search for the missing travelers. Several pilots retraced the route from Entebbe to Kosana, but the Cessna had completely disappeared. In the morning an airplane flew over the refugee camp and I ran out of my tent, half expecting to see Paul waving from the cockpit window. Instead, it was Erik Viltner.

  I walked over to the runway while he taxied to the camp. When Erik climbed o
ut of the cockpit, he saw me and frowned.

  “Your friend was with Paul?”

  “That’s right. Has there been any news?”

  “Nothing.” Erik glanced up at the sky as if a neon message would suddenly appear in the clouds.

  “What are their chances?”

  “They have the plane and the radio. Even if Paul was forced to make a landing, his radio should still operate.”

  “Unless it was a bad crash.”

  Erik touched one of his elephant hair bracelets for luck. “Paul was a very good pilot.”

  I returned to the camp and found Julia in one of the medical tents. She had just delivered a baby and Fiona was washing it off in a basin.

  “I’m flying back to Entebbe airport. Erik wants me to pick out the landmarks we passed on the way up.”

  “Good luck. Maybe they just had mechanical problems and had to make an emergency landing. Paul could do anything with that plane.” Julia tried to look optimistic, then gave up and pulled off her surgical gloves. “Of course, we probably should have heard from them by now.”

  “Have you told Paul’s girlfriend?”

  “Ellen’s crying in her tent. She won’t come out. If there really was a crash and Paul is dead, I might have to send her home.” Turning away from me, Julia tossed the gloves into a pail and began to scrub her hands. “When I began working for Médecins Sans Frontières, a French doctor told me that you should never like anyone you meet at a relief camp. You should never admire another person or allow yourself to care. Because chances are your new friend will die or go away or you’ll lose them somehow.”

  A lock of hair fell across Julia’s forehead and she pushed it away. I could have told her the truth at that moment—that I was worried about Daniel—but pride held me back. I already knew that you weren’t supposed to care about the people you met in relief camps or anywhere else. I saw myself as a master of that particular discipline while most people were still learning the trade.

  “Maybe they’re right.”

  “Yes. It’s possible.” Julia turned away from me and picked up a basin filled with surgical instruments. “Who’s next?” she asked Fiona.