Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa

by M L Rudolph

  “How can say that? You, who almost killed the guy who did it. I’d think you’d want her out of there. Plus, she’s an adult. She can go where she wants. You can’t stop her.”

  “Adult? Who do you think pays for her to live in Abidjan? Who do you think raised her?”

  “And clearly you know what’s best,” Matt said, indignant after all he’d seen Sally endure.

  “This Paris idea is one day old. I am not too worried. She is angry with me, as she should be. But no. She stays in Abidjan.” He looked at Matt to gauge him.

  “I did not cause the rape or the beating,” he continued. “I will take responsibility—and I will atone by delivering you to your son, if that is what she wants—but I will not take the blame.”

  “Why do you think she blames you then?”

  “Because that’s what girls do at that age. When the world disappoints them, they blame their parents, and I’m the closest she has to a father.”

  “A rape is a little bit more than a disappointment.”

  “Of course I know that.”

  “She’s been physically and emotionally violated. She has every right to be angry. At the world and at you. You nearly killed Robert, then he came at you for revenge and beat her again. She’s completely innocent, yet she suffered more than anyone.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that.”

  “Well, you set the train in motion. If you didn’t work for Le Croc, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “How convenient to have you here to teach me how to handle my affairs. My very own American teacher. Because, of course, we Africans are too ignorant to manage our own lives. Please tell me more. Tell me. How do you teach and guide young people, Monsieur Reiser?”

  “I don’t guide.”

  “But you coach. No?”

  “I identify each player’s strengths and weaknesses, if you want to know. And we work to create full players. All members of a team.”

  “And with your son? Where did he fit into the team?”

  I won’t play for you! Karl protested the day he threw down his helmet for the last time and walked off the field. Maybe they want to be like you, but I don’t!

  Matt tapped his passport pouch on his thigh, shifting attention to the missing border guard. “What’s taking him so long?”

  Jean-Louis shrugged. “By the looks of it,” he motioned toward a wisp of smoke escaping the shaded entrance to the hut, “he is smoking a cigarette.”

  The well-tuned engine hummed while they waited.

  “You did not answer,” Jean-Louis said. “How did you coach your son?”

  Matt sat quietly. He lost all contact with his son and he wasn’t exactly certain when it stopped. There came a day when Matt realized Karl didn’t listen to him, which wasn’t unlike many teenage boys. But Karl had gone further than simple teenage rebellion. He closed off, shut down, and eliminated all emotional communication with his father.

  “My son’s an adult,” Matt said, this side of losing his temper. “He’s making his way in the world.”

  “Eh, oui.”

  The guard returned, handed back the passport, and nodded them along.

  “Why do you even bother to stop? We could have zoomed right through.”

  “Just because you don’t see phone lines doesn’t mean news doesn’t travel.” He gunned it up the incline into Upper Volta. “Do you really want to be stopped and checked? No visa, no passport?”

  The Mercedes kicked into climbing gear.

  “You must be very proud of your son,” Jean-Louis kept at Matt.

  “I am.”

  “But you had no idea where he was until you came here?”

  “No.”

  “Did he come to Africa to get away from you?”

  “I have no idea why he came.”

  “Ah. There is more.”

  “He didn’t share his reasons with me.”

  “What is it about your son that you are avoiding?”

  “Avoiding?” Matt shot back. “I came here to find him. I promised his mother I’d find him. How is that avoiding? You obviously don’t understand what I’ve been through this past week if you can say I’m avoiding anything.”

  “It must be hurtful for you this search.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  Matt’s pain at having lost the relationship with his son bubbled up, at times overwhelming him. He maintained an outward pride in his son, talked about what he knew, and didn’t dwell on all the things he had no way of knowing any more. If he thought too much about everything he missed, and that he might never hear from his son again, might never share another moment with him—that his son had become a stranger—it was too easy to sink into the emotional wound.

  “He’s the one who left, you know,” Matt said. “Do you know how hard that is when your only son decides he doesn’t want anything to do with you? Flies to the middle of nowhere and sends you a postcard?”

  “Middle of nowhere,” Jean-Louis repeated under his breath, considering that description of his native Sahel.

  Matt stopped talking at the precipice of a memory.

  When she finally determined how she wanted to track down their son, Melanie made her play to Matt on a bright Sunday afternoon. She plucked Karl’s postcard from the pocket of her robe. “He arrived in Bamako, Mali, January 16, 1977. Good chance he’s still there.” The postcard showed three shirtless African boys grinning proudly in front of a thatched hut. On the flip side Karl had jotted next to an exotic stamp with foreign post markings.

  “Abidjan has the biggest embassy in the region. You can start there. Maybe they can decipher the postmark, get you close. Or maybe they have a registry of Americans. Or maybe whoever you talk to has a friend at the Peace Corps. It’s not as if you haven’t got a good reason to find him.”

  “Melanie, I wouldn’t know what to do once I got there.”

  “It’s not a sightseeing tour. You’d be there for one thing and one thing only: Karl.”

  “What if you’re not here when I get back? Then it’s all been for nothing and I’ve deserted you. No. We’re finally back together. I’m not leaving you again. Sorry, but I just can’t do it.”

  “You can. And you will,” Melanie said, pulling at his windbreaker to plant a rare kiss on his lips. “I promise you. I’ll be here.” She kissed him again. “When the two of you get back.”

  Matt grabbed the container of fruit at his feet and tore off the lid, stuck a slice of dried mango in his mouth. “Sally has to be suffering.”

  “Yes.” Jean-Louis’s countenance darkened.

  “If you love her, why not let her go to Paris?”

  “And if you love your son? What should you do?”

  “He’s an adult. He makes his own choices. Like your niece.”

  “No comparison. Sally will always be my responsibility.”

  “Even as an adult?”

  “Until she gets married.”

  Matt could have erupted. His nature was to confront the obtuse comment, but he caught himself and relaxed under the weight of a culture he probably never would understand. “You left the farm to go to Abidjan. How old were you?” he said by way of detour.

  “Too old to herd goats,” Jean-Louis said, with a look that said he wasn’t joking.

  “So one day you hung up your whip and just left?” Matt conjured up an image of Jean-Louis as a pubescent knock-kneed herder languidly lashing his flock.

  “Everybody was talking about the economic miracle in Abidjan. The farms emptied out. Everybody chasing a better life.”

  “Did your mother try to stop you?”

  “Stop me. She could barely feed me.”

  The two men soon tired of the thrust and parry of conversation and settled into an uneasy silence. Jean-Louis drove more aggressively than his nephew, as fast as he could take the car over the rolling asphalt road.

  At the crest of one hill, they encountered a sweeping view of emptiness that stretched to the edge of the earth. Dry scrub with a greenis
h hint of recent rain was only interrupted by rocky outcroppings. Far ahead, in the immense eastern sky dark clouds threatened. Lightning flashed.

  Staring out the windshield at the impoverished landscape induced daydreaming, and before long Matt fell into a light sleep.

  He woke to the racket of gravel. Not gravel, hard pack, washboard. They were following an unpaved road, tires tearing through the red earth churning in their wake. A shadowless countryside streamed past.

  “Did it rain?”

  The windshield wipers were working at full speed, carving visibility through the spray of wiper fluid.

  “How long did I sleep?”

  “You mean snore? An hour, maybe two. And no rain, just dirt. The rain is out there. We will get it later.”

  The road cut through a wide valley, rising to foothills in the southeast. Dark clouds closed off view of the horizon.

  “What happened to the road?”

  “Same road, just not paved.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Three more hours.”

  The wiper fluid mixed with the fine red dust on the windshield to form a gluey smear. Jean-Louis pumped the spray until the wipers, encrusted with red paste, swept a muddy concoction back and forth in a streaked arc.

  “Why don’t you stop and let me clean it off?”

  “I can see well enough.”

  “No you can’t. Let me clean it off. I don’t want to die out here because you’re too stubborn to stop the car and clean the windshield.”

  “I can see. And I am not stopping. We are coming to Koudougou. You can wash there.”

  Jean-Louis hunched over the steering wheel, visibility reduced to glimpses of road. The blades pumped across and back, pushing the muck across and back, across and back.

  “This is stupid. Just like you didn’t want Jacques to stop in the rain. Pull over before I pull you over.” He feigned a grab for the wheel.

  Jean-Louis jerked the car left and leaned against the door to get a better view.

  “You’re in the middle of the road.”

  “I see fine.” He jerked the car back toward the right. “We stop at Koudougou.”

  An angry wind blew from the south and with it grit hit the car like sleet. An uprooted bush tumbled into the hood where its brittle twigs shattered and rained over the windshield.

  “Pull over,” Matt insisted. “You can stop on the road. Come on.” He grabbed a water bottle from the back seat. “Let me wash it off.”

  Jean-Louis, set on his course, clutched the wheel and moved his head with the rhythm of the wipers to synch with streaks of sight.

  The interior grew claustrophobic; the unrelenting whipsaw of the wipers grated Matt’s nerves. “I can’t see a goddamn thing and neither can you, dammit. Slow down.”

  The road dipped frequently. Jean-Louis barreled over crests, creating brief moments of lift before gravity tested the shocks, the car settling hard and bounding onward.

  Directly over one crest, he encountered a dark bovine shape in the middle of the road. He braked too late. The Mercedes glanced off a thousand pounds of Voltan beef, bounded off the road, and ripped through a gulley of stubborn thorn bushes.

  Matt caromed off the passenger window and head-butted the dash as the car slammed down the incline, swiped the trunk of an acacia tree, and crashed into a crumbling mud brick wall.

  Chapter 32

  Matt smelled dry grass under a moist cloth on his forehead.

  He lay on his back in the dark with a fuzzy recollection of hands grasping him, dragging him, carrying him.

  A small square window opened to the outside. Wooden beams, not beams sawed into four-by-four’s, but beams made of twisted tree limbs stripped smooth of bark and branches, supported a thatch roof. Calabashes dangled from the beams.

  Beside him Jean-Louis lay with a forearm over his eyes. A shadow moved across the curved rough wall, out an open door where Matt sensed a bustle of people and purpose.

  He sat up and moaned with a stiff shoulder and neck. The moist cloth fell into his lap. His shirt was wet. I’m bleeding, he thought. He tapped his pocket for his passport pouch and to his relief discovered it. Melanie’s letter and his money were safe.

  He felt for spots of tenderness, bruises, pierced skin, but he found none. He struggled to his feet, his head knocking into a dangling calabash.

  “Hey.” He tapped Jean-Louis’s foot.

  No response.

  He reached down to shake him but felt a wet shirt. Blood? He couldn’t see. He’d go get help.

  A throng of children mobbed Matt when he stepped out of the hut, surrounding him with curiosity.

  His head spun; an acrid taste in his mouth. His legs buckled and he sat on the broad stone extension of the hut’s foundation. Shapes and chatter of the children too much to process, too complicated to decipher. He understood nothing. Fought an overwhelming desire to lie down in the dirt.

  At a touch on his shoulder, he looked up at a diminutive snow-haired old man, ragged shorts, an open shirt, and a missing eye-tooth. Matt’s nausea boiled over and he dropped to his hands and knees and retched at the old man’s sandaled feet. His temples pulsated and his throat burned. He watched the dry earth soak in his puke until his vision stabilized, his balance returned, and he managed to sit back on the stone foundation.

  The old man directed certain children in a strange language full of familiar vowels and consonants, but arranged all wrong. The odd sounds grabbed the attention of a pair of older boys who ran off—as confused as Matt? As scared? Or on a clear-eyed errand at the old man’s beckoning? Before Matt could sort through his jumbled thoughts, one of the boys, knock-kneed and sandaled, returned with a familiar looking bottle of water and a plastic container of fruit which he placed on the ground within easy reach.

  Matt grabbed the water bottle, failed at twisting off the metal cap. Good, he thought. Safe water. The old man reached down and snapped off the cap with a small opener. Matt sipped. Then at the refreshing effect of the clean taste he kept drinking to soothe the fire in his throat until he nearly killed the bottle.

  The stone foundation where he sat supported a mud hut with a thatched roof like those he’d seen zoom by the past several days. Simple patterns were etched into the walls. Nearby, a mud wall defined an enclosure, a residential compound, with similar dwellings and craggy trees strung with colorful strips of fabric and a range of calabashes. Strange to hang things from trees. For no apparent purpose. The smell of burning wood was oddly vivifying and helped Matt regain composure. At the middle of the grounds he caught sight of a low wood fire burning in a central pit.

  Beyond the mud wall, among a thicket of trees, a car door slammed creating a commotion which Matt gathered had something to do with him.

  “Thank God,” Jean-Louis said, poking his head out the door of the hut. “I was afraid you were dead.”

  “Where are we?” Matt said, coughing, throat still burning.

  “Outside Koudougou,” Jean-Louis said.

  “Where the hell’s that?” he said without looking up, eyes tearing up from his tender throat.

  “Can you stand?” Jean-Louis said.

  He shook his head, not much in the mood to try. “I thought you were dead,” Matt said and realized what a relief it was to hear Jean-Louis’s voice. “I was floating in there. Like I was hovering, looking down at myself. I felt blood on your shirt.”

  “A water bottle shattered. We both got sprayed.”

  “I was scared for you,” Jean-Louis said. “You hit your head so hard when we bounced off that tree. I thought you broke your neck.”

  “Maybe I did.” He moved his head in a roundabout way. Sharp pain at his temple.

  The snow-haired old man returned with a young boy at his side and walked up to Jean-Louis. Again, he spoke gibberish. Then he stooped to get a good look into Matt’s eyes.

  “We’re stuck here, right?” Matt said, oblivious to the old man squatting before him.

  Jean-Louis placed a hand on Matt
’s shoulder. “I will look at the car and see how bad it is.”

  “You can’t even drive.” He cleared his throat and spit in the dirt, narrowly missing the old man’s foot.

  “We will find someone to fix it. That is my responsibility. If the car cannot take us, I will find another way.”

  “Yeah? What? Donkey cart?” Matt rubbed his eyes. “How long is that going to take?”

  “It will take as long as it takes.”

  “As long as it takes?” Matt waved a hand dismissively. “I don’t have as long as it takes. I got three days and two nights until I go back. Three days and two nights. Hear me? That’s all I got.”

  Fat drops of rain hit the dirt and the old man stood up and walked away with the young boy following.

  “Who’s that?” Matt noticed him for the first time.

  “He is the elder of this village. He discovered us and brought us up to this hut. The bigger boys are pushing the car out of the trees.”

  Matt didn’t listen to the answer. His mind was elsewhere as the raindrops fell heavier and faster all around. Matt tilted to one side, as if losing balance, or possibly looking through the shadows for a better angle at an obscure object. “Melanie…?” he said, an awkward smile playing across his face. “Is that you…?” then he slumped against the side of the hut.

  Chapter 33

  At Matt’s collapse, the raindrops grew to a deluge and all living creatures fled before the storm. The fire under the central tin-roofed shelter sent wild wind-whipped smoke and shadows into the night.

  The snow-haired man returned to help Jean-Louis haul Matt into his unlit hut, slammed shut the wooden door, and unfurled a canvas over the entrance. He closed off the small window with a wooden shutter, then in the dark he efficiently spread woven mats across the ground and guided Jean-Louis to turn Matt on his side and supported his head with a stack of folded cloth.