Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa

by M L Rudolph

  But instead Matt said, “It would be nice if you came home to pay your respects. She’d’ve liked that.” He added a prosaic concern. “They must give you compassionate leave or something.”

  Karl didn’t immediately answer. His jaw set, he aimed his dark glasses at Matt and nodded in a way that rather than indicating assent, implied he acknowledged the request.

  Matt’s rage nearly burst forth. He loved his son but he couldn’t accept such cold disdain for the basic human gesture of showing respect for the passing of a good person, a good person that happened to be his mother. His goddam mother. Do not turn and walk away, he coached himself. And no head butting. Definitely no head butting. Stay with him. Bring him in.

  “You must have a lot on your plate out here,” Matt said. “But let’s see if we can work something out.”

  Dark clouds pressed in after they left the village. The worn and torn seats in the cab squeaked as the heavy duty International Harvester truck bumped along. Matt watched his tired and drawn reflection in the long side view mirror, his jowls jiggling to the beat of the bumpy road and the squeaking seat.

  Karl’s work mate led the way in the jeep. Karl drove Matt. Jean-Louis followed in the Mercedes.

  “I’ve been here about a week,” Matt shouted to be heard over the roar of the engine and the hot air rushing in. “I was mugged in Abidjan the day I arrived. Lost my suitcase. Had to buy everything new. Now look at me.” He drew attention to his battered khakis.

  Karl glanced over then returned his gaze to the unpaved road, its border rugged and loose where a grader had carved away the brush and soil.

  “Were you going to let your Mom know,” Matt yelled. “Where you were at some point?” Maybe Karl was going to reveal himself at his own pace, but Matt couldn’t wait for that to happen. He pushed for answers.

  When Karl didn’t answer, Matt turned toward him and began to repeat the question, louder. “Were you….”

  “I heard you,” Karl snapped back.

  “Sorry,” Matt said, defensive. “It’s not easy, you know. To get you to talk. I’m doing my best here.”

  “Just talk, if you got something to say.”

  Matt had so many questions to choose from. How had Karl adapted to the hardship? Did he have to bribe everybody to get anything done? Had he been sick from the water or the food? Where did he live and how did he spend his time? When did he learn how to drill wells? And to drive a ten wheeler? Did he remember the time in the Corvair when he almost ran into the John Deere? When did he plan to return to the US? And, why was it so damned difficult to simply talk like they once did, father to son?

  “Doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Karl eventually said.

  Matt knew exactly what Karl meant. Melanie was a social smoker; she smoked the lowest tar cigarettes on the market through a skinny holder that she diligently scoured with pipe cleaners. Paper towels with tar smudges and mutilated pipe cleaners were common kitchen counter sights. Until he quit, Matt was the real smoker in the house, a standing ashtray next to his favorite lounger perennially full of crushed butts and ash.

  “She smoked ’cause you did,” Karl said.

  The truck slammed over a crease in the road and Matt bounced in his seat, rattling his lower back. He grabbed at the dash to stay balanced, shifted his position to take some pressure off his sacrum. Another way bad choices caught up with you: slamming into opposing linesmen for years.

  “She maintained her dignity,” Matt said. “She put on her makeup every day, wore playful bracelets and necklaces to add a little sparkle. I don’t want to trivialize her suffering, but she added those touches of color to brighten her life to the end.” He looked out on to the long low shadows of the undulating terrain. “That’s a helluva decision to make.”

  “What?”

  “When you know you’re going to die soon.” Hard to be heard over this noise. “Do you go on like normal?” he yelled, and checked to see if Karl heard him. “Or do you do something completely different?”

  Melanie did both. She kept up her routines, the school, the house, her clubs, and she sent Matt to Africa to find Karl. Facing his own mortality, what would Matt do? Stay home? Coach and teach? Keep the news from everyone so they didn’t know he’d even made the choice? Or was he doing it now, thanks to Melanie and her letter? Was he really doing the most important thing in his life by tracking down Karl to have this talk?

  “What would you do?” Matt yelled over the grinding gears and the ongoing blast of hot air through the windows. “Anything different, or are you already doing it?” The minute he asked, Matt knew that it was unfair to ask Karl. He was too young to consider his mortality as anything other than a distant probability. He was still defining his path. Maybe that was why he took a deep breath and didn’t answer.

  A bend in the road gave way to a long dark descent. Karl downshifted with confidence, working the transmission with easy familiarity, then he coughed to clear his throat.

  Matt knew that cough; it meant Karl was preparing to do or say something uncomfortable. That was the cough he forced out before baiting hooks with wiggling earthworms. That was the cough he barked into his hand while watching Matt gut a freshly caught musky.

  “Why’d you come back?” Karl said.

  “You mean to your mom?”

  They rode without speaking for a moment. The engine whining through the lower gears as Karl worked down the decline.

  “She came to me,” Matt yelled back. “She knew I was only waiting for a word from her. She needed help.” He waited for another question, and when it didn’t come, he added, “She missed you, Karl. She needed you back in her life. Long before she got sick.” Normally he would have added, It was killing her, but he stopped in time. Instead, he said, “It kept her up at night.”

  “So you got back together?”

  “I wouldn’t say it like that, but yes, I helped her.”

  “That’s a first.”

  Matt bit his lip. Let the insult slide. He determined to show respect for Melanie, honoring her last wish—her two boys reunited—without descending into a confrontation.

  “If we knew where you were, maybe I could have got here sooner.” He didn’t mean to speak with bite, but his tone was cutting. To locate Karl, Matt had to literally crash into a primitive village on the outskirts of a regional settlement hours away from the capital city in a landlocked West African nation about which he didn’t know a single goddam thing before last week. Finding Karl turned on a random traffic accident, an act of chance. No help from Karl.

  “Sounds like I couldn’t have made it back in time anyway.”

  “She lived almost three months after she found out,” Matt shot back, his blood rising. “That was plenty of time.” Matt would not butt heads. He made a fist to tamp down his anger. “I could have paid for the trip, if that was a problem.”

  The use of the word problem goaded Karl. “I don’t have any problems,” he growled. “I’ve got things pretty well handled, if you haven’t noticed. Money’s got nothing to do with it?”

  “With what?”

  “With you.”

  “With me? I thought we were talking about your mom?”

  “Yes, but…No, you’re…” Karl gripped the jerky steering wheel with his left hand, his right hand vibrating on top of the gear shift. “If you don’t know, there’s no way I can tell you.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Matt was on familiar ground now, the anger out in the open. Its expression released him from the cumbersome politeness that only got in the way of communication, as far as he was concerned. If you said what was on your mind, it wasn’t always going to be easy on the ears, but it got the truth out. You had to deal with issues head-on. Maybe a little head butting would do them both good.

  “You got something to say, so say it. Get it off your chest. Whatever it is. Let me have it. Then at least we know what we’re dealing with here.”

  Karl swerved to avoid a batch of bound kindling that had fallen in the road.
The motion knocked Matt sideways into the passenger door and he groaned at the spike up his spine.

  Karl looked over at his dad. “Your back?”

  He grimaced, shook his head. “It’s fine.”

  Karl revealed a knowing, sarcastic smirk. “Always fine, isn’t it? Things are never how they really are with you. Everything’s always fine.”

  “Hey. I’m not the one running off to Africa. I’m the one coming after you. Coming all the way over here to track you down. Making the supreme goddam effort….”

  “Oh, so now it’s a supreme goddam effort. The big sacrifice. Getting up off your ass and seeing a little bit of the world. That’s a supreme goddam effort to you?”

  Matt took a deep breath, checked his anger, shifted in his seat, one hand on the open window jam to steady against the bumps. He leaned back and let the inrushing air soothe his sweaty neck and shoulders.

  “I came for your mother,” he resumed after calming down. “It’s that simple. I wish it could have been different, but this is how it happened. I can’t change that. Can’t go back in time and fix things.” He paused, watched his son work the gearshift and the pedals. “It’s only you and me now. Can we please let go of this anger? Karl? Please.”

  Karl would not be drawn out by his father. He concentrated on the road, following the taillights of the jeep up ahead, and once in a while commenting on the cockeyed headlights in the rear view mirror. For the rest of the drive under the starless sky, Karl only asked Matt about his trip and would not be steered into a conversation about his former home.

  When they reached the regional truck depot on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, Karl said, “Your friend seems to have made it okay,” as the Mercedes pulled in behind them. Then he wasted no time hopping down from the cab to bid Jean-Louis farewell. “You know how to get to your hotel, then?”

  Looking over the roof of the car at his father, Karl stepped back, gave an awkward salute, and said, “Tomorrow then. Meet you there at two.”

  “That sucks,” Matt said, as they drove away from the depot toward the weak glow of Ouagadougou’s city lights.

  “What?” Jean-Louis said.

  “We’re having lunch, then he heads upcountry on his next project.”

  “But you found him.”

  “I did and I didn’t.”

  Chapter 41

  The Hotel Silmandé lobby was cool and spacious and faintly lit by wall sconces. Each tiny sound echoed through the marble-floored lobby. Muffled conversation and the clatter of crockery emanated from the hotel restaurant beyond the lobby bar.

  “He’s got a big job on his hands,” Matt said. “Got to drill thirty more wells by year-end.”

  “Did you give him the letter?”

  Matt shook his head and patted his vest pocket.

  “I do not believe it,” Jean-Louis said. “You came all this way.”

  Matt clammed up and walked over to the front desk for the key. The receptionist handed him a small envelope addressed to M. Djédji.

  “What’s this?” he asked Jean-Louis, handing over the envelope.

  “It’s a request for payment,” Jean-Louis said, reading. “Giving us notice we have to pay in advance if we extend our stay. Since we didn’t give a credit card we have to—how you say?—pay as we go.”

  “Where do they think we’re going to go? They still have your passport.”

  “They do not want us to run up a bill and then find we cannot pay. That is standard practice.”

  “Right,” Matt said, then either in reaction to his unsettling reunion with Karl, or because he was miffed at the implicit lack of trust in the curt demand for payment, he waved his arm in a follow-me gesture. “This calls for a drink.”

  Thirty minutes later, a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black sat on the round bar table where Matt picked at the crumbs of an empty bowl of peanuts. He and Jean-Louis sat alone except for a trio of men drinking bottled beer at the long ebony bar under the watch of a dark-eyed bartender.

  “I still do not understand how you can come all this way, go through everything you did, and not give him the letter.”

  “Didn’t feel right. I mean, you saw him. How would you react if you just learned—God forbid—your mother died? He just kept his feelings inside. Like he was too mad at me to show them. So yeah. It didn’t feel right under the circumstances.” He popped a round peanut in his mouth. “Maybe after I sleep on it.” Another peanut. “Anyway, what’s a flight to Abidjan cost?”

  “I do not care how he acted, if he was my son and I went through what you did, I would give him the letter. I would just give it to him.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s not your son. So the flight to Abidjan, probably a hundred bucks, exchange rate five hundred to one, that’s fifty thousand francs, right? So two seats.” He threw back another shot of whisky and refilled his glass. “That’s a hundred thousand.”

  “Nobody does what he does out here if he is not of strong character. I saw a lot of what we call sangfroid in him.” Jean-Louis put his hand over top of his glass to stop Matt from filling it.

  “How much money do you have left?”

  “Why?”

  “Fifty? Hundred?”

  “I do not want to count it here.” He glanced at the men drinking at the bar.

  “Okay, so say you have fifty.” Matt pulled out his remaining roll of francs and peeled them off as he counted ten-thousand franc notes. “Okay, so each one of these is about twenty bucks. That’s twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred.” He set the stack aside and repeated the exercise until he came up with the equivalent of three hundred and forty dollars. “Okay, with your hundred that makes four hundred and forty. We need two tickets to Abidjan. Say two, no three nights here. Three nights in Abidjan.” He looked up at Jean-Louis. “What are you going to do about the car? You can’t drive it back the way it is.”

  “What are you going to do about your passport? You can’t fly back without one.”

  The question stumped Matt. He felt adrift. Karl’s cold reception had hollowed him out. Further, the lack of any familiar landmarks left him feeling isolated. His clothes, the money he counted, the languages he heard, the style of the furniture, the look and smell and taste of the food. Even these peanuts he scarfed failed to satisfy or comfort him. Only Johnnie Walker connected him in any meaningful way to a world he recognized. The perky logo on the label and the warm burn down his gullet fired up memories of better times and places.

  He foolishly let his expectations rise during the trip and imagined Karl would be glad to see him. But now, after Karl’s indifferent reception, Matt realized nothing had changed between them. His son could not have made it clearer that he wanted nothing to do with him.

  Matt realized how little he knew Karl by how little they talked during the drive. He could have been Karl’s supervisor the way they conversed. Matt always had a button-busting pride at being Karl’s father, but now that pride gave way to an emotional blankness, a gnawing empty ache.

  How had he so badly mangled his relationship with his only son? How had he got to this point from that magical moment when he held aloft the newly swaddled infant in his hands? When in front of an exhausted Melanie in her hospital gown he held the sleeping form of love and potential and hope and dreams and beauty and softness and purity. When his world shifted on its axis and he knew from that moment forward this boy would be the center of his life.

  Today’s failed reunion created a lust for a powerful medicine to fill the void and room-temperature Johnnie Walker Black was doing the trick.

  Each shot gave Matt the courage to pour another. One drink at a time. That’s how he decided to get through the night. One goddam drink at a time. Until his pain receded into oblivion.

  Knocking back shots on an empty stomach would eventually take him where he needed to go.

  “I think I’ve had enough,” he said.

  “Good,” Jean-Louis said, putting the cap back on the bottle. “Let’s go up.”

  “Not t
hat,” Matt said, grabbing the bottle and moving it over to his side of the table. “I’m not done with that. I’m done with this trip. With everything. With Africa. With French. With the food. With the water I can’t drink, the ice cubes I can’t use, with the fruit I can’t eat because it’s been washed with the water I can’t drink.” He threw back another shot and twisted off the bottle top. “I’m done with forgetting to take the malaria pills, with the newspapers I can’t read. With the roads that aren’t paved, with the people who always take your money, rip you off, steal your things. What the hell.” He eyed Jean-Louis over the bottle. “You know what I can’t believe? I can’t believe you shot that jeep?”

  Jean-Louis kept an eye on the men at the bar. They’d taken an interest in Matt’s outburst.

  Matt’s watery eyes fixed on Jean-Louis. “You.” He stabbed at the air between them. “You shot that jeep.” He laughed sarcastically. “Is that a sport around here? Some kind of hobby? People go around shooting cars? Hey pal, guess how many cars I bagged today? What the hell? How hard is it to shoot a parked car anyway? Not like it’s going to outsmart you. Jump out of the way. It’s just going to sit there and get shot. And it’s kind of a big target, if you didn’t notice. What’s the sport in that? Why’d you shoot that car, Mister Djédji? Huh? Tell me that. I need to know why you shot that goddam car so I can understand. I just need to understand something about this place.”

  “Allons, monsieur.” Jean-Louis reached to take the bottle. “I am tired.” Matt shoved his arm away.

  “Answer me. Why’d you shoot that car?”

  “You answer me. Why didn’t you give your son the letter?” Jean-Louis dropped his voice hoping to calm Matt.

  The three men were leaning with their elbows on the bar, watching.

  “I asked you first,” Matt said.

  “We can take the bottle upstairs.” Jean-Louis wasn’t in the mood to argue.

  “No. I need to know now. I’m tired of not knowing what the hell’s going on around me. Tell me why you shot that car? At least then I’ll understand something.”