Thirty Girls

by Minot, Susan

  Pierre seemed pleased.

  Don is what you would call a successful businessman, Lana said.

  Are you?

  Some of us have to bother with the practicalities of the world, Don said. I know it’s boring. He was looking for the waiter.

  The waiter came and took their orders. He did not meet anyone’s eye. What business exactly? Pierre said.

  Don took a deep breath. It’s not creative like you all. Then he began to explain. Harry drank his beer and regarded him with interest.

  Jane compared what he said with what Lana had told her, that he bought failing companies, fixed them up, then resold them. Don was describing it rather differently with more technical terms. He did say he was here taking a break from the grind. Jane started writing in her book. The thought of Jake appeared, altered at this distance. She remembered how he had signed up for a business course at night, then it turned out he was spending the Tuesday nights at high-stakes poker games in hotels around New York. Soon came phone calls from strange men asking for payments. Then another image of Jake came to her, one that came often, of the day he sat slumped in the chair reserved for him, in the middle of that empty room, facing the semicircle of family and friends, as they itemized one after another their disappointments and grievances against him. He was wearing his motorcycle jacket and a tie. His chin dropped down further with each strained utterance from the mortified family and friends who were being made to speak. Among them, she remembered, was the boss who studied bats, with pointed ears resembling a bat himself. Jake looked at none of them, and it seemed unlikely he was going to. His head remained bowed with humiliation; then she realized, of course, that he had fortified himself with an injection before arriving at this appointment with his older, disapproving brother. An intervention it was called. It still gave Jane an odd, fluttery feeling to remember it. The facilitator, a very thin man, put the question to him: Was he willing to get help, or have everyone here cut ties with him if he did not? There was a great silence. Jake, his mother said. A lawyer with a gray bob, she had long given up on him. What? he said. He looked at everyone with hatred then stood up like a weak wave rising. Anything else? he said, and walked out of the room. His dismissal of them was so breathtaking and absolute it still shocked her to think of it. She was divorced from him by then, though they were still meeting in secret and having sex. But none of the others knew that.

  Harry’s eyes were closed, resting. Everyone parsed out the bill. Jane unfolded a fortune from her cookie. You will find yourself wherever you go.

  Traveling, she thought. You could outrun yourself for a while, but it didn’t last. Your self always caught up.

  They drove in circles around an empty rotary in a topaz light, unable to choose a turn. Everyone was perched, watching.

  That looks as if it goes back to the highway, Lana said.

  Let’s just find the nearest motel, Don said.

  There’re no lights down that road.

  Just pick one for Christ’s sakes.

  Harry turned at the next road.

  Easy there, Don said.

  All tired eyes were on the lookout. A string of lit motel signs appeared. A number of them had No Vacancy signs.

  Who would come here? Jane said.

  Tourists, Lana said. We’re at the foot of the Nile.

  One sign said Happy Aches Motel.

  Sounds promising, Jane said.

  They pulled in. A deserted building had no lights in any windows.

  Now what? said Don.

  They continued on. Streetlights disappeared.

  What time is it?

  Don reported that it was ten-forty-seven.

  There were no signs of life on the black, well-paved road.

  This all looks new, Jane said.

  The road forked, and Harry turned onto more newly paved tar and wound along the shorn lawns of a suburban development. Suddenly they could have been in Ohio. Occasional streetlights threw down milky pools onto curbs with garbage cans at the ends of short drives. A white sign near a clipped hedge said simply Hotel, and they turned up a drive.

  Eureka, Don said.

  The house looked like a country club with a long white porch. Lana got out and banged a brass knocker on the door and entered. They waited.

  Come on, Don said, and was ignored.

  After a while Lana returned, bringing energy into the lethargic car. No, she said. Let’s go.

  No vacancy?

  It’s a brothel.

  Really? Pierre said. Great. Let’s stay.

  There are some beauties at the bar, Lana said. But single white girls are definitely not welcome.

  Please, Pierre said as they drove off. Can’t I find you all tomorrow?

  This is ridiculous, Don said. Where the hell are we going?

  No one answered him. They continued along curving roads. At the base of a lamppost swarming with moths they spotted a pale girl in a halter top smoking a cigarette on a tilted lawn. Beside her was a knocked-over bicycle, a yellow inflated canoe, and a white dog. Harry slowed down.

  Hey, he said.

  Hey. The girl looked up with no surprise.

  You don’t know a place we could crash around here?

  The girl looked left, then right, like a cartoon. Not really.

  No motels?

  Not around here.

  The truck idled. She took a drag of her cigarette and glanced behind her. You could probably stay here.

  Really?

  Maybe. She tapped her ash and stood up. I’ll ask.

  Cheers, Harry said, and pulled the truck into a short driveway cluttered with more bicycles and paddles and rubber tubes.

  A bare-chested fellow with orange tufted hair strode out in bare feet. We’ve got a spare floor, he said in an Australian accent. Where’re you all from? I’m Brian.

  He ran a rafting outfit with a couple of guys from Sydney.

  Inside the prefab house there was no furniture. On concrete floors were strewn sleeping bags and cardboard boxes. A few candles glowed in corners beside shadowy figures. There was a man leaning against one wall with his eyes closed. Deeper in the house, a tape player was gently pounding rock and roll.

  Everyone accepted a warm beer to be polite, but even Lana was looking wan after driving all day. Business hadn’t been so good lately, Brian told them. Recreational options on the Nile were short-lived. The government was planning to build another dam.

  Jane laid a blanket down beside a pile of lifejackets and went to find a bathroom. Feeling her way along a dark hallway, she ran into a couple kissing; it was Don and Lana. She found a toilet in a sort of open alcove near a loudspeaker. It was like being inside a giant beating heart. When she got back to Harry, he was asleep.

  She lay beside him awake. After a while the music clicked off and there was some shuffling around, then it was quiet, a quiet house with floors covered in bodies. It reminded her of college, and for a moment images appeared of things back there. Faces appeared. She saw her old friend Stacy, in Congress now with a girlfriend, then her sister, Marian, pressing petunias into window boxes. Just before she’d left for Africa, Marian had told her she was having another baby. She saw her friend Penny in London, waving from her doorway (three boys and a husband) as Jane drove off in a cab. Then she saw Jake teasing Penny one time in New York as elevator doors closed, and she and Jake were left alone. It was odd to be thinking of Jake more today than she had in months. The others in the world back there seemed so embedded in their lives. Except for Jake—he wasn’t in his life anymore. Though he felt no more distant from her than the ones still alive. Then she thought of watching Harry take off from the escarpment, and of his face expectant as he waited for the wind. Next to her his face smelled of soap he’d washed with before going to sleep and his shoulder was salty and dusty. He was younger, but as a man he was bigger. Harry was her best new thought, and she stayed with that till she fell asleep.

  She woke to something leaping on her forehead. A black furry thing scampere
d off. It was grabbed, and a monkey was placed on Brian’s shoulder. Name’s Bastard, he said. Everyone rose, rumpled.

  The Australians offered them a discount rafting trip, so later that morning they found themselves on a dirt road with spindly bushes encroaching like umbrellas. At a put-in they removed rubber boats from the tops of their vehicles and launched them onto the Nile. The surface of the river was like melted glass, swirling and dimpled with current.

  Sitting in the rounded bow, Lana dragged her arm in the water. It’s so warm. Too bad we can’t swim.

  Brian stood up in the stern. Why not? he said and dove overboard.

  Everyone followed. The water was dark green and they floated in it, arms out, toes breaking the surface, letting the current carry them. Twist one way and the water would spin you that way. It would turn you the way you bent. The bank was an unbroken wall of mangroves with knobby trunks and bushes jutting out in shelves over the water. Hulking birds perched still as mummies, watching them drift downstream. Suddenly wings would lift, and, crooked and bent and thin, they would fly into the blank sky, uninterested. The Australians pointed out the species: open-billed heron, fish eagle, darter, the ancient cormorant. Harry grabbled Lana’s feet to swirl her over. He reached for Jane’s arm and held them together so the three of them were linked shoulder to shoulder moving down the river. The water was warm and thick. Jane kept thinking, I’m in the Nile, aware of the romance in the word. The source of the Nile. It was part of the bigger world, of history.

  Then she thought of how in history at that moment, three hundred miles north of this peaceful gliding river, children were being yanked out of their homes, held captive, raped, infected with deadly disease, and made to kill. The sun shone down as the river carried them along.

  Signs for Kampala appeared on the road late in the afternoon, and short of downtown they stopped at a place called Al’s Bar, where Lana had been instructed to call their hosts. Al’s Bar had an enormous thatched roof and was vacant at five. Boz Scaggs played over an empty bar. Lana borrowed a phone to call the McAlistair brothers.

  An hour later Pat and Rodney McAlistair arrived, blasting techno music from huge speakers mounted on a roofless Land Rover. The windshield was folded back, and it had enormous jacked-up tires. Pat, the older brother, was dark and barrel-chested with a booming voice; Rodney was narrower, with beige eyebrows, silent.

  Follow us back to the house, Pat said. Giving directions never works. Nothing here is marked anyway. Get in, girls. You’re riding with us.

  The sun set as they drove south of Kampala to the Gbaba Road. The headlights of the Toyota behind them lit the stirred-up dust. They drove past lines of shacks lit with candles stuck on counters or inside tin cans on the ground. They were selling bags of chips, breadfruit, dried meat, and cans of soda. Stiff kangas hung over rods, flip-flops were wound around poles like rose vines.

  Jane and Lana stood braced against the roll bars, blasted by warm wind and throbbing music. The road turned dark, and the land seemed to become greener and deeper. The farther they went, the softer the road became.

  Eventually they arrived at an aluminum gate glinting in headlights among the trees. A dark-skinned man appeared out of the shadows. This askari was a Samburu in a long greatcoat who unlatched the lock and let the cars through. Jane looked back and saw him close the gate. He would be, as all the askaris were, at the gate all night. The Land Rover came to an open black space with far-off squares of lights in a cement block house with no curtains. They neared the house and parked on the grass. It was a rental, Pat said. They’d been there two weeks.

  To the north on a hillside dotted with yellow lights was Kampala’s suburb, but down here there weren’t many houses nearby. The black space was a huge lawn at the end of which, they were told, were the shores of Lake Victoria. The silhouette of a woman stood in the open door with a baby in her arms. It was Pat’s wife, Daphne.

  Here, please, take her, she said, pouring the baby into her husband’s arms. Her hands lingered over his big hands, and her large liquid eyes gazed at him with a manic hope. She had dark bangs and a fresh face. Come in, she said. Her quick gaze moved up and down her guests, as if to see what they’d arrived with, what news of the world. The house is in shambles, she said. We just moved in. Who wants a beer? Unpacked boxes were piled against the walls; a plastic tarp covered a big lump in the hallway.

  Lana put a firm arm around Rodney and strolled him into the darkness of the lawn, her chin raised in profile, saying, Tell me everything. He was another of Lana’s old flames. The brothers were starting up a computer business, but still getting hired out for concerts and parties. During the next few days, music was always playing from speakers lodged in the windows, sailing across the bristly lawn.

  Again, Jane noted, they were being hosted by a mother with child. Daphne was in her mid-twenties, and later, as they sat around candles on a makeshift door propped on cement blocks, Jane learned that being a mother had happened earlier than planned. Daphne had been working with trauma victims, first in London, then in Bosnia. Already that seemed like a long time ago. She was from Scotland also; she and Pat had known each other since they were kids.

  Harry and Jane were given a room that just fit a double bed, leaving a few inches of space beside one wall. They got under the mosquito net and found each other’s tacky skin in the heat. Jane felt a little drunk and thick as she rolled around with him. Though she was taken up with his body, images still appeared in her mind of the drive that day, of the candle flames on the counters of the shacks, of Pierre flicking Lana’s anklet, of the morning already so long ago, of Harry pulling Jane over in the waters of the Nile and letting her go.

  Later she lay awake in another new bed, listening to his quiet breathing. Already she could review their other nights together in other beds. She felt more with him when he slept and rode the feeling as if it were a raft on the sea. His mouth was near her forehead, as close as it could be without touching. Her arm was draped across his waist, and her leg was hooked heavily over his hip. Their bodies could not have been closer, and yet Jane felt what she so often did in precisely this proximity: how very far away another person was, and how immense and unknown his mind. Her hand flat on his chest felt the sweat on his skin and still she had the longing to be closer. Would it ever stop?

  After having music thumping all night, silence was profound. Everyone in the house could therefore hear the woman with the Scottish accent screaming, Goddamn it, Pat, you should have told me!

  She woke early. There was the milky cast of a mosquito net. Where was she? That’s right, a new place. To avoid the waiting again for Harry to roll in her direction or not, she got up. The house was quiet. Someone had made coffee and she followed the smell to the kitchen. There were dishes in a tiny sink. A narrow window looked on a gigantic lawn to the lake reflecting an orange sunrise across the horizon. The kitchen was a welcome disarray, the counter crowded with plates and wrappers, mango skins, the ubiquitous carton of Parmalat. One mug was stamped with the face of Nelson Mandela.

  She heard Daphne’s voice out the back door and saw her talking quietly to the baby as she hung laundry on the line. She had probably been up for hours. The new mother led a life parallel to others. Jane thought of her sister back home who inhabited her role with a placid, focused air and of her husband with a manner to match. She saw that Marian had a capacity for attachment and had tried to mimic it, but did not feel it penetrate some hard core. Jane’s attachments to people turned out to be more intermittent, not entirely there. Perhaps it was herself never entirely there. Jane took her book and cup of coffee out to the front lawn and sat on a dewy chair.

  She stared at the water beyond the grass. The lake drained of blue as the sun rose and the color was pulled into the sky. Behind her were gentle kitchen sounds and the smell of toast. She pictured Harry still sleeping. He was making beautiful moments. And wasn’t that all one got anyway, moments? She had a shameful awareness, which she managed mostly to hide from herself,
that her connection to the world came only in a string of moments. Might she hope for more? She opened her book to read about the Lord’s Resistance Army.

  Jane felt like a white plastic chip in an ancient forest and asked herself again just what she was doing here, in a place she’d never been, going to report on a place she didn’t know about, with struggles she could only begin to imagine. How did she find herself here? Fact is, she’d made a choice each step of the way. It was how a person arrived anywhere: with one deliberate step after another. She read about Uganda’s recent history, about Idi Amin having people buried alive at Bucoro, about pregnant women being disemboweled.

  She read on. The Lord’s Resistance Army was led by a nut named Joseph Kony.

  Attacks associated with the LRA had been around for nearly twenty years. Everyone found it astonishing that no one had stopped them. The statistics, as always, were difficult to digest, much less fathom. Just a year ago four hundred civilians were slaughtered in Kitgum. She saw on the map this was where they were headed to visit.

  Hey, said a voice above her, and she felt a hand on her shoulder. How goes it?

  Past the brim of her hat she saw Pierre’s crumpled khaki pockets.

  She felt the transformation that came when a person was near. His hand on her shoulder grounded her. I’m discovering new and inventive ways people have of brutalizing each other, she said.

  That’s our Africa, he said.

  He was holding a book. Here’s more, he said. The raid on Entebbe. It happened right nearby, you know. She took the book and read about the famous hijacking. Could that have really been more than twenty years ago? She was in college then. Jane remembered the story but not the details. Some world events made an impression then, while others seemed to slip by.

  An Air France plane had been hijacked by Palestinians, and Idi Amin offered them asylum. His precise words greeting them at the airport were: I am His Excellency, Field Marshal Doctor Idi Amin Dada, appointed by God Almighty to be your savior. Then Jane thought, Was Harry even born then?