Kid Moses

by Mark R. Thornton

  Copyright © 2011 by Mark Thornton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First North American edition 2015

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thornton, Mark R.

  Kid Moses : a novel / Mark R. Thornton. -- First North American edition.

  pages ; cm

  Summary: “The story of Moses, a nine-year-old survivor of the harsh streets of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who longs for something outside the grim existence he has known”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-62872-571-1 (hardcover : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-62872-633-6 (ebook) 1. Street children--Tanzania--Fiction. 2. Wilderness areas--Tanzania--Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.H78435K53 2015

  813’.6--dc23

  2015034229

  Cover design by Shawn Paikin and Maggie Davey

  For Toroye

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Helen Moffett for her professional eye on numerous edits and to Daudi Peterson and Tessa Berlein for their reviews. I am also especially grateful to Neil Olsen, Jeannette Seaver, Maria Matthiessen, and Bridget Impey in South Africa who all made the publication of Kid Moses possible.

  Part 1

  Much later they sit under a tree, looking at the place where the snake has bitten Kioso. They have given up walking, not from being tired, or from the pain in Kioso’s leg, or from any understanding of how snake venom works. They stopped because they were just not getting anywhere.

  Moses sits doing nothing, not able to fix a venomous bite on a kid with no chance. They don’t know much about snakes or any animals really, but they know enough to understand that they have reached a place they have never been before. The view before them seems different. They are not philosophical enough to wonder if this valley will be the last thing Kioso will see, or if the ground under this tree will be the last place he will visit, or if there will be any final moment of transition or clarity. They do not seek frantically for a solution, a way out, a cure, or a poultice to prolong Kioso’s life. They cannot run, and there is no place they can go that seems better than where they now sit.

  Kioso’s leg swells fast, reminding Moses of the bloated, dead-men legs of the homeless people back on the streets of Dar es Salaam. The leg bulges and takes on odd shapes. The skin is tight and hard and its surface smooth, like the stomach bladder of a slaughtered goat.

  The leg keeps changing. Moses looks away at the valley, then at the land behind, then at Kioso’s face. And when he looks back at the leg, a new bulge has appeared under the skin, or a new kind of seeping stuff is dripping down the leg like cooked fish fat. The leg takes on not just a shape, but a life and evolution of its own. Both boys just sit back and watch it. Almost as if putting some distance between them and the leg will prevent it from jumping altogether on top of them.

  The venom finally reaches Kioso’s brain. The formula of toxins designed for the simple destruction of a field-mouse has crept northwards, from leg to knee, up thigh and through the vast interior of his body to arrive in his head and the sensations of his mind. Kioso mumbles, sweats, panics, grabs Moses’s arm, and then falls into a dreary sort of sleep that is not real sleep, but respite for a period of time from reality.

  Death crawls into his bones. Or rather, gnaws its way there. Kioso does not know he is dying. He just knows he is scared, and doesn’t have the strength to do anything. He looks up at Moses with eyes like those of a begging dog. Some drool slides from his mouth. He is thirsty, then has brief jolts of pain. Death takes him as he gazes skyward into the thin canopy of acacia trees.

  Moses buries him under a tree. He uses a stick and his hands, and he digs for a long time, but the ground is too hard, so he rolls Kioso into the shallow scrape and then puts the earth back over him. When he first throws the earth onto him, it goes onto Kioso’s face and into his mouth, and Moses stops. He wants it to be over him all at once. He hates seeing bits of Kioso’s body exposed—his shoulder sticking up—because he can’t dig a deep-enough hole. He panics and squeezes his eyes shut and sits on the ground to shovel in the earth with his feet so he does not have to stand there and throw it onto him.

  And then Moses walks—it is what he knows how to do, if nothing else. Thirst and hunger are now permanent aspects of life. He finds a rocky outcrop just high enough to give him a view, and climbs up. From the top he can see out across the vast expanse of trees. There is nothing so flat in the world as the giant land before him. Not even the ocean back in Dar es Salaam seemed this flat. But now that he has found the view, he doesn’t know what to do with it. It means nothing to him. He cannot figure his direction. Instead, he turns to where the land looks slightly less hostile, and goes there.

  After some days, the trees begin to thin out and the country opens up into plains and scattered woodland. Spindly trees come up from the earth like old women’s fingers. He finds water in a couple of small mud holes. But food, no. He tries to eat some leaves, but they make him vomit, and he does not try them or any other leaves again. He finds a honeybee hive, and sits at a distance watching the bees, not wanting to get stung.

  It all seems distant to him now. Not just Kioso’s death, but the school, the harbour, living on the streets back in Dar es Salaam. He sings Radi Bundala in his head. At times his mind is blank, numb, and then the songs just appear there. He will be walking along, or sitting in the shade and then: “Listen to me child. There is nothing for you in this town …”

  Again and again the songs play in his mind, like he is walking with some sort of companion. It makes him think of the harbour, of the old days. Despite the struggles of his life there, the thought of it is familiar, and he takes comfort from thinking about their names—his and Kioso’s—etched in the wood at their old sleeping spot in the rotting ship hull.

  Moses keeps walking. He stops to rest sometimes, but soon feels that he too will die if he just sits, and this pushes him on, slowly but to somewhere.

  Eventually, he does not think of Radi’s songs, and his fatigue reaches the point where no music plays in his mind.

  Chapter 1

  Moses came out of his sleeping place and into the dusty seaside world of Dar es Salaam. He made for the main road—always good at that time of day, with all the people going to work and moving about. He crossed the rail-line and the small field after it, and continued along the dirt streets to where the big avenue stretched out wide, with palm trees and shops and banks and people crowded along its sides. It was already hot, and the big road was loud. Fare-collectors shouted from the matatus with all those people inside going somewhere.

  Moses stood in the street and pointed his fingers together at the thumb, motioning towards his mouth: “Give me money.” Windows rolled up and he pressed his face against them. Drivers looked at him and said no, or looked ahead and pretended he wasn’t there. Walking people moved around him so not as to brush against his dirty body or be touched by his grubby hands.

 
“Don’t beg,” some said. “Don’t touch me. Go away.”

  Then a woman approached: “Come with me.” She took Moses’s hand in hers, and they walked. The woman was big and walked slowly, her ankles thick and spilling out over her shoes. They came to a corner where a man sat on a crate roasting maize over a small fire. The woman handed the man a coin, then took an ear of maize for herself, and handed one to the child. “You say you are hungry, then eat.”

  Look at this filthy child, she thought. That brown shirt with no sleeves was probably white at one time. Hands black with dirt, teeth yellow and brown, bits of dried grass stuck in his hair. How old, even? Nine? Ten, maybe? And he holds the maize with such dirty hands, rubbing them all over his food.

  “Well, say thank you, at least,” she said as she wiped her hands with a handkerchief. “And you go safely, you.” So he did, and she left him and walked on, and he returned to the big avenue.

  At dusk he left the streets, careful to avoid the bored and lonely men who guarded the shops at night. Some of his friends had been taken by them before, into hidden places in the alleys. But he knew that nobody could find him in the old ship hull at the harbour. It was where he and some of the other kids from the street had made a home of sorts, a haven. So he headed there.

  It was cramped, but safe. He crawled down inside the hull and squeezed through some loose planks to a place in between the boards just big enough for a handful of small children to sleep. Soon his friend Kioso arrived. He had managed to get some bread and bananas. Moses shuffled over to make room for him to sit down. They made a small fire from scraps of cardboard, and Kioso laid the food out and they began to eat.

  Above them were the sounds of the night, the men from the street, coming to their place in the rotten ships along the harbour’s edge. Their shouts were always loud, cries of frustration and madness. The men would be drunk and the women expressionless, going to and returning from the corners of the harbour with their customers. And then the fights and smashed bottles and the crashing of men jumping from chairs and stools. One yelling about a knife, a cry, and then the clattering of boots as the men ran down the harbour road.

  The morning looked and felt different. Rays of sunlight found their way into the hull of the old ship. The beams of yellow crisscrossed Moses’s face as he sat up to look out over the blue water. The harbour was quiet. The men above were rising slowly to cigarettes, or not yet rising at all. He had sneaked up on them before as they lay passed out, dipping into their gloomy places, over the broken glass, between the crates and fallen chairs. Slipping gently into their pockets, crawling around them silently, combing them for money, cigarettes, watches. But that was dangerous work, and he and Kioso still had food. So they finished the rest of the bread.

  The only other sounds were from the old men, the ones who had survived the harbour the longest, the ones who sifted through the morning rubbish before people woke up. Fantastical creatures, missing eyes, fingers maybe, and clothed in tangles of shirts and rags and plastic bags. Like angels or phantoms or beasts from some unknown place, shuffling along the harbour road.

  Moses stared into the sun, thinking of the uncle who was supposed to take him to school and give him clothes and food. But just never did. Just beat him until Moses left, one day gone, and that was it. And before that, his father who went to load crates at the harbour every morning for a daily wage. Working for meagre pay that couldn’t feed the family, only enough for a cup of watery uji in the morning. And his mother who ran away somewhere after his father was killed.

  But his father had spoken of good things. He was from a farm, and had come to the big city for the good life, like so many others. From a place up in the mountains where people grew bananas and vegetables and maize and even coffee, to a place of struggle and waiting for things that never came.

  “We will go to the farms one day, Moses,” he would say.

  Moses remembered them talking outside their shack, his father’s hands brushing the dust from his pants and shirt. With big eyebrows, he had smiled down at the boy: “When I get enough money from the docks, we’ll go back and build a house to live in, and have money to buy things from the shops. And even a bicycle for you, maybe.”

  Moses loved the idea of riding a bicycle past farms, down a road to a shop with big barrels of sugar and meal and rice inside in the shade, and all those items hanging on strings from every corner, no inch of space wasted. He imagined how he would lean his bicycle against the wall of the shop, keeping an eye on it so nobody would steal it, and how he would go inside and buy a soda, and then sit outside by his bicycle drinking it, and watching the people looking at him.

  The next morning, as it turned out, was the day Moses would remember as the one when it all began. He and Kioso had not planned to go anywhere, but a lorry had passed and they had hopped aboard. One minute they were playing in the street, asking for change, stealing oranges from the street vendor with clubfeet, and the next they were hiding under a canvas tarpaulin in the open cargo bed of a lorry leaving town.

  Moses had been thinking of his father more often than usual, and of farms, any farm, just the idea of a farm. Over the days, the thoughts had turned into possibilities, the idea of a farm becoming a chance to take. The boys had no plan or idea of which direction to take, how to go, or what to do when they arrived there, wherever “there” turned out to be. They simply hopped on and went.

  The lorry was blue and left a cloud of lead-smoke behind it as it bounced on leaf springs too tight for an empty load or for travel on a corrugated road of holes. Moses and Kioso peeked out from under the canvas cover sometimes, but mostly they lay low and bounced about the big, empty, open bed of the lorry. At first it was exciting, then funny, then boring, and then scary.

  After a couple hours, the lorry stopped. Men got out. The boys stayed quiet and kept the canvas tarp over their heads. The men opened the bonnet of the lorry and poured water into the hissing radiator. Then they climbed back in and drove on. They passed through a town, then another, where they stopped to buy cigarettes, and carried on again. When the lorry slowed for a big bump or a deep hole, the dust would overtake it and envelop the lorry and fall onto the tarp in the back. Fine particles would form clouds so thick that their glimpses of the sky were blocked out.

  They passed through more towns and then small villages, climbed some hills, crossed a river, and the land stayed bumpy, the boys bouncing about the lorry bed along with the leftover fruit. Villages then became scarce, and the boys sat low, exhausted and abused by the banging of the lorry on the road.

  They listened to the gears of the lorry, to the strain of the old engine. They peered out to watch the tops of the trees passing by and the sky and the clouds overhead changing from everywhere in the morning to bubbly at midday to flat like the tops of the trees in afternoon, and then to nothing at all. Sometimes they could see signboards along the road, but after a while these too became scarce. They passed fewer trucks and cars, until eventually the road was empty except for them.

  Moses thought of their options. Jump out now or stay longer? They were scared of being discovered and scared of the men. Boys like Moses and Kioso didn’t like men or trust them either. To boys like Moses and Kioso, men only meant getting yelled at and kicked and beaten.

  There were a few decent men at the harbour, mainly the old ones, who were just too old to be trouble. The phantoms who just minded their own business and hobbled along the streets, waiting for their day to die. The orange vendor with the clubfeet wasn’t a bad man either. He yelled at the boys and shook his stick at them, but nothing more than that.

  It was the younger men who were the problem. They thought they were big men, especially when they were with girls and other young men. They didn’t have anything though, no jobs, nothing. Just size. They would beat the boys sometimes, and take whatever they had and throw it on the ground and laugh. Sometimes they had knives to show to each other and whistle at.

  And of course there was Prosper. He looked young, b
ut he always had people around him, willing to listen to him and be a part of his gang. Maybe it was because he never smiled. Maybe because he did everything first. Maybe because he wasn’t afraid to talk big.

  Either way, Prosper hung around the market like the others, waiting for night-time to do his stealing. He didn’t necessarily dislike the young streetkids, but he hassled them and beat them as part of his routine. And he didn’t necessarily dislike Moses more than any other kid, but Moses always seemed to be crossing paths with Prosper—and was always trying to get out of his way.

  Moses thought of Prosper and thought of the men driving and knew that eventually they would stop at their destination and pull back the tarpaulin and find the boys.

  So they jumped. One and then the other, they fell and bounced in the dirt and scurried with bloodied knees into the bush. The truck bounced along at the same speed and with the same noise, coughing its way down the road until it was gone and its banging heard only occasionally, and then not at all.

  Moses and Kioso watched the dust settle. Quiet returned to the scene. A dove flew onto the road and pecked at its stones. The world around them became a world of wilderness, with just a small road passing through it. Moses lifted Kioso up by the arm. He wiped blood from his knees and elbows and brushed the sandy stones from the scrapes. He looked down at the road and then into the woodland around them.

  “Where are we?” Kioso asked.

  Moses walked down the road a little way and then back, and then in the other direction, and back again. Kioso looked at Moses, waiting for some solution. Moses brushed his head with his hand. “I don’t know where to go or which way is better.”

  The two stick-figure children remained standing in the road, afraid to move as the sun got lower and the birds started moving to their places in the treetops where they would spend another night safe, nestled together, wings in tight, heads tucked down in their feathers.