Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

by Ben Fountain

  Dennis blanched; Jill wondered what it meant that for once she felt no pity for him. He turned away, then looked back as if he couldn’t help himself. “Screw you guys,” he finally muttered, and left.

  “Oh dear,” Starkey fretted, watching Dennis make his way across the terrace. “I do hope I didn’t spoil anything for you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jill smiled and pulled him onto the stool next to her. She almost laughed; for the first time in months she felt clear about things.

  “If you can get your guy down to Bomi,” she said, “I’ll bring those diamonds in for you.”

  “Get out. How would you manage that?”

  “We’ve got some trucks going up-line next week, we’ll be in Bomi one of those days. If your guy can meet me there I’ll get your diamonds.”

  “Really, Jill, you have no idea—how would you get past the checkpoints?”

  “You think they ever mess with me?”

  He acknowledged this with a thoughtful nod. “You know the U.N.’s not the only risk.”

  “So pay me. Pay me for my trouble.”

  He looked at his drink.

  “This is business, just treat it like a business deal. What’s the going rate for something like this?”

  Starkey hesitated. “Three percent.”

  “Which comes to?”

  “Quite a bit, if Petrik’s got what he says he’s got.” He looked up from his drink. “This is for your project, isn’t it, your sewing shop. For Christ’s sake, just let me give you the money.”

  “If you had it to spare, but you don’t. And I wouldn’t take it anyway.”

  “Say I agreed to let you go—what would you do for security?”

  “I’ll have the trucks and crews, just like always. Anything else I’d just draw attention to myself.”

  Starkey looked bleak, like a man imagining his own funeral. “What about your moral objection to all this?”

  “Like the man said, it’s never clean.”

  Starkey chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment. It occurred to her that he must be desperate to consider this; either that, or the challenge appealed to him, the sheer balls of letting her go alone.

  “I’ll need to hop down to Joburg for the cash, which you’d have to ferry in. So you see, you’d be on the spot both ways. With no security to speak of.”

  “I’ll be under the radar, look at it that way.” She laughed and squeezed his hand, wondering how much the rum had stoked her mood. “I can handle it, okay? I’ve done lots and lots of really hard things in my life, I don’t see why I can’t do this too.”

  “Well,” he said a bit sadly, lifting the glass to his lips, “no one ever said you lacked potential.”

  It began, as it always did, with rumors—they started several days before she left Freetown, hints of movement, something stirring upcountry, the stories rippling through the capital in barely perceptible waves. The rumors swelled and took shape as the trucks began their swing through the southeast, and soon she was hearing it on the radio news: the RUF had surrounded peacekeepers in Magburaka and Makeni, effectively holding the towns hostage, and more peacekeepers were turned back on the road to Bendu, faced down by a bunch of kids with automatic weapons. Testing, prodding, seeing how far they could push before the U.N. pushed back—that was Jill’s rationalist take on the situation, though at the depot in Kabili the Irish priest’s explanation was like a slap in the face: “The devil is hungry again.” The devil, or whatever psychopathic gods lived out there—Jill was beginning to hate them all. The news became something else she was responsible for, along with her drivers’ morale, the insane logistics, the neverending drama of flats and breakdowns. The strategy she’d developed over dozens of these trips was simply to keep going until something made her stop, and when the Ghanian officer confronted her at the Falla depot she thought that perhaps the time had come. She thought she was busted—he was that formal, that menacing with his small squad in tow, and Jill was spacey from the heat and four nights of short sleep. He got off on a tangent about rogue kammajohs and disarmament centers and reports of “demonstrations” in the area, and it took her a while to realize that he was talking about the rebels. She almost laughed—oh, them? In that same formal shout he asked if she would accept an armed escort to Makela.

  By then she already had the diamonds. They were in a cloth pouch stuffed at the bottom of her daypack; she’d gotten them the day before, while the trucks were unloading at the Bomi depot. She’d slipped away on the pretext of delivering some letters, crossed the square by a small cinderblock mosque, and followed the street past rows of mud-brick houses and sludgy garden plots. Except for a few pot-bellied children she was alone on the street—people, dogs, goats, every other living thing had sought shelter from the sun, and peering out from under the bill of her baseball cap Jill watched the street vibrate under the onslaught of light, its outlines shimmering like a half-formed mirage. In two minutes her blouse was soaked through with sweat. No one could handle sun like this for long, and she concentrated on her breathing and the motion of her legs, pulling awareness into herself as a way of saving strength. She was not, she noticed with some satisfaction, very afraid; the dense bricks of cash in the daypack gave her a sense of purpose, their heaviness pleasant on her shoulder, somehow steadying. Presently she saw what she was looking for, a hand-painted sign announcing the CHAZ=3 BAR wired to a tamarind tree by the street. She passed through a gap in the palm-thatch fence and followed the path up to the bar, a small wood-frame structure with a rusting metal roof and bushpoles supporting the porch overhang. The door stood open, the interior a bruise of shadows; she didn’t falter until she heard voices inside, and then she was scared in spite of all the guarantees, in spite of Starkey’s calm coaching and her own resolve. Afraid, and suddenly weary to the point of despair; this was part of the deal now, the drag-weight of fear. Another thing she’d have to carry for the rest of the trip.

  She kept going because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Petrik was there, a wild-haired Russian for whom the payoff seemed to be a mere sideline, a distraction from the main business of the day, which was convincing Jill to go back to Koidu with him. “I’m rich,” he declared, slouching against her—they were sitting thigh-to-thigh on a plank bench. Four Leonean soldiers sat at the table with them, dark, strapping men in camouflage fatigues who fell out laughing at everything Petrik said. His security, Jill guessed, the hired help; Petrik scowled but otherwise ignored their hazing.

  “I’m rich,” he insisted as the soldiers cracked up. “I know it looks not possible but is true, seven years I do nothing but work! Seven years in this shithole, one more year I take my money and I go home.”

  “Good,” said Jill. She’d accepted a warm orange Fanta. The soldiers and Petrik were pouring gin from a filthy plastic jug, everyone sluggish and greasy-looking in the heat. The old lady who ran the place sat at the next table over, a tiny, frizzle-headed woman with immense earlobes. From time to time she reached for the jug and poured herself a drink.

  “You tell Starkey, I do one more year for him.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Jill said.

  “Stay with me,” the Russian said, begging her with puppy eyes. “I go crazy for you baby, I take care of you. When you with me you don’t worry for nothing, okay?”

  “I have to go back. I’m sorry.”

  “I give you everything baby, you know it’s true!”

  “I’m sorry. I promised Starkey I’d be back in two days.”

  “Fuck Starkey, he’s not the boss around here!” The Africans howled and slapped the table. “Me! Only Petrik is the boss in Kono! Just stay one night baby, I go nuts for you. Only one night Petrik asks you for.”

  “I can’t,” Jill said, wondering how much choice she had in the matter.

  “Just one night. Please baby.”

  “I’m sorry. I have people waiting for me.”

  To Jill’s horror he slumped over and started sobbing, which inspired a fresh
surge of laughter from the Africans. The old lady chattered happily in Sherbro; she and the soldiers regarded Petrik and Jill with no more worry than they’d show a couple of dogs by the road. When it became clear that nothing was going to happen soon, Jill turned to the soldier with the most stripes.

  “Please,” she said, “talk to him. Tell him I need to go.”

  The soldier eyed her a moment, then leaned over and thrust his hand into the white man’s pocket with a brusque, almost sexual familiarity. He pulled out a blue cloth pouch and handed it to Jill over Petrik’s head; she pulled out the shrink-wrapped bricks of American currency and passed them back, then stuffed the pouch into the bottom of her daypack. She started to rise but the Russian grabbed her arm.

  “Please baby.” His face wrecked, pathetic; strings of dry, cottony spittle stuck to his cracked lips. “Give me one kiss and I let you go. Just one kiss baby, it’s not so much.”

  It seemed the fastest, easiest way to go, but when she bent to kiss him it wasn’t without some shading of mercy. As her lips met his she reflected that she’d never kissed a crying man before. She shuddered, but didn’t rush; the Africans hooted and clapped. They were still laughing when she started down the path.

  They left Falla at two in the afternoon, traveling west through a lush, monotonous country of remnant rain forest and abandoned rice paddies. Jill rode in the Mazda doublecab with Pa Conteh, while Pa’s son Edmund followed in an ancient Mercedes flatbed. Jill had left Freetown with nine trucks, sending them back to the capital on successive days as their loads were delivered. After Falla the Mercedes and Mazda were empty as well; this was the first leg of the homeward trip, and as the potholes and gullies slung her around Jill considered the crude irony of the situation. Up ahead, the U.N. escort; down by her feet, blood diamonds. To gloat on it, even to think it, seemed like bad luck, though she knew that Starkey, a fearless collector of Third World ironies, would relish the story. In this she supposed she would always fail him as a student.

  Pa kept riding the bumper of the U.N. jeep, trying to hurry it along. The Ghanian soldiers stared back with scathing indolence.

  “These guys,” Pa said in a disgusted voice, “what’s the problem with these guys?”

  “Take it easy, Pa. We don’t want to run over the U.N.”

  Pa grunted; like most Leoneans he was scared of the dark and loathed the prospect of traveling at night. He was a small, wiry man with a flat-nosed Mende face, easily the best in Jill’s spotty talent pool of drivers. A good mechanic, fluent in Mende and English, and so ferociously loyal that he embarrassed her at times; if Pa had a fault it was his tendency toward pessimism, though Jill reasoned that in most situations he was merely advocating the realist point of view.

  “We going to Makela?” he asked for the third time.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Lots of soldiers in Makela.”

  “According to the officer.”

  “We stay the night.”

  “I think that would be the smart thing to do.”

  He eased off the accelerator, momentarily reassured. Jill kept the daypack on the floor, half-consciously nudging it with her shoe from time to time. They gradually passed into a series of gently rolling hills, the peaks as round and mossy green as turtles’ backs. The rich mineral smell of wet earth filled the cab; dense stands of fetid jungle alternated with grassy fields, the country almost oppressive in its luxuriance. Clusters of mud-wattle huts punctuated the route, their roofs freshly thatched, with staked fields beyond, but Jill could count the human beings she saw on one hand. They’d heard about the trouble and taken off, either to the towns or deep bush; the loneliness of the country, its still, desolate air, set off a hum in her head like a blank tape, and she was glad when the Ghanians passed them off to a detachment of Indian peacekeepers. There were two jeeps now, eight soldiers in all, and the Indians were considered the most professional contingent in the U.N. force. The lead jeep swung around and pulled even with the Mazda, the heat rising off their engines in cellophane waves.

  “You are going to Makela?” the officer called up to Pa. He was fit, in early middle age, with alert, hawkish features and a trim mustache. His face and khakis were powdered with rose-colored dust.

  “That’s right.”

  The officer smiled when he spotted Jill in the cab; his next words seemed directed at her. “We’re going to pull over for a bit, there’s some business near Makela we need to sort out.” His starched, precise English made her think of Starkey. “Nothing to worry about. I shouldn’t think we’ll be long.”

  They followed the jeep off the road and parked under a stand of locust trees. So here you are, Jill thought, slowly jamming the daypack under the seat with her feet. Stuck here with your head in the lion’s mouth, and nothing to do but sit still and wait. Edmund walked up to bum a cigarette and get the news; they passed the water jug around, then he went back to his truck to nap. Jill settled her head against the seat and tried to relax. A dull, dry ache had taken root behind her eyes, and amid the full-body throb of general soreness there were pockets of quite specific pain, as if she’d been struck here and there with a baseball bat. She wanted to sleep but her eyes kept flipping open, gazing past the umbrella of trees to the field beyond, then the low forested hills in the distance. The arc of the horizon, the glaring, empty sky, gave her the sense of being trapped in a vast bowl of light.

  “Eh, Miss Jill, how long we going to sit?” Pa was fingering the juju bundle around his neck and staring at the soldiers, who didn’t seem to be in any rush. The officer and sergeant were looking through a stack of maps, the officer speaking occasionally into the jeep radio. The other soldiers stood around with their helmets off, smoking and slapping at flies.

  “No idea, Pa. It’s their call.”

  “What they doing?”

  “Scoping out the situation, I guess.”

  “Time to go,” Pa muttered gloomily, squinting at the sun. “Too many killing man out here. You just sit, after a while they gonna find you for sure.”

  Jill reflected that riding with her number-one driver could be downright depressing sometimes. She rested her head against the seat and watched a flock of herons turning loops above the field, their bodies startling white against the background of green. Their elegance, the serene, fluent curves of their flight, seemed to merge into the ongoing stream of her longing, the desire—only lately admitted—that she very much wanted to go home. She’d chosen this life because she couldn’t imagine any other way, but over time, without her strictly being aware of it, the dead stares of the thousands of amputees had served to drain all the purpose out of her work. Those stares, the aura of hopelessness that always settled over the camps, implied that they knew something Jill didn’t, a basic fact that had taken her years to understand. They were finished, their lives were over—if not now, then soon, and this applied to virtually every other Leonean as well. Her work was a delaying action at best, a brief comfort and hope to a very small few—she was handing them a glass of water through the window while the house burned down around their heads. She couldn’t save them, she couldn’t save anyone but herself, which made her presence here the worst sort of self-indulgence, her mission a long-running fantasy. In this light Starkey began to seem pure to her, his career an ideal she might aspire to. There was truth in that kind of life, a black-edged clarity; more than anyone else she’d ever met, he seemed to operate with a firm understanding of what was and was not possible. Such knowledge seemed to her the key to happiness, or failing that, a way of being that might be plausible, and for a time, sitting there in the sweltering truck, Jill felt as if this version was within her reach.

  She could have it, but she would have to quit this kind of life, and the co-op was the deal that would let her walk away. That was the sequence she worked out sitting there in the truck, as if one couldn’t happen without the other—as if the whole moral concept could be bought off with a bribe. She’d take her payoff from Starkey and turn it over to the c
o-op, and only then would she be allowed to leave.

  She had no memory of dozing off; there was only a blank, then the thing that shouldered her out of sleep, wakefulness a half-beat behind the fear. She opened her eyes to see the herons flapping toward the treeline.

  “Shhh!” hissed Pa Conteh. “You hear that?”

  A faint clattering in the distance, bursts of automatic fire like nails raining down on a sheet-metal roof. With a word from their sergeant, the soldiers pulled their rifles from the jeeps and formed a loose perimeter around the stand of trees. The officer was talking steadily into the radio now, taking notes, shuffling through his stack of maps. No one seemed rattled or panicked, Jill noticed; they’d simply gotten extremely efficient in their movements.

  “Rocket,” Pa murmured when the explosions started. RPGs, standard with the rebels—Jill had learned about rockets the year before, while she sat out the fighting in the basement of the Cape Hotel.

  “It’s getting closer?” Pa asked.

  “I think it is.”

  For the next twenty minutes they sat and listened while the gunfire grew more distinct, an excruciating exercise in self-control. Pa groaned and shook his head; Jill jammed the daypack farther underneath the seat and made herself sit completely still. Finally the officer climbed out of his jeep and walked toward the truck. His name was stenciled over his right breast pocket, Sawhey; he was folding a map as he came, bending it back along the creases as he approached Jill’s door.

  “So sorry for the delay.” His voice was calm, matter-of-fact; Jill felt herself release a breath.

  “That’s all right.”

  “Apparently the situation is quite serious,” he continued in the same conversational tone. “I’m afraid that Makela is out of the question today. We have a sizeable garrison in Guendu, however,” he laid the map on her windowsill and pointed to a town, “and we believe the roads are clear. I strongly recommend that we proceed there.”

  “Could we just go back to Falla?”