by Ben Fountain
“No. Apparently the situation has deteriorated there as well.”
“Wow.” Jill laughed without exactly meaning to. “That was fast.”
“Yes,” Sawhey said briskly. “So it’s Guendu, then?”
“Guendu’s fine. Whatever you say.”
“We would like to make a detour, here,” he went back to the map, “we’ve been asked to evacuate a small NGO group in this location. Would you be willing to carry them in your lorries?”
“Of course.”
“That would be most helpful. Let’s proceed then.”
They followed Sawhey’s jeep as it turned and headed east, back the way they’d come; as the Mazda made its lumbering U-turn, Jill could see columns of smoke rising to the west. They drove for several miles, then turned south and took a trail through the deserted countryside, their route little more than a confluence of dry streambeds and overlapping ruts. After an hour of crawling along in low gear they came to a highway, the road littered with chunks of macadam and broken rock. They turned west, the low sun blinding them now, an orange ball raging just above the horizon; after several miles they followed Sawhey’s jeep onto a dirt road marked by crumbling stone gates. The road wound through a narrow belt of grassland, the jungle framing the margins like sheer canyon walls. Ahead Jill could see a set of smaller stone portals with a cyclone fence stretching to either side, then a surreal cluster of ranch-style homes. Tennis courts, a basketball hoop, the angled stanchion of a high-dive—she’d seen such places before, self-contained bits of suburbia plopped down in the bush to house foreign logging or mining engineers. She started to ask Pa if he knew this place when a flash of movement caught her eye. A man, shirtless, in torn camouflage pants, had stepped from the trees, then fifteen, twenty, thirty wild-looking men were strung along the edge of the bush, waving rifles and machetes and screaming at the trucks.
“Shit,” said Jill. Pa Conteh was grimly muttering to himself. Not just her mind but her whole being seemed to spool down—as if watching from some far remove, Jill saw one of the rebels lift his gun and fire into the air. Pa, Jill, the soldiers in the jeeps, everyone flinched, raising a howl of laughter from the rebels. In the jeeps the soldiers swung their rifles toward the rebels, barrels held at forty-five degrees. Jill braced for more shots but no one fired.
“Jesus, Pa.”
He was muttering something over and over, shaking his head as if resigned to the dreadful worst. They passed through the stone portals and followed Sawhey’s jeep toward the houses. Jill could see people huddled in the interior courtyard, a crowd of Africans sitting or crouching low. Something was off, she could feel it as the truck approached—the place was shabby, barely holding together, and that glimpse of the crowd had left her strangely unnerved. Pa parked in such a way that her view was blocked.
“Do you know this place?”
He shook his head, unable to speak just then. They glanced back and saw the rebels sauntering toward the fence, laughing and jeering as they crossed the field.
“I don’t think I’m gonna see my wife again,” Pa said.
Jill felt so wretched that she wanted to hug the old man. Sawhey and two of his men disappeared between the houses; the other soldiers formed a line among the jeeps and trucks. Soon Sawhey reappeared leading an older, heavy white woman by the arm, the woman sobbing, pleading with him in a guttural smear. She was a nun: bareheaded, dressed in men’s work clothes, but a nun nevertheless—after years in the relief business, Jill could spot them at a glance. The other soldiers came behind with two more nuns, both of them weeping as messily as the first. A handful of black women followed with quick, controlled steps, looking neither left nor right as they hurried toward the truck.
The first nun stumbled and fell to her knees. Sawhey launched into a complicated slapstick routine, pulling here, gathering there, straining to manage it all; after several seconds of this Jill jumped out of the truck and jogged toward them. As she cleared the corner of the nearest house the courtyard was gradually revealed to her, the crowd seething, roiling in place like a termite mound. Some were weeping, some babbling or laughing to themselves, others rocking back and forth or wringing their hands—the process of understanding was like a slow electric shock, a gathering jolt that finally brought her up short. She had the nun under the arm by then, but she wavered, undone by all those lunatic faces.
“Come on,” Sawhey gasped, “help me.”
Jill heaved, the nun lurched to her feet. The three of them staggered toward the truck.
“Do you speak Dutch?” Sawhey panted. Jill shook her head.
“They’re Dutch,” he managed between breaths, “there were supposed to be more.” The other women were climbing into the back of the Mazda. “I think everyone bolted but these.” With Pa pulling from inside, they managed to hoist the nun into the Mazda’s cab. Jill turned and started back toward the courtyard.
“Get in the lorry,” Sawhey told her.
“What?”
“Get in the lorry,” Sawhey repeated.
“What about them?” Jill motioned toward the courtyard.
“Our orders are to evacuate staff.”
Jill took a step toward Sawhey. “You’re going to leave them?”
“Our orders are to evacuate staff.”
“Good God.” Jill looked past the trucks—the rebels were strung along the fence like outraged crows, cawing, bending over to show their asses, rattling the steel mesh with their machetes. They knew the soldiers wouldn’t shoot unless attacked.
“Don’t you know what they’ll do to these people?”
“It’s out of my hands. Get in the lorry, please.”
Jill turned and ran back to the courtyard. She stopped at the edge of the crowd and went through the motions of making a count, though she knew there were far too many for the trucks. Physically they looked fit enough—they were well-fed, and most of them had decent clothes and shoes, but below that line of thought she was struggling, unsure what kind of claim they had on her. How flawed were they, how deficient; how deep their lack of essential human stuff, and could she live with herself if she walked away and left them to this lavish butchery. There would be no limits here, she knew that in her bones. Here it would be a pure Brueghel vision of hell, cretins and lunatics left in the care of compulsive torturers. They didn’t even have their reason to protect them, the scant, maybe infinitesimal shield of being able to meet their tormentor with a sane eye. Better to go ahead and shoot them, she thought. Better to have the soldiers machine-gun the lot than leave them for the rebels to carve up.
“Miss.” Sawhey had appeared at her side with an enlisted man— did they mean to drag her off too? “Please, Miss, we need to leave at once.”
“How far is it to Guendu?” she asked sharply.
“Fourteen kilometers,” he answered with supreme patience. “Please, I insist that you come with us at once.”
“We’ll walk them out. We’ll put as many on the trucks as we can and the rest will have to walk.”
Sawhey blinked; it was as if she’d jabbed him with a pin. “My orders are to evacuate staff.”
“And you’ll evacuate staff, nobody’s telling you not to evacuate staff. But you can bring out everybody else too.”
He seemed to hold his breath as he glanced over the crowd. “It can’t be done.”
“Of course it can. We’ll make a column, we’ll put the jeeps and trucks at the front and the back and everybody else will be in the middle. It’ll be slow but we can make it.”
For a split second his discipline cracked, his face collapsing as if punched from inside. “Don’t you think I would save them if I could?” he cried. “I can’t handle these people, I don’t have the men. Even if we try that mob will fire before we reach the first gate.”
“They won’t if they know you’ll fire back.”
He seemed to plead with her now. “I don’t have enough men, can’t you see that? Perhaps they’d wait until dark, perhaps we’d get that far. But as soon a
s night falls we’ll be slaughtered.”
It surpassed her, simply carried her along—in some clenched part of herself she registered surprise, a faint grace-note of wonder as it happened.
“No,” she told Sawhey, “I can fix that. Those people aren’t going to touch us.”
Later, playing it back in her mind, she found that whole blocks of memory had been lost to her. She couldn’t recall getting her daypack from the Mazda, nor stepping into the open away from the trucks, away from the thin, sheltering line of soldiers. There must have been an exchange, an understanding of sorts, because she started down the road with a vague sense of assurance, a mental imprint of their rifles coming to bear. Then it was all jump cuts and pieces of things, fragments spliced one after another—the awful heat, the scything birdsong in the bush, her nausea and a sharp copper taste in her mouth. How the sun threw orange shafts of light across the road, shadow and light alternating like flattened stairs, and how the rebels fell silent when they saw her coming. Like a switch had been thrown, that sudden, then her despair when they rallied and started in again, howling, obscenely urging her on.
At a certain point she lost the sense of her feet touching the ground. Things went away, spinning off as if gravity had lost its hold—mainly it was about not showing fear at precisely those moments when you were most afraid. Eyes, mouth, voice, strict control of the pressure points, because fear was a tacit form of consent. She was close enough now to see the lumps in their skin, the juju bundles they’d sewn into themselves. They wore rags and tatters of clothes but fairly bristled with weapons; they were boys, teenagers most of them, red-eyed, heads swiveling as they drifted toward the gate. Giggling, clearly messed up on something. Several pointed their guns at her and laughed.
She stopped on a line even with the two stone portals. “Who’s the head man,” she called in a neutral voice, pitching it between request and command.
There was more laughter. “You a long way from home,” a voice answered.
“Sure, padi. But don’t you know I’m trying hard to get back there.”
The youth who’d spoken waved down the road with his gun. He was tall and gaunt, bare-chested, his thin Fullah face edged with decorative scars. Bandoliers wreathed his body like a fashion statement—gangsta, that was the style they aspired to. Tupac Shakur was their Haile Selassie.
“Walk on,” he said in a jeering voice. “Nobody stopping you.”
“Yeah, that would be fine, I appreciate that. But what I’m asking is you let my friends come with me, saby? Let them pass, all these people good people here. Nobody here you need be making trouble with.”
The youth laughed; she watched his eyes range past her shoulder, scanning the soldiers at her back. The rest of the mob stood slack-jawed and goggling, their stares like cigarette burns on her skin.
“You and de soldiers, I leave you go outta de goodness a my heart. Everybody else got to stay, das de order. We in charge of security in all dis place now.”
“Come on padi, these people sick. Let these people go to Guendu for the doctor.”
“We got doctor,” he said, raising a laugh from his friends.
“Let them go, nobody but simple people here. Nobody here going to make any trouble for you.” When the youth just stared, Jill added: “I’ll pay.”
He wasn’t impressed. “What you pay,” he snapped.
She pulled the cloth pouch out of her daypack, loosened the drawstring, and poured a spoonful of diamonds into her hand. “This now,” she said, showing him her hand. “And this later,” she lifted the pouch, “when we get to Guendu.”
The youth came forward several steps, close enough for Jill to hear the asthma in his chest. When he saw what she had he went blank for a moment.
“Yah.” He swallowed, came a few steps closer. “You give me everyt’ing now, you free to go. Give me everyt’ing now and all dese people free to go.” When she refused he made a childish swipe at her hand, then played it for a joke when she pulled back. He was laughing, trembling slightly as he glanced from her to the soldiers, trying to solve the hard calculation they presented. The cost of taking them, and his own chances in a fight. Whether he’d be among the lucky when it was all said and done.
“Do the trade,” Jill said quietly. “You’re a very rich man if you do the trade.”
His eyes got busy—diamonds, soldiers, then back to the diamonds. Working the numbers so hard she could hear them squeal. He licked his lips, took one last look at the soldiers, and carefully held out his hand.
Most were manageable. The nuns told them to walk and so they walked, lapsing into a one-track catatonic state in which the next step forward was the only thing. Others, though docile enough, were prone to wandering off or sitting down in the road, and it was a struggle to keep them focused and moving with the group. Those who couldn’t be managed at all—the violent, the contrary, the overwrought—had to be bound and secured in the trucks, where they passed the night howling like kenneled dogs. What the column must have looked like to someone watching from the bush, Jill could only imagine—like a nightmare, an apparition some sorcerer had conjured up, a shambling caravan of demons and freaks. The rebels bought into the spirit of the thing, buzzing up and down the line in their junkheap technicals and yowling like angels of the apocalypse, singing songs, urging the walkers on, doing note-perfect imitations of the lunatics. Toward Jill and the others they assumed a pose of bluff camaraderie, shouting advice and officiously pointing out the stragglers.
The engulfing dark, the fragile beam-shafts of the trucks’ headlights, made it seem as if she was walking down a tunnel or chute, a low, dust-choked space of jagged shadows and light. From time to time Sawhey would leave his jeep and drop back through the column to find her. He’d give her a drink from his canteen, and they would walk together, herding the people at the rear of the column along. The nuns and their staff were farther ahead, spaced at intervals to keep the column intact.
“They just keep going,” Sawhey said during one visit.
“Yes,” said Jill. Everything hurt, legs, lungs, feet. She welcomed the pain; she hoped it would fill all her interior space.
“Do you think they understand what’s happening to them?”
“No.”
“That’s what I think too,” he replied. “None of us does, not really. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to lately.” They walked in silence for a time. “Wouldn’t you care to ride in the jeep?”
“No.”
“You’re planning to walk all the way to Guendu.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m planning to do.”
“You know,” he said after a moment, “you make me ashamed of myself. I don’t think I’m a particularly bad man, but you make me ashamed of myself.”
She wanted to hit him then. By now she was convinced that something was wrong with her, and that was what she planned to say to Starkey: I’m sick, I’m mentally disturbed. That’s why I gave away your diamonds, I’m fucked up in the head. To the women of the co-op she couldn’t imagine what she’d say—nothing, hopefully, if she could manage it. If she could resist the idiot urge to explain herself. At dawn a detachment of peacekeepers met them at the outskirts of Guendu, and as the column filed into the waking town Jill pulled the daypack out from under Pa Conteh’s seat and threw it to the Fullah youth. Tossed it carelessly, like so much dirty laundry, glad that she couldn’t do any more damage with it. After that things ran together in a blur—the walk into town, the peacekeepers herding them along, everyone collapsing finally in the dusty square. Pa Conteh found Jill propped against a concrete wall; he led her back to the Mazda, got her settled in the cab, and went to find them something to eat. She was still there, dozing with the door swung open, when she heard someone approach.
“Miss. Excuse me, Miss.”
She opened her eyes. Sawhey was standing there with a group of officers. Jill let her head fall back against the seat. Smoke from a hundred cooking fires was rising over the town, spindly columns drifting
past the thatch and sheet-metal roofs, delicately twisting into nothing as they rose past the palms. For several moments she followed the smoke with her eyes, trying to find the exact point where it dissolved into air—there, that’s where she existed, where she’d lived her whole life. Turning back to the soldiers felt like the hardest thing she would ever do.
“Please, Miss,” Sawhey said. “We need to know what to do with these people now.”
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
1. Love and the Revolution
When I was six my father became president of a college in Virginia, a small, well-endowed Episcopal school to which generations of wealthy Southern families had sent their sons, and which, though it had admitted women since the early fifties, still very much expressed that ripe, combustible blend of sentimentality and viciousness so vital to the traditions of the monied Southern male. We lived in the president’s mansion on campus, a massive Greek Revival structure in the old plantation style, with columns towering along the broad front porch, a sweeping central staircase fit for royalty, and high-ceilinged formal rooms whose hardwood floors had the acoustic qualities of a bowling alley. School tradition required my parents to host receptions for the faculty several times a year, and it was at these gatherings—peeking with my sisters from the top of the stairs at first, then later as a fringe participant, serving punch with the help in my coat and tie—that I became aware of my attraction to Mona Broun. Mrs. Broun was a faculty wife, a trim, petite woman in her early thirties whom I confused for a time with the actress Natalie Wood. She had the same wholesome looks as the famous movie star, the same well-scrubbed, faintly exotic sex appeal, along with fawn-colored hair worn loose and soft, this at a time—the mid-sixties—when women’s hairdos, in the South at least, resembled heavily shellacked constructions of meringue. But it was her eyes that got our attention from the top of the stairs, intense brown eyes with rich, lustrous tones like shots of bourbon or maple syrup, framed by sharp, exaggeratedly arched eyebrows like the spines of enraged or terrified cats.