11.
9 PM on 118th Avenue (Khair-em-Sokar, he reminded himself). Air was cool while they walked west, and the sky was charging itself into an electric violet so intense it hummed.
Been talking an hour. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d had his mother’s attention that long. Breathless, like hauling ass across a river by jumping from one crocodile’s back to another: discovery, terror, exhilaration.
“When the army came to Juba,” she whispered at the three stars piercing night’s veil, “they arrestedt everyone workingk with us. Said we were all workingk with the SPLA. That’s the—”
“—the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. I know what it is.”
Glared at him. Him, catching her eyebrow, armed.
They crossed the street. A turning taxi stopped to let them pass. His mother waved to the South Sudanese driver—yet another person she’d probably helped.
“I’m guessing,” said Raptor, clawing for more credit, “the fact his last name was Garang didn’t help.”
“It’s a common name,” she said, then nodded anyway. “But haffingk the same surname as the rebel leader doesn’t endear you to the gunmen tryingk to kill him.”
But as she explained, neither she nor his father had been in the SPLA or its political wing, the SPLM. His mother already had a party, and his father didn’t trust large organisations, especially ones with guns.
“Your father was always more of an anarchist.” She shook her head. “We’dt be up all night arguingk, listening to Sam Cooke and debating Marx versus Kropotkin . . . nott thatt the soldiers caredt.”
“So what happened? I mean, after everyone got arrested?”
Her smile: like a blossom, losing its petals in one strong wind. “Months of misery.”
No visitations for prisoners in the camp, but if there had been, they’d’ve arrested her, too. She’d been outside Juba on business when the army took the city. A poor family in the countryside took her in.
For “a forever,” she didn’t know if her man were dead, tortured or maimed. But when the SPLA retook the city, everyone was freed. Sort of.
“Your father wass a typical Dinka. Tall and skinny.” They crossed 97th Street, passing the statue of a giant baseball bat his mother had always called the Freud statue.
“But after jail, he wass a skeleton. He’dt lossit his right pinky finger. He never toldt me how. He looked twenty years older.”
Nearly all his father’s fellow prisoners immediately joined the SPLA, especially after seeing how the national army had murdered its way across Juba, forcing kids to become soldiers.
“Nott thatt the SPLA didn’t haff child soldiers,” she said. “Some were only eleven years oldt. Turning children into killers . . . it’s the worst abuse there is. And then these children, they twistt them, destroy their souls, and so they go out, and they, they, they infeccit everyone they meett like a virus.”
Panicking that they’d have no choice but to join the war or be killed by one side of it, she and Jini decided to flee Sudan.
But she was five months pregnant.
He stopped walking. “You didn’t know?”
“I was young. And I’dt always, well, I’d always . . . I hadt an uneven, you know—cycle.” She stopped, turned to him.
“You know whatt thatt—”
“Yes, I know what that is!”
“Well, I don’t know! I’m justt . . . !”
She resumed walking west. He sped up to catch her.
“Anyway, I didn’tt show much for the longestt time. I’dt been sick when your father wass in jail, so I thoughtt it wass just nerves.
“But by then I was so sick I could barely standt up half the time. I was throwingk up constantally. I’dt lost weight even though I was pregganant. How couldt we leave Sudan then? We didn’tt know whatt to do, so we hidt out in the countryside, switching homes among people we’dt worked with.
“And then it was Christmas, when you were born. And from thatt moment onwards,” she said, “we were like birdts. Birdts who never foundt a branch to landt on.”
For the government, Jini Garang was a marked man.
All it took was his letter-writing. He’d spent two years trying to build international business contacts so Dinka and other poor people could sell art and handcrafted goods and maybe attract an investor for small manufacturing.
To the men in the shadows, that made him look like a foreign agent.
After months in hiding, with horrible stories about what the army had done to his family, Jini Garang hacked a last desperate gambit to get them out of the country.
Fifty kilometres south of Juba, a contact stashed a motorboat. Given the poverty in the south, that boat might’s well’ve been a yacht.
The plan was to hide by day and motor upriver by night, aiming for Uganda, but otherwise foot-crossing the border to meet another a church-group contact who’d get them to Kampala or over into Kenya.
“Your father hadt me reciting every step of the plan,” she said, “all the contaccit information, all the locations—he even hadt me drawingk outt a map by memory, again andt again.”
But none of it mattered.
Somebody had tipped off somebody else.
“The nightt we were supposit to escape, we were bangingk around on dirt roads in your grandfather’s car, racingk to get to the Nile. But then we saw somebody chasingk us, somebody in a vehicle thatt wasn’t thirty years old and fallingk aparrit.
“And we knew, we didn’tt even haff to talk, we understoodt: we’dt never make itt as far as the river before they caughtt us and killedt us.
“I was holdingk you in my arms and your father was screamingk at me to repeat the plan, repeat the plan, repeat the plan! And I was so scaredt I was cryingk because I knew whatt he was goingk to do.
“He toldt me I hadt to keep goingk without him and he pulledt over and kissedt me and you andt jumpedt out and saidt, ‘Hangk onto him, no matter whatt!’ And then he ran straightt for thatt car thatt was followingk us.
“And I never saw him again.”
In the shadows between two streetlamps, she turned away from him. The insides of her wrists, up against the sides of her cheeks, once, twice.
From television, he knew that that was the moment he was supposed to hug her.
But he hadn’t watched that channel since he was a kid.
“So whatt couldt I do?” she said. “Whatt couldt I do?”
Was she actually asking him?
She’d raced to the motorboat in the darkness, threw in their four bags of food and belongings, set her swaddled baby on the boat’s floor, and somehow started the motor on the first try before dodging crocodiles and hippopotami on their long trip up the Nile.
Her story, his story, their story dwelt in nights, past and present beneath a dome of blossoming lights, her words slipping round his skin in harsh caress like a coarse blanket, as if he’d lived her tale with more than just an infant’s bewildered perceptions, when he’d been baby-pressed against his mother’s back or breast or belly, when his mother’s body might as well have been the sky stretched out and wrapped in glinting golden chains of stars from horizon-fingertips to horizon-toes.
Her voice. Hollowing against concrete, mosquitoes humming like a violin section: a time warp echoing a phantom-life nearly two decades gone and half-a-planet away.
Never even got close to Uganda. A hippopotamus destroyed their boat and almost took them with it.
“They’re nott cute, like in the cartoons, you know!” she said. “They’re monsters, with mouths bigk enough to swallow you whole. They kill more people than any other animal in Africa!”
They’d joined up with dozens and then hundreds of displaced Dinka marching across southern Sudan, eventually re-routing thousands of kilometres off-course to refugee camps in Ethiopia, and later to Kenya, back to Sudan and then to Chad and back to Kenya again as countries changed governments and governments changed whims and lives.
“I remember,” she said, “how bi
rdts would be standingk by the thousandts over dusty fields, and then suddenly—whoosh!—they’dt all be scuttered and flyingk. That meantt raiders were comingk.”
“Raiders?”
“Gun men. Men who plannedt to kill us or rape us or sell us into slavery, or rape us and then kill us—”
“Who were they? I mean, which side were they on?”
“Men with guns are always on the same side,” she said. “Whoever paidt for the guns.”
And she and the few women who still possessed white clothes agonised that they couldn’t wear the colour of mourning for their butchered men and sisters and parents and children, “because then the bombers could’ve seen us while we were walking.”
Flooding over Raptor like the rushing Nile: a month of marching from Sudan to Ethiopia . . . terror when gun men confronted them . . . relief and tears when it was SPLA, there to protect their raggedy convoy . . . running out of food and then water, and only UNHCR caches dropped along their paths to keep them alive . . . some wanderers so hungry they ate leaves, some dying from eating poisonous ones . . . his mother fording a river with him floating beside her in a handmade basket, and crocodiles would have massacred them both except the monsters were too busy ripping spines from ribs from four other people while she fled to the opposite riverbank to scramble up a tree with him, later strapped to her back, to stay there all day and all night . . . and one cataclysmic day in Ethiopia, when something like eighteen thousand people tried crossing a river to escape murder-by-militia, hundreds of them drowned after their boats overloaded capsized or hundreds others were killed by unknown gunmen.
And finally, after years of running and being run out of one land and into the next, they left their camp in Kenya for Canada.
He’d asked her about his father, and the story had taken them all the way here. He wanted—he needed—to ask her about Kenya. About Jacob’s Ladder.
But how much could either of them take? All this misery from their past. Like diving into the Swamps of Death to rescue children drowning there: how long could you fight off the crocodiles or hold your breath before you died in the depths?
Another time.
Maybe next decade.
But one final question.
“Why’d you name me Raphael?”
Figured it had to be heavy. Probably not the painter. Obviously not the ninja turtle. A grandfather’s name? Some radical?
She smiled. “Your father wantedt to call you Samuel, after Sam Cooke. But I hatedt the name Sam, so I saidt why nott the new Sam Cooke, Raphael Saadiq?”
“Get outta here! That retro guy? Are you serious? I’m named after him?”
“I don’t expect you kidts today to appreciate good music—”
“‘Kids today’? My mp3 player’s got Sam Cooke on it! And Fela! And King Sunny Ade! And Hugh Masekela! And Harry Belafonte—you coulda named me after any of them—”
“Well, it doesn’tt matter anyway, since now you’re a Raptor, Raptor.”
Stopped walking. Facing each other. Next to the municipal airport on Kingsway Avenue at 117th Street, the road lined with sodium lamps gleaming like the eyes of a promenade of sphinxes.
“Mum.” Invoking her title for the first time that night. “Why didn’t you ever tell me all this?”
Her, looking above the airport and up into the vast darkness of space. A single helicopter slicing the night with its search beams.
“What were you afraid of?”
Her eyes, on that helicopter.
She swallowed. “I don’tt know. I justt . . . I wasn’t raisedt here, Rapha—R-r-raptor. With Oprah and Maury and people goingk on national television and tellingk all their secrets—”
“We’re not on TV. And I’m your son.”
Closed her mouth.
Did she even know why she hadn’t told him?
Her: “Are you really goingk to liff with this wolf-man friendt of yours?”
“His name’s Jackal, Mum.”
“Jackal, then. Are you? Can’tt we talk aboutt this in the morningk? Couldn’t you jussit . . . wait a few days, and, and talk together aboutt this?”
He looked up. The helicopter, heading north.
“So, does that mean we’re gonna talk about you and Doctor Liberia, too?”
Both of them, standing in silence. Watching the chopper sliding slowly beyond the dark buildings of the NAIT campus before finally diappearing.
12.
Two days later. 3:30 PM in the afternoon at the Street Laboratory.
Raptor disclosed it all to Moon. The conversation. His own confusion.
“People hang onto all kinds of shit for what they think is all kinds of reasons,” said Moon, sorting through Falcon registration files, making a call-back list to track Falcons who hadn’t been round in a while.
“But those reasons are all pyrite,” said Moon. “There’s just one real reason.
“They think hanging on’ll help them survive—live longer, be happier, be safer. ‘Don’t give away that food! Don’t share that friend! Don’t say “I love you.”’ They figure if they give away their stash, they’re vulnerable. Can you transform that?”
“Transformed,” said Raptor. He’d double-timed it by bicycle to get there after school before the shenu for the Daily Alchemy.
But already other Street Falcons from closer high schools such as Vic and St. Joe’s were trickling in and trading Throne-clasps and Nub-Wmet-Ãnkhs.
A whole squad of Falcons was ooing and awing over the Street Laboratory’s newest poster: a digitally-coloured blow-up of the picture Raptor’d done for Jackal, the one of Hru and Yinepu battling monsters in the Savage Lands.
Raptor smiled at their admiration, then asked, “Hey, who coloured that?”
“Sister Yibemnoot. She’s got skills.”
“Man, she could colour for Dark Horse!”
“Indeed,” said Brother Moon. “But let’s focus. Look at Hru and the Mesnitu, his legion of Blacksmiths. What’d they do because of all the pain and misery they were suffering? Did they hole up in the Savage Lands, hoarding their gold? No. One, because they knew there was no way that’d work: the Destroyer was coming for them no matter what, and their mud-brick fortress was gonna fall. So what did they do?”
“Revolution?”
“That’s right. And . . . ?”
“Replace-Elevate?”
“Transformed, bruh!” Moon smiled and offered him a Throne-clasp. The man never clapped him on the shoulder like he did other Falcons, not since he’d freaked out during that first jiu-jitsu lesson.
“They went across the Savage Lands,” said Moon, “to all the sweatfields and mines and cells and harems where people were chained and tortured and terrified, and they made stand those who wept, they revealed those hid their faces and they lifted up those who sank down.”
Already a couple of dozen Falcons had arrived, forming two concentric rings.
“They didn’t hoard their alchemy,” said Moon. “They taught it. So everyone could rise nearer to the supreme.
“If you keep your gold, it just devolves into lead. Whole tombs full of it. It’s only by giving it away that you truly become rich . . . . Transform that?”
Raptor looked at him while. “Yes.”
“Good. Now let’s join the shenu.”
“Whatcha working on?” said Yibemnoot. Clutching her rolled-up waiver like a scroll. She’d cornered Raptor at his table at the back of the Lab.
5:38 PM. Most of the Falcons were heading home for dinner and a parental signature on the waivers for the free flight lessons Sbai Seshat had arranged.
Raptor’d already forged his mother’s signature on his.
“Uh—”
“C’mon,” she said, reaching for his stack of ink drawings. He had to fight the urge to stop her.
She glued her eyes to the top one, a falcon with triumphant wings, silhouetted against a sunburst, orbited by a series of Kemetic hieroglyphs.
“Supreme!” she said, bright eyes and teeth. “Wha
t’s this for?”
“I’m . . . uh . . . I’m trying to come up with, like, a logo or a flag or something, for the, y’know—”
“The Street Falcons!”
“Exactly—”
Tried not to stare at her staring at his art, pointedly staring at some posters even when he saw her staring at him.
“So, brother, did you even see what I did with your Hru and Yinepu poster? The digital painting?”
Looked away and nodded. Glanced back.
Her smile flatlined.
“Oh. Well . . . did you . . . uh . . . like it?”
Chewed the inside of his mouth. “It was, uh, y’know . . . I just didn’t expect . . . I mean, I’ve never worked with anybody on art before. I mean, you did stuff I, uh, I just wouldn’t’ve done.”
She put his art back on the table.
“Oh.”
Great job, genius.
Raptor: “But, but it was good. I mean, really.”
She backed a step away from the table, glanced out the door towards the bus stop.
“Muh-maybe, sister, we could, y’know . . . do some more art or something.”
She glanced back at him.
“I gotta catch my bus, Raptor,” she said.
Walk her to the bus stop, moron.
Stayed sitting. Watched her walk out. The door, jangling open, hissing closed.
Looking down, shuffling his papers, uncapping his pens.
13.
“You two kill me!” said Moon that same night at the Hyper-Market. “I’m really disappointed with you!”
Raptor and Jackal, staring at feet, floor, walls, anything.
“Well?” pressed the older man.
“Brother Moon, what difference does it make?” said Jackal. “We’re still gonna get our diplomas—”
“Worthless diplomas,” he growled. “You’re taking, what do they call it now?” He glanced back at their class schedules he’d asked to inspect. “English Thirty-Two?”
“Thirty-dash-Two,” offered Raptor.
“When I was in school they called it English 33. Remedial. Get a diploma, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Go to University.”
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