by Melanie Finn
Now the ferry began to move out from the far bank. Only the starboard engine worked, so the boat crossed in a series of slow pirouettes. It was why he loved this country.
By late morning, he turned off the main road (such as it was) and onto a narrow sand track through a grove of palm trees. The track cut directly east, so that in a few miles they reached a small bungalow on the edge of the sea. Pilgrim got out of the car and Harry watched her walk toward the water. She had barely spoken, she was still far off. She walked to the water’s edge, and then into it, deeper and deeper, like a crazed baptist.
He ran after her and pulled her back. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you’re not the one who’s dead.’ She looked at him, green-blue eyes, Jesus Christ, she was beautiful. He persevered. ‘There’s a basket of food in the back of the car. Go and put it in the kitchen.’ As she walked up to the house, he took out the Konyagi and had a long drink. He had always been drawn to folly.
* * *
Pilgrim slept. He had given her two Valium claiming they were aspirin. He wanted her to sleep, best thing for her. But also, he needed time to acknowledge his own life was shifting. At last. To open his ears and hear the tap, tap, tapping of the past. He needed to decode the message.
They had come to him again, they had come to remind him. They did not threaten, but they were insistent.
He sat for a long time, through the hot, still afternoon and into the night, watching Pilgrim, watching the light change, drinking, though not too much.
* * *
Dreams. A long time since he’d had them. Dreams had no mercy, dreams were sons of bitches. Of course that’s part of the reason he drank: to keep the dreams at bay. But he’d always drunk too much. That’s why it had happened in the first place. A sober man would have made a different decision: too late to fly, go in the morning, the pussy’ll still be there.
In certain dreams he turned around, banked the plane through the golden clouds and headed back to Arusha. He would wake and grasp at the golden seconds of possibility, try to suck them in like clean air. He had turned around.
But he hadn’t. No. He had kept flying. He had seen the strip in the bush, a little cut in the miles of bundu, a little scratch. It was way too dark and he should have done a flyover, he always did flyovers. But he was drunk, he couldn’t be bothered. He’d landed.
The sea, deep blue in the dawn light, wrinkled with wind. A little ruffle on the sand, a petticoat of surf. Incredible that the big bold sea could be so delicate. It was cheating to drink the dreams away. He should live them, he should dream them every night. His dreams should be a memorial to his shame.
Betty and Dave had had to sell the farm. They’d woken up one night, the house surrounded by villagers holding flaming torches. They’d climbed out the bathroom window, run to the Land Rover and driven off. Left everything: Betty’s pugs to be killed, Dave’s Steinway to be set ablaze. They moved to Iringa, managed a tea plantation. They’d stayed together. Harry had seen Betty once in Dar, maybe fifteen years ago. She was walking down the street, plumper, her hair graying, but the beauty lingered in the way she moved, the structure of her. She saw him and pretended she hadn’t, ducked into a shop. He stood at the entrance to the shop, shouting, ‘You can’t take back a fuck.’ He was at the nasty end of a bender.
You can’t take back a fuck. You can’t take anything back.
Now he drank the Konyagi, three big gulps, then screwed on the top. He couldn’t go cold turkey, not with the girl to sort out. But he would ease off. Not too much, mind: he took another three swigs. He regarded the girl on the bed under the mosquito net. He wanted desperately to touch her, but more desperately to be the young man who he had been, when beautiful women took off their clothes for him.
Before. Before he dropped the air speed. Before he lowered the wing flaps.
Take his dreams and put them on the table. He’d sat there, listening—hearing. The propeller stopped spinning. His throat opened, his mouth had been dry.
They hadn’t been able to get the living ones out until morning. A tourniquet can only do so much. So some of them died. Exsanguination.
* * *
Pilgrim made breakfast: papaya and toast, a pot of tea. ‘There are eggs,’ she said. But after some discussion—boiled, poached?—neither of them wanted one. She was wearing an old kikoi of his, she must have found it in the cupboard. It hid her breasts and hips, but this only accentuated the slim length of her arms, her lovely ankles.
‘I need to know,’ she said. ‘About the ghosts.’
Had he told her about them? He didn’t recall. He must have been bat-faced to blather on like that. He could deny it, say it must have been the booze talking, he didn’t know any ghosts.
‘Need?’ He was still trying to decide what he should tell her. ‘Why do you need to know?’
‘The boy,’ she said.
Harry noticed the little knot of bone where her wrist joined her hand.
‘The boy in the white shirt,’ she continued. ‘Who is he?’
Harry considered denial. What boy? ‘Ah,’ he said to give himself another fraction of time. He kept thinking: if I’d finished the beer, if I’d finished the beer. But I didn’t. Because of the boy. So he said what was obvious, ‘The boy is a ghost.’
Pilgrim laughed, an odd, contorted little laugh.
Now Harry laughed. And he caught her up in his true laugh, so that laughter flowed out of her.
‘A ghost?’
‘Yes, a ghost.’
‘This is a ghost story?’
Later, after they’d eaten, he told her.
‘It’s a long time ago now. They were in the road, walking home. They’d lived near me, a young couple. One block over. I used to see them when I drove home from the club at night. For a long time I thought they were just out walking. One night, I stopped to have a chat. I realized too late the woman was crying. They’ve had a row, I thought.
‘But the woman said to me, “We can’t find our dog.”
‘The man put his arm around her shoulder, “He’s a little terrier, a black shaggy thing, have you seen him?”
‘I said I was sorry, but no, I hadn’t. I’d keep a lookout.’
Harry pulled the quart bottle of Konyagi out of his pocket and took a grateful swig. He offered it to Pilgrim, and she took a taste.
‘Rough.’
‘Not after twenty-five years.’
She took another sip. ‘The couple who were lost in the caves? Are you talking about them? I thought you said they were before your time.’
‘They were. Long before.’ Harry let the fact sit by itself for a moment. He’d gone over it many times, he’d checked the dates, and he was dead certain.
‘The next day I drove round to their house to see if they’d had any luck and found the dog. But the house was all closed up. Had been for years. For a few days I drove home another way. And I forgot about them. The benefit of booze. Then I got home one night and found her sitting on my bed—the woman, very pretty, dark hair like you.
‘“They want to know what you’re going to do,” she said.
‘“Who?” I said. But I knew. Of course I did.
‘She repeated: “What are you going to do?”
‘I told her to get out. Never before, never since told a woman to get out of my bedroom.’
‘Did you see her again?’ Pilgrim asked.
Harry shook his head. ‘Not her. Others.’
‘And you’re sure?’
‘Sure? That she existed? Do ghosts exist?’ He smiled. ‘Did I make her up? Was she a projection of my poor, beleaguered conscience? Of the booze? I’ve thought about all that. How can I know—how can I really be sure?’
‘Did you do anything?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She asked you, “What are you going to do?” Have you done anything?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just drink.’
Pilgrim was leaning forward now. She wasn’t smiling, but her face had a kind of light.
‘Anything beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Have you done anything beautiful?’
At first, he didn’t understand what the hell she was on about.
GLORIA
At dawn she pilots the little boat out into the bay. Something not many people know about Gloria: she grew up on the water. Lake Michigan. So she can handle boats. People think she’s just a fat woman. But she is a woman of great physical strength and grace, and a very able swimmer. Thirty-six years ago she was Michigan’s junior state champion in breaststroke. But her real love had been butterfly: arcing up out of the water like a manta ray, the power cording like electricity through her body to her feet, and how she flew and plunged, the high arch of her strong back.
But then Milton. Soft words, such soft words, always watching from the bleachers, watching her in her swimsuit and bathing cap. Revealed. Thighs, breasts, the shape of her buttocks. She might as well have been naked. He was older and that made her feel oh so special. Don’t worry, little Mary, I’ll pull out. Whatever that meant she hadn’t a clue. I want to be your first, Mary, little Mary, my Mary, does that feel good, Mary, I bet that feels good, god, your tasty little cherry. Technically, his impregnation of her was statutory rape. And that made the violation about age, him being forty-two and her being sixteen, and not about the bruises. He’d pinched her, hard, dozens of times, as if he was plucking a turkey, before fucking her, rudely, quickly. Then rolling over and falling asleep. What a turd blossom.
Mary never could lose the pregnancy weight. The muscle turned to fat. Her body made new fat like a morphing sci-fi creature. The upside was Milton stopped wanting to fuck her. The upside was James in her arms, on her breast, sucking fiercely. The downside was being seventeen, a high school dropout. It didn’t matter how smart she was. It sure as hell didn’t matter that she could swim.
The sea is still as a mirror and this makes the sound of the outboard loud. People might peer toward the noise, might see her. But then they’d have to be looking hard and with binoculars: she is wearing a kanga over her head and another over her shoulders. From a distance it would be difficult to tell she’s even white. Let alone a woman. Let alone: Mama Gloria.
She sees the first buoy at the harbor entrance. The fishermen are there, dynamiting the last of the coral reefs. A lot of fishermen these days are missing an arm; they always say, Oh, a big papa got them. Yeah, right. A big shark with a fuse on the end that goes boom.
Out past the second buoy, the water gets choppier and the little boat thumps against the waves. Gloria wonders why she doesn’t come out here more often, for how it makes her feel: like a strong, competent woman. Not a fat old hag. She bears north now, heading for a narrow gap in the mangroves. The tide’s still high enough to cut through this way.
Closer in to the mangroves the water stills again. So still she could dimple it with her breath. She can see straight down, five or six feet, to the silty bottom and mangrove shoots and sea-grass. She imagines the Amazon must be like this: wild green embracing the water, a low horizon, the feeling of being hidden inside. Lake Michigan was deep and murky and polluted; she could never see what was down below or how far down.
After a quarter of a mile, the channel opens up into a small bay. More of a cove, less than a quarter of a mile across. At the far sea-end is an island with an old lighthouse. She and Harry visited the lighthouse once during their lovin’ days. The metal staircase, the brass fittings—everything was still there, tarnished by the elements. Herons nested in the well of the old light. She’d loved their high, forlorn cry, a sound made to carry across the water. She and Harry had a picnic and snorkeled around the coral rag. She’d been light in the water, delicate and graceful and sure. Harry hadn’t noticed. He didn’t want to see her pale, rubbery thighs.
Scavengers had since come to the island and taken away the metal to sell as scrap to the Chinese ships off shore. They took it to China to be recycled into buckets and shovels. And then the buckets and shovels would be imported back to Tanzania.
Machetes, too. She’d read that somewhere. Before the genocide in Rwanda. The killers had ordered half a million machetes from China. No doubt the metal had once been sourced in Africa. One thing for sure: you can count on the brutal irony of this continent. The most ironic thing that can happen, will happen.
Here she is, for example, escorting Mr Koppler to a watery grave.
In the middle of the cove Gloria turns off the motor, drifts and drops anchor. She waits a moment, checking for other boats. Then she puts her hand on the tarp and gives it a reassuring caress.
Just yesterday she’d looked out the kitchen window and seen an overweight man in a raincoat getting out of a taxi, looking around. He had no idea where he was, like he hadn’t even clocked that he was in Tan-zanier—i.e. the heat and blazing sun and the totally goofy way of things, like the taxi had one wheel a different size from the other three; like he hadn’t even clocked he had his raincoat on at all. He looked dazed. Mental patient dazed.
‘Can I help you?’ Gloria had said.
She figured out pretty much in that instant why he was there. Not exactly why, but that it had to do with Pilgrim. She had backstory steaming off her. Husband, lover, bail bondsman—man trouble of some sort.
‘I am Ernst Koppler. Excuse me to bother you.’
‘No bother,’ Gloria said. She’d even been excited, she was about to find out something. Part II of a miniseries.
‘I am looking for an American woman.’ He spoke the words mechanically. I. Am. Looking. For.
‘Pilgrim,’ Gloria offered.
‘You know this woman?’
‘Sure. Come on in. Let me get you a drink. Take off your coat, Mr Koppler.’ He came in. The coat stayed on. He smelled like a tramp. But also, she’d recognized the particular stench of grief.
She made Mr Koppler coffee. He liked it black. He sat with the little cup and saucer perched on his knee. Awkward, he was, like her, plain and overweight. Back in the States people bumped into her all the time with their shopping carts or as they walked down the street chatting on their phones as if they didn’t see her. She and Mr Koppler, the invisibles.
‘Now, Mr Koppler, what do you want with Pilgrim?’
He said, ‘She killed my daughter.’
‘She killed your daughter,’ Gloria repeated neutrally, but she was giving herself time to take it in. She felt so much, all at once, a great noise or strobes suddenly blasting right at her. What she wanted to say was, ‘I know how you feel, I know, I know, I know. I know your heart is a hobbled beast.’ She took a sip of coffee instead.
‘She hit Sophie with the car,’ Mr Koppler went on. ‘Two other children also. All dead.’
That moment of finding out, it had been the same, surely, for Mr. Koppler. The cops at the door. ‘Mrs Maynard? May we come in? It’s about your son, James.’
I know, I know, rushed through Gloria’s head and sort of possessed her. She sat very still and attentive, her body squared and open. ‘Now that is the most terrible thing.’
He looked up at her, his dull face, cross-hatched with spider veins. He seemed to be waiting now for her. ‘It doesn’t make sense, does it?’ she continued. ‘How objects persist, they just carry on, houses, cars, beds, other people, and your child doesn’t.’
Mr Koppler started crying. He cried profusely for nearly ten minutes. Gloria let him. She didn’t try to touch him or comfort him. She knew he didn’t want this, she knew it did no good at all, the there, there. Then he said, ‘At my shop—I have a little stationery shop—yes, I look at the pens, all the different pens—rollerballs, soft tips, dry erase markers—I look at them, and I do not understand how it is that these pens are still here, these stupid pens, and my child, my child is not here.’
Gloria sat very still, very quiet. She didn’t tell him, ‘Oh, it’ll be all right. You’ll get over it. The pain will get less and less.’
It does not.
‘You closed up your shop, didn’t you, Mr Koppler? And you will never go back.’
Koppler then spoke of himself in a way Gloria knew he never had with another soul. As if—and she thinks about this in the boat with his dead body—as if he was giving a testament. He wanted one other person on the face of this lonely planet to know his story. He wanted to be heard out.
Before he killed himself.
He told Gloria how his wife died of cancer. He had loved her. And—incredibly—she’d loved him. Hamida was from Uzbekistan. She’d been his cleaner at the shop. ‘It was simple like a movie,’ Mr Koppler had said. ‘She wants a kind man and I realize I am an ugly, boring man but also kind.
‘Maybe she just wants a visa when we begin. But we’re happy. Chatting, breakfast, TV, walks. And then one day she says, “I am pregnant.” She thought it was not possible, after Uzbekistan. Torture, because of the books she’s teaching there.’ Mr Koppler beamed, suddenly, as if the sun had burst through the window with an accompaniment of violins. ‘And so Sophie. Her little hands, her feet, I would look at them, touch them. Kiss. Wunder, wunder—you know the word, the same in English?’
‘Wonder,’ Gloria nodded. Yes, wonder.
Wonder rushing out of her. The way James slept, mouth open, palms open, fingers stained with ink or paint. He was so perfect she could barely breathe for loving him. Mary—she of all people, she of the awkward squad—had made perfection. Her heart blossomed, her love fell on little James like petals, softly, softly. She kissed his forehead. She lay down next to him, sheltering his small body from the world.
These old feelings stirred, and she’d fallen back with Mr Koppler to that time right after James’s death. She lost the years in between, stepping through a door into another room. The past was that close, always, a door away, the walls paper-thin and she could see shadows of people moving on the other side. She could hear them, mumbled voices, but not quite determine their words.
