by Brady Hammes
“Do you have any water that won’t rot my gut?”
Slinky pulled a canteen from a duffel bag and tossed it to Gavin. “Next you’ll want something to eat.”
“Are you offering?” Gavin asked, suddenly hopeful.
“No.”
Gavin finished drinking and set the bottle down at his feet. It was warm, with a slightly metallic taste, but he was grateful for it nonetheless. “Where are we going?”
“To deliver this product.”
“And then I can leave?”
“Only if your brother obeys the rules.”
“There are rules to this?”
“There are always rules,” Slinky said. “And so far, your brother hasn’t done a very good job following them.”
* * *
—
GAVIN SAT BACK IN the boat and stared at the stack of tusks hidden beneath a blue tarp. There was no denying his complicity in the act. He’d done what he’d done, and he would have to live with that. He wanted to blame his brother for putting him in this situation, but the truth was that he’d traveled here under his own volition, without any clear role, the only one in the family unable to justify his passage. He’d proved himself to be perfectly useless, a burden more than anything. He’d come to help his sister, but he hadn’t considered the possibility that she didn’t need his help. Only Sam knew what Sam needed, and it was foolish to think he had any control over that. It was foolish to think he could convince anyone to do anything. He couldn’t convince Renee to want children, and he couldn’t convince Mariana to want him. He’d spent most of his life trying to micromanage the emotional lives of other people, a tactic the futility of which he was only now realizing. “What you don’t understand,” Renee had once said to him during one of their more heated arguments, “is that you’re most effective when you disappear.”
Oliver steered them into a cove hidden under cover of dense vegetation. He then waded to shore and pulled the boat aground, allowing Slinky to step onto dry land. Gavin waited in the boat, unsure what was expected of him. Two jeeps approached from the forest and pulled to a stop along the riverbank. A tall, wiry man in a pinstripe suit stepped out of the first jeep. His skin was smooth and unblemished, his thick hair carefully coiffed in a back comb, and he possessed a hushed and delicate air that reminded Gavin of the musician Prince. Hands were pumped, then Slinky pulled the tarp from the ivory and streaked his flashlight across the tusks. “One hundred twenty kilograms,” he announced.
Prince pulled his phone from his pocket and snapped a picture of the tusks. “Twelve total?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Slinky said.
Prince jabbed at his phone. “Sending this to my client for approval.” A moment later, he turned to Gavin. “Who’s that?” he asked, seemingly annoyed to find an unexpected white man sitting among his product.
“Don’t worry about him,” Slinky said.
“I’m worried,” Prince said.
“He’s nothing. A nuisance.”
Prince looked down at an incoming message on his phone, then nodded his approval. “Okay. Load it up.”
Slinky’s men began loading the tusks into the jeeps.
Prince looked to Gavin. “He should come with us.”
“Not a chance,” Slinky said.
“What do you intend to do with him?”
“Ollie,” Slinky said, handing his pistol to the boy, “you stay with the American. If he tries to run, shoot him. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
“Okay,” Oliver said, sitting up a little straighter in the boat, holding the gun awkwardly, as if it were a small, unpredictable animal.
A moment later, the men piled into the jeeps and drove away, leaving Gavin and Oliver alone. With everyone gone, the sounds of the forest asserted themselves, the barking of distant monkeys, the trill of an unseen bird.
“Low man on the totem pole, huh?” Gavin said.
“What do you mean?” Oliver asked in heavily accented English.
Gavin finished what was left in the canteen. “It means he doesn’t tell you anything.”
“He tells me things,” Oliver said, registering the slight. “He’s my dad.”
“That’s your dad?” Gavin said.
“Yeah,” Oliver said. “And I hate him as much as you do. Probably more.”
Gavin tried to arrange this new information into something he could understand. “Then why are you here?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Oliver said. He went on to explain that he lived in Libreville with his mother, who had moved there after leaving Slinky for what Oliver explained were obvious reasons. But a few times a year Oliver was forced—due to some legal maneuvering by his dad—to spend a few weeks back in his hometown. Oliver hated everything about the place—the boredom, the food, the absence of friends—but it was the awful business of elephant poaching that he most despised. He suffered it only because he feared his father’s legendary temper, which he’d been subjected to on more than a few occasions.
Gavin had suspected that Oliver, unlike his father, was not an executioner. While the rest of Slinky’s men had taken a perverse pleasure in disassembling elephants, Oliver had moved with a ruefulness that suggested he was ill-suited for such heinous labor. And the fact that he’d brought him water for no apparent reason other than a vague sense of sympathy hinted at a generosity Gavin imagined being able to exploit.
“So the elephant guy is your brother?” Oliver asked.
“Who? Jonah?”
Oliver nodded. “I see him around town sometimes. At Laurent’s place. My dad stole his camera and gave it to me for my birthday.”
“Oh,” Gavin said, unsure if the kid was looking for an apology or just an acknowledgment.
“Tell your brother I’m sorry about that.” Oliver laughed. “I should have known my dad would never actually buy me a real gift.”
“That was shitty of him,” Gavin said. “Your dad, I mean.”
Oliver shrugged, as if he were used to it. “Like I said, he’s an asshole.”
* * *
—
AN HOUR PASSED, THEN another and Slinky still hadn’t returned. Gavin leaned against a fig tree, flicking ants off the toe of his shoe, while Oliver paced back and forth in the darkness.
“You really think he’s coming back?” Gavin asked.
“Why?” Oliver said. “You don’t?”
“I don’t know.” Gavin wasn’t sure what the play was, but he assumed Oliver knew the geography better than he did, and if there was any chance of making it out of here he’d have to rely on the kid. “How far is it to town?”
“Ten kilometers?” Oliver said. “Maybe less.”
“You think we could make it?”
“Tonight?”
“Do you really want to sleep out here?” Gavin asked. He could see the kid turning it over in his mind. “Here’s what I’m thinking. You and I start walking. I know it’s dark, but the moon’s bright enough and I think we can make good time. If we see your dad’s truck, I’ll run into the forest and you just tell him that I beat you up and took the gun.”
“He’s never gonna believe that.”
Gavin stood and approached Oliver and struck him hard across the face. He swung again, this time connecting with his bottom lip, which burst open and began trickling blood down his chin.
“Putain!” Oliver said, holding his face in his hands.
“I’m so sorry,” Gavin said. He’d never punched anyone before, and he felt terrible for what he’d done. “I had to do that so your dad would believe your story.”
Oliver turned his back to Gavin, quietly whimpering.
“Are you okay?” Gavin asked, leaning closer to get a look at the kid. “Let me look at it.”
Oliver turned and swung at Gavin, landing a fist just above his right ear, a tough pie
ce of skull he imagined must have stung the kid’s hand more than it hurt his head.
“Feel better?” Gavin asked.
“Yeah,” he said. He stood and began walking toward the road. “Let’s go.”
They followed the jeep trail that Slinky and the rest of the men had taken: a narrow, winding road pocked with patches of rainwater. They hiked in silence, Oliver hesitantly leading the way, stopping every so often to rest, occasionally doubling back when the road split and they lost their way. Oliver showed himself to be very much a city kid, flinching and jumping at the slightest rustle and movement, waving his gun at the surrounding forest like a skittish bank robber trying to manage a room full of hostages. After a few kilometers, Gavin began to question the logic of leaving. He remembered being lost once while exploring the Grand Canyon with his college girlfriend. The trail they’d been following had disappeared into a dry riverbed, and they spent hours bushwhacking through desert scrub brush before finally realizing they should just return to where they’d lost the trail and wait for help to arrive, which it eventually did. The only problem with applying that logic to his current situation was that help wasn’t coming.
“So what are you doing here anyway?” Oliver asked, attempting to fill the silence. “In Gabon?”
“I came to help my sister,” Gavin said, “but I haven’t been very helpful.”
“Is she sick?”
“Sort of. But she’s getting better. She’s a very strong woman.”
“I don’t have any brothers or sisters,” Oliver said. “What’s it like?”
What was it like? Gavin had never considered the question. He thought of his siblings like appendages, things that had always been there and he imagined always would be. “It’s like…,” he said before stopping.
Oliver turned back to him, awaiting his reply.
“It’s like a part of yourself you can never really know.”
* * *
—
AS THEY HIKED, GAVIN’S mind drifted back to his childhood. When he was sixteen, his parents went to a conference in Orlando and left him in charge of Sam, who was eight at the time. Jonah had gone to a friend’s cabin in Wisconsin, so it was just the two of them together for the weekend. On Saturday night, Gavin rented Spice World from Blockbuster and set her up with a tub of popcorn in front of the TV in the living room. A couple of Gavin’s friends—Richie and Nick—showed up with boxes of beer, waving to Sam as they descended to the basement. Gavin warned his sister that she wasn’t allowed to come downstairs, said to call him on the intercom if she needed anything, and that if she ever mentioned any of this to Mom and Dad she would be one very Sorry Spice.
More kids arrived later in the night, most of whom Gavin didn’t recognize and definitely hadn’t invited. They entered without knocking, dumping beer in the refrigerator, oblivious to the little girl dancing along to the television. Gavin moved around the house, frantically trying to manage the situation, which was quickly spiraling out of control. He looked out the window and saw a line of cars stretching down the street, a mass of teenagers walking toward his home. The music grew louder as more kids arrived, a thumping he could now feel through the carpet. The kids wore shoes in the house, which was a blatant violation of their mother’s policy, and they smoked cigarettes in the kitchen, which was so completely against the rules they didn’t even have a policy for that. When the party outgrew the basement and began overtaking the rest of the house, Sam retreated to her bedroom. Pretending to be a neighbor, she called the police to file a complaint. When the cops arrived, the party drained through the back door, a wash of drunk teenagers fleeing into the cornfields bordering their property. Gavin had been drinking gin and orange juice all night, so that by the time the party had died, he was sitting on the floor of the powder room, a thread of saliva hanging from his mouth, something awful brewing in the toilet. Sam knocked gently before poking her head in. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He said he was not okay, he was fucked, completely fucked, because not only was the carpet ruined but someone had stolen a twenty-year-old bottle of scotch from their dad’s liquor cabinet, plus a Nintendo controller, maybe both. Sam didn’t say anything, at least not that Gavin remembered. Instead, she helped him up to his room, where she tucked him into bed, then stayed up late cleaning the house. When he awoke the next morning, she was making pancakes in the kitchen. Sitting on the kitchen table were two Advil, a glass of orange juice, and a note that read You owe me big time. And he did. He’d spent his life trying to repay that debt, trying to rise to his sister’s level of grace, but he never could, and it destroyed him to think that even now, so many years later, when she needed him most, he had tried once again, and once again he had failed.
SAMANTHA
NOW SHE WAS DEEP UNDERWATER, swimming through the amniotic fluid of her soul. What she found was Samantha, but a better, more honest version of Samantha, the person she aspired to be. She was separated from her ego, desiring nothing. The sharp edges from earlier had given way to a slow-moving carousel of pastel hues. Time had ceased to exist. Had it been five minutes or five days? No idea. All she knew was that it had been awful for a while, but now it was less awful. She felt a hand on her shoulder and surfaced to find Grace sitting next to her with a bowl of water. She took a drink and felt the liquid cascade down the walls of her stomach. A crown of leaves was placed upon her head and then Grace and the other woman lifted her to her feet and out into the night.
Outside, more women joined them, everyone singing a happy tune as they descended toward the river. Leaving the hut had sobered her up a little and, though her limbs were still numb, she felt strangely lucid, as if observing herself from a comfortable remove. When they reached the river, she was stripped naked and passed through a structure made of sticks. “This is the third stage,” Grace said. “Rebirth.”
Let it begin, Sam thought. Show me a new life.
* * *
—
AFTERWARD, THE WOMEN ESCORTED her back to the village. Grace fed her another small dose of iboga, and Sam swallowed it without difficulty. A young girl placed flowers at her feet. An elderly woman blew pipe smoke in her face and caressed her cheek with a dry, calloused hand. The world had snapped into sharp focus and she experienced a divine clarity. She had spent the day examining her life as if it were an object she could hold, critiquing it in a manner that felt beautiful and without judgment. Something profound was happening, and though she didn’t understand the mechanics of this drug, she felt as if she were finally stepping into the light.
Men dressed in the hides of wildcats played the mougongo, while others kept rhythm with small drums. A woman lifted Sam to her feet and led her to the center of a circle formed by villagers holding torches made from tree bark. A chant went up and they began dancing around her, orange cinders trailing them like comet dust. There was something celebratory about the spectacle, an air of victory, and though she didn’t know what had been won or by whom, she wanted to believe she had broken free of her shackles, those beastly urges that had ruled her for so long. She fell in line with the mass of swirling bodies and began clapping her hands, pulsing, exultant.
The ceremony faded as the night wore on. Grace approached with a blanket under her arm. She took Sam by the hand and together they walked down to the river and sat on a large rock under the light of the moon. “You will sleep here tonight,” Grace said. “This is the final stage of your journey. In the morning, you will return to the village. There will be nothing to speak of then. The ceremony will be complete.”
“Will I feel normal again?”
“If the ceremony has worked you will never feel normal again. Normal was your old self. That person is dead. This is a new life.”
Grace handed Sam a blanket. “Bonne nuit,” she said, disappearing into the forest.
Sam spread the blanket on a patch of grass next to the river. It had been years since she’d slept o
utside under the stars, but despite all the creatures circling around her, she wasn’t afraid. She had walked to the edge of this world, then returned unharmed. She rested her head on a mound of leaves, pulled the blanket around her, and fell quickly asleep.
JONAH
DRIVING THROUGH FRANCEVILLE, HE PASSED the burned shell of the hotel, now guarded by a half dozen tanks and military trucks. It was hard to imagine anyone making it out of there alive, and the scale of the destruction made him flinch at the gravity of what Sam and Gavin had endured. It was almost ten o’clock, eerily dark save for the splash of an occasional streetlight, and he registered a notable tension as he drove these streets that had once been alive with commerce.
He passed Laurent’s place, then continued into the city center, where he finally located the nightclub. He parked the car, shouldered the bag of money, and headed inside. The club was nearly empty, save for a clutch of prostitutes in citrus-colored miniskirts lounging on a velvet sofa, sipping Orange Fanta from highball glasses. The dance floor was shrouded in the colored exhaust of a smoke machine, and as he made his way toward the bar he could feel the women’s eyes stalking him like wolves in a predawn fog. He took a seat on a stool and ordered a beer. Two men dressed like construction laborers sat at the other end of the bar skipping dice. They didn’t look at him, though he knew they registered his presence, the way everyone registers the presence of a foreigner in a place foreigners don’t belong.
Jonah drained his beer and headed to the men’s room. He was parked at a urinal when he suddenly felt hands on his shoulders. His heart clinched. He turned around expecting to find a gun but instead was greeted by the smiling face of a woman massaging his back. “Feel good, yes?” she said.
“No, thank you,” he said, zipping his pants.
“More?”
“Not interested.”
“Come.” She took his hand and led him toward a stall.
