Acts of faith (45 page)

The recipient of the blow yelped and threw himself off the girl. Ibrahim hit him a second time, and he fell and rolled in the dirt, covering his head with his hands against the cut of the braided hide. A third stroke tore the sleeve of his jelibiya, a fourth made his knuckles bleed. The man lay doubled up. A floret of red blossomed on his back. Someone grabbed Ibrahim to stop him, but he broke free, pushed the fellow aside, and immediately gave the one lying at his feet another whack.

“Stop, please! I beg you, stop!”

In disbelief, Ibrahim stood for a moment, the whip poised; then he lowered it and, planting a boot in his nephew’s ribs, he shoved him onto his back.

“What are you doing? Practicing for your wedding night?”

Mistaking the cold sarcasm for calm, Abbas risked standing up, confusion and fear on his face.

“Answer me! Are you practicing for Nanayi with this—” He jiggled the whip over the girl, who was sitting up now, shaking as if from cold. Two brass disks were pinned to the sides of her nose, and their barbaric gleam disgusted him and made him bring the whip down across her thighs. She screamed.
Why did I strike her
? “This whore?” She bent over her slashed legs, and he gave her one across the back, raising a red welt from her shoulders to her hips, like a second spine, and she screamed again.
Why do I hit her
? He felt possessed by someone other than himself, prodding him to do things he didn’t intend to do, some jinn or demon that dwelled in these mountains, this
bilad al Kufr,
land of unbelievers, beyond the sight of God, the all-merciful, all-loving-kind. “You know my orders, Abbas! All of you! You all knew my orders, and yet you . . . with these . . .” And the whip, seemingly of his own will, striped her again. She accepted it with barely a sound. Oh, that he could fly, fly right now back to Dar Humr, to Dar al Islam, House of the Faithful. “Answer me, Abbas! Answer some one of you! You are instructed to do one thing, and you do the other. You desert your posts to practice fucking with these abid whores.” The next stroke, laid crosswise to the one preceding, sent the girl sprawling.

Abbas backed away, his arms outspread, his bloodied knuckles facing Ibrahim. “Please, uncle . . .”

“Please, what? Please to stop beating your whore? Then shall I beat you again instead?” He stepped forward, the whip raised. Dropping it and his rifle as Abbas turned to run, he snatched his nephew by one arm, and with a strength that amazed himself as much as it did Abbas, he flung the boy down atop the girl. Ibrahim pinned him there, a knee in the small of his back, a hand on the back of his neck.
I don’t understand what I’m doing.
“Practice now. I’ll give you another chance for practice.”
I must get out of here.

“Oh uncle, please . . . Oh God . . .”

“Oh God? Esmah, you pious hypocrite! Had I told Ganis to stand watch over the captives and not to touch them, he would have stood his watch and not touched them. Not you. You had to practice. Therefore, practice.”

He pressed down on Abbas’s neck, pushing his face into the girl’s shoulder. Her face blended in with the darkness, so her eyes seemed suspended in space, two disembodied ovals glaring up, as empty of expression as the disks fastened to her nose. She made some animal-like croaking sound.

“Please” came his nephew’s voice.

“What? They didn’t teach you this at the madrassah? What would your teachers say if they saw you as I saw you?”

His nephew should have looked out for his interests, his nephew should have restrained the others, not shown contempt for his uncle by joining them. The uncle who had been as a father to him. He knew why he was doing this. It no longer had anything to do with his dream or obedience to orders. He was doing this to Abbas for betraying and humiliating him, for being a hypocrite, for being stupid, for having an ugly crooked nose, for not being like Ganis, for breathing the living air while Ganis occupied a grave. “Let’s see you fuck her now.” He dug hard with his knee, driving his nephew’s loins into the girl’s.

Two men seized him from behind by the straps of his ammunition belt. With a single powerful jerk, they pulled him off.

“Ya, Ibrahim! Enough! Have you gone crazy?”

He recognized the voice of his lieutenant. Someone must have summoned him. Just as Ibrahim turned to face Hamdan, Abbas, feeling the weight lifted from him, leaped to his feet and whirled, his right hand darting to the opposite shoulder. Like most young murahaleen, he had a short dagger strapped to his upper left arm, and this he drew, faster than any eye could follow, and slashed at his uncle’s throat. Ibrahim Idris had just enough time to draw away, so the blade cut across his chest, tearing through his jelibiya. Abbas lurched forward, carried on by the violence of his thrust, tripped over the prone girl and fell; fell very hard face-down. He grunted, then pushing himself up with his left arm, he drew one knee into his belly and attempted to stand. His arm gave way, and he dropped again, halfway onto his side, the dagger’s handle protruding from his ribs, just below his heart.

“M
IGHT AS WELL
tell me what the matter is.”

“Nothing.”

Draped in the folds of the mosquito net, she was sitting on the edge of the cot, facing a mildewed wall, its single window covered by a screen and shuttered by two scrap-lumber boards. This was their second night in Malakal, where the Hawker was undergoing repairs. The base manager had assigned them two empty bungalows, side by side, and a little over an hour ago Mary had knocked at his door. When he opened it, she said, “I just wanted to tell you that yesterday? The way you got us out of that fix, and the way you handled the plane in those storms . . . Ah hell, that’s not what I want to say, this is what I want to say.” And clasping the back of his neck in both hands, she gave him the most thrilling kiss of his life.

Now from the Malakal riverfront came the sound of a Nile boat’s diesel, the laborious whine suggesting that it was pushing a barge up-current. Dare’s finger explored Mary’s spine, from her pale neck down to the smooth rise of her splendid hips.

“Well, you ain’t said word one for what I reckon is two minutes.”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“It’s been my experience that when a woman gives that answer to that question, she means just the opposite.”

“Listen to the old man of the mountain, gone through more women than most men have socks.”

His finger retraced its route, sliding over her damp skin, the sweet little bumps of her vertebrae. “Any man who says he knows the first thing about the female gender is a fool or a liar and maybe both.”

Her hair made the faintest whisper as she turned to look down at him, her chin nestled into her shoulder. Beads of sweat on her forehead and upper lip sparkled in the glow of the kerosene lamp, its mantle filmed with soot. She pressed Dare’s nose as if it were a doorbell.

“You didn’t have to ask. You know damned well what the matter is.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“I always go home with the guy who brought me to the dance, so I’ve got some self-image issues to deal with.”

“Me too. Me and him flew together for two years.”

“Except I started things, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.”

And lying on his side, admiring the sculpture of her ribs, the line and curve of her arm, and the breast it partly concealed, he was very glad she did. He considered himself the most fortunate man alive.

“Of course you know what we’re doing, confessing how guilty we feel. We’re justifying ourselves. We’re saying to ourselves, ‘Well, we did what we wanted, but we don’t feel exactly right about it, and that means we’re decent people after all.’ It’s a license to cheat, sort of.”

“Mary quite contrary, don’t go psychological on me.”

“Anyway, Tony is only the half of it.”

“The other half bein’ what?”

“Here’s a girl who just fucked her boss. What’s worse, she would like to fuck him again.”

“The boss would like that too, but the boss is fifty-four and he won’t be up to it till mornin’. Pun intended.”

She thought about this for a while. “That’s a theory, not a fact, and with the boss’s permission, I’m going to test it.”

She made little legs with two fingers and walked them over the plateau of his chest, up the hill of his belly, and down into the bristling valley below his navel, from which, with manipulations tender and skillful, she caused a stalk to sprout, much to Dare’s amazement. Upon this stalk, straddling him, she impaled herself and proceeded to demonstrate, once again, how wrong he’d been to think that
lusty
and
Canadian
were an adjective and noun that didn’t go together. She made love like a woman who wanted to get pregnant—an event he hoped would not come to pass—and climaxed first, burying her face in the pillow to muffle her delighted squeal. She lay like that for a few moments; then, feeling him still hard within her, sat up straight so that they formed an upside-down T in violent motion, Dare thrusting, Mary grinding her hips with a mechanical professionalism that, strangely, excited him more than her previous abandon had done. She brought him off and rocked forward, pinning his shoulders with her hands.

“Oh yes, I can!” she said with wicked laughter.

He wasn’t sure if she was speaking for him or for her ability to stir him to such an accomplishment, as if she were a director who’d coaxed a brilliant performance from a washed-up actor.

She gave his nose another touch. “Some old man you are. It’s a good thing you’re ugly and a Neanderthal attitude-wise. If you weren’t . . .” She left the comment hanging.

“Sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it.” He reached for his cigarettes, on the packing crate that served as a night table, and lit one for each of them. “I reckon, then, if you had to sleep with the boss, the one you slept with is safer than the other one.”

“Doug?” she asked, spitting smoke to stress her incredulity.

“Good looking, says all the right things, not a Neanderthal, attitude-wise.”

“He’s sexless. Looks like a catalog model for L.L. Bean.”

She slipped off the cot, snatched her clothes from the floor, and got dressed. “So what do we do now, Wes? How the hell do we handle this?”

Leaning against a wall in the lantern light, the cigarette between her fingers, all she needed was a dress with padded shoulders to look like a film-noir femme fatale. And this was neither a pose on her part nor an illusion created by bad lighting. She was a throwback to rogue dames like Jane Greer and Barbara Stanwyck, with their mixture of toughness and vulnerability, their guilt, their dangerous allure.

“I can tell you how we’re not gonna handle this. We’re not gonna go makin’ any confessions and get down on our knees and beg Tony to forgive us.”

He’d used the plural for diplomacy’s sake. He’d meant her.

“That wasn’t even on my radar screen,” she replied with a flash of pique.

Oh, a part of him hoped this one-night stand would not go any further. She would be difficult and demanding and not allow him to get away with anything.

He got up and, as he dressed, felt painfully self-conscious about his middle-aged body, of which only his arms and shoulders retained their youthful form. Was Mary averting her gaze? Did his anatomy repel her, now that she saw him clearly rather than through the fog of whatever randy impulses had led her to come to him? Was she asking herself,
What possessed me to jump in the sack with this flabby old dude?
He was disturbed that this possibility disturbed him as deeply as it did.

“We’re gonna put tonight into the ‘It was just one of those things’ compartment,” he stated, with a certain paternal finality. He imagined she wanted this from him, the voice of wisdom and experience. “It happened on account of the unusual circumstances. We had a right full day yesterday.”

She crushed the cigarette in an old tuna fish tin and regarded him contemptuously. “The eroticism of danger? Two people have a close call that makes them itchy, and then they scratch it and go on like nothing happened?”

“Don’t know I’d put it that way, but that’s the idea.”

“It’s stuffy in here. I need some air.”

At this time of year, close to the Nile, the air outside was almost as still, cloying, and sultry as it was inside. A mosquito sang a high C in Dare’s ear. He took a spray bottle out of his shirt pocket and lacquered his neck and hands with the stuff, eighty percent Deet, pure poison, but it could keep a thirsty vampire bat off of you. He’d had malaria twice, and though both cases were mild, the sweats and chills and crazy dreams weren’t anything he cared to repeat. Mary slapped her arm, and he handed the repellent to her. The tents and huts of the UN compound showed in silhouette, kerosene and Coleman lanterns burned here and there, the generators having been shut off for the night to conserve fuel. The tail of a C-130 loomed above the warehouse tents at the airstrip. The Hawker, out of sight, was parked on an apron, awaiting the further ministrations of the British mechanic who had confirmed Dare’s first suspicions about the landing gear: shrapnel had punctured the hydraulic lines, bled them dry. Why the warning light had failed remained a mystery.

“Must’ve damaged the sensors when it hit the lines,” Dare mumbled, thinking out loud.

“What are you talking about?”