Blessed Child (6 page)

“Come on, kid. You want to see the birds?”

The boy glanced at him and returned his eyes to the cages. He suddenly stood and hopped to the ground. Without waiting for Jason, he struck out across the street.

“Hold on!” Jason took after the boy into the busy street. A small pale yellow Fiat honked its horn and slid to a stop three feet from the boy.

The driver's face puffed red with angry objections, but the Fiat's window was up, and Caleb only looked curiously at the man's shaking jowls. He walked past the car, fixated once again on the birds.

Jason lifted his hand in a hasty apology to the driver and hurried after the boy. The incident had gathered some attention from pedestrians strolling along the cracked sidewalk. “Caleb . . . Caleb wait.”

But Caleb did not wait. In fact he was suddenly running. His eyes were now wide in a look of sheer horror, and he ran right up to the merchant's collection of thirty or so cages.

They were the typical tubular cages which frequented markets throughout Ethiopia, holding a variety of birds, in this case mostly white-collared pigeons. The merchant had his back turned to Caleb, but at least a dozen onlookers had now stopped and focused on the boy. He was of mixed race, an unusual sight to be sure. But it was his expression, Jason thought; his face held such a blend of innocence and anguish that it would have stopped a dumb mule had one been in front of the boy.

At the last possible moment, Jason knew what the boy intended to do, and he broke into a run. He spoke sternly but quietly, not eager to draw attention, although with the running he was beyond that. “Caleb, stop! Don't touch the birds . . .”

It was too late. The boy reached the first cage, flipped the gate open, and pulled a rather strange-looking bird free. A look of delight splashed across Caleb's face as the bird flapped noisily to the sky. He giggled.

The merchant spun around at the sound, but before either he or Jason could reach him, Caleb had repeated the process with another cage, setting free another bird of the same species. He was turning to a third cage when Jason reached him and grabbed the arm extended for the cage.

Had Jason not been there, the merchant would have probably slapped the boy's head from his shoulders. As it was he screamed a string of obscenities and flung his hands to the sky. A crowd was gathering, delighted at the show.

Jason pulled Caleb back. “I'm sorry. I don't know why he did that.”

The merchant immediately switched to English. “You must pay! You must pay!” He looked at the sky, lifted his arms as if beseeching the sky for mercy, and swore in Amharic. “These are very rare birds, you know. Very rare! Abyssinian catbird! You will pay for these now!”

Jason was reaching for his wallet already. “Yes, of course. I'm sorry. I don't know what got into him. Please, how much?”

Around them the crowd was cackling and pointing to the skyline, where the two birds had perched themselves on a three-story building.

“Very rare, you know. These are very rare, very expensive birds.” The merchant now had his eyes on Jason's wallet.

“Of course, and I'm very sorry. Please how much do you want?”

Caleb stepped away from Jason and stood looking up at the merchant. He spoke in a dialect of Amharic usually reserved for Orthodox religious ceremonies. “What will you do with these birds?”

The sound of the language from the boy's mouth cut through the crowd like a sword. A hush swallowed their laughter. The merchant looked from the boy to Jason and then back again.

“Please, tell me what you will do with these birds,” the boy repeated.

“I will sell them.”

“And why would you sell them?”

“They are a delicacy. What do you care, you thieving young scoundrel?”

“He's hardly a thieving scoundrel,” Jason said. They were speaking in separate languages now: the merchant and the boy in Amharic and Jason in English. “He's an innocent boy who obviously loves birds. Not everyone is set on killing every piece of meat they can find.”

The merchant's face grew red. “And what do you know, you
farenji?
Perhaps you need to be taught a lesson.”

“I meant no insult. Just tell me what you charge for the birds.”

“In the cages, two pounds each. But they are not in their cages. They are on the roofs. Now you must pay five pounds each.”

A rumble of agreement went through the crowd, as if this ploy were a particularly clever move on the merchant's part.

“And that's highway robbery, my friend,” Jason said.

A note sounded very softly, like a tuning fork, quiet but pure, echoing at the back of Jason's mind. Someone was singing. Jason extracted some small bills from his wallet, and the crowd hushed.

The note sounded like the perfect C, held unwavering, and it occurred to Jason that it wasn't his wallet but this singing that had hushed the crowd. He looked down to see Caleb's chin lifted lightly and his eyes closed. The boy's mouth was parted in a pure, crystalline note that carried on the air, effectively silencing the crowd. Even the merchant had frozen and now stared at the boy.

From the corner of his eye, Jason saw Leiah step from the rest room and pull up at the sight. He turned to her and their eyes met. It must be strange, he thought, to look across the street and see him and the boy surrounded by a crowd while the boy sang this odd note of perfection. The entire street seemed to have turned its attention to the boy now. A donkey drawing a cart twenty yards up the street stopped and turned its head to the scene. Even the drivers in the cars that drove by were craning their necks for a view of the commotion by the bird merchant's cages.

Still the note hung in the air, undisturbed and soft. The crowd now stared at the boy as if he were performing an astounding feat right before their very eyes. But it was just a note sung from the thin lips of a ten-year-old boy.

And then it was more. Because then the two Abyssinian birds who had flown to freedom took flight again. Only this time they flew to the boy. On wings that seemed to flap too slowly for their flight, they fluttered through the air, over the street and over the crowd, which lifted its eyes as one and watched. The birds hovered just above the boy for a moment and then settled onto his shoulders.

Caleb opened his eyes and smiled. He took the birds from his shoulders and set them back in their cages. Now the crowd found its voice: murmurs of incredulity.

Caleb looked up at him, and Jason knew precisely what the boy was thinking. He wanted the birds. Jason pulled out four pounds and paid the reduced price to the merchant. “Your price for the birds?”

The man nodded.

“Jason!” The piercing scream came from the gas station, and Jason spun to see Leiah frantically pointing up the street. He followed her arm. A truck blared its horn as it picked its way through the crowded traffic.

Jason saw the markings clearly then. It was an EPLF Land Rover identical to the one that had cornered them in the canyon!

Panic crowded his throat and he spun back to the boy. Caleb had one bird out and he threw it in the air. He laughed and went for the second bird, oblivious to the danger behind them.

“We have to go, Caleb! Leave it!” He grabbed the boy's arm.

But Caleb pulled away, snatched the second bird from its cage, and threw it into the air.

Jason lifted the boy from his feet and spun to the street. Someone from the crowd had spotted the EPLF vehicle and was shouting frantically. The street broke into pandemonium. From the truck's direction a machine gun began to pop, and the Land Rover broke through the traffic.

Jason saw all of this in the time it took for three draws of breath, and by then it was too late. He'd left the Jeep across the street, and the Land Rover was closing the gap with a full-throated roar.

“Jason!” He snapped his head back to the street before him. Leiah was shouting at him from the driver's seat of his Jeep. She had swung the Jeep around! “Hurry!”

He reached the Jeep in three strides, hefted the boy into the back seat, and piled in beside him. The Jeep lurched forward before he had seated himself, and he nearly toppled off the back.

Machine-gun fire ripped through the air, and Jason shoved the boy's head down. Caleb cried out in surprise.

“Stay down! Move it, Leiah! Floor it!”

“It
is
floored.”

They careened around a corner, beyond the sight of the EPLF truck. Jason had driven the Jeep cautiously over the last hundred miles, and it had just received a change of oil, both factors that may have contributed to its healthy pace now.

“Same truck?” Leiah yelled back.

“I don't know. Keep it floored!”

“It's going as fast as it'll go, believe me!”

The EPLF truck came into view, nothing more than a small speck now, just emerging from the town. The sound of weapons fire popped adjacent to the truck: the Land Rover was taking fire. It made a sharp turn onto a side street and disappeared from their view.

Jason released the boy's head and climbed over the passenger seat. “Just keep her pegged.”

“We okay?”

“Maybe.”

Leiah stared ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Jason glanced back at Caleb, who sat staring at a rust bucket on the side of the road that looked as if it might once have been a Model T. His hood had flown off, freeing his shoulder-length hair to fly wild in the wind. It struck Jason that had his own son lived, he would be Caleb's age. He might not have looked so different.

“What happened?” Leiah asked.

Jason turned to face the road. “I'm not sure. Animals seem to like him. So does the EPLF.”

“Or hate him. Isn't this a bit far south for them?”

“A bit far? Honey, we're halfway to Addis Ababa. There's no way they should be this far south.”

“And what does that mean?”

Red hues drew the first lines of a sunset in the western sky. There was more happening here than Jason could even begin to piece together. What was it about this boy? Even beyond his unique innocence, there was a sweetness that had worked its way into Jason's heart.

“It means that I'm taking him,” he said.

“To Addis Ababa?”

“To the United States. To California. It's where the priest wanted him.”

“You . . . how can—”

“The papers are already drawn up. Father Matthew was no idiot.”

Her jaw stiffened and she looked ahead. The Jeep's tires whined incessantly, speeding them down the deserted road.

“I thought you were going to allow me to take him.”

“You assumed. And you assumed wrong.”

“Then I'm going with you,” Leiah said.

He faced her, surprised. “Don't be ridiculous. I thought you were going to Kenya.”

“I said I was
thinking
of going to Kenya. But really I have no reason to go to Kenya or to any other place. The boy needs a careful hand. No offense, but it's not something I'm sure you have.”

“Thanks. And you're Canadian, not American. What do you think you can possibly do in the States that I can't?”

“I can be with him. The last time I checked, the Red Cross was an international organization. I'll go with you to California and then return to Canada. I may be more help than you might think, Mr. American.” She paused and looked to the horizon. “Besides, it's been a long time since I've been home; maybe it'll be for the best.”

She said it with a finality that silenced him for the moment. In reality, as a Red Cross evacuee she had as much right to take a flight to Los Angeles as to Nairobi. She was also a nurse who had obviously taken to the boy. He had no reason to suggest she do anything against her wishes, regardless of how wacky they seemed. It was a wacky world.

“Fine,” he said.

She nodded. “Good.”

4

Minus 2 days

C
HARLES
C
RANDAL STOOD TALL AND COMMANDING
, a confident smile curving his lips just so, basking in the winds of political favor, his arms thrust over his head in a victory sign. Four thousand of San Diego's citizens had discarded any notion of spending a day at the beach in favor of hearing this man shake the rafters with his call to power. They stood on the park's green grass with fists lifted to the sky, young and old, male and female, mimicking the victory sign. Paying homage to Charles Crandal, who had persuaded them that he should be the next president of the United States.

Blane Roberts watched him from the side of the podium, intrigued by the man's ability to bring out their affections. Crandal's shiny bald skull flexed with his smile. He wasn't particularly handsome, but even there, looking at the women crying out to him, you would think him a rock legend. John Lennon resurrected. In these moments even Roberts wanted to believe the stump speech. There was a sort of redemption in unity alone, he thought, regardless of its focus. It could be Hitler up here with a flat palm saluting the fine residents of Southern California and they would hardly know the difference.

They were chanting,
“Power to the people
.
Power to the people,”
which was a slogan Roberts had come up with
(yuk, yuk)
, and it might just as well have been,
“We'll follow you to hell
.
We'll follow you to hell,”
for all they knew. Either way it didn't matter; people like Crandal were destined to rule. This campaigning stuff was America's road to power, but in reality, when you really got behind all the flags and the dancing girls, true leaders made their own roads. And in the case of Charles Crandal, Roberts was as much the road builder as the man San Diego was going batso over at the moment.

Crandal turned, made one last gesture to the people—an open-armed
we-are-family
gesture—and walked toward Roberts, who smiled and nodded supportively.

They walked off the platform together and headed directly for the black limousine waiting on the park's driveway. Their bodyguards, Bone and Carson, followed at ten paces as demanded by Crandal. “You had even me going there,” Roberts said with a chuckle.