Mountains of the Moon (41 page)

Thwump! Shiver a response to the heat outside. Can’t reach my bag from this side, as I turn the corner of the truck I see his face in the broken wing mirror, watching me. Wanker. I put my toe up on the back tire and step up to lean for the straps of my bag. But the tire drives out from under my foot, crashes me down to hang by my armpits on the side metalwork of the truck. He starts to drive. Gaining speed, my legs are tangling, my boots are bouncing high off bumps in the road, I can’t hold on any longer, I let go, falling hard and ugly in the road.

“Hey! Hey-hey!”

No Man’s people, a crowd of them, have seen this happen. My bag is bouncing away on the back of the truck. There’s a bye-bye touch on his red tail lights. There’s the sweep of his one headlight. I know that I am covering ground, at this moment quicker than he is. Cattle crossing the road are going to force him to slow down. No Man’s people are running behind me.

“Hey!”

The cows are in his way; he rages two wheels up the bank trying to get the squeeze past them. I’m only a stride off his tailgate. He slips a gear, it’s all I need, enough to get beside his open winder. Enough to grab for the neck of his shirt, enough to get a twist in it, enough for me to hang on, enough twist in it for him to turn purple, his hands tear between his throat and the steering wheel, enough to slow us down, enough loss of life, to make him, to make him, to make him…stop. Stop.

Finding my feet I tighten the twist around his throat with one hand, turn the engine off with the other and throw the keys. No Man’s children bang heads to catch them. He is a fat black man, bulging purple, his fat
fingers trying to remove the squeeze, I am so far possessed there
int
anything can touch me now.

“One more squeak out of you, you fuck, and I am going to kill you. Do you understand?”

Wise man.

I loosen the twist, throw the neck of his shirt back at him and leave him to live. Flaming flaring torches and a crowd part to let me through with my bag. Could lay face down on the dirt and sob. Because he’s still alive. Sickness weeps out of my skin; tiredness buckles my knees, hot sweat mixes with night shiver. Only fury keeps me moving.

“Hey! Hey!”

Turn to see the Bull’s head as it rams full speed into my stomach. Knocks the wind out of me, sends me sailing, reeling backward. Thorn bushes break my fall; tip me face down under them.

“Hey! Hey!”

He’s walking away with my bag, held up like a trophy for the crowd to see, but he hasn’t bargained on me. I unhook my cheek from a thorn. I take off from ten yards, land on the back of his knees, it takes us both straight down. I’m up quicker than he is and I want him to die. Stupid man down, kicking up dirt with his knees, his eyes are defiant, his mouth is defiant, his throat is offered up like a final gesture. I decide to cut it for him and open out my penknife blade. It flashes silver in the headlight beam.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!”

Flashes silver against his fat throat. He buckles down under the blade. Blood sprinting down his neck changes the expression on his face. It’s not enough, though, to cut his throat, there’s nothing in it for me. My elbow jabs his fifth rib, sure enough to bend him forward. Piece of shit. My boot connects under his jaw, his bottom lip explodes. Fury gets him up, snorting and blinded with blood, he spits out the bitten off end of his tongue and he comes for me. Stupid man. Stupid man. Can’t resist his exposed groin.

“Awah! Ooo!”

He drops back onto his knees, perfect height for a perfect treat. I’ve been practicing this one. I measure my three strides.

“This one,” I tell him, “this one is especially for you.”

The reverse-turning butterfly kick takes his face out like an ice skate. He sounds like nothing on earth. But he is amazing, defiant, roaring, trying to stand up. I’m tired of him now. I’m going to kill him. He’s got the headlight in his eyes. And defiance. I’m holding my knife blade pinched at the tip. It’s the natural thing to do, looking at his wide open chest. I lift my arm, feel the weight of the knife, loaded to spin through the air, loaded to slam straight in.

He grabs at his heart with both hands.

Drops back to his knees.

Falls sideways like a dead man.

I step forward, look down. See plainly in the light of the flaming flares that he is plainly dead. See several hundred No Man’s people holding their heads on, silenced in violence, and among them Robertson’s face, white with horror. The crowd cowers, shows me its empty hands; I see that the knife is still in my hand.

I look at the dead fuck on the floor.

I look at my purple backpack, go quickly and open it. His bulk flays over as my boot shoves his hip. I open my medical kit. The freaky polythene bat opens out, I squeeze the orange oval mouthpiece into his bloody busted mouth. I blow down the tube, his chest comes up. My hands kick the air back out.

“Breathe, you piece of shit,” I says. Beats seven sorts of life back into him. Until his eyes flicker and my effort is interrupted by six uniform pairs of boots with uniform trousers tucked in. A man in a purple frock comes between the muzzles of guns and an African woman with a toolbox.

“We are doctors,” she says.

I shift out of their way.

“Border Police,” a uniform says. I stand up, helped on all sides by the tips of the six guns.

I look at Robertson’s face. I wish she hadn’t seen all that. It wasn’t pretty; you couldn’t chuck it under the chin like a wayside violet.

“Wrong daisy,” I says to her.

Thwump!

“I’m not going to leave you,” she says. “I can go to the British Consul. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

“Nothing that twenty-five years in a Tanzanian jail won’t fix.”

Rifles propel me forward. Robertson is coming along beside us. She turns on the uniform with the biggest epaulettes and the red feather in his black beret.

“Are six guns really necessary?”

“Your friend is a very dangerous lady.”

They’ve got that right.

“She has killed this man,” one uniform says.

“And then she has made him come back to life,” says another.

Somehow a far worse crime.

“Exactly so,” the chief says. “The dangerous lady cannot decide if she wants him to be dead or alive.”

The No Man’s people are coming with us, all having the same debate.

“Everybody is shutting up,” yells the chief. Everybody does.

Looks like it’s just me, booming under the bare bulb, in this wooden scout hut.

And the Border Police chief sitting behind the barren desk.

And the six uniforms standing behind him.

And the No Man’s people that have followed us in with boxes and crates to stand up on. And Robertson with her backpack and mine, white-knuckled ride. Can’t look at her face, she doesn’t know me. My breath climbs over a wall of panic, could run, no where. Thwump! Nearly knocks my head off. Sweat stings, pouring over the carpet burns I got on the bus. The pajamas wet with sweat have stuck to my back. My breath swims in the shallows, around a couple of broken ribs.

The chief knows what he has to do. None of his keys fit the desk drawer. A uniform points out that it only needs a yank. Nothing in it. He holds his fingers up to receive a pen, snaps them as if magic will produce one.

Nobody has got one.

“Do you want a pen?” I ask him.

He waves the idea off—no paper.

“Just give me please your passport.”

My white pajamas are tie-dyed with blood in sprays and drips and heart-shaped splatters, wonder if it’s mine. I produce the passport from my money belt and lay it on the desk stiffly so my rattling hand doesn’t show. He reads all of it, admires the border stamps.

“You were in Zaire?”

I look at him. Yes I was.

“How is it there?”

“I was made offers I couldn’t refuse.”

“I don’t understand,” he says. “What is your meaning?”

“Well. For example,” I say, “I got a lift on a beer lorry. I agreed to pay the driver and we traveled the first day together happily. On the morning of the second day he picked up five soldiers at the side of the road.”

No Man’s people are interested to hear about this place Zaire.

“Two soldiers sat in the cab with me, the other three sat out on top of the cargo.”

“Beer!” the chief says.

“My bag was also on top of the cargo, out of view, and I was worried about the soldiers taking things from it.”

No Man’s people can understand that.

“At the end of the journey, a lonely spot, we all got out of the lorry. My bag was handed down from the roof. I gave the driver the twenty dollars we’d agreed and he was happy about it. But when I tried to walk away the soldiers ran and stood in front of me. ‘One, two, three, four, five,’ the talking soldier said, counting himself and the others. ‘Twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty,’ he added it up, ‘one hundred dollars,’ he said, ‘you must give it to us.’”

The chief makes a clicking sound with his tongue.

“‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why must I?’ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘we did not take anything from your bag.’”

No Man’s people laugh.

“I tried to walk away but they came again and stood in front of me. So I had to pay them one hundred dollars.”

“Aye!” the chief says. “Zaire was in this condition?”

The generator outside dies. Darkness snuffs us out.

I lift my head from my arms on the desk. Wonder if I’ve been in a bus crash. The chief’s chair is empty. The uniforms are in charge. No Man’s people have bedded down across the entire floor of the shed. And Robertson. When I ask, I’m taken outside to a toilet. The uniform in shorts, with overdeveloped calves, leads the way, parting growth with the tip of his rifle. The one with the cough follows behind. Robertson stays to mind our bags. No Man’s people line the route all the way to the shithouse door. Inside I throw up a spoonful of burning yellow bile. Then smoke a cigarette. Stare down the black shithole.

There’s something not right about me being here.

I think about what I did yesterday; in any law or language: throw away the key.

And so many witnesses. It’s the bottom line; I write off the rest of my life.

The chief is back, with the bull-necked fuck from yesterday. He’s sitting forward on a chair that has been added next to the chief. No Man’s people shove and strain to see him. The heart attack has stroked down one side of his face. My reverse-turning butterfly kick has spread his nose on the other. The doctors have stitched up the nick in his throat. What’s left of his swollen tongue lolls in his open mouth. His jaw is broken. In any language: savage. His eyes are bloodshot, defiant; they want me punished.

An American ten-dollar note is on the desk. It seems very large, fingerprinted with brown blood. Robertson is left of me, sitting on her bag. I can’t look over at her face.

“Yesterday,” the chief says, “you have agreed to pay this man one hundred dollars but when he had brought you here to the border you only paid him ten. True?”

“Not true. We agreed five dollars, I paid him ten.”

“This ten dollars?”

No Man’s people have a laugh among themselves, like how many other ten-dollar notes are there floating around in these parts?

I nod that it probably is the selfsame ten-dollar note. He’s pleased that I am so willing to enter into the spirit of the prosecution.

“So! You will now pay this man ninety dollars.”

Makes me laugh. I laugh so hard and it hurts so bad, makes me rock in my chair. No Man’s people join in laughing. Above it all I hear Robertson’s great wholesome bray, elated at such a cheap conclusion.

“No,” I say.

“No? You will not pay this man ninety dollars?”

“No.”

“But you have paid the soldiers in Zaire so now you can pay this man. How much will you pay him?”

“Nothing. We agreed five dollars, he’s got ten dollars.”

The chief sucks air through his teeth as if I’ve made a very painful decision.

“Madam, you do not understand. You are in serious trouble. If we cannot resolve this matter here it will be passed on to the courts, you will have to be detained, in prison, here in Tanzania maybe for many, many months, maybe many, many years, here in Tanzania, tut-tut-tut.” He doesn’t recommend it, the Tanzanian judiciary.

“Good.” I light a cigarette. “I’ve got all the time in the world. I love Tanzania.”

“Give me one of those,” the chief says. “So, you will pay soldiers in Zaire but not this man here. Aye! I do not understand it. Tell me please, how is it so?”

“This was different,” I say.

“How so?”

“Well. This was only one man. You can argue with one man and a pickup truck but not with an AK-47 and five bloodstained machetes.”

I see Robertson out of the side of my eye gnawing on her wrist knuckle.

“Eighty dollars is a good price,” the chief says.

“No.” I put my heels up on the corner of his desk.

The Fuck snorts.

The border closes early.

Darkness comes on the dot.

A uniform is sent outside to crank up the generator. We wait. We listen. We listen to insects throbbing and the Fuck’s breath, whistling past the swellings in his nose and throat. The generator doesn’t want to know. We listen to it trying. No Man’s people who can’t fit in the shed light up flares outside, filling the black windows with flames.