Sudan: A Novel (36 page)

Leo sat on a warped fruit crate and studied the crowds that passed the bar as he sharpened his knife, running the whetstone over it in smooth, fluid strokes. Joak sat on a crate next to him.

“When will Faoud pay us for telling him about the American journalist?” Joak asked. “He will pay us, yes? He is a man of his word?”

“Oh yes, a real gentleman.” Leo was tired, and the little man got on his nerves. “Faoud will pay us whenever Faoud gets ready to pay us—and not before.”

With that, Leo stood, slipped his knife into its scabbard and the whetstone into his pocket. “I want a drink. And I want to see one of the girls in the back.”

Joak thought about their sleeping accommodations. “Give me some money then, and I will go and reserve our rooms for the night.” Without paid-in-advance rooms at the inn where they were staying, they’d have to spend the night like cattle in the traveling room.

Leo turned back and glared at the little man irritably. “I will pay for us when we get there,” he snapped, then stepped up on the porch, marched through the big double doors and was lost in the dim interior.

Joak sighed. Leo would be drunk within the hour—drunk and mean. The girl he picks will earn her money today, he thought. Then Joak got up and went to find something to eat.

About midmorning, Ron heard the sound of boots in the hallway. He and Masapha exchanged a glance; both men swallowed hard.

The key scraped in the lock, and the heavy door swung open with a clang. Two of Faoud’s men entered, followed by the jailer. And then Faoud himself.

It was Ron and Masapha’s first daylight look at the slave trader, and he was even scarier than the shadowy specter in the dark had been. Uglier, too. Way uglier. Ron thought that if he were casting somebody to play a slave trader in a movie, he probably wouldn’t have picked this guy. He was so sinister and evil looking it was overkill.

Faoud al Bashara was a big man, well over six feet tall, who had probably in his youth been heavily muscled. Now, in middle age, it had all gone to fat. He weighed at least 270 pounds, probably closer to 300. For comfort around his huge, pendulous belly, he wore a white African dishadasha, a shapeless, one-size-fits-all robe, with an equally shapeless blue outer garment called a jubbah. His thinning black hair was slicked back in a short, greasy ponytail. The skin on his round, fat face and neck was pockmarked with deep craters from what must once have been a horrific case of acne. His nose was flat, his nostrils wide—like a pig’s snout. His eyes were black and unusually small. They glowered from beneath a lone, heavy black eyebrow that stretched across the length of his forehead. Gold earrings hung in each of his large, drooping earlobes behind the jowls that sagged from his jaw.

The slave trader stared down with equal parts outrage and loathing at the blond man on the floor at his feet. How dare this infidel interfere in his world!

“What are you doing in my country, you American
khawaja
?” Faoud spit out the Arabic word for “foreigner” with disgust. “How dare you even set foot in Sudan.”

Faoud turned to Masapha and growled, “You are Sudanese. Tell me what this infidel is doing here! It will go easier for you if you tell me the truth now. If you do not, you will suffer the same fate as the imperialist pig.”

“I can only tell you the same thing he has said,” Masapha replied, with what he hoped was a good imitation of calm and confidence. “He hired me to show him around Sudan so he could take pictures for a travel magazine.”

Masapha had it all worked out in his head what he would say, how he would describe the pictures they had already taken and explain the shots they sought now. When he wasn’t in prayer, he’d spent the better part of a wide-awake night fleshing out the details of his story. But it was a tale Masapha never had a chance to tell.

“Liar!” Faoud roared. “Both of you are liars! I want the truth! I want to know what you are doing here and I will find out.”

He turned toward the jailer, who unfurled a thick black whip he held coiled behind his back.

“They only want to lie to me. Drive the truth out of them, Ahkmad. One of them will talk. Whip them until they do.”

Masapha choked.
Whip?
Ron didn’t understand what the ugly Arab said, but he understood the whip in the jailer’s hand and the look of fear on Masapha’s face. He knew something very bad was about to happen.

The two soldiers put their guns on the floor, grabbed Ron and Masapha and pulled them to their feet. They shoved their bodies face first up against the wall, pulled their arms up over their heads and fastened their wrists in the sets of shackles that dangled from iron spikes driven into the stone at five-foot intervals all around the room. Masapha was so short, he had to stand on his tiptoes.

Faoud watched for a moment. A cruel smile twisted his ugly face, then he spat on the floor at Ron’s feet and stormed out.

Ron’s cheek was pressed against the rough, clammy wall. He could smell the musty odor of the fungus that grew in the stone cracks where water occasionally seeped in. The smell made him gag. Even as he hung from shackles next to Masapha, he wrapped his denial snug around himself for a few final moments of protection from reality. They couldn’t...they wouldn’t...

One of the soldiers stayed behind with the jailer. He grabbed Ron’s shirt collar from the rear, inserted a cold blade of steel beneath it and with one quick move, the knife separated Ron’s shirt from his back. The soldier stepped over to Masapha and repeated the procedure. Then he moved back into the corner of the cell to give Ahkmad plenty of room.

Ron’s heart hammered in his chest, fear a cold knot in his belly. His back felt bare and vulnerable. No, they weren’t
really...

From the blindsiding jolt an unspotted safety had given him in a football game his senior year in high school, to the time he had cut his leg with Uncle Thomas’ chainsaw, Ron had never known such pain. As the whip sliced a groove down the right side of his back, every nerve anywhere near the blow exploded in agony, and his body recoiled, arched into the wall against the cold stone. The entire middle of his back felt like someone held a torch to it. He gasped a huge lungful of air with such force his throat throbbed, and held onto the scream that threatened to tear out of his mouth.

All of his senses were so heightened by the pain that when the jailer stepped over to take his turn with Masapha, it sounded like an elephant had stomped across the dirty hay.

The crack of the whip as it whistled through the air sounded more ominous than the rebel rockets fired at his hotel in Liberia. The lash landed on Masapha’s back with a sickening thud, and Masapha’s moaning gasp was a stifled cry of agony.

The footsteps turned Ron’s way again. He heard them halt. Like the tide recedes before a great wave, Ron sensed the whip draw back. His skin crawled and he instinctively shrank away, tensed...

Whap!

The second blow was slightly lower than the first, harder. It cut a deep canyon of lacerated flesh as it sliced downward. Ron’s body arched and jerked in an involuntary spasm; a gasped moan escaped his lips. Like broken underground water lines, the shattered capillaries sent a surge of warm blood down his back. He heard the jailer’s steps shift to repeat the blow on Masapha’s back.

Whap!

This can’t be happening! Ron thought, it can’t be hap--!

Whap!

Whap!

The men screamed now. Both of them. Every time the whip sliced into their backs, they screamed.

Whap!

By the fifth blow, Ron and Masapha were limp, their weight supported by their wrists in the shackles.

Whap!

After the eighth blow ripped into Ron’s swollen, bloody back, he slipped mercifully into unconsciousness.

The unconsciousness is a color. Blue. Blue and gray. The sky at the gravesite after his father’s funeral. He and Dan are standing by the casket at Hillcrest Gardens while Uncle Thomas escorts Aunt Edna down the cemetery path to the waiting limousine. Most of the crowd has left. Dan stands tall and straight, his hands in his pockets, gazing at the shiny silver casket with fresh roses strewn on top. Only 18, he already has the air of a young man who’s going somewhere; Ron, long-haired and sullen, looks like he has nowhere to go. Gusts of frigid wind cut across patches of snow on the ground and whistle among the grave markers. Dan and Ron are quiet, each in his own world. Then a deep, rumbling voice makes ripples in the silence.

“Pastor Wolfson was the bedrock of this community,” Mr. Albertson, the chairman of the local chapter of the NAACP has come up behind them and stands next to Dan. “I never knew a finer man than your father, ever! Black or white.”

He reaches out and pats Dan on the arm.

“You should be very, very proud of him, son,” He pauses and looks each of the boys in the eye in turn. “You just make sure you make him proud of you, hear?”

The old man turns and crunches across the frozen ground to his car.

Before either of them has a chance to respond, Ellen Birkeman comes gushing at them, her dyed platinum hair football-helmet perfect, her dress under the fake fur coat a little too tight and a little too low-cut for the occasion.

“Boys, I am so, so sorry,” she says in her shrill, nasal voice. She pauses and looks at the casket. “You know where I’d be today if it weren’t for Reverend Wolfson.”

Actually, they didn’t, specifically. But judging from her appearance, they could make a pretty good guess.

“You boys had the best father in the world!” She squeezes Dan’s hand, pats Ron on the shoulder, turns and walks away. A door slams shut, and the car bearing their father’s sister pulls away from the curb. When it does, the dam holding back Ron’s emotions bursts.

“He never should have been on that road in an ice storm,” he says quietly, but with so much emotional intensity he sounds like he’s shouting. “And he wouldn’t have been out there if he had said no—just one time, no, I’m going to stay home with my family, you’ll just have to solve your own problem! But he couldn’t do that; he couldn’t put us first just once! And now he’s gone.”

Dan tries to put his arm around Ron’s shoulder, but Ron pulls away. “He did the best he could, Ron.”

“That was the best he could do?” Ron shouts back in a rage. “The best he could do was never showing up at a single one of your games, not one? The best he could do was never taking us fishing or building a snow fort with us or showing me how to shoot the .22 rifle he got me for Christmas, or teaching me to drive?”

“He wasn’t perfect, but…”

“Oh, yes he was! Just ask all those people out there he helped and they’ll tell you he was perfect. They’ll tell you all about how he fed the poor, built shelters for the homeless, stood up to the legislature, took on the river boat casinos and the pornographers, child abusers and drunk drivers.”

Ron is sputtering, his words coming out in a great rush, “All those people will tell you he was a great guy...a wonderful guy!”

Some of the air whooshes out in a tired sigh. “Wish I’d known him.”

Dan stares at the casket for a few moments before he speaks.

“He screwed up, Ron. He was a good man who made a lot of mistakes. But I think he would have figured that out someday. I think he’d have changed if…”

“If he wasn’t dead?” Ron retorts viciously. “Yeah, being dead more or less limits your ability to interact with people, doesn’t it. Dead is…gone.”

Suddenly, Ron turns on Dan and spews it all out on him like the time when they were kids he had vomited all over Dan’s shoes.

“And for what? Can you tell me that? For what? Look around you, Dan. The same prejudices, the same problems and battles to fight. Nothing changes. The only difference is we don’t have a father anymore.”

Dan is struggling, too. As the oldest, he has a special treasure—a few memories of his father playing catch or reading him stories when Ron was too little to remember. Back when the legendary Dr. Paul Wolfson was just beginning his ministry. Those memories slice into his heart now like a rusty can lid, and he wants to cry, to sit in the dirt beside his father’s grave and cry.