Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (9 page)

There was no use in trying to figure out exactly what had happened, Benny supposed. “You think they’ll just hush it up—if they found him?”

“Yes,” Gerry said.

The Well-Bilt people with their machinery would know how to get rid of a body, Benny was sure. “What’ll we tell his wife?”

McWhirty looked miserable. “We’ll have to tell her he disappeared—that he’s maybe dead. I’ll tell her. You know—our job has its hazards.”

“We’ll make sure she gets a generous pension,” said Benny.

McWhirty went into a daze or depression which he could not shake off, but he still came to the office. He would not take a week’s leave, even though his doctor ordered it.

In the following week a torrent of letters and a two-day picketing of the NCC grounds—which did much damage to the pretty lawns, what with the police trying to wrestle the more unruly protesters off the premises—disturbed the whole staff of NCC, and caused them to come to work in armored cars which they crawled into at 8:30 in the morning at appointed places. The demonstrators called themselves the New CIO or Citizens in Outrage, and the nucleus of them seemed to have come from the Three Mile Island district, but they were aiming to make Outrage a nationwide movement by teaming up with militant environmentalists. The NCC came to work and departed in a shower of stones, eggs, epithets and threats.

One day in late September, Gerald McWhirty drove his car, the older of the two he and his wife owned, over the edge of a highway into a valley and killed himself. He left no note behind. It was called an accident.

Evelyn Ferguson, who had been drinking quite a bit since her husband’s disappearance (as it was called), was admitted to a rehabilitation center in Massachusetts at government expense. Benny wrote her cheerful postcards, when he remembered to do so.

The NCC came up with an affirmative report on Operation Balsam for Washington, when the site got its official inspection in October. Benny was there, and saw even worse cracks in the concrete than McWhirty had, but Well-Bilt promised to repair them, so the cracks were not mentioned in the report. Still worse, a rem count taken by the NCC at various vents on the exterior of the stadium detected 210 per hour at one, 300-odd at another, and so on, with only one of the twelve vents clean. Where was the radioactive stuff coming from? Well-Bilt promised to look into it, but meanwhile said it believed that the rem discharge was not high enough to cause alarm or to do perceptible damage to human, animal or plant life in the vicinity.

Benny had other problems now. A plutonium shipment, codenamed the Italian Shipment because it had nothing to do with Italy, out of Houston bound for South Carolina, had disappeared, and could the NCC look into this and see if a friendly country had stolen it, or what? This made at least four lost shipments on land and sea that Benny’s office was supposed to find. Benny missed Gerry McWhirty in a strange way, as if Gerry had been the voice of his conscience, which was now silenced. He missed Doug Ferguson too, but in a different way. He remembered the interesting rust-red tweed jacket that Doug had worn that last day, remembered complimenting Doug on it. Now Doug was sealed up, probably, and if so, for ever. All the container rooms had been filled and the term used by Well-Bilt was “permanently and hermetically sealed.” Benny’s ulcer was no better, but no worse either, and he had managed the inspection day at Operation Balsam quite well: he had vowed to himself not to wince, not even to think about Doug Ferguson’s corpse maybe lying behind one of those square steel doors that he walked past that day, and he had succeeded.

Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee

Nature and Lady Luck had smiled upon the broad and fertile land of Nabuti, in West Africa. Nabuti had rivers, lush plains, a seacoast of more than a thousand miles, and in the hills there was copper. For two hundred years Nabuti had been exploited by the white man, who had mined, and built roads and ports and railways to service them. Before the first half of the twentieth century was over, Nabuti had five thousand miles of paved roads, rivers had been dredged and banked for ships and boats, electricity and water systems installed, schools started. Malaria and bilharziasis had been conquered, general health much improved, and most of the many infants lived.

Nabuti won its independence in the 1950s by merely asking for it. Independence was in the air all over Africa, like a champagne that could be inhaled. A cadre of whites stayed on for a while in Nabuti to make sure everything was functioning properly, that crews knew how to run the railroads, repair electric power plants, service machinery from tractors to bicycles, but the whites were not popular during this period. The sooner they left, the better was the idea, and the whites got the idea after being spat on in the streets a few times by idle youths, then—several of them—attacked and beaten to death. The whites left.

There was a half-year-long party or festival then, while four or five contestants for leadership made speeches to the public, saying how they would run the country. Each of them promised a lot. They had to orate over the noise of jukeboxes and transistor radios. There was a voting of sorts, then a run-off between the two leading contestants, an argument about the vote-counting, and a husky young man in his twenties named Bomo came out the victor, because he was chief of police and the police were armed. The police, originally trained by the whites, would make a good cadre for the formation of a Nabutian army, the white administrators had said, and that is what happened. The police force became an ever-growing army, and with the millions of dollars bequeathed to Nabuti to launch it as an independent African state, and the yearly gifts and loans since, the purchase of snappy uniforms, rifles, machineguns and tanks was no problem at all. Bomo, who had never been awakened by a 6 a.m. bugle in his life, appointed himself General-in-Chief of the army, besides being President. Armed force, armed menacing was necessary, because Bomo intended to make his people work. Progress—the word to Bomo meant more comfort, higher medical standards, more exports of copper, more cars and TV sets—progress had to continue.

A few white construction workers arrived by invitation to get some projects started: Bomo’s Government House for one, and his private dwelling, the Small Palace, for another, a few high-rise apartment buildings to house workers in the capital Goka, and also a bigger airport terminus and longer runways, because Bomo had tourism in mind. Wages for manual labor were at first good, attracting people from the farms to the cities. Then the inevitable happened: basic foods ran short, and Nabuti had to start importing food, not a terrible burden because rice, wheat and dried milk were fairly given away by an arrangement with a United Nations agency. Worst was the copper mines’ condition. The miners had grown ever more undisciplined, absenteeism could not be controlled, there was drunkenness on beer mainly, and a constant demand for higher wages resulting in half-strikes or disorganized strikes which within two or three years had slowed production down to twenty percent of normal. If a piece of machinery broke down, an angry worker would profess not to know how to repair it, and maybe he didn’t.

Nabuti appealed for more financial aid and got it. Bomo realized full well that his people wanted refrigerators, TV sets, private cars and flush toilets in just about that order. He got the TV sets, millions of them, at remarkably low cost, a tiny sum to be added to the national debt. The TV kept the population quieter as to labor unrest, though more and more people simply did not come to work, but stayed home watching TV. Those whose sets had broken down went to the houses of friends whose sets hadn’t broken down. Life had turned into one big TV and beer party in the capital because, thanks to satellite pick-up, the TV sets were showing something twenty-four hours a day, and the Nabutians didn’t much care what language it was in, as long as there was a picture on the screen.

Other problems existed: traffic jams, for instance. People paid no attention to red and green lights, first with the excuse that nobody else paid attention, then on the fact (it was a fact) that most of the lights were not working anyway. The main avenues of Goka bore stagnant streams of private cars, trucks, and an occasional farm tractor, a popular means of transport, because a tractor could push anything else out of its path, and could glide over potholes and manholes without covers. Lots of cars broke down due to overheating in these traffic snarls, and cars were often abandoned and became cannibalized hulks a couple of hours later. There was no service for removal of these ruined cars, so they stayed a long while. A shantytown of unemployed and houseless people had built up a ring around Goka and around two or three other large towns too. Smoke from garbage burning and a stench from open gutter sewage wafted at all times over Goka no matter which way the wind was blowing. When no wind blew, a smog hung, almost obscuring the national flag atop Government House, which was six storys high. The telephone system worked just enough for some people to keep trying to use it, though usually their dialing, despite a dial tone sometimes, got them nowhere. Consequently footrunners were in demand. Young boys and a few young girls would deliver letters or more often verbal messages, packages, and groceries and black market goods to people who lived in the high-rises and stayed there for safety reasons and because the elevators did not work. A handful of people had plenty of money, but the majority were hungry. The people with money were in or connected with the army, the black market, prostitution or drugs.

Business and commerce had almost ceased to exist, and Bomo had given up, though he had never told himself this consciously and directly. His job, he told himself, was to hold his country together, to be in touch with regional groups, the strong men (on his side) who could quell disorder, and stamp out the roving bands of adolescents who robbed people and looted stores, to make a twice-yearly report to the United Nations on health progress, and blame lack of agricultural and industrial progress on drought, strikes and disruptions caused by adjacent countries’ belching their own hungry and unemployed into Nabuti, right over the borders, despite machinegun fire from Nabuti’s soldiers against them. These intruders took to the bush, then insinuated themselves among the squatters that ringed the big cities. It was disgusting. But the United Nations people seemed to believe Bomo when he said he was doing his best. At any rate, the money kept coming.

Bomo, six foot four in his youth, had grown heavier with the years. Now at nearly fifty-two he had a two-meter girth, and ordered extra long Sam Browne belts so that four or more empty holes remained for the tongue of his belt buckle to slide into, in case he ever needed them. Such attention to detail made a man look good, he thought. He had two dozen medals which he wore when making speeches, several caps with abundant gold braid, and a high-necked, gold-braided tunic uniform for the most important occasions such as military reviews. He seldom wore full uniforms, because they were uncomfortable in the heat. But he always wore khaki trousers, not shorts, and on most days an open-necked army shirt with sleeves rolled up, and sandals without socks. In this gear he was driven every morning in a jeep on a zigzagging tour of inspection of Goka and its surrounds. This took from about 10 a.m. until 1 p.m., when it was time to go back to his Small Palace for lunch and an afternoon rest. Three soldiers with rifles in hand rode standing in the jeep, on the lookout for trouble and also to give a show of armed power, though it had been years since they had had to fire a shot. The populace now stood on street corners talking, and sat on curbs drinking coffee or beer. Bomo’s morning round had another purpose, to drop in for half an hour on two or three mistresses, or wives as he had to call them when speaking to foreign diplomats. Bomo couldn’t count his sons, maybe seventy-five, maybe a hundred. The number of his daughters didn’t matter, though the country was full of girls who claimed that he was their father, so many that the claim was now worthless.

Bomo’s favorite sons were two, by different mothers, one named Kuo, about eighteen, the other Paulo, the same age give or take a couple of months. Both were keen to be their father’s successor, and they lived in the Small Palace with their wives, who numbered three or four each. Bomo played them off against each other, urging them to vie for severity against insurrection, and to shoot first, which was what it took to rule Nabuti. One of them would kill the other one day, then Bomo would know that his country would fall into the right hands, those of the stronger man.

One day a runner brought Bomo a sealed envelope, much smudged, with the United Nations’ insignia on its back. The letter was a month old, Bomo’s old translator informed him, and the substance of it was that fifteen members of the UN African Aid Committee and five aides would like to pay a visit to Nabuti on such and such a date which was now only nine days off. The letter said that the Committee had been unable to reach Government House or the Small Palace by telephone, and that this letter was the second dispatched, and the writer hoped that it would reach its destination, and requested confirmation, if possible, at Hotel Green Heaven in Gibbu, which was the capital of Gibbi, a country adjacent to Nabuti on its eastern border, and with which Nabuti had such bad relations that Bomo doubted that any message from his country would be delivered.

There was no way of avoiding this visit, Bomo realized. The Committee was visiting several countries in the area on this same tour, their first in five years. To create a civil war—easily done—would make his government look worse, even though it might prevent the visit for security reasons.

Bomo summoned his two sons.

“Clean everything up!” Bomo said in his native language, and used a few French and English words as he went on. “Garbage, beer cans,
merde, bidonvilles,
beggars and thieves! Shoot them and burn the corpses! After that, the streets must be cleaned, the windows washed! And the airport! Clear those runways!”