The Book of Water (12 page)

Violator? N’Doch swells up with outrage. He grips the ragged sides of the porthole and almost yells out in his own defense. He’d
never
take a woman against her will! Most of the pleasure is wooing them and winning them over.

But the fishermen are buying it, hook, line, and sinker. They are shaking their fists and roaring because, N’Doch thinks, it’s probably what they’d like to do to at least one woman of their acquaintance, and they’re pissed that he got there first. He tells himself he’ll get even, in the way he always has: when this nonsense is over, there’ll be a whole new repertoire of nasty songs about drunken fishermen going around town.

When it’s
over
. . . .

He realizes he’s thinking about the blue dragon, holed up forward in the gym. He has been all along, with a part of his brain that won’t set her aside. It keeps asking, will she be safe in the ship? Will this stupid mob get bored and go home, or will they keep at their drinking and roaring until they’ve worked up enough courage of numbers to invade his sanctuary? What will the dragons do then? Eat them?

For a moment, he thinks how much he’d like to be there to see that. Then he reminds himself forcibly that he doesn’t care what happens to the blue dragon, or the brown one with the girl. But he doesn’t need to check his pocket for the jewel he’s stolen. It lies warm and heavy against his thigh, weighing inexplicably more than a thing its size reasonably should. Small as it is, for a jewel, it’s big enough. Finding a fence for it will be tricky. N’Doch has never dealt with the Big Guys before.

Meanwhile, it’s time to be out of range of the mob before its outrage whips up from passive to active. N’Doch crosses back to starboard and skins through the thin gap between two in-bent metal plates. Between the inner hull and the outer, he has stashed a tarred length of rope for just such an emergency, looped around a cross-tie. He drops the loose ends through the outer hole and lowers himself hand over hand to the sand. He jerks the rope free, coils it quickly
and tosses it deftly up into the hole. He’s racing away before he’s sure if it’s landed correctly.

He speeds along the beach without really knowing where he’s heading. His brain is full, too full to think. He puts himself on autopilot, his eyes squinting to scan for debris. The moon has set, and a predawn glow is creeping across the sky. N’Doch feels vulnerable, too visible, dark against the lightening sand. The damp night air is thick with fish stink. He wonders about it until he feels the first few dead ones under his feet. Another kill, washed in with the tide. Getting to be commonplace. He shifts his trajectory, avoiding the water’s edge, and slows. He skirts two small inhabited wrecks, people he knows. He sees the elder son of one family pacing the deck with a shotgun, probably anxious about all the shouting and firelight down the beach. N’Doch stays out of sight and cuts inland at the next path through the palm brake.

He spots the thicket of old vid antennas and satellite dishes sprouting from the
bidonville
, and slows when he reaches the first tents and lean-tos. A runner always looks guilty, he reasons, even if running for help. People in the camp are just stirring, the women mostly, starting their morning duties in the dull, slow way of the unwillingly awakened. Maybe the mob back at the tanker will go straight to their boats when dawn comes. Wait till they see the beach already littered with their day’s catch. But they’ll go out anyway, and maybe this morning, their wives will get to eat some of the breakfast they cook.

Several campfires are already burning. The starchy hot scent of boiling rice reminds N’Doch that he’s now as hungry as he’s ever been. The girl’s little morsels of bread and cheese were just a tease. He decides he’d better head home. Whatever little food his mama might have, she’s sure to give him some.

It’s full dawn when he reaches her house, a cinderblock box lined up with a thousand others along a dusty road on the far side of town. The houses are small and dark, having been thrown up several governments ago during a rare moment of social oratory convincing enough to lure foreign aid. The mortar between the cinder blocks is already crumbling and the corrugated plastic roofing is brittle and cracking
from the heavy, steady dose of UV in the sunlight. But it’s a house and his mama is lucky to have it. She knows this. She’s so aware of it that she hardly ever leaves it for fear some squatter will move in and take possession while she’s out at the market. It’s the only thing she has, the house and her vid set, which is as old as she is but like herself, still functional.

She’s up and talking to it when N’Doch steps in the open doorway, a tall woman in a once-bright print moving slowly around her one small room, scraping up last night’s cold rice from the bottom of the pot. Surreal color flickers along the cement-gray walls. His mama is shaking her head.

“I told you yesterday if you let him do that to you, you’d sure be sorry,” she’s scolding. On the pinched old screen, a lovely woman is weeping while an angry man throws crockery around a perfectly appointed room. It looks like no room N’Doch has ever seen.

“Ma,” he says. He’s sorry now that he has nothing to bring her. But wait. He has. The stone in his pocket.
She
could fence it, maybe. Say she found it somewhere in the rubble.

His mother clucks her tongue. “Anybody could have told you that, girl.”

N’Doch tries again. “Ma.” He does not move from the doorway.

Her eyes are fixed on the vid, reflecting the dancing image and brimming with knowledge and empathy. She turns her long back to N’Doch as she shakes the used tea leaves loose in her cup and pours in boiling water. “Well, don’t just stand there like a lump, boy. Get on in and sit down.”

N’Doch thinks it’s weird that his mama never calls anyone by their name. A lot of the time he calls her by
her
name, which is Fâtime, mostly to get her attention. He slouches in and drops down at the scarred metal table under the window next to the door. The window’s too high and narrow to see out of, but it’s the only one and it does let in some light and air, to add to the breeze provided by the man-sized hole his father pickaxed through the back wall just before he took off. To cover it, N’Doch salvaged an old Venetian blind as soon as he was old enough to carry
something that big. He gazes around the room, taking stock. The pocked cement floor is gritty under his feet.

“You sold the couch?”

She nods, spooning the cold rice into a plastic tub. Her eyes on the vid, she sets the tub in front of him. “Ayeesha’s third is too old to be sleeping with her now. She took it. I told her she’d have to come get it herself, ’cause I wasn’t gonna be dragging it all the way ’cross the street, so she did.”

N’Doch pouts irritably, knowing Fâtime won’t turn away from the screen long enough to notice. Now the table and the two folding chairs beside it, plus the TV on its plastic crate, are the only furniture in the house besides the loom in the corner and the broken-down cot behind the sheet on a rope that offers Fâtime a measure of privacy. The sofa was hers, after all, and it’s true he hasn’t been home in a while, but where’s she think he’s going to sleep?

“She pay for it?” he demands through a sticky mouthful. He sees the finished weave on the loom is still short, a long way until her next sale. His mama’s generosity worries him sometimes.

“‘A sack of relief rice, near full. Ten cans of beans, two melons, and the promise of a dozen of those big yams she’s growing up right.”

He sits up, impressed. “Got any melon left?” He can’t think of anything that would taste better right now.

Fâtime rolls her eyes back at him briefly. “Finished the first two weeks ago. She’ll bring the second when her next crop comes in.”

Two weeks?’ It’s been longer than he realized since he’s visited. He should come by more often, he knows he should. He’s all she has left, ’cept that crazy old man out in the bush, his grandfather. But he hears no reproach in her voice. His mama, he knows, gave up a long time ago expecting much out of the men in her life. They’re always dying or leaving.

He reaches for another fistful of rice and discovers he’s cleaned the bowl out already. Impossible! He’s just started eating! He tips it toward him. Sure enough, he hasn’t left her so much as a grain. He sets the bowl down and flattens his palms on the table. But maybe he won’t show her the
jewel just yet. In fact, he can’t really bring himself to take it out of his pocket, to reveal such a lovely thing in the drear light of this house.

“Ma, I didn’t bring you anything this time. I was . . .” How can he begin to explain? “. . . kinda in a rush.”

Fâtime shrugs, points at the screen. The lovely woman has changed one sparkling gown for another and redone her makeup. “Not a brain in her head, this one with the nails. Now that other one, with the head of hair, look, here she comes now, see her? She’s a smart one. She don’t let anybody by her.”

N’Doch looks. The woman in the French-style gowns has been replaced by another slim beauty wearing bright festival robes and a high, elaborate hairdo, corn-rowed and braided and strung with glittering glass beads. Her skin is dark silk, flawless. She is breathtaking. Normally N’Doch would use this occasion to drift off into a fantasy about himself and this woman in a soft bed somewhere. Perversely, he finds himself staring at her hundreds of beads and tiny braids, thinking that both he and his mama could eat for a year on what that hairdo cost. Probably the jewel he’s stolen wouldn’t bring as much. A single hairdo!

This is an odd thought for him, not that he hasn’t counted such things out before, but odd that he should feel
angry
about it, rather than merely envious. The equation is somehow shifting in his mind. He used to be glad that at least his mama had the vid and its constant diet of fantasy to distract her from being so hungry most of the time. Now there’s this vague, undeveloped notion that if the hairdo wasn’t eating up so much of the world’s money, there’d be more of it around to feed his mother and himself. The idea sighs into his head like a night breeze and out again as he loses his grasp on it, unable to apply it in any pragmatic way to his own life.

But it leaves him looking at his mother from a new angle, actually
looking
at her, for the first time. She’s his mama, but she’s also a stranger, a rangy, sloppy woman who happens to resemble him, as if someone else’s skin had been wrapped around his skeleton. A woman afraid to leave her house. A woman starting to put on weight, who weaves and
watches the vid and expects no more out of life. A woman who’s finished.

It’s the resemblance that catches in N’Doch’s throat. Suddenly he sees himself, a fat old man glued to the tube. It’s the starch that puts the pounds on and stretches out the skin, swelling it up, then leaving it slack in the endless cycle of gain and loss. When the food comes, you eat as much as you can, storing up for the times when there is none. Rice, bread, yam. The relief people never send anything fresh like a vegetable, and who knows what brew of chemicals are laced into his mama’s favorite, their instant mashed potatoes? Only N’Doch’s music and the chance of fame stand between him and this horrifying vision, this endless . . . sameness. Only his music, and now the . . .

His hand has slipped unnoticed into his pocket. The red jewel is a hard, hot lump on his palm. When he closes his fist around it, the heat is nearly unbearable. Yet it draws him, like the flame tongues of a bonfire beckoning in the darkness, and he understands he’ll never sell it. Could never. Not this, the dragon stone. He’ll keep it, then. It’ll be his secret talisman. He holds it tightly, suffering the biting heat as best he can, and hears . . .

MUSIC
.

N’Doch’s head whips around. Where? But it’s not the television and it’s not his mother singing to him, though that’s what it sounds like, her low tuneless lullaby that soothed him when he was too hungry to sleep. He knows who it is, of course. It’s the one he’s just tried to leave behind, the other Big Chance he doesn’t want to think about, the one who’s gonna ask so much in return for what she’ll give. It frightens him that she can touch him even here.

He stares at his mother while she stares at the vid. She’s totally absorbed. How can she not hear this music, so like her own? She’s lost to it, and probably lost to her own as well. N’Doch doubts she could sing to him now the way she used to. And suddenly, he can’t sit like this any longer, not speaking, with her locked up in her vid world. If he’d talked to her more in his life, maybe she’d be talking back. But he hasn’t, and she isn’t. He has to leave, just like he always does. But this time, he isn’t off to meet up
with his boys or chase after some girl or pursue any one of the many scams he’s usually juggling.

This time, he doesn’t know where he’s going. In town, the brothers will be after him. On the beach, there’s the mob. They won’t leave him alone as long as his supposed villainy offers them entertainment at his expense. So he doesn’t know where he’s headed and he’s not sure when he’ll be back. Abruptly, he’s tired of the runaround. It doesn’t seem as glamorous as it did when he was a kid, first getting into gangs. But he should tell Fâtime something if he’s going to be away for a while, make up a story at least, so she doesn’t worry. He opens his mouth with the beginnings of an excuse.

“Ma . . .” He stops, stumped.

She turns to him. She looks at him directly, for the first time since he came in, yet her gaze is fuzzed, like she’s watching something just a fraction past him, like where the back of his head might be if she could see right through him.

She says, “If you’re in trouble again, go visit Grandpa Djawara.”

Then she turns back to the vid, and it’s like she’d never said a thing. It’s like smooth water closing over a sunken boat.

N’Doch is chilled. It’s been years since she’s tried to pawn him off on his grandfather. It’s also the third time in twenty-four hours that the old man’s come to mind. Weird. And three is a mystical number. N’Doch reminds himself he doesn’t believe in omens or signs or any of that superstitious stuff. On the other hand, he didn’t believe in dragons either, until yesterday. And Papa Djawara’s
would
be a good place to lay low for a while.