The Laughing Monsters (14 page)

He squirmed and clawed at his ribs, elbows knocking the steering wheel. “I’m in a cocoon. What will I be when I come out?”

Davidia said, “He’s going mad. We’ll be holding him down while he screams bloody murder before it’s over.”

“I’m coming out of my skin!” he screamed. Writhing. He bumped the horn and it honked and we all jumped, and then he got hold of himself and we got quiet again.

When daylight came we found ourselves parked behind a church in the middle of a field, a big crumbling adobe building, salmon-pink, its tin roof corroded red. Beyond it lay a proper dirt road and a collection of low buildings, dark inside, the wind blowing through. But pots steamed and fry pans sizzled on cookfires all around. Without talking about it the three of us got out of the car and made our way toward the possibility of breakfast. I watched Davidia walk. Her long African skirt swayed and the hem danced around her feet as she floated ahead of me. People wandered around, others were just waking up, crawling from under a couple of lorries, dragging their straw mats behind them. Nobody remarked on us. Michael found us some corn cakes and hot tea served in plastic water bottles. He said, “Last night I became a lizard. Now I know what we have to do.”

He went exploring, running his electric clippers over his scalp and his cheeks and his jaw as he walked around talking to folks.

Davidia and I sat on a bench outside a shack called The Best Lucky Saloon and she said, “Boomelay boomelay bommelay boom and all that.”—“What?”—“Vachel Lindsay. Or Edna St. Vincent Millay or somebody.”—“Oh.”—“It’s a poem about the Congo.”—“Oh.” We watched a woman sitting on a stool, working on the hairdo of a little girl sitting on the ground between her knees, while behind her, standing, another woman worked on
her
hair … The buildings and shacks were gray and brown, everything streaked with red mud. I recall three green power poles, one broken and leaning and held up apparently by the wires alone.

Michael came back with several bread rolls for each of us and said, “Some lizards can fly, so you pick up information if you become one,” and went away again.

Davidia said to me, “You haven’t seen this before?”

“What—seen him go through magical transformations, you mean, in the jungle night?”

“Well,” she said, “when you put it that way”—she was kicking at a rock—“then it sounds as troubling as it really is.”

“Maybe it’s a chemical problem. Are you taking something for malaria?”

“Once a day. It’s called Lariam.”

“Lariam causes nightmares. I take doxycycline.”

“You said ‘transformations in the jungle night’—but where’s the jungle?”

“The people cut it all down. They burned it to cook breakfast, mostly. And to make way for planting.”

A hundred years ago it would have taken an hour to hack through ten meters of undergrowth. Now huts and footpaths and small gardens cover the hills. By 9:00 a.m. we were passing among them, back on the road, driving on the right side now instead of the left. Within 20 minutes we had a flat tire.

Very briskly Michael raised the car on a jack and attacked the nuts with a tool and got on the spare—a different-colored wheel and a wrong-sized tire lacking any tread at all.

We saw very few motorized vehicles. An occasional motorcycle, an occasional SUV, always, it seemed, stenciled with a corporate or NGO acronym. Passenger busses coming like racecars, nearly capsizing as they careened around the curves toward us, slinging dust bombs from under the wheels. A few lorries bearing cargo, laboring slowly; other lorries with smashed faces dragged among the trees and abandoned. Many, many pedestrians strolling on the margin or crossing side to side, looking up from their daydreams only at the sound of a horn. It was the holiday of sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, and Muslims walked on both sides of the road, some of the women lugging prayer mats as big as house rugs.

The point is, our Land Cruiser stood out, and we couldn’t possibly face any officials. Before we reached any sizeable town, Michael drove off the road to detour, along little more than footpaths, down into gulleys, through patches of agriculture, knocking over stalks of corn and bushes of marijuana to get around the checkpoints and then back onto the real road, along which he sped as if he hadn’t only yesterday slammed this jeep into tragedy, again proceeding African style, all honking, no braking. A little boy ran right in front of the car, running at top speed as if hurrying to get killed. Michael swerved in time, mashing the horn and crying out the window in English to the boy’s family, “Beat that child, beat that child!” I watched to the side, keeping my eyes off the future. The fields were a light green, the color of springtime in the temperate zones, soft and even-looking, with here and there the slow white smoke of trash fires strung over them like mist. Late that day Michael pointed at the hazy distance and claimed he saw the hills of his childhood, the Happy Mountains, called by the missionary James Hannington, in frustration and disgust, the Laughing Monsters, and Michael told us of a forest in those mountains “where you’ll find pine trees about a dozen meters in their height, Nair. Bunches of ten evergreens, fifteen, twenty or more together. What do you call a bunch of trees—a copse? Copses of pines about a dozen meters in height, Nair. And these aren’t common evergreens, but their needles are actually made of precious gold. And you can gather all the needles you want, but if you get pricked by one, and it draws blood—you will lose your soul. A devil comes instantly at the smell of your blood, and snatches your soul right—out—of your heart. Remember,” he said, “when I told you never to have anything to do with the voodoo? Now you’re going to find out why.”

“Michael,” I said, “was it your people who martyred Hannington?” and he only said, “Hannington was stabbed in the side with a spear like Jesus Christ.”

The wedding would be blended into the Burning of the Blood, a weeklong ceremony, he said, “when we put away the bad blood of the war, and drink the new blood of peace. I tell you it is an orgy! Many babies are made. A boy conceived in that week will be a man of peace among his people. But only within wedlock. No bastard can be a man of peace.”

At one point, as the dusk fell on us, he said, “Any moment now we’ll reach Newada Mountain. Tear out my eyes, and I could find it by my heart.”

We turned onto a road that got muddier and muddier each kilometer until we were just mushing along through patches of gumbo separated by horrifyingly slick hard flats, but at least it wasn’t raining. “Fifteen kilometers more to Newada Mountain,” Michael announced, and after a couple dozen kilometers, three dozen, many more than fifteen, certainly, we took a shortcut, a footpath that delivered us into a wasteland, a stinking bog of red gumbo, the sort of mud you can’t stop in, even with four-wheel drive, or you’ll sink and never get going again. By full nightfall we’d determined that the stink came not from the bog, but from our vehicle. “I smell petrol,” Michael said, and the engine began to miss. “I’m not sure about the fuel pump,” Michael said, and the engine died. He cut the headlamps, and in the blackness quite vividly I perceived how an English missionary like James Hannington might have stood up to his buttocks in this sludge and wept, and heard the mountains laughing.

The dead engine gave out small noises as it cooled. With the headlamps switched off we could measure the darkness, which was deep and thick, without moon or stars. Every now and then the frogs started up all around, and then stopped. From far off came a wild, syncopating percussion.

Davidia said, “Are those jungle drums?”

“Probably someone’s idea of a disco,” Michael said.

“Well—let’s go,” she said, but we all three felt the impossibility of moving off on foot into the dark and the muck. Michael closed the windows and we slept the same suffocated sleep as the night before.

And woke at dawn in the foundered jeep, with no better plan than to get out of it and pee.

Michael and I stood on the driver’s side, Davidia squatted on the other. We’d arrived, we now realized, nearly at the limit of the red muddy lowland, at the feet of the mountains we’d seen by day, within sight of a place of twisted trees and lopsided shacks.

“Take your packs,” Michael said. “Walk soft.”

He meant us to understand that by a light tread on the superficial hard spots we might not break through into the gunk, although in many spots we broke through anyway. By tacking in search of better footing we spent half an hour making a few hundred meters.

The village lay between a field of corn and a banana grove. Michael had called it exactly right—the main shack, among squat huts and other shanties, was the Biggest Club Disco, with a generator on the ground outside, not running. Michael took a tour while Davidia and I sat on a bench and watched the village wake up, men and women fussing over cookfires beside the huts, children, chickens, goats, all going softly and talking low in the chilly dawn. Michael turned up with three Cokes and quite a few biscuits wrapped in a page of the
Monitor
, a Ugandan newspaper, and said, “Watch these people. We don’t know their hearts.”

“Why don’t you just say they’re not your tribe?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “Is this your clan, or not?”

“All right, the simple answer is yes—they’re speaking my dialect, but it’s not my close family. It’s not the right time to reveal myself.”

“Who do you think you are? Long-lost Ulysses?” Then I felt embarrassed for him. I could see by his look that he thought exactly that. “Michael, is this Newada Mountain?”

“By my reckoning, it’s very near.”

Davidia wasn’t suffering any of this. “Get us some real food,” she told him.

“Sit there,” he said, as if we weren’t already slumped side by side on the bench.

When he’d gone I moved close to her, hip touching hip. I said, “He’s using you for something. Something mystical, superstitious.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know. Kidnapping one of the gods and coercing the others to … rearrange the fate of us all.”

She made a sort of barking noise, with tears in her eyes. “You’re crazy.”

“As crazy as he is?”

“No. Once in a while.”

“It’s time I got you out of here.”

“You don’t have to say it twice.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Go how?”

“We’ll walk.”

“Where?”

“Uganda’s that way—east.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know. But it isn’t getting any closer while we sit here.”

“What will he do?”

“Nothing. He can’t hold us at gunpoint.”

“Why not?”

“Because he hasn’t got a gun.”

Something was happening, suddenly, to every person in the village—as if they choked on poisonous fumes—and their voices got loud, and we heard a vehicle in the distance. Davidia asked me what was wrong, who was coming, what kind of car. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I don’t give a shit—we’ll hitch a ride out of here or kill them and take the fucking thing.” Then we heard other engines, several vehicles, none of them visible yet. Somebody had a gun: one shot, two, three … then the rest of a clip. At that point our own jeep, three hundred meters away and to the right of us, burst into silent brightness—the boom of the explosion came a second later.

Davidia and I stood up simultaneously from the bench. We watched a white pickup truck scurrying across the landscape at a tangent to us, driving hysterical villagers before it, sparks of rifle fire bursting from the passenger window and soldiers standing up in the back and firing too, when they could manage it, as they bounced and swayed and hung on.

I turned toward the nearest copse of larger trees, and discovered that it was besieged by other vehicles. I felt relief when Michael came toward us in a hurry calling, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

The banana grove seemed a possibility. Anywhere, really. We proceeded in a sort of innocent, unprovoked manner, nothing wrong here, just walking.

We entered the grove. Behind us came a hush, then a man’s rapid voice, many gunshots, and the uninterrupted keening of a woman somewhere, and soon the whole village, it seemed, was crying out, some of them screeching like birds, some bawling, some moaning low. Every child sounded like every other child.

As soon as we’d put a little distance between us and the din of souls in the clearing, I sat on the edge of a pile of adobe bricks and wrapped my arms around my middle. “My stomach’s a sack of vomit.”

“I’ll give you ten seconds. Then double-time.”

“Where’s Davidia?”

“I’m right here.” She was behind me.

A woman burst onto the path ahead of us with eyes like headlights, running with her hands high in the air. Bullets tugged at the banana leaves around her.

I lost my head. I see that now. We’d moved a hundred meters along this path, breathing hard, our steps pounding, before I formed any clear intention of getting up and running. Of my panicked state I remember only others panicking, the faces of tiny children swollen into cartoon caricature, the long wet lashes and pouting lips and baby cheeks and the teardrops exploding like molten gobs in the air around their heads. I remember shoes left behind on the ground—flip-flops, slippers, whatever’s hard to run in.

Michael collided with my back, gripped each of my elbows from behind, and propelled me along. Davidia kept pace, clawed at our clothing, at the banana fronds too, and got in front of us, then away from us, and Michael steered me off the path and hugged me, stopped me.

“You can’t outrun bullets.”

“Yes I can!” I meant it.

He pointed amid the grove and said, “Go ten meters and get down.” He watched while I obeyed, then was gone.

Multiple guns now, and many fewer voices.

I lay on my belly. A few steps from my face the grove ceased, and to the right the gumbo bog took over, and for an unquantifiable period I watched a heap of something burning out there before I understood it was our vehicle. Part of the driveshaft remained, a wheel with its tire, and around these two things only the shell, still giving out small flames, and surrounding that, the red earth steaming and smoking.