The Laughing Monsters (20 page)

They’ve stopped everything. He’s catching his breath. Listen, Davidia—his face frightens me. The blade is twitching in his hands.

She laughs at him.

I need water and I’m going out now before Michael kills her.

[OCT 27 ca. 5:30PM]

The sun is low and very red and mean. I can’t look west.

Down to double digits: 94 hours to go. Plus 30 minutes. Still 5000 KM to cover.

I’ve drunk my fill at the creek. No matter. The toxins work slowly. Thirst would have killed me by tomorrow. I’m resting beside the creek among some new associates, that is, four skeletal sad-eyed Brahma cattle and the three herdsmen who tend them. Later I’ll tell you all about these guys. I don’t intend to move from this haven, I’m at my leisure to write and also to drink, and not just water, and I’ll tell you all about that too, but first—as to this morning’s romp—

When I came out of my hiding-hut, Michael was declaring again:

“I’ll destroy this place!” With a sweep of his machete he said, “You people are crazy!”

I stood by my doorway till Michael noticed. At first he didn’t, but the villagers watched me. Without the usual smiling and laughing, their mouths took up no room in their faces and their eyes seemed abnormally huge.

The sight of me slapped Michael awake. His recognition of me seemed to travel up from his feet and when it got to his face I came closer, but not in reach of the machete.

He looked around himself: a dozen or so huts; the one tree—deceased; two piles of red dirt; two purple coffins, and a hole; also his clansmen huddling together on the ground like survivors of a shipwreck.

He said: “Where is she?” He meant you, Davidia.

“The Americans had us,” I said. “Your outfit, the Tenth.”

“Where is she, Nair?”

“She’s gone. She got on a chopper and didn’t look back.”

His spine withered. The weapon dangled at his side. “Sometime during Arua, she took her heart away from me. I felt it. In Arua, something happened.”

I wanted to take him away from this scene and talk about that other scene, about you, Davidia, and the colonel and the prop-wash and the noisy cloud that ate you up.

However: the Dolce woman strode up to my face and gave out a hearty, phony laugh and cried, “God knocked backwards!”

Michael said, “This woman is insane.”

I said, “You must be La Dolce.”

She yelped, “You’ve got an English for us!!??” (I punctuate excessively because her manner came straight out of comic books. She communicated in yelps, whoops—what else—guffaws, huzzahs, preachments, manifestos—and I had to agree instantly with Michael that she was insane.) “You are right, because I am!!!—I AM LA DOLCE!!!”

“What a stupid name to call yourself,” Michael said.

She raised her face to Heaven and sang ha-hah.

“I understand she’s the village queen or something.”

“More than that. She’s a priestess of genocide.”

La Dolce addressed her brethren, pointing at Michael’s head. “Do you hear the Devil talking in his mouth?”

“She calls me her prisoner,” Michael said. “She tells them I’m being kept here by her power.”

“She speaks good English.”

“She’s from Uganda. She’s the cousin of my uncle.”

La Dolce pointed at me now, almost touching my nose: “This one’s clan is called Bong-ko. Their lies make you laugh!!!”

Michael said, “They know the truth about you.” I said What?—he said, “Aren’t you a liar? Why are you here without Davidia? If the Tenth got hold of you, how did you get away? Did you sell me for your freedom? How long before they come for me?” He raised high the machete. “I feel like cutting the lies right out of you!”

The blade didn’t scare me so much—only the look of him. His beard was growing out in streaks and whorls. Nappy head, red eyes, fat parched lips. He’d plastered the laceration on his forearm with red mud. His greasy black face, his mangled sweatshirt, his mistreated jeans—all dabbed and smeared with it. His sandals and feet were tainted with the same African muck.

“Michael. Lower your weapon. I need water.”

“I can’t help you. Do you see her crazy eyes?” La Dolce sat in her wooden chair like an enormous toddler, broadcasting happy rage. “This woman is calling for a sacrifice. She wants to bury someone alive. If I don’t keep an eye on her, she’ll throw one of these people into the grave.”

“Has she got more bottled water?”

“She’s got a whole commissary.”

“Where?—Please.”

“Die of thirst, Nair. You sold me to the machine.”

“I’ve got no time for your accusations.”

“You should be the one to go in the grave with those children.”

“Lower your weapon and help your friend.”

“Sacrifice for sacrifice.”

“Two things,” I said, backing away. “First, water. And then we get out of here.” I guess I looked stupid, stumbling off. And he looked stupid with his cutlass in the air, as if it was stuck there and he couldn’t get it down.

I poked my head into several huts and found one stacked with half a dozen cases of bottled water and boxes of cereal and canned goods, its entrance guarded by a man leaning on a hoe. He took it up like a cudgel when I got near. I tried to bribe him with all my Ugandan shillings, then with US dollars—twenty, a hundred, two hundred—but he wouldn’t share.

I experienced a sort of dislocation here. The next several minutes have gotten away from me, and I’m not sure I remember things in their actual order.

I saw the villagers all standing around the grave, shuffling their feet in place as they moaned and trembled. They were dancing. Singing.

La Dolce and Michael had resumed their own dance, circling the scene.

I didn’t notice that the purple coffins had gone until they reappeared on the shoulders of four men coming two-by-two from behind me. The dead children, I assumed, traveled inside them. The crowd made way, still chanting and moving in a zombie trance.

The diggers waited in their hole and each coffin was just shoved over into their double embrace and let down to the floor with a little sploosh, and then helping hands raised one of the men from his work, while the other simply stepped onto one of the coffins and clambered out on his own, leaving behind the smeary impression of his bare foot.

La Dolce screamed at some length, and Michael spoke briefly in a much lower tone, both in Lugbara, I supposed.

The mob circled the grave on their knees, shoving dirt into it with their hands. They tossed the piles back into the holes and then bowed their heads while their queen made a speech that included much repetition of “La Dolce, La Dolce.” When she got near me, she took up her theme in English: “What is that name? I am La Dolce Vita!! You know it means that life is sweet. That’s me. I bring life. Life is sweet. But first we must sacrifice. First God will take what he wants. He takes the babies into his jaws. Can we stop him?” She went among the crowd, looking into face after face, bending close: “Can you stop God?—Can you stop God? What about you?—Can you stop God? No!! You cannot!!! And now God is angry that you have not sacrificed. I know this because I am God!” I doubt they comprehended.

Michael said to her, “The Newada people are not animists and sacrificers like that. This village used to be Christian”—he pronounced it Chrishen. Then he shouted, still in English:

“Go home! The grave is full enough! Go home!”

Many of the mob stood up and wandered away. Some of them wept, nobody talked. A dozen or so stayed with their queen.

La Dolce watched the others go, and I got the sense that Michael had triumphed here.

The queen performed a kind of slow elephantine dance, singing ha-hah, ha-hah. She pointed at Michael’s crotch and said, “I’m going to my sleep now. When I dream, your parts will turn into a white stone!”

Michael laughed. It was false, but loud, from deep in his lungs. He said, “Woman! If I had diesel, I would soak you and burn you alive.”

“La Dolce is going up!” The queen lowered her butt into her throne with an ostentatious lot of wiggling. The two diggers hurried to help her.

Next to the tree stood a rough-hewn table with some items on it—a few liters of bottled water—empty—a whole cassava, some mangoes, and some of the green oranges they eat in this region. From nails hammered into the trunk hung plastic shopping bags by their knots, full of what I don’t know. Clothes, probably, food. A pole jutted from the earth nearby, and between it and the tree some bright things flapped on a length of twine—a scarf, a skirt, a T-shirt. A pair of white athletic socks. Stair treads had been hacked in a zigzag up the trunk, but La Dolce didn’t use them.

La Dolce raised one finger and made a winding motion with it and two stout women and a man took hold of her rope. She laughed and laughed while, by a system of pulleys anchored out of sight above, they hoisted her chair off the ground, and she ascended into the boughs.

We tilted back our heads to watch—the chair swaying, the rope rasping against the tree’s rough hide, the crowd’s murmurs and exclamations—ayeee ayeee—the wind coming across the expanse.

She pointed down at Michael. “Hees name shall rot!”

I remembered a spider I’d seen swinging in just such a manner from Michael Adriko’s toothbrush. I thought: Yes, everything’s coming together now.

I wouldn’t have thought that anything could distract me from my thirst, but now I heard the sound of an engine, and a burst of hope lifted me. “Is that a car?”

It was a cow. Another one also moaned.

I said, “Shit. We can’t ride out of here on cattle.”

Michael took a couple of strokes at the tree with his machete. He gave it up and seemed about to walk off somewhere.

“Michael—I need you to focus now. I talked to some missionaries. Tomorrow they can take us out of here to Bunia.”

“Good for them.”

“Don’t do this. Jesus, man—not now. I need to get to Freetown, and I’m out of ideas.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I need your help.”

“Leave me alone.”

When he’s like that, he’s like that. I left him alone.

I followed the path down the hill.

While a humpbacked Brahma cow was loosing a stream of piss two meters away, I sponged up creek water in a dirty sock and squeezed it into my mouth. No liquid so sweet has ever touched my lips, until perhaps five minutes later—because gathered around a stump quite near to where I’d fallen on my knees, three remnant herdsmen had convened. One of them offered me a gourd. I thought he meant it for a water glass, but in fact it was already swimming with a filmy yellow liquid, pungently alcoholic, and I knew I’d come among my tribe.

*   *   *

Three fine men: one younger, two older. I forget their names. They have the puffy look of corpses floating in formalin. And three stunted, starving cows and one bull who drags his chin across the ground because he can’t hold up his own horns.

As far as I make out through the language barrier, they’ve been trading off the last of their cattle for plantain and sugar cane, which they bury together in a formula that ferments and emerges as a remarkable beverage they call Mawa. I don’t think it’s good for the teeth—they’ve got none. But these dregs in the gourd, I’ll bet you, give strength to the bones.

I can’t say whether they’re from Michael’s clan or some neighboring society. They wear rope sandals. Long-sleeved shifts of coarse cloth, brown or gray, depending on the light.

I fell asleep by the creek, I woke from a long nap, and I’ve been sitting here writing away with no intention of leaving this spot because, if I take their meaning, a new batch of Mawa comes up from the earth around sundown, and I plan to be here for the resurrection. Prior to my nap, I only got a few swallows.

I’m not going back up that hill to deal with Michael. I’d sooner take my chances on the Tenth Spec Forces than hang my hopes on Michael Adriko, the lunatic comedian.

I should stay sober and alert for the sound of a blue-and-white Isuzu.

Really? Kiss off. What difference does it make? It’s been two weeks since we left Arua and I’ve come altogether about fifty kilometers.

[SAME-SAME, 6:30PM?]

Oh, Davidia! Or maybe I mean

Oh, Tina!

Whichever is your name, I call to you, oh woman of my heart.

The Mawa decants out of 2 five-liter jugs.

The gourd bowl goes round and round.

My flat black silhouette comrades. Right now they stand against the sunset. Behind them it looks like Dresden’s burning. I forget their names. I’ll ask again.

—Oudry

—Geslin

—Armand

Priests of the nectar, ministers to the flock, of whom I am one.

If I can’t buy or think my way out of this by tomorrow, I’ll go back to the Americans and say, Prison? Fine.

*   *   *

My handwriting may be illegible—let’s blame the dark.

Also my pencil must be dull, but come on, enough—it worries the mind and body to have to sharpen a utensil every half page.

Oudry, Geslin, and Armand have kindled a fire from dried dung on a bed of former thatch, and our laughter flies up into the blackness with its sparks.

Incidentally, Davidia, that’s why they’re tearing the huts apart around here. For firewood.

Davidia, I wish you could meet Tina.

Tina, I’m not sure I’d like you to meet Davidia.

Do I contradict myself? Not to worry. I’ll soon be transcribing these notes in a prison cell, with plenty of time to get my thoughts in order.

Let’s face it. I’ve got to go back to the Yanks.

I’ve improved the plan a bit: take the last of my cash to Bunia, lavish it on a finale of booze and prostitutes, then advise the UN to arrest me.

*   *   *

Fifty kilometers in 14 days. Per my calculations, a circus clown walking on his hands would have made better progress.

Tina.

You’re sexy, Tina. And smart. But not glamorous in the Michael’s-woman way. Still. You might have had dealings with Michael. I think you might have dealt with him. You know what I mean? I mean, did you fuck him, Tina? I always suspected you did but I never asked, so I’m asking. Did you fuck Michael?

[OCT 28 ca. 8AM]

When next I encountered Michael Adriko, I found him continuing in a wretched state. He looked like he’d been beaten about the face with a bat, but it was just sadness, only misery, it was nothing physical, it was all from the inside. That was last night.