Thirty Girls (11 page)

By the time she reached him, Harry had his sail packed up.

You had an audience, she said. They were impressed.

I think it’s safe to say that no other humans have probably flown off that hill.

But they knew about Monica Lewinsky.

Children know everything, Harry said. He glanced back to the hill. If there were more wind … I’d like to try again on our way back.

They stepped off the lumpy grass onto a rough road and headed for the truck.

Behind them a woman screamed. Harry put his hand on Jane’s shoulder, stopping her. They looked back toward the huts and saw a woman in a yellow shirt screaming from a doorway. A man could be seen scurrying off in an odd crouched position. The woman’s arm was raised as if she’d just thrown something, and the hand stayed up, with fingers spread. Harry studied the scene for a moment, then he turned Jane’s shoulders around.

Come on. He moved her forward. She glanced back. The woman was bending over to pick up the girl, whose pink dress was streaked with red.

She’s bleeding, Jane said. The woman lifted her and carried her back inside.

Family business, Harry said. Not for us.

She trusted Harry, so she went, but thought how children, the ones most needing protection, were perhaps the hardest to save.

On the drive back, nearing Naivasha, the sky lost its ochre glow at the horizon, and the air quickly darkened. No one drove at night if you could help it. You were more likely to be robbed on the road at night. With no streetlights outside of town and only a few other headlights beaming by, it was like driving at the bottom of a dark sea. Out the window Jane saw no signs of life in the blackness. She knew the animals were out there though, awake and on the prowl. The black tunnel of road was lit only as far as the headlights reached. Going down a hill, Harry braked abruptly. In the headlights was a dark lump in the road, a roll of clothes in their lane. Harry put the car in neutral, the motor idling in the quiet night, and peered over the steering wheel close to the windshield, trying to make out what was there. He looked out the black windows to his left and right and behind. Carjackers flagged you down for help, then people hiding in the bushes would pounce out. Flat tires happened all the time, but if you were going to help anyone, you took a risk. Stopping at night at all was a
risk. Harry pulled on the emergency brake and opened the door, leaving the car running. He got out.

Lock it, he said, and shut the door.

He strode, not quickly but not slowly either, in front of the dim headlights. He stood over the bundle, looking at one end then the other. He bent down and slid his arms underneath, hoisted it like a sack onto his shoulder and across his back. A head appeared, dangling down. Harry carried the body off the road and set it down. Back in the headlights he had his usual expression—as she’d seen in the five long days she’d known him—internally focused and untroubled. Even carrying a passed-out, possibly dead, stranger on his back. He crouched down to see the person more closely, gave the body a pat, then stood up. Jane unlocked the door.

Just drunk, he said, and shifted into gear.

They weren’t far from Beryl’s. She thought about the bed waiting for them there. When they got back, there was a delicious curry dinner and a smaller group at the table. Leonard, however, had not returned.

Beryl’s guest Damian turned out to be not only a paleontologist but an environmental consultant who flew around East Africa. He and Harry were discussing wild dogs. Jane was surprised to learn that when Harry had worked for a couple of years he’d become rather an expert. The wild dogs were, like most every other mammal on the continent save the human, on the decline. Weeks were spent tracking dogs to locate their dens so they could be coaxed out and transported to areas where they’d less likely vanish. There was a movement among those trying to save them to call them by a less off-putting name—painted dogs.

Either way, Harry said, wild dogs are a lot cooler than people realize. Like all dogs, they are a submission-based species, but it’s not to do with sex. Females rule some packs, males rule others. The packs hunt for food together and never fight over it, even when they’re starving. When they want food, they beg for it from each other. They don’t fight.

Jane looked across the table at Harry. Maybe she looked at him a little longer than usual. He winked, unsmiling.

Later they fell into bed like trees and she lay beside him motionless. She listened to his quiet breathing, asleep. Her leg under the covers against him felt alert. The longing had started. She wanted to wake him but didn’t. Mustn’t let them know you need them.

Before dawn, he woke her. They were out before sunrise, carrying their bags off the terrace. Beryl was up to see them off, holding on her hip the youngest boy, chewing at her gold necklace. As they drove away Jane watched her figure in the murky light, her brown arms around her son, still standing as they drove down the alley of eucalyptus trees, still unmoving when the truck crossed the fields and turned out of sight.

An unpaved road took them up small hills where in the dawn light the ground looked sprinkled with pale blue sand between ghostly bushes. The sun rose and the road became pink then turned to pavement and the truck slammed the potholes.

On a steep hill the motor started to sputter and buck. Everyone stirred from their drowsiness. The truck strained upward, slowing to a crawl. Harry’s expression showed no concern. He stopped, put the car in neutral, revved the engine, then put it back in gear. It popped and stalled. He turned the ignition key. Nothing. The emergency brake screeched on.

Before anyone had even opened a door Lana was out and on her knees in the pebbly dirt. She flung herself underneath the car so her sandals stuck out with their dark red toenails. Her hand thrust out, holding a cap the size of a shot glass, which Harry took, dumped out, and swiped with his shirt. He handed it back to Lana’s open palm waiting.

When she slid out and stood, her backside was stamped with white. She rubbed her fingers on tufts of grass to clean off the oil and patted herself down. Now let’s give her some juice, she said, and hefted herself back into the truck. The engine started.

Farther down the road, the tire blew.

III

First Days

You are filled with a new intention. Something stretches beyond you, drawing you along, and as you move forward in a dark place you can barely make out shapes and your face feels invisible. No one sees you anymore. You don’t think it, but you have the odd feeling: Maybe this will lead me home
.

Y
OU TURN NEW
in a new place. Where are you being taken?

You will go further and take the way you have not planned.

You wonder where you belong. It seemed you used to belong somewhere. Maybe you never did.

Different things matter.

Sometimes, in longing there is a homesick feeling. But when you picture yourself home, you look out of place, a cutout figure, not fitting in.

You think you have control, but there is no control. Again you are with strangers, in a foreign place, all far from home.

You wait. What else can you do? You wait, and not so patiently either, for moments when clarity and meaning visit you. You try to arrange for their coming, but those moments visit you regardless of—well—regardless of anything.

You are being taken, yet each step is made deliberately by you. Where are you taking yourself?

Your instinct seeks a right feeling.

In a new place you are surprised to find a feeling of home.

Things you thought lost forever come back. When you add one thing, another is dropped behind.

What will happen. Who knows it.

You hope to bring back something good. Will you ever be able to describe this? This must be described.

Who would have said such a world could exist?

You think, I can’t go on. I won’t make it. Then you do.

You pray, Help me not turn into a monster.

You sit in the back, watching the driver’s hair blow around.

Your family no longer knows you. They do not follow you into your life, but stay at the side of the road, off in their own lives, waiting sometimes, sometimes turning away.

The odd feeling comes which you know may not be right but which still inhabits you: I belong below people.

Most people when you get up close are not more in focus, but less.

We cannot avoid wounding another. We do it by being ourselves. Stay away from people and you avoid brutalizing each other.

Easier if you need no one.

In the freedom alone you have a beautiful feeling then think, I wish someone were here to feel it with me.

Without someone beside, what’s the point? You think,
Stay with me
.

You keep on. It doesn’t help to think of how they are treating you. It doesn’t help to think how others are being beaten.

What good does it do to think of it?

Someone hurt because of you may be the hardest thing to bear.

You think your life is your own, but we all belong to others.

Life is the same everywhere.

There is nowhere like this.

These things must be told. You wonder if the world knows of such things. They must not. Surely such things would stop if they knew.

You care, then you are drained of caring.

You missed the time of growing into a woman. You became one too quickly. You are still a girl.

You pretend you are not watching him. Dry grasses blur along a crumbling road.

You might have found yourself anywhere on the planet, but here is where you end up: with people, fighting.

You belong where you are. You are possible.

You think that if you share what is in you, you will be exposed, so you keep it to yourself. It is right to feel in pieces.

Will you ever be free?

The tangled brush abruptly ends and the land zooms out to a wide savannah with flat-topped trees in the distance and a hazy horizon.

In the morning you wake to roosters crowing. Where are you? Then you remember. In this other life.

T
HEY STOPPED IN
Nakuru. The week before, the town had been in newspaper headlines as having the worst rioting after the January elections. The Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest tribe, were targeted, houses had been burned, and eighty people killed. Other reports said there were more. The white truck pulled into a peaceful gas station. The only sign of violence was hundreds of flattened dragonflies plastered across the parking lot like green satin confetti.

Lana disappeared into Desire Grocery. Jane strolled past storefronts, notebook in hand. On assignment one could be official in looking for things to notice. A large tree made shadows out of men who sat on a circular bench, observing. A boy passed Jane pushing a warped hubcap.

Jambo, she said.

The boy lifted his hand, looking hard at her.

The town consisted of a small line of shops. In one window burlap sacks spilled beans, tea bags were stacked like dominoes and a few belted
dresses hung from hangers. In a restaurant doorway a blue and green beaded curtain hung showing a diamond-patterned snake and behind was a shadowy room with a couple of tables and a menu painted on the wall for goat, chicken, rice, chipatas. The establishment next door was a window with a narrow shelf selling cigarettes, batteries, and aspirin. No one appeared anywhere within.

Lana came out of the grocery carrying paper bags stained with oil and a handful of clinking glass bottles, laughing over her shoulder to the friends she’d made inside. A white van with a red cross on the side had pulled into the gas station on the other side of the pumps. A tired-looking woman and man were getting gas. A black circle logo on the back had a machine-gun silhouette with a line through it. Jane stood nearby, about to ask them where they were going, but saw that her fellow travelers were decidedly uninterested in the Red Cross workers. Apparently NGOs occupied a parallel world of their own.

They drove on through the farmlands of Molo. Tea fields tilted on hills were electric green against a sky of gray storm clouds in the distance. Women in kerchiefs were bent over in narrow paths of black shade, picking leaves into baskets. Along the road schoolgirls in blue uniforms walked in groups or alone. The road straightened and fields of sugarcane spread on both sides, its stiff shoots rocking side to side in the breeze.

The road was a demolished tar surface pockmarked with red gashes. Few cars appeared. Now and then the surface changed back to dirt with deep railroad-track ruts then back to the corroded blacktop with potholes big as sofas. The truck slammed into them and you felt it in your spine. When Jane cried out, Harry said, You’re going to have to be tougher than that.

She learned to stop bracing herself, it made the slam worse.

They got used to being thrown up and down and jerked forward.

What day is it anyway? Jane was in the back seat, attempting impossibly to write in her notebook. The pen stabbed the page, then was thrown off.

February? Pierre’s eyes were closed, but his head magically lifted off the backrest before they banged down.