Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (11 page)

“Truly?” Pip's voice held surprise. “Qat's used all over this bit of Africa. Like a mild cocaine. Chewing it makes you all trigger happy.”

“When there is fighting . . . Euhh, a combat?” said Dubois, “All the older Kutu order the younger ones to attack. They, the elders, stay back and shoot anyone who tries to escape.” She pointed her finger like a gun. Her nails short and rather ragged.

“But why . . . ?” Max trailed off. The term “child soldier” had never made sense to her. She pictured a Marine holding a gun, a large man with a crew cut, trained like a dog to attack. A kid struggling to lift that same gun would look silly. “If the Kutu have the choice, why don't they kidnap the parents instead, the dads?”

The others paused.

Mutara was the one who broke the silence. He used a gentle voice, as you would when talking to someone who should know better. “But rifles now are light. Made of plastic like toys. And—unlike parents—children have not much fear. Will run into anything, yelling and shooting their guns.”

Dubois spoke. “You kidnap the dads, they try to escape, know how to find help. They have more . . . Euh . . . ” She combed through the air with one hand, searching for the word.

“Life experience?” asked Yoko.

“Determination?” suggested Pip.

Dubois nodded and continued, “The dads hold onto their souls a long time, fighting back. Children, not so much.”

Max considered this.

“When the doctors' jeep was found, a few Kutu were in it, trying to sell the medical supplies as well as some–” said Pip.

Yoko's head shook ‘No.' Max glanced as far as her mouth and saw it was stretched into a tight line.

“I think she should—” asked Pip.

“No.”

Since they'd started talking about the Kutu, none of them had taken a bite of their dessert. They were slightly hunched into the conversation. Pip had her arms wrapped around her waist.

“What?” Max asked. “What aren't you saying?”

Yoko turned to her. “The rest of the story is just . . . in Africa especially around a war, there's not much reliable news coverage. Instead information tends to travel from person to person.”

“Radio Sidewalk is how it is called,” said Mutara. He did not say much and, when he spoke, his voice was quiet.

“The information gets exaggerated.” Yoko said, “We're scientists. We believe in facts, not gossip. We've heard many different versions of the story. The only confirmed facts are that the doctors disappeared and later on their jeep was found with some Kutu in it. The doctors haven't been seen since.”

Into the silence Dubois said, “Since the doctors, there are other incidences. Belgian nuns in Beni. A boy from Peace Corps in Lubero. Three merchants of diamonds with their guards. The Kutu kill every white they come upon. It is difficult to know what they do to Africans. There are different stories. Some, they let go. Some . . . ” She made a flicking motion. “Perhaps it depends on their mood.”

“Don't forget that UN soldier,” said Pip. “He stepped into the bush to take a pisser and the next people pass by found his head in the middle of the road.” Max noticed Pip's fingers rubbing the edge of her robe rhythmically, like a child might with a security blanket.

“Radio Sidewalk,” said Yoko.

“Whatever's in the road, it's dead.”

“There are UN soldiers in the Congo. They try to keep the peace. War is there for years. Three times,” said Dubois, “these soldiers come upon groups of Kutu. Does not matter how many soldiers there are, how many guns they have, the children attack.”

“The soldiers,” said Yoko, “are well disciplined, from Belgium and Ghana. They order the kids to stop, fire shots in the air. The Kutu keep charging forward anyway, chewing their qat, shooting their Kalashnikovs, crazy skinny little kids.”

“They yell out they want a cuddle,” said Pip.

“Radio Sidewalk.”

“Whatever they yell, they keep running. The only thing that stops them is the soldiers shooting bullets into their hearts.” Pip's fingers rubbed faster on her sleeve.

There was a silence. Max found her vision had settled on the door through which she'd entered the cabin. Plywood, a long smear of mud near the base. In some essential way it looked different than it had a few minutes ago. “How far away are these Kutu?”

“Probably fifty miles now, maybe forty,” said Yoko.

Max looked right then left. In her life she'd come upon many situations she didn't know how to deal with—social difficulties or matters of etiquette. In these circumstances, she'd learned to locate the neurotypical she assumed had the most appropriate experience and ask that person for information and advice. “That's less than an hour's drive. Isn't this something we should be concerned about?”

Yoko said, “In the Congo there are no real roads left, not after decades of Mobutu and then the war. Nothing but dirt paths. Even with jeeps, it would take two days to travel here, maybe three.”

“And they are on the other side of the border?” Max pictured the large stone buildings on the Canadian border at Interstate 89: officials and procedures, cameras and computers, gates that could be lowered. She could imagine these details much more easily than the scenes that had just been described.

“Well,” said Pip. “Yes, but . . . ”

“Then what are the chances we're in danger? Could you answer in terms of a percentage?” asked Max.

At this question the four of them went still. Perhaps there were looks exchanged.

“Too high for me,” said Pip
.

“Ah, it is not so much. Less than 10 percent,” said Dubois.

“No real chance of danger at all,” said Yoko.

They turned to Mutara for his answer and he paused, then began to lift his hands in the start of a gesture. Max noticed a long scar running diagonally across his left palm, pale against his skin. Looking at the scar, she realized he was old enough to have lived through the genocide here.

He said not a word, just shrugged, his palms cupped upward, as though to say it was in the hands of fate.

T
he first murder occurred in the middle of the night.
Jeremy slept through the whole uproar and in the morning was told of all that had happened. Five men sleeping in a tent, their heads circled around the center pole, a ring of feet pointed out toward the wall. At some point, the story went, something reached under the canvas to snag one set of feet, sliding the screaming man out of the tent and dragging him away into the bush where his outcries abruptly ended. By the time the sun rose, the crowds of frightened men running around the tent waving firebrands at the darkness had erased any prints that could have told the tale.

The head jemadar, Ungan Singh, carried the remains over for Jeremy to examine while he ate breakfast. A man of great dignity, without experience in this sort of situation, Singh must have pondered the proper etiquette. In the end, he had proffered a small hand basin, the way a waiter might in a fancy restaurant, discretely flipping away the napkin that covered it. Unfortunately, having worried so much about the correct method, he had forgotten to announce the contents. Jeremy stared down into the basin for a moment, still chewing on an eggy bit of bacon, before he kicked violently away from the table.

Could not these people have any respect for their own physical remains? He did not know if the practice of stuffing a piece of coal into the mouth to represent Hindu cremation had been started by the railway out of expedience and continued by the Indians out of practicality, or if the reverse were true. Either way, the numbers of those with malaria were rising quickly now, men crumpling over on the job, the hospital full. Already Alan had informed him thus far five had died from fever, their bodies transported a few miles out of camp and abandoned along the railroad's shoulder. This, he had learned, was standard practice for Indian cadavers.

After Jeremy had backed away from Singh's basin and spat the piece of bacon out into his napkin, he asked, “Where is the rest of this man?”

Singh tilted his head slightly to one side. “The animals, sir.” His white robe and turban were impeccably clean, his manners flawless. Several times Jeremy had sensed Singh's disappointment at having only an American to serve—not a nationality known for its appreciation of the finer points of social customs. Around Singh, whenever he remembered, he attempted better posture.

“Even the bones? The skull?” In Maine, there would have been more remains after a full year in the forest.

“Oh no, sir. There are bones.” As proof, with two fingers, he delicately plucked something out of the basin. Jeremy turned away.

This was the day he had the men start the bonfire, ordered them to keep it burning day and night. With the wood so wet from the monsoons, it took a lot of kerosene to start and had to be periodically slaked with more. It popped from the moisture in the wood, tossing embers high into the air. From the fire sizzled a thick black smoke that quickly obscured any cadaver thrown on top.

He ordered them to burn all dead bodies from then on, no matter what their religion or burial preferences.

Before he had the pyre started, no Indian had mentioned to him any dismay at how the bodies of their comrades were treated. Of course, the bodies were abandoned a few miles from camp, where most workers would not see them, but yesterday riding in the train to Voi with one of the jemadars to pick up supplies, they had caught a momentary glimpse of a corpse. The limbs were twisted and splayed by predators, like a dancer in the midst of some complicated jump. Jeremy had flinched and then glanced at the jemadar who said nothing, no visible change in his expression. The man continued to stare stonily out at the rolling landscape as though the body of his countryman was nothing more than the meat of an animal lying there in the bush.

Jeremy had this funeral bonfire constructed in hopes it would stop all the nearby carnivores from learning to consider humans as food.

The assumption in camp seemed to be that a lion had killed the man last night, an assumption Jeremy doubted. Having heard a lot, back in Maine, about the king of the beasts, he longed to see one, but so far the only time he had actually spotted one was from seventy-five yards away. The distance was great enough that he would never have found the creature on his own. Standing on the top of the embankment, overseeing the progress of the workers, a jemadar had called his attention to the two small bumps above the tall grass of the riverbank. At that distance, they resembled the leaves of a bush. As though they knew they were under discussion, the ears swiveled toward his position, paused and then sank down slowly behind the grass.

Yesterday, spotting the cadaver from the train, he had noticed prints in the mud around the body. The prints were too large to be anything but a lion's pugmarks. He had also noticed pugmarks several times along the river near where the Indians washed their laundry, and twice there was a trail of them crossing the muddy earth by the newest section of train tracks. From how common these prints seemed to be, he assumed the creatures were everywhere in the area, but that when they sensed humans, they melted away into the brush to avoid being seen. These actions ruined his image of a ferocious hunter. He had begun to think of them as nothing more than tall hyenas, cowards who skulked away with a nervous giggle at the first sight of a human and a gun.

No, from what he had seen, he didn't believe a lion would walk into the settlement of several hundred men, even at night, to sneak its paw under the wall of a tent and calmly probe about, to drag away a grown man thrashing to his death.

For the perpetrator, Jeremy instead suspected the four survivors who had been in the tent. A week ago, two Shiites had ambushed a Sikh on the road coming back from the lunch tent and beat him unconscious. The man who had been dragged out of his tent last night and killed, supposedly by a lion, was a Mohammedan, a productive mason who had been paid well just two days before under Jeremy's newly instituted piecework wage. The other four men in the tent were Hindus who had signed up in India as masons, but Jeremy suspected, from the level of their output, that they were not sure of the working end of a chisel, and were simply trying to hoodwink the railroad into paying them higher wages. After realizing a full third of his masons fell into this category, he had instituted a wage based on the number of pieces completed. It was the only way he could think of to reward those who knew what they were doing while stopping the rest from stealing from the railroad.

However this morning, standing in front of the newly lit bonfire, its dark smoke curling up, hiding its recent load of corpses from the infirmary, he had abruptly realized his payment strategy could have caused the murder. Perhaps, the non-productive and thus impoverished imposter masons had brained the Muslim where he lay sleeping, taken his money, and dragged his body into the bushes emitting their own screams the whole way. By morning, the thieves could be sure the animals would have destroyed any clue left on the body.

For a long moment, Jeremy remained there, utterly silent in front of the pyre, watching the dark smoke curl away across the river toward the other bank.

 

The Indians spent the morning recounting, for each other, stories of man-eating tigers in India, so many tales it began to sound like humans were the only food the tigers ever touched. The pall of fear that resulted from these tales meant that Jeremy was forced to lose the whole afternoon of work on the railroad as the men insisted on building bomas around their tents, cutting down nyika branches and weaving the thorny fences higher than a man's head.

To show how foolish they were, Jeremy spent that night as usual in his canvas tent out in the open, one flap pinned back for the slightest breeze. His gun propped up, as always by his bed.

That night he was irritated by the bad timing of some lions roaring in the brush. The creatures continued to call back and forth around the camp for at least two hours. He knew, at these sounds, the men's panic would worsen. Tomorrow they would be groggy from lack of sleep and they would probably insist upon putting up bomas around even the cooking tent and latrines.

The roars kept him awake until at least eleven, the noise of the beasts circling closer and louder, until, abruptly, they stopped. Afterward the silence seemed a bit unnerving, but he assumed the brutes had finally caught the scent of some prey—a kudu perhaps or eland—and commenced some serious hunting. He fell into a deep sleep.

Sometime, long after midnight, he woke. The tent flap waved gently, although from his cot he could feel no breeze. He considered the fact that at night, with him alone and sleeping, even a cowardly hyena could potentially be dangerous. Now that none of the men were around, he got up to tie the tent flaps. Outside he heard not a sound. Lying back down, he waited for sleep again, listening to the night sounds. The sawing cough of a leopard, the crazed xylophone of frogs. For a moment in the dark, lying in his fragile canvas home, he felt awe at how far he had traveled from all he held familiar.

Later, in the pitch dark, he awoke to screams.

 

Five of the Indians—confident in the height of the seven-foot-tall boma—had lay down outside their stifling tent, hoping for a breeze from the river. From the cities of Bombay and Calcutta, these men had no experience with large carnivores, believed the others' terror of lions overwrought. The night had been hot and still, the skies above shivering with stars. With sheets pulled even over their faces to keep the mosquitoes away, they had drifted off to sleep, each of their heads pillowed on another's belly or leg.

Two hours later, no one heard the soft
whump
of the lion's paws landing on the ground inside the boma. No one was awake to watch it cautiously circle the sheet-covered men, padding ever closer.

The killing was so fast and quiet, only one man awoke as his friend's leg was tugged out from under his head.

Jerking upright, still bemused by sleep, the man saw what he thought was a hunched-over giant dragging a bundle of laundry toward the fence. Then the sheet slid from the body and the lion raised its head toward him. The animal huge in comparison to the corpse. Picking the body up in its mouth, the creature turned and, with a grunt, awkwardly jumped the boma.

The man began screaming, waking the rest of camp.

This time, no one was brave enough to venture out, to wave torches and yell. Those few who had been sleeping on the ground outside quickly piled for protection until morning into whatever tent was nearest for protection until morning. Thus, the proof of the lion's visit remained intact in the mud.

In the morning light, the pugmarks appeared huge. Listening to Ungan Singh's translation of the man's story, Jeremy pressed his own hand into the dirt next to one of the paw prints. Although his outstretched fingers spanned a little further, the imprint he left was thin and spread out, some type of spindly heron or marsupial, whereas the lion's prints were solid with weight, the mark pressed as deeply into the ground as the wheel prints of a fully laden cart.

The Swifts, the next farm down from Grandpapi's in Maine, had a Newfoundland dog; it lumbered along at over one hundred pounds. Its prints, however, he had noted in the past, were comparatively dainty, nothing bigger than his closed fist. The pugmarks left by this lion were well more than three times that size, by far the largest tracks he had ever seen. If it were built on the same scale as the Newfoundland, this predator would weigh more than four hundred pounds: the heft of a small grizzly, the speed of a cat.

The man who had woken and seen the lion, said the animal had been without a mane. If this lion were a female, Jeremy could not imagine how large the males must be.

The imprints of the toes and claws were deep where the animal had landed inside the boma. Her prints then walked cautiously in toward the sleeping men. She had circled them, two feet away. After nearly a full circle, the prints stopped. Who knew why she had chosen the man she did or how she had killed him, but the death must have been instantaneous, for there was remarkably little blood. Afterward, the pugmarks trotted directly to the fence, the prints partially erased by the drag marks of the victim's toes and the backs of his hands.

In preparation for jumping the boma, the creature's prints had not changed in any way, not lengthening their pace or leaving a visible kick-off. On the far side, it had landed three yards in, then trotted off into the scrub. Certainly the Indian workers were not a large or fleshy people, but to jump over a seven-foot barrier carrying that weight must take immense strength. He remembered once seeing a farm cat leap onto a windowsill carrying a squirrel a third its size. The grace of its leap had been marred only by the fact that its head was canted up to keep the squirrel's body out of the way of its legs.

Following the pugmarks, four hundred yards from the boma, Jeremy found the scene of the man's corpse. There was no longer any single object that could be referred to as a body. The skin gone, the contents scattered, even the bones cracked and eaten by hyenas. All that remained was a darker stain to the soil, the stain wiped liberally around a thirty-foot-wide clearing, small gritty pieces overlooked in the dirt, a two-inch flap of hairy scalp somehow impaled a yard up on a thorn.

For once, it was not raining. Jeremy wished that it had been raining all night so the scene would have been at least partially cleaned up, so he would not have to stand here beside Singh, looking over the stain of the remains. Or to state it more truthfully, he wished, with Singh watching him, he would not have to stand here,
pretending
to look over the remains. After that first horrifying impression, he kept his eyes trained just above the ground, on the mostly clean branches, while he struggled with his nausea.

From the moment he had spotted the lion's tracks, he had known what would be expected of him as Pukka Sahib, the top representative of the railway here. He was helpless to stop the mosquitoes from biting the Indians or the fever from building in their blood. None of the Indians assumed he would even attempt to deliver safe working conditions or high-quality medical care. Instead, aside from their nominal salaries, in return for risking their lives here in Africa, the Indians expected him—in the tradition of the great British rajahs—to exterminate any threatening large animals. He was the white man in charge, the one with the guns. The least he could do in front of Singh was act confident.