Acts of faith (84 page)

She wound one of his curls around her finger and yanked. “I see you haven’t lost your talent for saying exactly the right thing.”

“You know what I mean. What are y’all doin’ with me? It makes no sense.”

“Baby, if love made sense, the human race would be an endangered species.”

“C’mon, I’ve got to know.”

She plucked the cigarette from his hand, took a puff, and gave it back to him. “Let’s go back to the day I met you. That flight to Somalia. If you hadn’t reacted the way you did, Tony and I could’ve been killed. And no, it isn’t that I feel I owe my life to you. All this hasn’t been gratitude. What I thought then was, ‘Well, here’s a
man.
Nothing to look at, but he knew what to do and he did it.’ ”

There it was again—his competence.

“I’m not gettin’ any younger, and one of these days I’m not gonna know what to do, or if I do, I won’t be able to do it. What happens then?”

“Don’t worry about that. That’s what started things off, but that isn’t it. What it is, is this—being with you, I don’t think only about myself and what I need, I think about you and what you need. And don’t ask why, because I don’t know.”

He could not have asked for a better cue, but he said nothing.

“That’s my side of the story,” she said with an inviting glance. “Yours?”

“Look in the mirror, that’ll tell you.”

“Wrong thing, Wes. Wrong again.”

“Oh, hell. It’s the same as with you. I don’t think about me.”

She sat up, laughing and patted his scalp. “That’s better. Wasn’t so hard, was it? So now that we’ve made sense of it, let’s call room service. All this making sense has made me hungry.”

“We’re on the afternoon flight to Loki,” he said. “How about lunch at the Aero Club?”

He’d suggested the Aero Club, not for its proximity to the Wilson Field terminal, certainly not for the excellence of its fare, but to give himself time to recover his nerve. The club was crowded, except for three empty tables in a corner. He took one after they’d gone through the serving line.

“Been thinking about what y’all said,” he began, betraying his nervousness with his sidelong glance, his habit of twirling his sunglasses. “About being so far away from your mother. Well, Texas is a lot closer to Manitoba than here.”

Her response, a look that seemed to say,
What other obvious points do you want to call to my attention?
caused him to revise his approach. Waving a hand to indicate that she should ignore his geographical commentary, he started again.

“There’s some things I haven’t told you. One is that me and Doug have an agreement. I’m gonna fly these runs for another few months, then I’m cashin’ in my shares in Knight Air. If the cash ain’t there, Doug’s gonna transfer ownership of my old G1—the plane Tony’s flying on the Somalia runs—back to me.”

“He agreed to that?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Signed a contract. My plan is to sell the plane and the Hawker—” He was interrupted by five boisterous Americans who seized a table next to theirs. “Well shit, I was hopin’ for a nice private conversation.”

“Try lowering the Texas decibel level,” Mary said. “You were saying that we’ll be millionaires.”

Dare looked down at his curried lamb and wondered why he’d ordered it. His fluttering stomach wouldn’t take curry. “I always did want to be a Texas millionaire, but the only part I ever got right was the Texas part. Sellin’ those planes, added to what Yellowbird earns, would take care of the other part.” He then outlined his scheme—the corporate jet to fly top-name acts, piling up a nest egg to buy a ranch in the hill country outside Austin. “I’ve always wanted that. What do I do then?” He shrugged. “Maybe I don’t do a damned thing except watch the sun come up and go down. Bottom line is, three, four months from now, Doug Braithwaite goes his way, I go mine, and that’s back to Texas. I’m done with Africa, done livin’ like this.”

He’d deliberately used
I
throughout this speech, and now he looked at her to gauge her reaction. She smiled indifferently and said, “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” Then she added, “Doug Braithwaite goes his way, Wes Dare goes his. Where does Mary English go?”

Dare noticed the Americans stealing glances at her. He couldn’t blame them.

“Wes Dare hopes that Mary English goes with him,” he said, choosing to throw out his prepared proposal—he couldn’t remember it anyway. He removed the small white box from his pocket and set it on the table in front of her. “Since I don’t ever say the right thing, I won’t say anything except open it.”

She did and then sat blinking at the diamond sparkle. They had an audience—the men at the next table had fallen silent and were listening in—but at this point he didn’t care how public their little drama had become.

“I’m gonna need a partner,” he said. “Someone in the seat next to me on that new airplane. Austin’s a pretty town, it’s a good place to raise a kid.”

“It sounds good, Wes,” she said in an undertone. “Sounds very good.”

“I hear a
but
comin’.”

“But it sounds comfortable and predictable, and I’ve never been comfortable being comfortable, or with predictability. I need a little chaos in my life.”

“Flyin’ Texas blues bands around the country can get right chaotic. I’ve done it.”

“I know it would be interesting, but—but it doesn’t seem important. Doesn’t seem like it would mean much.”

“Y’all think what we’re doin’ now means something?”

“It seems to.”

“Well, it doesn’t. Like the troops used to say in Vietnam. ‘Don’t mean nuthin’, don’t mean a thing,’ except that it buys a ticket out of here.” Unable to face the finality of a rejection now, he said, “Take a week, take a month, take two months. Y’all decide it’s not for you, you can always give that back to me.”

She looked shocked. “I would never take this from you if I had the least thought to giving it back.”

Once more she stared at the ring, her arms folded as if she were chilled. In that silence he could almost hear the voices debating in her head. Time stretched—five seconds seemed like an hour. This was torture. For an instant he wished he’d never met her.

“Try it on for size,” he suggested. “That wouldn’t be the same as taking it.”

She pried the ring from the box and slipped it onto her finger. “It’s a little small.”

“That can be fixed.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said, and twisted the ring over her knuckle to the base of her finger, then tried to twist it off. “See? It’s stuck.” She rose partway from her chair and, leaning across the table, kissed him on the forehead. “I love taking chances, and this will be the biggest one yet.”

Dare, his heart soaring, experienced one of his rare moments of speechlessness. As Mary sat down, the men nearby broke out in cheers and applause. She blew them all a kiss and then spread her hand to show off the diamond.

“You had us in suspense,” said one, a stocky, middle-aged guy with carbon-black hair. “Sorry, but we couldn’t help overhearing.”

“Oh, I reckon y’all could have if you wanted to,” Dare said congenially. His happiness had put him in an expansive mood. “Don’t know a one of you, but since you’re the first to know, I’ll buy you a round in the bar.”

“Thanks, and congratulations,” the other man said, and stood to offer his hand. “Bob Mendoza. Soft drinks for us. We’re flying this afternoon.”

With their newfound friends, Dare and Mary moved into the bar for an impromptu engagement celebration. Mendoza said it was great to run into “fellow Americans.” Dare pointed out that Mary was Canadian, which Mendoza, erasing four thousand miles of border with a swipe of his hand, dismissed as a distinction without a difference.

“Y’all said you were flying this afternoon. Flying what?”

They were an Air National Guard crew on a KC-135 tanker, doing their annual tour of active duty. Their usual assignment was to the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, but this year they’d been sent to Kenya to practice maneuvers with the Kenyan air force.

“We’re out of Tucson,” Mendoza said. “Y’know, I thought I heard you mention the name of Doug Braithwaite. I knew a guy by the same name.”

“He’s my business partner. We’ve got a small airline, flyin’ aid out of Loki. I reckon this is one of those it’s-a-small-world stories, on account of he’s from Tucson and there can’t be two guys with a name like that from the same town.”

“I’ll be damned. So this is where Doug fetched up. When you see him, be sure to tell him you ran into his old captain in the hundred-seventy-sixth.”

“How do you mean, his old captain?”

“Doug was in my crew,” Mendoza said. “He was our refueling operator.”

Dare exchanged glances with Mary. “Maybe we are talkin’ about two different guys. The Doug Braithwaite we know was with the regular air force, not the guard. Flew A-tens in the Gulf War.”

“Anyway, that’s what he told us,” Mary said.

Mendoza paused, half-closing an eye. “He’d be early to mid-thirties by now. Six-one or -two? Slim build? Light brown hair? Good-looking guy?”

“If you like the catalog model type,” Mary quipped. “But that’s him.”

Mendoza said, “He was in commercial flight school when I knew him. Why the hell would he say he flew A-tens in the war?”

“Got no idea,” Dare said.

That was the topic of conversation between him and Mary on the flight to Lokichokio. Instead of talking about their future, they speculated about Doug’s motives for revising his past. Dare brought up the story he’d told at their first meeting with Hassan Adid—how he’d strafed a column of retreating Iraqis and was horrified by what he’d done, calling it murder. What did he stand to gain from an invention like that?

“Maybe he was just trying to make himself more than he is,” Mary conjectured. “We’d have to ask him, but I don’t imagine he’d say.” She placed her ring hand atop Dare’s. “Should it make any difference to us?”

“It could,” he replied. “Makes you wonder what else he’s lyin’ about.”

Star at the River’s End

T
HEIR HONEYMOON WAS
a walking tour of the Nuba. Having met with his senior officers, Michael now had to confer with his subordinate commanders before the coming offensive. He wanted Quinette to join him so she could meet the inhabitants of his military domain and they meet her. It was going to be a celibate honeymoon; his full bodyguard accompanied them, and to their thirty-odd, Fancher, Handy, and a parade of porters carrying gear and supplies on foot or on bicycles added twenty more. As usual, Negev shadowed Quinette everywhere, a diligent guardian who had to be told not to traipse after her when she went to relieve herself.

Trekking mostly at night to avoid enemy aircraft and ambushes as well as the sun—temperatures now hit one hundred and twenty-five degrees—negotiating trails that twisted among tumbledown slopes where tall pinnacles jabbed at the stars and tree roots clutched precipitous ridges like the fingers of desperate climbers, they journeyed into some of the remotest parts of the mountains. Not so remote, however, that news of Michael’s wedding to a white woman had failed to reach them. Women and children swarmed out of the villages to gawk at Quinette, touch her, and ask her questions in dialects that Negev could barely understand.

In every village, while Michael met with the meks and SPLA officers, Fancher and Handy waged their spiritual offensive, evangelizing with a mixture of revival-tent fervor and military efficiency. They distributed hymnals and Bibles in the local language. They powered up the generator and showed videos about the life of Christ. (It was startling to see a TV screen glowing in villages that had no electricity.) If there was a church, they preached in it, encouraging the congregation to remain steadfast in the face of their adversities, reminding them that in the suffering is the glory. If there were soldiers present, they told the stories of Gideon and Joshua and the other mighty warriors of God. They conducted catechism classes with flip charts and audiotapes of gospel messages.

On the sixth day of the journey, they enlisted her. Taking her aside, they explained that Nubans thought it improper for men to minister to women, which was why their audiences were exclusively male. They had observed the numbers of females who were drawn to her and noticed the empathy she had for them. With some coaching, she could take on the task of teaching them about the women of the Bible, about Mary and the virgin birth, the tribulations the mother of God had endured. Would Quinette be willing to do that? She considered the request. God had called her away from her former life for a purpose. Was this it? Eager as she was to say yes, she had to point out that she had no experience or training in missionary work. Fancher expressed approval for her modesty. It normally a took a year to train a fieldworker, he said, but an exception could be made in her case. She’d already overcome cultural biases, the hardest lesson a fieldworker had to learn. If she proved able, she could undergo more formal instruction once they returned to New Tourom. He gave her a cassette recorder, tapes of Mary’s story in five different Nuban tongues, and flip charts that showed it in pictures, then tutored her on how to use the materials and conduct a meeting.

They traveled into the lands of the Masakin tribe, where the crowded mountains of the eastern Nuba gave way to broad valleys offering no sanctuary from air raids and the dreaded murahaleen. Horsemen and airmen had brought
tamsit
to the Masakin. The Arabic word, Michael told her, meant “raking.” The Masakin had been raked out of their valleys and forced to flee into a range of hills that stretched across the southern horizon: Jebel Tolabi, Jebel Doelibaya, Jebel Tabouli. Tamsit, in other words, was ethnic cleansing; it was scorched earth.