Beneath the Darkening Sky (20 page)

‘Nothing!’ Parasite calls back, heading for the door. ‘The motherfuckers have already taken off.’

I poke around the ransacked building. Anything to keep me from shooting anyone else. I kneel down and peek under the bed, figuring the others have already checked a dozen times. Seems they
haven’t. Huddled and quaking are the mother and daughter from the picture.

I let out a little cry.

‘Remember,’ Priest whispers. ‘We are the angels of mercy.’ And then aloud, ‘Pussy! These two are for People’s Fire and me!’

As I sit on the edge of the truck, watching the ground whip by beneath my feet, I imagine us being in a village when the government men show up. I could run, strip off my
jacket, ditch the gun and pretend to be a villager. By the time they figured out who I was, things would have calmed down. They wouldn’t just shoot me.

Glancing back into the truck, I see the kids we’ve taken all huddled up together. It makes me wonder how many soldiers who came to my village hadn’t wanted to come. How many dreamed
of escape. How monstrous they had all looked to me, hiding in my mango tree. That’s how I must look to these kids. I almost puke again.

‘I know what I want to dream tonight,’ says a young soldier, sitting close by me. ‘I want to dream of that girl I fucked in the village.’

The others laugh.

‘Did you see her, man?’ he goes on. ‘Damn, she was beautiful. There was a girl that beautiful back home, I remember.’

‘Hey,’ barks Priest. ‘None of that backhome talk.’

‘No, no, sir, that’s just it. This gorgeous girl I knew never even looked at me. She would just walk around like everything belonged to her, like she was the queen of all Africa. If
I went back to my village and I saw her now, I’d just grab her by the hair, drag her into the closest hut and fuck her right there on the floor!’

Another chorus of laughter.

‘I had a magnificent dream last night,’ Parasite says. Having killed so many, he gets treated with the same seniority as Priest now. He spends so much time with the Commander, I keep
expecting to hear he’s become an officer.

‘What was it?’ Priest asks. ‘Did you fuck your grandmother’s bones?’

The boys all say, ‘Oooh,’ like Priest has delivered a big insult, but I know for a fact that Parasite once had that exact dream. He thought it meant his grandmother was blessing him
from beyond.

‘Nope,’ Parasite says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘An American girl.’

The boys go crazy. They cheer and laugh and talk over each other. ‘I want that dream!’ ‘God send me to America!’ ‘American girls screw more than anyone else!’
‘I hear they go crazy when you slap them.’ ‘Their breasts always taste like milk.’ ‘Tightest pussies on the planet!’

‘Shut up, you sinners!’ Priest orders with a laugh. ‘Let the man finish his story and maybe you’ll dream about white girls tonight.’

More laughs and Parasite begins again. ‘We were in this big, huge bathroom. It was the size of the barracks. It had this giant hot tub and I sat in this big comfy chair. She gets out of
the tub and she’s wearing nothing but bubbles.’

More hooting and cheering.

‘Biggest tits I’ve ever seen. As big as your head. She kneels down in front of me and starts massaging my feet.’

‘Oh, that’s the best!’ someone says.

‘She had this forever-long blond hair. You can’t imagine how beautiful she was.’

‘Then what?’ Priest asks.

‘You ruined it, man.’

‘What? Me? How?’

‘You woke me up!’

Even I’m laughing now.

‘You were kicking like a trapped animal! I’m going to have bruises for a week.’

We lie under the canopy of stars. We are bivouacking in the open. We listen to the soft weeping of the new recruits. We share jokes about rape and murder and food. Rape,
murder and food, that’s our life. What else do we have to joke about? We sleep on whatever bits of grass we can find, holding our guns to our chests like babies with blankets. Big, tough men.
I’m not even sure how old I am any more. Older than eleven and younger than sixteen. Years don’t matter out here, not in our world. We count age in kills.

I’m older than I should be.

We’ll be back into it tomorrow morning, the village of some other government man. A military man who was betraying his people, his family, his Africa. On and on and on. The Commander has
no end of speeches, but they all add up to the same thing. In the morning, I’ll get up and make sure my clips are loaded up. Then we’ll jump into the back of the trucks and drive off,
looking for more people to kill, more women to rape and more children to steal.

For some reason I think of Pina. I haven’t thought about her in a long time. I wonder, like I always do, why they left her alone. I wonder what I’d do if I saw her again. Looking for
answers for everything is another way to go mad.

What if she knew? What if she knew what I’d done? Maybe she’d understand. Then I remember the children sleeping nearby, the ones we’re supposedly guarding. I remember my night
on the football field, the bruises and the pain and the mosquito bites. Then, I couldn’t understand what this world was. It never occurred to me that the soldiers didn’t want to do what
they did.

The boy who killed my father. If he hadn’t done it, they’d have blown his head off right there. It wasn’t his fault. And yet, if I knew who he was, I’d get up, walk over
and put a bullet through him. I understand and I don’t care.

What about Pina? Would she run away from me? Hit me? Curse me? Spit on me? I can see her doing it.

What about Mama?

No one will ever understand what I’ve done. They’ll never forgive me. Will God forgive me? I look up at the stars and wish I could talk to Priest alone. I wish I could grab a
flashlight and read his bible. Maybe someone worse than me is in there, and maybe he was forgiven. If a person like Priest could forgive me, surely so would God. So would my mother.

I hear a laugh, but it doesn’t come from around me. It’s not a boy’s laugh. It’s a woman’s laugh, somewhere distant. Maybe it’s an angel. Maybe it’s my
forgiveness. Who laughs like that? Sleep crawls into my eyes and everything feels far away and unreal. Christmas laughs like that.

‘People’s Fire!’ the Commander calls as I stand in line for ammo.

‘Yes, sir.’ I jog out of line.

Priest and a couple of others stand with him at the back of a truck. They examine maps spread out with a few other papers. Maybe they really do know who these government men are, where they come
from.

‘Sir?’ I say, standing to attention.

‘I hope you like landmines.’ The Commander smiles.

‘Sir?’

‘You’re helping Priest take the new recruits back. Enjoy your walk.’ He laughs again and hits me on the back.

They trucks are off somewhere else to collect more supplies, and the only unguarded road back to our old camp is mined. They load us up with a few backpacks of supplies. There’s water and
food, plus extra stuff we stole from that last village.

My second day. Yes, I did a lot of bad things yesterday, but it was just one day. One day is easy to forgive.

Today, I’m not frightened of the minefield. The new recruits are there to protect me.

We move out.

On our walk through the minefield, the kids are a pain in the ass. I’ve been trying to be nice to them but they just cry or stop walking. One even hit me. Priest and I
would never do what was done to us when I was a recruit, but we have to make them understand there’s no point running away. They have to do what we tell them.

‘In the wild,’ Priest says, ‘the lions fight for territory, but you and me, People’s Fire, we’re the other animals that are in the wild just because they happened
to be born there.’

When we get back to the camp, I’m actually glad to see the officers. They take the kids away and I finally get to take off the backpack. An officer opens it. It’s full of packaged
snacks, which are like gold to us. For helping lead the march back, he gives me two bags of peanuts. I open one and eat as I walk towards Priest’s hut. The government troops left it standing
because, Priest jokes, it looked ransacked already. Some of the rest of the camp has been rebuilt, but most is still in ruins.

‘Baboon!’ I hear as I’m walking. It’s Christmas. She stands at the gate to the Commander’s hut, one of those that has been fixed. There are no guards now, they were
killed by the government troops, but there are officers nearby.

‘Christmas,’ I reply with a nod.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Just to see Priest.’

‘Ah.’ She’s silent for a second. ‘Did you bring me anything?’

‘What?’

She glances behind me. An officer is watching us. ‘Surely,’ she says louder, ‘my husband wouldn’t fail to send me a gift.’

‘A gift?’

‘What about a letter?’ She winks. ‘Didn’t he give you a letter? Come with me.’

‘What?’

‘Silly, I can’t read. You’ll have to read it to me, and I don’t want to embarrass my husband by having his letter read out loud where anyone can hear it.’

I stand at the gate. A lot has changed since I stood here last, waiting to play guitar.

‘Of course, usually my guards do this, but I’m all out of guards.’

I think of Akot. I haven’t seen him since he was taken on as a bodyguard by the General. I look around. The officer has moved on. I follow her into the Commander’s house.

Inside is one room with a table, two chairs and a bed. ‘Well,’ Christmas says, sitting on the bed.

I stand just inside the door, slowly looking around the dark musty space. ‘I don’t have a letter.’

‘Of course not. My husband would never write to me.’

‘He’d kill us both if he knew I was here.’

Christmas looks at me for a moment. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me one?’

‘One what?’

‘Peanut, stupid.’

I still have half the packet in my hand. I’d forgotten about it.

‘Open your mouth,’ I say.

‘What? No. Just give me one.’

‘Come on, open your mouth. I have a good aim.’

She rolls her eyes, then opens her mouth wide. I throw a peanut and she tries to catch it, but it bounces off her nose.

‘Don’t move your head!’

‘Whatever,’ she says. ‘You’re a terrible shot.’

I try another one and it almost hits her eye.

‘Okay, just one more.’

‘All right, fine.’

She opens her mouth again and closes her eyes. I watch her sitting there on the bed. Then I throw. The peanut hits her back teeth, and she coughs once before chewing it up.

After that we talk. She tells me how bored she has been while everyone was away. A lot of the other wives were taken by the government troops.

‘Why didn’t you run away?’ I ask.

‘Easy for you to say, you know where to go. A couple of the hospitality girls ran for it and they got killed by a landmine. Here is better than dead.’

Then Christmas tells me that Akidi was one of the girls who got blown up by the landmine. My heart aches. But I’m happy that she feels pain no more.

After a little while, Christmas says, ‘I miss your guitar playing.’

‘It almost got me killed.’

‘Not playing here, it didn’t.’

‘For you
and
the Commander,’ I remind her.

She pauses. ‘It’s a shame you don’t dance. You never learned to dance at school?’

‘At my school,’ I say, a bit slower than usual, ‘we learned useful things.’

‘And dancing’s not useful?’ Christmas laughs.

‘How could that be useful?’

‘What? Were there no girls in your village?’

‘Of course there were.’

‘Then it’s useful to know.’

‘I don’t know if anyone is left in my village now.’

Christmas jumps to her feet. ‘Come. I’ll teach you!’

‘No. Thank you. In fact, I must go now.’

‘Baboon. Come here. Don’t you like me?’

I don’t know what to say. But I don’t leave. ‘How are we supposed to dance without music?’

‘With our feet.’ Christmas grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet. I let my gun slide from my shoulder and rest on the chair. ‘Okay, one hand here.’ She puts my left hand
on her hip, then grabs my right. ‘And this one stays up.’ She rests her right hand on my shoulder.

The curve of her hip fits into my palm.

‘Now, you step forward with your right foot.’

‘Won’t I step on your foot?’

Christmas laughs and presses her face into my chest. ‘I’m going to move my foot too, stupid! Okay, right foot forward.’

I do so, resisting the urge to say ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now, left foot out to the side. Good. Now, feet together. Then, I’m going to step forward and you step back with your left foot. Wait. That’s backwards. Oh well. Okay, step
back. Now, out to the side with your right foot. And feet together and we’re back where we started.’

‘So we just step in a circle?’

‘No, it’s a box. It’s called a box step.’

We go again, slowly. We don’t talk. At first Christmas makes little drumming sounds to keep the beat, and then I hum. It’s one of the songs Priest played on his guitar, but I slow it
down to match her drumming. I dance with death.

It’s dark when I leave the hut. There’s no one around. Still, I walk quickly. I take a couple of random turns through the ruined camp.

I step out into the space that had been the barracks. Half a dozen soldiers sit around a small fire, talking quietly and carelessly. I recognise a couple who had been at the village when I shot
the mother and daughter. One of them jumps up. He’s angry he didn’t get his turn.

‘Hey!’ he yells angrily.

I keep walking.

‘People’s Fire,’ he yells again, ‘I’m talking to you!’

I hear his footsteps heavy behind me. I turn around and swing. My fist connects with his face and he staggers back. I grab his shoulders and knee him in the groin. He doubles over, gagging, his
shoulder presses uselessly against my stomach. Aiming for his spine, I bring my elbow down hard on his back. With a grunt he hits the ground and lies there, back arched. Looking like a turtle in
the sun, he’s barely able to move. Blood is running down his face.

His friends are silent. I look up at them and spread my arms. ‘Who’s next?’ They look at each other, then me. My eyes hit each one. Who will rush me first? Instead they slowly
clap. Someone starts laughing and they cheer.