The Smoke Jumper (49 page)

In their morning counseling sessions, Julia had tried hard, as others had before her, to encourage him to draw. And sometimes he would take a crayon from her and sit with it poised over the paper as if trying to muster the courage to begin. But he never did. Whatever lay locked inside him was clearly too terrible to release.

Throughout this evening’s English class he sat watching from the back corner of the room and when it was his turn to come to the front and buy something from the market stall, he just shook his head. Julia picked up a few items and took them to him and eventually succeeded in getting him to point to a comb and pay for it with five matches. Everybody cheered and he gave a rare shy smile.

How much English anyone ended up learning, Julia wasn’t sure, but they all had a good laugh which was probably more important. She ended up thoroughly exhausted and was relieved when the bell rang for supper.

As she came out into the corridor she was surprised to see two soldiers standing in the hallway, talking in hushed voices with Sister Emily. From their uniforms Julia could tell they were members of the Uganda People’s Defense Force, the government army who had a base at the northern end of town. But soldiers of any kind weren’t welcome at St. Mary’s. Even a glimpse of a uniform or gun could strike terror into the children’s healing hearts and some had been brutalized by the UPDF almost as badly as they had by the rebels. As Julia walked toward them she heard one of the soldiers say the name Makuma but then he saw her and stopped talking until she was halfway up the staircase and out of earshot.

They were all outside in the dining tent and halfway through supper when Sister Emily joined them. She was a tall, graceful woman who was probably in her late thirties but whose gentle manner somehow made her seem ageless. Her official position was Director of the Rehabilitation Program but to the children she was the mother that many of them had lost and that’s what they called her. It was rare to see her without one or more of the younger ones sheltering under her arms or clinging to the skirts of her spotless white habit.

The staff ate at a separate table from the children though everyone always ate the same meal. This evening it was corn bread, boiled cassava and a spiced beef stew. They had left a place for Sister Emily and as she sat down among them, one of the kitchen maids put a plate of food in front of her. Since the beginning of supper all they had talked about was the soldiers and why they might have come and now everyone fell silent, waiting for her to tell them. For a few moments she pretended not to notice, just crossed herself and picked up her fork to start eating. Then she looked up at all the expectant faces and feigned surprise.

‘What’s the matter with you all? Have the cats got all your tongues?’

She smiled and took a mouthful of food and they all waited.

‘All right,’ she went on. ‘It’s nothing. Just rumors. They have had intelligence reports that Makuma has been gathering a big force across the border and that he is planning some new offensive. The soldiers say that this is why everything has been so quiet these past months. Nobody knows what he intends but he is apparently under pressure from his paymasters in Khartoum to use this new force against the SPLA in Sudan not, as he would no doubt prefer, against Uganda.’

‘So why did the soldiers need to come to tell you this?’ Françoise asked.

Sister Emily shrugged. ‘Because nobody can be one hundred percent certain. They want to station some soldiers with us as a precaution, to set up a camp here in the garden.’

‘And what did you say?’ Pringle asked.

‘What do you think? I said no, of course. How would it be for the children to have soldiers tramping all over the place? We have our own guards on the gates. It is enough. And anyway, what need do we have of soldiers when we have the brave Peter Pringle here to defend us?’

Everyone laughed. Pringle blushed. Sister Emily took another mouthful.

‘Julia, the stew is good, no? I bet you don’t have stew as good as this in America.’

It was a signal that the subject of the war was closed. Julia smiled and shook her head.

‘Nowhere near as good.’

After supper the staff and children usually convened in the recreation room and played music or a game of some sort or watched a video. Tonight, for about the eighteenth time, they were watching one of the tapes that Julia and Amy had brought with them,
The Lion King
. Julia had seen it a hundred and eighteen times and she told Amy, whose appetite for it was insatiable, that she was going up to their room to read.

Walking through the darkened hallway to the stairs, she saw Sister Emily sitting writing by lamplight at her desk in her little office near the front doors. She heard Julia’s footsteps and looked up and smiled.

‘Julia, do you have a moment?’

‘Of course.’

She walked across and into the office and Sister Emily gestured for her to sit. On the desk between them was a tray with a blue china teapot on it with two cups and a small pitcher of milk and a bowl of sugar. The window shutters were closed and the walls bare save for a simple wooden crucifix above the Sister’s chair and a framed print of the Virgin Mary above Julia’s.

‘Will you have some tea?’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s Lipton’s English tea, as drunk by Her Majesty the Queen of England herself, they say. I’m afraid it’s one of my vices.’

‘I don’t think it quite qualifies as a vice. Maybe if you add a slug of whiskey.’

Sister Emily laughed and poured her a cup and passed it to her and then offered sugar and milk which Julia declined.

‘We are all so busy that sometimes we don’t get a chance to talk. I just wanted to hear if everything is all right, you know, with your work and so on.’

‘Well, yes. Absolutely.’

‘You are doing so very well.’

‘Thank you. I love every minute of it.’

‘And you are happy?’

The question startled her.

‘Sure. Why? Don’t I look it?’

‘No. Sometimes you look very sad.’

‘Do I? Wow. Well, gee, I’m sorry.’

‘No, please, don’t be sorry. In front of the children and everyone else, you always appear happy. But sometimes I see you when you think no one is looking and then, just occasionally, I think you look a little sad.’

‘It’s my long face. Ever since I was a kid, people have always asked me what’s wrong, why the long face? And I say, nothing, I was born with it.’

Sister Emily smiled again, clearly unconvinced. There was a pause. They both sipped their tea.

‘I hear your English classes are a great success.’

Julia laughed. ‘Well, we sure make a lot of noise. But, yeah, the kids are doing great. I just wish I could learn their language as fast as they learn mine.’

‘Oh, but you speak Acholi well now.’

‘I wish! Amy’s the one who’s gotten the hang of it. All those fresh young brain cells, I guess.’

‘The children love having her here. It is very good for them. She is a beautifill child. She is very like her father.’

Julia frowned. ‘You mean . . .’

‘I’m sorry, I mean her - what is it she says? Her “biological” father.’

‘Amy told you about Connor?’

‘Yes. Was she not supposed to?’

‘No. I mean, yes. It’s fine. I just didn’t know she had.’

‘She is very proud of him. And so she should be. He is a fine man.’

‘Yes. Yes, I know.’

She couldn’t think why, but the subject made her feel uncomfortable. It was somehow as if the woman knew more about her than she did herself. She took another sip of tea and decided to change the subject.

‘So you don’t think the war is going to flare up again?’

‘I don’t believe so. Karingoa has never been an important place for the rebels. If they did launch an attack, it would much more likely be directed at Kitgum or Gulu than here.’

Later, as she lay reading with Amy in the lamplit igloo of their mosquito net, with the frogs and insects chirping like some demented electronic machine outside, Julia couldn’t stop thinking about what Sister Emily had said.

‘Do you think I look sad?’

Amy put down her book to examine her. ‘What, you mean, like now?’

‘No, I mean, any time.’

‘Uh-huh. Sometimes. I figure it’s when you’re thinking about Daddy.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is it?’

‘Sometimes.’

Amy cuddled up close, laying her head on Julia’s breast.

‘He’d have liked it here,’ she said.

‘Yes, I think he would.’

Julia stroked her hair and for a long while neither of them spoke.

‘Mom?’

‘What, sweetheart?’

‘Do you think you’ll ever get married again?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She paused. ‘Depends if he’ll have me.’

Amy propped herself up on her elbows and frowned at her.

‘Who?’

Julia pretended to look all coy. Amy tickled her under her arms.

‘Tell me. Who?’

‘Cringle, of course.’

Amy yelped with laughter. Julia told her to hush or he would hear but it was some time before they both stopped laughing. At last they went back to their books but Amy soon fell asleep. Julia quietly lifted the book from her hands and turned off the lamp. Floating on the humid air from somewhere away across the town came a muted boom of drums. And she lay there in the darkness, listening to the rhythm and the shriller pulse of the insects and trying not to think of Connor.

28

T
hey had taken away his watch so he always waited for the day to show its face before he allowed himself to count it. And when at last it came seeping through the slit of the window, he would feel with one hand under the grass matting of his bed and find the shard of rock and then he would hoist the mosquito net and carefully etch another small vertical line on the hut’s mud wall.

The line he had etched that morning was the last of another group of seven and so he had scratched a longer line across them all. There were eight of them now, like a small shoal of fish skeletons, each with seven bones divided by a spine; each bone a day, each spine a week. Fifty-six days. Seventy, if he counted the two weeks he had spent waiting for Makuma to arrive. He tucked the rock shard back under the mat and lay for a long time on his side staring at the fish.

He still didn’t know what Makuma had in mind for him. Okello had taken pictures of him on the first day of his imprisonment before confiscating all his camera gear along with his recorder and his notebooks and pens. But Connor had learned enough about hostage-taking over the years to know that a simple mug shot was never enough to secure a ransom. Even the dumbest kidnappers knew the procedure. You had to provide evidence that the hostage was still alive, photograph or video him holding up the front page of a newspaper and this they still hadn’t done. In Okello’s pictures, with his face all bloody and bruised from his beating, he probably looked half dead. No one back home would be hurrying off to the bank on evidence like that.

The only clue that this was what they intended had come from Makuma himself. Lying in the dust after the beating, just as he was coming around, he had heard the man make some smart remark about being able to get a better price for an American photographer than for a few bony children. But that was the last anyone had said about it. In all these weeks he hadn’t seen Makuma again. For all he knew, The Blessed One had again taken to the heavens.

At the start they had kept him cooped up in his hut. The beating had left him with two cracked ribs and for those first few days the pain had been so intense and the heat so stifling that he kept passing out. They slid his food and water under the door and it took all his strength to crawl to it or to the bucket that they gave him as a toilet. The flies on his cut face nearly drove him crazy but after a while he couldn’t find the energy to brush them off. Then one morning Okello came with an offcer he hadn’t seen before and who had obviously had some medical training. The officer examined him and was visibily shocked by what he saw. He obviously had status too, for Connor could hear him outside afterward yelling at Okello.

From that day on things improved dramatically. The food got better and more plentiful and he was given clean water, enough to wash himself and his clothes too and twice a day he was allowed outside for exercise. The medical officer came several more times to check on him and seemed pleased with Connor’s recovery. He brought him some more antimalaria pills and some iodine to purify the water and the last time he came he brought a Bible and an oil lamp to read it by. Connor thanked him and asked if he could have a pen and some paper but was told that this wasn’t possible.

Since he had gotten better, it was only Okello who came to see him. The purpose of the visits seemed to be mostly to gloat and goad. Connor would hear the Jeep pull up outside and the guard unlocking the padlock on the slatted door and then Okello bellowing
muzungu!
The door would swing open and Connor would step squinting into the sunlight to see old Snake Eyes lounging in the driving seat and leering at him or strutting the compound like a turkey cock, thwacking his stick against his boot tops while he accused Connor of being a spy. Mostly it was the CIA that he was supposed to be working for, but sometimes it was the British or Mossad or the Ugandan government or all of them at once, depending on what day of the week it was.

‘We have gathered all the intelligence on you,’ Okello had said on his last visit two days ago. ‘All of it. We know where you have traveled, we know who you report to, who your contacts are in Kampala and Nairobi. Everything. We know that you were sent by the CIA to provide photographic intelligence that would enable our enemies to attack us here.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You don’t deny it!’

‘Hell, what’s the point? Sounds like these intelligence guys of yours have gotten the whole thing sewn up. Of course, the CIA’s got satellites up there can photograph every inch of this place, even something as small as your dick. But hey, why bother use all that shit when they can send me here cleverly disguised as a photographer?’