Thirty Girls (29 page)

Something was clicking. I stepped onto a wide path and saw an old man pushing a bicycle. He had a mattress flopped over the handlebars. I moved behind a tree and the man saw me. It was only one instant but I saw his face and he was not afraid of me.

He greeted me and offered to walk with me. I felt gratitude for his kindness. He understood I was just a girl.

I woke this morning and remembered something I thought forgotten, a time they caught a man on a bicycle and cut off his foot. If you are on a bicycle the rebels think you may be delivering news. The man’s wife came out and they told her to eat that foot.

You do not forget such things, even when they are not appearing. They are just in the back of your mind, waiting.

Sometimes I want to hit myself with stones.

The camp in the morning is pale yellow. I am watching, waiting for something I cannot name. I try to think of what I know and I cannot find it. Life is there before me but not close enough for my hand to reach it. My heart is suffocating.

VII

Gulu

T
HEY CHECKED IN
to the Exciting Hotel, a group of stucco cottages blackened by mold. Reception had a façade featuring a yellow painted sun emerging from a line of rotting plastic bags. Lana stood at the counter between Pierre and Don, boot heel at a tilt, and asked for a room of her own. Flies buzzed them. A sort of lounge area loomed in deeper darkness.

A few streets away they found Caffè Roma and sat near the door in a sort of porch area surrounded by windows barred with grating of white hoops. The waitress took their orders with a tenderness implying pity, and they ate a late lunch of chicken wings in thin dark gravy and something called boo with peanut sauce.

After lunch Jane and Pierre walked through town in the ochre dust. It was still and hot. Thoughts of Harry drifted to Jane.
What do you have on under there?
Up on the concrete porches shop doors were shut for the afternoon. A hair salon sign was a hand-painted, yellow checkerboard of different hairdos. On some heads, green hair was arranged in a
patchwork of braids like planted fields, on others, blue hair sculpted into heart-shaped puffs. Pierre was taking pictures. Look at this, he said, zeroing in on a tattered bit of ribbon around a rusty pole.

At the end of a street a man stood on a pile of garbage the size of a small hut, picking through it.

They walked loosely apart. A bony-legged brown dog trotted past with the rare attitude of no interest in the white people.

They passed a beggar sitting behind bony knees with a few coins on the ground near his toes, and farther along a boy passed out, having slid off a step with white glue caked around his nostrils. He was probably with the rebels, Pierre said. And now this. He stood looking for a long time, then snapped a picture of the boy’s fingers, curled in sleep.

Jane carried her notebook but kept it closed. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, she said.

Reporting your story I would say, said Pierre. He was lying on the ground on his side now, his camera jammed against his nose, squishing it, as he clicked, near some rusted cans.

What do you see there?

It’s fantastic, he answered mysteriously.

I mean here on the planet.

You just want to be free, he said. His cheek pressed the dusty ground beside his camera. You have a wild spirit.

If anyone back home had said such a thing it would have been met with mockery. But here was mercifully not
back home
. Sometimes you needed another person to say something out loud. How did Pierre see it? She didn’t think she showed. Maybe she showed to Harry.
Come here, take this off
. Maybe she showed in bed. It was where she felt most herself, there or away from people altogether.

Knowing oneself was like smoke wafting into air. Other people might show you the stranger of yourself. The likelihood she’d forget Pierre saying this was high. Clarity was harder to keep than puzzlement. But she would not, however, forget this. It would turn out to return to her: the hot afternoon in Gulu when Pierre said, You just want to be free. Each time it came like a steadying hand.

Look at this. Pierre stood in a yard of hard dirt sunk with fossils of plastic caps and glass shards. Above the doorway of an abandoned house
a faded painting was visible in the peeling concrete. Two carefree figures on surfboards rode a curling green wave. More faded, in pink and green, were the words
Surf Club
.

One can always dream, Jane said.

C’est fantastique. Pierre snapped pictures, then stepped through the doorless doorway to an empty blue floor with two broken chairs tangled in a corner.

They came out to a boy standing at the edge of the yard with a doubtful face, holding up small baggies of popcorn. He wore a choker of white beads and a tank top that would fit a large man.

Jane asked him how much.

One shilling.

I’ll take them all. She rummaged around in her bag.

There is tipu here, the boy said.

The Surf Club? She smiled, delighted. Really?

He nodded solemnly. His stance declared he wasn’t going any nearer. The joki is there.

Should we be worried? she said, giving him a fifty-shilling coin.

He didn’t seem to hear, or understand, more concerned with her gross overpayment. Asante, he said, and nearly tossed the little bags to her, hurrying away before she saw her mistake.

Don would say you’re going to disrupt the country’s economy, Pierre said.

Did you hear it’s haunted?

Everything old is. The ancestors here stay around. Pierre walked past her, his expression already opening to something new. He was gazing toward the long alley of eucalyptus trees. Look at that. He shook his head. The sunlight cut through the trees in dusty swords. Beauty is everywhere, he said.

The loveliness of sleeping beside Harry cast a spell over the day.

He was lovely. His shoulders were lovely and wide and his skin was lovely and firm and it was lovely against her skin and his shoulders around her let her feel the particular muscle a man has in his arms. She liked how he was led by his body, not his mind.

The loveliness of bed sometimes overrode all else. She lapsed into daydreams, scanning the images of the nights to relive the sensations, which were even stronger with the layer of reflection added to them. He was moving in to kiss her. Maybe he was reconsidering, studying her mouth. No, he was looking, he came closer. Still he didn’t kiss her, making her heart thump in its gigantic room. Sleeping, she lay against the raft of him. Inside, he had a secret and maybe if she were close enough she would learn it.

Her mind emptied
through
the body, through Harry. She fell into a fugue, replaying his hands anchoring her waist, his shoulder pinning her chin. He twisted her wrist. His mouth covered her mouth.

One could point to a difference in our ages, she said.

Yes, I’m too old for you. He tapped her forehead.

He asked her, Don’t you miss your family?

Sometimes, she said. It sounded dismissive, which she didn’t intend. I mean, sure, she said with a different tone.

What about your country?

No. That sounded spoiled. I miss my friends, she tried.

Why just friends?

Because I love them?

You asking me?

Because I love them.

People aren’t loved when you are away from them, he said.

That’s not true.

You haven’t even given it any thought.

She felt the sting of him being right.

You disagree with me before you’ve even thought about it, he said.

My friends matter to me, she said.

How do you love people you aren’t with?

From afar? She smiled.

I miss my family when I don’t see them. My sister lives in Ireland. It’s too far away.

You don’t choose your family, Jane said.

Isn’t that the point? Harry said.

Maybe some people are better off without their family, she said.

Harry didn’t speak for a moment. You show me one, he said.

How does it feel to be so sure about everything? she said.

You tell me, Harry said.

He told her about a girlfriend who did Reiki therapy. She taught him the technique and he turned out to have a knack for it and when he drove her to the hospital where she volunteered he ended up treating patients, too. He laid his hands on their arms or stomach or head and concentrated on the warmth and energy moving out of his fingers into them, and it seemed to give them relief. One time he had an old man in intensive care whom he worked on for fifteen minutes, and when Harry stood to leave he fainted. He’d drained himself.

He told her about one time in the locker room being teased by an older boy for being small. He was facing the ceiling, speaking freely not looking at her. It made me shy, he said.

Kids are mean, Jane said.

Thing is, I still believe him. It made an impression on me.

But you know it’s not true, right? She smiled, not at him, but because she was hearing about something from inside Harry.

He remained grave. No, I don’t.

A normal kind person might have said, You are fine, you are more than fine, but she found herself strangely blocked, as if reassurance would be a knee-jerk denial of that wound to his younger self.

Instead she glided onto him to reassure him with her body, the reassurance she trusted. She felt him distant, as if his shadow were walking away up a hill.

They were napping on the low bed at the Exciting Hotel, lying on their sides facing the same way. She was cupped behind him, her arm along his side. A cobra was chewing a small furry animal. When the cobra saw her it dropped the animal and lunged through the air toward her neck.

She woke. She turned abruptly onto her back and crossed her hands over a fluttering chest.

Harry’s low eyes appeared over his shoulder. What is it?

Sorry. She stared up. Bad dream.

He kept his head turned, maybe waiting, maybe not waiting.

She didn’t look at him. The thought of looking in his eyes was terrifying. I just got … She sat up quickly and looked for her shoes.

The town had come back to life when Jane walked past the flapping kangas and sputtering exhaust pipes in early evening. She followed the map in her World Vision booklet to the red star indicating the location of the largest rehabilitation center in the north. An entranceway was open in a high chain-link fence that bordered a neighborhood of lean-tos. In a denuded yard a small boy with a withered leg was wheeling around on a stick, showing how adept he was. She entered a cement building with a narrow sidewalk around it one step up and found a woman in a blue tie-dyed dress at an empty desk. She made an appointment with her to visit the next day.

Back at the Exciting Hotel she picked up her key where Harry had left it at the desk and saw across an empty lounge Don in silhouette at the bar.

She walked over. Here’s somebody, she said. Everyone else has disappeared.

Don laughed, not happily.

What is it? Jane said.

Must’ve not had enough to drink yet, he said.

That’s not like you, Don.

I’m trying to be not like me. He shook his short glass in small circles. Don’t you think that’s a good idea? I think it’s a good plan.

Is it working?

Lana’s found a soldier, he said. In a deeper part of the room, near a dusty window, Jane saw Lana throwing darts at a tire, watched by a man in uniform.

Have you seen Harry?

Fuck Harry.

Oh. Pierre?

Fuck Pierre. Or maybe you have, too. He lifted his glass. Another one, my friend. The bartender, a man with long holes in his ears, carried a bottle over and poured. Want one? Don said, drawing his face back as if to take in Jane.

No, thanks. I think I’ll let you be miserable all by yourself.

Or you could fuck me, Don said.

What?

Why not?

Jesus, Don.

I find you attractive.

Well, thanks.

What? Not young enough for you?

She regarded him with lowered lids.

Everybody else fucks everybody else here, he said. Why shouldn’t we? His attention turned back to Lana’s dark figure in front of the window, standing very straight, concentrating on her aim. The soldier in full dress sat on the arm of a chair, swigging beer, watching her.

You know, when you’re propositioning someone it helps if you look at the person, Jane said.

I was looking at you, he said. So what do you say?

Boy, I am tempted. She turned to go.

Don shook his head. You don’t know who you are, he said.

In the morning, when they arrived at the gates of the rehabilitation center they found a funeral taking place.

Behind the chain-link fence hundreds of children sat knee to knee in the yard. Hands shielded their eyes from the sun. Except for a few coughs, it was silent, unusual to see so many children without a lot of noise.

At the far end of the yard in spotty shade, a table held a small coffin covered with a white sheet and yellow and orange frangipani blossoms arranged in the shape of a cross. Behind on a bench sat a line of adults in good clothes. A priest in a white robe held a big candle and spoke in Lor. Then he switched to English. The boy will rise together with Jesus, he said. After his blessing a man in a crisp khaki shirt stepped forward. This turned out to be the director of the center. He spoke of a boy named Danny. The boy had been with them for three weeks after returning from eighteen months with the rebels.