Acts of faith (106 page)

He propped Mary’s legs on a fallen log, to prevent blood from draining from her head, and kneeling on both knees, he held her wrist and felt a faint pulse. Her face was a mass of lacerations and blue-black lumps, her right eye a slit in a contusion half as big as a man’s fist. Her right side had been crushed by the cabin bulkhead, punched inward by its meeting with the trees. The severity of her injuries, the razing of her beauty made him choke. He cradled her head in his hands and brought his lips to her ear.

“Don’t you die on me, Mary girl,” he whispered. “We’re less than an hour’s flying time from Loki. They know where we are. They’ll send a plane to look for us. We’re gonna make it out of this, but y’all have got to not die on me.” She made a sound, a rattling gasp. “That’s the stuff. That’s my lady.”

He staggered back to the plane and tried the radio. Dead. He got the duffel bag containing the water, food, and first-aid kit. He saw what had happened. The southeast end of the runway was black cotton soil, mushy as loam. The surface crust had broken under the Hawker’s weight, the gear had crumpled from the stress and spun the aircraft into a sideways skid.

He cleaned Mary’s face with alcohol and bandaged the worst gashes, then splinted her ribs with a stout stick and surgical tape. She made another sound. Her good eye, half shut, twitched. “That’s it, stay with me. Someone will come. You could be in a hospital by tonight, tomorrow for sure.”

He propped her head in his lap and put a water bottle to her lips. The water dribbled down her chin. He forced her mouth open with his fingers and allowed a few drops to fall on her tongue, then finished the rest himself. He drained another bottle. It amazed him how thirsty he was.

His watch had been smashed. The hands on the glassless dial stood fixed at twenty past two—the moment of impact. Judging from the sun, it was now around three. Even if a search plane found them, a rescue could not be effected until tomorrow.

Gather firewood, that was the thing to do next. A fire to signal a plane, a fire for the night.

An hour later he had accumulated a satisfactory pile of deadwood, fetched from a dry riverbed nearby. That done, he harvested green branches to create as much smoke as possible and laid them next to the wood. These labors had taxed his injured body to the limit, but he couldn’t permit himself to sleep. He had to stay awake at least till dusk. “Wasn’t no . . . any accident . . . uh-uh, no accident . . . and when we get back, I’ll find out who did it and I’ll kill him, kill him for you, baby.”

He waved off the flies drawn to her wounds, stroked her blood-matted hair, its golden color darkened to copper, and plucked a shard of glass from her scalp. She didn’t move or utter a sound. Her pulse was still there, faint but there. He spoke more encouraging words about their imminent rescue. He talked about the music acts they would fly in the States, about buying a ranch in the Texas hill country, about Stevie Ray Vaughan, about his early days flying Steerman crop dusters, about his father, the Mustang pilot, the World War II ace, six Jap Zeros to his credit, about a dead python he’d seen stretched out on an airstrip in Laos, about his mother, who’d told him he was as ugly as homemade sin and who, he was sure, would never speak to him again if he let Mary get away—“which I’m not about to do.” He talked and talked, free-associating, convinced that his voice was getting through to her, keeping her alive. Talking also kept him awake and held at bay the terrible silence of the desert. If not for the humming flies, it would have been as quiet as the surface of the moon. In the pauses between his tales, he listened for the buzz of an approaching plane. Once he swore he heard it, but it soon vanished, and there was only the silence, so profound it was a noise in itself, a kind of voice whispering in a tongue he couldn’t understand. He looked around, struck by the empty landscape, to all appearances devoid of any sentient life. It lay inert under an empty sky, its passivity strangely hostile. He would have preferred an overt aggression, some violent force he could oppose and conquer, or be conquered by; for these inattentive expanses seemed to be trying to tell him something, if only he could interpret the language of their stillness. He was glad he could not, sensing instinctively that it was something he did not want to know, must not know if he was to go on.

He talked to Mary as the sun inched toward the horizon. Dusk fell, swiftly dragging night behind it. Dare lit the fire and continued with his tales until exhaustion overtook him. His head slumped to his chest, he fell asleep beneath the stars’ neutral gaze.

An awful noise woke him, at what hour he didn’t know. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating; but no, the noise was as real as the ground he sat on: cackles, whoops, howls, bellows, demented giggles. If hell had a choir, he was listening to it. No moon shone. Starlight revealed vague shapes on the runway, moving toward him with a weird hopping gait. The fire had burned down to coals. He fed a few small sticks into it, then larger pieces. It blazed up, silencing the demonic chorus. Moving back to Mary’s side, he drew the Beretta and sat with the pistol in both hands, elbows wedged to his knees to steady his aim. This he could deal with, this was more like it. The fire mounted, disclosing several pairs of eyes, glowing a fluorescent yellow-green in its light. The creatures cautiously drew nearer, he could hear them panting as they halted, one in the lead, the rest a little behind, doglike heads held low, topped by big ears shaped like toadstools, obscene jaws parted, backs humped, scruffy fur bristling, nostrils twitching. He aimed at the leader, slowly let out a breath, and fired twice. He heard the smack of the 9-millimeter rounds striking flesh. The hyena screeched, all four feet leaving the ground at once, and rolled over dead. The rest of the pack, yelping and hooting, ran off a short distance and then turned and held their ground. The two bravest, or maybe they were the hungriest, lunged forward and tore into the carcass of their fallen mate. One turned broadside to Dare, its spotted flanks showing in the firelight. He centered on the shoulder and fired again, and the heart-shot hyena dropped without a sound. The others rushed in and Dare allowed them to drag both carcasses off, to about the middle of the runway. He listened to their snarls, the crunching of bones, the repulsive slurping of entrails, and decided they were still too close. Getting to his feet, he lumbered toward them, against the pain in his side, shooting two more rounds blindly into the darkness. “Go on, eat your buddies, you ugly bastards! She’s not on the menu tonight, and no other night neither!”

He went back, gasping, the icepick jabbing his lungs. “Gone,” he wheezed, and flopped down. “It’s all right, baby, they’re gone, they’re not gonna hurt you.” He looked at her and saw a single greenish-gray eye, wide open and staring at him without a blink. He laid his palm on her forehead and could not remember feeling anything so cold.

She had been dead probably for a couple of hours, and the keen-nosed hyenas had caught the first faint scent of death. He closed the eye and held her and apologized for falling asleep. He was determined to stay awake, in case the animals came back for her. For the rest of the night, watching the stars wheel down the ecliptic, as they always had and always would, for as long as there were stars and a heaven to hold them, he kept his vigil over the one person who had taught him to believe in something beyond himself, to have faith in love and the promise of love.

The sunrise was a wound in the sky. Just like that old Air America pilot had told him in Vientiane a thousand years ago: You’ll know you’re in trouble when you hate to see it come up. He more than hated to see it now. The joyless light peeled the shadows away and revealed to him again the same arid vacancy of sand, dirt, rock, and sparse trees, motionless and indifferent beneath the same annihilating sky; and its disquieting quiet, the silence that wasn’t silent, pressed down on him, as tangible as the heat in the whitening sun. Somehow he knew, as surely as he’d known anything, that a plane wasn’t going to come—not today, tomorrow, or the day after, and even if one did, he would not light his signal fire. He would hide in the trees and wait for his deliverers to fly off.

Mary’s body had grown stiff during the night. One arm was bent at the elbow, the palm facing out, as if she were taking an oath. He tried to straighten it, but it was frozen into that position by the cold a hundred suns couldn’t thaw. The odor of decomposition was now apparent even to the human nose. Flies covered her, she was almost black with them. He fanned them off with his cap, but the instant he stopped, the insects pounced on her again. He would have to bury her. That was the next thing to do. He got up, feeling as though he were rising against a great weight, went off a short distance, and began to claw at the soft soil that had caused his plane to careen off the runway. An hour of digging produced a rectangle six feet long and half a foot deep. He could dig no further—he was spent, and the roots of the grasses and shrubs formed a dense mat under the topsoil.

Dragging her by the legs, he laid her in the grave and covered her as best he could, which was nowhere near well enough. Her rigid arm stuck out. The hyenas would be back for her tonight. They could very well devour her within his sight, and there would be nothing he could about that either: He didn’t have enough bullets to kill them all.

Thirsty, weaving from fatigue, he returned to the ashes of the fire and pulled another water bottle from the duffel bag and drank it dry. He had no idea why he was slaking his thirst, no idea why he should endure his pain, physical and otherwise, for another second. He’d done everything possible, and none of it had been enough. He wasn’t able to keep his plane in the air and, once he landed, wasn’t able to keep it from crashing. He wasn’t able to keep Mary alive or straighten her arm or dig her a decent grave. He was overwhelmed by a sense of futility—the futility not only of his own efforts but of all effort, not only of his existence but of all existence. “Why should I?” he cried out, and his answer was the vast African silence. This time he understood its message, and to it, his faith in himself was no reply; indeed, he no longer had any faith in himself. Nevertheless, he sat there as still as the landscape and realized there was yet one more thing he couldn’t do, though the means to do it was at hand. The raw, animal instinct for survival was all that restrained him, and it was enough.

A tug at his boot startled him into consciousness. With a yell, he jerked his foot out of the hyena’s jaws, leaped up, and saw that it wasn’t a hyena but a young man, no less startled than Dare. Tall, bone thin, clad in rags, with one black leg and the other as white as ivory, he had a round face and ruthless eyes. A dozen others were with him, boys not men, gaunt and barefoot. Twenty or thirty more were swarming into and over the wrecked plane like ants. Except for two carrying spears, only the young man with the two-toned legs was armed—a Kalashnikov with a folding stock was slung over one emaciated shoulder.

“Who are you?” Dare asked in a scratchy voice.

“I am Matthew Deng,” came the reply in a British-tinged, mission-school English. “Who are you?”

Dare answered and asked Matthew Deng if he was SPLA.

“I was one time SPLA, before this.” He tapped his artificial limb. “I thought you were died. I wanted your shoes. For him.” He motioned at a kid of eleven or twelve whose feet were cut to ribbons. “Is that your aeroplane?”

That was how he said it,
aer-o-plane.
Dare nodded.

Another kid ran up and spoke to Matthew in Dinka. “He says there is no assistance in your aeroplane.”

“No, there isn’t.”

He pointed at the duffel. “What is in there?”

“See for yourself.”

He lifted the bag upside down, his stony eyes widening as the bottles, tins, and granola bars tumbled out. A yell went up, and the crowd of boys fell on the stuff in a way that reminded Dare of the hyenas falling on the carcasses of their dead mates. Displaying his SPLA training, Matthew restored order with the help of his two lieutenants, the ones with the spears. Snapping commands, prodding with their weapons, they got the boys to form two lines. Matthew opened a tin of hash and scooped out a mouthful with his fingers. It was obvious he wanted to finish it, but he restrained himself and passed the tin to one of the spear-carriers, instructing him to take only one bite and then to pass it on. He opened several more and rationed them out to the rest, with the water. Their discipline was amazing. One by one they stepped up, took a bite of food, a drink, and stood aside.

While this strange feast went on, Matthew told Dare a fantastic tale.

He and his companions had been on the march for six months. They all came from Bahr el Ghazal, more than six hundred miles away. At the end of last year’s rainy season, murahaleen attacked their villages, burned them to the ground, and either killed everyone or took them as slaves. Matthew himself lost his father, mother, two brothers, and a younger sister. He’d survived because he was some distance from the village, in a cattle camp. His camp-mates, numbering about a dozen boys and young men, had also lost their entire families. Being the oldest, and with his military experience, Matthew became their leader. They trekked to another village, seeking refuge, but it too had been annihilated. Picking up several more orphaned boys, they wandered for over a month, scavenging on the carcasses of dead livestock, of warthogs killed by lions. Sometimes they lived on nothing more than roots and leaves. Along the way they were joined by still more youths, until they numbered nearly three hundred.

Eventually they arrived at an SPLA camp, where they were given food and shelter and some military training, except, of course, for Matthew. They remained there for about two months, when a group of hawaga—Matthew recalled that they arrived in a plane bearing a Red Cross—arrived and made a fuss. They accused the SPLA of recruiting child soldiers. The hawaga made such a big fuss that the SPLA was forced to expel the boys from the camp.