Acts of faith (23 page)

Quinette listened, rapt. Ken was a smart, tough-minded guy who’d had a good deal of experience dealing with the media and had testified before Congress and the UN Human Rights Commission. She had watched videotapes of his testimony in Nairobi, and it was almost like observing a fine athlete in action, the way he fielded questions from congressmen and commissioners, giving quick, sharp answers, and he didn’t act as if he was grateful they’d invited him to testify, but as if they should be grateful to him for accepting. A man with an attitude, all right, more than a match for the acidic Phyllis.

“So what concerns us is that Khartoum deliberately violates human rights,” he was saying. “The religious beliefs of the victims are beside the point.”

“I take it you would agree with that?” Phyllis turned to Jim, the cameraman turning with her, like they were one person with two heads.

“This is my third time out with Ken,” Jim replied, sweat dripping from his long nose like raindrops from a gutter spout. “So sure I agree. But I, we—the ministries I represent—we do hope these people will be more receptive to the gospels, once they learn that Christian people have helped them gain their freedom.”

“So for you this is missionary work?”

“I believe Miss Hardin stated it perfectly,” answered Jim, Quinette swelling with pride. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Phyllis cut the interview when Santino announced that the boats were here at last.

Heads turned toward the riverbank. The two vessels were long dugout canoes, wider in the front than in the back, each with two paddlers, Dinka boys with twisty muscles, as if there were ropes under their skin. They stood in the shallows beside their vessels, leaning on their paddles.

Quinette and the others hoisted their rucksacks and filed down the muddy path through the tall papyrus reeds. Now that she was beside it, the Nile looked bigger, the current more powerful. Gobs of dirty foam bobbed downstream, a tree branch with the leaves sticking up sailed by, at the speed of a man walking fast.

“Let’s pray first,” Jim said. “All of you, if you please. Pray with me.”

He knelt down, and Quinette knelt beside him, there in the mud at the river’s edge. The others hesitated for a beat. They were anxious to get on across and start walking, to make sure they got to the town well before dusk. It didn’t seem an appropriate moment for prayer, but then Jean and Mike dropped to their knees, and Santino followed. Ken was the last. He wasn’t the praying kind, even though he worked for a religious organization, but Phyllis had signaled her crew to start filming, and Ken must have figured it would look bad on TV if he was on his feet while everyone else was kneeling.

“Heavenly Father, we call upon you to guide and protect us on our journey,” Jim intoned in a booming voice. He’d done some radio evangelizing on the Christian Broadcast Service. Head bowed, Quinette could feel the camera trained on her and the little band of redeemers. “Bless all who have come so far in your holy name and for your holy work.” Jim’s head wasn’t lowered, and he wasn’t looking up at the sky either; he was staring straight into the Nile, as though the Heavenly Father dwelled in its murky depths. “Bless our brothers Ken, Santino, and Mike, bless our sisters Quinette and Jean.” Quinette was trying to focus on God, but she was distracted by the self-consciousness the camera aroused in her. Did she look all right? It was hard to keep your mind on prayer with a TV crew videotaping you from only a few yards away. “Bestow your blessing, Heavenly Father, on the captives we seek to set free. Hold your hand over them as you held it over your children in captive Israel. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.”

“Amen,” Quinette murmured with the others, then stood and brushed her knees. Her baggy safari shorts dropped over them. Not the kind of thing she would have chosen for herself, loving as she did bright figure-flattering clothes to offset her drab brown hair and a face that was a little like Iowa, neither pretty nor ugly. Back in Nairobi, Ken had taken her to a camping store on Biashara Street and made her buy the shorts and the olive drab shirts to go with them. He’d objected to the outfits she’d brought from the States: a kaleidoscope of canary yellows, teal greens, salmon pinks. It was the dry season in Sudan, Ken had told her. Government planes could be flying, militia might be patrolling the countryside. Making herself so obvious could prove dangerous, to her and her companions.

They took off their hiking boots and sandals and waded in, the water warm as bathwater, and with the paddlers holding the unstable craft steady, got on board: Phyllis, her crew, Mike and Jean in one with two of the soldiers, Quinette, Ken, Santino, and Jim in the other with the remaining soldiers. They sat on the gunwales, three to a side, their gear between them. With sign language, one of the soldiers cautioned them to sit very still. A pod of hippopotami wallowed a little ways downstream, their gray-black backs humped out of the water. Quinette had never seen a hippopotamus before, except in one of those
National Geographic
specials Jake Mueller, her brother-in-law, liked to watch. The most dangerous beast in Africa, Ken had informed her on the flight from Loki. Killed more people every year than all the lions and leopards put together.

The stern paddler launched the dugout with a strong shove, then hopped in so nimbly that it barely rocked. Just then Quinette spied a crocodile basking on a mud bank toward the far side of the river, stationary as a log, its long head tilted slightly, like someone with his chin in the air, its plated back silvery green in the sunlight. Ken had given her some information about crocs as well—if hippos got the gold medal for killing people, crocs got the silver. They usually nabbed native women, washing clothes by the riverbank, dragged them in and rolled them over until they drowned, then devoured them. The thought of such a death stirred a primal dread in Quinette. Back home you tossed dirty clothes into the Maytag and forgot about them; here doing your laundry could have gruesome consequences. She could only trust that the Heavenly Father had listened to Jim’s petitions.

Eddies creased the surface of the dark Nile, little whirlpools formed and vanished and re-formed. Angling upstream to make up for the river pushing the dugout in the opposite direction, the paddlers dug in hard, their ropy muscles writhing. They were a beautiful people, these Dinka, so tall and lithe, with big, oval, slightly slanted eyes and skin so dark it looked as if God had cut bolts out of the midnight sky and made human beings from them.

The croc slipped off the mud bank with a leisurely sweep of its tail and disappeared. She pictured it cruising through the half-light below and felt vulnerable, sitting on the edge of the canoe. The soldier across from her must have seen the look on her face because he made a reassuring movement with his hand, then patted his automatic rifle.
Yeah,
she thought,
a lot of good that’ll do you if you end up in the drink with the rest of us.

The paddlers in the second boat, lagging a little, quickened their strokes and pulled up parallel to the one she was in, allowing the cameraman to film it broadside as it crossed. The camera’s glass eye stared straight at Quinette from five yards away, and she stared back at it and forgot her fears as she imagined everyone she knew looking at her on TV. It was a little like sneaking into a room full of people viewing a home video of yourself. You saw them and your own screen image at the same time; you were both the observer and the observed. Her mother, Kristen, Nicole and Jake and her nephew Danny, Pastor Tom, Mrs. Hoge, Alice, Terry, and the pupils from Sunday school—she saw them all watching her, sitting in a dugout paddled by bare-chested tribesmen, with a croc-infested river in the background and an African rebel beside her, wearing his ferocious scars and garland of ammunition. The Quinette in that inner picture did not appear as out of her element as the real Quinette felt; nor did the papyrus reeds and fever trees and soldiers’ faces, framed by the flickering rectangle in her mind’s eye, look as foreign and weird as they did to the eyes in her head. Visualizing the scene as it would appear on TV, before all those familiar people, had somehow domesticated it. An odd and wonderful thing happened when she turned away from the camera’s hypnotic stare to gaze at the world around her: the mental image dissolved, yet its feeling of familiarity lingered. The soldiers’ faces had lost their exotic menace, appearing no more peculiar or frightening than the faces of punked-out kids back home, with their pierced tongues and noses and spiked, tinted hair. The strangeness of her surroundings and this whole experience, which had nearly made her faint, had dissolved completely, and the sense that she was a stranger here dissolved with it. The thing she was doing no longer struck her as bizarre but seemed perfectly natural, something she was meant to do. A gusher of joy sprang from her stomach into her throat, and for a second she thought it would fly right out of her mouth in a birdlike cry, like lyrics that made you so happy you could not contain them inside yourself but had to sing them out loud. All that kept her silent, as the boats drew close to shore, was the knowledge that she was to be here for a short time only—five days, that was how long Ken figured it would take. Then she would begin the journey home, back to the routines she had longed for barely half an hour ago and now, suddenly, dreaded.

They entered a cove where the water was only knee deep. The soldiers and paddlers got out and walked the dugouts ashore, swinging them parallel to the bank so the passengers could disembark without getting their feet wet again. There was a large tree atop the bank, and from beneath the umbrella of its branches, another squad of four guerrillas stood up suddenly, surprising Quinette as she was lacing up her hiking boots. Where had they come from? Who were they? Dinka, she observed, noticing the same chevrons slashing across foreheads, as if they’d been clawed by an animal with a sense of precision. The same gap-toothed grins. Not just a cruel custom, she thought, but a tragic one, because the Dinkas’ teeth were as white as their skin was black; if they were allowed to keep them all, they could blind you with their smiles.

“Quite a bodyguard. Expecting trouble?” Phyllis said to Ken.

“Expecting it? No. Ready for it if it comes, yeah,” he replied. “But we’ll try to avoid making you a war correspondent,” he added in a patronizing tone of voice.

“Sarajevo, the intifada, Afghanistan. Been there done that, so it would be no problem,” Phyllis shot back, and you could tell it wasn’t just bravado.

The guerrillas collected the team’s rucksacks and shouldered them. Jim Prewitt blew out his cheeks, relieved that he wouldn’t have to carry his tent and sleeping bag the rest of the way. The leader issued commands in Dinka, and half the men jogged out in front, rifles clattering. The rest brought up the rear, and then the column filed through the reeds. The air was still, thick, and rank with the odors of mud and decaying vegetation. A mosquito sang in Quinette’s ear, another bit her on the forearm. She slapped it, smearing her skin with blood, then got bug repellent from her fanny pack and sprayed herself liberally.

They followed the trail up out of the marshes and onto the savannah and trooped down a narrow, rutted laterite road that cut through high grass the color of hay. This part of deepest, darkest Africa wasn’t dark at all, but light light light, as flat as Iowa it seemed, and almost as open, with the acacia trees wide apart. An arid wind blew across the vastness, relieving the heat but raising dust from the road that powdered everyone’s sweaty skin. Clouds sailed on the wind, like scattered blimps. The band of redeemers and guards walked on through the heat and dust, Jim, the oldest of the bunch, barely keeping up and the Kenyan cameramen, softened by life in Nairobi, sweating buckets as they took turns lugging the video camera. Quinette had expected Phyllis to be their weakest link; despite her war correspondent’s résumé, she looked too thin and citified to withstand a long tramp through the bush, but she was holding up pretty well, swinging along in her jaunty hat and safari jacket. Santino wasn’t having any trouble either, nor Ken, nor Mike and Jean, even though both were on the short side and had to take two steps for every one the rebel soldiers took, their legs nearly as long as the two Canadians were tall.

“I can’t figure out how the Arabs make slaves out of these people,” Quinette remarked, walking alongside Ken. She pointed at the soldiers in front of them.

“Don’t know how or don’t know why?” Ken asked. He’d clipped polarized lenses to his glasses and now looked like a blind man.

“It’s the same question, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly. You heard me tell Phyllis why.”

“Government policy. But Ken, these guys, they’re like a professional basketball team with assault rifles. Who would want to mess with them? Santino told me they’re as tough and mean as they look.”

“They are.” He was looking not at her but dead ahead, his wrists resting on his two army-style belt canteens.

“Dinka boys learn to fight with sticks and how to wrestle, and when they get their teeth chopped out, they’re not allowed to cry or make a sound, that’s what Santino said. Doesn’t make sense how Arab pipsqueaks can attack guys like that and steal their cattle and their kids and their wives. You’d think the Dinka would just kick their butts right into the middle of next month.”

Ken gave a short, dry laugh, but she couldn’t tell if he laughed because the phrase amused him or because he thought she’d said something stupid. She would be mortified if that was his opinion. She respected him for his dedication to his work and for his knowledge of this part of the world, and she wanted him to respect her. His approval seemed a thing to be coveted if you didn’t have it, cherished if you did. Maybe she should have explained the choice of clothing she’d brought from home. Taking part in the liberation of two hundred and nine people was a joyous event in her book, and she’d wanted to proclaim her joy by dressing in vibrant outfits. Nothing shallow or frivolous about that, was there? You didn’t go to a wedding dressed for a funeral, did you?