Acts of faith (38 page)

She glided up to the service counter, where two Kenyans stood behind steam tables and a propane stove, and asked for an omelet. As she waited for the eggs to cook, the Texan said, “Damn, girl, in that getup, all you’ve got to do is slap a little shoe polish on your face and y’all could pass.” Quinette turned and saw his copilot give an exaggerated eye roll. He pulled back an empty chair and boomed, “C’mon over and join us. We’re pretty damned bored with each other.”

“Sure I’m not interrupting anything?” she asked after she got her breakfast.

“Hey-ull no.”

He slapped the chair, but she elected to sit next to Fitz, finding him as appealing as the cowboy was obnoxious. His skin was a lovely shade of burnt sienna—the longer she was in Africa, the more unaesthetic she found white skin, her own excepted—and she remembered liking his boyish voice and the way his black eyes had seemed to undress her without offending her or making her uncomfortable. He had the sexiness of a man who loved women. Not that she had any intention of encouraging him.

“What gets you up so early on a Sunday?” he asked, pouring her a cup of coffee from the Thermos on the table.

She told him and explained that Malachy wanted to show her that the Turkana weren’t as bad as their image.

“Ah, those people should pay Malachy a salary for all his advocacy,” the bald man said.

“We haven’t met. Quinette Hardin.”

“John Barrett. Malachy and I go back a long way.”

The older woman introduced herself as Diana Briggs, extending a hand that confessed to the age her tinted hair and makeup tried to conceal. Quinette recalled the reporter from her first trip, smearing on facial cream, and she thought of Tara Whitcomb, arranging her hair and freshening up her lipstick before she flew Ken and the team into Sudan. These middle-aged babes at war with the clock. It was kind of pathetic. When the time came for her to get old, she would just let herself get old, as God intended.

“Are you working with Malachy in some capacity?” Diana asked with a stiff formality, accentuated by her Anglo-Kenyan accent.

Quinette shook her head and asked, “So what gets all of you up so early?”

There was just the slightest pause, just the briefest exchange of glances, before the Texan replied.

“Got us a load of goodies to bring into Chukudum,” he said. Chukudum was a Sudanese town not far over the border. “For that hospital the Norwegians built over there. Can’t bring the stuff in by road, so they called on us, old Fly-by-Knight.”

Quinette bit into her slightly burned omelet. She surmised that Chukudum was not his final destination, if he was going there at all. Everyone knew that the people from Knight Air were flying into the Nuba mountains, which was supposed to be very dangerous. A halo of danger and outlawry glimmered around these people, and it piqued her curiosity.

“I don’t see your partner. What’s your name again? ”

“Wes Dare,” the Texan replied, his glance slipping sideways as if he were ashamed of it. “Doug’s in Nairobi with Tony, leavin’ me and Mary to do the grunt work.” His arm went around the young woman’s shoulders, then dropped. “I like that name you’ve got. Shows your mama had some imagination.”

“It was my dad thought of it. Quinette was his grandmother’s name.”

“Knew it!” Wesley Dare’s eyes again skidded off to the side. He had jug-handle ears and a squashed nose and curly hair colored the distressing red of rust streaks in an old bathtub. “It’s been my experience that women don’t have much imagination, and y’all can really see that when it comes to naming their kids. One year everybody gets named Jennifer and Tim, next year it’s Matt and Margaret.”

Mary looked at Quinette, pleading silently to forgive Wes, as if he were some idiot child who couldn’t be held responsible for the things he said. That certainly had been a stupid observation, but it described Quinette’s mother to a T. Ardele never could imagine a life other than the one she had. For some reason, alternatives never occurred to her. If they did, she never acted on them. She was only forty-four when she was widowed, but she never remarried. She was Ted Hardin’s widow; nothing else was possible.

“So who named you?” she asked Wes.

“My mama, who else? Wesley ain’t very imaginative. If it had been up to my old man, I would’ve been named Quanah.”

That drew a little shriek from Mary. His glance shot to her, then ricocheted back to Quinette.

“On account of my great-grandma was a full-blood Comanche, back when their big chief was Quanah Parker.”

Quinette squinted skeptically.

Wes pulled out his wallet and produced a laminated card, with his photo on it, testifying to his enrollment in the Comanche Nation. “Where do y’all think these come from?” He thrust his head toward her, prying his eyes into circles with his thumbs and forefingers to better display his chocolate-brown pupils. “I’m like Fitz. A genuine mongrel. This here”—he tugged at a lock of his hair—“comes from the man great-grandma married. Not the color, the curl. He was a storekeeper on the reservation. Part white, part Comanch, and part black. His grandma was an escaped slave.” Wes hesitated for half a breath, and his tone of voice changed, taking on an edge. “Now I reckon that oughta give you a nice warm glow.”

“I’m afraid not. Should it?”

“You being in the business of freeing slaves, I figured it would.”

“It isn’t a business.”

“There’s some might say it is.”

She saw that he’d been setting her up with his genealogical discussion, and that she’d walked right into it.

“I’ve got you pegged,” she replied, whetting her own voice to cut back at him. “You like to jerk people’s chains to see which way they’ll jump. Your technique needs work.”

Fitz laughed, slapping the table, and Wes picked up his sunglasses and gave them a quick twirl. “And here I thought you were a sweet young idealist.”

“Guilty to the last two. The last time I remember being sweet, I was in eighth grade and even then I had to work at it.”

Wes said, “Would you bet that I was once an idealist?”

“I don’t gamble.”

“I was. Fresh out of Texas A and M with a degree in aero engineering in the late sixties. I think I smoked too much bad dope back then, because I decided to teach math to underprivileged Messican kids in El Paso. Did that till it come to me, like a light, that I hated kids of any creed or color. So I signed up with Air America to fly in Indochina, doin’ my bit to fight Communism. My mama wrote and asked me, ‘Wes, what are y’all doin’ over there?’ I wrote her back, ‘Mama, I’m flyin’ good to the good and bad to the bad.’ Ten years later I’m flyin’ guns into the Nicaraguan Contras for Southern Air, and I told Mama that I was flyin’ good to the good and bad to the bad, but it was sometimes right hard to tell which was which. Few more years go by, and I’m flyin’ photo-recon missions for the Royal Saudi Air Force, so we could liberate those useless Kuwaitis from those scum-suckin’ Eye-Raquis, and I wrote to Mama and said I was flyin’ good to the good and bad to the bad, but there wasn’t any difference. And now that I’m flyin’ in Africa, I tell her that I’m flyin’ bad to the bad because they’re all bad over here.”

The monologue pummeled everyone into a few moments’ silence. Then Mary said, “Jesus, did you sugar your cereal with cocaine this morning or what?”

Quinette looked at her watch and stood up suddenly. “Hate to leave this brilliant conversation, but I’ll be late. I’m meeting Malachy at the Red Cross hospital.”

“Do you have a car?” Diana asked.

Quinette shook her head.

“You intended to walk there?”

“Sure. It isn’t far.”

“Don’t be silly,” Diana said in a motherly tone. “Really, I’m surprised at Malachy, asking you to meet him there instead of his picking you up here. He ought to know better.”

“Some of his parishioners are in the hospital, and he—”

“Come along now.”

Diana and Barrett led her to a Toyota pickup, painted utilitarian gray, with the red and white logo of International People’s Aid on the doors.

“So that’s your connection with Wes and Fitz? You’re with IPA?” Quinette asked, climbing into the middle of the bench seat. It was immediately obvious that she was too long-legged to avoid being kneecapped by the floor shift, so Diana traded places with her.

“I am,” John replied, steering through the gate with a cheery
“Jambo!”
to the askaris. “Field coordinator for its Sudan operations. Diana is one of our benefactors.”

“A rich bitch buying her way out of white liberal guilt is how Wes would put it,” Diana said. “How he
has
put it. Quite the character, isn’t he?”

“He would be if he didn’t work so hard at trying to be one,” Quinette observed, pleased that she drew a laugh from both people.

“Bloody good pilot, though,” John said, as if that forgave everything.

“If what I hear is true, I guess he has to be.”

“There are a lot of rumors in Loki, and one needs to be careful about the things one hears.”

“More careful about the things one says,” Diana added, looking at Quinette sidelong. “Loose lips sink ships—and crash planes as well.”

Quinette kept silent, considering herself warned not to press them about where Wesley Dare was headed today.

They went past the compounds of Norwegian People’s Aid and Doctors Without Borders. If the UN’s base, with its neighborhoods of white and blue bungalows and offices, was the city, the camps of the independent agencies were the suburbs, though the organizational flags flying above them and the armed guards at the gates lent them the look of military outposts, an image Quinette preferred, as she preferred to think of the people inside not as aid workers but as warriors enlisted in the battle against hunger and disease and conquest. A Hercules thundered overhead, bearing westward. The four engines, sending tremors through the air and through her skin, shook her back into the excited happiness she’d felt when she woke up; and the antiquated throb of propellers caused a remote in her brain to click and bleed all color from the scene, so she saw it in the documentary black and white of the History Channel, the plane becoming, briefly, a World War II bomber, soaring away to pulverize the enemy. The Herc was going to drop sacks of grain, not high explosives, but food was a weapon in this war. So was breaking the chains of the enslaved. Her grandfathers had liberated people in France. She was carrying on in their tradition. Maybe thirty or forty years from now, this crusade would be on the History Channel, and she would be able to tell her grandchildren that she’d been in it, been part of something altogether noble and so much bigger than herself.

The hospital, in a village near Loki called Lopiding, appeared unexpectedly. There were mud-and-wattle huts and little congregations of goats lazing under tall tamarind trees, then suddenly a high gate with the usual complement of askaris, and beyond it whitewashed buildings and white tents as big as barns, the Red Cross emblem on their roofs, and people swarming everywhere: doctors and nurses in surgical smocks, ambulatory patients wearing light brown hospital gowns. Almost all were Sudanese men and boys wounded in the war, legs in casts or braces, arms in slings, heads bandaged, hands wrapped in dressings like prizefighters. One young man on crutches was trying to kick a soccer ball with his good leg. She recognized on some faces the V-shaped cicatrix of Dinka, the horizontal lines of Nuer—she was learning the various tribal marks—but most of the other tattoos were strange to her, and some were not tribal markings at all but scars left by bullets and bomb fragments and landmine shrapnel.

“Here you are,” John said, stopping in front of the admissions building. “A pleasure meetin’ you. Be sure to tell Malachy that I expect him to watch out for you.”

Several Dinka sat around flattened boxes spread on the ground, playing cards. As she waited, she was conscious of their glances; admiring glances, she hoped, though she didn’t rule out the possibility that a white woman dressed like one of theirs presented a curious figure, even a ridiculous one. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking. Their expressions revealed nothing, the famed Dinka mask made more opaque by the dead, blank look acquired by men who’d been in battle. She’d seen it on her father’s face, in a photograph of him and his buddies in Vietnam. The thousand-yard stare, he’d called it.

When ten minutes passed without Malachy, she went looking for him, peeking into the cavernous tents, catching glimpses of men with limbs in traction, of a woman sitting beside a bed occupied by a child with its face and arms burned from black to a shocking suppurating pink. Such a variety of injuries, so much suffering, more than she could grasp. From inside a tin-roofed building came the screech of a band saw, a belt sander’s rough hum, and when the noise stopped, Malachy’s voice—“I’ll pay you out of my own bloody pocket”—and another voice, speaking English in some sort of European accent—“I am sorry I must ask you, but those are the regulations.” She stepped in and saw, through a light mist of sawdust, a row of leg braces with metal clamps attached, and also dozens of prosthetic legs—knee-length and full-length, shiny and flesh-toned, standing on shelves or piled up in bins, as if some psycho had dismembered a store full of manikins. Several Kenyan workmen in coveralls stood around wielding power tools, another placed an artificial limb on a conveyor belt and fed it into what appeared to be an oven. A middle-aged Turkana sat on a chair, half of one leg sticking out like a thin stovepipe. A teenage Sudanese, missing a leg, stood on his crutches while a technician took the length of his right with a measuring tape. At one end of the room, beside rows of canvas sacks filled with coils of brightly colored rope, Malachy was deep in conversation with a crew-cut young white man. In olive shorts, a white cotton shirt, and Teva sandals, the priest looked emphatically unclerical. He spotted her in the doorway, looked at his watch, and bumped his forehead with the heel of his hand.