Acts of faith (40 page)

She noticed that a young woman sitting beside her was wearing what appeared to be a calculator as a pendant, its buttons and display window giving off an anomalous plastic gleam among the bright beads half covering her breasts. Quinette leaned over for a closer look and made out the words
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS
. She raised the camera, snapped a picture, and began to mentally compose the letter that would accompany the photographs when she sent them home. She’d been debating with herself whether to tell her family about the ambush: Why worry them unnecessarily? Now she decided she would, then go on to say that she had ventured out only a few days after the aid workers were killed, with no more protection than an unarmed priest and deacon, and taken photographs of the fierce Turkana without them harming a hair on her head. She would make some witty remark about the woman wearing a Texas Instruments calculator as jewelry, and explain the meaning of the marks on the man’s chest, making sure to adopt an offhanded tone to show that she didn’t consider it any big deal. She wasn’t sure how Kristen would react, but Ardele and Nicole would freak out, and in a corner of herself, the same dark nook where her wild impulses once flourished, prompting her to do things guaranteed to outrage her family, she relished the thought of upsetting those two timid, domesticated females with a tale of her daring—and with pictures to back it up.

The deacon finished his sermon and sat alongside her again as the congregation broke into a hymn—a hymn in praise of Father Malachy, the deacon said. “Apoloreng remembers us,” the crowd sang. Malachy stood grinning against the background of bare sticks and thornbush, his hair brightened by an arrow of late morning sun piercing the branches fanned over his head. He seemed to bask in his parishioners’ adoration, which didn’t appear quite right to Quinette. Shouldn’t he tell them to offer their thanks and praise to Our Lord instead? At the same time she envied his communion with them. He’d opened his heart to this parched corner of Africa, and it had taken him into its heart. Maybe one day she would experience the same reciprocity. She loved Africa and wanted it to love her back.

“Hey, you Turkana!” the priest called out as the last trilling ululations died away. “Let us pray for rain!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May all you people be blessed!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May you elders be blessed!”

“Eh-yay!”

“God of Saint John!”

“Give us rain!”

“God of Mary!”

“Give us rain!”

Two hundred pairs of dark arms and one pair of pale arms rose toward the cruel blue sky, and Malachy seemed more than ever the tribal shaman
.

“We call upon the one God to bring rain and our animals to come back from death. Make us fat! Give us oil and food! The one God, make us happy!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May all cattle thieving go away!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May peace come down on you and the Toposa!”

“Eh-yay!”

“Goodness come down!” He raised his hands high, lowering them, palms facing the ground. “All evil, go away!” He thrust his hands to one side, as if casting an object over the top of the boma. “Goodness come down! May all you people be blessed!”

The appeals went on, voices rising to such an emotional pitch that Quinette would not have been surprised if the heavens clouded over and thunder cracked that very minute. She felt herself caught up in the steam-locomotive rhythms, the football-cheer repetitions, the movements of arms, swinging up, swinging down. It was hard to restrain herself from tossing her own arms into the air, and she probably would have if the service—no, rite—had gone on much longer, but it ended in another burst of keen ululations that made the enclosure sound like an aviary. Breathless, sweating under her arms, she watched the people begin to file out, greeting Malachy at the entrance, just as churchgoers did back home when church was through.

“So what did you think?” the priest asked Quinette. Cheeks flushed, the tails of his sweat-blotched shirt hanging out of his shorts, he was standing beside the senior elder.

“It was . . . interesting? Actually, beautiful,” she added, deciding that
interesting
sounded too wishy-washy. “It wasn’t . . . It was strange? I mean . . .”

“Not quite Christian is what you mean. The Vatican has the same opinion.”

“Mind if I take your picture?”

“Surely I don’t.”

“With him.”

Malachy spoke to the Turkana chief, who grasped the priest’s hand and then said something to Quinette.

“He’s telling you that he and I are of the same brand, meaning that we’re brothers.”

She framed the two faces—a white square one and a black oblong one side by side.

“Turkana identify themselves by their cattle brands,” Malachy said, as Quinette stepped forward for a closer shot. “That’s why saying you’re of the same brand means you’re brothers.”

She flicked her head to acknowledge this snippet of ethnological information and took the photo.

“And I
am
his brother,” the priest carried on. “The secret to working with these people is that you bring yourself to them and become one of them without ever, ever forgetting who and what you really are. It’s a bit of a high-wire act.”

“Could you get my picture with him?”

She posed with her shoulder touching the Turkana’s, the print developed in her mind before the shutter clicked. She saw it laid out with the other photos on her mother’s kitchen table, the ancient white steel table with a border of thin black stripes that Ardele had salvaged from the auction because no one would buy the ugly old thing. She and Nicole were sitting at it, looking at Quinette in her long, golden Dinka dress and at the African beside her, his robe slashing diagonally across his chest, his ritual scars bared. They would show the picture to their friends, and the story of Quinette’s experience would spread, as stories do in small towns, and soon everyone would know that the distance she’d traveled from Cedar Falls could not be measured in miles alone.

A Clash of Cultures

“R
ADIO AND AVIONICS
on, Captain Quanah.
Quanah.
I love it. Was that an inspiration of the moment?”

“It’s one of my established routines,” Dare said.

Mary flipped black toggle switches.”GPS on and checked. How about the reservation card? Quanah Dare, the certified Comanche? Where’d you get that?”

“Beyond top secret. If I told you, I’d have to kill you
and
your dog. Throttles and control levers are set. Ditto hydraulics.”

“It didn’t convince her. She’s smarter than she looks. Fuel quantity—”

“I can see we’re topped off,” he said, gesturing at the fuel gauges.

“The sheet says that it’s the FO’s responsibility to check fuel quantity. I thought we agreed to do things by the book.”

“This ain’t a goddamned library. You think she looks dumb?”

Mary shook her head—a flow of blond waves that broke his heart. “A little wonder-struck, kind of how I looked when I first got here. An innocent abroad.”

“That one ain’t all that innocent.”

“That dress!” Mary did one of her patented eye rolls. “Who does she think she is? The honky princess of Zanzibar? Wish I had her legs, though. They don’t
stop.
”

“She’s a long drink of water, all right, but your legs look just fine,” he said, and patted a denim-sheathed thigh and allowed his hand to linger a little longer than he should have, to see how she’d react. She didn’t react one way or the other, as if it weren’t there. “We’re done with pre-start, Marian the Librarian, unless you want me to verify that the parking brake is set, which as you can see for your own self it is.” He motioned at the brake status light on the upper panel, then slid the side window open and looked at Nimrod, standing beyond the wingtip, a wheel block in each honest hand. “All clear down there, rafiki?”

Nimrod gave him a thumbs-up. Starter-motor whine, the prop making a couple of slow turns before the engine fired. He revved it up, checking the gauges, listening for flaws in the smooth turboprop snarl, then fired the other engine. A pair of Rolls-Royce Darts, each delivering eighteen hundred and eighty horsepower, and every one of those would be needed on this run. The plane was fully loaded with eleven thousand eight hundred pounds of cargo destined for the Nuba mountains. Here comes Santa in his Hawker-Siddley sleigh.

He got his clearance from Loki tower and eased down the taxiway toward the airfield’s western edge, where heat shimmers danced off the asphalt.

Forklifts were stuffing two UN Buffalos full of sorghum. The flight crews stood around in their corporate jumpsuits. Dare couldn’t make up his mind what they looked like: garage mechanics, janitors, or delivery truck drivers. Employees whatever the case, wage-apes. He laughed silently—contempt always gave his spirits a lift—and thanked the fates for sparing him the disgrace of ending up on someone’s payroll. He hadn’t warmed up to Douglas and knew he never would—besides being a bleeding heart and a humorless workaholic, Douglas came from a millionaire family with a social pedigree to go with the money, and the self-assurance that was a legacy of his privilege sometimes stirred in Dare’s hardscrabble heart a desire to bust his nose for no reason except to watch him bleed. But he had to admit that his partner so far had done nothing to support DeeTee’s fears and reservations. He appeared to be a straight shooter, raising the unsettling possibility that the canary had been wrong for the first time in its existence.

He tested the flaps, rudder, and elevators and called that he was ready to go. The tower gave the barometric reading. Mary adjusted the altimeter.

“Clear for takeoff, standard point delta departure,” the voice in his earphones continued. “Temperature three zero Celsius. Be advised Pathways Four Bravo tracking inbound, bearing oh niner five at level seven, forty miles out.”

That would be Tara Whitcomb, returning from one of her solitary runs. Dare aligned the nose, advanced the power levers, and took off. He switched to Knight Air’s company frequency and called Fitz.

“Read you loud and clear,” answered his cheerful voice. Even when he was miserable, that guy sounded like it was Christmas morning.

“We’re on the way. Estimate arrival in two hours. Call you then.” If the tower was monitoring the company radio frequency—which Dare trusted they were not—they would know from that last transmission that his flight plan was a work of fiction. The listed destination, Chukudum, was seventy-five miles away, a distance the Hawker could cover in a little over twenty minutes.

“You can take it from here, darlin’,” he said to Mary.

She gave the exaggerated shrug, shoulders almost touching her ears, that signaled anger or exasperation. Flying with her four to five days a week for the past three months had given him a marital familiarity with her tics and mannerisms. “Wes,” she said, “your social skills are way behind your flying skills. For the hundredth time, please knock that darlin’ shit
off.
”

“Take it from here, First Officer English, ma’am. How’m I doin’ in the social skills department now?”

“You can knock that off too. It’s M-A-R-Y.”

W
HAT IS THE
mother of desire?

What causes a man rich in cattle, honored in war, blessed with sons, endowed with wives, and granted fame to awaken each morning with his thoughts possessed by an infidel girl?

In what womb of heart or mind is this obsessive longing conceived, what milk does it drink that it should grow so strong as to clutch heart and mind with an unbreakable grip?

What is the price of desire?

For now, Bashir and I have set it at two hundred thousand pounds, but it will cost more in the end, and not in currency alone.

Astride Barakat, leaning lightly against the saddle’s backrest, reins in one hand, the other hanging loose at his side, Ibrahim Idris silently vowed that if Allah, the all-merciful, the all-loving-kind, returned Miriam to him, he would atone for his sins by making the pilgrimage. He would see to it that she was made a proper Muslim. He would divorce Howah, the jealous one who had arranged her escape, and take her to wife in Howah’s place.

And if her return was not God’s will?

Then I must, Ibrahim said to himself, submit to God’s will. I must learn resignation. I must not allow this desire to master me. Jihad is also struggle with oneself, it is above all struggle with oneself. Yet “war is enjoined you against the infidels, but this is hateful unto you.” So spoke the Prophet in Sura of the Cow. “Yet perchance you hate a thing which is better for you, and perchance you love a thing which is worse for you—but God knows and you know not.”

Behind him flowed more than five hundred men and nearly that many horses, murahaleen in white, militiamen in tan, some riding double with the horsemen, some afoot. Alongside him, walking, were his two Nuban guides and Kammin, and, riding, his lieutenant, Hamdan, and the militia commander, the same one who had been with him when he first saw Miriam kneeling at her grindstone. He was still a captain, but not quite so zealous as he was then. The captain had been wounded, which, Ibrahim had observed, often sobered a man. Saddle creak, soft jiggle of bits, bridles and rifle slings, tramp of feet, hoof-clop. Sounds of war as much as gunfire and mortar bursts. Sounds that had become hateful to him, and was it possible that this that he had grown to hate was better for his soul while that which he loved and desired was the worse for him? “War is enjoined you against the infidels.” To wage jihad was, then, an act of faith; therefore to hate jihad was to hate the faith. Perhaps that—an apostasy of sorts—was also a sin to be added to the others.