Acts of faith (46 page)

“The plane. Can’t figure out why we didn’t get a light, losing all that fluid.”

“Do not try to change the subject.”

“It’s just that I understand airplanes a whole lot better,” he said after a pause.

“None of that right-stuff crap. You always know what to do next. So what do we do next about this?”

The question came in an uncharacteristically querulous tone. It was also, he realized, a challenge, one he didn’t feel up to accepting.

“Already said what.”

She let out a sigh and placed her hands on her cocked hips, and this petulant stance was likewise out of character; it was as if, in this strange new emotional territory, she were reverting to the mannerisms of adolescence.

“You are pathetic if you think that we can really can go on flying and working together and pretend nothing’s happened.”

“Then we split up. Me and Tony, you with Doug.”

“I have no intentions of flying with Doug. He’s not half the pilot you are.”

Dare said nothing and looked up at the stars of the southern latitudes, the ones he’d used, in the days before GPS, to tell him where he was and thus where to go. Antares and Arcturus, Canopus and Spica and Rigel Kent. All perfectly useless in these circumstances.

“And you are further pathetic,” Mary carried on, “if you think that tonight was just some bitch who got horny because she”—her voice went mock-dramatic—“
had a brush with death.
Jesus, what rubbish. You mean to tell me that you haven’t been able to see how I feel about you?”

With his internal organs tumbling as if they were inside a clothes dryer—his goddamned pancreas was doing flips—he looked at her, trying, in the weak light of the slivered moon, to parse the grammar of her facial expression and see if it agreed with the meaning of her speech.

“It’s been pretty obvious to me how you feel,” she said.

“Thought I’d hid it pretty well. You sure did, right up till tonight.”

“It astonishes me how obtuse men can be. I
had
to hide it. Okay, I don’t want you to think that what happened tonight was all glandular, so.” She drew his face to hers and gave him another kiss.

He stood there in a state of terrified joy, astounded that this woman actually cared for him, desired him, maybe even for Christ’s sake loved him; yet he sensed a certain restraint on his happiness, heard a cautionary warbling in his head. Remember your mama, feeding the old man when his arthritic fingers couldn’t hold a fork? That’s not Mary English, DeeTee warned. You two might be flying a sophisticated piece of technology together, but her attraction to you goes back to the cave. You’ve gotten her through some perilous moments, and she respects you for your powers. Get it? Hope A has been fulfilled. Your competence has overcome all your deficiencies in other areas and won her to you, but that comes with an attached rider: you’ll lose her affections if ever you lose your competence, and the day is coming, Wes, you know it’s coming, when your joints will stiffen—they’re stiffening even now, aren’t they?—and your nerve and instincts will fail and your skills desert you; the day is coming when you won’t know what to do next, and that’s the day she’ll be gone, not because she’s cruel or selfish or shallow but because she isn’t built to be with any man weaker than herself.

And with those thoughts echoing in his brain, he kissed her back, as ardently as she had him, though with less grace.

“Well, goddamn,” he said, holding her by the waist.

“That’s all you got to say?”

“For now, yeah.”

“So how do we handle it?”

“That depends on how you feel about Tony. I mean, if you’ve felt like you say you do all this time, what in the hell have you been doin’ with him?”

“Fair enough. Tony and I drifted into a relationship, and we’ve been drifting ever since, and I suppose one day we’ll drift out of it. That’s how I’d like it to happen anyway, but I don’t think it will now. I’m looking for some advice on damage control.”

“No, you’re not. What y’all are lookin’ for is how to dodge the consequences.”

She tossed her head to one side, her hair swirling across her face, and laughed. “Bingo!”

“Never happen, darlin’. Never happen.”

Man of All Races

I
T WAS A
disastrous rainy season that year in Sudan. Each afternoon cumulus would tower on the horizon and distant thunder would sound false rumors of relief. As the dry season approached, pastures darkened to burnt brown, water holes turned into bowls of cracked clay, and doura stalks took on the color of dried tobacco, growing no higher than a child’s head. The cattle began to show their ribs and shoulder blades. The drought was most severe in Bahr el Ghazal. Fitzhugh heard about what was happening from aid workers sent to that distant province to access the catastrophe. The Dinka had turned to the Masters of the Spear, who could speak to the ancestors, and through them, to the ancient tribal deity, Nialichi. The Masters of the Spear ordered white bulls to be brought to the sacred byres for sacrifice. The bulls’ horns were sharpened, for battle against the hostile spirits that had caused the drought; their throats were slashed and men and women danced around the carcasses, dipping spears into the bulls’ blood while the magic-men called to the ancestors, “Tell Nialichi that our lives have never been so hard, our children are dying. Tell him we must have rain.”

It seemed, however, that Nialichi had other matters to attend to, and his heedlessness sent some people to mission churches to implore the God of the gospels for deliverance; but it seemed that he also had other things on his agenda. Or perhaps he’d reverted to his Old Testament self, for in the hiss of the parching wind, the people heard the harsh pronouncement of his prophet Isaiah,
“Woe to the land shadowing with wings beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.”

The elders conferred about what to do. They spoke to their chiefs, who sent urgent messages for food to the hawaga, the white men who flew the blue and white airplanes that had saved the Dinka from starvation in the past. The hawaga answered that relief would soon come, but first the people had to clear fields and mark them so the airplanes would know where to drop the sacks of grain and the tins of powdered milk. This was done. Now the villagers and the herdsmen in their cattle camps scanned the skies not for clouds and rain but for the blue and white airplanes—which never came. It appeared the hawaga too had more important things on their minds. The people in those isolated settlements had no way of knowing that the white men were prepared to help but couldn’t because the government forbade it. They had no way of knowing that the regime far to the north had seen an opportunity in their catastrophe to break the will of the infidels’ resistance in Bahr el Ghazal. They didn’t hear the mullahs preaching in the mosques of Khartoum that Allah had withheld the rains from the land of the gazelle expressly for that purpose. To fail to take advantage of such a providential event would be an offense to heaven, and so the government ordered the expulsion of the UN teams established in Bahr el Ghazal and decreed that the aid embargo, previously restricted to those parts held by the rebels, would be imposed on the entire province. The only planes that showed up were those sent to evacuate UN workers.

Yet rumors flew that the white men had established big camps, called feeding centers, in certain provincial towns. In their desperation, driven by a hunger that had long since passed from their bellies into their very cells, the people began to walk to the towns, some traveling as far as sixty or seventy miles under a tyrannical sun. The roads Fitzhugh heard, were as he had seen them in the previous famine: filled with emaciated men; with mothers whose breasts had run dry carrying infants with swollen bellies and heads that looked too big for their necks; with the aged and the sick, who sat in the scant shade of shriveled trees to wait for death. Unlike Nialichi and the hawaga and the God of the gospels, it did not keep them waiting for very long.

While the Masters of the Spear had been praying for rain, Fitzhugh had to face the inescapable truth that his own fortunes were now inversely proportional to the fortunes of the southern Sudanese. He was a junior partner in an enterprise that was as much a business as it was a cause (and maybe more the former than the latter). The calamity in Bahr el Ghazal—a sharp spike in the ongoing calamity that was Sudan—was the best thing that could have happened to Knight Air and thus to him.

The UN’s compliance with the embargo left relief entirely in the hands of the independent agencies. Tara Whitcomb’s airline, despite its fleet of fourteen planes, wasn’t able to handle the volume of business. Logisticians from various NGOs began to call on Fitzhugh, asking to charter the G1C and the Hawker. The company’s invoicing doubled and then tripled. One plane would fly out in the morning, the other in the afternoon. If that kept up, Fitzhugh’s five percent share of net profits would come to more than he’d earned in his four years with the UN. Those prospects brought him a joy that outweighed his pity for the starving victims, which shocked him, as a devoted son would be shocked to find his sorrow over the untimely death of a beloved father lightened by the discovery that he’d inherited a small fortune.

In six weeks Knight Air flew sixty-one missions, grossing almost half a million dollars. Rachel Njiru, the secretary and bookkeeper, deducted for expenses and salaries and declared that the company had netted two hundred thousand. The next day Fitzhugh flew to Nairobi to personally present a check to the South African from whom the G1C was being leased. Knight Air now owned the airplane free and clear.

In the meantime UN officials in Kenya pleaded with Khartoum to lift the embargo. After resisting for a time, the fanatics relented. UN Hercules and Buffalos began to make daily airdrops. Tara’s company was contracted to deliver smaller shipments, but Knight Air was left out because of an obscure regulation: to carry UN cargoes, an independent airline had to possess a UN radio call-sign. Douglas got a meeting with base officials and, deploying his persuasive charms, convinced them that in the present emergency, one should be issued to Knight Air.

Fitzhugh, Douglas, and Dare waited for a rush of new clients, but none came. The UN agencies continued to send their business to Pathways.

“Don’t have to think too hard to figure out what’s going on there,” Douglas declared one morning, after he’d returned from a flight. He and Fitzhugh were in the office. Douglas, polishing off a six-pack of Coke, seemed drawn to a high, fine edge, each gray eye cupped by a shadowy crescent as he twisted a pencil through his fingers. “She’s not sleeping with agency logisticians, so that leaves the alternative. She’s got them on her payroll. Ten percent of each flight’s charges goes back to them.”

“You don’t have any proof, and besides, I can’t picture Tara giving kickbacks to anyone.”

Douglas braced the pencil over his two middle fingers, hooking one around each end, as if he meant to break it in two. “That woman’s got everybody sold on the idea that she’s some sort of nun. The flying nun, but hey, you don’t get where she’s gotten without marking a few cards in the deck.” He pulled off his baseball cap and gave it a Frisbee toss across the room. “Talk to those people. You know them. Talk to ’em, see if you can get them to throw some business our way. Give ’em the sales pitch. Tara can’t do it all, and what she can do for nine thousand, we can do for eight.”

“I’ll try,” Fitzhugh said. “But you know, we don’t have the aircraft to handle much more than we do now.”

“Tony and I will do two turnarounds a day if we have to, and so will Wes and Mary.”

This was a different Douglas Braithwaite from the one Fitzhugh had met in Diana Briggs’s house last year. He was harder somehow, annealed by the pressures that had been on him, transforming Knight Air from an idea into a going concern, flying mission after mission in dangerous skies. In the process the old Douglas had not so much vanished as been overshadowed by another side to his personality, which displayed the defects of his virtues. Lately his resolve, passion, and drive manifested themselves in an obsessive quest to surpass Tara Whitcomb. “We’re playing Avis to her Hertz, but not forever,” he’d said, and more than once. Reversing that equation had become the focus of his energies. Tara had done nothing to earn the animosity he’d worked up for her. Was there some strand of hostile competitiveness woven into his American DNA that wouldn’t allow him to be content with second place?

“As far as equipment goes, I’m working on that,” he said now. “There’s a Russian guy in Nairobi looking to lease an Antonov-thirty-two. Tony found out about him. The deal comes complete with a five-man crew. Five-fifty an hour, with a sixty-hour-per-month minimum. The Russian pays the crew and insurance, we pay the rest.”

“So”—Fitzhugh took a calculator out of the desk drawer—“if it does just twenty turnarounds a month, we—”

“Gross about one-sixty,” Douglas cut in. He’d already done the arithmetic. “After lease fees, fuel, and operating costs, net seventy and change. But here’s the sweet thing. An Antonov carries seven and a half tons and cruises at two-twenty. That’s three tons more than one of Pathways’ Andovers and reduces block time by a factor of forty miles an hour. We deliver seven-odd tons, at a buck-thirty a kilo, she delivers four at a little over two bucks. Less for more. We’d be irresistible to any logistics guy trying to stay in budget. I’ll be talking to this Russian or whatever he is in a couple of days.” Douglas spread his arms out wide. “We’ve got the big mo, and if I learned anything from my dad, it’s that when you’ve got the big mo, you keep it rolling.”