Disaster Was My God (24 page)

“Fergus!” cries Mrs. MacDonald, lest he inquire again. “You heard him.
Up
. Let us now make our choices and go.”

F
ool, thinks Rimbaud, still smarting over MacDonald’s idiocy.

Failed fool thinking that in a land of unwritten rules—inflexible rules—being
nice
would carry him through.

Putrid fool with his primitive, ballyhooing idea of Jesus, chasing his burning bush.

But beneath it all, Rimbaud is disgusted with himself. That back in Harar, what with Djami and Tigist and the beggars—that in a low moment, stupidly, he had taken on the MacDonalds and their children. That now, when all he had was his reputation, that his reputation might be destroyed—him and everyone in his party if the skinny men get the upper hand. Proof forever of the Rimbaud luck.

So it had been two years ago with one of his colleagues—Leonetti, an Italian. Wiped out, him and all his party, including his wife. Thirty-two in all, and not forty kilometers from where they now stand. Even spookier, Rimbaud, all prepared to go, had to stay back at the last minute—problems with the king. Then five days later came the terrible news. With a heavily armed search party, Rimbaud left the next day.

Coming on the scene, he thought what a mercy shipwrecks were, how clean, their horrors swallowed by the sea. Not so here. Days later, here they were, stinking, once-living men in almost archaeological attitudes, the only life spared being those of the camels and horses. Things that actually had value.

Taking out his brass telescope, he saw them to the east, not a quarter of a kilometer away, the skinny men, the defiant, lion-haired men. Through this narrow, wavering aperture, he could see them—white teeth. Mocking them. Laughing and cavorting, under the proscenium of red rock, they were like ancient actors in the bloody final act of some Greek tragedy.

A
nd yet by the third day, whatever his failings, MacDonald is not the goat. By then, amid the heat and the tension and the slow progress, Rimbaud feels the party’s frustrations directed at just one man—him. Angry at him for slipping. Angry at the burden he represents. Angry at the potential disaster if he dies. And angry most of all—after all their agonies—at the pittance they will receive should he survive.

But of all the aggrieved, none are angrier than the sixteen porters
now laboring to carry him, four teams of four, angry at the leg and the dead weight of him, forever sliding and complaining. Mutinous bastards. Too bad he can speak their language. Hence his state of suspense, as he thinks, They’re going to kill me? When are they going to kill me?

Well, why not? Here there is no force in law, no hope of quarter or rescue, and yet for the first days, for almost no reason he can discern, the leader mystique holds, but barely. Then on day three, a big rain falls. It’s a long, dark plume. It’s an inverted mountain in the sky, a floating waterfall rent with white flashes and lightning cracks, torrential in its energy. Driving rain. Hot, then cold rain, it sizzles in the mud, coming down so hard that one almost has to spit to see. No shelter, not even a tree, and in the deluge the porters drop him hard—purposely so in the rain-boiling mud, a spewing gargling sewer where he remains for five hours, freezing and virtually unprotected under a goatskin—a rag, an insult. And so, when the sky clears, as the beasts are collected, Rimbaud sends the MacDonalds on ahead—well ahead with three gunmen. Tells them to stay there, too. Then at gunpoint, by the throat several of them, the mutineers are brought up.

“Drop me in the mud!” he says, in a low, slow, emphatic growl. “Do you think you can do that and get away with it?
Do you?
Do you want to see what I am now prepared to do? Dabir!” he calls, to the leader of the killer clan, “bring it out! The
kit
. Show these bastards what we have for mutineers.”

And so Dabir, with the cleaverlike dagger strapped to his side, Dabir withdraws from his saddlebags the coiled-up bullwhip of braided leather, the notched stakes, and the rawhide straps to bind the wrists and ankles—straps, swears Rimbaud, with which he will stretch them like raw goatskins, with lashes arbitrary in number and entirely at his whim.

“At even a
whiff
of insolence,” he thunders. “Even so slight as the wings of a fly.” He has not lost his frightening flare for drama.

“But who then will carry you?” So asks Abdullahi, their leader—a smart mouth.

“
You
will carry me, Abdullahi—even bloody. Gaze into my eyes. Do you doubt me? Perhaps …” He trails off. “But,” he says, pointing to his
mercenaries, “do not doubt
them
. Especially when I pay them.
Double
, if you try me again. Double to peel you like a banana—you and you and you, if you even so much as
displease
me.”

Anger, it is like a locomotive, roaring and unstoppable—pain’s antidote. But however horrible, however unsound, Rimbaud’s hideous little show is effective as, with new obedience, the now sobered porters carry him off, slowly bouncing like a carcass. But then like a lost god—gazing up at the swallowing sky—Rimbaud stares down at himself, stares as through a microscope at his ruthlessness, horrified at what he was utterly prepared to do.

Still, addled or not, Rimbaud knows one thing: that if he lets up for a second, one night in a blaze of knives and muzzle flashes he and the MacDonalds will wind up like Leonetti and his wife. Twisted wrecks in the cinder road.

“
B
ut, Monsieur Rimbaud,” protests MacDonald on the fourth day. Which, even among bad days, is a very bad day indeed, much of it spent clambering over prehistoric boulders. “But, Monsieur,” he says, all teeth and squint, “under the circumstance, sir, we’ve made very good progress, have we not? I mean the poor children, sir, well, as you can see, Monsieur—”

“
Sir
or
Monsieur
,” spits back Rimbaud. “Pick one!”

Rimbaud then calls down to the bearers.

“
No!
Do not set me down. This will not take long—”

“—But, sir—”

“
—Out
with it.”

“Monsieur—”

“Did you not hear me?
Sir
or
Monsieur.
”

“But, sir—Monsieur,” stumbles MacDonald, flustered. “What with the rocks, they’ve had their little legs run off—the children. Suffer the little children, sir.”

“Oh, good God,” groans Rimbaud, “suffer you, MacDonald.”

“Well, I expect so,” he replies, attempting, for the children’s sake, to
turn this public beating into a moment of levity. “But, Monsieur, please.
Were
you one, once? A child? I mean,
can
you not see their faces?” Rimbaud gives a chop of the arm.

“Down,” he barks as if to an elephant. “Set me down.” Then, fastening on MacDonald, he thunders, “what, then, do
you
propose? That we go plod along until we run out of water? Or stay right here in a spot we can’t defend? Is that
your
idea, you kind, decent man?”

“Oh, God!” cries Mrs. MacDonald in exasperation. “Oh, do let us all go on. And
get on
. Without all this head butting from you two
tortoises.
”

“Mummy,” cries the girl, joining her, “Mummy, make him stop.” She glares at Rimbaud. “Like to see
you
walk!”

“Children, hush!” cries Mr. MacDonald.

“Oh,
you
hush!” snaps Mrs. MacDonald. “Yes, Mr. MacDonald, you are correct. The children are indeed knackered. In view of which, they are, I believe, entitled to have their feelings. Eh,
Mr
. Rimbaud?” Then she lets him have it. “
You
, you posh
poet
, you. You, up there. Reclining—you, sir, on your precious poet’s
pinnacle.
”

Clubbed. With the dreaded word
poet
she flattens him.

“But, please,” says Rimbaud, still desperate for her approval, “but, Madame. I—I wish we could all drink lemonade in the shade. I do. But
…
”

25
Shame

And bad as that day is, that night is worse, the moonlit desert glistening, almost phosphorescent, like the tropical night sea. Nighttime, the worst time. For if the skinny men can see you, rest assured, once darkness falls they are coming to kill you.

Termite mounds ten feet high. Ravines. Glowing reefs of grass and bush. Swirling with light and dark, the ground is indefensible for the defender and almost hallucinatory in its vastness, cloaking like a second skin the night-crawling, diabolically patient skinny men. Of these,
worst of all are the scorned young males—the Immortals, as Rimbaud thinks of them, boys of fifteen or sixteen, vicious as fire ants and hungry for their first kill so the older warriors will stop hazing them. But most of all so they can finally lie with a woman. Get laid. Be a man.

Against this reality, weapons are deployed, animals unloaded, circles laid, and fires started. Let the fire roar, as Rimbaud’s gunmen fan out on snorting, reluctant horses—ten of the twelve, four with long spears to prod the bushes and run down intruders, this as the rest of the pack closes in, with repeater rifles and muskets and curved daggers.

Hy-eet
. Gouging their mounts’ ribs, off they trot, Rimbaud’s hunter-killers. Chewing coffee beans, they are jumpy tonight, eyes on fire after several days with barely any sleep. As for supper, they eat it riding, eat it raw, knifing raw strips off an antelope shot that day, its hind quarters flipped like two saddle bags on the steaming rump of Shaheed’s horse.
Hy-eet
.

F
urze burning and sparks flying, roaring up heaven’s flue. No one really sleeps or eats; other than MacDonald, flipping the pages of his Bible, no one really does anything as one anxious hour passes, then two, then three. When all jump at a distant shot—this followed, endless seconds later, by a final capping shot
so you know
. Then, after another agonizingly long pause, they hear another wild tattoo of shots, one, two, then three and more, roaring into the night.

Breaking open the breech, Rimbaud rechecks his brute-bored double barrel. Sets down his pistol, the lever-action Winchester, too, then lays out fat shotgun shells—ten in neat rows of two. Fast loads if they burst out of the bushes. Blood is squeaking in his ear, heart blood, his eyes dizzy, inhaling, as it were, the whorling, ever-widening darkness. And MacDonald, sitting by his wife with his Bible, his two children squeezed between his knees? Still unarmed. Even now, when any minute they could be attacked and overwhelmed.

Horses and men emerge from the darkness.

“Rinbo!” says the hunt’s leader, Dabir. Eyes blazing, he grins as two horsemen emerge from the darkness, holding, between them, a drape of human meat. “See,” he says proudly, “see what tried us.”

Like cats with limp prey, they drop the bloody corpse. Fifteen or sixteen, perhaps, still limp and oozing. Eye gone and jaw shot off, flap and bone.

“God!” cries Mrs. MacDonald, “Up, up, children.” Shielding the children’s eyes, the MacDonalds disappear behind a tent. No matter. Furze is thrown on the fire, sparks belching—revealing men with their blood up, excitedly settling pistols and daggers and thrusting into the darkness the still warm barrels of dull-gleaming rifles, pointing where they had been, pointing where they had shot. Apparently the first attacker, badly wounded, had crawled off—to die, Dabir assures his employer. Truly. Big blood trail. Black clots. White foam. Lung foam—done. About death, the many species of death, the gunmen are as specific as Eskimos might be enumerating the many varieties of snow. As for Rimbaud, trapped in
his
world with his frightened guests—well, he is mortified. Socially embarrassed. All the more when he knows there can be no putting off this business, the children notwithstanding. For here, dead at his feet, is a bill now due. Same for the one that crawled off and the three more that ran away. For such success there must be shillings.
Shiny
shillings.
Shiny-new
, hence worth more.
English
, the best. Not the thalers used to pay the haulers and camel drivers, not for fine horse warriors such as these. No, no,
the English
. This is what they want.

Thus the bartering starts, as Dabir’s men, like the solid workmen they are, gab and point at the corpse quite as if he were a gazelle.

Beau-ti-ful!

This is a word they like, Shaheed now motioning how
beau-ti-ful
that first blast that took the legs out from under him—shot from a horse, a running shot, too. Rimbaud nods. Yes, yes, he knows well the lethal .45-70. A beauty. A knock-down weapon, with its slow, heavy slug.
Don’t be distracted
. Sit up, Rimbaud, he thinks.
Fuck the children. He
is now the judge and the captain, and if he is not—if at this moment he is
anything less than riveted and commanding—well, then they’re all cooked.
Frangi
children. White children. Here they are nothing—needless mouths to feed.

Meanwhile, he can see Mrs. MacDonald behind the tent, then behind the camels, cloaking the children and whispering. But finally she has had it. Tromping over: