Disaster Was My God (26 page)

As for this Bretagne, now that the lad had gotten what he wanted?
Ecch!
Get lost!

I
n her frosty way, Mme. Rimbaud, meanwhile, is ecstatic about the boy’s stroke of good fortune. Gladly, she pays his third-class ticket. Indeed, in a gesture of unparalleled generosity, the Vampire coughs up another hundred francs—to
stay
in Paris.

Shockingly, the boy cleans up for his big moment, and he cleans up well in the new clothes that Mme. Skinflint has bought for him. High-water pants, stingy tie. New bowler hat—then known as
le chapeau melon
—even a haircut and clean nails. Baby-faced and “cherubesque,” he is both a chicken hawk’s dream and a Trojan horse: a cuddly-cute, sixteen-looking-thirteen menace.

And even as he makes ready, Verlaine—à la P. T. Barnum—is hyping the lad all over Paris. The Ardennais Annunciation! Poetry’s Prince! The Uncrowned King!

O
h, and one more thing the lad’s packing: a hundred-line, just-written yawp the likes of which poetry has never seen, “Le Bateau Ivre.” “The Drunken Boat.”

“The Drunken Boat” is a blast as from the Jules Verne moon gun, a flat-out brawling masterpiece rocketing clear to the twentieth century. In fact, the most blindingly new and strange poem the kid has yet conceived—him or anyone else at that time. And all written at incredible speed. Essentially in just two days’ time.

No clowning this time. Slick as a new puppy, the kid’s got his train ticket and his grievances and a very big chip on his shoulder. And this time he is packing the goods.

27
Early Service

“Please,” said Rimbaud as gently as he could to Mr. MacDonald the next morning in the early red cool, the very pleasant cool, before the heat. His guest was then on his knees. Stabbing the ground with an iron tent stake, he was endeavoring to bury the boy, now half covered with a fraying coffee burlap.

After the eruptions and ugly accusations of the night before, the furies had fled—leaving what? Dawn red sky and redder earth, a whisper of breeze. Rimbaud felt both shame and boyish anticipation. Something was poised to happen—something immense, even a baffled form of hope. Still, there was the reality of MacDonald digging and the dead boy now returned to innocence, or at least to human scale. How small the boy was in daylight. No terror, just dead. Thin black legs and two human feet.

“Honestly, better just to leave him,” continued Rimbaud. “This is
what he would want. As a warrior. For us to bury him, this will only antagonize them.”

Lowered by two of the porters, Rimbaud settled himself on the ground, then painfully wrested himself up, supported like a very resolute crab on three of his four appendages. Down: a new sort of normal. At a gesture from him, the porters withdrew. That left three of them, MacDonald, Rimbaud, and the dead boy. Eye to eye with him, Rimbaud noticed in particular his fat black feet. Permanently white on the bottom from pounding the road. Cracked and much enlarged with calluses that had grown like coral over his heels and toes, immune to stone or thorn.

Otherwise, it was morning, all the party knackered, aching, stiff, and dirty. Camel hooves, horse hooves, human feet. Pollen puffs of yellowish dust in the sun as sullen, sleepless men loaded beasts and cinched ropes, the camels groaning,
eer-oowww
. As for Mr. MacDonald, thus warned he did not quibble this time; he seemed, in fact, relieved, for the grave was unsatisfactory, hard-crusted sand, like cement. Pebbly, Rimbaud noted. Pebbly with black bits, and white bits of what looked like crushed seashells, at the bottom of the world, below even the sea. Everywhere now his eyes moved; his sight sniffed at everything, moments and particulars, whoofing up life like an anteater’s snout. MacDonald’s Bible. Black cover. Leather, worn like an old harness. Red-edged pages. Sunburned MacDonald, who, even at this hour, had already sweated through his appalling shirt.

“If you say so,” said MacDonald, with a breath. Momentarily he paused. Wiped his brow with dirty hand and dirtier sleeve.

“They—” began Rimbaud, and he, too, sighed. The effort involved. He felt like he was budging stone, a very large mental stone covering an old mental crypt.
Enough
. He wanted to be freed, manumitted—to any fate whatsoever. Anything but this. And they were getting closer to their objective, four, five days away; he could smell it almost—the ripe, the rushing ever-vastness of the sea. Far clouds, towering clouds over foamy blue slicks. He was desperate, he was relieved; he was on pins, pent up, then thrilled—fit to burst, like a schoolboy aching to be released for the
holidays. And yet even his pain, this cannonball-like dread he dragged, even this was now dulled by the anesthesia of a still greater pain.

Corked
. That was the word for how he felt, he thought,
corked
. Commanded to
shut up
—to listen and await further instructions. What? To be told what? Lord, what would you have me do? Who do you want me to be? Who?

“There is,” Rimbaud continued after some unaccounted-for seconds of this zooming state, “no way to put it right. They will take it as a disrespect. If we bury him. Or pray over him.”

Rimbaud gestured toward the uncooperative distance—being vast. “Those beehivelike formations of rock that you see—the
waidellas
, surely you have seen them.” Clearly, Mr. MacDonald had not. “Well, there he shall be buried. Tombs,” he emphasized. “Always on some elevation. Up on—”

When he jumped! They both did—at a rifle blast.

And look: in a plume of shot and smoke, not thirty feet away, a horse fell. On buckling forelegs, the colossus crumpled. Collapsed in a pile of hooves, neck, and trunk, as in a sweep of robes, squinting from the acrid smoke, the shooter lowered the rifle, stepped away, then reloaded, not even bothering to look at this heap he had made, or the pressured blood spurting from the small hole below the horse’s quivering ear. A used-up horse was all. Finish him off. First chore of a long day.

Thirsty sand. How quickly the blood clabbered. Black pudding. Flies feeding. In seconds, the red black puddle was thick with flies, iridescent and dancing. Innocent, Rimbaud looked around as if at some imagined and very sympathetic audience. Didn’t they yet see the point? After too many pounding days and nights, as expected, the horse was done, even as his replacement was being bridled and saddled. This was the bush. Quick. Efficient.

B
ut the matter still was not finished—no.

For well in sight of this before-breakfast debacle—even as the poor
beast subsided—here, across the camp, stood the two children with Mrs. MacDonald beside them, newly stupefied. Ready again to erupt. As for the children, after days on the road, they, at least, were remarkably unsurprised.

These people! fumed Rimbaud, now trapped. Doing their slaughtering in the camp! And here when he had specifically
told
the man—twice—not to do it in the camp. Do it a distance away, he told him. As was his controlling practice in this part of the world, he then asked the stolid killer to
repeat
his instructions. What did I just say? Repeat it. Look me in the eyes. Tell me exactly what you are going to do.

The host faced his two agog guests.

“The horse could not continue,” he offered almost urbanely. Then, more haplessly, pointing at the shooter, “He was told, specifically told, not to do it
here
. Not now.”

It was, one supposed,
an
answer. Mrs. MacDonald stood thick in shock. “Fresh meat,” he offered. He gestured toward the malign hills. “Feeding the whole village, Madam.” Again, he paused, that gratitude might take effect, applause perhaps. “Instead of coming at us.”

“Quite.” Briskly, Mrs. MacDonald drew in a breath. “Right.”

It was, in short, the horridly ordinary beginning of another dreadful day.

T
hey saw buzzards flying, shiny wings tilting in the strong desert currents.

They saw a walking stone—a giant tortoise. Toad in a shell. Yellow eyes. Grinning, the boy straddled him, giddy-up! Then was told, Come along.

They saw dik-diks, rabbit-sized antelopes. Darling creatures—duly shot for supper.

They saw on a hill, in a rare, large tree with horizontal vegetation, what looked like two ragged black sacks—two witches. No,
shiftas
, their supine guide explained. Highwaymen. Examples, hung until they fell like rotten apples.

They saw—and Rimbaud made it a point to point out to Mr. MacDonald—those grave formations the
waidellas
, which he had been so kind to mention, flat rocks piled not very high on a low hill. Mesas, almost. Slits skimming the distance, like eyes. Indeed, the skinny men, the watching men, unafraid, they stood on the same low hills, easy shots against the sky. Daring the
frangis
. Men hard as fire sticks carrying long, gut-stirring spears. Spears that wobbled ever so slightly as the men moved.

Later, they saw the night, the undersea, the gloom, when all changed and advantage shifted.
Look
, human, as an animal looks into the night when he winds the predator. Open wide your mouth and nostrils. Let the darkness fill your throat like water. Sieve and taste the oyster taste of darkness, salty and brined with fear.

Listen. Really listen
.

Lions letting out roars. Hyenas yipping. Obstreperous frogs both deep and shrill. Shadows weaving shadows, in moonlit shoals—admit finally your utter irrelevance and superfluousness, for you are bait. Feed the fire. Stare at the flames. Check and recheck the guns—hope.

And the feud was on. Here was a relay race of tribes, warriors whose abomination of one another was second only to their sacred duty to kill the
frangi
, that godless affront. Every night now shots were heard. Rimbaud’s hired killers, meanwhile, tried in their awkward way to quell fraying
frangi
nerves—to show, for lack of a better word, some etiquette. Two more kills were brought, not into camp but to the edge of camp—just visible, as proof. Praise the cat who drops the mouse. Coyly dribble more coins. Done.

Then, on the ninth night, six went out to patrol. One heard something, then rode off to look when, up from the deeps, like a shark, suddenly a shadow arose. Became a man who drove his spear clear through his leg—mortally gored the horse, too—as with his spear another hooked him through the back and unhorsed him. Rimbaud’s other killers heard his cries as the two skinners went to work, took from between his legs their slickly warm prize, then happily left the job screaming and deliberately unfinished. And so, as was customary and
agreed—promised in fact—there was another muffled shot, a mercy truly, when his comrades found him.

Returning, the leader looked at Rimbaud with a mixture of rage and shame; the others looked not at all, briefly eating and drinking before they inserted more cartridges in bandoliers, checked guns, then rode out again to exact their revenge. As for the dead man, this would be costly, Rimbaud knew, with much wrangling. Truly, when a
frangi
was involved, what normally just happened, what fell like a crumb before God’s feet, suddenly it soared in tragedy, became cosmic in its consequences and hence in price. The price! Beau-ti-ful was the price.

Otherwise, no one spoke of the man—ever. It was, what was. Back there. Vanished into the whirlwind,
inshallah
. Who could count upon his next breath or second? For here there was only here, only now, and now there was only
on
. Onward. On under Allah’s wing, on to the end.

T
hey were, Rimbaud estimated, now two-thirds of the way, perhaps more. Close enough that, in his mind, almost gravitationally, like an undertow, he could almost hear the roar. Could feel the fabulous pull of the sloshing, the propulsive, the shiningly endless gray blue sea—the Gulf of Aden, then the Red Sea, then the cobalt blue Mediterranean and the quay of Marseille. Of France itself and what his mother and Isabelle would say, and then, as in a play, what he would say, and how rich and resonant it would be. A compact of implicit forgiveness all guided by the evident fact that people change. Have to. Change, as the play of life itself changes. Act, then. Stand over there. Walk differently. Smile.
Try this
.

Yes, in life it was very good to have a play, with distinct parts and well-defined words. A script—that way everyone would know what to say, and how to behave, and so how to act. And instinctively, in this much-revised play, Rimbaud knew he had to prepare, to learn his lines and
act
so as not to
react
. Or rather, not to
over
react, sparking, as he feared, some kind of fracas. Yes, this time it would be different at home, he thought, as different as he, as she, as they were different. Really, a different family. Fifteen years different.