Escape Under the Forever Sky (18 page)

F
OR THE NEXT
two hours the whole village was busy getting ready. More jewelry, more face paint, more feathers. Some of the older girls covered their entire bodies in the same red stuff they used in their hair. I realized that the pictures I had seen of tribal people had in no way prepared me for the real thing. In books, tribal people look so
weird
. I could never understand why people would want to carve scars on their bodies or put plates in their lips or cover their hair with paste. But in person—well, is it really so different from all the piercings people have at home and all the makeup they wear?

Being a
ferenji
didn't get me off the hook. I was
lying exhausted on the dusty ground next to the hut where the women had bathed and fed me when a group of girls led me away to join them under a shady tree. Before I knew it, two of them were arranging my hair in rows of tiny braids like theirs and coating my head—not to mention my face, arms, and legs—with the red paste. “No, really,” I said. “It's okay. You don't have to do that.” But they just laughed and kept braiding.
If Tana and Teddy could only see me now
.

When the chanting started, I knew the ceremony was about to begin. Everyone gathered in an open field, where a dozen men were holding eight emaciated bulls together in a straight line. The bulls were snorting and pawing the ground while the men held them by their long, curved horns to keep them steady. All the girls were yelling like crazy. I stood with Bikila and the two women who had helped me. At first Bikila tried to explain what was going on, but everyone around us was so loud he gave up.

When the crowd parted to let the boys through, I gasped. They were stark naked! Well, except for these skinny little strings they wore crossed over their shoulders, but those didn't count. I tried hard not to
stare, but how could I help it?

The first boy stepped forward, and the crowd chanted louder. He looked around nervously before setting his shoulders, taking a deep breath, and making a running jump for the bull on the end nearest him. He made it up onto the bull's back and started stumbling down the line, holding his arms out wide for balance. It had to have been incredibly hard, because aside from the fact that the animals were struggling to get away, Ethiopian cattle have huge humps on their backs, so the boy's path was both unsteady and uneven.

The boy made it to the third bull before falling, and it took him two more tries to get all the way across. But when he did, the crowd let out a gigantic cheer, and there was dancing and singing as if we were at a high school pep rally.

The fourth boy was taking his turn and I was wondering how much longer I'd be able to keep standing. That's when I saw them.

Markos, Dawit, and Helena
.

I grabbed Bikila's arm and yelled into his ear, “That's them! That's them!” He read the terror in my
face and shoved me behind him, shielding me from view. My whole body trembled. I crouched down low, so close to Bikila that I could follow the trickle of sweat running down his dark brown skin, bumping over the neat rows of scars on his back.

The chanting died out as more people noticed the intruders. Peering through the space between Bikila's arm and his body, I had a clear view of Markos. He slapped his hand against his gun while he talked, just to make sure any idiot could tell he meant business. I kept seeing the black dog lying dead in the dirt.

Now Abba was talking to them. I couldn't understand a word, of course, but I could guess. Markos was probably making up some ridiculous story about what a liar I am and how my parents sent him to get me, how worried they were about me, blah, blah, blah. For all I knew, he might even have been telling them Helena is my mother. Who were they going to believe?

I leaned my head out another inch for a better view, and in the same second Dawit turned in my direction. I froze like a wild animal caught in a spotlight.
Maybe if I don't move, I'll be invisible
. But, no, Dawit's eyes found
mine. It was so quick I couldn't be 100 percent positive he had seen me, but I was pretty sure he had. At least it felt like he had. But then he turned around again as though nothing had happened.

I was stunned. Was it actually possible that Dawit would let me escape?
“I am sorry, Lucy,”
he had said. Maybe he really was.

Now it looked like Markos was getting angry. He started yelling and jabbing the air with his finger. I saw Abba shake his head, and then Markos ran to the nearest hut and leaned inside. Two of the village men ran after him and tried to pull him out. With all the fighting going on, no one noticed when Abba caught Bikila's eye. Bikila nodded and the older man gave a small thrust of his chin.

“Go!” Bikila whispered to me. “We go now.” Waves of relief flooded over me as we melted back into the crowd and hurried to squat down behind the nearest hut. I couldn't believe it—the villagers were letting me go!

“Bikila, what happened?” I asked as soon as we were hidden.

“He say you run away and your father ask him to find you.”

“But why did Abba tell you to hide me?”

Bikila's face grew serious. “That man is very bad. He has angry
zar
.”

I knew from the Ethnological Museum that a
zar
is a person's inner spirit. So Markos has an angry
zar
. I guess that's one way of looking at it.

“He has no respect. He yell to Abba. He want to go inside house after Abba say no.” Bikila stood up. “We go now, Lucy.”

I nodded, but a wild hope made me hesitate. I grabbed Bikila's arm. “Bikila, wait a sec—”

He stopped.

“Are we anywhere near Guge?”

A huge grin lit up Bikila's face, the circles of red and white paint crinkling around his eyes. “Foosball!”

Teddy
.

W
E SAT ON
the floor of the
tukul
, Teddy, his little sister, his father, and I, watching his mother perform the coffee ceremony. Teddy's house looked different from the ones in the tribal village. It was round, with walls made of mud and grass, but it had a pointed roof, and it was wider in diameter and a lot taller. You could stand up anywhere inside. People here dressed differently too. Some, like Teddy, his father, and his sister, had on Western clothes, and others, like his mother, wore national clothes.

Bikila and I had walked for about two miles. It took us an hour, first through some woods and then along a dirt road, although it probably would have
taken about half the time if I hadn't been in such lousy shape. It drove me crazy to go so slowly. I kept waiting for Markos to spring out from behind the next tree, rifle cocked and ready. Even now I couldn't fully relax. I remembered how furious he had been back in the tribal village.
He must be out of his mind by now
.

Bikila had gone back to his village for the big party after the
ukuli bula
. I cried when he left, and he gave me one of his hair feathers as a keepsake, which I now wore in my own braided, red, oiled hair, completing my look as a tribal Pippi Longstocking.

Teddy's mother spread lavender branches and eucalyptus leaves over the dirt floor, filled a metal pan with pale green fresh coffee beans, and placed the pan over the cooking fire. The smell of the roasting beans mixed with the scent of eucalyptus and lavender was clean and potent. While we waited for the coffee, Teddy and I shared a dish of popcorn, some half popped, some burned, all of it nutty and delicious. The walls of the
tukul
curved in and down to make two narrow sleeping platforms, and I sat with my back against one of them.

I was thinking that Teddy seemed different here in
his own home, bigger and older somehow, and I must have had a strange look on my face because he asked, “What is it?”

“I don't know. I was just thinking that you look different.”

“Really?” he said, tugging on one of my pasty braids and smiling his gorgeous smile. “You do not look different at all.”

Teddy's mother offered me a turn grinding the beans with a mortar and pestle. I was glad to have something helpful to do because there was no way I could even begin to talk about what had happened. It had been all I could do just to get myself to say the word
kidnapped
and ask them to call my mother.

When the coffee was ready, Teddy's mother added one part sugar for every two parts liquid and passed around the cups, smiling and nodding when she gave me mine. It tasted almost like tea, with none of the bitterness coffee usually has. Teddy's family seemed to sense my need for quiet, and we drank our coffee in silence. Conversation would have been difficult anyway, since Teddy's family doesn't speak English.

When we were done, Teddy asked me if I wanted
to go outside for a while. I was grateful for something to distract me from counting the minutes until my parents arrived. Teddy pointed out the main sites of the village as we walked. “That is the house of Yonas, my laziest friend,” he said. “And there is the papaya tree I fell from when I was six years old and broke my arm.”

Some boys were playing soccer in the road, using a bundle of rags for a ball. Teddy waved at them, and they stopped their game to stare at me. I noticed several women wearing traditional long skirts and white
netala
shawls and using pink plastic umbrellas as sunshades. Skinny sheep with long fluffy tails dozed by the roadside, and humpback cows were grazing in the fields around us, though I couldn't imagine what they could find to eat in the bare, dusty earth.

We had almost reached the end of the village when I spotted it, standing in all its glory surrounded by teams of worshipping teenage boys.

“Behold!” Teddy said, grinning. “The famous Guge foosball table.”

“A beacon for lost American teenagers,” I added, pointing at it with my walking stick.

“Lucy . . .” Teddy wasn't smiling anymore.

“Yeah?”

“You could have been lost forever.”

“I know,” I said softly.

Teddy turned to me and took my free hand in both of his. Then he leaned down and gently pressed his forehead against mine. “I am happy that you are safe,” he whispered.

It wasn't my first kiss, but by Ethiopian standards it was close enough.

W
E HEARD THE
helicopters way before we saw them—that unmistakable
chop-chop-chop
sound that signaled the real, true end of my ordeal. In seconds, three Black Hawks had landed in the field, and soldiers in black body armor poured out the open sides. Villagers scattered toward their huts, their hands over their faces to protect them from the swirling dust.

But I barely noticed any of it because there they were at last, my mother and father, stooping low under the propellers and gazing around wildly. All I wanted to do was run to them, but for some reason I couldn't move.

“Lucy!” Mom screamed, and the sound of her
voice freed me. I let go of Teddy and started limping toward them as fast as I could—and then tripped over a rock and fell flat on my face. I struggled to get up, but I didn't have to because all of sudden Mom and Dad were there. They pulled me into their arms and the three of us clung together, crying. Mom was practically hysterical, and Dad just kept smoothing my hair back from my face and saying my name over and over again. “Lucy, my Lulu.”

And all I could say was, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry.”