The Outcasts (3 page)

“How about the interior? The road. The bridge.”

“Nothing. No one cares. In the interior people fight about important matters only, like sacrilege.”

“Oh. Good. Are you married?”

“No,” Philips said. “And you?”

“Divorced, now. Twice.”

Let it be forgot.

“That's not fire,” he said a few minutes later.

“No. That is the sun, you see,” in a patient, explanatory tone.

Five-fifteen. Morrison quickened. In the faint glow veins of silver streaked the land. The land was quite flat but crisscrossed by silver streaks. “Canals?”

“Irrigation ditches. And drainage ditches. Some are natural. The river is two miles to the east.”

The shacks were closer together now. Beyond them, far off, the rain forest, the river, the blood and bones of a continent. In the blush of dawn dark shapes stirred: a naked woman at a well, a man stretching and then slacking to watch them by, his hands dangling and all his weight on one jaunty hip, bowed leg, flat firm foot. Poultry now, pecking at the roadside. A yellow dog also stretched, forelegs flat, tail like a flag.

“Have you been up all night?”

“No. I merely turned out a bit early.”

“Thank you. You could have sent someone.”

“Protocol,” Philips said. “We are a new nation, sensitive to the minor amenities.”

“Look at the sun. In five minutes.”

“Phoebus' fiery chariot, I believe,” Philips said politely. “I see it every morning. By noontime you will not like it so much. It rushes down in the evening. The tropics.”

Philips went on for a bit about the summer sun in England, and how late it set, and Morrison listened. Philips's voice was like music; not a chant, not a singsong, but gentle, and with a beat and a warmth to it, and the almost-British vowels, and no contractions. As though he loved speaking.

“There are no crops along here,” Morrison said.

“No. We are in the suburbs now. These people have a few chickens and perhaps a goat. They are day workers, unskilled. There are posters at every bus stop urging them to wear clothes and use forks. The ones with transistor radios are the proletariat. The ones with transistor radios and tennis shoes are the bourgeoisie.”

Morrison laughed, drunk in the golden morning, a child within him wide-eyed and happy at the sight of palm trees, gray rotting shacks, red flags and white flags limp in the hot still air; and more people stirring now, black, Chinese, Indians. Letting the child play, he imagined that somewhere in this crowded capital were Lebanese traders and Portuguese merchants and missionaries under broad-brimmed black hats; an English ticket-of-leave man, and an emigre Russian madam and an Irish mercenary soldier and an earnest management consultant from Cleveland; and a drunken doctor; and perhaps even his own sloe-eyed half-caste destiny. Good God.

No. It was more than that. It was euphoria. The rapture of the exile. He was responsible for men, and works, and great sums of money, but he was alone. Alone! And the rain forest and the savanna to swallow him up, if he wanted. Savages, but not as savage as his own kind; cats that ate people, but not one nauga. Fresh running streams, and green mysteries, and a burning sun. He might stay forever. Alone! Free!

Philips blared their way. Dogs and chickens and donkeys—and turkeys!—darted and clopped and fluttered for their lives. A child shouted. Men stared. Women waved. The battered ruin of a bus frayed to a stop, whistling and groaning, and Morrison remembered a story Sims had told: up an Asian river after the war he had passed half an hour in a Buddhist temple before noticing that it was a Liverpool tram. “Low church,” he said. Wheeler had driven a 1926 Rolls-Royce in Samarkand, and had eaten twenty-year-old K rations in Cappadocia.

High above them birds wheeled, then drifted lower: graceful, black, commanding, with black-and-white faces and long, slender black wings. “What are they?”

“Carióncru,” Philips said.

“Carióncru,” Morrison repeated.

Philips smiled. “Very good.”

“I don't understand.”

“Carrion crow,” Philips said distinctly. “We make a different music here.”

“Yes. A pretty music.”

They swung into a long bow to the left, and Morrison saw a small bridge and a dilapidated factory. There was a bad smell and he looked for dung at the roadside, or a drainage ditch, but saw none, and then it was worse, much worse, and they slogged into it. He gagged. It was the thick, liquid stench of a thousand dead, a world gone to rot, a universe of offal. He gagged again and swallowed, held his breath, groped for a handkerchief. A truck approached. Philips swerved left, off the road, and they jolted to an open patch and came to a halt.

“Not here,” Morrison choked. “No.”

“Sorry.” Philips gestured.

The truck blew past: a weapons-carrier. Half a dozen soldiers stood like statues. They carried short weapons with long, curved magazines. They wore steel helmets and were webbed about with bandoleers. The handkerchief at his mouth was useless. He leaned over the side, but before he could retch they were moving.

“They tend to be rude about the right of way,” Philips said. “It is always better to lay by and let them go past.”

Morrison looked back, but the dust had obscured them. “The smell,” he managed. “What is it?”

Philips pointed to the factory. “That is a molasses refinery. I know. It smells like feces. You will not be able to drink rum for a day or two. But you will grow accustomed to it.”

“I hope not. Drive faster, will you?”

“Fifteen hundred people live right here,” Philips said blandly. “To them it is merely the air they breathe.”

Then it was behind them. Morrison tucked away his handkerchief and noticed with mild surprise that he was wearing a jacket and tie. He removed both and sat back exhausted. He could see tall buildings now, a mile ahead. Six storeys, at any rate. A water-tower. To the right, beyond Philips, a muddy river, coffee-colored in the red-gold morning. Coffee. A shop, the sign in Chinese. A service station, familiar, red white and blue, an American name. Policemen: blue-and-white uniforms, frogging, brass buttons. Bicycles, bicycles everywhere. A shoe store. A pharmacy. The streets were thronged, abruptly, as though men had sprung from the earth, bursting by thousands from the morning's seed. Shirts of white, pink, yellow, red, stripes and checks; dresses of orange and yellow and swirling flowered print; women with hair heaped high, with frizzy hair, with white hair; one in an unadorned white brassiere; a white woman, middleaged and bespectacled, with a basket of laundry on her head and one graceful arm propping it. Straw hats, cloth hats, flat, crowned, conical. Shirtless men trailing machetes, donkeys yoked in teams, the red dust of the road rising, a mingling of smells now, and the day's heat beginning. A column of foot-soldiers, and the crowd parted in momentary silence. Honey Road Police Station. Librairie Françhise. The Albert Hotel, ramshackle.

Then a vast open shed, a market, and as they drove slowly past, Morrison saw strange fruits and exotic vegetables, bright yellow and dull red and purple-black. Chickens, live; chickens, dressed. Mounds of nuts and beans. Coffee. Tobacco leaves. An old, old woman, all wrinkles, nearly bald, squatting behind six tomatoes. A heap of coarse yellow flour. Jets of speech, sprays of laughter. Flowing heat. A fat Chinese in madras shorts and a red mandarin hat.

Beyond the market was a traffic circle black with bicycles, and one empty two-ton truck sagging and clanking, billowing and bellowing, leaking dust and exhaust. They had fallen in lazily behind the truck when the firing began, and again Philips wrenched the wheel to the left and ran them off the road, onto the red dust walk, and they were still jerking to a stop when he pushed Morrison's head down. “Look later,” he said. They were blind, bent, cramped, heads on their knees, shoulders touching; they sweated and panted in the waves of acrid heat and petrol fumes.

“What is it?” Morrison whispered.

“God knows,” Philips said in conversational tones. “We will be all right. We have government license plates.”

“That's grand.” Eminent engineer, recently slain, claims diplomatic immunity.

The first burst had been from machine-guns of some kind. Then there were single shots. Then a burst again. There were no shouts, no screams. Trapped and sweating, Morrison remembered a Belgian farmhouse, and the doctor passing out, slumping forward with a handful of sponges and lying peacefully in another man's bloody remains. Then there was another burst and memory fled. Philips's hand was still on his neck. Scuffling. Shouted orders. Men at a trot.

A whistle. Philips straightened, slowly. “I think that is all right now.”

Morrison sat up beside him. The traffic circle was empty. A population had vanished. No troops, no police, no bodies. But immediately the living emerged from doorways. Out of a haberdashery directly in front of them rode a man on a donkey. He was wearing a straw hat with a blue band, and he kicked his mount onto the road and became again a traveler.

“You'd better tell me what's happening,” Morrison said.

“No one knows,” Philips said.

2

The round black head bobbed like a rotted melon, with sunlight beating off the ashen hair; the body dangled. Not much nose left, two fingers missing; a mis-made marionette, even the eyes dulled and uncaring. He hung on one rude crutch at the hotel gate: the porters had not come yet to drive him away. His bad hand begged patiently. He spoke in a language Morrison did not know; but Morrison understood. Morrison could not look away, and for several seconds they stood in the morning light, a rest in the staccato of a wide avenue, breathing the city's brown breath. The black man seemed to focus then; his eyes brightened, and he looked into Morrison's with interest, as though he had waited many days for a man who would not turn away. But Morrison did turn away. He found a small bill and pressed it into that hand, his own fingers crawling and tingling at the touch, and then he turned away, and went back to his room, and washed. When he came out again the man was gone. “There are not many,” Philips said later. “There is a small colony on an island offshore but we have few trained people. We need our doctors and nurses for the healthy. They are almost all white and with independence many of them left.” He shrugged. “Are there many in America?”

“We have hospitals for them.”

“Ah yes. You keep them out of sight.”

That was on the third morning. The hotel squatted beside the main avenue between a night club and a commercial building. There were two storeys of it around a square patio and in the patio was a swimming pool. The rooms were perfectly anonymous and of no country, implacably modern and indistinguishable from rooms in Paramaribo and Lagos, Jakarta and Manila, Bombay and Kingston: plaster, tile, fixtures, bureau, desk, air-conditioner, sterilized tumblers. Prints of exotic flora. Letterhead stationery: Dear Mother, here I am in Persepolis and there is plenty of toilet tissue. Microscopic bars of gift-wrapped soap. Black plastic ash-trays. We are turtles and not travelers, and all over the world identical shells await us.

The avenue outside was broad, parted by an esplanade of grass and flowering shrubbery. In daylight traffic was ceaseless, bicycles and cars and trucks and dogs: small smooth-coated hounds of no breed and various muddy colors. They were everywhere, and they had learned to move with traffic as their ancestors had moved among panthers and snakes; they loped carefree among the wheels, pausing here and there to piss or dung, and they were often killed, leaving pellets and corpses for the beetles and scavenger-birds outside department stores, airlines offices, government ministries and barber shops. The scavenger-birds were officious and awkward, not carrion crows but much smaller, citified, pecking and ripping and fluttering up in raucous clouds to escape cars and trucks; bicyclists avoided them, veering fastidiously around the maggoty meat. The streets reeked of heat and flesh, flowers and exhaust, dung and the river; on the first day Morrison absorbed the reek, on the second he liked it, on the third he forgot it.

He was in khaki and sneakers by then, his nose and forearms lightly sunburnt. He ignored beggars if not lepers; his education had begun. That first morning they had ordered bacon and eggs at six o'clock, and he had been curious: peccary bacon? bird-of-paradise eggs? A young and very small Indian bellhop whose name was Gordon had taken his bag and shown them to a ground-floor room maintained, in honor of his northern eminence, at a temperature of sixty degrees. His sweat dried like ice in seconds. When he asked Gordon to still the machine, Gordon favored him with a sparkling bow, as though Morrison had complimented the country on its superlative climate. Philips and Morrison returned to the warmth of the morning air and took a table beside the pool. The sun was not yet high enough to brighten the patio, nor was it needed; in ninety-five degrees of heat they sat beside the still waters. “What do we have to do in town, and when do we go to the site?”

“In two or three days,” Philips said. “You must buy clothes. Khakis, sandals, a hat, underclothes, and so forth. We will inspect the road on the way out. Although there is not much to be done if you do not approve. You will live in a caravan, as you know, and our field office is also a caravan; a trailer, as you say. They are better than tents. Your blueprints and papers are filed there. The camp is some four miles from the site.” He went on. They had thirty men now, most unskilled, some who knew carpentry and concrete, and the best craneman in the country, who had mastered all the heavy machinery available. The men slept in hammocks. Late every Saturday they boarded lorries and were brought to the capital for their weekend.

“And they are brought back on Monday drunk and maimed.”

“No,” Philips said. “Hung over and maimed.”

“Who's the foreman?”

“Ramesh. An Indian, about sixty, very capable. Softspoken and always calm, a bit of a philosopher. You may be disturbed by the relatively slow pace. Was that mentioned?”