The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (20 page)

“Na boat we tek go Guinea, na’ now a de ton back kam,” Sammy says. “A kam back fo’ go skool, na day sojaman dem ketch we, tay tiday nary a ah dae.”

“He went to Guinea but came back for school,” Tim says flatly. “The army caught him so now here he is.”

The kid says this with a smile, like he’s glad it has all worked out this way. Maybe because he’s driving us two idiots around, Daniel thinks. He’s probably never been in a car with two white guys before. Daniel sees something up ahead on the road, a dark shape askew in some kind of disastrous way. Tim sees it too and instinctively puts his hand on his camera. “Dead rebel,” the kid says. He pulls over to the left to head around it; it’s a pickup truck flipped over onto its roof. It must have been hit by something big, a tank round maybe.

“Stop!” Tim yells. “Stop the truck!”

The kid is startled and skids the Suzuki to a halt and Tim has the door open even before it’s stopped moving. Engine parts are sprayed across the road and two charred corpses lie contorted in the wreckage. Tim puts the camera to his eye and crouches down, moving from angle to angle, motor drive whirring.

“Na’ bad bad place dis,” the kid says, turning to Daniel apologetically. “Ah no’ go able koba yu oh.”

Lots of rebels, he can’t protect us, Daniel thinks—something along those lines. “Tim!” Daniel shouts. “Tim, come on, let’s go. It’s not safe.”

Tim doesn’t answer. He’s close up to one of the corpses now, the camera right in its face, click, whir, click, whir. Embarrassment tugs at Daniel but the kid could care less about the dignity of dead rebels at the moment, he’s too worried about live ones.

“Na’ bad bad place dis,” the kid repeats, still convinced Daniel can do something. “Na’ rebel ah de watch for so.”

Daniel just shrugs. The kid waits another moment, looking at him hopefully, and then gets out of the truck with his gun and walks out to the middle of the road. He starts turning slowly in a circle with the gun at his shoulder, scanning the forest for trouble. Jesus, he’d die for us right here if he had to, Daniel thinks. There’s nothing else to do so Daniel climbs out of the truck too and walks over to the wreckage and looks down at one of the rebels. His arms are flung over his head and he has a shocked expression on his face, as if in that final moment he had time to register his disbelief. Mouth open, eyes wide, teeth bared. Tim straightens up and drops the camera back onto his neck.

“Okay,” he says. “Done. Let’s go.”

The kid looks over with relief when he sees them move back towards the truck. He lowers his gun and hurries over. “Na’ bad bad place dis.” Soon they’re speeding down the road again, the forest a pale blur on both sides. Tim empties his camera and slides the roll into his vest pocket and loads in a new one. “The editors will never run those photos but it’s good to send that kind of stuff,” he shouts over the wind. “It reminds them where the fuck you are.”

“Yeah,” Daniel says without much interest. The stunned expression on the dead guy’s face is still in his head. “It sure does.”

THE NEXT TIME the car slows down it’s half an hour later and Daniel is thinking about Nairobi—about Jennifer, more precisely. It’s been a month since she left him and they’ve spoken a few times on the phone but it’s mostly a charade of pretending there’s something left. The truck’s speed backs off a notch and Daniel can feel the kid braking—more of a question mark than a real braking action—and he looks up just in time to hear Tim say, “Shit.”

At first he thinks it’s just another checkpoint, but those are manned by regular army. These guys are shirtless and ill grouped, ranged along one side of the road with their weapons leveled. Daniel feels Tim go tense. “This don’t look good, mate,” he says.

It’s all wrong even before they pull to a full stop. Daniel recognizes the CDF commander from earlier that morning standing furiously apart from the others. The rest are training their guns on the car, one kid even has a grenade launcher leveled at them. If he fires it’ll kill us and half his friends, Daniel thinks. The commander is stripped to the waist and has an ammunition belt over his muscular chest. He’s strung with necklaces of cowry shells and amulets and leather satchels and he’s got some kind of bowler hat on his head with a hatband made of more bullet shells. He’s holding a machete in one hand and a pistol in the other and he walks towards the car pointing the machete at the driver and unloading an incomprehensible torrent of Krio invective. Daniel barely understands a word.

The kid in the driver’s seat puts his palms out and tries to explain himself, but the commander cuts him off in fury and puts the machete under his chin. The kid falls silent, hands still up. Daniel catches something about the Suzuki and the captain back in town—it’s a matter of respect and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with them—but when Tim tries to intercede, one of the fighters swears and cocks his machine gun with a loud clack. He takes three steps backwards, everyone looks at him, and then with a sudden laugh he simply starts shooting.

Time doesn’t slow down or stop or do anything particularly exotic and Daniel certainly doesn’t think anything brave. His mind is still wallowing in disbelief, encumbered by some Western sense that certain things are not allowed to happen and other things certainly can’t happen to him when the gunfire crashes through the heavy midday air. It is only then that he realizes one of the other fighters must have grabbed the barrel of the gun and jerked it upwards because they’re wrestling for the gun now and otherwise the inconceivable would already have happened, he would now be doubled over in the back seat with his chest cavity impossibly opened up and the darkness rushing in on him like the last eclipse of the sun.

Daniel watches it all numbly and without much fear, a few stumbling thoughts about whether this is going to hurt and what his family will think. Tim is curled up in the front seat with his hands up, palms outwards while the kid frantically starts explaining something and the rest of the fighters start cocking their guns. Several of them seem to be arguing with each other. The kid who did the shooting is now at the windshield screaming. The commander is silent. It goes on for a while, the argument rising and falling until at times it seems like they might start shooting each other and other times their attention turns to the car and things slide back towards the unthinkable.

Daniel sits in the back seat wondering dully if diving out of the car at the last moment would save him—no thought of Tim or the driver here, just raw survival—when he catches the commander’s eye. The commander seems to have reached some decision. He shakes his head and raises his pistol and steps up to the kid in the driver’s seat, who is still pleading his case. The kid is still talking when the commander puts the pistol to his head and the kid is still talking when the commander cocks the hammer back and the kid is still talking and not daring to look when the commander tells him to shut the fuck up and then in midsentence he shoots the kid in the head just like that.

The execution is oddly undramatic, the kid just stops talking and falls over. The commander laughs and the other fighters start laughing, the laughter is almost worse than the murder itself and all Daniel can think is that the amount of blood coming out of the kid is unbelievable. It’s everywhere, rivering between the seats and puddling beneath his shoes and covering all of them and everything, even the fighters on the far side of the truck. There’s so much blood on him that in his dull confusion he wonders if maybe he hasn’t been shot as well. He’s not dying, though, Tim’s not dying—everything is the same except that the kid is hanging strangely in his seat and the entire world seems to be made of his blood.

“Jesus,” Tim mutters. “He didn’t have to do that.”

They almost have to kill us now too, Daniel thinks. That line has been crossed and it’s easier to kill us than not to. The fighters glance at one another and then one of them steps backwards. Another one backs up and then a third, a widening circle studded with black little holes. Daniel feels his body go to wood.

“Just a minute,” Tim says loudly, no shake to his voice at all.

The fighters exchange looks. Daniel is too numb to be interested in what Tim is going to say. His tongue feels impossibly thick, his vision has started to go dark around the edges. He watches Tim’s hands find refuge around his camera, automatic reflexes that he probably isn’t even aware of. His thumb flips the rewind lever while the other hand cups the focus ring.

“That’s right,” Tim says. “Don’t move an inch.”

Tim has his camera up and Daniel can hear the whir of the motor drive. The fighters are too puzzled to do anything, even kill him. Tim waves the commander into the picture. He’s shooting and opening the car door and shooting some more, on his feet now and moving from angle to angle, talking like he always does to his subjects though the fighters can’t understand a word. One of them finally glances to either side and then presents his gun self-consciously across his chest in an exaggerated Rambo pose. One by one the others reposition their guns— across the chest, cocked in the elbow, straight up into the air— until they look like a caricature of the nightmare they truly are.

The commander walks over and takes his position out front. Tim runs out of film and keeps talking while his hands unload the roll, pocket it, dig for a new one in his vest and load it back into the camera. The fighters start to jostle one another, trying to get in front. One of them laughs. Another one says something and shoves his friend out of the way. They’re teenagers, Daniel thinks. They’ve probably never had their pictures taken before.

“You’re going to be famous, mates,” Tim says from behind his camera. “You’re all going to be fucking movie stars.”

Daniel hasn’t moved from the back of the truck. The kid, absurdly, is wearing his seatbelt and hangs patiently from it, ignored and irrelevant. The world has already moved on. Daniel pulls a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lights it and sits in the blood and the heat smoking and watching Tim talk to the fighters. Tim says something funny and for a moment the commander’s face opens up like a child’s, laughing, and the next instant he’s a killer again. All of them shift back and forth from men to boys and back to men again before Daniel’s eyes. If we hadn’t come out here this kid wouldn’t be dead, Daniel thinks. If Tim hadn’t done something all three of us would be dead.

Daniel tries to picture it. The killers would move on up the road towards the rest of their brutal little lives while the three of them stayed where they were, unrecognizable in their last agony, forever unconcerned with the affairs of men. The shadows would lengthen and it wouldn’t matter and the sun would set and it wouldn’t matter and finally dusk would creep in—the birdcalls, the sudden agitation of the forest—and still it wouldn’t matter. None of it would ever matter again and it occurs to Daniel, drawing down the last of his cigarette, that no one can say for sure whether the living are really in a position to pity the dead.

Acknowledgments

WITHOUT THE AUDACITY and hard work of many people, this project would have been nothing more than a good idea that never got legs and eventually drove me to madness. My foremost thanks to the writers who have trusted me with their secrets and their stories. I am hopelessly in their debt. Considerable thanks to my agent, David Black, who turns every fresh kill I lay at his feet into an edible dinner—every author should be so lucky. Thanks also to Jason Sacher for completing the marathon of extensive nail-to-board logistics this project required. At Random House, my thanks to Dan Menaker, who invited this book inside, gave it a warm blanket, and has kept it watered and well fed. Thanks also to Jonathan Karp, as well as Matthew Kellogg, Stephanie Higgs, Holly Webber, and Veronica Windholz. My thanks to Pete Hansen, whose driving provided the inspiration for this collection. For introducing and then fostering in me an appreciation for the not-so-delicate pleasures of the Northeastern Pennsylvania GDS Demolition Derby, thanks to Bob, Ronnie, Emily, and Sara Bailin. For early and continuous support as well as all-around cheerleading, my thanks to friends and family, especially my folks, Kevin and Maxine, Lisa and Charlie Cohan, Joe Murphy, Tim Roth, Steve Alden, Frank Clem, Barbara Bloom, Jim MacDonald, and Karen Rizzo.

Deepest thanks always to my dearest, steadfast, partner-in-crime, Susan, as well as to our cowboys, Casey, Owen, and Willem—the engine that drives me.

About the Editor

MARC PARENT is the author of
Turning Stones: My Days and Nights
with Children at Risk,
a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and
Believing It All: What My Children Taught Me About Trout Fishing,
Jelly Toast, and Life.
He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and three sons.

About the Authors

AIMEE BENDER is most recently the author of
Willful Creatures
. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Tin House, Harper’s, and more, as well as heard on NPR’s
This American Life
. She lives in Los Angeles.

BENJAMIN CHEEVER is the author of the memoir
Selling Ben Cheever
and the novels
The Plagiarist, The Partisan, Famous After Death,
and
The Good Nanny
. He has been an editor at
Reader’s Digest
and has taught at Bennington College and the New School for Social Research.

MICHAEL CONNELLY is the author of the bestselling Harry Bosch novels, including
The Narrows, A Darkness More Than Night,
and
City
of Bones,
and the bestselling novels
The Poet, Chasing the Dime, Blood
Work,
and
Void Moon
. He lives in Florida.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER is the author of
The Perfect Storm
and
Fire
. As contributing editor for
Vanity Fair,
he has covered conflicts in West Africa, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. He won a 1999 National Magazine Award for his coverage of war crimes investigations in Kosovo. He lives in Massachusetts and New York.

ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of two novels,
The Giant’s
House
and
Niagara Falls All Over Again,
and a collection of stories,
Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry
.

ROSIE O’DONNELL, the middle of five children, born to a mom with the same name who died in ’73, senior class president, college dropout, standup comic, actress, mom, talk show host, and activist, is the author of
Find Me
.

CHRIS OFFUTT is the author of five books:
Kentucky Straight, Out of
the Woods, The Same River Twice, No Heroes,
and
The Good Brother
. His work has received a Lannan Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an award from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of four bestselling novels,
Object
Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue,
and
Blessings
. She writes “The Last Word” column every other week in
Newsweek
.

JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ is the author of the novels
Claire Marvel, Reservation Road,
and
Bicycle Days
. His work has appeared in
The
New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe,
and
Vogue
. Currently deputy director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife.

ALICE SEBOLD is the author of a novel,
The Lovely Bones,
and of the memoir
Lucky
.

LAUREN SLATER is a psychologist and the author of
Opening Skinner’s
Box, Welcome to My Country,
and
Prozac Diary
. She lives in Massachusetts.