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| Photo by Anja Niedringhaus / AP |
I`m a man I`m a man
Run run run I no go run
Run run I no go run
Brothers and sisters
Na GOAT dey run, n MAN dey stand
I`m a man I`m a man
- Fela Kuti, "Fear Not For Man"
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Every step he took brought him further away from danger eventually. He accepted the tight uncomfortable pants. His gun was safe back there. It moved with his hips. The only place for him was out of this city. Egypt was a crazy idea, but he felt crazy. Crazy was what saved him. He swung the crispy plastic bag like a beggar, because no one would bother a beggar. He forgot about his sidekick, but that was ok, for a while. It was still back there, scraping the top of his ass a little, the biting little fucker.
An hour later, he was on a paved road, his heartbeat back to a casual lightness. Every step sent the city, fraught with gunfire and rebellion, people running amok, killing and taking over their own city, and sucking him in like quicksand as if he cared, in fact the entire last several days and nights, into a single slathered picture memory.
He was wondering about food, but kept walking.
Every now and then a vehicle would pass, either in the direction he came from or in the direction he was headed. Whatever that was. Maybe Egypt, but mostly south. He wouldn’t say no to Egypt. The one fact becoming certain was that when sun went down, he’d have to find a house with something to hide in and sleep. Planning for this was not a new procedure and its moment came without shock or anguish because its regularity predated being hired as a soldier.
Getting into the barracks and company of men was vitalizing. It broke his life of roaming and helplessness and hidden dismay. The people in his village who didn't leave and the refugees who did and who he met on the road all advised him: he should find a rebel group and belong. And then he could achieve something. When he found the group, bivouaced under trees in the desert, they asked him questions and let him enter. Some of the men liked to fight and so fought everywhere, and that was ennobling. Some of the men fought to get payed the way his father sang at weddings, and that was cunning. And some of the men fought with the hope that their fighting elsewhere could some day, somehow, be returned to Chad for revenge and establish the right kind of power. That was inspiring. They made their camp under the trees an unruly junk yard.
Locating food and shelter for the night was child’s play compared to that..
Did he really want to give up being a soldier? The near disaster he was walking away from was the exact opposite of what he wanted to be involved in. It was a mess, men got swallowed eaten and forgotten, he had been tossed aside, and it all meant nothing.
As he saw it, the bag in his hand was two things: his recent self and the shedded skin of that self. Now he was in a blue shirt and tight pants, the clothes of a stranded civilian and easy pickings for anyone who wanted to be tough
As a soldier, he had men all around him. They made a group and as a group they could look outwards at anything that crossed their path. They could choose to engage it or let it pass. A man swinging a bag on the road had to be careful about everything and everyone, especially if they were in a group looking at him. He had to be careful even about the sun going down and dragging the heat of the air with it and from him.
The sound of the diesel truck stopped him from thinking like a lonely person and made him turn around. It shuddered emptily, moving quickly in his direction, rumbling with purpose. Show yourself, he decided and pulled out the fatigues from his bag. He waved it to them: “Hey Hey Hey!”
The truck flew past him, spitting bits of gravel into his neck and hair. He looked at the heavy wheels and thought of jumping on somehow, but it was gone. Then it swerved gently to the side and waited, panting.
“C’mon,” he said.
“What are you doing?” the driver yelled from inside.
There was no good answer for Tewwe. He eventually lifted his shoulders and showed the them the area they were in: nothing.
The man with the rifle said, “He’s got a uniform in that bag.”
The driver tried again. “Where’d you get that uniform from?”
He decided to answer. He spilled everything he knew: about being recruited, offered pay, Captain, the cold building they were bivouacked in the last few nights near the freak Colonel’s compound. But kept the name of the rebel faction and the camp he walked into six months before out of it. Factions had colors and pride and private treacheries. It was all homeland crap, but it still mattered. That was what passed between Tewwe, the two men in the truck and the black hole of the rifle eyeing him.
“We’re going for more men. Get in the back,” the driver yelled. It was a big, open face truck and he moved quickly to the back, climbed the metal panel and jumped over, but not before overhearing the rationale going on up front, that even if he was a deserter, they were already ahead one warm body.
Settling down, squirming around rivets, it never occurred to him until now that someone could see him as a deserter. He was redeploying himself and the dickheads up front will hear about that, he promised.
The sun swiveled across the front of the truck and found a place to land on his left shoulder as they headed south. Realizing this, south and all it entailed changed his mood and his frame of mind. South meant a long, agonizing ride through the desert. He remembered he had no food. Night will come and bring a rattling desert chill to the back of truck. Perturbation, and a minor dread settled on is chest. Shit. He remembered musing about Egypt, when he was free. He reached around, banged on the cab. Nothing came back.
After a long while, he thought very little, especially after the sun left. Peaks of thought were as short and widely separated as the contour of the desert, monohued like the full moon. This was the thin trance of waiting, upon him again. When the truck, breaking the headwind, lurched into a long curving reroute to the left, he didn’t bother to look, just let his body roll with the bend. The stars were dense.
A deep unknown stretch of time later, the truck slowed and then came to a stop. Their forward heading ghosts went on without them. Front doors opened and the two men stepped out silently. The driver stepped to the side and looked in at this passenger.
“Go pee if you want,” he said.
Tewwe didn’t return the look, just shook his head. Then changed his mind. Agile arms and legs sent him over the truck panel and the sand gave slightly under his boots. He didn’t pee. Stretching felt good. The goon with the rifle had his pants down, his back propped against the toasty front grill, trying to dump.
“Where are we going?” he asked the driver, and then inserted his own answer. “Don’t tell me. Fada.”
Tewwe’s juvenile guess made the driver warily curious. “What’s your story again?” Tewwe told him, in crisp, dry terms. He took his time. That it didn’t end well earned sympathetic nodding from the driver. His commandant, higher up than Captain and therefore tantalizingly closer to the pay and rewards promised to everyone, ordered the driver and twelve other men into ambulances provided by the freak’s perverse, unmilitary son. When the citizen-crowds marched, they were supposed to drive up to them, lights and horns flashing and when the crowd let them in, they opened the doors and started shooting.
“Terrible,” he said. “Terrible. I did that, but I also learned how those bastards think.” He touched his head. Locked safely inside. “It’s something your Fada pig-fuck would pull.”
Tewwe took the opportunity to be insulted. “Don’t confuse me with – ” but the driver raised his hand and turned his cheek.
“Joking. Don’t get so hot.” He went to the cab, reached in and pulled out a bag just as the rifleman returned, tying his belt. The driver handed Tewwe the bag of food.
“Came out yellow,” the rifleman said.
“It’s that fish. I told you.”
Tewwe ate a little while the slim driver spoke. The driver liked to use his hands, deftly. He had beliefs, sturdy and earnest, crafted little by little by experience and driver-seat contemplation. Tewwe learned that the commandant was a template for planning and stalwart reserve, working collaterally to build a resolute force of modern, democratic fighters. We will be the spoils you bring home, the commandant told his men, the driver among. And as one, made of many, we will inflict real justice on the thieves and reprobates your family and kin all have to hide from individually.
Tewwe admitted this was the man he wanted to meet all along.
The driver agreed. The commandant himself pulled him aside and sent on this little mission because why? Trust, the driver answered. And loyalty in return. Fighting for the bedouin ass and his son didn’t matter as much as establishing relationships, learning who to trust, and recognizing what you really saw when you looked.
“When I opened fire in the ambulance, I recognized what or who I was shooting. Those people – they’re right. You’ll see. I was breathing their air. And so were you. So was he,” thumbing at the rifleman.
“I just want my pay,” the rifleman snorted, unfunny. When the other two didn’t pay attention, he sucked his gums with his tongue and spit.
Everyone back in their places, the truck churned on. It found a railroad and followed on the right of way. The packed sand and gravel helped their speed and for miles they hurtled track side, slightly canted and aloof from the shifting desert floor.
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| photo credit: Andrea Pistolesi |
All the driver did that night was keep to the simplest route, and on the way passed black misshapen wrecks of tanks, peeled open with fire, still sitting cold and vacated, their turrets pointing south, meaningless and forgotten that night and every night. In the demi-moonlight of mission-haste and nonchalance, they looked like desert rocks. Even though they were also sent this way thirty years before by their employer, the same despot colonel whose whimsical fury was no different attacking the desert or defending his compound. It was also the route the commandant suggested.
In the back, having made friends, the prickly chill and the hunkered waiting in a dull trance didn’t take Tewwe over completely. Instead, he rolled in his mind what the driver was getting at. Justice, until this moment in the back of a fleeing truck, did not really hold any weight. Imams mentioned it but he couldn’t cut through their scolding and berating. Its lightness and certainty may as well have been compassion for aliens in the distant future.
But because of their shared gunfire experience, the driver managed to be the first to put a little context into Tewwe’s thinking. And out of that alchemy, his imagination tried on a little moral clarity. The vicious yellow teeth of thugs who broke into his home and left with his uncle then came back for his older brother, they brought into his home the wind of evil. The policeman who coolly collared his friend Janjan at the market for no good reason and stuck a reptilian finger in Tewwe’s face for silence and permanent foreboding, he spread the evil further. The official who accepted the money in a sack from his mother in one hand and with the other made his mother jerk with a sharp, hooked penetration that forced her to come whenever he called and return home even more frayed and poor – he was the infector and administrator of evil.
And still he was not the cause. These and the countless incidents everyone shared but didn’t speak about, until he couldn’t stand the ringing of awfulness in the air any more and left, it all oozed from the sore of Mustafeh Kep. He knew it because he was old enough to be alive when Mustafeh Kep appeared in his family’s region, sent up from Njdamena by the pig of Fada. They could all be eliminated from his memory at the hands of justice wielded by an army of inflexible men convinced of their truth and rectifying power.
First the sunlight warmed his forehead and eyelids, making sleep a little cozy and pleasant. Then the doors banged shut and he remembered lying in the back of a truck. He sucked in long warm breath and curled over his shoulder as the rifleman stood at the truck panel.
“Get up. We need some breakfast.”
“What the hell are you doing?” the driver asked. He was heaving a large drum of gas into the truck’s fuel line.
I used to live here. “I know this place,” he answered. The cool floral scent of the lake, invisible but faithfully near, whipped around him.
“Hurry up.”
The tight pants screeched up his leg with his quick hop-to and finally tore along the inside seam. He shook his other leg to give it and his asscrack some room and then headed across the dusty road for the family who fried fangasou with the raisins. The pistol rocked and rolled in the jacket’s pocket as he jogged.
It should have felt like a homecoming morning, but the lopsided heft of the gun and the business he rode in with wiped that from his mind. It was only sentimental any way. He was concealing purposes and looking warily in all directions again, reviving that hunch-shouldered need to be invisible.
The building with food was a short walk upwind, but people were watching him already. He realized he was different now, walking upright, dressed modern, eyes on something. Who else wore that here? They were seeing purpose, confusing him with a stranger. Definitely – well, hopefully – not seeing the boy returned, the one who’d left in a panic the last time rebellion was fomenting around here and people started disappearing one at a time, or were popped in the street and left stone cold dead until nightfall and his own family scattered like beetles, children scurrying to hide in other homes. And he, gone.
“Good morning, mother,” he said to the old woman in the doorway. She was either waiting for him or guarding the door, the slanting shadow of morning sunlight cutting her in two. He didn’t want to shout. “Six fangasou. With raisins?” The woman didn’t move, the creases of her face dry and stagnant. Her bright little eyes blinked. He held up the paper money, hoping that would trigger an order to daughters inside. Instead she withdrew from the doorway. Two men sat against the building, regarding him.
He approached the doorway. What was she doing? As his eyes got used to the dark, he didn’t see a soul, not at the work table with the cups, knife and bowl or near the fire with the pan and the snapping grease. A thin almost naked child came around the corner, her mind on something else. A young woman yanked her back. He took a step inside when he heard the two men to his right stand up quickly and hurry away.
He turned around in the doorway as a cloud of dust moved across the street. Down by the truck two men with guns aimed down at a figure spread on the ground, a third waved a gun over the truck and two other men grappled a figure with his hands tucked behind his head. Their voices were secret, wind wiped.
Shit. His body whipped around once, twice. Shit! What?
A sixth man climbed into the cab of the truck, and started the engine. This was daylight organization, precise. The five men herded the driver and rifleman into the truck bed and then drove off, efficiently stranding him.
Bewildered, he backed into the house. Two women held three children while the old woman dangled her hands in front of her body. You’re trespassing, he thought and found a rear door.
The sunlight was brighter back here, opening to the desert. He kept himself against the building, troubled, worrying, scanning his mind for a plan. Mustafeh Kep’s power now proved omnipotent, patrolled with men circling so high off the ground you could never see them. Their vigilance was devotionally hostile and they were deliberately kept untethered. The pitiless speed they used to snatch the truck, the driver, the rifle man, their guns, their plans, their bodies overwhelmed him. He was lost in any direction he went.
He brought himself around to the front again and darted across the street, up another way perpendicular to the main road. There were residences scattered up here, people he knew, and maybe they could shelter him until nightfall, but after that he hadn’t a clue.
There were hills up this way and the road would eventually go out to the lake. But now he recalled the nature of this road. This was the road to the night building, the building among trees that was black inside, without rugs or furniture and an empty morning dread on the walls. The building everyone knew to avoid and swallowed in their minds that it even existed.
The truck sat outside.
A hundred yards away, the ravine he and his cousins played in and used as a safe conduit to visit the building after every incident could still protect him, even now. He crept close to the homes on his way there, then dashed to it when there was no more shelter. The gun, his sidekick, bounced against him.
There really wasn’t any planning in the ravine. He would snake with it, climb up its sides just outside the building, hide and then kill. Get the keys with or without the driver and the rifle man and drive away. More importantly, he would kill. For the first time, killing something that counted. Send his own message that the time had come. That was enough to goad him up the ravine.
The covert crouching was satisfying, menacing on its own. He relished the idea of laying these snarling assholes onto the bloody ground.
It was a quick exposed run from the ravine to the sheltering, desert-flaked sidewall. He sensed the noiseless vacuum of intention all around him. Against the building, but not touching it, he didn’t breathe. Rocks lay everywhere outside, their shadows pointing away from him, pointing away from every spot of the desert they lay in. But there was no where to go.
Then a shriek. It burst through the building and cut deeper and spread its barbs further inside him than he ever dreamed possible. Immediate and quailing like the shriek he heard in his home when they took his older brother to the back room and forced everyone out and he was kept still by the hostile ugly man pointing the weapon.
He was unmovable. And the next queasy wail turned him into water.
From the front a boy came around the corner, carrying a ball of fangasou in his hand. A half-mooned mouthful was bitten from it. He stopped when he saw Tewwe. Unmistakably, his cousin Djamou – this much older, this much left behind. Djamou gasped, uncertain if it was true.
“Djamou!” someone bellowed coming outside. He was reprimanding a child but also gripping a rifle with hair and blood smeared on the butt. He turned the corner and his sun shadowed face found Tewwe. Young Djamou, poised helplessly between now and then couldn't say a word either.
/End
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"The Mercenary Comes Home," © CMMartin, 2011
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