Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [69]
“Please,” she said, “talk to him. Tell him I need to go.”
The soldier eyed her a moment, then leaned over and thrust his hand into the white man’s pocket with a brusque, almost sexual familiarity. He pulled out a blue cloth pouch and handed it to Jill over Petrik’s head; she pulled out the shrink-wrapped bricks of American currency and passed them back, then stuffed the pouch into the bottom of her daypack. She started to rise but the Russian grabbed her arm.
“Please baby.” His face wrecked, pathetic; strings of dry, cottony spittle stuck to his cracked lips. “Give me one kiss and I let you go. Just one kiss baby, it’s not so much.”
It seemed the fastest, easiest way to go, but when she bent to kiss him it wasn’t without some shading of mercy. As her lips met his she reflected that she’d never kissed a crying man before. She shuddered, but didn’t rush; the Africans hooted and clapped. They were still laughing when she started down the path.
They left Falla at two in the afternoon, traveling west through a lush, monotonous country of remnant rain forest and abandoned rice paddies. Jill rode in the Mazda doublecab with Pa Conteh, while Pa’s son Edmund followed in an ancient Mercedes flatbed. Jill had left Freetown with nine trucks, sending them back to the capital on successive days as their loads were delivered. After Falla the Mercedes and Mazda were empty as well; this was the first leg of the homeward trip, and as the potholes and gullies slung her around Jill considered the crude irony of the situation. Up ahead, the U.N. escort; down by her feet, blood diamonds. To gloat on it, even to think it, seemed like bad luck, though she knew that Starkey, a fearless collector of Third World ironies, would relish the story. In this she supposed she would always fail him as a student.
Pa kept riding the bumper of the U.N. jeep, trying to hurry it along. The Ghanian soldiers stared back with scathing indolence.
“These guys,” Pa said in a disgusted voice, “what’s the problem with these guys?”
“Take it easy, Pa. We don’t want to run over the U.N.”
Pa grunted; like most Leoneans he was scared of the dark and loathed the prospect of traveling at night. He was a small, wiry man with a flat-nosed Mende face, easily the best in Jill’s spotty talent pool of drivers. A good mechanic, fluent in Mende and English, and so ferociously loyal that he embarrassed her at times; if Pa had a fault it was his tendency toward pessimism, though Jill reasoned that in most situations he was merely advocating the realist point of view.
“We going to Makela?” he asked for the third time.
“That’s the plan.”
“Lots of soldiers in Makela.”
“According to the officer.”
“We stay the night.”
“I think that would be the smart thing to do.”
He eased off the accelerator, momentarily reassured. Jill kept the daypack on the floor, half-consciously nudging it with her shoe from time to time. They gradually passed into a series of gently rolling hills, the peaks as round and mossy green as turtles’ backs. The rich mineral smell of wet earth filled the cab; dense stands of fetid jungle alternated with grassy fields, the country almost oppressive in its luxuriance. Clusters of mud-wattle huts punctuated the route, their roofs freshly thatched, with staked fields beyond, but Jill could count the human beings she saw on one hand. They’d heard about the trouble and taken off, either to the towns or deep bush; the loneliness of the country, its still, desolate air, set off a hum in her head like a blank tape, and she was glad when the Ghanians passed them off to a detachment of Indian peacekeepers. There were two jeeps now, eight soldiers in all, and the Indians were considered the most professional contingent in the U.N. force. The