Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [70]
“You are going to Makela?” the officer called up to Pa. He was fit, in early middle age, with alert, hawkish features and a trim mustache. His face and khakis were powdered with rose-colored dust.
“That’s right.”
The officer smiled when he spotted Jill in the cab; his next words seemed directed at her. “We’re going to pull over for a bit, there’s some business near Makela we need to sort out.” His starched, precise English made her think of Starkey. “Nothing to worry about. I shouldn’t think we’ll be long.”
They followed the jeep off the road and parked under a stand of locust trees. So here you are, Jill thought, slowly jamming the daypack under the seat with her feet. Stuck here with your head in the lion’s mouth, and nothing to do but sit still and wait. Edmund walked up to bum a cigarette and get the news; they passed the water jug around, then he went back to his truck to nap. Jill settled her head against the seat and tried to relax. A dull, dry ache had taken root behind her eyes, and amid the full-body throb of general soreness there were pockets of quite specific pain, as if she’d been struck here and there with a baseball bat. She wanted to sleep but her eyes kept flipping open, gazing past the umbrella of trees to the field beyond, then the low forested hills in the distance. The arc of the horizon, the glaring, empty sky, gave her the sense of being trapped in a vast bowl of light.
“Eh, Miss Jill, how long we going to sit?” Pa was fingering the juju bundle around his neck and staring at the soldiers, who didn’t seem to be in any rush. The officer and sergeant were looking through a stack of maps, the officer speaking occasionally into the jeep radio. The other soldiers stood around with their helmets off, smoking and slapping at flies.
“No idea, Pa. It’s their call.”
“What they doing?”
“Scoping out the situation, I guess.”
“Time to go,” Pa muttered gloomily, squinting at the sun. “Too many killing man out here. You just sit, after a while they gonna find you for sure.”
Jill reflected that riding with her number-one driver could be downright depressing sometimes. She rested her head against the seat and watched a flock of herons turning loops above the field, their bodies startling white against the background of green. Their elegance, the serene, fluent curves of their flight, seemed to merge into the ongoing stream of her longing, the desire—only lately admitted—that she very much wanted to go home. She’d chosen this life because she couldn’t imagine any other way, but over time, without her strictly being aware of it, the dead stares of the thousands of amputees had served to drain all the purpose out of her work. Those stares, the aura of hopelessness that always settled over the camps, implied that they knew something Jill didn’t, a basic fact that had taken her years to understand. They were finished, their lives were over—if not now, then soon, and this applied to virtually every other Leonean as well. Her work was a delaying action at best, a brief comfort and hope to a very small few—she was handing them a glass of water through the window while the house burned down around their heads. She couldn’t save them, she couldn’t save anyone but herself, which made her presence here the worst sort of self-indulgence, her mission a long-running fantasy. In this light Starkey began to seem pure to her, his career an ideal she might aspire to. There was truth in that kind of life, a black-edged clarity; more than anyone else she’d ever met, he seemed to operate with a firm understanding of what was and was not possible. Such knowledge seemed to her the key to happiness, or failing that, a way of being that might be plausible, and for a time, sitting there in the sweltering truck, Jill felt as if this version was within her reach.
She could have it, but she would have to quit this kind of life, and the co-op was the deal that would let her walk away. That was the sequence she worked out sitting