Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [73]
“Miss.” Sawhey had appeared at her side with an enlisted man— did they mean to drag her off too? “Please, Miss, we need to leave at once.”
“How far is it to Guendu?” she asked sharply.
“Fourteen kilometers,” he answered with supreme patience. “Please, I insist that you come with us at once.”
“We’ll walk them out. We’ll put as many on the trucks as we can and the rest will have to walk.”
Sawhey blinked; it was as if she’d jabbed him with a pin. “My orders are to evacuate staff.”
“And you’ll evacuate staff, nobody’s telling you not to evacuate staff. But you can bring out everybody else too.”
He seemed to hold his breath as he glanced over the crowd. “It can’t be done.”
“Of course it can. We’ll make a column, we’ll put the jeeps and trucks at the front and the back and everybody else will be in the middle. It’ll be slow but we can make it.”
For a split second his discipline cracked, his face collapsing as if punched from inside. “Don’t you think I would save them if I could?” he cried. “I can’t handle these people, I don’t have the men. Even if we try that mob will fire before we reach the first gate.”
“They won’t if they know you’ll fire back.”
He seemed to plead with her now. “I don’t have enough men, can’t you see that? Perhaps they’d wait until dark, perhaps we’d get that far. But as soon as night falls we’ll be slaughtered.”
It surpassed her, simply carried her along—in some clenched part of herself she registered surprise, a faint grace-note of wonder as it happened.
“No,” she told Sawhey, “I can fix that. Those people aren’t going to touch us.”
Later, playing it back in her mind, she found that whole blocks of memory had been lost to her. She couldn’t recall getting her daypack from the Mazda, nor stepping into the open away from the trucks, away from the thin, sheltering line of soldiers. There must have been an exchange, an understanding of sorts, because she started down the road with a vague sense of assurance, a mental imprint of their rifles coming to bear. Then it was all jump cuts and pieces of things, fragments spliced one after another—the awful heat, the scything birdsong in the bush, her nausea and a sharp copper taste in her mouth. How the sun threw orange shafts of light across the road, shadow and light alternating like flattened stairs, and how the rebels fell silent when they saw her coming. Like a switch had been thrown, that sudden, then her despair when they rallied and started in again, howling, obscenely urging her on.
At a certain point she lost the sense of her feet touching the ground. Things went away, spinning off as if gravity had lost its hold—mainly it was about not showing fear at precisely those moments when you were most afraid. Eyes, mouth, voice, strict control of the pressure points, because fear was a tacit form of consent. She was close enough now to see the lumps in their skin, the juju bundles they’d sewn into themselves. They wore rags and tatters of clothes but fairly bristled with weapons; they were boys, teenagers most of them, red-eyed, heads swiveling as they drifted toward the gate. Giggling, clearly messed up on something. Several pointed their guns at her and laughed.
She stopped on a line even with the two stone portals. “Who’s the head man,” she called in a neutral voice, pitching it between request and command.
There was more laughter. “You a long way from home,” a voice answered.
“Sure, padi. But don’t you know I