Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [74]
The youth who’d spoken waved down the road with his gun. He was tall and gaunt, bare-chested, his thin Fullah face edged with decorative scars. Bandoliers wreathed his body like a fashion statement—gangsta, that was the style they aspired to. Tupac Shakur was their Haile Selassie.
“Walk on,” he said in a jeering voice. “Nobody stopping you.”
“Yeah, that would be fine, I appreciate that. But what I’m asking is you let my friends come with me, saby? Let them pass, all these people good people here. Nobody here you need be making trouble with.”
The youth laughed; she watched his eyes range past her shoulder, scanning the soldiers at her back. The rest of the mob stood slack-jawed and goggling, their stares like cigarette burns on her skin.
“You and de soldiers, I leave you go outta de goodness a my heart. Everybody else got to stay, das de order. We in charge of security in all dis place now.”
“Come on padi, these people sick. Let these people go to Guendu for the doctor.”
“We got doctor,” he said, raising a laugh from his friends.
“Let them go, nobody but simple people here. Nobody here going to make any trouble for you.” When the youth just stared, Jill added: “I’ll pay.”
He wasn’t impressed. “What you pay,” he snapped.
She pulled the cloth pouch out of her daypack, loosened the drawstring, and poured a spoonful of diamonds into her hand. “This now,” she said, showing him her hand. “And this later,” she lifted the pouch, “when we get to Guendu.”
The youth came forward several steps, close enough for Jill to hear the asthma in his chest. When he saw what she had he went blank for a moment.
“Yah.” He swallowed, came a few steps closer. “You give me everyt’ing now, you free to go. Give me everyt’ing now and all dese people free to go.” When she refused he made a childish swipe at her hand, then played it for a joke when she pulled back. He was laughing, trembling slightly as he glanced from her to the soldiers, trying to solve the hard calculation they presented. The cost of taking them, and his own chances in a fight. Whether he’d be among the lucky when it was all said and done.
“Do the trade,” Jill said quietly. “You’re a very rich man if you do the trade.”
His eyes got busy—diamonds, soldiers, then back to the diamonds. Working the numbers so hard she could hear them squeal. He licked his lips, took one last look at the soldiers, and carefully held out his hand.
Most were manageable. The nuns told them to walk and so they walked, lapsing into a one-track catatonic state in which the next step forward was the only thing. Others, though docile enough, were prone to wandering off or sitting down in the road, and it was a struggle to keep them focused and moving with the group. Those who couldn’t be managed at all—the violent, the contrary, the overwrought—had to be bound and secured in the trucks, where they passed the night howling like kenneled dogs. What the column must have looked like to someone watching from the bush, Jill could only imagine—like a nightmare, an apparition some sorcerer had conjured up, a shambling caravan of demons and freaks. The rebels bought into the spirit of the thing, buzzing up and down the line in their junkheap technicals and yowling like angels of the apocalypse, singing songs, urging the walkers on, doing note-perfect imitations of the lunatics. Toward Jill and the others they assumed a pose of bluff camaraderie, shouting advice and officiously pointing out the stragglers.
The engulfing dark, the fragile beam-shafts of the trucks’ headlights, made it seem as if she was walking down a tunnel or chute, a low, dust-choked space of jagged shadows and light. From time to time Sawhey would leave his jeep and drop back through the column to find her. He’d give her a drink from his canteen, and they would walk together, herding the people at the rear of the column along. The nuns and their staff were farther ahead, spaced at intervals to keep the column intact.
“They just keep going,” Sawhey said during one visit.
“Yes,” said Jill. Everything