James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

It had taken twenty minutes to walk to the village. No time passed before we were at the raw gouge again, over the edge, sliding toward the bottom. The huge pit held us all, the entire village gathered in the middle. They jostled me, but Seydou kept her hand on my back, pushing now, moving to the center. I didn’t feel afraid, but it was as if I’d lost volition. Somewhere between the time when I’d ascended the platform and now, I’d surrendered myself to the day. Villagers’ sweat-damp skin rubbed by me, boys, men, girls, women, the elderly, dancing in the pit. Here their feet dug into mud. Steps splashed. Mud splattered to their knees; on some, it stained their shirts, smeared their faces. People I ran into turned to look, but I had become a space in the crowd; their eyes grew wide. Seydou said in French to them, “It’s fine. Don’t worry,” then she spoke in Dioula.

A voice rose above the chants, swearing. “Whores, you black sons of bitches! Let me go.” Heads turned in that direction. Seydou’s final push brought me to the center, a cleared area ten feet wide. I stood in the middle, Seydou behind me. Two burly men held Devoe between them, pinning his arms to their chests. He roared something in another language. It might have been German, but it sounded obscene. Then, he saw me. “Baily, tell them to let me be.” His face twisted in fear.

Around us the villagers pressed in close, quiet now and intent. Seydou moved beside me, her face shining, then she handed me the knife the dancer had used to cut himself, pointing it toward Devoe who stood a foot away. The closest villagers leaned back. The air crackled. Voices murmured. A man said, “Ça plane!” I didn’t understand. It floats? He looked at my hand. “Le couteau Ça plane!” It means, “The knife, it floats.”

The man’s eyes rolled up to their whites, and he passed out, sinking to the ground. Their stares were on the knife. In the sun, in the glare, I couldn’t see my hand, but the blade stood out, solid and sharp. Had I really disappeared?

Seydou said something. I didn’t get it. I shook my head. She repeated herself, and I thought I understood the words, but they didn’t make sense.

What was I doing there? I wish I could give you the dislocation, the weirdness, how removed from my experience. My life had been spent trying to ease suffering, to calm my sleep so I wouldn’t think about pain a half a world away. But how could I help here? Where did evil reside? Who suffered now? Devoe begged with his eyes.

Seydou said in my ear, “Bad follows the big stone, and bad will find it. Remember, you did no bad.” She licked her palm and wiped Devoe’s cheek; he looked at her without comprehension.

I knew what she intended: I was to kill Devoe, with the knife heavy and blood-sticky in my hand. They wished to avoid the curse. Why would she think I would do this? I put my arm down and stepped back. “No,” I said in English. “This is not for the good.” No one reacted to my words; it was if I’d not spoken. Their eyes locked on the knife. I turned to walk away… and I turned… and nothing happened. My skin cooled, but not as if a breeze came up. More like a cold liquid filled me. An interior cold. The knife came up, dragging my arm with it. Then it flew forward. For an instant, as I lunged toward Devoe, I wondered if my eyes bulged blankly. Was this a sékés?

Something inside him grabbed the blade, a muscle spasm; the knife twisted in my hand, then it pulsed. His heart beat through the handle, and all become wet. My feet were wet. Blood covered my wrist, splashed on the ground; I tasted it on my tongue, coppery and warm. Devoe’s mouth opened as if to speak. Instead, he coughed, lightly, a pink froth on his lips; I barely heard it. He convulsed, tearing the knife from my hand. The men laid him back, the knife a black and silver cross sticking from his stomach’s Golgotha.

Whatever filled me poured out. It fled through my fingers, through my feet.

I rubbed my hand on my pants. What I wanted to do then was kick off my wet shoes and pants. He was on me, touching my skin, squishing between my toes.

Seydou pushed me back and knelt. At first I thought she prayed. I held my hand before me; the palm was clean, but red marked the creases in my fingers. She dug at Devoe’s feet, where the blood had fallen; she scooped out rocky dirt and placed it in a pile to her side. It oozed, and the ooze was blood. She scooped again, then sat back, still holding the gruesome handful, and I could see it in the hole: a red glint. I knelt beside her, placed my hands on the ground. In the tiny pit’s bottom, the sun reflected off a lumpy glass ball the size of a ping pong ball. Blood marked it, and bloody mud surrounded it. For a second, I thought it beat, like a heart, a throb I felt through my palms: once, twice, the mud swelled and receded, then it was still. Seydou dropped the dirt. She cupped the rough diamond so it rested in her hand, then stood, holding it out from her.

“It is done,” she said. The celebration began. Shovels appeared. They dragged Devoe away, buried him deep in the pit’s side. They danced and chanted and sang. More were possessed, and there was much running into each other. Among them all, the panther men stalked, and people gave them room to move, gave them the jungle respect necessary to men who sacrificed their humanity for seven months to live with animals.

Seydou came to me in Devoe’s car. When I could not find the keys, I’d put my head down on the steering wheel and waited. I didn’t care if they killed me. It didn’t matter, because I couldn’t get the knife’s shape from my head. Devoe’s pulse remained in my wrist, transmitted through the killing blade.

She spoke through the passenger’s window. “Bad follows the big stone, and bad will find it.”

The hard plastic steering wheel had become warm beneath my forehead. A single blood spot marked my pants above my left knee. “So you brought a curse upon yourself,” I said heavily.

“We did no bad,” she said. “We didn’t kill him. You held the knife.”

“So the curse comes to me.” I didn’t care. The conversation was irrelevant.

She said, “Intent makes the murderer. I needed you to hold the knife because you weren’t us.”

I didn’t know if what she said was true. Was there no intent? When good men do nothing, evil flourishes. I held the knife. I didn’t move it myself, but was I sorry when it sped home? Devoe died. They didn’t even steal his batteries. I raised my head and looked apathetically into the pit. The villagers had gone, walked away or turned into wisps. Who could know?

Seydou reached into the car, touched my cheek with her knuckles. It was opposite from what she had done to Devoe. It felt as if she were rubbing something onto it. “We have our price out. The debts will be paid, and my people will not work the mines again. We will recover our relatives, the ones buried in the fields, and find a better place for them. You have done much good here. I had a vision a man would come to us from Abdijan.”

She backed away. “I can give you something too. We found a diamond today. A big one, and it will have no curse on it. You should think about how we found it, how it came to us.”

I thought about the knife in my invisible hand. The pouring blood. Was the diamond there before Devoe died, or did his death bring it? For a moment I saw his blood mixing on the ground, and the stone shaping itself. Even as Seydou dug toward it, the mud coming together in its perfect form.

She said, “Magic works. It is a rare thing for a man to see who does not believe. But if there is magic, Bailey, if there is magic, isn’t there a chance there is God too? The saints were God’s tools. He acted through them. Today you were a saint for us, the saint from Abdijan.”