Russell Banks - The Darling

He was thriving, and within a month he had bought himself a Mazda van to carry his goods. I remember sitting with him one afternoon at a beach bar called Last Stop that he liked and had made his informal headquarters. It was a Sunday and very hot, and he had talked me into meeting him there “For the breeze,” he said, “if nothing else. Who knows, you might actually enjoy yourself for a change and meet somebody you’d like and maybe even fall for.” For some reason, Zack was eager to see me involved with a man. “Or a woman,” he said. “Doesn’t matter to me, so long as you get your own pad if you decide to shack up with him. Or her. Two’s company, three’s a drag.”

We sat out on the terrace and drank the local Gulder beer and watched a gang of small boys and girls chase the surf while their tall, slender mothers stood knee-deep in the water with their skirts pulled up and talked. The breeze off the sea was aromatic and cooling. I kicked off my sandals and showed my face to the sun and admitted to Zack that I was glad I’d come out there.

“Yeah. Too bad there’s nobody interesting here today. Probably still too early.” He’d completed a successful sale that morning of a half-dozen rare, elaborately carved chieftain’s stools to a midtown Manhattan gallery and was more pleased with himself than usual. “Actually, this gig’s going so good I’m thinking of setting up a gallery of my own here, with maybe a branch in the States in a year or two. Cut out the middleman, you know?”

“You’re the middleman,” I said. “Jesus, Zack, do you have any idea how you sound?”

“Look, there’s no more trust fund, babe,” he said, spreading his empty hands. “Same with you, y’know. No more checks from Mommy and Daddy waiting at the American Express office. This is Africa , babe, not Ameri-ka. So lighten up, will you?”

“I never took money from my parents, you know that. And don’t call me ‘babe.’”

He scowled. “You put me down all the time, but look at you , for Christ’s sake. Taking U.S. dollars from a university lab that’s financed by a U.S. pharmaceutical company that’s trying to patent and sell a drug that cures a disease that’s been inflicted on the liver of some poor African-American woman who’s addicted to another drug that’s imported by the CIA from Southeast Asia. Terrific. I suppose that’s better than being an upscale African street peddler like me? Because that’s all I am, you know. A street peddler. I mean, c’mon, Hannah, which of us is really working for the enemy?”

“Dawn.”

“Hannah. We’re not underground anymore.”

“Dawn Carrington is who I am here. So I’m still underground.”

“Yeah. Whatever,” he said and flagged the waitress impatiently.

“I used to think I was attracted to dangerous men,” I said. “Dangerous to me , I mean. And I don’t necessarily mean sexually attracted.”

“Fuck you. Find yourself a dangerous man then.” He waved his hand around the bar like an impresario or a pimp. “A little while and the place’ll be full of ’em. The whole fucking city’s full of ’em.” And it was. In the mid-1970s, Accra, and this bar in particular, along with several others like the Wato and Afrikiko’s, were catch basins for First-World drop-ins: anti — Vietnam War draft dodgers, black U.S. military personnel gone AWOL, and ex — Peace Corps volunteers, and probably more than a few of them were CIA agents collecting information on the rest of us and sending it back to Washington. They were Zack’s and my tribesmen and — women, although only a few were women. West Africa was peppered with Americans like us in those years.

“You used to think I was dangerous,” Zack said. “And now you don’t. Is that what you’re saying?” He grinned in a manic way, showing me his perfect teeth. With his gingery hair worn in a ponytail he looked more like a Colorado ski bum than a fugitive would-be terrorist. I didn’t know what I looked like anymore. Actually, I’ve never known. I used to tell people that on the FBI wanted poster I looked like a Mexican hooker, but I wasn’t really sure and in fact was only asking for an opinion.

“I never thought you were dangerous, Zack.”

“Man, you are cold. Just like with Carol, man.” He shivered and abruptly stood. “I’m outa here. I’ll see you back at the apartment later, maybe,” he said and strode off.

I’d hurt his feelings and didn’t care, and he knew it. And he was right: from his point of view, Africa hadn’t warmed me up. Though we shared the apartment, we kept to our separate bedrooms and were rarely there at the same time anyhow, never ate together, and didn’t socialize with the same people. Actually, I socialized with no one, and he hung out with everyone. I liked the city of Accra, though. The huge, bustling city sprawled inland from the sea for miles and was such a glorious and inviting contrast to the gray, old mill towns I’d left behind — those recently abandoned, rust-belt cities like New Bedford and before that Cleveland, which had borne me down almost without my knowing it — that I found Accra irresistible. It was hot, equatorially hot, but thanks to the steady breeze off the Atlantic not uncomfortably humid, and as long as you kept out of the direct sun, it felt ideal — the climate to which human anatomy, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, was perfectly adapted. And I liked the Ghanaian people. They were excitable, loud, confident, and in your face, but in an engaging and good-humored way, waving hands, gesticulating, bending, bowing, and spinning as they talked, haggled, hassled, gossiped, and sang. Like the people, the city itself competed tirelessly for your attention and ear with its unbroken din of car horns and buses and trucks without mufflers, radios blasting from windows and open storefronts and hawkers hawking, babies crying, jackhammers pounding. Everywhere you looked Accra worked to catch and hold your eye with bright, busy color — the tie-dyed and beautifully woven wraps on the women and their elaborately coiled, braided, and beaded hairstyles, glossy black, hatlike structures as precarious as wedding cakes; the Chinese bicycles repainted in gaudy colors; the jammed minivans called tro-tros , the dazzling heaps of fruits and vegetables in the Makola market; and the barbershop signs with crude, hand-painted portraits of black men wearing spiffy Detroit-style haircuts called “747 Wave” and “Barracuda Zip” and “Concord Up.” I liked the street food, especially keli-weli —savory little chunks of plantain fried in palm oil and flavored with ginger and hot peppers and served on a banana leaf — and even grew fond of the culinary leftovers from colonial days, a cup of hot Milo in the morning and for lunch at the office a thick sandwich of Laughing Cow cheese and the spongy white bread that Zack, just to get on my nerves, liked to call bimbo bread.

Never much of a cook, evenings I dined alone and mostly in little hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the neighborhood, where I favored the chopped-spinach dish called kontumbre and fish and rice jollof and the thick, darkly spiced stews. And I liked smoking the very strong Ghanaian marijuana. It was called bingo and sometimes wee , sold by a dealer named Bush Doctor, who hung out by the pool at the Golden Tulip. Zack bought it by the pound and, whenever he motored off to the backcountry on one of his art-buying jaunts, he carried enough with him to fill a tobacco pouch, leaving the rest carelessly behind at the apartment in a quart jam jar. Those nights when he was away, I’d dip into his jar, roll myself a pencil-size joint with tissue paper stripped off the foil liner of a cigarette pack, get sky high in a single swoop, and sit out on the balcony, hidden in darkness, and watch the thronged street below as if ensconced in a private box at Shakespeare’s Globe in seventeenth-century London.