Russell Banks - The Darling

Beyond all that, even if I was just being paranoid in that Liberian way, and none of it were true, and there was no warrant, no reward, and in the passage of time and the blur of alcohol and drugs and the intoxication of having ruled his tiny country with absolute power for so many years, Charles had forgotten me altogether, I was nonetheless a white woman alone, a sexual curiosity, spoilage, perhaps, at my advanced age, but with a little use still left to the madmen and crazed boys here in the madhouse.

For the first time since leaving my farm in the Adirondacks, I wondered if somewhere along the way — going back to those early days in Mississippi and Louisiana and coming forward to the afternoon at the farm when I suddenly announced to Anthea that I was returning to Liberia to learn what had happened to my sons — I wondered if I had lost my mind. Not figuratively, but literally. I thought, I could be a madwoman . And I wondered if I was standing there in the dark by the side of a narrow, unpaved road in the eastern hills of Liberia because somewhere back there, without knowing it, I’d lost touch with reality. Lost it in small bits, a single molecule of sanity at a time in a slow, invisible, irreversible process of erosion, and couldn’t notice it while it was happening, couldn’t take its measure, until now, when it was too late.

On the driver’s side of the truck, Mamoud was hurriedly unfolding a stiff, old tarpaulin and spreading it over the lumber and tying it down at the corners. He worked his way around to my side, and I darted four or five steps away from him, ready to make my escape. I looked toward the front of the truck, searching for a rock, a brick, something to injure him with.

Mamoud said, “Checkpoints be comin’ up now, missy. Dem won’t bother me none, but mebbe best f’ you t’ hide back here.” He held up the corner of the tarp and indicated with a nod a hollowed-out area the size of a coffin in the middle of the cargo.

“Oh! You want to hide me,” I said, relieved. “You don’t think that’s the first place they’ll look, under the tarp?”

They wouldn’t look there, he explained, because they knew that that was where he carried the stuff he didn’t want them to see. Perfect Liberian logic. Surprised at the turnaround and a little shaky, for I had gone into fight or flight and my adrenalin was running high, I climbed onto the stacked lumber. When I had lain myself down in the hiding place, Mamoud drew the tarp over me and finished tying it at the corners, leaving a flap loose so I could peek out and breathe fresh air. A moment later, the truck was chugging along the rutted road and then trundling steadily downhill from the highlands towards the towns of the savannah and the cities of the coast.

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT I rode back there, stretched out between the boards, sweltering from the heat, jostled, pitched, and bumped, and every now and then I peered out from under the tarpaulin, and when I did I felt more borne down by the wet air than by the stiff canvas. A decade in the hills and valleys of upstate New York and I’d almost forgotten the moist weight, even at night, of the tropical air against my body, its nearly tangible density, as if, between the tarpaulin and the freshly planed planks that I lay upon, a large animal were holding me down. And the odor of the bleeding green lumber and of the canvas that hid me, old, patched, and smelling of rotten fruit and urine and wood smoke, made me nauseated and dizzy.

My discomfort disappointed the puritan in me. I wondered if in those few years away I’d turned delicate and, traveling again in Africa, would have to hold a scented hanky to my nose. For that’s all this was, the same old smell of Africa and its sense-surrounding, watery heat and its sounds — the blat of a battered, out-of-tune diesel truck and, whenever the truck passed through a village or town or came to a crossing and slowed and the clatter of the engine eased, the yips of a small dog, the clack of dominoes against a masonite lapboard, or a transistor radio playing its lonely juju song to no one at a village crossroads cookshop. Once, I heard the call of a desperate boy from the side of the road as the truck rumbled past him, Take me wit’ you, take me to Monrovia, to the city, an’ from there, m’am, carry me to the Great World beyond, where is plenty of jollof rice an’ tinned meats an’ good water, where no one sick, no one hungry, no one ’fraid! All of it, his whole, long, hapless plea compressed into one repeated, fading cry, “Hoy, hoy, hoy!” as the truck picked up speed and roared down the red-dirt road into the African night.

Several times the truck was stopped at checkpoints — gates, we used to call them — at Ganta and where the road crosses the St. John River. Without looking, I could tell where we were, because the map of Liberia and its few roads were still clear in my mind’s eye, and I knew people in these towns, or once had known them, and was even related to some of them by marriage, for we were not far now from Fuama, my husband’s tribal village. But surely most of those people, all Liberians, were gone by now, dead or swept away like dry leaves by the fierce wind that had blown across the country in the civil war and burned by the fires of chaos that had followed. Even if they had somehow survived and still lived in their old homes and villages, they would have been of little help to me anyhow. Not now. Not back then either, when we were all running for our individual lives.

The truck wheezed and slowed and downshifted, then crept along for a few moments at a walking pace, and I knew that we were approaching another checkpoint. Then the truck stopped, and I heard men’s low voices, speaking first in a Krahn dialect, then switching quickly to Liberian English for Mamoud, the Monrovian Lebanese, with light, conspiratorial, male-bonding laughter interjected — he was a regular on this route, obviously, and he paid the soldiers on time and gave them good dash. Yeah, Mamoud, him a good Arab guy . A loud hand slap on the front fender of the truck, like a slap on a horse’s flank, granting permission to leave, and the truck moved ahead again, soon picking up speed.

I was wrapped in my thoughts in the darkness like an animal hiding in its burrow. I had a plan. I wasn’t so out of touch with reality, I wasn’t so far gone that I had come out here without some sort of blueprint. Lord knows it wasn’t much of a plan. It couldn’t be; there was so little here that I could predict or control. I had in my mind merely a vaguely worded, partially completed outline whose blanks I would fill in as I passed from moment to moment: I would get into the country somehow; I would make my way to Monrovia; I would ask after my sons in a way that would not put me or them in danger, although I had no idea yet whom I would be able to ask; and I would either go to my sons, wherever they were, and try to bring them home with me or, if no one could tell me where they were, I would leave the country and return to my farm. That was it. That was as far in advance of my actions as I was able to think.

I was carrying enough U.S. currency around my waist and in my backpack to buy my way through these few steps and probably enough to let me take advantage of any exigencies or opportunities that arose. Unless, of course, I were attacked, stripped, robbed, or worse. Mostly, though, I counted on buying my safety. The comforting and most useful thing about total corruption is that it’s total. It’s systemic, top to bottom, and therefore predictable and more or less rational. So I wasn’t being especially brave or even reckless.

I don’t travel in fear anyhow; I never have. When I am afraid, I don’t travel at all; I stay put. Years ago, when I was in my early thirties and living underground in the States, moving from safe house to safe house, I was taught by comrades more experienced at flight than I that if a person, especially a woman, travels in fear, she is never safe. So if you’re afraid, don’t move. Freeze. Disappear into the scenery. You’ll only attract attention to yourself by running.