Russell Banks - The Darling

The night of the coup, however, Woodrow surprised me and did not stay out till dawn or beyond. Instead he arrived home around one a.m. Jeannine and I rushed from our bedrooms to the living room to see who or what had caused the dogs to bark. I flipped on the light, and there he was, standing by the door like a burglar caught in the act.

“You’re home early,” I said.

“Yes.” Then, speaking slowly, almost with a drawl, he said, “I’m lucky to be home at all, if you want to know the truth. Have you been listening to the radio?”

“No. I was at the lab till supper, and Jeannine was with the boys all afternoon outside. Why? Did we miss something?”

“You missed something, yes.” Quickly, he told us what had happened that afternoon and evening and gave us an indication of what would likely happen tomorrow. A dozen enlisted men led by an illiterate master sergeant named Samuel Doe had pushed their way into the Executive Mansion, and facing barely token opposition from the president’s personal security force, had captured Tolbert and placed him under arrest. Their boldness and the suddenness of the attack had bought them sufficient time and unpredictability to let them capture and imprison in a single afternoon all of the president’s ministers, including, of course, Woodrow, along with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the few generals still loyal to William Tolbert. The soldiers simply walked into the offices, homes, and restaurants where the officials happened to be working or dining and took them at gunpoint to the damp, windowless cells at Barclay Barracks. By midnight, Sergeant Doe and his men had released several of the lesser ministers, again including Woodrow, and the generals, in exchange for their pledge of support for the coup. They announced over the radio that they had overthrown William Tolbert’s corrupt and barbarous regime. Sergeant Doe stammered and stumbled his way through the announcement, as if making it up as he went along. Then he and his men eviscerated the president with their bayonets and tossed him and his guts from the window of his office to the lawn below.

“These boys mean business. They’re going to clean house,” Woodrow said, and poured himself three fingers of whiskey and drank it off.

“What are you going to do? What are the Americans doing?” I asked.

“The usual. They’re evacuating most of their embassy staff and any U.S. nationals who want to leave. The cultural attaché over there, Sam Clement, called to check on you and the boys, actually. Kind of surprised me. I guess they still regard you as a U.S. citizen over there. Anyhow, I told him we’ll be all right,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“These new boys, they know they’re going to need a few people like me just to keep things running. They’re enlisted men is all, soldiers, sergeants and corporals, mostly illiterate Krahn country boys, and they’re already scared of what they’ve done. They even want Charles Taylor to come home and help them run the country,” he said, and abruptly gave a pleased cackle. “Ha! I may come out of this with a promotion!”

Jeannine in her nightgown and cotton robe, castoffs I’d given her, stood listening at the door, half hidden in the darkness of the hallway. “You wan’ some supper, Mistah Sundiata?” she asked. She rubbed her eyes like a child wakened unexpectedly from sleep.

“No, no, I’m fine! You two go on to bed. I’ve got to check through my files. There are some things I’d just as soon keep out of the hands of anyone who might come looking,” he said, and poured himself another drink. “Can’t be too careful at a time like this.” His face was covered with a film of sweat, whether with excitement or fear I couldn’t tell. Possibly, in this climate, it was the whiskey: Scotch is a northern-latitude drink. Woodrow’s consumption of alcohol had gradually increased over the last year or so, and I’d begun to suspect that he was becoming an alcoholic. I’d never lived with an alcoholic before and wasn’t sure what to expect or how to measure the disease’s stealthy approach.

“I’ll fix you some chicken,” Jeannine said and headed for the kitchen.

“Fine, fine, fine. I’ll eat it in here!” he hollered.

“Good night, Woodrow,” I said, and turned and walked slowly down the hallway to my bed. I wondered if the symptoms of alcoholism were different for Africans than for Americans, for blacks than for whites. A drunk is a drunk, I decided, regardless of his race or culture.

A while later, from the bedroom, I smelled paper burning. The living room fireplace was mostly for decorative purposes and had a lousy draft, but was cheering on a rain-chilled evening. Woodrow was cleaning out his files, erasing paper trails that might link him to the doomed and despised president and his inner circle, a circle that Woodrow had for so long tried to join but that, despite his best efforts at flattery, servility, and faithfulness, had rebuffed him. No wonder he seemed almost pleased by the coup. No wonder he’d cackled with delight at the prospect of his good friend Charles Taylor’s triumphant return.

Sometime later, I was wakened by a woman’s light laugh. Jeannine’s? Then silence. I could still smell the smoke of burnt paper, but it was old, cold smoke now. It was nearly dawn, birds were making their first chirps, and Woodrow still hadn’t come in to bed. Then I heard that all-too-familiar thumping, the sound of my headboard being bumped against the wall by Woodrow’s tireless thrusting — only this time, for the first time, it wasn’t my bed, our bed, and the wall wasn’t the one behind my pillow. I knew at once that Woodrow was with Jeannine, and the bed was hers, the wall the one behind her head in the small room beyond the boys’ bedroom. I lay there curled on my side like a question mark, listening, unable to shut out the sound of my husband fucking his niece, my sons’ nanny, my friend, perhaps the only human friend I had in those days. And did I want to do the normal thing — leap from my bed, run down the hall, fling open the door to Jeannine’s room, and shriek bloody murder at the treacherous bitch and bastard adulterer of a husband? Did I want to expose and humiliate them both? Would my relationship with the two of them be forever changed?

No. None of it. It was as if they had been doing this for years, since the first week of our marriage, and I had come to accept it as normal and even necessary. Simply, it was how we lived now, Woodrow and the boys and I. And, of course, it was payback for my little tryst with Satterthwaite. We were all adulterers. I knew that, restless, agitated, still exhilarated by having come so close to death and escaped, Woodrow had walked into Jeannine’s room and slid into her bed, spread her legs, and begun to fuck her. He was exercising his prerogative as head of the household, and she had merely accepted his heavy, sweating presence atop her as natural and inevitable. I grabbed Woodrow’s pillow and covered my ears with it, muffling the sound of his betrayal and Jeannine’s easy compliance.

A moment of relative silence, the only sound my own throbbing pulse, and then the thumping of Jeannine’s bed against the wall gradually began to filter through the pillow, and I could hear them again. I took the pillow away and lay on my back listening, as on and on it went, like the steadily pounding piston of an engine, while the ground doves outside my window began to gurgle and pepperbirds began to sing, a rooster crowed, a car drove slowly past the house, and someone in the house next door, in the kitchen just beyond the terrace outside our bedroom, turned on the radio. A man was speaking from the radio, his voice a weird blend of authority and confusion — Samuel Doe, the new head of state for the Republic of Liberia. He was announcing the execution of the president and the arrest of fifteen traitors and giving the time and place of their upcoming public execution.