Russell Banks - The Darling

Satterthwaite turned to me and brought his face close to the bars between us. I remember his yellowed eyes, his handsome broad nose, his thin moustache and sharply defined lips. I remember his loathing. In a low, cold voice, he said, “Take your boys now, an’ go home to America wit’ ’em.” Then he joined the others, and the four nonchalantly walked down the street together and were gone.

The boys were still inside the car, peering out cautiously as if at a forbidden movie. I shouted, “Stay there! Don’t leave the car! I’ll be right there for you! I have to fetch another key for the gate!” I cried and ran for the house, cursing myself for not having kept a duplicate on the ring with the house key. I found it in Woodrow’s desk drawer and raced back outside and, fumbling with thick fingers, managed to get the padlock open and off the hasp and pushed the gate back. I stepped quickly past Woodrow’s body without looking at it and flung open the rear door of the car.

The car was empty. My sons were gone.

I REMEMBER DRIVING through the city like a madwoman chasing ghosts. There was very little traffic — a few military vehicles was all, trucks and jeeps carrying soldiers who handed open bottles to one another, laughing and, when they passed by, ignored me as if I were invisible. A pack of teenage boys in looted clothing ran from an electronics store lugging stereos and armloads of CDs, the Indian shopkeeper gazing mournfully from the doorway. A few cars with household possessions lashed to the roof were headed inland to some imagined place of safety. It was not quite dark, and plumes of black smoke rose ominously in the south from the vicinity of the airport, where Charles Taylor’s forces were rumored to be dug in, battling the remnants of Doe’s ragtag army. From Mamba Point the sea was glazed red by the setting sun. Across the harbor there was more smoke rising. Prince Johnson’s bands of marauders were advancing towards the city, looting, burning homes, killing and raping women and girls as they came. A large crowd of people was gathered outside the closed gate of the American embassy, shouting to be let inside. Behind the gate a pair of stone-faced Marines with automatic weapons stood ready to fire if the crowd tried to climb the wall or rush the gate to get inside, where they imagined entry visas to the U.S. were there for the grabbing. People shook their fists, held up their babies, and waved their hands pleadingly as if for alms. I recognized some of the faces of my neighbors and several people we knew from the government agencies and ministries, a judge, a doctor and his wife with whom Woodrow and I had occasionally played bridge, the man who owned the big appliance store on Broad Street, a teacher from Saint Catherine’s. Still I drove, left and left and left, in a gradually widening circle, like a rat seeking its way out of a maze. Out by the hospital, when I came to a barrier of burning tires, I stopped, reversed, and started turning right and right and right, until I got held at a checkpoint by a half-dozen soldiers and was forced to turn back. My sons had disappeared, that’s all I knew. I didn’t think they’d been marched off at gunpoint by their father’s murderers or by Doe’s soldiers. I hadn’t left them alone in the car long enough for them to have been captured and taken away. But how long were they alone? How much time passed when I ran into the house and got the key to unlock the gate? I didn’t know. It could have been sixty seconds, it could have been five minutes or even ten. But what good would it do anyone to imprison the three sons of Woodrow Sundiata, now that Woodrow was dead? It was Doe who had him killed, I knew that. Probably from the beginning Satterthwaite had been working for Doe and not Woodrow. Until the end, because of what Satterthwaite reported back to him, Doe believed he had nothing to fear from the small man who ran the Ministry of Public Health. But now, with Charles closing in from the south and Prince Johnson from the east and north, with his army abandoning him in droves, and then with the Americans stepping stealthily away from him and Sam Clement visiting first Woodrow and later me, suddenly Woodrow must have seemed dangerous or, at the least, disloyal. But in this chaos, no one was loyal. Alliances were made and broken hourly. Betrayal was standard operating procedure for everyone.

It was dark now, and I couldn’t get out of the city. I heard the hard clatter of gunfire from the port where the Nigerians were stationed and the boom of artillery and the occasional shriek and explosion of a rocket grenade coming from the direction of the Barclay Barracks. It was useless, driving in circles around the city like this. My sons, wherever they were, did not want me to find them. I drove slowly past the homes of their schoolmates, the few whom I knew. The city was entirely in the dark. No streetlights, no house lights. Even the hotels and restaurants were without electricity. Candlelight and kerosene lanterns danced behind windows, and now and then, crossing ahead of me, the headlights of prowling military vehicles. I drove past the several houses where I knew the families, people whose children at one time or another had played with my children, houses where Dillon or the twins had once stayed overnight, but I could not bring myself to leave the safety of the locked car and walk to the darkened door and knock and ask, Have you seen Dillon, William, and Paul? I looked away for a moment, and suddenly they were gone. They watched their father being murdered, and I had to leave them alone for a few seconds, and when I returned, they had disappeared . I couldn’t imagine saying that to anyone.

Finally, hours later, I found myself parked in an alleyway outside the narrow, wood-frame shack where Jeannine had gone to live with her aunt and uncle and their children. I got out of the car and walked up the rickety steps and knocked quietly on the door. There were no lights inside, not even a candle. After a moment, I heard Jeannine’s voice, little more than a whisper. “Who that?”

“It’s me. Hannah.”

The door opened a crack, then a little wider, and I made out Jeannine’s round, brown face in the gloom. I sensed others behind her, as if the room were crowded and I had interrupted a meeting of conspirators. Jeannine said, “What you want here?”

“I … need you. I need you to help me. I’ve lost the boys. I don’t know where the boys are, Jeannine.”

“No,” she said. “The boys not here.” She started to close the door, and I held it back with my hand.

“Wait. Woodrow … he’s been killed. Woodrow’s dead, Jeannine.”

She looked at me blankly, as if I’d said my telephone wasn’t working. “Plenty-plenty people dead. Go ’ way, missus.”

“Please, Jeannine. I need you. I can’t find my sons.”

“You don’ need me for nuthin’. Missus.”

We looked at each other in silence for a moment. We had been servant and mistress, then she the teacher and I the student, then friends. We had shared my husband, and then, at my doing, had become servant and mistress again. Now we were enemies. The truth of our relationship had finally become its reality.

“Will you come back to the house with me, Jeannine?”

She did not answer. She pushed the door closed on me, left me standing on the little porch alone in the darkness.

Slowly I drove down Duport Road towards our house and realized that I would have to pass Woodrow’s body and would somehow have to bring it into the yard and wrap it and bury it. I would have to search in the gutter in the dark for his head and carry it, too, into the yard and bury it with his body. I didn’t know if I was capable of performing this grisly task alone, now, in the middle of the night, but decided that I had no choice, I had to do it for the boys. For Woodrow. For myself. I was not going to leave my husband’s body lying in the street for the rats and wild dogs and the buzzards.