Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Some children near him sang softly as they padded forward, and he thought of Zizi, how she sang in her throat when she was anxious. He grew sad and sentimental, hearing the humming, seeing the children’s dusty legs and torn shorts, and he reminded himself that these same children had wanted him drowned and dead.

Just before noon, after almost two hours of walking, they came to a grove of trees that tickled and scratched his head, and he stepped past them into the margin of an open field, where the children had begun to gather.

He saw that another group of children — from where? — had ranged themselves along the far side, in the ribbon of shade cast by protruding branches. These children crouched, they sat, they knelt; none was standing. The whole straight side of this extraordinary empty rectangle of parched grass in the bush, about the size of a football field, was dark with other waiting children.

Approaching the boy in the black baseball cap, Hock was surprised when the boy touched his sunglasses nervously and stepped away. Hock smiled, holding the snake’s head, and lifted his arm with the coils that had tightened into bulgy armlets.

“Where are we?”

The boy crept backward as he spoke. “We are being in the bush.” It seemed in his fear that the boy’s assured command of English was diminished, as he spoke haltingly, with a stronger accent. “At the football pitch.”

“What do you do here?”

“Sometimes we are challenging them.” He nodded at the children seated and kneeling at the far side of the field. “We play football. We dance. We fight.”

“Whose field is this?”

The boy hesitated until Hock raised the snake at him, and then the boy shrugged and said, “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On who wins.”

“So it’s a battlefield,” Hock said. “And you fight with fists?”

“With hands. With sticks of wood. With weapons.” He said steeks, he said wee - pons.

Hock said, “I really want to know where you learned English.” The boy was still stepping back, seemingly reluctant to answer. Hock said, “I used to teach English.”

“It is not hard to know English,” the boy said, almost with contempt.

“What’s hard, then?”

“To have food is hard. To have medicine. To have a mobile phone. To have good weapons.”

Saying this, he stared at the snake that Hock held before him, leveled at the boy’s face: the snake’s lipless mouth and dead unblinking eyes and flicking tongue.

“You will die if he bites you,” the boy said.

“Or you,” Hock said. He saw more children entering the field from one of the shorter sides. “Who are they?”

“From the big marsh,” the boy said.

And they too hugged the shade at the edge, for the sun was directly overhead and the flat dusty field of dry grass was so hot that the watery illusion of shimmering heat rose from the brownish bare patches at its center.

“What do we do now?”

“Just wait,” the boy said, almost meekly, backing up, and then he turned and walked quickly away.

Hock felt he had lost all contact with his other life, or any other place, and he was reminded of his feeling that he now existed in another age, on another planet, as a despised fugitive, and not on the surface of that planet but on a river in an eerily lit underworld.

And wait for what? Some sort of spectacle? A game, maybe, an event, because all the children had arrayed themselves like spectators — solemn, expectant, facing the open field. The field had no road leading into it, but merely lay, a great trampled expanse of sun-heated dust and tussocks of grass, a deliberately cleared acre that, in its symmetry and blight, was the work of human hands. He hoped they hadn’t come for a battle, yet their look of weariness and hunger made them seem desperate and unpredictable.

Dizzy with hunger himself, Hock sat, easing his grip on the snake. Holding it gave him confidence; he could face the children without flinching; he could ask questions. Yet he feared the recklessness of children, and he knew in spite of the snake that he would be overwhelmed by their numbers.

The boy he had spoken to was now standing in front of the seated children from the village, his back to the field. He seemed to be leading the children in prayer, or at least eliciting responses, the big boy reciting a line, the children repeating it. A prayer, a promise, a war chant, a threat, a lament — it could have been anything.

The children at the far side of the field simply watched, and the ones who had just arrived were settling into postures of waiting. Dressed the same, in old American T-shirts and ragged shorts and trousers — facing the empty field — all the children looked like members of a cargo cult.

Their patience was like indifference, like a form of despair, not anticipation of an event but hopelessness. When the children on Hock’s side of the field were finished chanting they lapsed into silence, blinking at the flies that were settling around their eyes. None of them sat near Hock. Because of the snake, they kept away from him.

Then the snake’s body contracted on his arm, its throat swelling again, and this made Hock more watchful, as though by its flicking tongue it had smelled a rising emotion in the children. Certainly the children were more tense, seeming to contract themselves, resolving themselves into more compact postures of listening. The snake too seemed hyperalert, its muscles pulsing and pinching against Hock’s hot arm.

Nothing was in the sky, and yet a far-off sound, a yak-yak-yak, became audible and grew louder, until, like a giant insect, a helicopter burst from the dusty haze and hovered over the field, high up.

So this was the bird. The helicopter was blue and white, with a logo, a shield in gold on its side, and under it the words L’Agence Anonyme. And it was growing larger. What had seemed a small bulbous chopper, flying in and circling, grew as it descended, became elongated, and the updraft of its whirling rotor blades sucked a dense column of dust from the ground that became a wide brown cloud.

Even before it landed, while it was settling lower, the double doors on its side slid open, revealing its interior. Then two things happened, surprising things. First, music began to play — rock music, very loud, a pounding rhythm, yada-boom, yada-boom, yada-boom. And then, while it played, growing even louder, a group of people appeared at the opening. The two in front, flanked by Africans, were a white man in a cowboy hat and a woman in high boots — a blonde, chalky-faced, in a black skintight suit. Both of them were gesturing to the children, looking jubilant.

Yada-boom, yada-boom —where were the loudspeakers?

The children, most of them, kept their places at the edge of the field, though a handful of excited, much younger ones ran into the thickening dust cloud, staggering, seeming to choke, many of them retreating as the helicopter came to rest, its long skids sinking into the rough grass and loose dirt of the field. The two white people standing in the cabin hatchway waved, still jubilant. Just behind them was an imposing-looking African man in a spotless safari suit, taller than the white man and woman; from his assertive gestures he seemed to be issuing orders.

Before the children sitting and kneeling at the margin of the field stood up, preparing to run to the helicopter, the boy in the black Dynamo cap appeared next to Hock and said, “Tell the Agency to help us.” He held his body away, his arms behind his back, his head to the side, as though he expected the snake to uncoil itself and strike him.

Hock said, “Help me get near — keep the children away,” and he snatched up his bag and headed toward the helicopter, which had become a blur in the rising dust cloud.