Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Without warning, Aubrey threw his skinny shoulders at the steering wheel and pulled the van to the side of the road. He cut the engine and rolled down his side window and listened.

“What is it?”

Saying nothing, he opened his mouth wider, as though his gaping mouth, his long bony teeth, helped him hear better. And perhaps they did, because, straining to listen, he began to nod.

“The fishermen are just now going out.”

A group of young men in Malabo kept a canoe on the embankment at Marka. They sometimes set off in the middle of the night to walk the twenty miles to the riverside village so they could launch their boat before dawn, enter the channel, and be on the mainstream of the river in daylight.

“So what?”

“Moon,” Aubrey said, and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

The ruts on the dusty road had the whiteness of new ashes, and the bushes beside them were blue in the moonlight. The tree branches were iced with the same eerie light, for though the moon was a crusted disk, half in shadow, no clouds obscured it. The sky was clear, and the whole landscape glowed, seeming to lie under a coating of frost.

“They can see,” Aubrey said, without moving but still breathing hard.

One of the characteristics of the Sena people that Hock had noticed was their ability to sit without stirring for long periods. It was not repose; it was an almost reptilian trait. They kept alert — watchful, anyway — like bush creatures, snakes in dead leaves, lizards on rocks, blending with their surroundings and only their eyelids flicking. Aubrey seemed to slip into this state of immobility, resting against the steering wheel, his head tilted to the side windows, his eyes on the landscape of cold lunar phosphorescence.

They were near enough to the shallow creek that ran along the right-hand side of the road to hear the gulp of frogs, the odd suck and chirp of insects, and another noise, a rattling like pebbles in a pot, which Hock knew to be the vocalizing of a certain nocturnal heron, with a fish in its throat.

Hock whispered, “Did you give my message to the Americans?”

Aubrey sniffed, an ambiguous reply that in its evasiveness Hock took for no.

“But that’s what I paid you to do.” Hock was still whispering, but more harshly.

“This is more better.”

That was a definite no. “So you read my message,” Hock said, louder now. “I gave you something simple to do, but you didn’t do it.”

“I am helping you,” Aubrey said, and he wheezed the words so softly they were scarcely audible.

“Where’d you get this van?”

“The Agency.”

Now, parked at the edge of the road, Hock felt only confusion — the uncertainty of night and the seeming indecision of Aubrey. He felt that he was about to be subjected to a greater ordeal, perhaps robbed.

He said, “Listen to me,” and moved his head closer to Aubrey’s. As he did so, he got a whiff of dirt — not just sweat on old clothes but illness, the doggy odor of human decay, the stink of rotting lungs. The darkness inside the van seemed to make the odor sharper and inescapable. Hock winced and went on, “I don’t have much money.”

“No matter.”

That answer surprised Hock. He said, “In fact, very little money.”

Hock wanted to make sure he wasn’t being taken away to be mugged and abandoned. But Aubrey simply nodded, accepting the fact, and faced Hock without blinking. Perhaps Aubrey didn’t really care. Perhaps he was resigned to the hundred dollars Hock had given him, and the promise of a hundred more when they got to Blantyre.

“So where are you going?”

“Where you want.”

“I want to go to Blantyre,” Hock said. And, getting no response, “ Now. ”

“Too much moon,” Aubrey said. He hitched himself close to the windshield and twisted his face to look at the sky, making a false smile from the effort, his teeth showing in his narrow face, the shadows of his sharp features turning his face into a mask. “But some clouds are coming.”

Hock saw a mass of purple clouds, whitened at their edges by the moon, rising from where the river entered Mozambique, like smoke swelling upward from a bush fire. He watched the clouds advance, broadening, thinning, in the same way as smoke in still air. He found himself silently urging them on, and when the first wisps flickered past the bright moon and veiled it, lifting into shadow, Hock stamped his foot as though on the accelerator.

“Okay, let’s go.”

Too slowly for Hock’s liking, Aubrey cocked his head again, then turned the key and started the engine. He held the wheel awkwardly, gripping it at the top with both hands, hanging on it like a new driver. Then they were moving again, bumping over ruts, brushing the tall grass at the side. Aubrey switched on the fog lights, and they showed the road ahead as bouldery and crusted with mud like a dry streambed.

Aubrey was nervous, he drove badly, and Hock thought, He’s going so slow I could jump out here and walk back to Malabo. He knew this bend in the road. They were passing the bank of the shallow creek that lay just past the tall grass, where the village women washed their clothes on the flat rocks and often bathed in the seclusion of the reeds.

Then Aubrey groaned. Hock heard him above the engine that was racing, then slowing, as Aubrey thumped the gas pedal, too hard, then too softly, uncoordinated, the clumsiness of a beginner — or was he as ill as he seemed?

He was moving jerkily, accelerating over each bump, braking as he faltered forward.

“What is it?” Hock said, peering through the windshield. The dirty glass distorted the road.

“You did not give him money!” Aubrey shouted.

Up ahead, in the feeble glow of the fog lights, the ragged boy stood with Manyenga.

Behind this man and boy, spectral in the dim light, a tree lay across the road. Fresh chips that had flown from the stump littered the ground — the tree had just been chopped down — and though it was slender, it was an obstacle. There was no way around it. Manyenga, looking fierce, like an executioner, held the panga he had used on the tree, and the ragged boy from twenty minutes ago, beside him, scowling.

“Back up,” Hock said.

“Cannot.” Aubrey had slowed the van to a crawl.

“It’s not my fault.”

“It is being your fault one hundred percent,” Aubrey said hoarsely. “You sent the boy away with nothing.”

“Why didn’t you give him something?”

“You are the mzungu. ”

“So what?”

“You are the money!”

But by then Manyenga was at Hock’s side of the van. He snatched the door open. He was in shadow now, but Hock could smell his strong odor — a whiff of anger, the sweaty effort of hacking down the tree, his body reeking of hostility.

Manyenga spoke rapidly in Sena to Aubrey, hissing at him. It must have been insulting, because it had a physical effect on him: Aubrey slackened his grip on the steering wheel and looked beaten.

“You want to stay with him?” Manyenga said to Hock.

Aubrey had turned his face away from the men.

“You want to die?”

“I want to go to Blantyre. I want to go home,” Hock said in a whisper of fury.

Manyenga laughed so hard it brought on a coughing fit. He smacked the panga against his thigh, the big knife slapping at his dirty trousers.

“This is your home, father.”

Out of pride, seeing it was hopeless, Hock got out before Manyenga ordered him to, and he walked a few steps from the van, keeping away from the light.

“ Mzungu, ” the ragged boy said in two insolent grunts— zoon - goo. Now Hock understood: because he had not tipped him, the boy had run to Manyenga’s to tell him that Hock was fleeing. Malabo was only minutes from the left-hand side of the road. The boy would get something from Manyenga.