Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

I smiled and handed him a stack of bills. He stared at my nose. I smiled harder and rolled my eyes.

"Long story," I said.

He waved the money off. I took his hand and put the bills in his palm and closed his fingers, dry and ringed like birch twigs, around them. I smiled and nodded in an eager and anxious way, like I was taking his money, not giving him mine.

He said nothing. He took the bills and walked off. I jogged back to the car, my feet slapping the pavement in a happy way; a boy was there, about six years old, though there wasn't a house or hut in sight.

"Where'd he come from?" I asked.

"He just showed up," said Hand.

The boy, barefoot and wearing Magnum P.I. shorts, was leaning against the side of the car, looking inside, his hands cupped around his eyes and set against the window, reflecting the endless fields, newly tilled and dry, behind him.

"What's he want?"

"I think he was here to help."

"We have anything for him?"

"Money."

"No. He'll get robbed."

We gave him a package of white cream cookies and a liter of water, full and in the sun seeming heavy, like mercury.

We got in the car but the car wouldn't move. The boy, at the side of the car, yelled something, waving his tiny bony arms.

"The rock," said Hand.

"Oh," I said.

While watching us, carefully, holding his hand up in a gesture begging us not to run him over, the boy bent down and removed the rock. We thanked him and waved and honked and drove away, down the coast.

There were beaches being used as dumps. The sand was white and duned, and the water clear beyond, but the beach overwhelmed with garbage, great heaps of it, and broken boats. Periodically we'd pass through a village, the buildings, squat and of clay, abutting the road, kids running out of open doorways. We drove around more blue buses, and a few carts driven by horses nodding, but no donkeys. We couldn't find a fucking donkey. Cows would be just as good, we thought, but every time we stopped and approached a cow on foot, a car would come down the road, or a bright blue bus, or a farmer or a cart or child, and we'd abort. At one point, when we really thought we were going to do it, had the money in a pouch and the tape all around it and a cow picked out and were only a few feet away, it wasn't a car that came but a whole caravan of men, French we guessed, on four-wheel ATVs, eleven of them, in a row, half with white girlfriends strapped around their waists, all with aviator glasses, a few with scarves.

"Good lord God no," Hand said.

The image was unsettling and indelible.

"Did the old man say anything to you?" Hand asked.

"No."

"Huh."

"I think he felt bad for me. Like I should be using the money to get my face fixed."

Hand laughed quickly, then stopped.

"Sorry," he said. "How much you give him?"

"About $800, I think."

"That's too much."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Don't you want to spread it out more?"

"Why?"

"It makes sense, doesn't it?"

"No."

"I guess not."

We gave up on taping money to animals. We were now looking for people. Anyone to unload the money on. But choosing just who was a strange kind of task. We found a group of boys working in a field, raking hay and throwing it into a large wooden wagon attached to a mule. Five boys -

"Brothers, probably," said Hand. We stopped and parked on the the side of the road.

"They're gonna see us," I said.

"Then get out and give em some money, idiot."

"Not yet. I gotta make sure."

"Here," Hand said, spreading a map between us. "This is like a fucking stakeout or something."

– working together, without pause. They were perfect. But I couldn't get my nerve up. All I had to do was get out of the car, walk a hundred feet and hand them part of the $1,400 we had left. We had to get rid of this money. Tomorrow we would cash more checks – swoop! swoop! - - and start over. We were already so far behind. But I couldn't do it.

"That one guy looks like a dad," I said.

"No, he's just a little older than the others."

"I can't give it to them if the dad's there."

"Why?"

"Because the dad won't take it, or let them."

"Bullshit," Hand said. "Of course he'd take it."

"No he wouldn't. It's a pride thing. He won't take the money in front of his sons."

"Not here, stupid. These guys know they need it and that we can afford it. They're not taking it from a neighbor, they're taking it from people who it means, you know, next to nothing to. They know this."

"You do it."

"No, you. It's your money."

"No it's not. That's the point."

"Just go."

"I can't. Maybe we wait. The dad'll go get some water or something. Or you could create a diversion."

We sat, watching.

"This is predatory," I said.

"Yeah but it's okay."

"Let's go. We'll find someone better."

We drove, though I wasn't sure it would ever feel right. I would have given them $400, $500, but now we were gone. It was so wrong to stalk them, and even more wrong not to give them the money, a life-changing amount of money here, where the average yearly earnings were, we'd read, about $1,600. It was all so wrong and now we were a mile away and heading down the coast. To the right, beyond the fields and a thin row of trees, the Atlantic – wait; right, the Atlantic – shimmered like a dime.

The sun was low in a white-blue sky and the air was cooling. We approached a huge warehouse in a field. The place, a gallery of some kind, was immense, and shuttered, the parking lot covered in grass. There were no other buildings for miles.

We parked. We'd look around.

A flock of small black birds came across the building in a desperate way. They weren't in any kind of formation, just fifty of them, all flying in the same direction, each with its own path. Not every one with its own path, I guess, but so many of them, which struck me. I don't know why it struck me then but had never struck me before. When we see birds flying in a flock, we expect them in formation. We expect neat V's of birds. But these, they were flying in more of a swooping swarm, a group fifty feet left to right, twenty feet top to bottom. Within that area they were swerving up and down, swinging to and fro, overlapping, like a group of sixth graders riding bikes home from school. Which would imply not only free will but a sense of fun, of caprice. I mean, I want to know what this bird:

is thinking. How does he feel his flight? Does he know the difference between stasis and swooping? Birds were so much better in flight. My bird feeder, now empty in Chicago, taught me how nervous and jittery birds were when they stood and hopped and ducked their heads into the glass for their miserable little seeds. But tearing in and out of formation, there was proof of -

And then they were gone.

"This is a good place to walk around," said Hand.

I agreed to walk around.

We parked the car behind the building, hiding it from the road. Though we had no evidence of anything like it, we imagined the possibility of roaming marauders who would stop, strip our car bare and move on. So the car was hidden; we could walk through the fields and head to the ocean, less than a mile west.

"You got some sun today," I said.

"You too," Hand said.

"Let's go that way," he said, vaguely indicating a small farm in the distance, three small huts and a fence of sticks. This would be the first walking we'd done. The field was quiet. We walked toward the huts, over rough savannah breached by the huge and common bulbous leafless trees – one is at right – their bark smooth and knotted. Closer now, there were figures under and around one of the farm's largest hut, and around the hut a fence and within the fence ten or twelve sheep, all a dirty grey. Four young kids ran from the fence and toward us, still very small in the distance.