Alex Berenson: The Night Ranger

Today she had brought a thick comic book that she’d pulled at random from the warehouse. It was called Maus and looked like it was about cats and mice. As she reached the tree, more shoeless, stick-legged kids came running over, chattering at her. Her regulars. Even after a month of reading, she couldn’t keep them all straight, though she knew that the littlest one called himself Guster, and the tallest Nene.

“I brought a good one today,” she said. “Lots of animals.” She sat against the tree, folded her long legs underneath her. She loved this moment, the feel of the rough trunk against her back, a book in her hand. The noise of the camp faded and the kids circled up and she read. But by page three, she had a sinking realization that Maus wasn’t about mice at all.

Not that it mattered. The kids weren’t paying attention. Without Joseph to translate, they were losing focus, arguing. Guster got up and ran around the tree, yelling. She snapped the book shut. “I’m leaving unless you behave.” They ignored her, and she knew the language barrier wasn’t the reason. They didn’t care. “You know, this is why you’re never going to amount to anything.”

She was joking, but she wasn’t. Another lesson of the last three months. She felt terrible for these refugees. Especially the kids. Yet she felt something else too, the feeling she tried to keep down. She hated the way they lived, the dirt and smoke. The way they bred kids they couldn’t support. The fact that instead of standing up for themselves, they had run away from their own country to this place, where they depended on handouts from white people to live. Would Americans have done that? Did the refugees even want to go home? Or were they content to live here, helpless as baby birds chirping for their next feeding?

Then she’d remember Joseph, and her anger would turn to shame. She’d had every chance. They’d had none. Now she judged them. She couldn’t square her feelings, this anger and heartbreak jumbled up. The kids circled around her and the tree. She stood. The sun was high now. Her face flushed under her hat. The heat and the smoke dizzied her. “All of you. Enough. Enough.” They kept running, spinning around her. She reached out, clenched her hand around Guster’s skinny arm, pulled him close. “Listen—” She saw at once she’d grabbed him too hard. He yelped and looked up at her with such hatred that she felt an almost electric shock tear through her. She let go and he tore off into the mess of tents and disappeared as the other kids shouted at her.

She spent the afternoon in her trailer. She plowed through Maus start to finish and then tried to distract herself with Cosmo and Elle and Yoga Journal . She had the magazines stuffed in her backpack like a twelve-year-old’s porn stash. She shouldn’t have lost her temper. She should have let the kids run themselves out and then gone back to her stupid reading. She just wanted to help and she didn’t know how. She couldn’t deliver a baby or dig a well. She couldn’t even unload the trucks. A forty-pound bag would knock her over.

Where was Hailey, anyway? Her best friend had deserted her. On her birthday. She lay on her cot, buried her face in her pillow until she heard footsteps enter the trailer.

“Gwennie? Happy birthday.”

“I have a headache.”

“No, you don’t.” Hailey tugged at her legs. She had no choice but to sit up. She fake-swiped at Hailey’s face and Hailey responded with a long hiss. In the bars in Missoula, they made a striking pair. Hailey’s dad was black, her mom white. She was tall and light-skinned, with big brown eyes. Guys liked her. Lots of guys. Hence Hailey the Heartbreaker.

“Where have you been?”

“Taking care of cholera patients. Which basically spells cleaning bedpans. I told you I’d be at the hospital today.” She held a canvas bag.

“You did?” Gwen felt stupider than ever.

“Come on, tell Dr. Hailey.”

“I can’t even.” But she did.

“So you grabbed his arm,” Hailey said when she was finished. “Trust me, that kid’s been through worse.”

“It’s not that. Do you know what this is?” She held up Maus .

Hailey flipped through it. “The Holocaust, right? The mice are the Jews and the cats are the Germans.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know, some world history class I took freshman year, maybe.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Gwen. I don’t know how to say this straight out without sounding condescending, but you are not dumb. You just never bothered to study.”

“It’s the same.”

“It’s not. If you were dumb, you wouldn’t be upset about any of this.”

“This place—”

“Look, we’re not the Army or anything, we’re not even getting paid. We’re volunteers, we’re doing our best. If nothing else, we’re witnesses.”

“Witnesses to what? I can’t even get anyone back home to understand what’s going on here. They send these dumb emails like God’s work, keep it up, and that’s all they want to know.”

Hailey unzipped her bag. “Time to put the pity party to bed. Guess what I have in here.”

“Hailey, I’m serious—”

“You want your birthday present or not?” Hailey reached into the bag and pulled out a bottle of Patrón and a jar of margarita mix. “Do not ask what I had to do to get these.”

“Tequila?”

“Come on. Let’s drink our sorrows away. Just like real aid workers. And if Owen or Scott stop by, I’m telling them to get lost.”

It was a fun night. The next morning, Gwen’s head was screaming, but even so she felt better. She came into the canteen, choked down a glass of water. Owen and Scott sat at the center table spooning down oatmeal, a replay of the day before. Neither looked glad to see her. She liked that.

“So Scott wants us to take a run to Lamu,” Owen said.

Moss had told Gwen about Lamu. She made the place sound like paradise. It was an island a few miles off the Kenyan coast, on the Indian Ocean. Turquoise-blue water and an old port. But the Somali border was only about fifty miles away, and not long before, bandits had attacked a resort close by. They’d killed an English tourist and dragged his wife back to Somalia, where she’d died in captivity. Since then, most Westerners had stayed away. “Isn’t it too dangerous?”

“You said that yesterday when I told you I was going to Witu.”

“Just because you didn’t get killed doesn’t mean it was smart.”

“Suggs says we’ll be fine. We drive to Garissa and then southeast so we don’t get too close to the border. Get to Mokowe in two or three hours, that’s on the coast, and from there it’s about a twenty-minute speedboat ride.”

Gwen wished she didn’t have such a nasty headache. “What do you think, Owen?”

“It’s probably okay as long as we have Suggs. Maybe we go one morning, stay a couple nights, drive back in the afternoon. I was talking to an MSF guy last week and he said it really is great. Plus all the millionaires are staying away, so if we go now we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

Owen’s confidence was reassuring. Aside from his doomed love for her, he was a levelheaded guy.

“When?”

“Next week,” Scott said. “Before the rainy season starts.”

“What about the reporter? Aren’t we supposed to be here to talk to her?”

“She’ll be around a few days.”

“I’ll talk to Hailey about it.” Gwen just trying to buy time now.

Scott smiled. “She’s in. Said it sounded great.”

Then Gwen knew that she was going, whether she felt like it or not.

—

The Land Cruiser had the usual supplies that African roads demanded. A full-size spare tire and a spare for the spare. A plastic jerrican of gasoline, two of water. Twenty yards of tow rope and two-by-fours to provide traction if the truck got caught in mud. A jack and a repair kit with every tool a mechanic might want.