The Gloaming (2 page)

Bob has the expensive teeth of a much younger man. He tries to keep pace with Melinda, who is relentless in her forward momentum. Even standing she tilts forward by degrees. I'm sure she senses the decay that awaits Bob, who does not exercise and eats and drinks too much. It will be a stroke, a heart attack or cancer. In only a few years, Melinda knows, she will become a caretaker, ferrying Bob to a series of specialists, keeping track of his oxygen intake, counting out his pills.

Contained in a car for six hours a day, Melinda maintains checklists of birds and animals. She asks Jackson about trees, grasses, the weather, geology. His answers are usually vague, even plainly wrong, and I often see impatience glance across her face; for the money they're paying she expects more. But this is always replaced by genuine sympathy—and perhaps the strong desire for Bob not to be right about the tipping issue. It isn't Jackson's fault he's black and uneducated and born in Africa. He must be so grateful for this job. She's read that the average employed Tanzanian supports forty unemployed relatives.

I am being unkind in how I describe them. Tom hated my sarcasm. ‘Poor man's wit,' he called it. But I never had another kind of wit. And Bob and Melinda's Americanness comforts me. They are familiar. I can understand them, not just the words but the motivation and the culture behind them. I have been away from America for so long. I like that Melinda isn't afraid to ask questions. She doesn't worry that her curiosity will be taken as ignorance. As an envoy of her country, she wants to be kind and strong: give me your poor, your unwashed. And even Bob, when we finally stopped to watch a leopard sleeping in a tree, sat very still and whispered unashamed as a child: ‘Goddamn, that's a beautiful cat.'

There are more huts, closer together, and gardens containing crops. Children in rags scatter and cluck like chickens, waving at the car or running from it.

‘So many children,' Melinda says. She has statistics for this too. Seventy-five percent of the population is under fourteen.

A boy runs right at the car, banging it with his hand. I feel my stomach lurch. Is that what it sounds like—a child hitting a car? The sharp, sudden thud, the quick release of the sound?

The car, so large, absorbs the impact and continues on, effortlessly. I turn to look over my shoulder at the little boy. He's chasing after the car, laughing, and then he vanishes in the dust. Eclipsed, as if he was never there at all.

Then I correct myself: the sound I'm trying to place isn't a child hitting a car. But a car hitting a child. Hitting
children
. Smashing into them. Children who didn't run away, laughing. They broke open. They stained the asphalt.

‘These children,' Jackson says. ‘They are very bad.' These children, these children. I move my head on its axis, casually, slowly toward Jackson. I appear completely normal.

‘What kind of a future are they gonna have?' Bob shakes his head sadly, angrily. ‘No land, no jobs. No Serengeti, that's for damn sure.'

‘Are we any better off?' Melinda valiantly battles her nausea to score a point. ‘Texas has the highest rate of child poverty in America. And some of the richest people.'

Bob scowls, ‘You read too much.'

How does she stand him?

Jackson doesn't participate in these conversations. Either he genuinely has nothing to say about the current state and future of his country, any other country, the entire world; or he doesn't want to express his opinions. I get the feeling Jackson is like a train on a single track—one of those airport monorails. He goes around and around, the doors opening and closing, people he doesn't know and doesn't care to know getting in and getting out. He drives the same routes, Manyara, Ngorongoro, Serengeti, stays at the same hotels, answers the same questions, points out the same lions, turns around, drives back, gives the same smile whatever the tip.

Now he grips the wheel, as usual driving too fast, hunched forward. Is he even looking at the road? Or at the end of it? To the bustling capital of Arusha where he lives: the bar, the girlfriend, the blessed silence or the loud music—anything but the ceaseless chatter from the back seat, what's that, what's this, does an elephant, does a giraffe, where is, how is, when is, what, what, where, how,
I specifically asked for the vegetarian lunchbox
.

‘Oh, God,' says Melinda, and this time she just pukes out the window.

Bob says, ‘This is no joke, sweetie. We should be going to a real hospital. Not some quack shack in the middle of Tanzania.'

A grand roundabout heralds a town. A town of sorts. The cement structure at the juncture of two dirt roads comprises a series of flying arcs. But I'm unable to interpret the artist's vision as a large section has crumbled, revealing a rusting rebar skeleton. Perhaps there was supposed to be a fountain, but the cement floor has cracked wide open. Instead of sparkling, glittering water, the roundabout holds all manner of trash, which is picked over by chickens and children.

‘Where are we?'

Jackson slows momentarily to avoid a goat. ‘Magulu.'

‘Magulu, Christ.' Bob peers out the window. ‘It's goddamn Splinterville.'

‘What comes after Magulu?' I ask Jackson.

‘Nothing.'

‘It's a dead end?'

‘Yes,' he says. ‘It is a fully dead end.'

‘For God's sake, sweetie.' With his bandana, Bob pats away the spittle on Melinda's face, ‘We have good insurance, we're fully covered for evacuation.'

Low-slung breeze-block buildings extend beyond the roundabout. Small side streets drift off between these buildings to mud-and-wattle shacks. But beyond them, Magulu loses interest in itself. The thick, knobby bush resumes, relentless, interminable, muttering on until the sky. The rolling geography of the land means the horizon could be anywhere. Am I seeing a hundred miles or twenty?

There's a bar with four breeze-block walls and blue UN tarpaulin for a roof. Inside I can just make out a pool table, red plastic chairs, men peering at us. Outside, a duck with a broken wing pecks at an old corn cob.

Jackson stops in front of what must be the clinic. The whitewash is fresh, the door marked with a painted pale blue cross. Perhaps this is a good sign: someone, after all, cares.

Three women and their babies sit on a wooden bench under the overhang of the tin roof.

Bob swats at a fly. ‘We should just turn around and go back to the hotel. Get the flying ambulance like the manager said.'

‘We've come all this way,' says Melinda. ‘At least let's see if this doctor can help.'

When Jackson is out of the car, walking up the steps, Bob says, ‘You know Africa is where all the pharmaceutical companies dump their out-of-date stock and all the crap they can't get past the FDA.'

‘For goodness sake, Bob, dear, let's just see.'

Jackson comes out of the clinic with a small, odd woman. She wears a beige polyester trouser suit, high heels and a badly fitting wig. The wig is cut in a pageboy style, black with garish blonde highlights. It's the kind of wig a prostitute might choose. Yet, she is wearing a white lab coat. The overall effect is confusing, and I wonder for a brief moment if she's a tiny transvestite. I'm certain she's a woman, but that's the feeling: of disparity, of pieces that don't quite fit. She is oddly and overly dressed, yet her features are neat, naked of makeup, and her dark brown eyes are quick and clever.

‘Hello.' Her gaze moves from one to the other of us in the car. She smiles. ‘I am Doctor Dorothea. I am here to help you.' She speaks with the faintest of lisps.

‘It's Mrs Phillips,' Jackson gestures to Melinda. ‘She's very sick.'

Doctor Dorothea's eyes widen and she follows Jackson's look to focus on Melinda. ‘Oh, I am so sorry. Mrs Phillips, please. Let us go inside.'

Melinda gets out. She wobbles slightly and Jackson catches her arm. ‘I'm all right,' she snaps.

‘No, you're not,' Bob says, taking her other arm. ‘I'm coming with you.'

‘Of course,' replies Doctor Dorothea. ‘We must all come.'

Jackson now looks at me. ‘You come, also. You cannot wait here at the car.' He then waves an arm in a general way. ‘These people are not good.'

‘Yes, yes,' Dorothea says. ‘There is room inside.'

A small crowd has gathered to watch us.

Dorothea turns and stage-whispers, ‘These people are all thieves. They stole my stethoscope. Can you imagine? For what? What are they going to do with a stethoscope? It's just to steal, that's all.' She shakes her head and makes a little snort.

We reach the door and she pushes it open. The coolness inside is a dark, calm well in the heat. But the room is too small and there aren't enough chairs. I tell them I'll wait outside. Melinda looks as if she's about to be sick again. Bob turns to me, ‘Yes, you wait outside.'

There is space on the edge of the bench, next to the women with the babies. I sit and shut my eyes against the sun. I can feel it through the red tissue of my eyelids. The sun holds me, I hover in the heat. I am encased by warmth. Still. I can allow myself this, can't I? Not peace, merely stillness.

I can hear Dorothea talking quietly inside the clinic, the calm and sure tone of her voice, Melinda's grateful murmur. Bob says something about fake drugs from India. Dorothea reassures him.

When Bob and Melinda and Jackson come back out I tell Jackson I won't be joining them for the rest of the trip. I'm slightly surprised to hear myself say this so definitively because the thought has only just surfaced. But maybe that's why: I haven't had time to consider the consequences.

I don't choose Magulu; simply, I can't go back. I can barely bring myself to summon the image of Arnau and its Swiss chocolate quaintness, the faux chalets, the geranium window boxes. Within the coil of its streets, people whisper:
Kindermörderin
.

‘Are you also ill?' Jackson squints at me.

‘No,' I say. ‘I'm not ill.'

‘But,' he insists, ‘it's not possible.'

‘What's not possible?'

‘For you to stay here.'

‘Is there a law?'

‘There is no law. No law. But nothing, look, look! There is nothing here.' His voice begins to rise, almost to a squeak, like a teenage boy. ‘There is nothing here! A bus once a week! Not even mobile service! Nothing!'

I give him a hundred bucks. ‘It's all right, I take full responsibility.'

He takes the money and gets in the car.

Melinda is in the back, lying down. Dorothea has put her on a drip and given her a full complement of antibiotics.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' Bob says to me. ‘You can't stay here.'

‘You are my witness,' Jackson turns to Bob. ‘I don't want to be accused.'

Bob looks me over. I sense in him the shades of menace, what he hides even from Melinda. How he hopes bad things happen to people. He is familiar with the soothing pleasure of spite. ‘Don't expect us to sort out the mess you're gonna find yourself in.'

I try to look calm and resolved. ‘Thank you for your concern, Bob. I hope Melinda feels better soon.'

‘Foolish,' he mutters.

Foolishness is the least of it, I feel like telling him. If you found out about Arnau, I would watch your face transform with disgust; and even Melinda would shrink back as if from a foul smell.

‘You are my witness!' Jackson announces in his falsetto, this time stabbing the air, then wagging his finger at Bob. ‘It is not my responsibility!'

This moment of my transgression will bond them, I think. They will talk for hours about my foolishness. They will discuss all the signs that I was trouble, all the ways I was difficult on the trip. How he and Melinda hadn't wanted me along anyway. I just showed up, a party crasher, with a small suitcase and no safari clothes or sunscreen—not even binoculars or a camera! Odd, yes, there was something odd about me from the beginning. Bob will end up giving Jackson a good tip and calling him ‘pal.' Back in Chapel Hill, he'll talk about his pal, Jackson. ‘What a stand-up guy.'

As they drive off, Bob glances back. I wave, a quick ticktock of my wrist. He turns away.

I sit quietly, listening to the sound of the car recede. I feel a touch on my shoulder. Doctor Dorothea. I'm sure she's going to ask me what's the matter, why have I been left by my friends—why I am here. But instead she asks if I need somewhere to stay.

 

She doesn't speak any English, but somehow we communicate. Gladness is proud of the Goodnight Bar and Inn. It seems to be her own business. When she shows me the room, she walks around it pointing out its many features in loud Swahili. But it is the gestures and the enthusiasm I understand: Look, the windows have bars on them, the bed has a net without holes, the cupboards are roomy. Here is a small sink and mirror. Here are the towels. And a complimentary pair of green rubber flip-flops. Down the hall are the bathroom and the shower.
Baridi
, she says, turning the knob so that water trickles out. I check my Swahili-English dictionary: cold. She picks up an empty bucket, ‘Moto.' Hot. The hot water comes only in a bucket.

She does the cleaning herself. I watch her in the bar area, bent double so that her torso is almost perfectly parallel to her legs, dragging a damp rag over the floor. She wipes down the plastic table cloths and the plastic chairs. She polishes the glasses behind the bar. She waters the plants on the veranda. Her industry stands in contrast to the sloth of her customers. They lean back in the plastic chairs and stare at the television and drink beer after beer. The TV is on mute, while a radio plays African rap and whiney Swahili gospel. ‘Mwanza
fresh
!' the announcer burbles. ‘Mwanza
poa
!'

Mwanza, I remember the name. Melinda was looking at the map with her endless questions and pointed to one of its larger dots. ‘Mwanza. What happens in Mwanza?'