Cross Country (16 page)

F
OR THE NEXT few minutes, Adanne explained what should have been obvious to me — that the simple act of gathering firewood was one of the most dangerous parts of life at Kalma.

Emmanuel secured me an older model M16, which had been retrofitted with a decent scope.

"Don't hesitate to fire," he told me. "Because, I promise you, the Janjaweed will not. They are skilled fighters, even while riding on horses or camels."

"I won't hesitate," I promised, and I felt Adanne grab hold of my elbow, then let go.

"You're sure about this, Alex?" she asked. "You want to get involved?"

"I'm sure."

An hour or so later, we set out with an intrepid group of two dozen women wood gatherers.

Several had swaddled babies on their backs. One had brought a donkey with an old fork-shaped cart for carrying wood.

I needed to do this, to help in some way if I could. I knew this about myself: It was my nature. Adanne came too because, she said, "I feel responsible for you now. I brought you here, didn't I?"

Y
EARS OF WOOD foraging, moving farther and farther from the camp, had turned this into a long and scary walk.

"She says there is a hut in her sector," Emmanuel told me.

"Three boys were sharing it. But now they are gone."

"I thought that wasn't unusual," I said.

"Yes, except they left their things behind. She says a large man in fatigues was sighted in the camp. She was told he was the Tiger."

"Did any of the missing boys have parents in the camp?" I asked.

"No parents."

"And did anyone see the boys leave?"

"They left with the enormous man."

After two hours of walking, we finally came to a long line of low, skeletal brush. The women spread gathering cloths on the ground and set to breaking down the brush. Adanne and I pitched in while Emmanuel kept watch for Janjaweed patrols on the horizon.

Without translation, we were mostly reduced to eye contact and gestures as we worked side by side with the gatherers. The women seemed oblivious to the scratches that appeared up and down their arms. They easily outpaced us newcomers and tried not to laugh at our clumsiness.

One young mother and I fell into a kind of unspoken communication, making faces at each other like little kids. She stuck out her blue-tattooed lip. I held up two sticks like antlers. That one got a real laugh out of her. She put her hand up to her mouth, not quite hiding a brilliant white smile.

But then the mother stopped short.

Her hand came down slowly as her eyes fixed on something in the distance.

I turned around — but all I could see was a far-off dust cloud.

And then Emmanuel started shouting for everyone to run!

"Go quickly! Now! Get out of here! Go back to camp!"

J
ANJAWEED!

There was a vapor, a kind of mirage that made it hard to tell the exact number. Either way, their pace didn't leave much to the imagination. They were coming for us — fast.

Two of the women, one with a child fiercely holding on to her blouse, were still unhitching the communal donkey.

"Get them out of here!" I shouted at Adanne. "You go with them. Please, Adanne."

"Is there another weapon?" she yelled back.

"No," Emmanuel answered. "Distance is your weapon right now. Go! For God's sake, go! Take them back to camp."

Emmanuel and I had to make a stand.

We took up a position behind the abandoned donkey cart. I was using it as a brace for the rifle more than as cover.

Our best hope was that we were on the ground — while they would be firing from horseback.

I could see them through my scope now, eleven killers, bearded males in baggy fatigues, waving Kalashnikov rifles.

Just coming into range.

The first shots came from them.

Sand kicked up on either side of us. They rode a little wide of the mark, but still too close. They weren't amateurs. They were already yelling threats at us, confident about the final result. Why not? They outnumbered us eleven to two.

"Now?" I finally said to Emmanuel.

"Now!" he shouted.

We fired back four shots, and two were hits. The killers slumped on their horses — like someone had dropped their puppet strings — then fell to the ground. One of them was trampled under his own horse. It looked like his neck had snapped.

Even as I pulled the trigger again, it registered with me:

Everything changes now. First kill in Africa.

I heard a scream behind me, and my gut seized. One of the fleeing women had been hit, either by a stray shot or on purpose.

Not Adanne, I saw with a quick check over my shoulder.

She was keeping low, trying to get to the wounded woman, who was writhing on the ground. She'd only been shot in the arm. Only.

When I turned toward the Janjaweed again, two of the riders had stopped. They were jumping down off their horses, not to help their brothers but to get off a better shot at us.

The others kept coming fast. They were maybe fifty to sixty yards away now.

Emmanuel and I had the same instinct. We fired on the lead riders, quick shot after shot. Then at the two who were on flat ground. Three more of the Janjaweed went down in the next half minute or so.

Then Emmanuel screamed, dropped, and began twisting in pain on the ground.

And the rest of the Janjaweed were on us.

D
UST WAS KICKED up everywhere. That was probably a good thing. They had to fire blindly — but so did I. The gunfire from all the rifles was deafening at this range.

I grabbed his rifle and kept it at my feet. I fired and wounded another of the riders. And then another, in the stomach. They had been cocky — because the wood gatherers usually couldn't fight back — but they weren't well trained, and not many men can fire accurately from horseback, despite what Emmanuel had said.

I saw three of the riders break ranks and retreat. It gave me some hope — not a lot, but some.

I rushed to the fallen rider I'd pulled from his horse. I pushed his head down into the ground, then got off a hard punch that struck the hollow of his throat.

"Don't move!" I yelled. He didn't need English to know what I was saying. He stayed very still where he was.

"Alex!"

A voice came from behind me.

It was Adanne.

She and another woman stood swinging pieces of firewood at the last rider's horse to keep him away. Several of the women were on the ground, hands over their heads. I'm sure they still thought they were going to die.

Adanne swung again, and the horse reared up onto its hind legs. The rider lost his grip and fell.

"Alex, go!"

I looked and saw Emmanuel had propped himself up. He was covering the Janjaweed from his place on the ground.

I took off at a sprint.

The downed rider near the women was just getting up again. I yanked my rifle around as I came up on him. He looked at me in time to take the stock in the face. His nose exploded.

"Adanne, take his gun. Are you all right?" I asked her.

"I will be."

Emmanuel was calling to me, screaming. "Let them go, Alex! Let them go!"

I didn't hold back. "What are you talking about? We have to bring them in."

Even as I spoke, the truth of the situation settled over me. Same game, different rules.

"No use arresting the Janjaweed," Adanne said. "They know the government. The government knows them. It only brings more trouble to the camps. The UN can't help. No one can."

I kept the Janjaweed's rifle, but motioned for him to get on his horse.

And then the strangest thing happened. He laughed at me. He rode away laughing.

T
HE UN CAN'T help. No one can. This was what the refugees in the camp at Kalma believed, what they knew to be true, and now I knew it too.

That night, several of the women used their precious firewood to make a meal for the three of us, as thanks for helping them. I couldn't imagine taking food from these people, but Emmanuel told me it was the only proper response.

He shocked me by showing up for the supper, bandaged and smiling, with a bag of onions he'd nicked for the occasion.

Then we all shared kisra and vegetable stew around the cookfire, eating right-handed only from a common bowl. It felt like the right thing to do, almost like a religious experience, special in so many ways.

These were good people, caught in a terrible situation not of their making.

And yet, even they talked freely of frontier justice, the violent kind. A woman proudly told us how criminals were dealt with by the people in her village. They would all rush forward, stab the offending person, put a tire filled with gasoline around his neck, and then light it. No trials, no DNA testing, apparently no guilt from the vigilantes either.

Adanne and I were treated like guests of honor at dinner. There was a steady stream of visitors and a lot of laying on of hands.

When Emmanuel wasn't around to translate, I got the gist of the Dinka or Arabic from the warmth in the voices and the body language.

Several times, I heard something that sounded like Ali in the middle of sentences. Adanne picked up on it too.

She leaned near me at one point and said, "They think you look like Muhammad Ali."

"That's what they're saying?"

"It's true, Alex. You do look like him, when he was world champion. He's still very well loved here, you know." She nodded with her chin and smiled at a group of younger women hovering nearby. "I think you've made a few girlfriends in the bargain."

"Does that make you jealous?" I asked, grinning, happier and more relaxed than I'd been in many days.

A little girl crawled uninvited onto her lap and curled up.

"The word's not in my vocabulary," she said. Then she smiled.

"Maybe a little bit. For tonight anyway."

I was finding that I liked Adanne very much. She was courageous and resourceful, and Father Bombata was right about her: She was a good person. I had seen her risk her life for the wood gatherers today, and maybe because she felt responsible for me.

We stayed late into the evening, as the crowd got steadily bigger. Actually, the adults came and went, but the kids pooled all around us. It was an audience I couldn't resist, and neither could Adanne. She was very free and easy around children.

With Emmanuel's help, I got up and told an improvised version of one of my own kids' favorite bedtime stories.

It was about a little boy who wanted nothing more than to learn to whistle. This time, I named him Deng.

"And Deng tried—" I puffed out my cheeks and blew, and the kids rolled all over one another as though it were the funniest thing they had ever heard. They probably liked that I could be silly and laugh at myself.

"And he tried—" I bugged my eyes and blew right in their faces, and when they continued to laugh, it was more than a little gratifying, like an oasis in the middle of everything that had gone on since I'd come to Africa.

"You like children, don't you?" Adanne asked after I'd finished the story and come back to sit beside her. She had tears in her eyes from the laughing.

"I do. Do you have children, Adanne?"

She shook her head and stared into my eyes. Finally she spoke. "I can't have children, Alex. I was… when I was very young… I was raped. They used the handle of a shovel. It's not important. Not to me, not anymore." Adanne smiled then. "I can still enjoy children, though. I love the way you were with them."