Into Thick Air (34 page)

At a gas station I stop and, panting now with panic, tell my story to an Ethiopian truck driver. He shrugs. “There's nothing you can do. In Djibouti Town the people are good. These are animals.”

He's going the wrong way. There are no taxis. On my own, I'm flying by
the time the children in the next camp see me. Still, they try. Their best shot ricochets off the spokes. The next time I see a crowd of children ahead, on the right side of the road, I look back over my shoulder and see a truck coming. When it passes I duck behind it, picking up speed in its slipstream until a surge of adrenaline allows me to overtake the truck on its left, using it for cover as we pass the children. By the time they spot me and give chase, I'm out of range and only a few rocks skip past.

I'm too shaken to celebrate. I'm thinking of the parentless children in
Lord of the Flies
—but what were the refugee children thinking? Probably not much besides the thrill of hunting.
A new animal. Don't let it get away!
If they'd knocked me out, they might have gathered round in awe and poked at my sweating body with a stick. The very bravest might have touched my strange moon-colored skin.

After I've passed the last sorrowful shelter built of palm mats and the burnt flatbed of a long-dead truck, my fear deflates—after all, they were only forty-pound children with stones. Yet as I ride into the black rock desert I can't help but think that pedaling a bike through Djibouti is a ridiculous way to suffer voluntarily, as absurd as peeing into a water bottle at 20,000 feet because you' ll freeze if you leave your tent.

At least the local herders should be in good cheer. Recent rains have persuaded the leguminous trees and bushes to let loose an extravagance of green, vivid against the volcanic clinkers. The sandy dirt is the red of Persian rugs. Lofty camels sway over the brush and strip the leaflets, while goats attack from beneath. The dry watercourses are trimmed with milkweed eight feet tall, with huge leathery leaves like oven mitts and big wrinkled seed pods constricted round the middle into a pair of hemispheres.

A cloud slides over the sun, and the gift of shade softens my temper. It can't be much over 90 degrees. It's Friday, the Muslim day of rest, with so little traffic that the policeman at the sole checkpoint is snoozing peacefully in his shack. The bike lets me slip past without a sound.

As I ride west, a steady climb brings into view the narrow Gulf of Tadjoura to the north, the milky blue light blending sea and sky. The blacktop is smooth and bordered with the toxic purple blooms of nightshade
and the brain-twisting white flowers of sacred
Datura.
Some forward-thinking soul has created a rest stop of a few shade trees by surrounding them with an anti-goat wall of fifty-five-gallon drums. Atop a power line is a long-legged buzzard with orange and white feathers and a slaughterhouse beak, hooked and tipped with black. It turns and casts a baleful eye, and just like that I'm glad to be cycling through Djibouti.

As the road climbs, the bike slows, but a downshift keeps the pedals spinning at the same clip. A truck labors past, also downshifting, rattling with racks of returnable pop bottles and emblazoned with
This is the Fanta Moment!
I make do with Yemeni yogurt and oranges when I stop for lunch under a thorn tree. By habit I begin to clean up the orange peels before realizing that they'll be more appreciated on the ground. Pedaling off, I turn to see
This is the Orange Peel Moment!
The goats vacuum up the peels in ten seconds.

Ahead is a junction with a five-mile spur road to Arta, a summer retreat for those with the means to escape the heat of Djibouti Town. It's goat land all the way to the summit. The white flocks move lightly over the dark mountain, like sliding cloud shadows that expand and contract as they pass over ridge and canyon. At the mountaintop village of Arta, the homes are behind walls topped with broken glass embedded in the cement, or impenetrable hedges of red and white oleander, or an inspired trellis of bougainvillea and barbed wire. I push on toward a forest of antennae and spinning radar parabola, past a pair of massive gates with lion's-head knockers. The sign says,
Ambassador of France
.

I head to the Centre d'Estivage, a little hotel and a big white stucco bar and restaurant with a veranda onto a spotless playground and groomed volleyball court. The supervisor is welcoming.

“Nobody has come on a bicycle! Would you like to have lunch?” (Yes.) “And the evening meal?” (Yes.) “You can dream outside if you like, or you can dream inside, with bath.”

I choose inside. This may be my last chance for a shower, for there will be no more French oases after Arta. Lunch costs the same as the room, but someone must pay for the signature white china, rimmed in blue. The hushed music I identify as a Rhinelander waltz without ever having heard
such a thing. Likewise, the fixed menu is unrecognizable, but once the food appears I guess it's Petit Snippets Verdure and Jus L'Oink. With my diet of anti-
Salmonella
drugs, I don't chance the alcohol kindly offered by the couple with an infant at the next table.

“Bordeaux Saint-Emilion,” she says. “Good with savage animals.” Her name is Corinne. She's dark and lovely and the owner of some nose. The baby is enormously attractive to me in my child-deprived state.

“His name is Morvan. It is name from Brittany. ‘Son of the Sea.' ”

Son of the Sea is landlocked in a Chicco car seat. His crew-cut father wears an orange T-shirt, Camel Adventure shorts, and what is either a faint birthmark or a black eye. His improbable name is Claude Target and he is a Legionnaire, which means that his name might not be Claude Target. Anyone who joins this secretive arm of the French military may assume a new identity, to leave behind their possibly unpleasant past.

This I learned long ago from the
World Book Encyclopedia
. Its entry for the Foreign Legion began with a yawn (“one of the world's most colorful and gallant fighting forces”) but led to an eye-opener: “Some of its members join to escape political imprisonment, others to avoid punishment, and still others to seek adventure.”

This was a revelation no boy would forget: no matter how bad you were, there was a place you could go and be paid to shoot guns in the desert.

So Mr. Target has a perfectly good reason for being here. I'm more of a mystery, and he wants to know, “Why have you come to Djibouti?”

Tourist, I say—just to see Djibouti. Mr. Target honks an incredulous laugh and asks again, “
Why?
”

Why not? Except for the refugee children outside Djibouti Town, the people are very nice.

“Because you are not French! Where are you from?”

America. Arizona. I like deserts, and I want to see Lac Assal.

“Ahh! Now this is very nice. Spectacular. And very hot. It is one of the hottest places in the world. But not so far away is the Forêt du Day.
C'est fantastique
. Clouds and trees and animals.” He growls. “Tiger.”

It sounds as if you like Djibouti.

“What? I did not ask to go to Djibouti. Nobody asks for Djibouti.”

But this is where many Legionnaires are posted. Why did you join?

“Adventure! Sensation! We just come back from desert school. Six days. Eighteen camels. We eat only banana and . . .
baaahhh
. . . .”

Goat.

“The goat. I have twelve years in the Legion. Many places I go. Bosnia, Desert Storm, Cambodia, Sarajevo, Chad, Congo, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Tunisia.”

Mr. Target lights a Camel, tickles Son of the Sea, and pours both of us a glass of wine. This time I accept.

Mr. Target is too kind. The Legion is not known for kindness. Their training includes not flinching as a tank passes over you, a churning steel track on either side. They worship a wooden hand, kept in a glass box in France, that once resided on the arm of a Legionnaire captain who was killed in a 1863 battle in Mexico. The clumsy prosthetic was all that remained of a brave platoon that was hopelessly outnumbered yet refused to surrender. That they were duly slaughtered only enhanced the Legionnaire's reputation as men who fear nothing.

Mr. Target burnishes the tough-guy status by spearing and eating a wedge of extraordinarily stinky cheese. It's veined with busy mold and likely capable of crawling off the dessert tray. Its odor attracts two more Legionnaires and a bottle of cognac to our table. The man with a tattoo of a human skull with a goat horn for a nose notices my bike by the door.

“Why do you ride the bike?”

For pleasure, I say.

“I do not ride for pleasure. If I get the order to ride a bicycle, I ride.”

And what do you do for pleasure?

“Fighting.”

Son of the Sea begins to wail. Corrine says he needs to sleep. Let me try, I say—putting babies to sleep is something I also do for pleasure.

The mini-legionnaire is passed to me, and at once I'm happy and teary-eyed. I hum and pat Morvan to sleep in five minutes. I might have dozed off too if not for the entry of a man who satisfies all my preconceptions of a Legionnaire, tattooed to the last knuckle. He takes a look at the sleeping infant in my arms, backs off like it's a land mine, and says, “Baby. Mom.”

I slip Son of the Sea back to Corrine.

Mike is, or at least was, an American. His wife, a round and red-faced Frenchwoman, joins us and helps herself to the cognac. Mike and Claude chat amiably—“Ha! Fuck you!”—before Mike turns to say, “Claude says you are a writer and something else? I'm looking for a writer. When I'm out of here I want to tell my story. Ten years in the Legion. French Guinea. Yugoslavia. Djibouti. All over the place. I got a story but I need someone to tell it.”

Well, I'm not really
that
kind of writer. But I may meet one someday.

“Here's my address. Yours?”

We swap addresses, and he says, “I know Arizona. Yeah. Pen.”

He takes my pen and scrawls a map on a napkin stained with cognac and coffee.

“Look. California. Arizona. Right. Yeah. Listen. Here. Marines—I was in the Marines. Here.”

In Yuma?

“That's right. Yuma.”

It's a lot like Djibouti.

“It's not Djibouti. Don't tell me Yuma is Djibouti.”

I mean the desert.

“Desert. Listen. You're riding that bike through Djibouti?”

I am.

“Listen. You've got people who know where you are, when you are?”

The embassy knows my route, and when I should return.

“Listen. Here's my phone. 35135. Ask for post 2240. Wherever you are, the French will get you. Got that?”

Thanks. I'm hoping the only help I' ll need is finding out where I can get water. Do they sell water in the village of Ouea?

“What? The village? Don't go there. If you want water we put some out at the gate to the post. How many liters? What time? Huh?”

His wife interrupts with, “Water at our house. You must come for dinner, and to stay the night.”

She nods off, cognac in hand, before I need reply. I mention that it's no problem to carry water down the mountain. I could even cache a few
liters in places I would return to after tomorrow's detour to the town of Ali Sabieh.

“Djiboutians steal it,” says Mike. “They're watching you. In the rocks. Watching you. Last month, tell you, a Legionnaire died while driving to the post. Djiboutians found him. Took his wallet. Watch. That's the kind of people we're talking about.”

It seems necessary for Mike to fear the natives, for he certainly wants them to fear him. He looks over the bulge of his considerable shoulder as another man enters the restaurant.

“Shit. That's the captain, and I want to kick his ass. So I think I need to go home.”

He rouses his wife. She manages to repeat her offer of accommodation, then totters out the door.

I prefer to dream with bath, at the little hotel. Unlike room 9 at the Djibouti Palace, there is a toilet seat. With the windows open it's cool enough to appreciate the hot water. All is perfect, except that my time with Son of the Sea has intensified my longing for my baby girl.

And when I lie down for the night on the white cotton, there's the twinge of guilt. It's the kids from the refugee camp.

 

THE SOLDIERS are up with the sun for their
petit déjeuner
, the men looking less-than-savage in snug camouflage shorts, spooning up Rice Krispies and chomping on baguettes. I join them. After breakfast the generous commander makes a gift of three liters of French spring water.

The road plummets back into the heat. The country is long low plateaus, rimmed with modest cliffs or so wasted by erosion that nothing remains but a steep cone of boulders. In the valleys between, goats drift and pause and move on. Always there is a man close behind, sashaying easily through the brush, a long curved knife in his belt, and his hands loosely clasping a staff carried across his shoulders.

The goats are voracious, yet none chances a nibble of the squat tree with bark curling off its inflated trunk like skin peeling from a bloated corpse. I snap off a twig and catch the scent of church incense. It must be frankincense or myrrh, and it must taste awful.

A pair of fighter jets shriek past, leaving an exaggerated silence in their wake. When a whistling cry spins my head, I remember:
In the rocks. Watching you.
But it's only what appears to be a very big rabbit with no tail and little ears.

Except rabbits don't whistle. It's not a goofy-toothed bunny but a hoofed mammal with little fangs, the rock hyrax. There are at least a dozen among the boulders, brave as Legionnaires, daring me to stop and look.

On the blind curve entering Ouea, a truck accident has stopped all traffic. It's another Fanta Moment: children have come from their rock homes to hawk orange soda to the drivers going nowhere. Of course the bike can simply be carried around the wreckage, but not without attracting attention. When a boy dashes for me I reflexively fear another stoning, but he wants only to help push the bike up the hill. At the top wait girls whose round faces are dusted with yellow powder, like nectar eaters sprinkled with pollen. The children offer peanuts in cones of newspaper from Japan; I offer the ten-minute version of my life, complete with pictures of my wife and children. The boy I leave with a postcard of Arizona. He clutches it to his heart like the Hope Diamond.