Pagan Babies Page 4

  He said it without feeling and it frightened her.

  “But you were offering the Mass. You told me, you were holding the Host in your hands when they came in. There was nothing you could do. You try to stop them they would have killed you. They don’t care you’re a priest.”

  Again he raised the yobie to draw on it and paused.

  “Let me ask you something.”

  He paused again and she said, “Yes, what?”

  “You think I do any good here?”

  Sounding like he was feeling sorry for himself.

  She said, “You want the truth? You don’t do as much as you could.” She said, “Do more. Talk to people, preach the word of God. Do what a priest is suppose to do. Say Mass every Sunday, what people want you to do.”

  “You really believe,” he said, staring at her in the candlelight, “I can take bread and change it into the Body of Christ?”

  What was he doing asking her that? She said, “Of course you can. It’s what priests do, in the Mass. You change the bread, and also the wine.” What was wrong with him? “I believe that, as all those who come to Mass believe it.”

  “Sally, we believe what we want to believe.”

  Calling her that, Sally, from asali, the Swahili word for honey, which he did sometimes.

  He said, “You want to know what I believe?”

  “Yes, I would like to know.”

  “I did come here with a few good intentions. One thing in particular I wanted to do was paint Fr. Toreki’s house. Every picture I ever saw of it, going back years, the house needed painting. I knew how, I used to help my dad sometimes when he had a big job, the outside of a two-story house.”

  Why was he telling her this? She believed she was listening to his mind wander from having too much to drink.

  “My dad was a housepainter all his life. Forty years at least he stood with a wall in front of his face painting it, smelling it, going to his truck with the ladders on top to smoke a cigarette and drink vodka from the bottle. He said to me—it was when I dropped out of college and was helping him—he said, ‘Go back to school and get a good job.’ He said, ‘You’re too smart to spend your life pissing in paint cans.’ The only time he took off was to go deer hunting in the fall. Never saw a doctor, he was sixty-three years old when he died, my brother Fran said watching the Lions on TV. Not real ones, the Detroit Lions, a professional football team. Fran said in a letter our dad’s last conscious experience was seeing the Lions march all the way down the field, fumble on the two-yard line and lose the ball.”

  She watched his expression looking at her. He seemed to smile. Or she could be wrong.

  “You have to know my brother,” Terry said. “He wasn’t being disrespectful.”

  Was he speaking to her in that quiet voice or to himself? She watched him draw on the yobie. It had gone out.

  “You should go to bed.”

  “In a while.”

  “Well, I’m going.” She got up from the table with her Russian pistol and stood looking at him. “Why do you talk like this to me?”

  “Like what?”

  Walking away she said, “Never mind.”

  And heard him say, “Why are you mad at me?”

  Lying still to listen, she heard him taking a shower and then could hear him brushing his teeth, in the bath between the two bedrooms. Always he brushed his teeth and smelled of toothpaste when he came to her bed. Once a week he brought two Larium pills, so they wouldn’t catch malaria, and a glass of water they shared. The pills were hallucinogenic and in the morning they would try to describe their dreams.

  Tonight he slipped in next to her beneath the netting and remained lying on his back, not moving, leaving to her whatever would come next.

  She said, “You tell me you come here to paint a house. That’s the reason?”

  “It’s something I wanted to do.”

  “Then why don’t you paint it?”

  He didn’t answer, but said after a few moments, “I want to have the bodies buried, the ones lying in the church, the bones.”

  She said, “Yes?”

  But now he was silent.

  She said, “Can’t you talk to me?”

  “I’m trying to.”

  She said, “Give me a break.” One of his expressions she liked.

  For several minutes she listened to the sounds in the night, outside, before turning onto her side and was closer to him now, close enough to see his face, close enough to rest the stump of her arm on his chest. Now if he takes it in his hand . . .

  He did, he took the hard, scarred end of what remained of her arm and began to caress it lightly with his fingers. She raised her head and he slipped his arm around her.

  She said, “I know why you don’t talk to me.”

  She waited and he said, “Why?”

  “Because you going to leave and not come back.”

  This time when she waited and he said nothing she raised her head and put her mouth on his.

  * * *

  She awoke in the morning looking at sunlight through the netting and closed her eyes again to listen for sounds in the house. She knew he was gone but continued to listen. Sometimes he would return to his own bedroom during the night. Sometimes he rose before she did and would put the coffee on the stove to boil. She listened to hear him cough and clear his throat. She believed if she didn’t see him for a long time and heard him clear his throat in a crowd of people she would know it was Terry. There were times she believed he loved her: not only when they were in bed and he showed his hunger for her, but other times, seeing the way he looked at her and she would wait for him to say it. When she said it to him she would smile, so the words wouldn’t frighten him. After they went to bed the first time he was so quiet she said to him, “Listen, there were always priests who want me, Rwandese priests, French priests, it’s nothing new. Do you think people care if we sleep together?”

  Opening her eyes she turned her head on the pillow.

  He was gone.

  Now she turned to her side of the bed to get up, looked at the night table and saw her pistol was also gone.

  6

  * * *

  IT TOOK HIM THREE HOURS to drive the hundred miles from Arisimbi to the Banque Commerciale and the Sabena ticket office in Kigali, and then three hours back, the road through Rwanda like nothing from past experience.

  Get to the top of a long grade and look around, all you saw were hills in every direction, misty hills, bright green hills, hills that were terraced and cultivated, crops growing among groves of banana trees, the entire country, Terry believed, one big vegetable garden. The red streaks on distant hills were dirt roads, the squares of red dotting the slopes, houses, compounds, a church. He cruised the two-lane blacktop with all the windows in Toreki’s Volvo station wagon cranked open. He drove with a sense of making his move, his life about to turn a corner.

  The downside was getting stuck behind trucks on the blind curves and grades, trucks piled high with bananas and bags of charcoal, trucks carrying work crews, a big yellow semi with primus beer lettered across the rear end that Terry stared at for miles. The trucks, and the people along the side of the road, people standing in groups like they were waiting for a bus and people going somewhere, women in bright colors carrying plastic buckets on their heads, clay pots as big around as medicine balls, boys pushing carts loaded with plastic chairs grooved together, goats grazing close to the road, Ankole cows with their graceful horns and tough meat taking their time to cross. But no dogs. Where were the dogs? A roadside poster warned against AIDS. A sign on a Coca-Cola stand said ici sallon de coiffure. People strayed onto the blacktop and he would lean on his horn, something he never did at home.

  Finally cresting a grade he descended toward Arisimbi, the village laid out below him left to right, the marketplace of concrete stalls on the offside of the main road, away from the sector office and the squares of red brick among plots of vegetation, the bar, the beer lady’s house, the compound where La
urent’s squad lived, the well, the charcoal seller’s house, the compound where Thomas the corn man lived, all of it a patchwork of red and green leading up to the white church and the rectory in the trees.

  Terry parked the Volvo wagon in front of the sector office and went in.

  Laurent Kamweya in his starched camies looked up from the only desk in the room and then rose saying, “Fatha, how can I be of service?”

  Terry liked Laurent and believed he meant it. “You know where I can find Bernard?”

  It seemed to stop him for a moment. Laurent turned enough to indicate the window, the heavy wooden shutters open, the street outside that trailed through the village. “You see the white flower by the door of the beer lady’s house,” Laurent said. “She has banana beer today, so that’s where he is, with his friends. Tell me what you want with him.”

  “Have a talk,” Terry said. “See if I can get him to give himself up.”

  “Persuade Bernard Nyikizi to confess to murder?”

  “To save his immortal soul.”

  “You serious to do this?”

  “I’ll give it a try. Are you busy?” Terry said. “There’s something else I want to ask you.”

  Laurent said, “Please,” gesturing over his desk, the surface clean except for a clipboard holding a few papers. The brick walls of the office were as clean as the desk. A woven mat covered the floor. The place always looked the same, temporary, never much going on. Laurent was watching now as Terry slipped his hand inside his white cassock and came out with currency, ten five-thousand-franc notes, the new one illustrated with tribal dancers, and laid the money on the clean desk.

  “Fifty thousand francs,” Terry said. “I’d like you to do me a favor, if you would. Use half of this to pay for graves dug in the churchyard, forty-seven graves.”

  “You have permission of the bourgmestre?”

  “Fuck the bourgmestre, it’s private property, the state has nothing to say about it.”

  Laurent hesitated. “Why do you ask me? You could see to it.”

  “I’m leaving, going home.”

  “For good?”

  “For good or bad. This afternoon.”

  “You have someone to take your place?”

  “That’s not my problem. Ask the bishop.”

  “Will you continue to be a priest?”

  Terry hesitated. “Why do you ask that?”

  “You seem different to other priests I’ve known. I say this as a compliment to you.” Laurent paused, waiting for Terry to tell if he would still be a priest. When he didn’t answer, Laurent said, “Twenty-five thousand to dig graves is very generous.”

  “What does it come to,” Terry said, “a dollar and a half each?” He picked up five of the notes and dropped them closer to Laurent standing behind the desk. “This is for another favor. I need a ride to the airport.”

  “Take the bus,” Laurent said, “is much cheaper.”

  “But what I’d like you to do,” Terry said, “is use the Volvo. Bring it back and give it to Chantelle, or sell it in Kigali and give her the money.”

  “I have to ask again,” Laurent said, “why you want me to do it, not someone else.”

  “ ’Cause you’re the man here,” Terry said. “You may have your doubts about me, but I don’t have any about you. If I’m wrong and you keep the car or the money for yourself, well, Chantelle’s the one who’s out. So it’s up to you, partner.”

  Let him chew on that.

  Terry turned to the door, then looked back. “I won’t be long.” He paused again, remembering something, and said, “Where’re all the dogs? I’ve been meaning to ask that for a long time.”

  “People don’t like to have dogs anymore,” Laurent said. “The dogs ate too many of the dead.”

  The only difference between the beer lady’s house and what was called the bar—both mud brick with metal roofs—the beer lady made her own banana brew, urwagwa, and sold it in used Primus litre bottles with a straw for five to fifteen cents depending on the supply. The bar offered commercial brands, too, Primus, made with sorghum, and Mutzig, which Terry drank once in a while. He walked into the beer lady’s house breathing through his mouth against the stench of overripe bananas and body odor, into a bare-brick room that could be a prison cell.

  There was Bernard in his shirt, one of his buddies next to him, both against the wall behind a plywood table, both sucking on reed straws stuck into brown litre bottles, the Primus label worn off from reuse. The third one sat to the left of Bernard in a straight chair with his bottle and straw, the chair tilted against the wall, his bare feet hanging free. The fourth one was just now coming out of a back hall. Terry waited until he was in the room—the same four from the market the other day—all of them watching him now, Bernard murmuring to them in Kinyarwanda. There was no sign of the beer lady.

  Terry said to Bernard, “Any more visions?”

  “I told you in the Confession,” Bernard said, “what thing is going to happen.” He spoke with the reed straw in his mouth, holding the bottle against his chest. “I don’t tell my visions in this place.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Terry said. “You told everyone at the market you saw me and I saw you. Talking about the time you came in the church with your machete, your panga. Your words, ‘I saw him and he saw me.’ Isn’t that right? I saw you hack four people to death, what you told me, and you saw me do nothing to stop you. Now you say you’re gonna do it again. Cut anybody you don’t like down to size, including me. Right? Isn’t that what you said?”

  “I speak only to my friends in this place,” Bernard said, still with the straw in his mouth. “We don’t want you. What do you come here for?”

  “To ask you to give yourself up. Tell Laurent Kamweya what you did in the church.”

  Bernard, smiling now, said, “You must be a crazy person.” He spoke to his friends in Kinyarwanda and now they were smiling.

  Terry said, “They were with you that day?”

  “Oh yes, these and others. It was our duty,” Bernard said. “We say, ‘Tugire gukora akazi.’ Let us go do the work, and we did, uh? Go now, we don’t want you here.”

  “Soon as I give you your penance,” Terry said.

  He pulled Chantelle’s pistol out of his cassock and shot Bernard, shattering the bottle he held against his chest. He shot the one next to Bernard trying to get up, caught between the wall and the plywood table. He shot the one in the chair tilted against the wall. And shot the one by the back hall as this one brought a machete out of his belt and shot him again as the blade showed a glint of light from the open door.

  The shots left a hard ringing sound within the closeness of the brick walls. Terry held the pistol at arm’s length on a level with his eyes—the Russian Tokarev resembling an old-model Colt .45, big and heavy—and made the sign of the cross with it over the dead. He said, “Rest in peace, motherfuckers,” turned, and walked out of the beer lady’s house to wait at the side of the road.

  Pretty soon the Volvo appeared, coming around from the front of the sector office.

  They stood in the rectory kitchen, Chantelle watching Laurent taking things from the deep pockets of his combat fatigues, a mist showing in the window behind him, the light fading.

  “The keys to the Volvo and the house and, I believe, the church.” Laurent laid them on the kitchen table. “Your pistol. I can get you another one that holds twice the number of bullets. There are only two in here now.” He laid the Tokarev on the table. “Four men with five shots tells me he concentrated, this priest of yours. He knew he could not waste the shots.”

  “How do you report it?”

  “Unknown assailant.”

  “No one will question it?”

  “The witnesses are dead. As always.” Laurent’s hand went into the big pocket of his tunic. “Sabena Air tickets, he said to give you. I told him even the Belgian ambassador will do anything to avoid flying Sabena. I drove the priest to Goma and introduced him to a man who runs arms into C
ongo-Zaire, a friend of everyone. He’ll take the priest to Mombasa. From there he can fly to Nairobi and take British Air to his home.”

  Chantelle said, “He could have exchanged the tickets.”

  “He wants you to have them, to cash in or go to Brussels for a holiday. Why not?”

  “He was always generous,” Chantelle said, “giving me money to spend.”

  “A priest,” Laurent said, “who took vows to be a holy man. Or maybe he forgot to take them. I always said he was different to any priest I ever knew.”

  Chantelle seemed about to speak, perhaps to give her opinion, defend her priest. No—she pulled the cord to turn on the electric light in the ceiling, brought an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker black, not the red, from the cabinet above the refrigerator she reached into now for a tray of ice. When she spoke again the priest was gone. She said to Laurent, “Have you had your supper?”

  7

  * * *

  “HEY. EVERYBODY HAVING A good time tonight? . . . Yeah? Well, come on, let’s hear it, okay? We’re up here working our asses off. No dogs or ponies, man, just us.”

  The comic acting as MC, the bill of his baseball cap funneled around his face, got a pretty good response: half the tables filled this evening, the back part of the big room dark; not bad for an open-mike night.

  “Right now it’s my pleasure to welcome back to Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle a chick who’s smokin’, so fucking hot that I ask myself, ‘Rich, why would a killer chick like Debbie ever stoop to doing stand-up?’ And the answer that flashed immediately in my tired brain, ‘Because she’s funny, dude. Because she’s a very funny chick, fast on her way to becoming a headliner.’ You with me? . . . Yeah? Then give it up for . . . Detroit’s own Debbie Dewey!”

  She appeared out of the center-stage door in a gray-green prison dress, extra-large, ankle-high work shoes and white socks, the outfit keeping the applause up. The right thing to do now was point to the comic-as-MC in his baseball cap leaving the stage and shout in the noise, “Richie Baron! Yeah! Let him hear it!” But she didn’t. When the room was quiet enough she said: