The Ants of God
To my daughter, Ann
ONE
1
It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when the train reached Awash station in the fierce African heat. The plain was white with dust. In the distance a few antelope and gazelle grazed on the dun-colored grass growing along the volcanic rock that littered the ballast bed. The steel rails shone like knives in the sunlight and bisected the plain as straight and true as a plumb line. In the distance lumps of rose and purple mountains lifted their peaks through the shimmering heat to the east. Behind the train to the west lay the sheer brown face of the Ethiopian escarpment, towering to eight thousand feet along the serpentine track the train had just descended. Its facets and fault lines were already cracked with evening shadow as the sun fell from its zenith.
McDermott looked out the train window and saw only the sky and the animals. The sky was like scalded milk—a pale blue without clouds beyond the high haze. The animals were sluggish and undernourished.
“Do you know the Yemen?” asked a small Frenchwoman with bobbed hair as she shared his coach window to watch a camel caravan leave a dusty village at the foot of the escarpment. In the coach every seat except the one beside him was occupied by middle-aged French tourists on their way to Harar, Djibouti, and the Yemen. Some carried overcoats; others, scarves and sweaters. Their faces, like hers, were as gray as boiled pork from the Parisian winter they’d just fled.
McDermott told her he’d been to the Yemen several years ago. It was her recognition that he was somehow identified with the wasteland the tourists were watching through the dusty coach windows that had drawn her attention, just as it was the face itself that had finally provoked her question. His face was burned by the sun, and his arms were even darker. He was wearing a short-sleeved khaki shirt and khaki trousers, like an agronome or ingénieur. She knew he was an American. His hair was dark and short, the brown eyes sympathetic without being intrusive. The smile came easily.
She took a picture through the coach window, rewound her camera, and said she’d wanted to visit the Yemen since her student days in Paris decades earlier. Then she brought an old French guidebook from her shoulder bag across the aisle and showed it to him.
“I think San’a has not changed very much in all these years, isn’t that true?” she asked.
“I think so,” McDermott said.
“You are going to San’a?”
“To Djibouti.”
Looking at the rocky plain afterward, McDermott thought of the Yemen. The monotony of the wheels recalled a bit of drunken doggerel an Irish aviation mechanic once sang at the military mess in Oman during the Friday night dart games. He’d forgotten the Irishman’s name, but he had worked in the Yemen for a UN survey team. McDermott remembered something about rose mountains and suqs dark and narrow. He sat studying the mountains to the east, and finally the Irishman’s drunken voice came into his mind and he remembered the first lines of the refrain:
In Yemen’s rose mountains
Among mossy fountains
I met a young maiden
Samira Rah’man
That was all McDermott could remember. The French tourists were already on their feet, and he watched through the train window as the coaches drifted noisily to a stop at Awash station. He followed them down the steps and across the blinding glare to the railroad restaurant. The concrete block walls were overgrown with green vines and shaded by a few tabid ash and laurel trees powdered with white dust. The restaurant beyond was cool, shadowed with green sunlight. The concrete floor had been doused with water and swept down in preparation for the train’s arrival. Under the high asbestos roof on open trusses were a dozen tables spread with red checkered tablecloths where a few Ethiopian and half-caste waiters were bringing dishes. The French tourists were served a common bill of fare.
McDermott resisted the waiter who attempted to seat him with the Frenchmen and sat alone against the back wall. When the waiter brought the spaghetti and salad, he ate without relish, returned the warm bottle of beer to the tray, and ordered a bottle of mineral water instead. After he’d finished, he smoked a cigarette, picked up his briefcase, and went back out into the hot sunlight. The train from Dire Dawa to the west had arrived on the far track, an hour late, and the hungry passengers hurried across the railbed to the restaurant. McDermott moved down the tracks and away from the black vendors hawking their wares near the empty coaches.
“Well, I’m goddamned fed up with it,” complained a young American voice from nearby. “I’m just goddamned tired of it and so’s everyone else. You’ve had your way so long we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing anymore. We don’t care about the frigging ocean. We’ve already got our tickets back to Addis, even if you haven’t. So we just don’t wanna hear any more about that saltwater shit—”
“Why don’t you go fry your head,” said a long-legged blond girl. She wore faded blue jeans, open leather sandals, and a blue tennis shirt. “You can change your tickets like I did.”
“The hell with that noise!” another young girl cried. “We’re not changing anything! If you don’t dig it, then buzz off.”
Six young Americans in blue jeans, denim, and tie-dyed shirts were squatting in the shadows of the restaurant wall, their backpacks, guitar cases, and sleeping bags at their feet. They were arguing with the blond girl standing in the sunlight. Her face was turned away, her eyes fastened to the distant mountains that showed as pale as smoke through the glare to the east.
“I’ll tell you how stupid it is,” a bearded young man continued, getting to his feet. “I’ll tell you, only you don’t wanna listen. Ask someone else then. Hey, mister!” he called.
McDermott stopped and looked back. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind.” The blond girl was still looking toward the mountains. “Is that train going straight to Djibouti tonight or Dire Dawa?” asked the bearded young American.
“Dire Dawa,” McDermott said. “You have to transfer at Dire Dawa to get to Djibouti.” The blond girl turned and looked at him angrily. He went on anyway: “There’s an overnight sleeper to Djibouti at eight. Sometimes it makes it; sometimes it doesn’t.”
“That’s what I figured,” said the youth. “Thanks.” He turned to the girl. “You heard what the man said. I told you that train wouldn’t get us there tonight. It’ll miss the frigging connection, and we’ll be stuck again. Tomorrow night we could be in Nairobi, not another goddamned fleabag hole like this one.”
The blond girl picked up her backpack and shouldered it. Another young man said, “If you’re gonna split, then like do it, and stop all the time rapping about it. You’ve had your way too long, that’s your problem. We’d be in Nairobi right now except you had to go see Rimbaud’s house.”
“Yeah,” a dark-haired girl joined in from the shadows of the wall. “Only we never got there. Now it’s the crummy Indian Ocean, and we’ll never get there either.”
McDermott walked along the track away from the train. The heat breathed against his face like the gases from a furnace. Plumes of white dust lifted into the windless sky behind two Land-Rovers moving across the open plain away from Awash station. Hawks stirred on the warm currents of rising air south of the escarpment; below them soared a few black buzzards. Behind him on the track Ethiopian village women hawked their wares to the passengers in the second-and third-class coaches, selling oranges and bananas through the open windows.
The French tourists returned to their seats in the first-class car. McDermott was the last to board. Sitting in his seat next to the window was the blond American girl who’d been arguing with her friends outside. On the seat next to her was the nylon backpack. He lifted the pack to the overhead rack and sat down. The girl was looking through the sun-glazed window, watching her friends boarding the other train westbound for Addis Ababa. The train slipped forward and gained speed as it moved out across the open plain. She didn’t look back.
McDermott sat beside her, swaying silently with the idle drift of the coach over the uneven ballast bed. A few miles beyond, she put her head down and pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. He saw her wipe her eyes and knew that she’d been crying. He sat uncomfortably in his seat and finally reached forward and brought a copy of Aviation Age from the briefcase at his feet.
As the sun dropped to the west, the scrubland beyond the windows began to reclaim its color from the bleaching of the midday sun—browns, sables, and roses appeared where only an alkaline ash had been. Camel trains plodded through the dry wadis and sent curtains of dust aloft, as sheer as silk. Wild pig and dik-dik galloped from the scrub as the train rocketed across the iron trestles and sent thunder echoing up the dry streambeds. Baboons loped away from the commotion, disappearing across the shoulders of the gorges, or climbed higher in the trees to stare back, vexed, at the speeding iron.
At the solitary stations along the track black vendors jostled beneath the windows with their lifted wares. The dirt streets otherwise were silent and empty. A few Arab, Greek, or Italian shops were visible, their doors open to the afternoon sun, their interiors in shadow. On the foot-worn earth banks near the tracks, Galla and Afar nomads in rough chammas stained sable-brown by the wind of the desert studied the coaches silently, arms draped across the barrels and stocks of the old British and Italian muskets they carried like sticks across their shoulders.
The American girl called for two oranges through the coach window from a barefooted young girl who was blind in one eye. She leaned from the window to summon the girl from the rear, gesturing to the older women to make way for her. As the young Ethiopian girl lifted her face into the sunlight to hand up the oranges, her bad eye gleamed like a boiled egg under her smooth forehead.
The blond girl peeled the oranges as the train slid forward. Both were rotten under the soft, greenish skin.
“That little bastard,” she said. “No wonder she was shoved to the back.”
She threw both oranges out the window, stepped over McDermott’s feet, and went forward to the washroom. When she returned, her face and hands were clean, and she’d combed the snarls from her lank blond hair. But her clothes were no fresher, and as McDermott lifted his magazine to let her pass, he caught the odor of stale laundry and dried perspiration now mixed with the pomade from the liquid-soap dispenser in the washroom.
She sat back in her seat, lit a cigarette with a sigh, and looked out the window, like an ingénue who’d just given a stage cue. McDermott ignored her, and she sighed again. A few minutes later she’d grown tired of waiting. “Don’t you speak any language known to man, or what,” she complained. “What’s your problem, anyway?”
McDermott put down his magazine. Her forehead was broad, her eyebrows darker than her blond hair, which had been bleached in flaxen streaks by the African sun, and her face was attractive. But he thought she knew that. Her mouth was wide, the upper lip a little petulant, like a woman accustomed to having her own way and ready to pout her way to victory when she didn’t. “Nothing I can think of,” he said, looking at the bold green eyes that were confronting him coolly. “What’s yours?”
“You don’t think very fast then. Like maybe it takes you a couple of months to make up your mind. If you’re on this train, you gotta have problems, man. No one in his right mind would be out here in the middle of Turkeyville flats if he didn’t. Unless you’re one of the misfit types—macho and all that shit.”
McDermott couldn’t think of anything to say. She slumped deeper in her seat, as if she’d already written him off and was now waiting for him to tell her why she shouldn’t. “God,” she sighed theatrically as he lifted the magazine again, her knees thrust against the seat in front of her. “You’ve got problems all right.”
“What kind of problems?” He put the magazine back in his briefcase.
“Alienation. What else? Like watching people and not even trying to communicate. What’s the matter—afraid you’d get involved or something?”
“Some people like to be left alone.”
“Sure—like when you’re dead, man. You’re not dead—you’re not even a tourist, like the rest of these grunts. No camera, no guidebook—none of that Disneyland shit. How come you’re so far out of place?”
“Maybe I got on the wrong train.”
She laughed. “Maybe we all got on the wrong train,” she said, but when McDermott smiled, she resented it. “Maybe it’s not so funny either, being on the wrong train. Is that the way you put people down, laughing like that?” She leaned forward to scratch her ankle, but McDermott thought the effort as phony as her sigh a few minutes earlier. “It’s not so funny when you think about it. What’s your problem, anyway? You still haven’t told me. Ashamed I’m an American, and maybe you’ll have to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in front of all these Frenchy schoolteachers or something? What are you going to Djibouti for?”
McDermott thought about it. “Business,” he said.
“That figures.” She dropped her eyes to the briefcase, and looked back up at him, her head still back. “Sure. Business. With a big-deal briefcase and a barbershop head, what else could it be? What are you—a government guy or something?”
“No—”
“What kind of business?”
“The airplane business.”
“No kidding. You mean a travel agent type? What’d you do—get this geriatric weenie roast together to come look at the wild animals? Is that how you bring in the bread—hauling around a planeful of old dudes that are too weepy-eyed to tell a cow from a camel?”
“Not quite.”
“So what are you going to Djibouti for?”
“I’m a pilot and I’m going to Djibouti to pick up a plane.”
“A jock! Why didn’t you say so. Good God.” She rolled her eyes and sat back. “I shoulda known. I knew it had to be something like that—something a little weird, a little out of date. No one’s a pilot anymore, man. You’re either an astronaut or a hang-glider freak. There’s no in-between, it’s all dead space.” Her head was back against the seat as she studied the short trim above his ears and the back of his neck. “Is that what keeps you in the barber chair for so long—afraid long hair’ll goof up the headphones, like in the World War Two movies?”
“Maybe that’s it.”
Beyond the window the light was changing. The villages were fewer, their mud and adobe walls glowing in the fading light. The dust sent up by the herds of cattle were mists of boiling brass; the acacia and thorn trees were dwarfed by their shadows. The dust was in the golden air outside and in the coach itself—on damp cheeks, necks, arms; on parched lips and in dry throats. The passengers sat among the lengthening shadows of the coach like spectators in a darkening theater, watching the proscenium awaken.
“That must be pretty neat,” she resumed absentmindedly after a long silence. Her voice was far away. “Going where you wanna go. Just picking up your feet and going. No problems, no hassle. Is that the way it is?” She turned.
“Sometimes.” In her momentary lack of self-consciousness McDermott had discovered another girl sitting there beside him.
“Like, you can go to Nairobi or Cairo anytime you feel like it?” In her lifted eyes he found her age for the first time—twenty or twenty-one, but still just a schoolgirl.
“Sometimes.”
“Who do you fly for?”
“Myself sometimes. Other people other times.”
“What kind of people?”
“I used to fly for the Desert Locust Service.”
“In Ethiopia?”
“Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia. The Yemen once.”
“You like Ethiopia?”
“I like the flying.”
“You could fly someplace else if it were just the flying, couldn’t you?” His nod told her what she wanted to know, and she put her head back against the seat, looking out the window again. “I think this country is gross. I don’t mind the villages and the boonies. The people are okay, but it’s the government that gets me down. It’s rotten. The poverty is what gets to you. It’s like Calcutta, and I’ve never even been there. Lepers, beggars, people living like goats back in Addis. Now I’m going to go swim in the Indian Ocean and wash it out of my mind. All of it. I’m from California. If I can’t swim in the ocean when I want to, I get freaked out. Anyway, that’s where I’m going.” She touched the glass of the window. “Those guys hassling me at Awash were from all over. Landlocked types. St. Louis, Ann Arbor. Rye, New York, preppies. Maybe that’s why they’ve got problems. Academic drudges, locked up in their skulls. I’ll bet a couple of them don’t even know how to swim either. Big talkers, that’s all.…” Her voice wound down.
“You’re in college?”
She roused herself. “I finished last year. No—wait a sec. Two years ago. It doesn’t seem that long, which is why I forget. I went to Cal at Berkeley. Now it’s like I’m on my way to nowhere. Do you know where that is?”
“I think so,” McDermott said. “It’s halfway between East Chicago and Gary, Indiana.”
She laughed. “That’s just Endsville, straight-up. Nowhere is the Santa Fe yards in Oakland at three o’clock in the morning.” She stood up and tried to pull her backpack from the overhead rack, but couldn’t move it. McDermott stood and lifted it down for her. She settled it on her knees, untied a side pocket, and withdrew a cotton tobacco pouch. She slid the backpack to the floor and began to roll a cigarette. Her hands were slim and well shaped, but her fingernails were dirty and discolored. The underside of her arms was marbled with dirt.
McDermott stood up again. “Thirsty?”
She looked up in surprise. “Sure. Are you?”
At the back of the coach was a refreshment bar and opposite it a blue leather lounge seat where two Ethiopian train employees were sitting and drinking beer. A thin Ethiopian woman in a blue smock sold stale sandwiches, Coca-Cola, and beer across the linoleum counter. She was small, bony, and brown-skinned, with a child’s small hands, and eyes as black as bitter coffee. The two Ethiopian men were teasing her in Amharic. They sometimes drew a smile from her lips but, to the French tourists she served, her face was as lifeless as a sack of sorghum.
McDermott and the blond girl stood at the counter, drinking beer and swaying with the motion of the coach. One of the Ethiopian men said something to the woman, who looked at the American girl, clicked her tongue disapprovingly, and replied in Amharic. Following her eyes, McDermott discovered the reason for her complaint. The girl wasn’t wearing a brassiere under her blue tennis shirt.
“Why don’t we get some air,” he suggested, and they went out through the rear door and stood on the platform between coaches, leaning over the half-door of the vestibule, watching the scrubland sweep past. The sun was down and the air had grown cooler.
“Flying beats the train,” she shouted above the roar of the wheels, her hair flying across her face. McDermott couldn’t understand her, and she brought her head closer: “I said it beats the train—flying, I mean.” McDermott nodded, and she laughed. “Smile,” she shouted above the iron clatter of the undercarriage.
McDermott thought she looked happy, but he felt sorry for her. A few minutes ago he had felt her despondency and isolation as acutely as his own. He studied the rim of mountains to the west where the sun had disappeared. She nudged him and he held her beer bottle as she lit another cigarette. It was misshapen and loosely packed—marijuana. As she touched the match to it, her head turned back into the vestibule; the twisted end flared like old newspaper before the tobacco took the flame.
“Where are you going after Djibouti?” she asked.
“Addis probably,” he said.
“And after that?”
“Someplace else.”
She seemed pleased. She leaned out into the windstream, her blond hair blowing as she hung out over the half door, her eyes narrowed to slits by the sand-laden wind, but still she was smiling.
When they reached Dire Dawa the station platform was crowded with scurrying passengers, policemen, taxi drivers, Ethiopian soldiers, and tattered urchins cadging coins. The smell of boiled coffee mixed with the fragrance of woodsmoke and the metallic fumes from the old diesel trucks waiting along the freight dock. The train was an hour late. On a second track at the far end of the platform the Djibouti train was waiting. The conductors hurried the Djibouti-bound passengers from the incoming train toward the already crowded coaches.
The windows were open. Ethiopian and Somali families sat inside on the hard wooden benches, carrying pasteboard boxes, baskets of fruit and vegetables, tin Thermos bottles, and fiber milk jugs. The aisles were piled with suitcases, wooden lockers, and squalling children. Two bearded French priests in dirty white soutanes sat huddled, reading French paperbacks in the anemic yellow light, oblivious to the tumult about them.
“God, I don’t even have my Djibouti ticket,” the girl remembered in panic halfway down the platform. “They told me at Awash I’d have to buy it here.” She thrust her backpack to McDermott. “I’ll just be a sec. Don’t let them leave, okay?” She ran back along the platform toward the ticket windows.
McDermott climbed aboard the coach behind the engine and found his compartment at the front of the car. At one window was a leather-covered chaise longue which converted into a bed; at the window opposite was a small reading chair. The compartment was paneled, like a nineteenth-century smoking car, in dark mahogany. At the rear was a private WC with a brass plate on the door: toilette. He put his bags on the carpeted floor, lowered the window, and looked out over the crowd, searching for the girl. He waited until he felt the train lurch under his feet, and went out into the aisle, looking for the porter. The coach contained four other compartments, but they were all second class. All were occupied. In the last cabin the door was open and two worried Ethiopian businessmen in suits and ties were sitting together on a lower bunk, talking conspiratorially, the way Ethiopians do among strangers. The stranger was a fat Italian who sat on the top bunk opposite, pulling off his trousers. Under the trousers he wore a pair of striped pajama bottoms. “Ecco!” he called to McDermott, pointing to the unoccupied lower bunk beneath. “Ça va?”
Still searching for the conductor, McDermott climbed down the steps as the train began to inch forward.
“Hey. Hey wait!”
He heard her voice before he found her running figure, dodging through the crowd, and followed by a dozen barefooted street urchins, all excited by the chase, all screaming Baksheesh, baksheesh! at the top of their lungs. She sprinted forward and sprang aboard just as the coach left the platform. She slumped against the iron bulkhead, still holding on to the handbar, her face damp, her shoulders heaving. “Jesus, I thought I was a goner,” she gasped.
The station lights vanished and they were suddenly back in the darkness of the scrubland again.
The French conductor took her ticket, looked at it dubiously, then leaned forward under the coach lamp to read it again. He studied her face disapprovingly, but then shrugged and pushed open the cabin door to his right: “Deuxième classe, mademoiselle.”
The fat Italian trader was stretched out on the top bunk in his striped pajamas, reading an Italian newspaper as he chewed the meat sandwich in which it had been wrapped. The two Ethiopians were still in conversation on the bottom bunk opposite, but they too were now in pajamas.
“Are you kidding?” she protested immediately, looking at the empty bunk and then at the conductor. “Forget it, man.” She turned to McDermott: “Is this guy for real? You mean he expects me to sack out under that rhinoceros? What in? My hard hat and combat boots! Come on, tell him he’s gotta do better than that! What about the other cabins.” She went out into the aisle and knocked at the door of the next cabin.
“Occupied,” the conductor said. “All occupied.” He took off his hat and wiped his damp, plump face. Without the hat he suddenly looked weak and irresolute.
“Can’t I swap around or something? Isn’t there someone I can trade with? What are they, vestal virgins or something?” She knocked at the door again.
“Ce n’est pas possible,” the conductor muttered, putting his cap back on. “Pas possible.” He tore her ticket in two, returned half of it, and went back the passageway.
“A lotta help you are!” she yelled after him.
“Maybe we can work something out,” McDermott said.
“I can sleep in the aisle, can’t I?”
“Maybe you won’t have to. Come on.” She followed him down the passageway to his compartment. “If we can’t work something out, you can stay here. I can take your second-class bunk.”
“You mean this is all yours? All this? This whole compartment? It’s half the train.”
“It’s first class—the only way you can get any sleep on this train.”
“No one has to take any bunk down the hall. There’s enough room for both of us.” She found her backpack, and began untying her sleeping bag, kneeling on the carpet under the window. “Who needs a bunk anyway? Who wants a crummy broom closet when the Hilton is next door? This is groovy, man. At least we’ve got privacy. If I’d known about this, I wouldn’t have had to screw around buying that stupid ticket, would I?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What’s wrong?” She lifted her head. “I’m not crowding you, am I?”
“No, there’s plenty of room.” He saw the sudden look in her eyes, the sudden vulnerability in her face.
“What’s the trouble then? Something’s bugging you. I can tell.”
“I just remembered there’s no snack bar on the train,” he said, hanging up his two-suiter. “I forgot to get some beer in Dire Dawa.”
In the lights of the compartment McDermott couldn’t see the desert they were crossing, so he turned off the cabin lights and lay back on the bunk, looking out at the ghostly landscape illuminated by the crust of moon above the western mountains. The room was partially lit by the WC as the door banged open and shut, open and shut in the gentle rocking motion of the coach. It had grown chilly, the room colder as they crossed the wasteland. He thought she’d fallen asleep on her sleeping bag, her head against her nylon backpack. But finally she stirred again and pulled on her denim jacket, sitting up to look out the window. “You’re not sleeping, are you?” she called.
“Not yet.”
“You know what?”
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s McDermott. What’s yours?”
“Penny. Penny Palmer.” She waited for his reaction, and when he didn’t say anything, she said: “That’s a pretty shitty name, don’t you think?”
“Penny? It’s an easy name,” he answered sleepily, his head back against the cushion.
“It’s a little trite, don’t you think? I’d use Penelope, like my mother, only guys would think I’m trying to hide from my past or maybe challenging peer-group pressures. Penny’s so insipid it isn’t even funny. Even in high school the kids would say ‘You’d better stop screwing around; here comes Penny Palmer.’ In the second grade they even made up a song: ‘Penny Palmer, teacher’s pet. Tells Miz Stone when your pants are wet.’ What can you do about names, anyway?”
“Get used to them.”
“Yeah, but McDermott’s not a bad name to get used to. What’s your first name?”
“Scott.”
“Sure. That’s easy too. But a crummy name saddles you with a life-style, too, don’t you think? When I was a freshman at Cal, I finally beat the rap. ‘Penny Palmer, she’s okay. Makes out, flakes out, balls all day.’ Only that was worse. God, was I sensitive. Did you ever feel that way about your name? I’ll bet you didn’t.”
Her face was hidden in the shadows. He’d been flying for two days in western Ethiopia before he’d caught the train from Addis that morning. He fell asleep.
He awoke at the frontier and sat up as she shook his shoulder.
The overhead lights were on.
“Someone’s trying to knock the door down,” she whispered. “Jesus, I thought you’d taken a sleeping pill or something. Who do you think it is?”
“It’s the frontier,” he said, getting stiffly to his feet. His mouth was dry and rusty. There was no drinking water on the train and he remembered again the beer he’d forgotten to bring. “Where’s your passport?”
“Passport?” She looked at him blankly. “I dunno.” The knocking came louder.
“When did you last have it?”
“In Addis, but that was a week ago.”
“What about the visa for Djibouti?”
“They said they’d take care of it—some Peace Corps creeps we met there. They said they’d get it. God, I didn’t even look.”
“Why don’t you see if you can find it.”
She rummaged through her backpack, and McDermott opened the compartment door. By the time the three Ethiopian soldiers had finished looking at McDermott’s papers, she’d found the passport. The Ethiopians wore heavy military overcoats, olive-drab helmet liners, and dusty combat boots. Two carried carbines. McDermott took her passport, found the Ethiopian and Djibouti visas, and passed the passport to the corporal.
“What about the ott-pay?” she asked suddenly. “What about the ass-gray.”
“The what?”
“You know,” she whispered, her head turned away from the soldiers. “The ottpay. Ott-pay, man. What are you, a functional illiterate or something? Don’t you know pig Latin? The grass.”
“These guys don’t know grass from Uncle Ben’s alfalfa.”
“Excuse me?” the Ethiopian corporal said.
“She was wondering about the customs fee,” McDermott said. He followed the three Ethiopian soldiers to the end of the corridor where the customs officer was stamping passports. When he returned, Penny took back her passport and slumped down on her sleeping bag.
“Jesus. I was scared shitless. All I could think of was the pot and getting thrown off this crummy train. It’s a wilderness out there, man. It’s nowhere.” She looked out the window at the cold desert under the moonlight. When she turned, McDermott had taken a nylon jacket from his two-suiter and was pulling it on. “Where are you going?”
“To see if I can get something to drink.”
“And leave me here.” She scrambled to her feet and pulled her denim jacket over her shoulders, but McDermott was already out the door. She ran down the corridor after him. “Hey, wait for me! Hey, McDermott!” He was already on the ballast bed, and she jumped after him, nearly falling over a switchman’s lantern. McDermott caught her arm and steadied her. “You sure don’t waste time, do you? Where are we going?”
“I won’t know until I get there,” McDermott said.
They went past the single light in front of the adobe frontier post and back a narrow rutted road that divided the miserable cluster of mud houses and huts. There were no lights. It was cold in the mud road. McDermott led her deeper into the darkness, searching for the flicker of an oil lamp or a kerosene lantern that marked an open shop. The road smelled of cattle and camel dung. A few white shapes lay along the verges of the road in front of the mud buildings—nomads wrapped in thin cotton sheets, sleeping with their heads into the wind. “Do you know where we’re going yet?” she whispered at his elbow.
“I think so.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“A year ago.”
“You better do more than think so. This is the Planet of the Apes, man—it’s nowhere.” She was afraid that the train would leave without them. She stopped, searching the darkness behind her, but couldn’t see the coach lights. “You miss a connection and zap—you’re back in the tenth century again. Who needs it?” She discovered herself alone when she turned: “Hey. Where are you?”
He was standing in the darkness ahead of her, looking into the doorway of a mud hut where a light flickered. The low doorway was half-covered with a strip of cloth. A small flame glimmered in a bowl of oil on the mud floor. A few Somali cattle buyers sat on stools among bags of charcoal, unsalted hides, pots of rancid butter and oil. They were smoking and drinking glasses of sweet tea. An old Galla woman found four bottles of warm Ethiopian beer among the crates stacked behind the counter. Penny stood behind McDermott, looking at the men squatting on the stools, unable to make out their faces. “Don’t you think it’s gonna leave?” she whispered as the old woman was slow to make change. “Didn’t you hear the wheels creaking or something?”
“Americans,” a voice spoke from the shadows. A few figures stirred.
“Yeah, thirsty Americans,” McDermott said easily without turning. He took the dirty bills from the old woman, turned and looked at the cattle buyers, and said something in Arabic. A few of the old men grunted in recognition. One laughed as they left.
“What’d you say that for?” Penny asked in the street outside. “Did you see the knives in their belts? God, they could have zapped us. Do you know what an American passport is worth these days? Why didn’t you say we were Swedish. That’s neutral territory, man. The US isn’t these days, not with all the PLO freaks running around Africa.”
“Maybe I don’t speak Swedish.”
“Maybe they don’t either.”
“Are you always as logical as you sound?”
“Who’s being logical? If I were logical, I’d be in bed in San Francisco. I just want to get my ass back on that train.”
The wind blew dust and chaff in their faces as they walked back. Ghostly clumps of rootless grass and thorn rolled across the road like wagonless wheels, vanishing into the wasteland.
“I guess you’re pretty used to wandering around alone,” she said after they’d returned to the compartment. The train began to move forward.
“Sometimes.”
“Did you ever come here with the Locust Service?”
He opened a bottle of warm beer and gave it to her. “There’s nothing here the locusts want.”
“You can say that again.” She sank back against her sleeping bag. “What’s here anyone wants?” She watched him uncap the second beer bottle and stretch out on the bunk. “Take you, for example. What’s in it for you?”
“I like the flying.”
The train lurched to a stop again at the French customs post. The French officials who came aboard were accompanied by Legionnaires. After they’d inspected the first- and second-class car, they moved back through the third-class coaches. Penny brought out her tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette as she watched them through the open door of the compartment. The Legionnaires searched for contraband and kat among the rolls of bedding, the vegetable baskets, and the rope-bound suitcases. The green switches of kat were thrown out the open windows where they were collected by other Legionnaires. Occasionally a passenger was ejected, too, most often a woman or young girl. They were herded aboard army trucks waiting by the roadside to be driven back to the Ethiopian frontier.
“Hey, they’re throwing people off the train,” Penny discovered. “They’re just kicking them off. No crap. How come?”
McDermott looked out the window. “Prostitutes.”
“Prostitutes! Out here? Are you kidding?”
“Djibouti’s an army town.”
“I think I’ll take a look.” She got to her feet and pulled on her jacket.
She didn’t return until the train had started to move again. “You’re right—prostitutes. They just dumped them in the truck like old laundry and took off.” She opened another bottle of beer and handed it to him.
“No thanks.”
“C’mon. You’re not pissed or anything, are you?”
He took the beer and turned on his side. “About what?”
“I dunno. About my crowding you, maybe. Everything’s worked out okay, hasn’t it?”
“Sure. Don’t you ever relax?”
“I’m relaxed. Only you always look like you’re deep into something, something heavy.”
“I was thinking.”
“About what?” When he didn’t answer, she said: “C’mon. What were you thinking about? Don’t be so mysterious.”
“I was thinking about a drunken Irish aviation mechanic I used to know. He used to sing a crazy song about the Yemen, and now I can’t remember it.”
She opened the last bottle of beer and sank down on the sleeping bag. “How come you wanna remember it?”
“I don’t. I just can’t stop trying.”
“How about a joint then. That’ll help you remember. Either that or help you forget trying.” He looked at the tobacco pouch she’d taken from her pocket.
“No thanks.”
She rolled the cigarette carefully. “What’s the trouble? You hung up on health foods or something?”
“No.”
“Trying to keep your body pure?” She lit the cigarette.
He watched the smoke drift away from her face. “Habit, maybe. Maybe just discipline. I don’t need it, that’s all.”
“No kidding.” She smiled. “What kind of discipline? The Los Angeles cops?”
“Like any discipline. First there’s the beer, then the whiskey, then something else.” He settled the pillow under his head. “Anyway, I’m not twenty-one anymore. I’m too old to start.”
“Is that right.” She sat against the bulkhead, still smiling.
“That’s right. You get all those goofballs inside, and pretty soon you don’t do anything but sit. Not move, not think, not fly. Just sit.”
“No kidding—just sit. Are you serious?”
“Sure I’m serious.”
She took the cigarette from her mouth. “Sometimes you really are a jarhead. When I get a headful, I fly. As much as you, I’ll bet. That’s what it’s all about. Like the hang-glider guys, like surfing, like going with the wind. Like what you do, I bet. So what’s wrong with that. I go where it takes me. At least I’m not polluting the atmosphere when I fly. You do. You take maybe a thousand gallons of gas to get your lift. I can go on the lint in my pockets, so why knock it? It’s not hurting anybody.”
“You’re not flying at all,” McDermott said. “You’re just polluting your own skull. You’re sitting on your ditty bag on a train that’s maybe doing thirty knots not counting what it loses on the curves. You may think you’re flying but you’re not. Even if any foreign substances make you think you are.”
She laughed in surprise. “Foreign substances! Are you kidding? What’s foreign about this? That’s the whole point. This is me, man.” She stripped off her jeans jacket and stood up, still laughing. She kicked off her sandals and swayed slowly with the motion of the coach. “Foreign substances!” She drifted around the compartment, her eyes half-closed, swaying from side to side. The desert passed beyond the window—gray anvils of rock, salt pan, clumps of thorn, honeycombed lava beds; and inside, under the compartment lights, she moved to her own music, oblivious to it all.
She finally collapsed across the foot of the bunk where McDermott lay, holding out the damp, pinched butt of the cigarette.
“Try it,” she urged. “Go ahead. Take a drag. Get your bio in gear. Try something new. It’s not gonna bite you.” She lay across his shins, her nose and temples damp with perspiration.
“No thanks.”
She brushed the strands of hair from her forehead. “You’re pretty weird. You really are.” She lifted herself and turned back across the room, dropping morosely to her sleeping bag, knees first, before she sprawled forward, facedown, her head turned away from him.
She didn’t move. After a while McDermott turned off the overhead light. Stretched out on the bunk, he watched the landscape sweep past. He got up finally and went into the bathroom, washed his hands and face, brushed his teeth, and went back to the bed. She hadn’t moved. He took off his shoes, pulled off his shirt, and put on a gray sweat shirt. He lay back against the pillow. Ten minutes passed before he heard her stir. She went into the washroom and looked back at him from the door. She turned on the overhead lights suddenly, and McDermott sat up, blinking painfully. “God! Aren’t you even gonna put your striped pajamas on, like your greaser friend down the hall?” she jeered. Then she snapped off the light and slammed the WC door behind her. She was gone a long time. She finally left the washroom and stood in the open door, the light behind her limning her silhouette. “Hey, McDermott.”
“Hey yourself.” She was wearing a long-sleeved cotton shirt that reached her thighs, and her legs and feet were bare. Silhouetted against the light, the body within the cotton shift was as lovely and graceful as he knew it would be.
“I was wondering if you wanted to sleep with me or anything,” she said tonelessly. “I thought I’d ask now and maybe save some grief later. Some guys ask; some don’t. I don’t wanna get scared shitless in the middle of the night when funny hands start grab-assing. They may not be yours, you know.”
“How do you feel about it?” McDermott asked. He knew he wasn’t being propositioned. He was conscious of the desert rolling past the window, her body in the door, the pale patches of moonlight lying across the bunk, and the artificiality of their predicament. He knew he’d like to sleep with her, but there was nothing between them but a common destination, and to pretend that there was seemed beyond his own ingenuity. Maybe it was his pride. He was too old to lie to her and too honest to tell her she meant anything to him. And even if he weren’t, she was too sly to be convinced, and too young to pretend.
“It doesn’t make much difference to me one way or the other,” she said halfheartedly, a reply McDermott thought honest enough. “I’m kinda tired, though, and I’ve got a headache.”
“Why don’t we just forget it then,” he said. Her tone had convinced him. She turned off the WC light and he lay uneasily in the darkness, wondering if he’d reached the age where desire had given way to pride, self-respect, and the fear of failure—the ultimate pretenses of his approaching middle years. Ten minutes later he heard her rouse herself and drag the sleeping bag across the floor. She unrolled it next to the bunk, and he heard the zipper being closed, followed by her voice:
“Hey, McDermott.” Her hand groped along the side of the bunk, her ring rattling along the wood. Her fingers brushed his arm and just as quickly went away. Had his hand found hers, he knew what would follow, but now it was too late. “Okay,” she sighed, reassured, snuggling back into her sleeping bag again. “I just wanted to see if you were there. People disappear, you know.”
He didn’t go to sleep right away, remembering other nights, other opportunities—some missed, some not. She lay within reach of his arm, but then he heard the sound of her breathing, as rhythmic and steady as the sound of the wheels under him. The moment had been lost to him. Had his self-respect grown, his pride prospered? No. He wanted her even more. What were the compensations for opportunities missed, revelations passed in the night, time moving past him? There were none. He could see the moon through the window. It painted the rectangle of pane silver and the cold desert lying under the stars. He could see the heavens, the nearer constellations: Venus, the Great Bear. The coach wound through the scrubland and he drifted toward sleep, listening to the wheels and looking at the stars. And then the forgotten words came into his mind, unbidden, and he remembered the drunken refrain:
In Yemen’s rose mountains
Among mossy fountains
I met a young maiden—
Samira Rah’man;
She drove a small burro
Through suqs dark and narrow
Singing ‘Cloves and sweet almonds—
Alo a long dong’
He had remembered the words, but their recollection brought another mystery, as stubborn as the first. He didn’t know what had made him remember them.
2
McDermott awoke to the crash of iron couplings as the train moved into Djibouti in the early morning. Penny was sitting on the floor next to the window, his open briefcase on the carpet beside her, reading a leather-covered flight manual. Nearby were aerial navigation maps of Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Sudan.
“I guess you’re a pilot all right,” she said as he sat up. “I was kinda checking you out. You hear so much B.S. on the road you don’t know who to believe.” Her hair was damp, as if she’d just washed it. The compartment smelled of shampoo and herbal soap. The wet cords framed her slim face and fell down across her shoulders and back. She was wearing a clean blue T-shirt and jeans. Soapy water lay over the floor of the WC. “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him as he washed his face at the basin. “Didn’t you hear all of that racket in the next coach? Two Ethiopian broads were fighting tooth and nail. One had a knife. God, there was blood all over the place.”
“Is that right,” McDermott said, eyes shut, searching for a towel. There weren’t any. They were all on the floor, soaking up the spilled water. After less than twenty-four hours in her company he knew her talent for exaggeration. If she’d seen as much blood as she wanted him to believe, she’d have been in the sack with him, yelling her head off.
They found a taxi outside the train station and drove into the city. The laurel trees shading the boulevards were motionless in the morning heat. Except for a few schoolchildren on their way to the French lycée, the streets were deserted. Between the white buildings, they could see the ocean, gray and torpid in the distance. Even the sunny square in front of the old hotel was empty and listless. A few Somali taxi drivers were washing down their dusty vehicles with sponges dipped from buckets of dirty water. The first dry wind of the morning stirred through the etiolate growth of Indian laurel trees along the square. The shadowy arches of the Moorish arcades were empty, the iron shop shutters still closed.
“This place is dead, man,” Penny complained. McDermott reminded her that it was only seven o’clock in the morning. On the pavement in front of the hotel a young Somali was mopping the sidewalk. Two dark-skinned busboys in white jackets were moving tables and chairs onto the pavement of the sidewalk cafe next to the hotel. An old Frenchman in walking shorts and white knee hose sat alone at a table, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. Penny lifted her backpack from the trunk of the taxi to the curb. “Maybe some of the kids are around somewhere,” she mused, looking around without enthusiasm.
“Sure,” McDermott said. He paid the driver. “You’ll find something.”
“They’re probably flaked out on the beach already,” she muttered disconsolately. “Where is it, anyway? Hey, where’s the beach?” she asked the Somali taxi driver.
“Beach?” He smiled and held open the rear door. “Come, we go.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” she said mistrustfully. She looked back at the hotel, at the empty square, and the bright sky overhead. McDermott picked up his briefcase and slung his two-suiter over his shoulder.
“Hey, are you in a hurry or something?”
“I’ve got a few things to do, that’s all.”
“Is this where you’re gonna stay?” She looked up at the old hotel, painted in pale lemon. The windows on the second and third floors were concealed by heavy wooden shutters. Flowers grew in wooden boxes on the small wrought-iron balconies in front of the windows.
“Until tomorrow.”
“You don’t screw around, do you.” She put her backpack down again, looking back out over the square. “Jesus. This is Djibouti?”
“Don’t you know anyone here?”
“Who would I know?”
“Maybe there’s a hostel someplace—a youth hostel.”
“Yeah, and maybe there’s a YWCA and fat women in sneakers playing volleyball. Who needs it?”
“You’ll find something,” McDermott said.
“Yeah? Where?”
“I thought you were used to traveling alone.”
“Who’s alone!” she protested. “That’s a bummer—being alone. There was always a bunch of us before, not this solo crap. It sucks. Who wants to spend all the time worrying about being alone.” A few of the taxi drivers were watching her as they washed their cars. Some were smiling. “Look, don’t you have time for a swim? Just a quick skinny-dip or something? I mean you’re so freaked out on being clean under the skin, being free and all. Being in the ocean is free. It’s like flying. No foreign substances. That’s as free as you can get—”
“I don’t have time.”