Kahawa Page 4

  She considered saying something to Lew, but hesitated. She hesitated, as she hated to admit to herself, partly because she was afraid any objection would be treated as the special pleading of a woman, but it was also because she wanted to see just what Frank Lanigan had in mind.

  “We’re here ahead of the rains,” Lew said.

  She looked skyward, seeing only a few scattered high thin clouds. “Rains?”

  “They’re due the end of March.” He grinned and said, “First drought, then flood.”

  “There are better systems.”

  They were about halfway to the planes when Frank, up ahead, suddenly let out a roar of rage, dropped Ellen’s bag onto the brown grass, and raced heavily away like an aroused bull toward a twin-engine Fairchild painted white with orange trim. Unlike the others parked here, it was not tied down. Lew and Ellen looked at one another, shrugged, and kept on walking. Ellen picked up her bag on the way.

  Meantime, Frank was roughly yanking somebody out of the Fairchild, so roughly that the man tumbled onto the ground, landing on his shoulder and rolling forward under the wing. Frank ran around the length of the wing, like a dog playing a game, and reached the man again as he pulled himself to his feet between the port engine and the fuselage.

  By this time, Ellen and Lew were close enough to hear what Frank was yelling. “What are you doing in that plane? I said to clear out of here!”

  The man mumbled something, and Frank raised a threatening hand. “You got your money! That’s all you get!” Watching, Ellen thought Frank was putting on the anger, that he was much more in control of himself than he pretended.

  “It’s only my gear,” the man said, in a north-of-England accent. He was thin, perhaps forty, moustached, with blotchy red skin and heavy bags under watery eyes. He had been drinking, and had shaved himself recently but erratically. His voice contained a whining he was obviously trying his best to conceal. “I only took what was mine,” he said.

  Ellen and Lew had arrived at the plane. Lew said, “Frank? A problem?”

  “Watch this bird,” Frank told him, “while I see what he was up to.”

  “Personal possessions!” the man cried, as Frank went away around the wing again, apparently unwilling to risk his dignity by stooping low and scuttling under it.

  Ellen, looking at the man, was surprised when he suddenly met her gaze and his expression turned sarcastic, his weak mouth trying for a sardonic smile. “So you’re the pilot,” he said, with heavy emphasis. “Frank’s new tramp.”

  Lew dropped his flight bag, moved his left foot forward, and hit the man in the face with a straight overhand right. The man staggered back, his head banging the fuselage, and fell to the ground, not unconscious but stunned.

  “Lew!” Ellen said.

  He turned to her, saw the anger in her eyes, and immediately stepped back, embarrassed, opening his hands out of their fists. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not awake.”

  Twice in their early days together, Lew had hit men under the mistaken impression he was defending her, reacting to provocation as he thought she would want him to react. Since he remained permanently unaware that the patronizing assumptions of a Frank Lanigan were a thousand times more offensive than any angry name-calling, he was hardly the protector of choice, even if she felt the need for such a medieval thing. She’d thought that argument had been resolved months ago, but now she saw that, if you got Lew Brady tired enough, jet-lagged enough, disoriented enough, the old incorrect basic responses were still alive and well and living in the middle of his wooden head. “I’ll fight my own battles, Lew,” she said.

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

  The man had struggled to his feet, patting his nose and mouth with the back of his hand as though dabbing for blood. “Oh, you’ll have a good time,” he said to Ellen, his anger undiminished. “Yes, you will.”

  “You aren’t hurt,” she told him.

  He put his hand down at his side, almost standing at a kind of attention, apparently remembering the dignity he’d earlier been striving for. “I can tell your kind,” he said. “You’re as bad as they are. You can all rot in hell together.”

  Frank had come back around the wing, this time carrying a clear-glass pint whisky bottle, about a third full. Extending it to the man, he said, “Here’s your personal possessions.”

  The man snatched the bottle, tucking it inside his shirt. “Thanks for nothing,” he said, and strode swiftly away toward the airport gate, walking with unnatural rigidity, to prove to them his sobriety in case they were watching.

  Lew said, “What was that all about?”

  “Didn’t recognize him, did you?” Frank said. “Timmins. Flew cargo when we worked for the Front. Angola.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” Lew said. “What’s his problem now?”

  “He was our pilot.” Frank grinned at Ellen. “You’re taking his place.”

  Ellen looked after the departing stick figure. “That’s why he was so upset?”

  “Still surprised, that’s all,” Frank said, and shrugged. “Let’s stow your goods.” He took Ellen’s flight bag from her hand.

  Ellen said, “Surprise? Why surprise?”

  Frank led the way around the wing once more and toward the cargo door aft on the fuselage. “I just fired him about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Twenty minutes!”

  He paused in unlocking the cargo door to grin at her. “I wanted him to fly me and the plane down here, didn’t I?”

  Ellen looked again after the previous pilot, but he had gone through the gate and disappeared. “Not much notice,” she said. “And no severance pay either, I suppose.”

  “I can see you’ve got a soft heart,” Frank said. “But don’t worry about Roger, he shouldn’t be a pilot anymore at all.”

  “He drinks too much,” she suggested.

  “He drinks at the wrong time.” Frank slammed the cargo door and moved forward to open the passenger door and tilt the front seat forward. “I’ll ride in the front to show the way. Lew, you get in back.”

  “Right.”

  While Lew climbed aboard, Frank gave Ellen a quizzical grin, saying, “I hope you know how to fly this thing.”

  “At least I don’t drink,” she told him. “Not at the wrong time.”

  Frank laughed, clipped the front seat into place, and climbed up into the copilot’s seat. Ellen followed, and took a moment to familiarize herself with the instrument layout. She had never in fact flown this exact model before, but it wasn’t much more complicated than getting behind the wheel of a strange automobile.

  Frank said, “We’ve filed a flight plan to Kisumu. Charts oughta be in your door pocket there.”

  “In a minute.” She found the control checklist in the pocket and studied it, then pulled half a dozen aerial charts from the pocket. They were old and flimsy, marked here and there with a variety of pens and pencils in several colors, and most of them were starting to tear at the fold lines. She found Nairobi on one, and asked, “Which way do we head?”

  “West-northwest.”

  “To Kisumu, you said?”

  That was on the next chart westward. Very high ground, the Mau Escarpment, nosed down into the direct line between Nairobi and Kisumu, but by heading directly west she could skirt the southern edge of the mountains. There was a small airfield shown at Ewaso Ngiro, eighty miles out, another at Mara River, forty miles farther on. From there she would turn north-northwest, passing between the airports at Kisii and Kericho as the land sloped gradually downward toward the shores of Lake Victoria, three hundred miles away. The airport at Kisumu, at the inmost point of Winam Gulf, was, surprisingly, marked for international flights. But of course the countries here were so small that international travel meant something very different from what it did in the States. Again she was reminded of the Caribbean.

  Frank said, “Everything okay?”

  “Just fine.” Unclipping the earphones from the stick, she put them on and spoke to the c
ontrol tower. Meantime, Lew leaned forward in his seat to start a conversation with Frank. Catching a word here and there, Ellen understood they were gossiping about old friends: where are they now, what have you heard from So-and-So. Except that with men it wasn’t called gossip.

  She started the port and then the starboard engine, ran through the items on the checklist, and rolled out of the line of parked planes toward the asphalt taxiway. The wind was fairly strong and out of the west, so she drove to the east end of the runway, waited while a British Airways VC-10 took off and a Kenya Air DC-9 landed, checked again with the tower, then lifted into the air.

  She loved it. This part she always loved: the lifting, the soaring, the sudden diminution of the Earth slowly turning beneath her. The plane responded well, and already her hands and eyes moved automatically among the switches and indicators. Sliding the right earphone back onto her hair so she could hear conversation in the plane while still listening to the radio through her left ear, she settled more comfortably in the seat and watched the brown land slowly unroll beneath her.

  “That’s the new airport,” Frank said, yelling over the engine drone, pointing ahead and to the left. “Supposed to be done next year.” He grinned at her. “Guess its name.”

  She looked down at the white-and-tan construction scars, seeing that the new airport would be something like three times the size of the old one. “Its name?”

  “Jomo Kenyatta!” Frank shouted. “President of the country! Heap big chief!” Laughing, he gestured upward with his thumb, as though the president of the country were in Heaven, or seated on some fishbone cloud.

  Lew leaned forward, his forearms on Ellen’s and Frank’s seat backs, his head just visible between them. He said, “Tell me more about the job, Frank. Guerrillas, is it?”

  “Kind of.” Frank seemed still amused by Jomo Kenyatta. “In a kind of a way it’s guerrillas.”

  “Going in against Uganda?”

  “It’s a raid,” Frank said.

  “Just one raid?”

  “Ah, but what a raid.” Frank’s big happy manly smile encompassed them both. “We’re taking a train, Lew. We’re putting the arm on a whole train.”

  “A train? Not a passenger train.”

  “No no no,” Frank said, waving his arms around in a negative gesture too large for the confined space inside the plane.

  “Hostages,” Lew said, shaking his head. “I don’t like that kind of thing.”

  “Don’t worry, Lew,” Frank told him. “This is clean as anything. You’ll love it.”

  “A goods train,” Lew suggested. “Weapons.”

  “Coffee,” Frank said.

  Glancing over at Frank, Ellen suddenly understood that something was wrong. Lew hadn’t been hired for the job he had expected. It was something entirely different.

  She saw that Lew had also guessed that, and was trying not to know it. His forearms rested on the seat backs; his curled hands hung down between the seats; his face was stretched forward above his hands. Now, gently cuffing himself on the bottom of the jaw with his half-clenched fist, an unconscious nervous gesture, he said, “Coffee, Frank? I don’t get it.”

  “Six million dollars,” Frank told him. “A huge motherfucking coffee train. Oh,” he said to Ellen. “Excuse me.”

  “Blow it out your ass,” she said, looking downward toward the ground.

  Lew said, “Frank, what’s going on? Is this a Ugandan guerrilla operation, or what is it?”

  “It’s a little different,” Frank said. “Our bunch isn’t exactly guerrillas.”

  “But Amin,” Lew said. “There’s got to be anti-Amin forces somewhere.”

  “Down in Tanzania. Nyerere keeps ‘em in cakes and cookies, but they’re mostly all fucked up.”

  Ellen glanced at Frank and found him grinning at her. He winked with the eye Lew couldn’t see.

  Lew was saying, “In that case, who are we?”

  “A couple white boys working for some people gonna steal six million dollars from Idi Amin.”

  “It’s his personal coffee?”

  “Everything in that fucking country is his personal property.”

  The tower was directing Ellen farther north, away from east-west air traffic. The usual urban sprawl spread out below her: Nairobi, capital of Kenya, business center of East Africa. The slums were bright colored and crowded, while richer homes lazed on the hillsides amid greenery. A railway line crossed their path, north to south, glinting in the sun like an ornamental chain. Frank said, “There’s your railway now. Eighth fucking wonder of the world.”

  Ellen said, “Why does it shine like that?”

  “The ties aren’t wood. They’re steel.”

  “Steel?”

  “Seventy pounds apiece, two thousand per mile, seven hundred miles from the coast to Kampala.” He reeled this off with apparent satisfaction, as though he’d personally carried and placed every steel tie himself.

  Ellen said, “But why steel?”

  “They tried wooden ties,” Frank told her. “The British, when they built the line around the turn of the century. But the ants ate them, and the floods rotted them, and the natives stole them for firewood. So they used steel. Indian coolies did the work, and sometimes in the sun the steel ties burned the skin off their hands.”

  The glittering chain had fallen behind them, and now the tower permitted Ellen to steer southwestward to her intended route over the Kedong Valley. She said, “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “I learn things,” he said. “I don’t just sit around pulling my pecker all day.”

  Lew said quietly, “Frank, talk to Ellen the way you talk to me.”

  Frank gave him a surprised look, as though he hadn’t expected a challenge from this quarter. Ellen considered the situation and decided the assistance fell within the range of the acceptable, so she said nothing but merely concentrated on her flying.

  After a moment, Frank nodded at Ellen and said to Lew less aggressively, “We’ll get used to each other.”

  “Sure you will,” Lew said.

  “I’m a reader,” Frank explained, talking now directly to Ellen. “I like history.”

  The tone of voice meant he was trying to make amends. Ellen cooperated. “African history?”

  “Mostly. I like to read about the fuckups of those who came before me. It’s nice to know I’m not the first damn fool to run around this continent.”

  Ellen smiled, surprising herself. “I can see how it might help.”

  “Every day in every way.” He shifted, making himself more comfortable, then went on in a more casual, storytelling style. “Those coolies worked their asses off,” he said. “Lions ate them, mosquitoes gave them malaria, drought robbed them of food and water, floods tore out the tracks they’d just put down, they caught dysentery and yaws and diseases they never heard of before, native tribes hit them with clubs and spears and poison darts, their British overseers objected to their sex lives, and every once in a while when conditions were really muddy a locomotive would fall on them. But they kept going, for almost ten years, and they built the fucking railroad. And do you know what it was all for?”

  “No, I don’t,” Ellen said.

  “To keep Uganda in the British imperial sphere of influence.” Frank grinned. “How’s that for a joke?”

  On the ground at Kisumu, a ragamuffin black man whom Frank called Charlie tied the plane down while Frank went away to make a phone call. Ellen and Lew stood near the plane, watching Charlie, who appeared to be drunk or stoned but who in his slow and distracted manner was nevertheless doing the job right, and Ellen said, “Do you want to turn around?”

  Lew frowned at her, about to become irritable. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t like this.”

  “I don’t even know what it is yet.”

  “You know it isn’t what you expected.”

  “Let’s wait and see. Frank’s a good man.” But he couldn’t keep the doubt out of his voice.

/>   Frank came rolling back toward them, with a strong but loose-jointed gait, as though all the screws and dowels in his body needed tightening. “We’ll just drop in and see Mr. Balim,” he said, “then I’ll take you to your house.”

  “Fine,” Lew said.

  Frank turned and shouted, “Aren’t you finished, you stupid bastard?”

  “Slow,” Charlie said, slurring the word.

  “I know you’re slow. Pick up these bags and come along.”

  Frank led the way, followed by Ellen and Lew, with Charlie bringing up the rear, carrying both bags. Ellen looked back at him, and Charlie smiled at her, drooling down his chin. Ellen faced front again.

  Their immediate destination was a tall and filthy Land-Rover with a patched canvas top. The yellow license plate with black numbers was dented in three or four places, as though somebody had been using it for target practice, like signs on country roads in the States. While Charlie heaved the luggage into the storage well in the rear, Frank said, “You two ride in back. Charlie’s turned this front seat into an outhouse.”

  Lew and Ellen clambered into the vehicle, and the instant she touched the hard and uncomfortable seat a wave of exhaustion poured over her so severe that she thought for a second she might be sick. Instead, her eyes watered and she yawned hugely, bending forward, her brow touching the top of the front seat.

  Lew said, “Ellen? You okay?”

  “Just tired.” The heaviness of the humid air pressed in on her.

  “Won’t be much longer.”

  “Good.”

  Adrenaline and curiosity had kept her alert and active this long, through the endless traveling from Alaska, and then the three-hour piloting job from Nairobi, but all at once it was catching up with her. She yawned again, behind her cupped hands, so hugely her jaw hinges ached.

  Charlie and Frank took their places in front. As Frank started the rackety engine, Lew said, “Frank, we’re both kind of tired.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Frank promised. “We’ll stop in for one word with Mr. Balim—he just wants to say hello, shake your hand—then I’ll drive you right to the house.”