Nairobi Heat (18 page)

A few minutes later Jamal’s black Mercedes limped up to the wreckage, the giant and another of his men dead in the back seat.

‘Really nice to see you again, old man,’ O said to Jamal,
breaking off from searching the bodies in the Peugeot for identification.

‘I have no doubt about that, my brother,’ Jamal said, climbing out of the battered Benz.

‘Do you know who sent them?’ I asked him, gesturing towards the three dead white men. Dressed in expensive business suits, they were clearly American, but I already knew that we would find nothing on them to tie them to Joshua or the Foundation. But where else could they have come from?

‘Them white boys, they are Foundation men, straight from the US,’ Jamal confirmed.

‘Joshua or the Foundation?’ O asked him.

‘I have no idea. We are in the middle of a civil war right now, and they could have been sent by anyone, but they are Foundation men …’

‘How did you know?’ I asked.

‘The guitarist was their contact,’ Jamal said, cocking his head as the sound of police sirens came to us from further down the road. ‘He came to me thinking I was with them. He just couldn’t keep from singing.’ He laughed at his own witticism and hopped back into his wrecked Mercedes. ‘Travel well, my friend,’ he told me as he started the engine.

‘I hope to God I never run into that asshole again,’ O said as Jamal drove away. ‘He scares me.’

What O didn’t say was that we both knew Jamal would collect on the debt we owed him, and when that day came we would have to pay – he had just saved our lives.

Back at O’s place – after a brief visit to the station and another short session with the Director of Investigations – O
and Muddy decided between them that it would be best if I left through Uganda. It was obvious that the Foundation would do everything in its power to prevent me getting to the airport – we had been lucky once, but we might not be so lucky again. The plan was simple enough. We would hire a car, drive all night and most of the next day before stopping at a village called Butere, which was close to the Ugandan border. Muddy had a friend who lived there. She hadn’t seen her in years, but was sure we would be welcome. At the village, we would get some rest, then closer to my flight time we would slip across the border under cover of darkness.

We drove, taking turns every two hours. Sometimes I fell into a deep dreamless sleep and woke to find either O or Muddy smoking up a storm. At other times, as O drove, Muddy would slip into the back and we would make out or rest against each other. And at other times I drove, feeling as if in returning to the US I was leaving myself behind. It was almost as if the America I was going to seemed to slip further and further away the closer we got to the border.

There was a lot of time to think, and I found my mind returning again and again to what had happened on the road to the airport only a few hours earlier. I had killed based on the calculation that it was better to take one man alive than two. On top of that I had calculated that the less injured man was more of a threat and less likely to talk. Based on these calculations, calculations that I would never have thought myself capable of before I came to Africa, I had shot the white gunman. If I had waited less than two minutes Muddy would have come, and in another three O, and in ten Jamal. Not that this would have saved the guitarist or the white gunman – they
certainly would not have survived O and Muddy. My calculations were wrong, but it did not matter because either way I looked at it the two men would still have died.

As the sun rose I tried to put these thoughts to the back of my mind and concentrate instead on the beauty of the unfolding landscape. Back home in the US nature has been compromised – chemicals poured into the earth and animals so that everything is big and colourless – but in Kenya it is still full. This isn’t some kind of romanticised American shit, like the wise old African who speaks in proverbs and parables, but an honest reaction to the fact that I could still see the soil through the grass, that mud ran along even the best of the roads, that I could look at a cow and know that’s where my
nyama choma
came from. Life wasn’t yet sanitised, it was still as it should be – in tandem with science, but not at the expense of human hands digging into the soil. If I ever came back to Kenya it would be to buy a small farm. Perhaps having found so much ugliness, and having contributed to its creation, I was projecting my hunger for something positive to take back with me on the landscape. A shrink would say that. To which I would say, where’s the harm in that?

We had been driving for almost twenty-four hours, stopping only for petrol. Finally, about ninety or so kilometres from the border, we came to Butere. The village was very poor, but in contrast to the poverty I had seen in Mathare it was a paradise. There were no UNICEF children running around and the village was meticulously clean – the bare ground still bearing the marks of sisal brooms. Even the bar we walked
past maintained a poor dignity.

There was music playing somewhere close by, so we followed it until we came upon a soccer field where a makeshift tent had been erected – it was clear that a wedding was just about to take place. We asked around for Muddy’s friend, but no one knew for sure where she was. Even though we were strangers, we were invited to stay for the wedding and we gladly and hungrily agreed.

The wedding ceremony started with a number of smartly dressed little girls and boys walking through the crowd to the makeshift dais, singing a hymn in Kiswahili as they threw handfuls of petals to the ground. They were followed by the wedding party, the groom, dressed in what was clearly a much-worn tuxedo a few sizes too big for him, and finally the bride, dressed in a white gown browned at the edges by the dust. The bride and groom kept looking at each other and breaking into giggles, so much so that the ceremony seemed to be keeping them apart rather than joining them together. The priest was long-winded, but eventually he pronounced them man and wife – though I could only guess, with Muddy too tired to interpret, from the kiss and the clapping.

A reception followed, and after eating a large plate of delicious beef stew with rice I decided to walk around a bit. I hadn’t been alone for a long while, and we had been cooped up in the car together for what felt like forever. There really wasn’t much to see, but it felt good to just walk around.

On the other side of the soccer field I found an old man trying to hold down a goat for slaughtering. He was surrounded by a group of young men and they were chatting and laughing loudly, but as soon as the old man saw me he
called out. I didn’t understand a word he said, but it was clear that they needed an extra hand. I went over and held the goat’s foreleg as he expertly tilted the animal’s head so that it was pressed on the ground, plunged the knife into its throat, and then slit it. The goat tried to kick, but we were firmly holding it to the ground, and I watched indifferently as death slowly overcame it.

The old man started skinning the goat expertly, but when he was almost done he suddenly stopped and handed me the knife, pointing to the final piece of skin that was attached to the carcass. The knife was sharp and it wasn’t too difficult to cut away the last of the skin and lift it off the goat – though the young men applauded me like I had just performed some kind of magic trick. Then the old man took my hand and gently guided it so that I disembowelled the goat. I pulled back as soon as the smell from the stomach hit my nostrils – a warm and sticky smell – but laughed when I realised that it wasn’t a bad smell. Taking back his knife, the old man then took out the stomach and pointed me to where there was a basin of water. I understood that this was my next job, and taking the stomach from him I went to the basin and started washing out the contents.

Thirty minutes later I returned with the clean stomach and was met by the familiar smell of
nyama choma
. The old man laughed when I showed him the stomach. He gestured until I realised what he was saying – it was too clean and some of the taste would be gone. He walked to the fire, cut a small piece off one of the hunks of roasting meat and, after tossing it back and forth to cool it a little, put it into my hand. It was simply the best piece of food I’ve ever had.

Soon the meat was ready and it was cut up, put in large bowls and sent off to the wedding party. We, the goat slaughterers, were left with meaty bones, which we gnawed with relish. From somewhere a bottle of vodka was produced and passed around until it was gone. Another appeared, but about halfway into it I left my drunken comrades to go and see what was going on in the tent.

By the time I got back to O and Muddy the chairs in the tent had been moved and a DJ with an old turntable and a collection of vinyl albums was getting ready to do his thing. After a couple of false starts the DJ played a ballad and the bride and groom opened the dance floor. Then he started to play a familiar song – it was Kenny Rogers singing about her believing in him. Muddy tapped me on the shoulder and we walked on to the dance floor with the other couples. O was already dancing drunkenly with an old woman, equally drunk. I had no idea why I wanted to return to the US. Something had been returned to me – though what it was I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it was something as simple as knowing I could be happy again.

Muddy and I started kissing on the dance floor, and as soon as the song was over we walked off and found an empty hut. Not caring whose it was we walked in and made love standing up. Then we returned to the dance floor and, intoxicated with life, continued dancing to the most eclectic collection of songs I’ve ever heard.

Later, Muddy took to the stage to perform one of her pieces. I didn’t understand a word she said because she performed in Kinyarwanda, but I gathered it was about consummation of marriage from the way she moved her hips
and how the crowd responded, urging her on and on.

Unfortunately, as soon as she was done with her performance, Muddy decided that she wanted a joint, and encouraged by O she told everyone I needed to rest – after all, I was the drunk American. Her excuse worked and I sullenly followed them to the hut that was pointed out to us as a place I could rest.

I sat on the low bed as O and Muddy rolled their joint, watching the light from the old lantern that lit the hut flicker on the walls. It wasn’t long before they were engaged in what they thought was a profound conversation about the meaning of life, enjoying being high. Tired of being around them I decided to take a walk – we would be leaving soon and I needed to walk and ‘wash the whiskey out of my blood’, as Joshua had put it that night in Madison.

Stepping outside I walked for a while around the outskirts of the village. Then, just as I was thinking of trying to find my way back to the hut the villagers had given us, I caught sight of an electric light. It was a security light – a single bulb – and it was flickering on and off. Intrigued, I walked towards it, only to realise as I approached that the building it was attached to was a little wooden church – it must have been the only building in the village with electricity. I tightened the bulb and in the constant light it suddenly provided I noticed the door to the church wasn’t locked. My curiosity got the better of me, and I walked in and turned on the light. Inside, unfinished wooden pews were littered with old Bibles and songbooks, and beside the altar, which had unlit candles all around it, there was huge poster on the wall with the words
WE SHALL NEVER FORGET YOU
printed on it. On closer
examination I found that it was surrounded by framed family portraits, small passport photos, with hearts drawn around them, and pictures of smiling babies and lovers holding hands. In the centre hovered a blue-eyed Jesus, looking decidedly out of place, even though this was a church – it reeked of a desperation that contradicted the celebration of life that was still going on outside.

As I turned to leave a large newspaper cutting pasted on cardboard, with a heart drawn around the photograph, caught my eye. I peered into it. The headline read:
Missionaries Caught in Crossfire
. I couldn’t quite make out the photograph in the dim light provided by the bulb high in the roof, so I quickly lit one of the candles and held it up to the wall. The photograph was taken in front of a small brick church. Only the parents, a burly white man and his wife, were smiling. The children, three sons and a daughter, dressed in a school uniform, looked like they would rather be somewhere else.