Somebody's Heart Is Burning (14 page)

“The forest manager,” Katie said dully.

“The forest manager,” I started to laugh. “Of course. Why not?”

Christy looked from one to the other of us, uncertain of our mood.

Katie began to giggle, too, and soon we were both laughing helplessly, holding our sweaty bodies against each other. I lifted my heavy hair from the back of my neck. The cropped look I’d left the U.S. with had grown into a straggly mass.

“I need a haircut,” I said.

“Good,” said Christy eagerly, back on firm ground. “I will cut your hair. I have cut white men’s hair before. Mac, VSO. And Eric, Peace Corps.”

“But not now!” I said.

“No, no, sistah,” she laughed. “It is nighttime! Now we go to the forest.”

When we reached a paved road, Christy flagged down a passing car, and after a brief consultation with the driver, indicated that Katie and I get into the back seat.

“He will take us to the forest manager,” she said.

“To the forest!” I murmured, starting to giggle again. I was definitely slaphappy at this point.

“This is a fairy tale,” I told Katie, as we drove down a narrow road, through thick trees. She seemed to have fallen asleep, her head lolling against my shoulder like a child’s. “The forest manager will make everything well,” I whispered into her tangled hair.

“You are lucky to find me in.”

A portly man with glasses emerged from the darkened cinderblock house in slippers and
bou-bou—
the full-length cotton robe worn by men in this area. He switched on an electric light. “I have just today returned from Accra.”

True to Ghanaian hospitality, he made no comment on our late arrival in this secluded spot, but ushered us into his home, offering minerals as though receiving bedraggled white visitors were his nightly custom. The front room was simple and bare, as in most Ghanaian dwellings I had visited. A clean-swept cement floor, a plastic table and chairs. A low maroon-colored couch against one wall. The only decoration was a placard on the wall, which read, “I am covered in the blood of Jesus,” with a drawing of a thorny crown tipped with bright scarlet blood. A television sat on a table in the corner. Beside it was a small stack of books. Through an open door I glimpsed a narrow second room with a single bed.

After ten minutes of small talk, I leaned over to Christy and whispered, “Please tell the forest manager why we’re here.”

Back in Kaleo, we thanked the forest manager profusely. As we climbed out of his air-conditioned car, Christy leaned over and said to me, “Tomorrow you come for your haircut.”

I was about to tell her that we had other plans, but before I could get the words out, Christy and the forest manager had disappeared in a puff of warm exhaust.

When we didn’t appear in Wa the next afternoon, Christy made her way to Kaleo to find us. Against the wishes of Facts, who was still annoyed about our absence the previous day, she worked beside us all afternoon and spent the night stretched out on a grass mat beside Katie’s sleeping bag. The next day Facts insisted that she leave.

“We cannot be housing the entire village,” he said huffily. It took a great deal of cajoling before he gave his permission for us to visit Christy on the weekend for my haircut.

We met Christy at the taxi park. With a flock of appreciative children in tow, we walked to her sister’s house for the scissors and then to her mother’s compound to perform the operation. The distance seemed much shorter in daylight.

I’d brought my theatrical headshot from the previous year, to show Christy the haircut I had in mind. My brother is a hairdresser, and back in the U.S. he always cuts my hair. This particular haircut was short and hip, with wispy bangs, a sprouting top like a cactus, and a zigzagged line shaved into the side. When I showed it to her, she smiled cheerfully and nodded.

“Yes,” she said.

Christy, whose manner up to this point had been sweet and self-effacing to the point of subservience, became a warrior goddess with scissors in hand. Brow furrowed in fierce concentration, she cut from all angles, moving up and down like a dancer, leaning over the top, barking at the children to stay out of her way. Grabbing chunks of hair, she chopped swiftly and decisively, while Katie gasped, “Oh!” and “Wait!” her hands flying to her mouth.

“What?” I asked repeatedly, but Katie simply brought her hands back to her lap and smiled weakly.

“Nothing,” she squeaked. “Never mind.”

Finally a mirror was brought. Uneven tufts stuck out all over my head. Most alarmingly, a parade of very short bangs trooped across the top of my forehead in a severely straight line.

Getting control of my breath, I took the scissors and showed Christy how to make the bangs “fringy,” as my brother would say. Then I pointed to various tufts and asked her to snip here and there.

“Oh! You’ve made a bald spot!” Katie cried.

I grabbed the mirror and inspected the damage. I demanded that Katie take an active role in the process, instead of heckling from the sidelines. Soon it became a group effort. The children screamed and pointed, making snipping motions with their fingers.

By the end my entire head was buzzed close, like a Buddhist nun. Katie took a photo of Christy and her shorn client, with Christy holding up the scissors and the headshot. Her face wore a wide innocent grin.

Christy claimed Katie and me as her own. She came to the camp almost every afternoon, and stayed until Facts kicked her out.

“What does that girl want?” he asked repeatedly. “She should go home and stop loitering about.”

Though Katie and I weren’t entirely sure we wanted Christy around, we felt compelled to defend her.

“She’s not hurting anything,” I told Facts.

“Well, she cannot stay overnight again,” he said. “For her own sake. If something goes missing, it is her they will blame.”

What
did
Christy want? We couldn’t figure it out. She never asked Katie or me for anything, not money, not clothes, not to take her to our countries. She seemed simply to enjoy our company. She would sit near us for long stretches of time, watching us closely, scarcely participating in the conversation. At first we tried to include her, asking her about herself, but she never seemed to understand what we were asking and always turned the questions back to us. After a while, we almost forgot she was there.

She was very solicitous of us and would do things like straighten our sleeping bags or bring us our food at dinnertime. This made me uncomfortable. When I asked her if she expected to be paid for her work, she just laughed.

“Never, sistah.”

“Then please don’t do it,” I said.

The next day I caught her taking my laundry out to wash.

“Stop, Christy,” I told her.

“What, sistah?”

“Don’t do my laundry for me. I can do my own laundry.”

“Yes,” she said, and continued walking.

“No!” I stopped her. “Please, I mean it.”

With a dainty sigh, she put the laundry down.

Christy was fascinated by Katie’s camera and my tape recorder. She was constantly pushing the buttons on the tape recorder and opening and closing the camera’s lens. When I asked her to stop, telling her she was wearing out my batteries, she always gave me the sweetest possible “yes,” but the next time I looked, she was at it again.

Sometimes I wondered if she was mentally disabled, but looking into her eyes, I knew better.

“She understands what she wants to understand,” I said to Katie one evening, after Christy had left.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean that she pretends not to follow what we’re saying in order to gain more information. Even that night, when she was leading us around. She knew we wanted to get in a taxi and head home, but she pretended not to grasp it.”

“So who’s she gathering information
for?
The CIA?”

“That, my friend, is the million dollar question.”

She rolled her eyes. “Wake me when you’ve worked it out.”