You Shall Know Our Velocity (13 page)

“Excuse me!” I said, knowing he wouldn’t understand the word, but knowing I had to say something, and then settling on the words I would have said had he been able to understand. He turned to me.

I smiled and handed him a stack of bills. He stared at my nose. I smiled harder and rolled my eyes.

“Long story,” I said.

He waved the money off. I took his hand and put the bills in his palm and closed his fingers, dry and ringed like birch twigs, around them. I smiled and nodded in an eager and anxious way, like I was taking his money, not giving him mine.

He said nothing. He took the bills and walked off. I jogged back to the car, my feet slapping the pavement in a happy way; a boy was there, about six years old, though there wasn’t a house or hut in sight.

“Where’d he come from?” I asked.

“He just showed up,” said Hand.

The boy, barefoot and wearing Magnum P.I. shorts, was leaning against the side of the car, looking inside, his hands cupped around
his eyes and set against the window, reflecting the endless fields, newly tilled and dry, behind him.

“What’s he want?”

“I think he was here to help.”

“We have anything for him?”

“Money.”

“No. He’ll get robbed.”

We gave him a package of white cream cookies and a liter of water, full and in the sun seeming heavy, like mercury.

We got in the car but the car wouldn’t move. The boy, at the side of the car, yelled something, waving his tiny bony arms.

“The rock,” said Hand.

“Oh,” I said.

While watching us, carefully, holding his hand up in a gesture begging us not to run him over, the boy bent down and removed the rock. We thanked him and waved and honked and drove away, down the coast.

There were beaches being used as dumps. The sand was white and duned, and the water clear beyond, but the beach overwhelmed with garbage, great heaps of it, and broken boats. Periodically we’d pass through a village, the buildings, squat and of clay, abutting the road, kids running out of open doorways. We drove around more blue buses, and a few carts driven by horses nodding, but no donkeys. We couldn’t find a fucking donkey. Cows would be just as good, we thought, but every time we stopped and approached a cow on foot, a car would come down the road, or a bright blue bus, or a farmer or a cart or child, and we’d abort. At one point, when we really thought we were going to do it, had the money in a pouch and the tape all around it and a cow picked out and were only a few feet away, it wasn’t a car that came but a whole caravan of men, French we guessed, on four-wheel ATVs, eleven of
them, in a row, half with white girlfriends strapped around their waists, all with aviator glasses, a few with scarves.

“Good lord God no,” Hand said.

The image was unsettling and indelible.

We gave up on taping money to animals. We were now looking for people. Anyone to unload the money on. But choosing just who was a strange kind of task. We found a group of boys working in a field, raking hay and throwing it into a large wooden wagon attached to a mule. Five boys—

“Brothers, probably,” said Hand. We stopped and parked on the side of the road.

“They’re gonna see us,” I said.

“Then get out and give em some money, idiot.”

“Not yet. I gotta make sure.”

“Here,” Hand said, spreading a map between us. “This is like a fucking stakeout or something.”

—working together, without pause. They were perfect. But I couldn’t get my nerve up. All I had to do was get out of the car, walk a hundred feet and hand them part of the $1,400 we had left. We had to get rid of this money. Tomorrow we would cash more checks—
swoop! swoop!
—and start over. We were already so far behind. But I couldn’t do it.

“That one guy looks like a dad,” I said.

“No, he’s just a little older than the others.”

“I can’t give it to them if the dad’s there.”

“Why?”

“Because the dad won’t take it, or let them.”

“Bullshit,” Hand said. “Of course he’d take it.”

“No he wouldn’t. It’s a pride thing. He won’t take the money in front of his sons.”

“Not here, stupid. These guys know they need it and that we can
afford it. They’re not taking it from a neighbor, they’re taking it from people who it means, you know, next to nothing to. They know this.”

“You do it.”

“No, you. It’s your money.”

“No it’s not. That’s the point.”

“Just go.”

“I can’t. Maybe we wait. The dad’ll go get some water or something. Or you could create a diversion.”

We sat, watching.

“This is predatory,” I said.

“Yeah but it’s okay.”

“Let’s go. We’ll find someone better.”

We drove, though I wasn’t sure it would ever feel right. I would have given them $400, $500, but now we were gone. It was so wrong to stalk them, and even more wrong not to give them the money, a life-changing amount of money here, where the average yearly earnings were, we’d read, about $1,600. It was all so wrong and now we were a mile away and heading down the coast. To the right, beyond the fields and a thin row of trees, the Atlantic—wait; right, the Atlantic—shimmered like a dime.

The sun was low in a white-blue sky and the air was cooling. We approached a huge warehouse in a field. The place, a gallery of some kind, was immense, and shuttered, the parking lot covered in grass. There were no other buildings for miles.

We parked. We’d look around.

A flock of small black birds came across the building in a desperate way. They weren’t in any kind of formation, just fifty of them, all flying in the same direction, each with its own path. Not every one with its own path, I guess, but so many of them, which struck me. I don’t know why it struck me then but had never
struck me before. When we see birds flying in a flock, we expect them in formation. We expect neat V’s of birds. But these, they were flying in more of a swooping swarm, a group fifty feet left to right, twenty feet top to bottom. Within that area they were swerving up and down, swinging to and fro, overlapping, like a group of sixth graders riding bikes home from school. Which would imply not only free will but a sense of fun, of caprice. I mean, I want to know what this bird:

is thinking. How does he feel his flight? Does he know the difference between stasis and swooping? Birds were so much better in flight. My bird feeder, now empty in Chicago, taught me how nervous and jittery birds were when they stood and hopped and ducked their heads into the glass for their miserable little seeds. But tearing in and out of formation, there was proof of—

And then they were gone.

“This is a good place to walk around,” said Hand.

I agreed to walk around.

We parked the car behind the building, hiding it from the road. Though we had no evidence of anything like it, we imagined the possibility of roaming marauders who would stop, strip our car bare and move on. So the car was hidden; we could walk through the fields and head to the ocean, less than a mile west.

“You got some sun today,” I said.

“You too,” Hand said.

“Let’s go that way,” he said, vaguely indicating a small farm in the distance, three small huts and a fence of sticks. This would be the first walking we’d done. The field was quiet. We walked toward the huts, over rough savannah breached by the huge and common bulbous leafless trees—their bark smooth and knotted. Closer now, there were figures under and around one of the farm’s largest huts, and around the hut a fence and within the fence ten or twelve sheep, all a dirty grey. Four young kids ran from the fence and toward us, still very small in the distance.

“Bonjour!” one of them yelled, the word sailing to us through the thin late-afternoon air with the strong voice of a girl of eight or nine. Then another one, “Bonjour!” this time from a boy. Then they both said it as they skipped toward us: “Bonjour!”

Hand yelled back: “Bonjour!”

“Hello!” I yelled.

It had to be those kids. Only the most blessed of little people yells hello across an empty field to strangers with dirty clothes.

“We have to give them some,” I said.

A man emerged from another nearby hut and faced us.

“Shit,” Hand said. We only wanted the kids. This man would be suspicious.

“I liked it better when it was just the kids,” I said.

“Who cares?”

“Look at him. He’s carrying a scythe or something.”

Hand squinted. “You’re right.”

“I am?” The man was standing now, hand shielding his eyes, and the kids had gone inside.

“We’ll come back,” Hand said. “We’ll swim and come back.”

We walked toward the ocean; we knew it wasn’t far. We’d been watching the ocean peek between towns and trees the whole drive down. We tramped through a growing thicket and toward the weakening sun.

“Fuck,” said Hand.

“What?”

“Mosquitos. That’s how we get malaria.”

He was right.

“You bring block?” he asked.

“No.”

“Fuck. This is stupid. I don’t want malaria.”

“I wouldn’t mind it,” I said. I had a distant and untested fascination with sickness like that, that would bring you to the brink but not over, if you were strong.

We debated. Continuing on meant an unknown risk—the place could be swarmed with mosquitos any second—but going back to the car meant that we’d truly done nothing, and we would never do anything. If we couldn’t pull off the road and walk through a field to the ocean then we were worth nothing.

We walked on. The ground was hard and brown and dotted with seashells. There were shells all the way back to the highway, the road lined with them, white and broken.

“You see all the shells?” Hand asked.

“I know.”

“This whole area was underwater.”

After a few minutes we could see the ocean. It was the lightest blue, a dry and sun-faded blue. We walked closer, a few hundred
yards from the shore, and saw a group of small houses, all of the same design and standing in formation—some kind of development, between us and the water. About fifteen of them, cottage-sized and neatly arrayed, on a sort of plateau, separated from us and from the beach beyond by a moat, sixteen feet down and filled with what seemed to be—

“Sewage,” Hand said.

The builders had run out of money. It was a resort-to-be, but without any sign of recent work. There were no vehicles or trailers. Only these small homes, well-built, windowless and sturdy. Each one big enough for one bedroom, a sitting room and a small porch. We got as close as we could before the moat asserted itself without solution. The water in the moat was too deep and dirty to wade through, and too wide to jump.

“There is no reason for this moat,” said Hand.

There was a man. He walked into view on the other side of the moat, among the houses. He was Senegalese, bone-thin and holding in his hand some kind of electric device, black and with a long antenna. He stared our way.

“Security,” Hand said. “They’ve got someone guarding the whole place.”

“We should leave.”

“No.”

We were watching the man and he was watching us.

“Let’s pretend we’re leaving and see if he leaves,” I said.

“Fine,” Hand said.

We turned and shuffled away. Was he armed? He could shoot us if he wanted to and no one would ever know. We sat behind a pair of thick shrubs.

“Pilar looked thin,” I said.

“She did?” Hand said, trying to balance a thin stick between his nose and upper lip. “I thought she looked normal.”

“You’re blind.”

I dug a small hole and put a scallop-shaped shell inside, and buried it. Then I retrieved it, and set it back in the exact spot I’d found it.

“This is slower than I thought it would be,” I said.

“Let’s go,” Hand said.

We stood and the man was gone. We walked alongside the moat, hoping to find a narrow place to cross, to get closer to the homes and then to the beach beyond. We soon saw a clothesline threaded between one porch and its adjacent tree. Shirts and pants hung from it, and on the porch towels and an Indiana University umbrella.

“Jesus,” I said. “Someone’s living here.”

“Makes sense.”

“But why does the security guy let them?”

“We could plant some money in there,” Hand said. “Put it in a pair of pants.”

“Yeah, on the clothesline. That’d be good.”

We went around the entire moat and at the far right end found an area where we could get down the bluff, about fifty feet, and over the water. There was a rocky sort of path sloping right and after taking off our shoes, in case we landed somehow in the moat, we descended, sliding and jumping, and soon found ourselves jogging slightly, as if descending stairs in a hurry. The path was now dotted with large flat rocks, like overturned dinner plates, and we were jumping from rock to rock, and doing so at a speed that I should have found alarming but somehow didn’t, and we were barefoot, which might have increased the alarm but instead made it easier, because the rocks were smooth, and cool, and my bare feet would land on the rock and kind of wrap around it, simian-like, in a way that a shoe or sneaker or sandal couldn’t. I swear my toes were grabbing for me, and that my skin was attaching to the rock surface in a way that only meant collusion between natural things—in this case, feet and smooth green-grey rocks. There was no time to think, which was plenty of time—I had a few fractions of a second in midair,
between rocks, to calculate the location of the next rock-landing options, the stability of each, the flattest surface among them. My brain and legs and feet all working at top speed, at the height of their respective games—it was thrilling and I was proud for them, for us. I had the thought, while running, without breaking stride, that I would like to be doing this forever, that thought occurring while I almost landed on a very sharp rock but adjusted quickly enough to avoid it in favor of a nearby and more rounded rock, and while I was congratulating myself on having made such a perfect rock-landing choice, I was also rethinking my thought about jumping on rocks forever, because that would probably not be all that fun after a while, involving as it did a certain amount of stress, probably too much—and then, I thought, how odd it was to be thinking about running forever along the rounded gray rocks of this corner of Senegal—was this Popenguine? Mbour?—while I was in fact running along them, and how strange it was that not only could I be calculating the placement of my feet in midrun, but also be thinking of my future as a career or eternal rock-runner, and noting the thinking about that at the same time. Then the rocks ended and the sand began and I jumped into the sand with a shhhht and my feet were thankful and I stood, watching the water and waiting for Hand.