The Lioness(65)

And now the moment had passed. Muema gave him the canteen and Benjamin took one swallow, what he supposed was his share of the warm, coppery water, and then passed it to the next man.

“You shouldn’t have stopped me,” he told Muema.

“You would have been dead in a heartbeat.”

“Well, we may all be dead in a few hours. What difference does it make?”

Muema shook his head. “No, they’re not going to kill us.”

“Don’t try and reassure me.”

“I’m not. They just fed us—”

“To keep us calm with false hopes.”

“I was listening to those two,” Muema said, and he nodded at the guards in the back of the truck with them. “They were talking about Shinkolobwe.”

Benjamin shook his head. “I have no idea where that is.”

“It’s a mine. Or was a mine. Uranium. It’s in the Congo.”

“And you think they’re taking us there?”

“It’s far, so I don’t know. Maybe the Simbas have gotten control. But if not to Shinkolobwe, then to a place like it. Another mine that the Simbas have taken. Maybe one closer.”

“To put us to work.”

Muema nodded. “The Soviets talk a good game when they speak of the rights of workers, but when it comes to a uranium mine on this continent? We have no rights. We’d be better off mining diamonds or gold in South Africa.”

“My grandfather mined gold. It nearly killed him. It ruined his back. He was never the same, he told us.”

“Uranium is worse. If that’s what they want us for.”

“So, we’d be Simba slave labor.”

Muema brought his bound hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. “Or Soviet slave labor. I don’t know. I just know that this wasn’t our moment. This wasn’t your moment. You’ll have another chance. A better chance. We all will.”

The driver took back the canteens, climbed into the truck, and they started off. Based on the sun, they were driving southwest, which might indeed mean the Congo and the violent world of the Simba rebellion.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


    Katie Barstow





These are all actual “baby” pictures of Julie Andrews, Paul Newman, and Katie Barstow. Perky little Katie dressed up for Halloween as a pumpkin? Her mother, Glenda, says it was one of her daughter’s favorite nights of her life. The child loved that costume so much, Glenda told us, that one year she insisted on going trick-or-treating in it on October 30—the night before Halloween. “Our neighbors laughed and laughed and thought Katie was adorable. The cookie and candy haul was insane,” said the proud mom.

—Teen Screen, July 1962



She was crying because she was going to die, she knew this now, she was sure of it, and her ass was wet from peeing her pants, and in the blackness of the hut she could smell the toxic cocktail of her urine and the damp earth beneath her pallet. Where had she smelled something like this? That fucking Halloween pumpkin costume. Her brother the shrink would say this was a manufactured memory—a memory someone had crafted from the stories of other, usually older people—but she knew it was genuine. It was her earliest memory. She knew the shame of trick-or-treating on the wrong night in a blob of orange fabric and cotton ticking that reeked like a dirty diaper in August. In hindsight, the stink was more Proustian than the reaction of the neighbors in the building: her recollections of their confusion and annoyance might have been manufactured from her conversations later with Billy and David and other people who lived on the same elevator line in the massive apartment.

Still, no shame or horror had prepared her for this: not even witnessing the cavitation of a human skull when Juma was shot with an elephant gun that morning. No, in the last few minutes, she had heard too much, and the fact she was hearing it all in the dark made it like a carnival funhouse, but real. She was virtually blind; no human eye had the capability to turn this darkness to day. There were the gunshots, three of them, but two at first. That’s where it began, with men arguing, fighting, behind the boma and then inside the boma. The languages had been Russian and English. She had heard David, she was positive, and though she couldn’t make out most of the words, she’d heard the wrenching fear in her husband’s voice. And she’d heard Terrance Dutton speaking, and he was adamant and angry, which might have given her hope, but no one came for her. No one. Good God, was David even still alive? Were Terrance and Billy and Margie?

Margie. Margie. Katie asked herself over and over in her mind what she had done allowing her sister-in-law to join them on this safari. She should have insisted that Billy and Margie remain in California. Before all of that activity and the gunshots just now, maybe—just maybe—she had heard Margie, and the woman was crying, and then one of the vehicles had left in a hurry.

She was afraid she was losing her mind, but she was far more terrified that though this had begun as a kidnapping, something had happened and everything had changed and now it was going to be a massacre. The Russians were going to kill them all. Her feet were tied to the foot of the pallet and her hands were bound, but she could easily bring her fingers to her cheeks and wipe away the tears. And so, finally, she did. She wiped the rivulets of mucus that were streaming from her nose, too.