Rawley took a step backward onto the rock. “Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus.” Another croc let out a ghastly hiss.
I was not afraid… not for myself, at any rate. It was as if the electric arc of fear had gapped and failed to engage my nerves. Perhaps I was too drunk to feel fear. Yet I was afraid for Rawley. He took another backward step, stumbled, and in doing so, went farther out onto the rock.
“No!” I shouted, beckoning to him. “Run! You’ve got to run! This way!”
I sprinted toward the crocodile closest to the bank. It was strange. I ran, it seemed, not fired by an instinct for self-preservation, but by the need to demonstrate to Rawley the proper method of escape. I may have felt a touch of fright as I hurdled the croc—it snapped at me half-heartedly—but it was nothing compared to the terror I had experienced the previous night. I landed awkwardly on one foot, spun half about, and fell hard on my chest. For the space of a few seconds, perhaps a bit more, I lost my wind. When I regained it, I came to one knee and looked back at Rawley. He had not followed my example. He was standing near the riverward end of the rock, made to seem small by the vastness of the sky that had opened up above him, with its scattering of wild stars and silver cicatrix of moon. His pale hair flew in the breeze, and the tail of his shirt fluttered; the beam of the flashlight struck downward from his left hand like a frail gold wand, his only weapon against the crocodiles massed and slithering toward him from the landward end of the rock. There was no way he could hurdle them now. Our gazes met. He said nothing, and at that distance, his expression was unreadable; but he must have known he was doomed. I called out his name and came a step toward him, thinking there must be something I could do. I screamed at the crocodiles, but they were intent upon him, crawling over one another in their eagerness for his blood.
Rawley whirled about, the flashlight beam drawing a yellow stripe across the bright water. He glanced back at me once more, a mere flicking of his eyes, not a signal or message so much as a reflex, a last hopeful engagement of life, and then he dived into the Kilombo, a racer’s dive learned in his shining youth and practiced in the green pools of Oxford. The crocodiles surged forward. Rawley surfaced about twenty feet from the bank, just as the first of the crocs went into the water; he headed down river, stroking a racing crawl, aiming for a place some fifteen yards away where the bank jutted out. I didn’t think he had a chance—a dozen crocs were in the water now, arrowing after him, their bodies only partially submerged, moonstruck eyes aglitter. But Rawley was making decent headway, and I began to hope for him. Then the croc nearest him submerged completely. A moment later he screamed and came twisting high out of the water, clawing at the air, a dark stain on his lips and chin. And then the croc took him under. The other crocodiles converged on the spot where Rawley had vanished, and the surface was transformed into a melee of thrashing tails and rooting snouts, a raft of scaly, undulating bodies, all splashing and bumping and skittering half out of the water as one croc slid up and across another’s back in a display of murderous frolic. But there was no sign of the man they had killed.
I backed away from the bank; I felt unsound, unclear. Rawley’s death had been real enough while it was occurring, but now it seemed I had imagined it, that I would have to re-imagine it in order to make it real. I was still holding my bottle, and now I hurled it into the river, as if it were damning evidence. And wasn’t I culpable for having hated him, even if the hatred was transitory and the event itself a dire form of coincidence? Hadn’t I brought him to the rock with murder in my heart?
The crocodiles began to swim away from the spot where Rawley had disappeared. Their fun was over. I sank to my knees, suddenly overcome by loss, and by the gruesome manner of his passing. I bent my head, pressed the heels of my hands against my brow, as if to compress the memory of what I had seen, to flatten it and make it so thin it would slip into a crack in my brain and never be found. The hypocrisy of my grief, coming as it did in such close conjunction with my internalized expression of loathing for Rawley, caused his death to weigh more heavily upon me than it otherwise might. Though I truly grieved, at the same time my tears seemed a form of indulgence, as if I were grieving for myself, for my own frail transgressions, or else trying to present a false appearance to whatever deity was watching, to convince him that I was sorry for my part in what had happened. And this duality of grief, this fictive quality overlaying the real, this sense of innermost duplicity, made my thoughts scamper and collide like confused rabbits on a killing ground. I thought my head would burst, I wanted it to burst, and I was disappointed when it did not.
At last I lifted my eyes. Not ten feet away along the bank, a crocodile was watching me. A smallish one, perhaps the same upon which Rawley had first shined his flashlight. Its jaws were slightly parted, its snaggled teeth in plain view, lending it a goofy look. A comical little death poised to pounce. My normal reactions were dammed up, and I could only stare at the thing. Numb, hopeless, and uncaring, I waited to die. Seconds ticked past, slow as water from a leaky tap. The croc began to seem familiar, almost human. Mad hilarity lapped the inside of my skull. I noted the croc’s resemblance to George Bush the elder. A distant relative, perhaps. An outside child conceived during a state visit. Then it bellowed, a glutinous, hollow noise—like a troll roaring in a cave—and that restored my natural animal terror. Its head jerked sideways, and it regarded me for a few beats with one cold gray eye, as if marking me for future reference. Then it whipped about, and moving in the ludicrous yet oh-so-efficient Chaplinesque paddling run of its species, it scuttled off into the shadows, leaving me to seek another solution to my misfortunes.
When I reported Rawley’s death, the police in Mogado detained me; later that night, they charged me with his murder. There was no body, no evidence of any sort, except for the fact that I had been seen arguing with him, then walking with him in the direction of the river. No one reported seeing him afterward. Men had been convicted and executed for less in the Congo. I neither disputed nor affirmed the charge. In truth, I could not dispute or affirm it. Rawley’s death lay at the center of a web of circumstance and possibility that could never be untangled. Unless one were to accept the explanation of my dream… or rather, Buma’s dream. My three improbable escapes from the crocodiles of the Kilombo lent credence to this explanation, for had not Buma spat on my palm to protect me from his “brothers and sisters”? But I was not prepared to accept it.
Later that morning, the potbellied desk officer entered my cell and informed me that I was no longer under suspicion—I could leave—if I wished, I could return to Abidjan. I was in a state of shock and disbelief. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “I thought I was to be arraigned?”
He hesitated. “We’ve been told to let you go.”
“By Kinshasa?”
The policeman dropped his eyes, as if embarrassed. “You are free to leave.”
I considered the length of time it would likely take for the police to communicate with Kinshasa, then how much longer it would be before Kinshasa could get through their ritual rounds of squabbling and communicate an official reaction. “It wasn’t Kinshasa who gave the order, was it?”