“How well did you know him?” Bugsy asked.
The Lizard King shook his head. The movement was languorous, as if designed to stall just for the joy of stalling. “Just that one night, man. Just that one bright, shining moment. We showed the Man that we would not be intimidated. The people would not be pushed down. We stood the National Guard and their aces on their asses, man. And afterward, it was love, sweet love until the dawn.”
Bugsy blinked, mentally recalculating. “So you and the Radical were… ah… lovers?”
“That make you uptight, man?” the Lizard King asked with a smile.
“Well, not in a queers-are-yucky way. I just never really thought of Tom Weathers as a sexual object.”
“Everyone was with everyone, man. No jealousy, no possessiveness, no hang-ups. We were free and wild and full of love, man. But no, Radical and me were the power and the light. People were drawn to us. There was too much of us not to share around. Radical, he spent most of his night with a chick called Saffron… no, no. Sunflower. That was it. Seemed really into her.”
“And after that night,” Bugsy said. “Did he keep hanging out with her in particular?”
“There was no after that night, man. There was that one authentic moment, and then nothing. Dude came when he was needed and vanished with the dawn.”
“You never saw him again?”
“Before or since.”
“Great,” Bugsy said.
Thomas Marion Douglas leaned forward, shaping Ellen’s face into a smoky glower that Bugsy recognized from the covers of classic rock albums. “The thing was, we weren’t afraid of death, man. We embraced it. We became free, and everything around us was transformed by our power. After us, nothing was the same. Nothing.”
“Two words,” Bugsy said.
The Lizard King lifted his chin, accepting the implicit dare.
“Britney Spears,” Bugsy said, and then while the Thomas Marion Douglas looked confused, he lifted the towel from Ellen’s neck and returned her to herself.
“Well,” she said. “That could have been more useful.”
“We’ve got Sunflower to work with, at least.”
“Couldn’t have been more than eight or nine million girls called that in sixty-nine,” Ellen said.
“It’s something,” he said. Then, looking at the limp towel in his hand, “So that guy was the edgy, dangerous sex symbol of a generation, huh?”
“Apparently so,” Ellen said.
“Guess you had to be there.”
Kawi Airfield
Tanzania
The plane had creaked as Wally stepped aboard, the suspension visibly sagging. Jerusha eyed the rust-spotted and patched fuselage with suspicion. “How old is this plane?” she asked Finch.
He grinned. “Ah, this crate’s as old as me, and just as mean,” he said. “She’s a Cessna 206, made in 1964-a good year, all around. We’re both perfectly serviceable, lady, if you catch my drift.” He winked one tiny eye at her, and his glance drifted down the length of her body.
“Can it carry Wally?”
“Your metal man, you mean? Sure. How much can the bloke weigh?”
She said nothing, but climbed into the plane and took one of the four seats in the cabin, in front of a pile of boxes and crates lashed in with webbing and straps. Finch climbed into the pilot’s seat, and the propeller on the plane’s nose spun into invisibility as the engine coughed, sputtered, and roared. They clattered down the dirt runway, bouncing as Jerusha held tightly to the seat arms. As the plane finally lifted into the air and began to climb, Jerusha could see the sapphire water of the Zanzibar Strait, and off the horizon, the distance-blued green hump of the island itself. Below, the port city spread out, revealing all of its complexity and life.
“Where’s Mount Kilimanjaro?” Wally asked, shouting against the roar of the plane’s engine as they lifted from the airstrip, wings dipping left as Finch set them on a westerly course. “That’s in Tanzania too, right?”
Finch snorted. He pointed out the right window of the aircraft. “Kilimanjaro’s that way about six hundred kilometers: north, not west.”
“Nuts,” Wally said. He looked disappointed.
“Maybe on the way back we can make a detour,” Jerusha told him. “With Lucien.”
Wally brightened a little. “That’d be swell,” he said. “I hope we can.”
“So do I,” she told him, but the churning of her stomach belied her confidence.
As they slid westward under the high sun, the shadow of the plane below moved initially across well-greened land, but as they moved farther from the coast, the landscape below became more arid, tan earth dotted with the green of occasional stands of trees and brush, interrupted at intervals by the winding paths of streams. An hour or so into the flight, the ground began to rise and crinkle underneath them, steep green-clad mountains and deep valleys sliding underneath their wings. “Mongoro Region,” Finch called out, pointing down. “Beautiful, if you like mountains.”
Jerusha nodded. Staring down, she realized that it would have taken long days to cross Tanzania by car as she’d first planned, following the winding, rough roads carved into this wild land. The mountains eventually drifted off behind them, and they were flying over flat savannah plain. Finch pointed out herds of wildebeest, and buzzed low above elephants and giraffes. Wally was entranced, staring out the windows of the cabin and pointing.
In the late afternoon, Finch set the plane down near a small village. “Delivery,” he said, jerking a thumb back toward the crates. “We’ll be spending the night here…”
The village-a Masai boma, according to Finch-was a collection of mud-brick adobe huts. The children hung behind the adults at first, staring at Wally mostly. By the time they’d off-loaded the plane, the kids had overcome their shyness: they darted out to tap Wally’s metallic skin and dart away again, coming back to hit him harder and laugh at the sound. They plucked at Jerusha’s clothes too, but it was Wally who intrigued them, and Wally seemed to enjoy their attention. He’d make false lunges toward them, roaring when they ran away shrieking and enduring their pestering. He showed them Lucien’s picture, telling them (in English that they couldn’t understand) how he was going to visit Lucien, who was his friend. One of them kicked a soccer ball in Wally’s direction, and he booted it high and long, the children exclaiming and shouting as they ran after it.
Jerusha watched, laughing with them. She reached into her seed pack and found an orange seed; she let it drop, drawing on the life within so that in a few minutes an orange tree had bloomed, with ripe fruit hanging on the branches.
The village smelled of orange rinds that night.
Special Camp Mulele
Guit District, South Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
“Hey!” Tom shouted. “Hey! Knock that shit off!”
The two ignored him. One was the stocky kid Leucrotta, the other the Lagos guttersnipe with the Brit accent, Charles Abidemi, the one called the Wrecker, or sometimes ASBO, after some incomprehensible Limey bullshit.
Tom already knew who started it. Poor skinny Charlie wouldn’t start shit with anybody, although he might make your Austin Mini explode a one-kilogram chunk matter at a time once he got clear of you. But Leucrotta was your typical adolescent male: a dick with legs. Which, given that he was an ace, was a very dangerous dick indeed.
Tom hauled Leucrotta off by the collar of his outsized Simba Brigade camo blouse just as it quit being outsized anymore. As a giant hyena-form chest exploded all the buttons off the front and blew out the sleeves, Tom tossed the rampaging were-beast up just far enough to transfer his grip from a collar that had just turned into a ribbon to bristly scruff.
“What the hell is wrong with you little shits? Don’t you know there’s a revolution on?” Tom spoke French. After spending six or seven years in the Congo, he could speak it just about as well as he chose to. He found that slangy with a deliberately nasty americain accent usually had the best effect. It wasn’t like anybody was going to mouth off to him about his bad pronunciation. Not twice.