“Yep.” After skinning the mango, she sliced it, neatly excising a large pit from the center. She dried the pit and put it in a pocket of her belt.
Childish laughter echoed across the street. A pair of kids not much older than Lucien ran down the street, trailing a homemade kite: a plastic garbage bag, two long sticks, and about a million little scraps of string tied together into one long string. The kids had two shoes between them; one wore the left shoe, the other the right.
Wally wondered if Lucien had ever flown a kite. Maybe Wally could show him.
They ate in companionable silence, watching the kids.
“Jerusha?”
“Yeah?”
Wally looked at his feet, not wanting to embarrass her. “I’m real glad you decided to come along.”
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
There’s a shot of the French Quarter on TV. At first, it looks like there’s been a freak snowstorm. But as the camera zooms in closer, you can see that there are bubbles everywhere. People are wading knee-deep through them, kicking them up in the air. Sometimes they pop and everyone laughs.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the reporter says. “It’s been raining bubbles here for three days now. We’ve been trying to talk to Michelle Pond, the Amazing Bubbles, to find out when this will end.”
Michelle rolled her eyes. She’d refused interviews because she really didn’t know how much longer it would go on. She was definitely lighter, and she thought she was getting smaller, but there was still so much energy in her. She looked up at the TV again.
The next shot was of a playground. Kids were shrieking and laughing as they slid into the masses of iridescent bubbles. They picked up bubbles and threw them at each other. Some popped immediately, but most bounced harmlessly off their targets.
Then another shower of bubbles began, and the children held out their arms and let the bubbles rain down on them.
9
Friday,
December 4
Lake Tanganyika
Tanzania
“Crossing over into the PPA would be very unwise,” Barbara Baden said, line static hissing underneath her voice. “Don’t. Things are getting very dicey there. The war, the Leopard Society, Tom Weathers
…”
“Don’t worry about us,” Jerusha told her, standing on the dock where the boat they’d hired was moored. Mist was rising from the lake, and the jungle around them was noisy with stirring life. “I’m just helping Wally nose around a bit.”
“Good,” Barbara said. “Be very careful, and stay in touch.”
“Sure will,” Jerusha told her and snapped the phone shut.
“Sure will what?” Wally asked. He was scrubbing furiously at his left shoulder with an S.O. S pad. Finch was a few feet away, talking to the boat’s owner. Their kit sat in bundles around them, looking heavy in the dawn light, but Wally seemed barely able to stand still now that they were so close to Lucien.
Jerusha lifted a shoulder. “Nothing important.” She wondered whether she should tell him what Barbara was saying about the PPA, but she was certain it wouldn’t change Wally’s mind. If she refused to go with him, he’d just go alone. Jerusha wasn’t quite sure why, but she knew she couldn’t let him do that. He needs you, and you…
Finch interrupted the thought. “Hamisi here doesn’t much like the idea of going over to the PPA side of the lake,” he said. “He’s saying he needs another hundred dollars. For the risk.”
“You already negotiated the price. We’ve already paid him fifty.”
Finch shrugged. “Now he wants more. Or, he says, he won’t do it. Can’t say I blame the bloke. The PPA’s not a place I want to get too near myself, with the things I’ve been hearing. You’re lucky to have found anyone who’s foolish enough to ferry you across.” He waved at Hamisi, who stood watching them from where the boat was tied up. “You want to talk to him yourself?”
“I’ll pay you back when we get home, Jerusha,” Wally interjected. His foot was tapping on the pier, shaking the wooden planks, which already bowed under his weight.
Jerusha sighed. “Offer him another fifty,” she told Finch. The man shrugged and went back to Hamisi. After a heated exchange, he came back. “Got him to agree to an additional seventy. Best I can do. Or the two of you can try to find someone else, or better yet, stay here. Your call.”
Jerusha looked at Wally. “All right,” she said. “Seventy.”
Ten minutes later, Finch had tossed the rope from the pier into the boat where they were sitting. The boat smelled equally of old fish and grimy diesel oil; the deck was filthy and slick, the bench seats only slightly less so. Hamisi fiddled with the controls in the small cabin; the engine snorted blue exhaust and bubbles churned at the rear of the boat. “Good luck to the both of you,” Finch called as the bow began to cut through the dark water of the lake. “You’re going to bloody need it.”
Jerusha tried to put that last bit out of her mind as she watched Finch’s body dwindle into the distance and mist.
Thirty miles across-that’s what Finch said it was-a trip that would take at least three hours, according to Hamisi, who didn’t understand English but could converse-haltingly-in Jerusha’s French. The Congo had always used French as an official, tribally neutral official language, a practice retained by the PPA, and Hamisi had originally come from the PPA, long ago. Three hours…
The lake water seemed to drift slowly past the hull as the mist lifted in the rising sun, but there was no sign of the other side of the lake. She could see other boats out on the water: schooners with white sails, distant fishing boats with their snarls of nets, pleasure craft lifting bows high out of the water. The horizon ahead of them was unbroken water seeming eternally fixed despite their own movement. The landscape was beautiful, though: the deep lake, the walls of green mountains behind them and parading off into the distance, a rain squall spreading darkness well to the north, and thunderheads looming in the distance. It reminded her of the wild beauty of Conrad’s description of the Congo.
Wally didn’t glance around at the scenery. He sat in the exact middle of the boat, staying very still and looking out at the water apprehensively. “Wally, you okay?”
He gave a shrug and worked his steam-shovel mouth. “All this water,” he said. “Cripes, I used to love swimming, back before my card turned. But now…” He tapped his chest with his fist, a sound like a trash can colliding with a Dumpster. “Can’t swim. Don’t like water.”
“It’ll be over soon. Just hang on.” She rubbed at the back of her neck with her hand, kneading the ache that threatened to become a headache. And then there’s the jungle, and the rains, and the rivers we’ll probably have to cross there, and getting across Lake Tanganyika again afterward…
After a time, Jerusha realized that she could finally see the smudge of the PPA coastline. The blue-hazed humps there crawled toward them, far too slowly for Jerusha’s comfort, but reachable now. The boat puttered steadily forward, and Jerusha was beginning to think that the crossing was, despite Finch’s pessimism, to be uneventful.
“Hey, what’s that?” Wally said.
He was pointing northward. A black dot was slicing through the water: a patrol boat, with a white wake tracing its path. At about the same time that they noticed it, the boat shifted course toward them. Hamisi, at the wheel, cursed.
“Can’t you beat them to the shore?” Wally asked hopefully. He pointed to where the trees reached the lake. Hamisi scowled. He spat a long, loud harangue in what Jerusha assumed was Kiswahili. “What’d he say?” Wally asked Jerusha. She could only shake her head.
Someone on the patrol gunboat was shouting through a megaphone in French. “Shut off your engine!”
Hamisi looked at Jerusha. She didn’t know what to tell the man. The command was repeated, and this time the machine gun mounted on the craft sent a long white line spattering into the lake just ahead of them. White smoke drifted away from the muzzle, the noise echoing back at them belatedly from the shore. Hamisi slapped at the key; the engine went silent as the waves swayed the boat from side to side.