Acts of Faith

THE WOMEN WERE in a pit, sending up doleful cries, arms raised, faces turned toward Ibrahim, standing far above. Their arms grew longer and longer, reaching for him with wriggling fingers, like a nest of rising serpents with worms for heads. They clasped his ankles, twined around his legs and chest, crushing the breath out of him.

With a strangled yell, he woke up, his heart thudding, flesh clammy and hot at the same time. Ribbons of smoke curled around him. He could see no stars, no light of any kind, except for a few red circles glowing demonically in a darkness doubled by the smoke that scorched his lungs. And the companions of the left hand shall dwell amidst burning winds and scalding water, under the shade of a black smoke, neither cool nor agreeable. He tried to stand, to rise above the smoke and breathe clean, cool air, but his legs wouldn’t move. Now, overcome by terror, he understood that he was in the pit, pinned down by the abid women, a captive of his captives. He couldn’t see them, yet he felt the pressure of their fingers, the coil of their arms. They no longer called to him for mercy, and he knew why: those appeals had been false; a trick to draw him to the edge of the pit so they could seize him and plunge him into eternal anguish. False! False! He’d mistaken the thing they were pleading for. They wanted his soul! On the day of resurrection some faces shall become white, and other faces shall become black. And unto them whose faces shall become black, God will say, Have you returned unto your unbelief, after you have believed? Therefore taste the punishment. . . . As for the unbelievers . . . they shall be the companions of hell fire. . . . His sins had made him like an unbeliever, deserving the infidel’s chastisements in hell, and the only cry he heard now was his own prolonged howl.

Suddenly he was free. He sat up, again with thudding heart and hot, wet skin; again his lungs and nostrils burned, again he saw fuzzy, scarlet circles shining through vaporous ribbons, but when he looked up, he beheld the lights of heaven and realized that the smoke and red light were from the fires the Brothers had lighted to keep insects out of camp. His previous awakening had been an illusion, a passage from one dream into another. Now he was truly awake. Delighting in the real-world scent of Barakat’s sweat, impregnated in the saddle blanket, in the tingle of this world’s smoke in his nose, he wanted to shout for joy. Only a dream! No ordinary dream, though. In its clarity, in its reality, it had seemed like a revelation, such as a prophet would receive. He rearranged his goat-hair blanket, lay down on his back, and tried to interpret the meaning.

While he pondered, he once more heard cries, sobs, groans. How could this be? Was he going mad that he should hear those lamentations when he was not asleep? Or had the women become jinns, determined to pursue and afflict him in his waking hours as well as in his dreams? Or was he still dreaming after all? Had he awakened from one into another, thence into a third? A thick ball of smoke rolled over him, and he coughed and returned to his senses. He wasn’t mad, wasn’t dreaming, and the captive women were not jinns.

Some of his men had invaded the zariba where the abid were being held and were taking women out to satisfy their carnal appetites. Ibrahim was exhausted, having fought a battle and ridden all day, the last hour in the late-season downpour, and the screams and wails were stripping off what bark remained on the branches of his nerves. Damn those men! he thought. He had issued express orders that no one was to touch the women captives. Most of those taken in the raid were young, and though their youth didn’t guarantee that they were virgins—Nubans were licentious, and it wasn’t uncommon for unmarried females to have had sexual relations—it did make virginity more likely. Virgins were coveted as concubines, bringing better prices from the traders than tampered merchandise. So it made sound business as well as moral sense to leave them alone. Yet there was the moral issue, and that was the reason for his dream. Through it God had shown him the torments that he would suffer if he failed to stop his men from sinning. To allow them to continue with what they now were doing would be the same as committing rape himself.

Picking up his rifle, he buckled on his ammunition belt, jammed his whip into the belt, and with his torso pitched forward and his head tucked into his shoulders, he struck off toward the zariba. Horses stood tethered to the trees, men lay snoring, barely visible in the darkness. He tripped over someone. The man cursed and said, “Watch where you step.” Ibrahim Idris cursed him back and said, “Watch where you lie down!”

Foul with the reek of bodies and shit and piss—couldn’t these people control themselves till morning, when they knew they would be allowed to relieve themselves?—he smelled the zariba before he saw it. When he got to the enclosure, a ring of sticks and thornbushes, he was shocked to find it unguarded. Not a single sentry in sight, and he’d commanded a double watch posted, both to enforce his order and to prevent escapes. The sentries were absent because it was they who’d raided the very thing they were guarding: plunged in, selected their victims, and made off with them, like hyenas raiding a stock pen. Ibrahim’s anger blew up into an exalted rage.

In today’s attack he’d lost only two men and five horses while slaying more than twenty abid soldiers. The airfield had been destroyed by the militia engineers. One hundred and fifty captives, more than Ibrahim had ever taken in a single action, had been seized, along with goods worth tens of thousands of pounds: clothes, implements, food, and medical supplies. All in all a successful mission, except for the airplane, and to Ibrahim that was no small exception. He could still see it, soaring so low above his head it seemed he could snatch it from the sky with his bare hands; so low it seemed impossible that he and his men could not shoot it down. They filled the air with bullets, and yet it flew on, and his hopes for rewards and honors went with it. The prizes he did take compensated somewhat for losing the one he coveted most. Now the miscreant sentries, thinking with their penises, had put it all at risk. A good thing the captives still inside the zariba were so frightened—they might try to flee otherwise. A fine job that would make, gathering them up in the middle of the night.

He caught voices and stifled cries coming from somewhere off to his left.

He came to a clear space in the woods and stopped at its edge, the shadows of the trees concealing him. A few meters away the long, skinny legs of a girl, flung down on her back, glistened in a fire’s embers. Her arms were pulled back past her shaved head and were held at the wrists by one man, while another, his jelibiya rolled up around his waist, knelt between her splayed limbs and ravished her with the spastic thrusts of a dog mounting a bitch. Finished in seconds, he got to his feet and traded places with his companion. It was like a dance, so fluid and practiced were their movements. Several more of these criminal couplings were taking place, farther from the fire. Ibrahim couldn’t tell how many, nor identify the culprits—a mere cuticle of a moon was shining—but he was able to observe that the girl in front of him was quite young. The sentries had taken the most valuable. Ibrahim was appalled by their disobedience, their carelessness, their lack of self-control. Had he raped Miriam after capturing her? He’d had no relations with her till he’d returned to his camp and brought her into his house as his formal serraya. Self-denial, self-restraint were marks of Humr manliness. These Brothers were not manly but slaves to their impulses. And yet he did nothing, said nothing, held in mute arrest by the lurid, captivating choreography of white-clad men, wreathed in smoke tinged red by the embers, leaping onto black bodies, lying so still he would have mistaken them for dead if not for their muffled sobs. The two murahaleen closest to him were finished with their victim and called to a third, and in the instant before the man fell on her, Ibrahim saw her fully from the side, her young belly flat and her small breasts flattened also by the pull of her outstretched arms, her face turned aside so that she seemed to be looking straight at him with a look such as he’d seen on the faces in his dream. False! False! he thought. He fancied he saw an enticement in her eyes, a beckoning that spilled the pollutant of desire into the fine, pure waters of his rage. He was surprised that he should feel such lust—he expected better of himself; so when he lunged out of the shadows, in two big strides, the rifle in his left hand, the whip in his right, and laid a hard stroke across the man’s back, Ibrahim was lashing out at himself as well.

The recipient of the blow yelped and threw himself off the girl. Ibrahim hit him a second time, and he fell and rolled in the dirt, covering his head with his hands against the cut of the braided hide. A third stroke tore the sleeve of his jelibiya, a fourth made his knuckles bleed. The man lay doubled up. A floret of red blossomed on his back. Someone grabbed Ibrahim to stop him, but he broke free, pushed the fellow aside, and immediately gave the one lying at his feet another whack.

“Stop, please! I beg you, stop!”

In disbelief, Ibrahim stood for a moment, the whip poised; then he lowered it and, planting a boot in his nephew’s ribs, he shoved him onto his back.

“What are you doing? Practicing for your wedding night?”

Mistaking the cold sarcasm for calm, Abbas risked standing up, confusion and fear on his face.

“Answer me! Are you practicing for Nanayi with this—” He jiggled the whip over the girl, who was sitting up now, shaking as if from cold. Two brass disks were pinned to the sides of her nose, and their barbaric gleam disgusted him and made him bring the whip down across her thighs. She screamed. Why did I strike her? “This whore?” She bent over her slashed legs, and he gave her one across the back, raising a red welt from her shoulders to her hips, like a second spine, and she screamed again. Why do I hit her? He felt possessed by someone other than himself, prodding him to do things he didn’t intend to do, some jinn or demon that dwelled in these mountains, this bilad al Kufr, land of unbelievers, beyond the sight of God, the all-merciful, all-loving-kind. “You know my orders, Abbas! All of you! You all knew my orders, and yet you . . . with these . . .” And the whip, seemingly of his own will, striped her again. She accepted it with barely a sound. Oh, that he could fly, fly right now back to Dar Humr, to Dar al Islam, House of the Faithful. “Answer me, Abbas! Answer some one of you! You are instructed to do one thing, and you do the other. You desert your posts to practice f*cking with these abid whores.” The next stroke, laid crosswise to the one preceding, sent the girl sprawling.

Abbas backed away, his arms outspread, his bloodied knuckles facing Ibrahim. “Please, uncle . . .”

“Please, what? Please to stop beating your whore? Then shall I beat you again instead?” He stepped forward, the whip raised. Dropping it and his rifle as Abbas turned to run, he snatched his nephew by one arm, and with a strength that amazed himself as much as it did Abbas, he flung the boy down atop the girl. Ibrahim pinned him there, a knee in the small of his back, a hand on the back of his neck. I don’t understand what I’m doing. “Practice now. I’ll give you another chance for practice.” I must get out of here.

“Oh uncle, please . . . Oh God . . .”

“Oh God? Esmah, you pious hypocrite! Had I told Ganis to stand watch over the captives and not to touch them, he would have stood his watch and not touched them. Not you. You had to practice. Therefore, practice.”

He pressed down on Abbas’s neck, pushing his face into the girl’s shoulder. Her face blended in with the darkness, so her eyes seemed suspended in space, two disembodied ovals glaring up, as empty of expression as the disks fastened to her nose. She made some animal-like croaking sound.

“Please” came his nephew’s voice.

“What? They didn’t teach you this at the madrassah? What would your teachers say if they saw you as I saw you?”

His nephew should have looked out for his interests, his nephew should have restrained the others, not shown contempt for his uncle by joining them. The uncle who had been as a father to him. He knew why he was doing this. It no longer had anything to do with his dream or obedience to orders. He was doing this to Abbas for betraying and humiliating him, for being a hypocrite, for being stupid, for having an ugly crooked nose, for not being like Ganis, for breathing the living air while Ganis occupied a grave. “Let’s see you f*ck her now.” He dug hard with his knee, driving his nephew’s loins into the girl’s.

Two men seized him from behind by the straps of his ammunition belt. With a single powerful jerk, they pulled him off.

“Ya, Ibrahim! Enough! Have you gone crazy?”

He recognized the voice of his lieutenant. Someone must have summoned him. Just as Ibrahim turned to face Hamdan, Abbas, feeling the weight lifted from him, leaped to his feet and whirled, his right hand darting to the opposite shoulder. Like most young murahaleen, he had a short dagger strapped to his upper left arm, and this he drew, faster than any eye could follow, and slashed at his uncle’s throat. Ibrahim Idris had just enough time to draw away, so the blade cut across his chest, tearing through his jelibiya. Abbas lurched forward, carried on by the violence of his thrust, tripped over the prone girl and fell; fell very hard face-down. He grunted, then pushing himself up with his left arm, he drew one knee into his belly and attempted to stand. His arm gave way, and he dropped again, halfway onto his side, the dagger’s handle protruding from his ribs, just below his heart.

 

“MIGHT AS WELL tell me what the matter is.”

“Nothing.”

Draped in the folds of the mosquito net, she was sitting on the edge of the cot, facing a mildewed wall, its single window covered by a screen and shuttered by two scrap-lumber boards. This was their second night in Malakal, where the Hawker was undergoing repairs. The base manager had assigned them two empty bungalows, side by side, and a little over an hour ago Mary had knocked at his door. When he opened it, she said, “I just wanted to tell you that yesterday? The way you got us out of that fix, and the way you handled the plane in those storms . . . Ah hell, that’s not what I want to say, this is what I want to say.” And clasping the back of his neck in both hands, she gave him the most thrilling kiss of his life.

Now from the Malakal riverfront came the sound of a Nile boat’s diesel, the laborious whine suggesting that it was pushing a barge up-current. Dare’s finger explored Mary’s spine, from her pale neck down to the smooth rise of her splendid hips.

“Well, you ain’t said word one for what I reckon is two minutes.”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“It’s been my experience that when a woman gives that answer to that question, she means just the opposite.”

“Listen to the old man of the mountain, gone through more women than most men have socks.”

His finger retraced its route, sliding over her damp skin, the sweet little bumps of her vertebrae. “Any man who says he knows the first thing about the female gender is a fool or a liar and maybe both.”

Her hair made the faintest whisper as she turned to look down at him, her chin nestled into her shoulder. Beads of sweat on her forehead and upper lip sparkled in the glow of the kerosene lamp, its mantle filmed with soot. She pressed Dare’s nose as if it were a doorbell.

“You didn’t have to ask. You know damned well what the matter is.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“I always go home with the guy who brought me to the dance, so I’ve got some self-image issues to deal with.”

“Me too. Me and him flew together for two years.”

“Except I started things, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.”

And lying on his side, admiring the sculpture of her ribs, the line and curve of her arm, and the breast it partly concealed, he was very glad she did. He considered himself the most fortunate man alive.

“Of course you know what we’re doing, confessing how guilty we feel. We’re justifying ourselves. We’re saying to ourselves, ‘Well, we did what we wanted, but we don’t feel exactly right about it, and that means we’re decent people after all.’ It’s a license to cheat, sort of.”

“Mary quite contrary, don’t go psychological on me.”

“Anyway, Tony is only the half of it.”

“The other half bein’ what?”

“Here’s a girl who just f*cked her boss. What’s worse, she would like to f*ck him again.”

“The boss would like that too, but the boss is fifty-four and he won’t be up to it till mornin’. Pun intended.”

She thought about this for a while. “That’s a theory, not a fact, and with the boss’s permission, I’m going to test it.”

She made little legs with two fingers and walked them over the plateau of his chest, up the hill of his belly, and down into the bristling valley below his navel, from which, with manipulations tender and skillful, she caused a stalk to sprout, much to Dare’s amazement. Upon this stalk, straddling him, she impaled herself and proceeded to demonstrate, once again, how wrong he’d been to think that lusty and Canadian were an adjective and noun that didn’t go together. She made love like a woman who wanted to get pregnant—an event he hoped would not come to pass—and climaxed first, burying her face in the pillow to muffle her delighted squeal. She lay like that for a few moments; then, feeling him still hard within her, sat up straight so that they formed an upside-down T in violent motion, Dare thrusting, Mary grinding her hips with a mechanical professionalism that, strangely, excited him more than her previous abandon had done. She brought him off and rocked forward, pinning his shoulders with her hands.

“Oh yes, I can!” she said with wicked laughter.

He wasn’t sure if she was speaking for him or for her ability to stir him to such an accomplishment, as if she were a director who’d coaxed a brilliant performance from a washed-up actor.

She gave his nose another touch. “Some old man you are. It’s a good thing you’re ugly and a Neanderthal attitude-wise. If you weren’t . . .” She left the comment hanging.

“Sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it.” He reached for his cigarettes, on the packing crate that served as a night table, and lit one for each of them. “I reckon, then, if you had to sleep with the boss, the one you slept with is safer than the other one.”

“Doug?” she asked, spitting smoke to stress her incredulity.

“Good looking, says all the right things, not a Neanderthal, attitude-wise.”

“He’s sexless. Looks like a catalog model for L.L. Bean.”

She slipped off the cot, snatched her clothes from the floor, and got dressed. “So what do we do now, Wes? How the hell do we handle this?”

Leaning against a wall in the lantern light, the cigarette between her fingers, all she needed was a dress with padded shoulders to look like a film-noir femme fatale. And this was neither a pose on her part nor an illusion created by bad lighting. She was a throwback to rogue dames like Jane Greer and Barbara Stanwyck, with their mixture of toughness and vulnerability, their guilt, their dangerous allure.

“I can tell you how we’re not gonna handle this. We’re not gonna go makin’ any confessions and get down on our knees and beg Tony to forgive us.”

He’d used the plural for diplomacy’s sake. He’d meant her.

“That wasn’t even on my radar screen,” she replied with a flash of pique.

Oh, a part of him hoped this one-night stand would not go any further. She would be difficult and demanding and not allow him to get away with anything.

He got up and, as he dressed, felt painfully self-conscious about his middle-aged body, of which only his arms and shoulders retained their youthful form. Was Mary averting her gaze? Did his anatomy repel her, now that she saw him clearly rather than through the fog of whatever randy impulses had led her to come to him? Was she asking herself, What possessed me to jump in the sack with this flabby old dude? He was disturbed that this possibility disturbed him as deeply as it did.

“We’re gonna put tonight into the ‘It was just one of those things’ compartment,” he stated, with a certain paternal finality. He imagined she wanted this from him, the voice of wisdom and experience. “It happened on account of the unusual circumstances. We had a right full day yesterday.”

She crushed the cigarette in an old tuna fish tin and regarded him contemptuously. “The eroticism of danger? Two people have a close call that makes them itchy, and then they scratch it and go on like nothing happened?”

“Don’t know I’d put it that way, but that’s the idea.”

“It’s stuffy in here. I need some air.”

At this time of year, close to the Nile, the air outside was almost as still, cloying, and sultry as it was inside. A mosquito sang a high C in Dare’s ear. He took a spray bottle out of his shirt pocket and lacquered his neck and hands with the stuff, eighty percent Deet, pure poison, but it could keep a thirsty vampire bat off of you. He’d had malaria twice, and though both cases were mild, the sweats and chills and crazy dreams weren’t anything he cared to repeat. Mary slapped her arm, and he handed the repellent to her. The tents and huts of the UN compound showed in silhouette, kerosene and Coleman lanterns burned here and there, the generators having been shut off for the night to conserve fuel. The tail of a C-130 loomed above the warehouse tents at the airstrip. The Hawker, out of sight, was parked on an apron, awaiting the further ministrations of the British mechanic who had confirmed Dare’s first suspicions about the landing gear: shrapnel had punctured the hydraulic lines, bled them dry. Why the warning light had failed remained a mystery.

“Must’ve damaged the sensors when it hit the lines,” Dare mumbled, thinking out loud.

“What are you talking about?”

“The plane. Can’t figure out why we didn’t get a light, losing all that fluid.”

“Do not try to change the subject.”

“It’s just that I understand airplanes a whole lot better,” he said after a pause.

“None of that right-stuff crap. You always know what to do next. So what do we do next about this?”

The question came in an uncharacteristically querulous tone. It was also, he realized, a challenge, one he didn’t feel up to accepting.

“Already said what.”

She let out a sigh and placed her hands on her cocked hips, and this petulant stance was likewise out of character; it was as if, in this strange new emotional territory, she were reverting to the mannerisms of adolescence.

“You are pathetic if you think that we can really can go on flying and working together and pretend nothing’s happened.”

“Then we split up. Me and Tony, you with Doug.”

“I have no intentions of flying with Doug. He’s not half the pilot you are.”

Dare said nothing and looked up at the stars of the southern latitudes, the ones he’d used, in the days before GPS, to tell him where he was and thus where to go. Antares and Arcturus, Canopus and Spica and Rigel Kent. All perfectly useless in these circumstances.

“And you are further pathetic,” Mary carried on, “if you think that tonight was just some bitch who got horny because she”—her voice went mock-dramatic—“had a brush with death. Jesus, what rubbish. You mean to tell me that you haven’t been able to see how I feel about you?”

With his internal organs tumbling as if they were inside a clothes dryer—his goddamned pancreas was doing flips—he looked at her, trying, in the weak light of the slivered moon, to parse the grammar of her facial expression and see if it agreed with the meaning of her speech.

“It’s been pretty obvious to me how you feel,” she said.

“Thought I’d hid it pretty well. You sure did, right up till tonight.”

“It astonishes me how obtuse men can be. I had to hide it. Okay, I don’t want you to think that what happened tonight was all glandular, so.” She drew his face to hers and gave him another kiss.

He stood there in a state of terrified joy, astounded that this woman actually cared for him, desired him, maybe even for Christ’s sake loved him; yet he sensed a certain restraint on his happiness, heard a cautionary warbling in his head. Remember your mama, feeding the old man when his arthritic fingers couldn’t hold a fork? That’s not Mary English, DeeTee warned. You two might be flying a sophisticated piece of technology together, but her attraction to you goes back to the cave. You’ve gotten her through some perilous moments, and she respects you for your powers. Get it? Hope A has been fulfilled. Your competence has overcome all your deficiencies in other areas and won her to you, but that comes with an attached rider: you’ll lose her affections if ever you lose your competence, and the day is coming, Wes, you know it’s coming, when your joints will stiffen—they’re stiffening even now, aren’t they?—and your nerve and instincts will fail and your skills desert you; the day is coming when you won’t know what to do next, and that’s the day she’ll be gone, not because she’s cruel or selfish or shallow but because she isn’t built to be with any man weaker than herself.

And with those thoughts echoing in his brain, he kissed her back, as ardently as she had him, though with less grace.

“Well, goddamn,” he said, holding her by the waist.

“That’s all you got to say?”

“For now, yeah.”

“So how do we handle it?”

“That depends on how you feel about Tony. I mean, if you’ve felt like you say you do all this time, what in the hell have you been doin’ with him?”

“Fair enough. Tony and I drifted into a relationship, and we’ve been drifting ever since, and I suppose one day we’ll drift out of it. That’s how I’d like it to happen anyway, but I don’t think it will now. I’m looking for some advice on damage control.”

“No, you’re not. What y’all are lookin’ for is how to dodge the consequences.”

She tossed her head to one side, her hair swirling across her face, and laughed. “Bingo!”

“Never happen, darlin’. Never happen.”