Acts of Faith

SHE TOOK ALMOST an entire morning to prepare for Michael’s return, darkening her eyes with kohl, putting on gold hoop earrings and then the dress he had given her. Her notion was to transform herself from a plain prairie flower into a brilliant and irresistible African orchid, but as she waited in the courtyard, she wondered if she’d succeeded only in making herself look ridiculous. Her fears were dispelled when he came into the courtyard, dusty from his journey, and stood gazing at her with admiration. “How much I have missed you. I was a very bad officer at the conference. All I could think of was you and the moment when I could do this.” As if to show that his military duties were a distant second to her, he flung his canvas map case aside and covered her with kisses. “Oh my, oh my,” he murmured, then pulled her inside and tugged at her sleeves. “You look so very beautiful in this, it’s a pity to take it off.”

As he went to draw it over her head, he touched the tender lacerations on her back. She gave a short gasp and flinched.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“You are hurt? What is it?”

“I was going to tell you,” she said, then turned around and, gathering the hem, pulled the dress past her waist.

“You didn’t . . . ?” he began.

She faced him, the dress falling over her. “Yes, I did. Day before yesterday.”

“I told you before that you didn’t have to prove a thing. It wasn’t necessary.”

“Yes, it was. I had something to prove to myself.”

“What?”

“That I do belong here.”

“And did you?”

“I hope so. Almost everyone has been wonderful. They’ve made me feel welcome.”

“Almost everyone, but not Kasli,” Michael said. “You had this done to yourself because of him?”

“No, for myself.”

He sat on the bed and motioned for her to sit beside him. “I have ordered him to stand with me at our wedding.”

“Why?” she asked, trying not to sound upset. It was his prerogative to choose his best man, but she thought he should have consulted her first.

“To show him that I mean business,” Michael replied serenely. He was always serene when he made a decision; he never doubted himself, a trait she found attractive but not in this instance. “I want him to be a part of this marriage, whether he likes it or not.”

“But he’s a Muslim!” she said. “The minister is going to ask if anyone has a reason why we shouldn’t be married. Suppose he says something? That would be awful.”

“He won’t. I have had a good talk with him. I have reminded him that he is second in command.”

“Michael, Kasli is one subject I don’t want to talk about. He’s censored. I’m too happy, and I don’t want anything to spoil it.”

“Then let us,” he said with a grin, “choose the day.”

 

QUINETTE WONDERED HOW many women had made their wedding arrangements over a two-way radio. After several tries she got through to Fitz, who talked to Malachy, who contacted Barrett, who replied via the same channels that he would be delighted to officiate.

He arrived two days ahead of the scheduled date, with his Nuban wife. She was from New Tourom, and the villagers greeted her as if she were a celebrity, paying a visit to her old hometown. The sight of the runty Barrett beside his six-foot ebony-skinned spouse encouraged Quinette. If such a pair, mismatched in ways more profound than race and stature, could make a success of their marriage, then surely she and Michael could.

After he recovered from the hike from the airstrip, Barrett quizzed the bride and groom to assure himself that they knew what they were getting into, then ran them through a rehearsal with Ulrika, who was to be Quinette’s maid of honor, and with Kasli, who looked as if he were going to an execution. Quinette took a perverse pleasure in his discomfort.

Following Nuban custom, she spent the night before the wedding in a bungalow called the lamanra—a kind of women’s dorm where girls sequestered themselves. Her trunk was deposited there, and she and Ulrika sorted through her things, looking for a suitable wedding dress. As she rummaged in the trunk, the clothes she’d brought from the States, the dresses she’d bought in Africa, her books and Bible and the letters from home, bound in rubber bands, it was as if she were making an inventory of a dead woman’s personal effects. She had to sit down, her heart fibrillous, her head as if it were about to float off her shoulders.

Ulrika looked at her. “You are having the nerves?”

She nodded, although nerves was too broad to describe the peculiar sensation.

Ulrika clapped her hands once and finally, then, rising, withdrew from the trunk a long red dress set off by a motif of light blue trees. “This one I think the best.”

Quinette spent the following day getting ready. She bathed under Ulrika’s calabash shower and sat for an hour while Pearl redid her braids, fastening scarlet beads to the tips. Afterward she tried to nap, but she was too excited. Finally, in the late afternoon, she slipped into the dress, the wide sleeves falling to her elbows, the bright red cloth, pinched at the waist, hugging her body down to the ankles. Kiki and Nolli draped her in necklaces that with their alternating bands of gold and black resembled slender snakes. Pearl covered her front with a bodice of blue beads and fastened bracelets around her arms; then, escorted by Ulrika and her soon-to-be-stepdaughter, she walked to St. Andrew’s church. It was the magic hour when woodsmoke perfumed the air and the sun spread copper over the dry-season grass and the distant hills took on the color of oxblood. The grounds outside the church were crowded with people, waiting under the trees with an almost palpable air of expectancy. They parted at her approach, and she saw Michael turn to face her, a smile arcing across his face, his beret cocked, his trousers bloused over polished boots, his shirt snugged to his middle by a black leather belt with an oval buckle. Behind him, in their best uniforms, his bodyguards were drawn up in two ranks, facing each other to form a corridor at the entrance to the church. A thrill bolted through Quinette when they presented arms as she and Michael, hand in hand, walked between them and passed through the open doors.

Inside, men and women packed the rows of half-log pews and jammed the side aisles. In front, drummers beat a solemn rhythm while a female choir in homespun surplices stood singing. Flanked by the canon and a gloomy Major Kasli, Barrett, garbed in minister’s black, waited at an altar covered in green cloth. Sunlight fell on it through the holes in the roof. Proceeding up the center aisle in a daze, Quinette was grateful for the support of Michael’s arm. Barrett’s voice sounded far away as he began to read from the service, pausing at the end of each sentence to allow the canon to translate his words into the Nuban dialect, for the benefit of the congregation. The same stuttering process had to be gone through when Michael made his vows, repeating after Barrett that he, Michael Archangelo Goraende, took Quinette Melinda Hardin to be his lawful wedded wife, halting for the canon, then continuing, “to have and to hold, to love and cherish . . .” When Quinette’s turn came, she felt as if she were speaking in a trance. They exchanged rings, which Barrett had brought from Nairobi. He pronounced them man and wife, they kissed to applause, and the drums and choir took up another lilting hymn as they started back down the aisle.

Before they were halfway to the door, the congregation on one side suddenly stirred. People were jostling one another, shouting and stomping their feet. A man raised a stick and swatted at something on the floor. An instant later a dark brown snake, thick as an arm and long as a leg, slithered across the couple’s path and down the aisle, out the door. There was a burst of gunfire, and when they went to look, they saw one of the bodyguards pick up the headless snake by the tail.

“Puff adder,” Michael said, squeezing Quinette’s hand.

Kasli shot him a look whose meaning was clear: the adder was an omen.

Michael squeezed her hand again. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” he said. “Snakes come in quite often. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Not for a minute, darling,” she said, catching her breath. “Whoever’s in charge of giving omens wouldn’t be so obvious.”

He laughed with her. The honor guard re-formed its ranks and saluted the newlyweds, slapping their rifles smartly. Followed by a procession of chanting women, they walked the road to the garrison, arriving at the house as the sun was going down, tinging the sky primrose. They went inside. She was Quinette Goraende. There was no going back, and that, she knew as she undressed, was what she’d wanted.

He took off his uniform, and she lit the lamp and beheld him beholding her. She took all of him in.

“I love the way you look in this light, I love the way these walls look,” she said softly.

They had been rubbed with graphite, he said—that was what gave them their blue tint. He had dug up the graphite clay with his own hands and spent many hours polishing it with his thumbs until it shone as it did now.

She touched the raised marks on his brow and, letting out a long, slow breath, allowed her head to fall on his arm.”The first time we made love, you beautified me. Would you again? The first time when a girl is ten, here.” She took his hand and placed it on her stomach.

“And what design would you like?”

She looked at the wall and pointed at a canted figure with a bulging belly and outsize hips.

“A pregnant woman?” He drew her down to the floor mat and squeezed a piece of her flesh between his thumb and forefinger. “This is the thorn that lifts the skin . . .”

“And then the cut of the small knife,” Quinette said, and felt the bite of his fingernails. “A pregnant woman because I want to have a child with you, a son. I want to give you back what you lost.”

“You are a generous soul to wish to give me that. How I love you.” And he pinched her sharply, below the breasts. “This is where a girl is tattooed the second time, when she is fifteen.”

“She goes high up into the rocks,” Quinette said.

“Yes, to that ledge where I brought you.”

“The thorn, the knife . . .”

“And then”—his palm rubbed her belly—“the ash of the acacia to heal the cuts and make the marks stand out in all their beauty.”

“The third time would be here,” she said, drawing his hand to her back. “After I’ve had my first child.”

“Yes. There and here, up and down.” She turned over. His fingernails nipped up and down along the edges of the welts, the scars of her sisterhood, and at her bottom, massaging it afterward with the healing ash. “After you have borne our son.”

Borne our son. The words rilled through her, and she bent her body like a bow, her cheek resting on the mat. He crouched over her, kissing the back of her neck as he thrust into her. She moved against him until he quivered, flooding her with his seed.

 

“THERE’S A POEM,” Mary said in a tired voice as they taxied into central Nairobi from Jomo Kenyatta. “ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ But that’s what Dad did. He took a breath, and then the numbers on the life-support machines went to zero. The nurses and the doctor came in and unplugged him, like he was an experiment that didn’t work out. I’ve gotten so used to people being shot and blown up that I almost forgot someone could go out that way. One breath, and then gone.”

At the bleak hour of one in the morning, just five days after watching her father die in a Winnipeg hospital, Mary’s grief acted as a brake on Dare’s happiness at her return. He wanted to kiss her but confined himself to sitting with his arm around her. It didn’t seem right that he should feel so good while she felt so bad. Through streets darkened by another blackout, they rode on to the New Stanley, where he had checked in earlier. In the elevator Mary mentioned that her two younger brothers would be looking after their mother, “but you know how it is with guys their age. It’s me she needs right now, and Christ, I hated leaving her so soon. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have come back.”

“Africa’s losing its charms?” he asked.

“All I’m saying is that I don’t like being so far away from her.”

They went into the room. Mary’s jet lag prevented Dare from realizing his fantasies of a passionate reunion, which had grown more pornographic the longer they were apart. She brushed her teeth, swallowed an Ambien, and walked out of her clothes. In two minutes she was asleep. He wasn’t disappointed. For now it was enough merely to look at her peaceful face, to hear her breathing quietly beside him. He dwelled on what she’d said. He knew he shouldn’t make too much of it, but maybe her father’s death had changed her outlook on how she wanted to lead her life. Whether it had or not, he concluded that he could procrastinate no longer; it was time to present his plans for the future and ask if she wanted to share in them.

She was still asleep when he woke up. Leaving her a note that he would be back in an hour, he dressed and went out, walking quickly down Kimathi Street, past a newspaper stand and a bank of phone booths, to a jewelry shop he knew. Fifteen minutes later he came out with a box in his pocket. His pace was slower as he returned to the hotel—he was rehearsing what he would say and marshaling his courage to face the possibility that she would turn him down.

He opened the door and was stopped cold by the sight of her, sitting up in bed, the sheet drawn to her throat, a saucy look on her face.

“Life’s for the living, and death’s for the dead,” she said before he could speak. “I need to apologize for conking out on you.” She whipped the bedsheet off her naked body. “C’mere, captain.”

His fantasies were fulfilled, but at a cost. He felt like Samson after Delilah gave him a haircut, and all the fine words he’d practiced had deserted his mind. Smoking a postcoital cigarette, he lay contemplating his convex belly and his knobby white legs, forked across the bed.

“What are you thinking?” Mary asked.

“That my mama used to say I was ugly as homemade sin.”

“So, manufactured sin is prettier?”

“Hell, I don’t know, but it’s always seemed to me that any woman who has anything to do with me has got to have something wrong with her, and the ones I was married to sure proved it.”

She wound one of his curls around her finger and yanked. “I see you haven’t lost your talent for saying exactly the right thing.”

“You know what I mean. What are y’all doin’ with me? It makes no sense.”

“Baby, if love made sense, the human race would be an endangered species.”

“C’mon, I’ve got to know.”

She plucked the cigarette from his hand, took a puff, and gave it back to him. “Let’s go back to the day I met you. That flight to Somalia. If you hadn’t reacted the way you did, Tony and I could’ve been killed. And no, it isn’t that I feel I owe my life to you. All this hasn’t been gratitude. What I thought then was, ‘Well, here’s a man. Nothing to look at, but he knew what to do and he did it.’ ”

There it was again—his competence.

“I’m not gettin’ any younger, and one of these days I’m not gonna know what to do, or if I do, I won’t be able to do it. What happens then?”

“Don’t worry about that. That’s what started things off, but that isn’t it. What it is, is this—being with you, I don’t think only about myself and what I need, I think about you and what you need. And don’t ask why, because I don’t know.”

He could not have asked for a better cue, but he said nothing.

“That’s my side of the story,” she said with an inviting glance. “Yours?”

“Look in the mirror, that’ll tell you.”

“Wrong thing, Wes. Wrong again.”

“Oh, hell. It’s the same as with you. I don’t think about me.”

She sat up, laughing and patted his scalp. “That’s better. Wasn’t so hard, was it? So now that we’ve made sense of it, let’s call room service. All this making sense has made me hungry.”

“We’re on the afternoon flight to Loki,” he said. “How about lunch at the Aero Club?”

He’d suggested the Aero Club, not for its proximity to the Wilson Field terminal, certainly not for the excellence of its fare, but to give himself time to recover his nerve. The club was crowded, except for three empty tables in a corner. He took one after they’d gone through the serving line.

“Been thinking about what y’all said,” he began, betraying his nervousness with his sidelong glance, his habit of twirling his sunglasses. “About being so far away from your mother. Well, Texas is a lot closer to Manitoba than here.”

Her response, a look that seemed to say, What other obvious points do you want to call to my attention? caused him to revise his approach. Waving a hand to indicate that she should ignore his geographical commentary, he started again.

“There’s some things I haven’t told you. One is that me and Doug have an agreement. I’m gonna fly these runs for another few months, then I’m cashin’ in my shares in Knight Air. If the cash ain’t there, Doug’s gonna transfer ownership of my old G1—the plane Tony’s flying on the Somalia runs—back to me.”

“He agreed to that?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Signed a contract. My plan is to sell the plane and the Hawker—” He was interrupted by five boisterous Americans who seized a table next to theirs. “Well shit, I was hopin’ for a nice private conversation.”

“Try lowering the Texas decibel level,” Mary said. “You were saying that we’ll be millionaires.”

Dare looked down at his curried lamb and wondered why he’d ordered it. His fluttering stomach wouldn’t take curry. “I always did want to be a Texas millionaire, but the only part I ever got right was the Texas part. Sellin’ those planes, added to what Yellowbird earns, would take care of the other part.” He then outlined his scheme—the corporate jet to fly top-name acts, piling up a nest egg to buy a ranch in the hill country outside Austin. “I’ve always wanted that. What do I do then?” He shrugged. “Maybe I don’t do a damned thing except watch the sun come up and go down. Bottom line is, three, four months from now, Doug Braithwaite goes his way, I go mine, and that’s back to Texas. I’m done with Africa, done livin’ like this.”

He’d deliberately used I throughout this speech, and now he looked at her to gauge her reaction. She smiled indifferently and said, “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” Then she added, “Doug Braithwaite goes his way, Wes Dare goes his. Where does Mary English go?”

Dare noticed the Americans stealing glances at her. He couldn’t blame them.

“Wes Dare hopes that Mary English goes with him,” he said, choosing to throw out his prepared proposal—he couldn’t remember it anyway. He removed the small white box from his pocket and set it on the table in front of her. “Since I don’t ever say the right thing, I won’t say anything except open it.”

She did and then sat blinking at the diamond sparkle. They had an audience—the men at the next table had fallen silent and were listening in—but at this point he didn’t care how public their little drama had become.

“I’m gonna need a partner,” he said. “Someone in the seat next to me on that new airplane. Austin’s a pretty town, it’s a good place to raise a kid.”

“It sounds good, Wes,” she said in an undertone. “Sounds very good.”

“I hear a but comin’.”

“But it sounds comfortable and predictable, and I’ve never been comfortable being comfortable, or with predictability. I need a little chaos in my life.”

“Flyin’ Texas blues bands around the country can get right chaotic. I’ve done it.”

“I know it would be interesting, but—but it doesn’t seem important. Doesn’t seem like it would mean much.”

“Y’all think what we’re doin’ now means something?”

“It seems to.”

“Well, it doesn’t. Like the troops used to say in Vietnam. ‘Don’t mean nuthin’, don’t mean a thing,’ except that it buys a ticket out of here.” Unable to face the finality of a rejection now, he said, “Take a week, take a month, take two months. Y’all decide it’s not for you, you can always give that back to me.”

She looked shocked. “I would never take this from you if I had the least thought to giving it back.”

Once more she stared at the ring, her arms folded as if she were chilled. In that silence he could almost hear the voices debating in her head. Time stretched—five seconds seemed like an hour. This was torture. For an instant he wished he’d never met her.

“Try it on for size,” he suggested. “That wouldn’t be the same as taking it.”

She pried the ring from the box and slipped it onto her finger. “It’s a little small.”

“That can be fixed.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said, and twisted the ring over her knuckle to the base of her finger, then tried to twist it off. “See? It’s stuck.” She rose partway from her chair and, leaning across the table, kissed him on the forehead. “I love taking chances, and this will be the biggest one yet.”

Dare, his heart soaring, experienced one of his rare moments of speechlessness. As Mary sat down, the men nearby broke out in cheers and applause. She blew them all a kiss and then spread her hand to show off the diamond.

“You had us in suspense,” said one, a stocky, middle-aged guy with carbon-black hair. “Sorry, but we couldn’t help overhearing.”

“Oh, I reckon y’all could have if you wanted to,” Dare said congenially. His happiness had put him in an expansive mood. “Don’t know a one of you, but since you’re the first to know, I’ll buy you a round in the bar.”

“Thanks, and congratulations,” the other man said, and stood to offer his hand. “Bob Mendoza. Soft drinks for us. We’re flying this afternoon.”

With their newfound friends, Dare and Mary moved into the bar for an impromptu engagement celebration. Mendoza said it was great to run into “fellow Americans.” Dare pointed out that Mary was Canadian, which Mendoza, erasing four thousand miles of border with a swipe of his hand, dismissed as a distinction without a difference.

“Y’all said you were flying this afternoon. Flying what?”

They were an Air National Guard crew on a KC-135 tanker, doing their annual tour of active duty. Their usual assignment was to the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, but this year they’d been sent to Kenya to practice maneuvers with the Kenyan air force.

“We’re out of Tucson,” Mendoza said. “Y’know, I thought I heard you mention the name of Doug Braithwaite. I knew a guy by the same name.”

“He’s my business partner. We’ve got a small airline, flyin’ aid out of Loki. I reckon this is one of those it’s-a-small-world stories, on account of he’s from Tucson and there can’t be two guys with a name like that from the same town.”

“I’ll be damned. So this is where Doug fetched up. When you see him, be sure to tell him you ran into his old captain in the hundred-seventy-sixth.”

“How do you mean, his old captain?”

“Doug was in my crew,” Mendoza said. “He was our refueling operator.”

Dare exchanged glances with Mary. “Maybe we are talkin’ about two different guys. The Doug Braithwaite we know was with the regular air force, not the guard. Flew A-tens in the Gulf War.”

“Anyway, that’s what he told us,” Mary said.

Mendoza paused, half-closing an eye. “He’d be early to mid-thirties by now. Six-one or -two? Slim build? Light brown hair? Good-looking guy?”

“If you like the catalog model type,” Mary quipped. “But that’s him.”

Mendoza said, “He was in commercial flight school when I knew him. Why the hell would he say he flew A-tens in the war?”

“Got no idea,” Dare said.

That was the topic of conversation between him and Mary on the flight to Lokichokio. Instead of talking about their future, they speculated about Doug’s motives for revising his past. Dare brought up the story he’d told at their first meeting with Hassan Adid—how he’d strafed a column of retreating Iraqis and was horrified by what he’d done, calling it murder. What did he stand to gain from an invention like that?

“Maybe he was just trying to make himself more than he is,” Mary conjectured. “We’d have to ask him, but I don’t imagine he’d say.” She placed her ring hand atop Dare’s. “Should it make any difference to us?”

“It could,” he replied. “Makes you wonder what else he’s lyin’ about.”