The Black Nile

Chapter TWO
We had an early breakfast of toast, juice and cigarettes on Claire’s patio, serenaded by the birds and by the shik-shik-shik of Sunday and David, the watchmen, cutting grass under the garden trees. “There’s got to be a better way,” I said, as they shiked forward with dutiful monotony, bent at the waist in identical blue coveralls and black rain boots, swinging their machetes at the ground. “You notice how the huts here all have dirt yards? No grass. Just a swept patch of dirt. It’s like that’s what makes a proper yard here. Like if everything—grass, weeds, flowers—grows with ease, just stick it in the dirt and it grows, then having an actual lawn doesn’t really prove anything. But if you’ve got a uniformly flat patch of dirt without one unwelcome thing on it, then it shows you care.
“I don’t know,” I added. “I could be wrong.”
Schon, reclining in a tan T-shirt with a blue bandanna around his neck, looked up from his journal—he’d already filled dozens of pages. “Oh, I’d believe it. I worked with this girl in Carolina who said her grandparents did the same thing. Every morning, grandma would be out there with a broom to sweep the entire yard. If grass came up, they pulled it. Must have been a pain in the ass when it rained.”
Noah joined us, carrying a stack of books in his arms. A progressive and observant Jew, a nonsmoking vegetarian and a former intern at Human Rights Watch, he still somehow carried the look, with his hooded eyes, scraggly beard and gaunt cheekbones, of a comic book mercenary. All that was missing was the Browning automatic and an old cigar. “Hi, guys,” he said. “Heading to the lake today?” He was preparing for a trip to displaced-person camps in the north and had found, on the same shelf as his Lwo-English dictionary, a copy of the Lonely Planet French phrasebook.
“Check this out,” he said. “The contrasts are really something.” He opened the French book. “Reading this you know exactly what the French are all about. You’ve got courtship: ‘Would you like to go out?’ ‘You’re a fantastic dancer.’ ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ Then consummation: ‘Let’s use a condom.’ Plus, ‘faster,’ ‘harder,’ ‘slower,’ ‘stop’ and, thankfully, ‘don’t stop.’ Then comes the fall: ‘Are you seeing someone else?’ ‘You’re just using me for sex!’ ‘I never want to see you again.’ ” He closed the book. “France is fun.”
He picked up the heftier Lwo-English volume and started flipping pages at random. “ ‘This is an arrogant and insolent talk which you should not say here.’ ‘Only eight children passed the examination.’ ‘The suffering of working as a porter does not allow me to put on weight.’ ‘You are a man who entices other people’s women.’ ‘He hypnotized people and therefore stole a lot of things.’ Oh my God—‘Your mother has a protruding labia minora.’ ” He snapped the book shut. “I can’t go on. They should have called this How Not to Make Friends in Northern Uganda.”
Ronya started barking; Jameel’s taxi was at the gate. We washed our dishes, grabbed our small packs and sandwiches and jogged down the garden stairs to join him. Jameel had spent time on Lake Victoria as a young man, and as we drove down the Entebbe Road, past the coffin makers and curbside furniture showrooms, he told us about fishing, East African style. There was the dragnet, where two parties standing in the shallows hauled in a U-shaped dispersion, the ropes knotted at meter intervals. It was banned—the dragnet brought up all kinds of animals that would never see market or plate—but the ban wasn’t really enforced. There was tycooning, where you beat the water with a club, scaring the fish into your nets. Mukene light fishing was done at night; a lantern was placed on a float to attract the fish, which were then scooped up into mosquito netting. Two different methods were used on the Nile perch: gill nets and hooked lines. “It is a lope with hooks every thirty centimeters,” he said, inverting his L’s and R’s like a caricature Japanese. The hooked lines were dangerous. “I have fished like this myself,” he said. “You must have your hands in the light place, between the hooks. But when you bring the lope in, the fish can fight, it is very strong, and at the last minute it will pull. The hook, it can go into your neck, and the hook it can kill you.”
“Sounds like a dangerous way to make a living,” Schon said. “Do a lot of these fishermen know how to swim?”
“They don’t swim. They drown.”
After twenty minutes on the road we made a left onto a rougher track and came to a fenced-in complex. The Kasenyi landing site, just outside Entebbe, was an important node in Uganda’s fish industry. We drove through the security gate, pausing briefly while a shotgun-toting guard in pressed blue khakis searched the trunk. “You see the size of that guy’s Mauser?” Schon said. “I guess they take the fish business seriously here.”
Jameel parked and we walked through a warren of drab shacks and wooden stalls selling insulated windbreakers, life preservers, engine parts, smoked fish and grilled sweet potatoes. In a clearing between shacks, a three-foot-high pile of tiny silver minnows gleamed like spilled treasure. They were dagaa, Jameel said, a high-protein staple of the Ugandan diet. Nearby, a shirtless mechanic probed the interior of a motor with the concentration of a heart surgeon. We descended onto the yellow sand beach and our first look at the broad sweep of Lake Victoria, an azure pool that rolled away forever from the shore. Dozens of long wooden plank boats sat at the water’s edge, their joints sealed with strips of hammered tin and brown adhesive goo. Lean men, many wearing jerseys or shorts promoting British football clubs, lounged against the boats, smoking cigarettes and listening to a portable radio. They watched our arrival with distant curiosity. Jameel called out a greeting and a man wearing a red “Abibas” tracksuit and carrying a Donald Duck calculator and an open composition book came forward. He ignored Schon and me and, leaning against a boat, began a long conversation in Luganda with Jameel, one punctuated by frequent use of the term mzungu and a reasonable number of outbursts of laughter, as more fishermen joined the conversation. The news was tough. Fishing crews left Kisenyi in the evening. They set their nets and slept either in the boat or on tiny mosquito-infested islands. Jameel could not recommend joining. “It is, ah, velly velly uncomfortable.”
There was, however, a nearby island where the fishermen sometimes left their nets out and returned to shore before picking up the catch hours later. A large boat was loading now to take passengers there, Jameel said, but there was no return trip until the next day, which meant he could not join us. The boat sat in the shallows taking on passengers and cargo. It looked like a tiny unfinished galleon, about thirty-five feet long, with a nine-foot beam, not so much smaller than the ships that brought Columbus across the Atlantic, or the dhows that even today linked India to Africa and Arabia.
Mr. Abibas punched his Donald Duck calculator for a moment and offered us a special one-day round trip for 900,000 shillings, more than $500, which was of course impossible. We walked back through the maze of shops and stalls to the car, gathered our small packs and walked through the sand toward the big boat, where porters wearing hot pink nylon tunics swarmed us like we were handing out green cards. Two engaged in a shoving match to get Schon’s bag, each push loud as a thunderclap; these guys were strong. I sat down and started taking off my boots when a burly porter approached and dropped to one knee as if he anticipated knighthood. “He will take you,” Jameel said.
“He’ll take me?”
“Carry you.”
“Like a damsel?” Schon asked.
We quickly agreed to portage for 500 shillings each (normal rate 200) and with an alley-oop I was sitting on the man’s shoulders, my bollocks smashed against the back of his neck as he waded into the chest-high surf. I teetered over the water as he reached the boat and a half dozen hands reached out to haul me up and drop me onto a jumble of bags, canisters and other freight. (Schon insisted on walking most of the way and was hoisted aboard soaking wet.) We were the last to board and would have to stand during the journey. The boat was divided by crossbeams into six sections. The first four were built up with a wooden floor and rows of benches; the rear two were piled with cargo. I stood on the cargo in the second bay, leaning on a crossbeam, facing rows of astonished passengers. Behind me were stacks of four-foot-long synthetic gunnybags of crushed ice. At my feet were piled large clear plastic bags of bread and, to the front, red plastic cases of Ugandan beer—Pilsner, Bell and Nile Special.
It was here that I took notice of a voluptuous woman of smooth red ochre complexion seated to my left against a gunnybag. She wore a white satiny gown, her hair pulled into a tall white satiny wrap. Next to her was a thin man in a Muslim topi wearing a green leaf-patterned shirt. A bit higher, on a squat Honda diesel generator he had bought on the mainland, sat a man with a trim mustache and close-cropped hair. And next to me, competing for space on the crossbeam, was a man I took to be a member of the crew, with broad cheekbones, wide lips and a clean bald head. He watched me watching the woman.
“You want to penetrate her?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You want to penetrate her? I give her to you.”
“She’s somebody’s sister,” I spat. It was ill-conceived last-second bullshit—but it was true, and it worked. He quickly changed the subject and asked if I was believing in God, and if I was Moroccan and if I liked fish. The mainland faded and the gaping passengers lost interest in the two mzungus and we settled into silence and watched the growing horizon. The Yamaha sliced our vessel comfortably through the silver-topped lake, immune to the smack of waves against the hull; a steady westerly wind kept us cool under the open sky even as it whipped my hair into a lopsided thicket. My neighbor the penetrator leaned forward and pulled a bottle of Pilsner from its case and, reaching back, tucked it into a gunnybag of crushed ice.
“You know,” Schon said, “I think we got lucky with those dudes at the beach not wanting to take us out. Imagine a night on the water with four other guys, not being able to understand what they were saying, and them not understanding us. That would have been some real misery. Misery we’re not prepared for, not really. And say the one in a million happens and the boat goes over in a storm and you and me are the only ones who know how to swim.”
The penetrator pulled his now cold beer out of the gunnysack and, curling back his lips, popped the top with an ivory molar. “Jesus,” I said. Schon, facing us from the opposite crossbeam, took his left hand from his lap and pulled down his lower lip to reveal a quarter-inch void. The missing tooth’s counterpart on the right was capped in gold. “I lost this doing exactly what you’re doing, just like that,” he told the man. “This one too,” he said, pointing to the gold. “It’s basically a crown.”
I laughed over the engine’s drone. “So you couldn’t learn your lesson after losing the first tooth?”
“Well, it was all cracked, but microscopically—shot through with tiny fissures that weren’t really visible until I lost the other one and wised up.”
We rolled across the equator under skies that I can only color September 11 blue, and the spirit remained happy even as I grew stiff from avoiding the hubcap-sized rolls lying at my feet. My left foot shared a toehold with the penetrator on a car battery. My right leg was tucked under the crossbeam and planted on a bag of ice.
The group to the left was gathered around two Nokia mobile phones, each apparently equipped with an FM tuner, listening to the Arsenal match being called in Luganda. The woman in white chatted with Schon, who crouched low to try to understand her. “They think we’re coming out here because we want an island to buy,” he said. “I shot that down real quick.” After an hour and a half a crown of land came into view, three-quarters wooded, with large patches of what appeared to be freshly mown lawn. Below that, a brown band of huts and alleys.
“What do you call this place?” Schon asked the trim man with the mustache.
“This is Nsazi, our destination,” he said. “You are English? American? I am Geoffrey Kimenke.”
The village was nearly all mud-and-thatch huts, most of them standing in ragged lines back from the stony beach. I climbed off the side of the boat and onto the shoulders of a waiting brute who demanded 500 shillings. I gave him 400 when we got to the shore; he stared at the two coins and then crammed them into his pocket and bounded away. Geoffrey, our new friend, said he would help us find the village chairman, the key to smooth relations during our stay. We walked up the beach past shacks selling tea and fried dough and found the genial headman, short, meaty of hand and paunch, with a strong grip. Geoffrey introduced us and I told him our purpose. “I am a fisherman too,” the chairman said, friendly and hard at the same time. “This man will help you,” he said, deputizing Geoffrey, who gave him a quick double take. “I am happy you are here.” Then he turned away to glad-hand some passing villagers as the sun began to set.
Geoffrey ran the village’s video hall, its sole public amusement, a long weathered gray building with a chalkboard propped at the door announcing football matches and Nigerian kung-fu movies. “You will want lodging,” he said. “I can help.” Outside his nearby house, one of the very few with a cement foundation, his gorgeous wife, Winnie, stood wearing a red turtleneck sweater and spotless tan capri pants. As it happened she operated a rooming house. We followed them through the village maze, past the chickens, ducks, goats and pigs that competed for alley space with toddlers who crawled and bawled in the mud and scat along the way. A barechested boy stood in the middle of a path, gnawing the end of a tree branch he held propped in the mud before him, stripping the bark with daydreamy zeal.
Many huts were fronted by squares of grass, but these weren’t lawns—the grass lay horizontal, newly cut lengths of thatch spread to dry before being woven into flat lengths of rope by women sitting on low stools. We came to a long black plankwood building with three doors on each side—Winnie’s island hotel. She opened the center door, number two, popping the small padlock with a key tied to her wrist on a long faded black cord. This was the only vacant flop. “You can do with one room? That is enough?” Geoffrey said. The six-by-seven windowless cell was painted an optimistic blue, its floor covered by a thick yellow sheet of linoleum. The ceiling was a layer cake of plastic, tree branches, more plastic and corrugated metal, all covered by a moss of dusty cobwebs. A red plastic basin of dirty water sat near the door; a foam mattress occupied half the floor space. From high on the back wall a palm-sized spider watched. “It’s perfect,” I said. “Thanks very much.”
We left Winnie to clean the room and walked back to Geoffrey’s porch, where we dropped our bags and sat on a wooden bench to wait. Geoffrey left for the video hall and a group of children gathered around our newness, pushing against the porch railing and spilling up the concrete steps to almost within arm’s reach. “How are you?” they cried. “I am fine, how are you?”
“You’re fine, are ya?” Schon said. “Well, that’s fine. I’m fine too.” We did a few more rounds of that, and Schon slapped hands and fist-bumped the braver ones and then they lapsed into quiet, save a big-eyed boy whose every gesture said personality. “Do you kids like football?” I asked. They answered with silence.
“Rugby?” I boomed, overenunciating. “You kids like rugby?”
Nothing.
“That’s good,” Schon said. “It’s a known fact that foreigners understand you better when you shout at ’em.”
Quietly, I asked, “What about basketball?”
“YES!” With a single roar they came to kidly life.
“Yeah, you like basketball?”
“Where is it?” asked the fey boy. He had a pebbly voice. “Where is it? Give it to me,” he said, half pirouetting, eyes fixed on our bags.
“But I don’t have one,” I said, despairing. “I don’t have a ball.” They didn’t show disappointment so much as resume their studious near-silence.
Winnie returned, scattering the children with a pleasant bark, and led us back to our lodging. Stall number one, next door, was open and a woman in blue jeans and a white blouse, buxom and strong, her hair braided half in coppery red, chatted with Winnie as we stowed our gear. “Do you need water? I’ll get some,” Winnie said, and she disappeared. I claimed the bed and spread my sleeping bag on top of the foam mattress, the newly made sheets and the damp acrylic blanket. Schon hung his wet sneakers on a nail and unrolled his foam sleeping pad. Winnie dropped off a two-gallon plastic vegetable oil container and left for the night as a dozen children gathered close around the doorway in the fading daylight. They watched with murmured fascination as I snaked rubber tubing from the Katadyn filter into the yellow jerrican and pumped water first into my own Nalgene bottle and then into Schon’s. The audience hushed when I stuck the tip of the SteriPen into my bottle and lit it up with germ-killing ultraviolet. “You notice how her clothes were all dry?” I said. “She obviously walked to the lake to refill that Crisco bottle but her clothes were all dry.”
“Years of practice,” Schon said. “You notice how she and Geoffrey seem to have this town sewn up tight?” Suddenly the red-braided woman from next door came screeching down the alley from the right, leaning forward in an exaggerated charge, waving a switch in her right hand. The urchins vanished in a rumble of tiny footsteps, save one toddler who, paralyzed with fear, sank shrieking to the ground, hands clawing his cheeks in an expression of impossible terror. Laughing, she lifted and carried him away. We drank some water and walked out to explore the moonlit village. The hamlet was still awake; people gathered standing and squatting by tiny shops, chatting in the paraffin lamp glow. By the shore a man worked over a charcoal griddle, rolling and pounding fresh chapatis, a flashlight held in the crook of his neck. We sat on the edge of a beached fishing boat and watched. The light would dim mid-chapati and he would shake it, recharging the battery for another two minutes, and return to work. Next to him another man grilled skewers of beef. We bought neither. At a stall farther down, I leaned on the wooden counter and bought two bags of peanuts. Inside the stall were stacks of eggs in one-foot-square cartons, bags of Ugandan UHT milk, laundry soap in long red and blue bars, cases of local beer, strips of condoms and, within pissing distance of Lake Victoria, clear blue bottles of spring water imported from China. Walking deeper into the hamlet, away from the beach, we saw a beacon. It was a wooden structure on a cement foundation, its doorway lit with bright diesel-generated light. Inside, a pool table, small counter and a couple sitting along the back wall eating fish stew. I joined a man sitting alone at another table while Schon went to the counter to buy a couple Bells. “I guess two thousand is what they tip around here,” he said with a short laugh when he returned with the beer. “I waited for the change and she said that was the tip. The way she smiled at me I guess was worth an extra grand.”
Our tablemate said he was from Kampala. He was in the fish business, here to buy and resell on the mainland. Nile perch sold for 2,000 shillings a kilo on the island, 2,500 in Kampala and from 3,000 to 3,700 if processed and shipped to the freezer aisles and chip shops of Europe, the United States and Asia. “Aren’t stocks of perch falling?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “With prices like these there will always be fishermen, until the last one is gone.” The waitress brought a second round and popped the tops of all three bottles, throwing Schon another smile. After a couple minutes our friend noticed I was still nursing my first Bell. He took a loose bottle cap off the table, placed it on the mouth of my newly opened bottle and slammed his palm down on it. Foam erupted, rolling down to the wooden tabletop and onto my lap. He flicked away the cap and jammed a finger in, stanching the flow. The finger stayed there for a beat before he pulled it back out. The eruption resumed, and he stuck his finger back in again and we all stared at it until I said, “Here. Slowly,” and gripped the bottle in one hand and his finger in the other and gradually eased the reluctant digit out of my beer. He resisted, fearing another money shot, but the slow withdrawal worked just fine.
One well-fingered beer later we were ready to leave when the chairman came in to a huzzah of laughs and handshakes. We bought him and the merchant a round, a sort of exit visa, as the chairman shouted, “I am a Frenchman! My name is Fran?ois, bonjour!”
On the walk back to the rooming shed I peeked inside Geoffrey’s darkened video hall, where about forty men sat on rough benches drinking beer and watching a Nigerian fight film. A man with a microphone stood off to the side of the television, performing simultaneous translation of the dialogue from Lagos English to Luganda. As we made our way lost through the village, our flashlights more than once fell upon naked women bathing quietly, almost furtively, crouched over plastic basins, outside their huts; one woman had an equally silent infant lying at her side. They showed neither anger nor annoyance at our intrusion, only a crouching modesty. Later, when I was lying on my sleeping bag on top of the foam mattress and acrylic blanket, burbles of delicious feminine laughter trickled in from the stalls next door. I wondered if we would be treated, if that was the word, to the sounds of human congress, but there was none that night and just as well. I needed my sleep.
With dawn came radios, washing, laughter, chastisement—a Lake Victoria morning pouring through the plank walls. I checked the skin of my hands, arms and face for insect bites and found none. All pale and smooth, save the Brillo pad beard. I pumped and zapped more drinking water by the light of the open door, where the urchin audience this time was a disappointing two. We walked to the shore and found the Muslim man we’d seen on the boat the day before strolling the beach in a knee-length lab coat, a megaphone in hand, peddling herbal medicines from a small red valise. We circled back up into the village and soon arrived at Geoffrey’s place. Winnie was outside sweeping the porch in a blue pinstriped skirt and jacket over a black T-shirt on which an American flag was stretched from breast to winning breast. She called in to Geoffrey, who emerged in a burst through the curtained front doorway. He wore flat-pressed green khakis and a black T-shirt with yellow block letters across the chest that read “Soviet Collection.”
“You want something? Some tea? The boats don’t leave until later.” We followed him deeper into the village to a small mud-and-wattle shack, outside of which a pregnant woman in a green wrap and maroon headscarf was mixing a grainy dough in a plastic washing basin. Another woman tended a pot of brown beans over a charcoal fire. We ducked inside and sat at a low table with benches on three sides. I ordered black tea.
“No milk?” Geoffrey said. “Had I known, there’s a better place for black tea. Something to eat?” Our eyes bulged with panic. “Maybe just bread then.” He handed the pregnant woman 5,000 shillings and she sent a girl to find us some. “There are two thousand people in this village,” he said. “There were six hundred when I first came here, in 1998.” Was there a school? “Yes,” he said. “From last year. There was one years ago, but it didn’t work. The teachers couldn’t afford the island prices. But now the government has made arrangements and they can pay their expenses. We have four clinics, including prenatal.” Still, the health situation was not good. “It’s the water—there’s no sanitation. We don’t have enough influence. The government has other priorities.”
“Other priorities?” Schon asked. We had earlier been directed to relieve ourselves in the woods behind the village. Judging from the number of piles I had to step around to take a private leak, it seemed everyone else here did the same. None of the homes had outhouses or latrines.
“The chairman has been elected to his post since the 1980s,” Geoffrey said. “Everyone loves him. He runs unopposed. He’s also elected chairman of his home village on the mainland. He owns a lot of property there.”
“For a city person it’s not the most comfortable place to live,” I said. “Were you already living here when you and Winnie got married?” Out of sight, Schon’s sneakered foot connected with my kneecap.
“Winnie is not my wife,” Geoffrey said evenly. “My wife is in Kampala, with my two children.”
Another patron came into the shack and sat at my right and was served milky tea in a brown enameled cup. I uncrossed my legs to massage my wounded knee and rammed the underside of the table, spilling everyone’s tea. I pulled out my handkerchief to keep the new guy’s tea out of his lap just as the cook ducked inside to serve him a bowl of beans and stretchy bread. “I can’t eat around these people,” he said in bitter Luganda. I stood up and let him move farther into the table, far to the left, out of harm’s way. The bread arrived, one of the round loaves I’d avoided stomping the entire trip from the mainland. Geoffrey dipped his bread into his tea while I picked mine into pieces and ate without gusto. I paid for the teas, 1,800 shillings, and we followed Geoffrey to the lake. The boats, long and low, were crawling with fishermen preparing for a day on the water. Geoffrey stopped at a green boat, painted inside and out, with metal flashing nailed over its every seam. “Sure looks yon,” Schon said.
“Yon? What is this, Moby-Dick?”
“He will take you for seven thousand,” Geoffrey said. Men were tying empty UHT milk pouches to the ends of the nets. Filled with dirt and gravel, they would sink the bottom half of the nets. The top sides were similarly tied with biscuit-sized hunks of cork. “The boats will be out for a long time, with nothing for you to do. They return around seven. It will be uncomfortable.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said.
“They leave in ten minutes,” Geoffrey said. “You will want to get your things.” It was nine-thirty. We walked back to the shack and threw together our gear: a plastic shopping bag with water pump, peanut butter sandwiches and two bottles of freshly zapped lake water. I wore my seven-pocket travel shirt, and at the last minute I grabbed a long-sleeved camp shirt and a bottle of SPF 50.
But we tarried with the packing, and by the time Schon and I got back to the beach our boat had already left in a fit of admirable, anomalous, un-Ugandan punctuality. “Well, go figure,” Schon said. “The first on-time departure in the history of Africa.” Our replacement wanted 10,000, Geoffrey said. His twenty-five-foot boat was of raw unpainted wood, its center bays piled with a tall, springy mound of thin-gauge monofilament netting. The top of the Yamaha motor was missing its cover. A fuel line ran from the motor into a yellow cooking oil container that sat upright on the floor. I paid the owner and we gathered around the boat with half a dozen other men and pushed it off the stones and into the dark and gentle surf, then hopped in, Schon and I side by side on a bench near the front. Frank, the pilot, manned the engine, and his first mate took the prow. We buzzed south, tracking the shoreline until the island curved away. Too soon, Victoria became choppy, and showed itself for what it truly was, a troubled freshwater sea, bigger than all but America’s Great Lakes. The swells slapped and pounded the boat from every direction. My left side became soaked, and my body went cold as I tried to shield my old Nikon from the spray.
I pulled the nylon camp shirt from the plastic sack and, pride draining with the last of my body temperature, buttoned it to the throat, pulling the collar up around my neck. The crew, I noticed, were wearing insulated hooded windbreakers over their bare backs. Clouds blocked the sun, the wind picked up and I began to feel I might as well be in a dinghy off the coast of Corsica. Or Greenland. The swells were pushing five feet, slapping the boat at three-second intervals. They drove my stomach somewhere near the bottom of the lake, thirty-five feet down; bile shuffled up from those depths to my gullet in a slow queasy two-step. Was it my imagination, or was the water striking my side more than Schon’s? I watched him—contented, interested, comfortable—with murderous eyes. The boat grinned forward and all evidence of land, that there had ever been such a thing as land, disappeared. One hypothermic hour later Frank cut the motor and we were instructed to move from our shared bench to the two fore positions. As Frank and the mate began feeding out the net, the sun finally showed itself, and the saliva jets came on, priming a backward pump. I slipped off my glasses and bent at the chest over the side and cast my tea, bread and tiny kernels of dried corn into Lake Victoria. “You feel bad?” Frank said.
“He’s fine, just a little seasick,” Schon said brightly. “You see, he’s just not used to the water. Gotta get his sea legs,” he said, with extra burring gusto on the “sea.” I wiped my mouth and beard with a handkerchief, rolled back onto my bench and tried to breathe my eyes, ears and stomach into agreement. “Hurling like a supermodel,” Schon chuckled. “That’s all right. I’ve spent a lot more time on the water than you. Fact, went out on my brother’s boat, the Talley-Ho, just last week. An oldie but a goodie. Goes forty miles an hour and pulverizes the kidneys in just five minutes. So we go to the Outer Banks, and I hook a beauty of a mackerel, and at the last second, just as I’m reeling her in, a shark comes and takes half of it. Big shark. Anyway, just keep your eyes open and your head up. And try to focus on the horizon. That’s about all you can do. You’ll be fine.”
The men continued doling net into the lake, orange cord suspended by the cork, blue cord weighed down by the milk bags, forming a barrier that would stretch more than a hundred yards through Africa’s great lake. I tried to fix my eyes on the sky and gave another retch. “Here,” Schon said. “You need to eat. Get something in your belly.” He pulled a Ziploc bag out of the yellow plastic sack and tore off a piece of peanut butter and honey on brown bread. “I really don’t,” I said.
“Just try a little,” he said, and I did. It was drier than a gravedigger’s callus, drier than Kalahari sand, drier than the queen’s perm. It was the driest food in the world. I washed it down without chewing, the Nalgene plastic stench burning my nose. “No good will come of this,” I said.
Water poured into the boat from several unplugged seams, including a quarter-inch gash at Schon’s feet. Frank tossed me a cut-down cooking oil container and gestured to the growing pool. I bent down to bail and the horizon rocked even more as I dipped the container into the swaying boat and dumped the water. Again I went over, sending my sandwich into the lake, feeding foam to the Nile perch, tilapia and tiny silver dagaa. Between gasps, I could hear the clicking of my best friend’s digital camera. “Now that’s what I call chumming,” he said with a laugh, as I prayed for some rare freshwater shark to break the surface and relieve him of his arm. “That’s enough,” Schon said as I heaved away. “I mean it, that’s enough.”
“I don’t really have a choice.”
“You do. Take it from me. I used to be a drunk. There’s a point where your mind can take over. It’s mind over matter.” I thought perhaps a change of vantage would help and so I half rose and half crawled toward the left-hand side of my bench just as a thick swell struck the boat. It rolled hard, nearly capsizing, the port-hand gunwale brushing the lake surface. “Whoa!” we all shouted and I lunged back to the right where I belonged. “Sorry about that,” I said, resettling myself as Frank glowered, the first mate avoided my eye, and Schon smiled in wonder. “Man, you just about did it. Just about put us in the drink.”
It took about an hour for Frank and the mate to finish paying out the net. They took turns with the paddle to keep the drifting boat broadside to the wind, staying perpendicular to the net. Then the first mate crawled forward and, standing in the bow, lifted and threw the anchor—a gunnybag full of stones—over the side. The rope whipped after it for a very long time. Whatever the official water readings, this slice of the lake seemed miles deep. Now it was time to wait. We shifted places again: me at the rear, on the left; Schon at the next bench, on the right; Frank in the middle; and the mate at the front, where he stripped to his undershorts and began washing his clothes against the wooden hull.
The iron gray sky had burned away, replaced by a poisoningly clear sun and a few cotton-wadded clouds. Slumped against the side, my ears and stomach swimming in mercury, I watched the clouds for ducks, woodpeckers, Varga girls, antelope. Exhaustion pushed me low into the boat, but the deeper I slouched the more difficult it was to focus on the horizon, which disappeared every two seconds with the rhythm of the lake. The tardy sun bored through my tinted lenses. I pulled my hat low and squirted more SPF 50 onto my face. Dreams came—short, detailed, intense narratives that ended with each new jostle. I was aware of my hands and lips warming and then cooking in the daylight. It was a comfort. A white heron with a long pointy beak and the palest of yellow eyes, sensing no threat whatsoever, landed on my calf and stayed there a moment before moving on to a solid wooden perch near my feet. “Please don’t crap on me,” I said telepathically, and the heron answered, “No promises.” While I had my sickness to keep me company, Schon was left alone to look at the sky and the lake and at me and Frank and the mate. His eyes darkened with boredom as the hours slowly lapped by. “I wish I’d brought a rod out,” he said. “At least I could pretend I was doing something.”
After the mate had finished his laundry and laid his slacks and shirt on the side to dry, he and Frank shared a pot of stew that had been tucked under a small alcove at the prow and had somehow remained untoppled through the chopping waves and my near-capsizing. Then the mate lay down on his back in the bilge and went to sleep. At about 6 p.m., seven hours after we’d left the island, they started bringing in the catch. The first mate stood and hauled up the anchor and then the nets. For forty-five minutes he pulled, bringing up perch after perch. While the fish grew to more than five feet, none of these was longer than fifteen inches—evidence of overfishing that had reduced the lake’s stocks by more than half. Each perch had its mouth open, with an enormous swollen tongue protruding between upper and lower fangs. They appeared to be smaller than the legal limit. The Nsazi fishermen were, as the Ugandan government later put it, “especially notorious in fishing malpractices.” There were a few catfish in the nets as well. The mate, with biceps like mangos, broke their dorsal spines against the side of the boat, the sound oddly affecting, before throwing them in a separate pile, for the local market. Frank took over the net work, moving slower than the mate did, and after another forty-five minutes they were done. Frank ripped the motor to life and we throttled back toward Nsazi as the sun dipped into the western horizon. We motored in the refreshingly cool moonlight while low clouds advanced from the east. “Sonny,” I told Schon. “I think we’re gonna make it.”
“I do believe you’re right,” he said. “My ass has never hurt so bad. It’s beyond pain. The whole ass just gave up about four hours ago, shut itself down and tried to fall off.” At this the motor sputtered and died, and Schon’s eyes widened into yellow orbs of panic. “You did this, Morrison. You had to jinx us. Now we’re gonna have to sleep out here.”
Frank tried rip-starting the engine a few times and then peered into the plastic fuel bottle and found it empty. He and the mate had no choice but to paddle the boat home for two hours as the clouds gained on us, their mass lit up by trapezoidal flashes of lightning. We crunched onto the stony beach just as the rain started to fall in earnest. I tipped them 500 shillings each, took the gear and stumbled back to the shack for an hour of coma while Schon went in search of a meal. “How you feeling, boss?” Schon said as he came in.
“Much improved,” I murmured, eyes closed. “Though I could use a toothbrush.”
“I went to the place we were at last night. They were serving this guy liquor in a plastic bag. Some local moonshine.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, I didn’t. But it was interesting.”
“It’s waragi, banana hooch. Or millet. Or cassava. Whatever’s around,” I said, sinking back to sleep. “Sold by the bottle or the bag. They drink a lot in Uganda. More per capita than anywhere. More than Ireland. More than Russia. I had thought waragi was a local take on arak. That when Samuel Baker led the Egyptians down here in the nineteenth century they brought their own booze, and the Ugandans adopted the name. It’s raki in Greece, arak in Turkey, Syria and Egypt. Waragi sounded like a reasonable adaptation. But it’s not.”
“Of course it’s not,” Schon said. “You think these people can’t have their own name for booze? They need to get it from Egypt?”
“Not from Egypt,” I replied, grateful for not having been an Egyptian conscript sent away from home under British command to claim central Africa for the khedive. “England. The local name, the original name, is enguli. During World War II the Brits down here were cut off from the motherland and they couldn’t get any more Gordon’s or Plymouth. So they made do with the local hooch and called it ‘war gin.’ War gin became waragi. You know,” I added, “I think I’ve had my fill of Lake Victoria. Let’s just start this trip at Jinja.”
“You suffered like a champion out there,” Schon said, switching off his flashlight. “Not one complaint. I’ll be sure to mention that when I’m showing the pictures around.”