"Not a Chance"

Her hands stopped.

She had not told them to. That was the stupid something about the hands---they went on their own when the talking went, did the work the words couldn't, made the shape of the boat and the shape of the goat in the car and the shape of everything she said so the soldiers would watch the hands and not the boat, and they had been going the whole time, going and going, and then the younger soldier asked the something and both of them stopped in the air at once and she could not make them start again.

He had asked which uncle. Whose boat. What village. He had said Kulún like he half knew the answer already and was only waiting to see if she'd say it too.

She did not say it.

"I don't know the names of places," she said, and got the hands moving again, slow, like nothing had happened to them. "We just go where our uncle goes. He doesn't tell us. He doesn't tell us anything, he's not a big talker, you can see he's not a big talker---"

The younger soldier laughed. Okay, that's good. They were getting somewhere. A soldier who laughs is a soldier who might keep laughing, and a soldier who is laughing is a soldier not doing the other something, and she had learned which was which early, before she had words for it, the way you learn which dog bites.

The older soldier was the other kind.

He was not laughing. He had not laughed once. He was not even listening to her, not the way the younger soldier listened---he was looking at the boat while she talked, at the line of it in the water, at the barrels, at the tarp, and his looking was the kind that has been taught to a person until it does itself. She knew that looking. She had been taught a looking like it once. You looked at a place the way you would look at it if you had to take it apart.

So she talked faster. She gave him the bird that walks on the water, the small brown one, the feet that go so fast they never learn the rule about sinking, and the wings being the hard part, anybody can do the body but the wings---she gave him all of it, fast, bright, the wall going up word by word, and at the end of it the laugh came out of her and it was the wrong one.

It was not the one that had got out that morning on the water, when the woman's hand had been too slow and the real thing had jumped the fence before she could stop it. The other one with nothing behind it but the need for the man with the gun to like the sound. She heard herself make it and she hated the sound of it and she could not stop making it.

The old one stepped to the edge of the dock.

He looked down into the boat. At Snail.

And Snail went to stone. He had the red cloth crushed in one fist, white at the knuckle, and he looked up out of his big eyes and did not move and did not breathe loud, doing the thing the small ones do, the going-away-while-still-being-there, and Kàkà's hands were going and going and the old one was not watching them at all, he was watching Snail, and the wall she was building had nothing on the other side of it. Nothing. Just more talking, and then no more talking---

A shadow came across the dock.

She knew the shape of him before she looked up. The whole dock had moved out of his way without seeming to decide to, the way water moves off a thing it does not want to touch, and there he was, big and dark against the palm-oil light, and the young soldier looked up at him and named him.

"Ferryman."

He said it like a thing he'd only heard about and was pleased to find was real.

"You're at my boat," the ferryman said.

"She says her uncle owns it." The younger soldier tipped his head at her, friendly, still half-grinning. "Only she can't name a single village. Funny thing. An uncle's girl who doesn't know where she's from."

And Kàkà looked up at the ferryman and saw the door of his face, shut, and the muscle going in his jaw, and she knew that he was about to put something true into the air. Because he did not lie. She had watched him a day and he did not lie.

"I lied," Kàkà said.

The ferryman's jaw stopped.

"He's my father." She said it fast and flat and bored. "He hates to say it. He's still getting used to it, it's only been since the dry season---our mother left us at his door like a basket of yams and went off, and he didn't even know we were his until she---"

"Not a chance," the ferryman said.

It came out flat and dry. He did not look at her when he said it and there was nothing in it, no warmth, no play, only the two words set down hard the way he set everything down.

And it was perfect. It was better than anything she could have built, because it was his, and it had his whole weight on it. A made-up father would have nodded along. Only a true one---a true one who had a girl-child and a boy-child dropped on him by a woman who walked off, and who had been losing the argument about it to the daylight ever since---only a true one says not a chance like that, to the air, to nobody, tired all the way down to the bone.

"See?" Kàkà folded her arms and put every one of her eleven hard years into it. "This is what I live with. Every day. You ask him is he my father and he says not a chance. In front of people. To soldiers. This is the man God gave me."

The young soldier laughed. A real one, up out of the belly.

And something went out of the older soldier. Not all the way---men like that did not go all the way out, but the looking changed, the taking-apart looking, because a girl having a loud and public fight with her tired father on a dock was a great many somethings and not one of them was a boat full of something. It was just a family. And there was no thread in a family for a man like that to pull. The thing he had been quietly building toward had had the floor taken out from under it.

"They're with me," the ferryman said.

That was all of it. Flat. The smallest thing a person can say and have it still be a thing he is saying out loud, in front of soldiers, with his name on it. He did not look at her when he said it. He set it down between the four of them like the gold, like a drum of cool soymilk, like everything, and left it there.

The soldiers nodded and went. The younger one looked back once, still grinning, and lifted two fingers at her like they were old friends now. The old one did not look back.

And in her chest there was a something.

It was tight and it was warm and it sat up under the bone in the middle of her, and she did not have a name for it. She kept her face very still, because her face wanted to do something and she did not know what the something was, and she was not going to let it do an unknown something in front of the ferryman. So she breathed. She looked at the river. The river was getting black with the hour and the lamps lay on it and it did not want anything from her, which was the restful thing about rivers.

The ferryman watched the soldiers go, the jaw still working. The young one had said one more thing before he left, low, almost shy, not a checkpoint thing at all---I heard you walked into the river. I heard it gave you back. and when he said it something crossed the ferryman's face, fast, so fast, there and gone like a fish turning under the surface, and Kàkà saw it. She put it in the pile with the other things she did not know yet. The pile was getting big.

Then, because the something in her chest wanted out and this was the only door she had, she reached into the pocket of his kaftan and took a cigarette.

He felt her do it. She knew he felt her do it. He let her think she'd got away with it, which was its own kind of letting, and she slid the cigarette into her own pocket, a small, hard weight against her hip, and she did not light it, and she kept it, and she kept the question that came with it, for later.

⁂

Ésa came back when the light had gone from palm oil to the grey just before dark, and she had two children with her.

The tall one was Àdúkẹ́si. She walked like she already knew where every door in the place was and was only deciding which one she'd leave by, and her face was shut the way a face shuts when it has had a great deal of practice. The other was Tólúyibi. He dragged his left leg a little, just a little, and his eyes went round the dock the way Kàkà's own still went round a new place without her telling them to---corner, exit, who's holding, what's between me and the water---the eyes of a person taught to take the price of a room before they set a foot in it. Kàkà looked at the two of them and the two of them looked at her and nobody said one word, because there was nothing to say that all three of them did not already know.

They would go in the drums at first light. She knew that too, without being told.

Ésa was tired. Kàkà had watched her be a lot of things in a day---still, and cold, and watching, and the small surprised laughing she did behind her hand---but not this, this grey weight that sat on her now like a wet cloth and pulled her face down at the edges. She looked at the four of them, and then at the ferryman, and something went between the two grown people that the children were not let into.

"Feed them," Ésa said.

The ferryman looked up at the sky, at the last light going out of it, reading it the way he read everything. Then he looked at the children.

"Come," he said.

The market at the edge of dark was a different animal than the market in the day. The day one shouted. This one hummed and hissed and glowed---little flames in tins, lamps coming up at the stalls, and in the middle of it a woman bent over a black pot of oil dropping rounds of dough in one after another, and the dough hit the oil and screamed, a hundred small white screams, puff-puff swelling and going gold, and the smell of it came up hot and sweet right through the diesel and the fish-smoke and the green rot of the swamp and filled her mouth before her head had agreed to want it.

Snail had the red cloth out. He held it up by a corner into the glow of the lamps, turning it a little, the way he did, checking the red against the new light to see if it was still the red. Then he folded it small and put it away inside his shirt.

The ferryman bought food. Big soft buns split and stuffed with sardine, the kind with pepper worked into the oil so they bit you back a little. A heap of smoked fish wrapped in a leaf for later. Two bottles of Fanta, the orange kind, cold, beads of water standing on the glass.

He put a bun and a Fanta into Snail's two hands and folded the fingers shut on them the way you had to with Snail, and he held the other bun out to Kàkà, and he kept for himself one stick of roasted meat, charred at the edges, and a cigarette from the woman at the end of the row, unlit, set behind his ear, that he had not yet done anything with---

---so she took the bite for him.

Leaned in quick and got a mouthful off the stick before it ever reached his mouth, hot and peppered and good, and sat back chewing, pleased with herself, very pleased, about as pleased as she'd been with anything in a while.

"Mosquito," he said.

"Papa," she said, around the meat.

"Don't call me that."

"You told the soldiers you were my father."

"I told them not a chance."

"Which is a kind of telling." She swallowed. "If you say not a chance, it means somebody asked. And if somebody asked, it means it was a question worth asking. And a question's only worth asking if there was a thing in it to begin with. So." She took another bite that was not hers. "Papa."

He made a sound. It was not a word. It was not quite a laugh, either---it was the thing a laugh would be if a man had spent years teaching himself not to, the ghost of one, the place where one used to live. And Kàkà heard it and marked that too, in the other pile, the good pile, the small one, the one that held the somethings that were starting, very slowly, to go the other way.

⁂

They ended up where the dock went quiet, on an overturned crate and the boards beside it, away from the stalls, where the lamps thinned out and the black water moved below them and a generator at one of the cooking fires coughed and caught and ran on. Snail ate half his bun and went heavy against her side. The Fanta had gone warm. She drank it anyway.

Beside her, the bun in one fist and the cloth in the other, Snail dragged his thumbnail through the dust on the crate. A shape. Quick. Just the start of one---the curve of a body, the line of a wing he did not finish---half a bird, the wing left open---and then his hand stopped and his breath went slow and even and he was asleep, and the half-bird stayed in the dust where he'd left it.

Kàkà had the cigarette out now, the one she'd taken off him, between two fingers, not lit, just held, the way she'd seen the soldiers hold them. The men in the camp. The boy.

The boy.

She let the door open the one crack. No more. The rest of it stayed shut and was going to stay shut. Just the boy. He'd been fifteen, or near it, the one who taught her the rifle, the short one they'd cut down to her arms, and he'd told her it was like a bird. You hold it light, he said. You don't grip it, you don't think too hard. You let it sit in your hands like a bird that might go---and you don't pull it. You let it go off on its own. And she had been good at it. She had a good eye and a light hand and she did not flinch and she did not miss.

"He died," she said. To the water. "An ambush. He said my name."

She stopped.

She reached into the puff-puff cone and ate one, cold now, the sweet gone waxy, and the eating was the door swinging shut, and she let it shut, and she did not look at what was behind it, and she would not.

"I was very good at it," she said.

And that was all of that.

She turned the cigarette over in her fingers.

"My father was a ferryman," she said.

She said it the way you say any small true thing, like it weighed nothing, because she did not know it weighed anything, did not feel the shape of the other stone sitting right there beside it in the dark---she just said it and went on. "Not like you. A bigger boat. He worked the lake, the open water, not the little channels. He'd carry twenty people at a go. He drowned when I was six. My mother said the river gets jealous of the ones who love it too much, and it keeps them." She drank the warm Fanta. "I don't know if that's true. She said a lot of things."

The ferryman did not say anything.

He was looking at the water. He was not looking out at it, the way you look at a thing to watch it. At it---down into it, hard and steady, the way a man looks at someone who owes him a conversation and has been a long time putting it off. The generator coughed and steadied. The lamps broke on the black water and came together and broke again. Kàkà watched the side of his face.

And there it was.

The opening.

It was not the river-reading look, the one she now knew, the one that ran the banks and read the dark for trouble. There was something under that one. Something under the surface of the surface, a give in him, a door not all the way shut, and she knew that if she missed it now it would close and she would not get it back tonight.

She did not miss it.

"That soldier," she said. "The younger one. He said you tried to drown yourself."

He said nothing.

"He said the river spat you back."

The generator coughed. The water moved. Somewhere back in the market a woman laughed, high and bright, nothing to do with any of them, gone as fast as it came.

"Why did it spit you back," Kàkà said.

She was not looking at him. She was looking at the river---the black water, the lamps on it, the light breaking and coming together and breaking again.

He did not answer.

She did not ask again.

Beside her, Snail had gone to sleep with the red cloth shut in his fist, and somewhere behind them in the dark was the half-bird, the wing not closed.

The question hung out over the water. The river did not answer it either.

She did not light the cigarette. She held it between her two fingers---unlit, borrowed, no use to anyone at all---and she kept it, the way she meant to keep the question that came with it, and she did not let it go.