"The Wrong Laugh"

They came to Tékéla in the late afternoon, with the sun gone low over the mangroves and the light the colour of palm oil.

He had not been here in six months. It had grown. It was always growing---Tékéla sat up on a rise of red ground that did not flood in the wet and did not crack in the dry, rare in the delta, solid, and the war had found it the way water finds the low place and filled it. Six months back the burned cars along the waterfront road had been three. He counted seven now, black and stripped, shoved off into the weeds and left to the rust. More concrete walls than he remembered. More iron roofs throwing back the low sun. A new row of stalls run up out of packing crates and tarpaulin. A town got fat like this on the edges of the fighting, on the soldiers' money and the traders' routes, and then one season the fighting turned and came in and ate it, and the fat made it slow. He had watched it happen to other towns. He did not think it was Tékéla's year. He did not think it was not.

The channel opened on the waterfront. It was a long concrete dock the oil company had poured in some better year and never come back to mend. Boats crowded the whole length of it: fishing skiffs, market canoes, a transport barge sitting low under palm-oil drums, and tied thirty feet apart and not looking at one another, a Vanguard patrol boat with its black flag hanging dead in the still air and a Swamp man's racer with three big motors on the stern and no markings anywhere on it, the men on both of them keeping their eyes off each other with some effort. They did not fight in Tékéla. Tékéla was where the money was, and money needed quiet, and so there was quiet---a thin quiet, an old one, the kind that holds because every man on the water needs it to hold and not one of them trusts it.

He brought the canoe into a gap between a fish-smoking raft and the barge and made it fast. The noise came down over them all at once---women calling prices, a radio somewhere pushing highlife music through a blown speaker, the blat of a motorcycle threading the crowd on its way somewhere. A cream Peugeot crawled the waterfront road with its tailpipe down, throwing a thin line of sparks, a goat stood up in the back seat with its head out the window.

Kàkà's head came up out of the boat like a dog onto a scent.

"What is this place."

"Tékéla," Ésa said.

"It's got cars. Snail---Snail, look, cars. That one's got no door. That one's got a goat in it, why is there a goat in a car, where's it taking the goat---"

Beside her, Snail had come up too, slower, and he said nothing because he said nothing, but he took the red cloth out of the front of his shirt and held it up in both hands against the town, against the cars and the iron roofs and the rust, the way you hold one thing up beside another to see if the colour is the same. The red against all of it. Then he folded it small and put it away.

"Stay in the boat," Osogó said.

"But there's---"

"Stay. In the boat."

Kàkà looked at Ésa. Ésa gave her the small nod---do as he says---and Kàkà sat back down and said something low to Snail about goats and cars and doors and the deep unfairness of a world that would put a person in a boat and then drive cars past them they were not allowed to get out and look at.

Ésa put two fingers on his arm. "A word."

⁂

They went a little way down the dock, far enough that the boat stayed in his eye and the children fell out of earshot. He kept the boat in his eye. Kàkà's hands were going, telling Snail something. Snail had the cloth out again. No one in the crowd was looking at the canoe. He checked it anyway, without deciding to, and brought his eyes back.

"You have questions," she said.

"It's not my business."

She did not answer that. The sun was behind her and her face was in the shadow of the scarf, and he felt her looking at the side of his face the way he had felt it on the black water the first night, a small, steady weight.

"I think we're past that," she said.

He said nothing for a while. A motorcycle went by up on the road, the two-stroke screaming, a boy in a red Manchester United shirt on the back with the chickens.

"I don't know who you are," he said. "I don't know what you are."

She let it sit. She did not reach for it. She gave him nothing back, the way she'd given nothing at the grave and nothing on the water, and she was not going to fill the quiet, he understood that---she would stand in it with the market going on around her and let him stand in it too, until he came across it himself.

He came across it.

"How many," he said. "Here."

"Two."

"What's the plan."

"There's a woman here," she said. "Faidana. She keeps a stall in the market. Vegetables, spices. She keeps children too."

"Hers?"

"No." She watched the crowd while she talked, not him. "A commander bought her out of a market when she was fourteen. Paid her father in cartridges. She was six years in his compound. She was not a wife, not a slave. She was just... the thing the war makes that it has no word for. Then a Swamp ambush took the commander on the north channel, and his men ran, and his house got picked clean, and Faidana walked out the front gate with a bag of rice and a cooking pot, and nobody stopped her." A beat. "Nobody had ever once looked at her and seen a person who could leave."

He said nothing.

"She came here with that and built a stall up out of a mat on the ground. Now she has a roof and a sign and two girls working under her, and children---always children, running her errands, carrying her baskets, fetching her water. The whole market knows her for it. The woman who takes in strays." She looked at him then, to be sure he had it. "The ones I send her stand in among the ones she keeps. There's no cellar. No hidden room. They carry yams in the open, where every soldier in Tékéla can see them, and not one soldier looks twice, because there's nothing to see. A child carrying yams is not a thing. It's part of the market. It's... furniture."

He thought about it. He had passed a hundred stalls like it and never once seen the children at them. One looked at the food. One did not look at the hands that brought it.

"That's good," he said.

"Two here. A girl, twelve. A boy, nine."

"Two in the boat now," he said. "Two at every village after. The boat won't carry them. You've seen how she rides with four."

"It's more than two per village, but... for now two raises no suspicion."

He held her gaze. "How do you---"

"Gárá." She had it out before he'd finished. "There's a waystation at Gárá. Deep channel. A woman who feeds them and holds them. We run to Gárá, we set the first lot down, we go back out for the rest."

"That's your circuit twice."

"It's the only shape the boat allows." Flat. Closed. A thing decided long before he was asked to like it. "I counted it before I came to you. Twice is the number. There was never a once."

A bicycle went past behind her, the bell going, the wheel ticking where a spoke was gone.

"What do you need from me now," he said.

"Stay with the boat." Her face did not move. Her voice did not move. "Try not to drown the girl while I'm gone. She talks."

It was a joke. Nothing in her face said so. Nothing in her voice said so. Only the words, set down flat between them, and left there for him to pick up or leave.

He did not smile. He turned and went back up the dock.

Halfway there, out of her sight, in the noise of the market with the radio going and the women calling and no one in all of Tékéla watching the Ferryman's face, it came---the smile, small, surprised out of him before his face could stop it.

He put his hand over his mouth and wiped it off. But it had been there. He had felt it come.

⁂

The market closed over him on the way back, and the way ran through the heart of it, the thick part, and he saw the stall before he knew it was the one. He knew it the way she'd said he would, without being told which.

A broad handsome woman in a yellow head-tie behind a spread of yams and bitter-leaf and dried pepper, and around her a scatter of children---one hauling a jerrican of water, one stacking the yams into a pile, two small ones scrubbing a pot in the dirt. She was taking a soldier's money with one hand and laughing up into his face, and the laugh was wrong. He had it on sight. It was the laugh you put on for a man with a gun who has asked you a thing and needs to like the answer, the laugh worn over the face the way a cloth goes over a cage, and under it her eyes were flat and counting his coins and counting him, and the soldier saw none of it, because the soldier was not a man who had ever had to learn to see it. She had built a life out of that laugh. She had walked out of a dead man's gate and built it.

He went on past. He did not slow. But he had the shape of her now, and he would know her again.

He saw the soldiers before they saw him.

Two of them, at the canoe. Vanguard, young---one maybe nineteen, the other younger, sixteen, seventeen. The older one stood with a rifle slung at his back, the strap frayed, the barrel held together with black tape. The younger one was down on his heels at the lip of the dock, elbows on his knees, talking down into the boat.

He was talking to Kàkà.

Osogó stopped where he stood. The crowd went on moving around him---a woman with a head-pan of dried shrimp, a man walking a bicycle with a dead tyre, two boys running a hoop through everyone's legs---and he stood in the middle of it and was no one, a tall thin man gone still in a market, and he watched.

Kàkà's hands were going. She was telling them something---the boat, the fish, the barrels, Snail, some long bright river of a story---her face open and lit, doing the thing she did, and the younger soldier leaned into it, half smiling, taken with her. The older one was not smiling. The older one was not looking at her at all.

That was the thing. That was the thing he did not like.

The older one kept his eyes off the girl and on the boat while she talked, and a man who is only being talked at looks at the one talking; it is the bright moving mouth that holds the idle eye. This one held his somewhere else. He looked at the waterline. He looked at how low she sat in the water. He ran his eyes along the gunwale to the barrels and the tarp, slow, the way a man looks at a thing he is putting a price to, and that looking had been taught to him somewhere. It was not a looking he had been told to do for the morning. It was one that had been worked into him until it ran on its own.

The younger soldier said something and Kàkà laughed.

It was not her laugh.

He had heard her laugh. It had come up off the water that morning, when Ésa got her own hand over her mouth too slow and the real thing escaped around the side of it, and he had not turned his head but he had heard it, the whole of a child in it. This was the other one. The worn one. The one with nothing underneath. The laugh you hand a man with a gun who has asked you a question you need him to like the answer to. He had heard it not ten minutes gone, at a stall, on a grown woman's face. He knew where the girl had learned it. He knew there had been a place that taught it to her, and he did not let himself go to the place, because there was nothing in the place that helped the boat.

The older soldier came up off his heels. He stepped to the edge of the dock and looked straight down into the canoe. At the barrels. At the tarp. At Snail.

And Snail---who an hour ago had held the red cloth up against the whole town to see whether the world still had a colour in it, who had not let it out of his fist through the drum and the dark and the river---went still. It was not the stillness of a quiet child. It was the kind that goes all the way down and empties the face and the hands and the breath, the stillness of a small animal under a shadow, that has learned the last thing left to do is be a stone and hope the shadow has poor eyes. He looked up out of the too-big eyes in the cassava-pale face and did not move and did not blink, and the red cloth was crushed to his chest in a fist gone white.

Osogó stood in the crowd.

Twenty feet. Thirty. The market ran between him and the boat, bodies and baskets and the bicycle and the boys and the hoop, and every foot of it was a wall and not one foot of it was anything; it would open for him in a stride. He weighed it. Come up now---a ferryman back to his cargo, big, silent, the known thing on the water---and the soldiers would turn off the girl and onto him, and the first question would be his to answer, and the question was what was in the boat. Stand where he was, and the girl might talk them off it. She was good. She had talked her way through worse than two boys with the night still on them; he could see her doing it, the hands, the bright face, the wrong laugh. Or she might not. The older soldier had his hand on the strap of his rifle. Not gripping it. Resting it there. A place to keep a hand.

The younger soldier asked Kàkà another question.

Kàkà's hands stopped moving.