"The Salute"

He smelled Fárá before he saw it.

The gin came across the water first---palm wine gone past wine into something with teeth, sweet and rotten at once, sugar turning in the heat, and under it the woodsmoke of the still-fires, and he knew the village by the smell the way he knew the channels by the pull of the current against the oar. Then the mangroves opened and Fárá came out of the dusk.

It had been burned so many times. He could read the burnings off it the way you read the rings in a cut tree: the old char gone grey on the dock pilings, the newer thatch bright over black timber, the mud-brick patched and patched again until the patches outnumbered the wall. Nothing here was whole. Everything here had been set alight and put back up by people who had nowhere else to take their lives, or who would not take them anywhere---who had decided to die in this exact mud and no other. He understood both kinds. He had been both kinds.

The distillery sat at the edge of it where the bank gave out to deep water: a long shed of corrugated iron and mangrove pole, smoke at the back, light spilling yellow from the open front. And the noise. Soldiers. A song, the clatter of bottles, a laugh going up and falling back. A patrol boat rode at the dock beside it with its black flag hanging dead in the windless air. Five voices, he made it. Six.

He brought the canoe in along the dark end of the dock, short of the light.

Ngalula was waiting there.

She was tall and lean and the gin-work had cracked her hands, and a burn scar ran from the corner of her left eye down into her jaw, old and smooth and silvered. Under it and around it her face was the kind that stops a man in a doorway, and the scar did not stop it---the scar was only one more thing the world had tried on her and failed to finish. Her right hand had three fingers. He did not look at it twice.

"You're late," she said.

"West channel was thick," Ésa said. "We went around."

"They've been here since noon." Ngalula did not look toward the distillery when she spoke of it; she seemed to have the trick of the very watchful, of seeming to look at nothing. "Paid for the whole night. They are not leaving. I have two in the shed. Boys. Dàga and Rẹ̀gí." A pause, half a breath, no more. "Their mother smoked fish for me eleven years." She did not say the mother's name. She did not say she's dead. The eleven years said it, and the way she set the number down and stepped off it fast, the way you step off a hot stone. "The older one stopped talking when it happened. The little one won't stop asking when she's coming for him."

Ésa looked at the shed end of the building, at the light, at the patrol boat.

"The layout," she said.

"They drink in the front room. Behind it the fermenting room, the vats. The shed comes off the back of that. There's a door through---front to fermenting to shed---but no way to the shed except across the front. The mangrove's too thick to go round. I've tried it with a machete. It doesn't go."

"So I cross the front room."

"Through five drunk Vanguard. Yes."

Ésa was quiet. He watched her do the thing she did, the weighing, the building and the tearing-down behind a still face.

"They know your gin," she said. "Do they know you've a cousin."

"I've a hundred cousins. Everybody's somebody's cousin."

"Then I'm one of them. Up from the river to help with the batch. You put me to work where you need me, and where you need me is across that room and into the back."

Ngalula weighed her in turn, the long flat look. "You don't move like a cousin. You move like a woman who's used to being obeyed. Drunks notice that, late. Walk smaller."

"I can walk smaller."

"Then it might hold."

Ésa looked back at Osogó once. She did not tell him to wait. She did not tell him what to do if it broke. She had laid him no part in this and given him no word for the thing going wrong, and he understood the not-telling was its own instruction---that she trusted him to be where he had to be, and that whatever he did when he got there would be his to choose and not hers. Then she went up the boards into the light with Ngalula's arm through hers, the two of them walking small now, two women with nothing between them and the soldiers but a lie and a level back.

⁂

He took the canoe back off the dock and held it in the black water a stone's throw out, where the light from the shed lay on the channel but stopped short of him. He shipped the oar across his knees. There was nothing to row. There was nothing to do but listen, and he had learned listening in places where it was the only thing between him and the end of himself.

The shed walls were iron and pole and they held no sound in. He had the whole of it across the water.

The singing he knew---the river song, the one about the blood and the Mouth and the purifying of the basin---and they sang it the way drunk men sing, half the words and all the feeling, falling off the tune and climbing back on. He listened past the song to the things under it. Drunk soldiers and checkpoint soldiers do not make the same noise. A checkpoint is taut: the laughter short, the silences watching, every sound with a hand near a trigger inside it. This was the other kind, the loose kind, the kind that has set the rifles against the wall and forgotten which wall. It was better and it was worse. Loose men do not watch. But loose men do not think, and a man who is not thinking does the sudden thing, and the sudden thing is the one you cannot plan around.

He counted them by their voices. Five that talked. A sixth that only laughed---high and wet, always a beat behind the others, laughing not at the joke but at the laughing---and he marked that one and did not know why.

His hands were on the oar-shaft and there were no strokes in them, and so they did the thing they did, which was count the bottles, maybe. The beats of the song. The seconds laid end to end. His fingers moving small on the wood, keeping a tally of nothing, because the hands did not know how to be still and never had, and when he gave them nothing to count they went back down the years looking for the old things they had counted, and he took them off that road the way you take a dog off a scent, and set them to the song again.

Ngalula's voice came up over all of it, made to carry: "You break it, you buy it---and you drank it already, so that's double you owe me." A roar from them. A bottle knocked over, not broken. The song lost its place and went hunting for it.

He could not hear Ésa. That was the whole of the plan---that he could not hear her, that she was a quiet thing crossing a loud room while the loud woman held every eye, the cousin nobody would remember because Ngalula kept their eyes full of Ngalula. He listened for her anyway. He got the song, the late laugh, the gin going into cups. Not her. Not her is good, he told himself.

A bottle went over near the back. He heard it roll on the iron and go off the edge of something and smash---close, close to where the fermenting room would be, close to the door she had to reach---and a chair scraped, a man coming up, the noise of him rising over the song---

And Osogó was already off the thwart, the oar already in his two hands, his weight already going into the canoe---

The man sat back down. Laughing. He had stood to curse the broken bottle and the woman who'd left it and had run out of standing before he found the will for the rest of it, and he dropped back into his seat and the song took him, and it was nothing. It had been nothing.

He lowered himself down. He set the oar across his knees. His heart did not pound; he had buried that response years ago, in places that needed it gone. But his hands had gone tight on the wood again, and he made them loosen, finger by finger, and went back to the listening.

That was the first time. He should have known it for the warning it was.

⁂

The first soldier came out the side door.

Tall, the bored one Ngalula had named. He came to the dock edge and pissed into the water a long time, swaying, and when he was done he did not go back in. He stood. He looked around at the dark the way bored men do, hunting anything that was not the inside of that room. Then he drifted---along the wall, past the fermenting room, toward the back. Toward the shed.

Ngalula came out behind him with a bottle in her hand.

Her voice went easy and loud, and the mouth in her scarred face had gone soft, a thing she had put there, not a thing that grew there. "Wrong way, soldier. Good gin's round the front. Nothing back there but palm rats and the smell."

"Looking for somewhere to piss."

"You just pissed. I watched you. Whole village watched you." She got a hand on his arm and turned him, easy, laughing, the bottle up between them like a lamp, and he let himself be turned, and she walked him back into the light. The soft mouth went away the moment his back was to her. He saw it go.

He let his breath out.

Then the second one came out, and the breath stopped on its own, before he had thought a single thing.

It was the body that knew first. The second soldier stood in the doorway and did not sway. That was the thing. Five men in there drunk since noon and this one stood square, weight even on both feet, and he did not look around the loose way the tall one had looked---he looked in pieces, the dock, then the water, then the treeline, then back, the way a man was taught to look, the way Osogó himself had been taught in another life, breaking the dark into squares and reading each square before he moved his eye to the next. He was not bored. He was not even very drunk; he had been pacing it, the way a careful man paces it in a room he doesn't trust. And his eyes, when they were done with the dock and the water, went to the back of the building. To the shed.

He started walking. Even. Unhurried. A man with all night.

Ngalula was inside with the tall one. She had not seen this one move. She could not. And Ésa was in the shed with the two boys, and the careful man was twenty steps from the door, and the canoe was a stone's throw out on the black water, too far, the oar already in Osogó's hands without his telling it to be there.

He made the decision.

He put the oar in the water.

⁂

Three strokes put him at the dock. He took the rope around the post without looking at it and stepped up onto the boards, and the careful soldier, twenty paces along, turned at the sound and saw him come up out of the dark, and stopped.

"Who's there." The soldier's hand had gone to his hip, where the rifle was not, because he had left it inside against the wall with the rest. Osogó watched the hand find nothing, and watched the man note that it had found nothing.

"The Ferryman."

He said it the way he said it at the checkpoints. Not loud. Not a threat. A fact laid down flat, true whether the man liked it or not. And he watched it land---the small backward shift of weight, the eyes going still, the recalculation. The man had been hunting the smell of something wrong at the back of a gin-shed. Now there was a dead man on the dock between him and it, and a story he'd heard a hundred times stood up in front of him in the dark.

"You're a long way from your water," the soldier said.

"The river runs everywhere. I go where it goes."

"What do you want here."

"Gin. For the north post. They paid me to carry it. They can't leave the barrier." He let it sit there, plain and dull as it was. A man who carried things, carrying a thing. The most ordinary sentence in the basin.

The soldier looked at him a long moment, and Osogó let himself be looked at and gave the look nothing to catch on. Then the soldier moved his head toward the door---go on, then---and did not take his eyes off him the whole way, and Osogó walked past him into the light and the heat and the reek, and felt the man fall in behind him, which was what he wanted. The careful one turned around now. Walking away from the shed and back toward the front room, because you do not put your back to the Ghost.

The room was low and hot and thick with smoke and gin. A door laid over two oil drums for a table, four men around it, bottles standing and bottles down, a clay jug, and Ngalula at the far end with the jug in her cracked eight-fingered hand, pouring. She looked up when he came in. Her face did not move. She was far too good for that. She poured.

"The Ferryman," one of them said---the tall one, loose and delighted, slapping the table. "The Ghost himself. Come to drink with us, dead man?"

"Come to buy."

"He buys! The Ghost buys gin!" The tall one was overjoyed. "What does a dead man want with gin?"

"It's not for me."

He came to the table and stood where the light was on him, because the light on him was the whole of the thing. Let them see him. Let them fill their eyes with the story---the Ghost, the one the river would not keep, the one their senior colleagues had warned them off---here, real, in the reeking light, buying gin like a man. While they looked at him they looked at nothing else. That was the work. He was not hiding Ésa. He was a brighter thing than Ésa, set down in the middle of the room to pull every eye the way a fire pulls them, and a fire does not have to do anything but burn.

And under the looking there was the other thing.

They knew. Not all of them, maybe---not the young ones---but the room knew. He felt it the way you feel a change in the water through the hull. Some of these men, or men they had drunk with, or men who had trained them, had known the basin in the years when the Ghost wore another name and another trade. He could feel that knowledge moving in the room, unsaid, a current beneath the flat noise of them. The tall one's delight had a thin edge of it. The careful one at the door had nothing else. None of them said the name. It sat in the room with all of them and not one of them touched it, the way you do not touch a snake even when you know exactly where it lies.

He kept his face the way the river kept its face. He had had the practice.

"How much," he said to Ngalula.

"Three sacks." She set the bottle on the table before him, full, stoppered. "Or what stands for it."

He took the cartridges from inside his shirt and laid them on the door-table, counted out, a small bright row in the gin-wet. The soldiers watched his hands do it. They watched the hands the way men watch the hands of a thing they have heard stories about, half-hoping and half-dreading the hands would do something other than count out brass.

"The north post sent the Ghost for their gin," the tall one said, reaching for the joke again, wanting to keep it light, because light was where he was easy. "What's the basin coming to."

"They pay. I carry."

A laugh went round, but shorter than the gin deserved, and it died sooner, because the careful one had come back in and was at the wall by the rifles, not laughing at all, only watching, and his not-laughing was a weight the others felt and went quiet under without knowing they did it.

Behind the wall, somewhere past the fermenting room, a child cried.

It was not loud. It was not even a scream. It was just one sound.

The room stopped around it. Not all the way. A drunk room never stops all the way. But the song slipped. A man's cup hung halfway to his mouth.

Osogó felt it happen.

The careful soldier heard it first.

His head turned toward the back. But it was only one cry. Nothing after it.

The room waited.

"Cat," Ngalula said at once.

Nobody laughed.

The careful soldier was already moving slowly. He set down his cup and started toward the fermenting door.

Osogó watched him go.

Three steps.

Four.

The room had gone thin around the edges. The tall one was still smiling but the smile had nowhere to land now.

Five steps.

Then another sound came from the back. It was not a cry this time. It was a small voice muffled through wood.

"...Mama?"

The careful soldier stopped.

The room stopped with him.

Every sound in it pulled tight.

Osogó moved. His hip came against the table-edge and the table moved with it---a scrape on the floor, a small movement that made a large sound.
A bottle tipped. Rolled. Fell and shattered on the floor.

The crash stopped the room.

Every head turned.

But not toward the back.

Toward him.

The careful soldier turned too.

"What happened to you?"

The question came from the tall one. But it was not suspicion. This was curiosity.

Osogó looked down at the broken bottle. He fought himself not to clench his fist. He could still hear the little voice behind the wall. Mama. A second time.

The careful soldier's eyes shifted back toward the fermenting room. Then back to Osogó. Choosing.

Osogó made the choice for him.

"The river."

The room waited.

"The river what?" The tall one laughed.

Osogó looked at him.

"The river broke my back once."

Silence.

"The bottle reminded it."

Half a second.

Then the tall soldier barked a laugh. A stupid laugh. A relieved laugh. The others followed because relief spreads quicker than fear.

"The river broke his back."

"The Ghost's afraid of bottles."

"The mighty Ghost defeated by the bottle."

The laughter rolled through the room. Not because the joke was good. Because everyone wanted the other thing gone. The careful soldier stood another moment, listening and waiting.

Then the room pulled him back. He took his cup again. Sat down.

And only then did Osogó realize his hands had been shaking.

Across the room Ngalula never looked at him.

But her hand, pouring the gin, shook once.

Osogó took up the bottle.

He looked at Ngalula then, one look, and into it he put the only thing that needed to pass between them. He tipped the neck of the bottle a half-inch toward the back of the room, toward the fermenting door, toward the shed---a question with no word in it: are they out. And Ngalula, pouring, not looking at him, set the jug down and pushed a loose cork across the wet table with two fingers until it tapped the row of cartridges and stopped. Done. Gone. Go. It took less than a breath. No two men in that room would have caught it, and no two men did.

He turned and went out, the bottle in his hand, and felt their eyes follow him to the door and past it, and not one of them stood, because the Ghost does not invite you to your feet. He went down the boards into the dark and the clean air and set the bottle in the bow of the canoe and crouched there beside it and waited.

She came before the song had found another verse.

Out of the black at the side of the shed, low, fast, a child gripped in each hand. The older boy moved like a soldier, silent, his eyes everywhere---Dàga. The little one came with his mouth already opening, and Ésa stopped the sound in it with nothing but a turn of her head, and they crossed the open boards bent double, and she put them down into the barrels, one and then the other, the older boy folding himself away without a sound, the little one needing her hand flat on his head, pressing him down, down, until he went. She came over the side. He had the canoe off the dock before she had finished sitting.

⁂

The dock went back. The light went with it, narrowing on the water, and the song thinned, and the gin-reek gave over to the green rot of the channel and the clean cold off the deep water, and he let the first of it come---the loosening, the long breath a body takes when the thing is behind it---

And at fifty yards a man came to the door of the distillery, and the breath stopped.

It was not the tall one nor the careful one. It was a man he had not seen in the room---he had been in the back, or sleeping it off in a corner, and had come awake to the noise of the canoe leaving. He stood in the spill of yellow light with a bottle in his hand. Older than the others, grey coming in at the sides of his head, and his right arm hung wrong, half-bent and stiff at the elbow, an old break or an old burn that had set it into a shape it would keep now until the grave. He held the bottle in his left hand, because the right would not lift it.

Osogó knew him.

He did not know his name. His name was gone, if it had ever been his to lose. But the shape of the man---the grey, the ruined arm, the way the head sat forward on the neck---this one came up out of the years he kept locked: the executioner years, the years of the old Hook, when the killing was a wage and the Ghost was only a boy with another name who was very good with his hands. This man had been there. They had stood in the same camps. They had done the same work, or watched each other do it.

The man lifted the bottle. The left hand, the good hand, raising it across the black water. A salute. I see you. I know what you are. I know what you were. The oldest greeting there is between two men who have done unforgivable things side by side and lived.

Osogó did not raise his hand.

He rowed. The oar went down and came up, and the man in the doorway watched him go, and held the bottle up a long while in the yellow light, and then lowered it, and turned, and went back inside to the song.

And behind him, in the front of that shed, Ngalula was still pouring. He had not seen her come out and she would not come out---not till morning, not till the patrol boat had taken its black flag and its hangovers back up the channel. She would stay in the reeking light with five drunk men who would have opened her throat for what she'd done tonight if they had known the half of it, and she would keep their cups full and her mouth soft and her hard eyes on the door, and she would not sleep, and in the morning she would sweep the broken glass and start a new batch and wait for the next canoe to come out of the mist. No one would carry her anywhere. The boat left, and her night went on.

Ésa was in the bow, her hand flat on the nearer barrel. She had seen the man in the doorway, and the bottle going up. She did not ask. She had learned, the way he had learned with her, to let a thing be set down before you reach for it. She waited.

"He knew me," Osogó said. "From before."

"From the Hook."

"From the Hook."

"What does it mean."

The oar went down. Came up. "I don't know yet."

The channel narrowed and the mangroves came down to the water and took the last of the distillery light, the single yellow eye of it shrinking on the black behind them, and then gone, swallowed, and there was only the lamp at the bow and the oar and the dark.

In the barrel, the little one had started.

It was not the way the loud girl had filled her barrel, not long ago and a lifetime ago, talking the dark full of birds and names so there'd be no room left in it for the other thing. This was not that. This was a small voice asking a true question into the dark, the truest there is, asking it patient and certain, the way you ask a thing you have no doubt at all will be answered. When is she coming. When's Mama coming for us. Is it soon. Dàga. Is it soon.

And the older boy said nothing.

He said nothing the only way he could. The boy who had not made a sound since the raid, who knew the answer his brother did not, who could not put it into the air, because to put it into the air was to make it true, and there was not enough of him left to do that. Osogó heard him shift in the dark of the barrel, the small sounds of him moving, and knew without seeing that the boy had done the one thing he had to give: put his arm round the little one and pulled him in and held him, and let the questions come, and answered not one of them, because the holding was the only true answer and it was not the one the small voice wanted.

Is it soon, Dàga.

The oar went down. Came up. The mist took them, and the basin moved them through it, and far to the south the flare stood up red where it always stood, and the questions went on a while in the dark behind him, and then they stopped, and the boat went on.