The Night Ranger

she felt held. She was starting to rethink Scott and all the Scotts of the world. One had given her a bad herpes scare a few months back. But for now she was still in the jock-jerk camp.

—

Back in her trailer, post-shower, Gwen tugged on cargo pants and boots and a black T-shirt that she knew flattered her. Though, in truth, she would have looked good in sackcloth. She had the honey-blond hair and long lean legs of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. She stood out absurdly in the camp’s crowds, an alien from Planet Beautiful.

But her looks hardly mattered here. The refugee kids wanted to touch her hair, sure. Their parents wanted more rations, a chance for an American visa. When they realized she couldn’t help, they moved on. She was just another aid worker here, unworthy of special attention. The realization unsettled her. She wondered if she was seeing what life would be like when she was sixty.

She walked to the WorldCares canteen, a concrete room with a gas-fired stove and two oversized refrigerators. Posters of missions covered the walls, smiling black and brown children surrounding white volunteers. Owen and Scott sat at a wooden table, spooning up oatmeal from chipped bowls.

“Oatmeal?” They hadn’t had any yesterday. Gwen poured a cup of coffee, busied herself brewing a fresh pot. Leaving the coffeemaker empty was a great sin at WorldCares. As Moss had made sure she learned.

“Bunch of Quaker Instant came in yesterday,” Owen said. “All kinds. Apples and cinnamon, brown sugar and whatever—”

“Pepsi’s getting a nice tax deduction on that, I’ll bet,” Scott said.

“Pepsi?” Gwen didn’t get it.

“They own Quaker. Stuff’s about to expire, they can’t sell it, so they give it to us, write it off at full price. Everybody wins.”

“I get it.” Just because she didn’t know that Pepsi owned Quaker didn’t make her stupid. Or did it? Other people always seemed to know things she didn’t. But then, she’d never tried very hard in school. Around sixth grade, she’d realized that boys would do her homework. She didn’t even have to fool around with them unless she wanted to. They were happy to be near her. This band, the Hold Steady, had a song called “You Can Make Him Like You.” And it was true. All the way through college, where she’d barely graduated with a 2.1 in sociology. Even that had required her to flirt with a professor senior year so he would let her retake her final. Not that she’d slept with him. He was old. And married. But she’d gone to his study hours dressed in her cutest gray yoga pants, the ones that cupped her ass perfectly, and made sure to lean over his desk and let him see the black thong poking out where her T-shirt didn’t reach. She knew that her moves were obvious, and she knew he knew too. But she’d learned that men didn’t care. They could be fully aware they were being played and still enjoy the game. No doubt he was filing her image away for later, when he was having boring sex with his wife for the millionth time.

So she’d gotten her C’s, and she was a college graduate, nobody could take that away. But she wondered if she should have studied a little harder. For this trip she’d bought a Kindle, loaded it with a bunch of famous books she hadn’t read, The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man and whatever. She’d forced her way through them, too. But she had to admit she didn’t really enjoy them. Maybe she should have tried Twilight and The Hunger Games; a lot of her friends liked those.

“What’s happening today?” Gwen said. Besides my birthday. She wondered if they’d forgotten.

“I’m meeting with James about that reporter coming next week,” Owen said.

“What’s that?”

“Yeah, from Houston. He wants a list of talking points for everybody, make sure we’re all on message about the mission. Talk about our local partners, how we do more than just hand out food, all that stuff.”

“Spin, in other words,” Scott said. “Make sure WorldCares gets mentioned along with CARE and MSF and the big boys. Publicity means donations. So if you have any questions about what we’re doing over here, keep them to yourself.”

—

Gwen had come to Dadaab imagining herself hand-feeding starving kids, handing out bowls of soup to grateful villagers. She saw now that she hadn’t had a clue how refugee camps operated. Only the most recent arrivals were hungry. A massive operation existed precisely to keep the refugees from starving. In that narrow sense, the camps worked. The Somalis who lived here ate better than their countrymen across the border—or the Kenyan villagers who lived nearby. Many refugees sold portions of their food rations in local markets.

At the same time, the refugees were stuck in legal limbo. Kenyans didn’t want Somalis any more than most Americans wanted Mexican immigrants. As far as the Kenyan government was concerned, the camps were too large and had been open too long. So Kenya didn’t allow the refugees to own land or work legally. They weren’t even supposed to leave the camps, although as a practical matter the Kenyan police couldn’t stop them. Most of all, the government didn’t want the refugees organizing for political rights or citizenship.

So the refugees couldn’t work or farm. They were warehoused in relative safety, and they would never starve. But they were basically prisoners. Like prisoners, they spent much of their time chasing freebies. Their requests ranged from the petty—My ration of cooking oil was short last week—to the heartbreaking—My brother disappeared at the border two months ago. Can you help me find him? If you weren’t a doctor, opportunities for genuine heroism were few and far between at Dadaab.

Recently, Gwen had been spending her time with kids. The average Somali woman had six children, and the camps didn’t have nearly enough schools to accommodate them. The girls stayed close by their mothers. The boys played with raggedy soccer balls and pretended to shoot one another. WorldCares had boxes of donated children’s books stored in the back of its warehouse. They’d arrived a few months before, but no one knew what to do with them. The kids couldn’t speak English, much less read it. The boxes sat untouched as the food deliveries came and went. Just thinking about them depressed Gwen, made her think of all the books she hadn’t read.

About a month before, she had gone into the warehouse and grabbed the first book she found, a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. She took the choice as a sign. All the books she could have picked, and she’d come up with one she remembered. She took it to the front gate and stood outside reading until a boy wandered over to listen to her. Since then she’d come out every day, picking a different book each time. Some days only a couple kids showed up. Some days, twenty or so. Only one, a tiny boy named Joseph who had the whitest teeth Gwen had ever seen, understood more than a few words of English. He had taken upon himself the role of translator. Gwen figured he was adding his own commentary, because he often had the kids laughing at stuff that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

—

“How about you?” Owen said, back in the canteen. “Any big plans today?”

“Joseph gonna be helping you with your reading again?” Scott said. “He told me last week that you got through The Cat in the Hat all on your own.”

Gwen didn’t bother answering. Scott had come by her trailer two nights before for a quick-and-dirty. She hadn’t been in the mood. Since then he’d been snippy. Guys like him hated being told no.

“Such a dick,” Owen said. “By the way, happy birthday.” He reached into the messenger bag he always carried, handed Gwen an oversize envelope.

“Seriously?” Scott said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been carrying that for three months to give to her. That’s weird, man.”

Bringing a card for her all the way from the United States did verge on weird. But Gwen wasn’t giving Scott the pleasure of hearing her say so. “It’s called being thoughtful,” she said. She wrapped an arm around Owen’s shoulders, kissed his cheek. She was surprised to feel the muscles in his upper back. Three months unloading trucks had toughened him up.

“Of course he remembered,” Scott said. “You’ve been talking about it for weeks. I wanted to pretend that we’d forgotten just to see what would happen, but your hero here wouldn’t dream of it. Bet he’s got a poem for you in there. ‘The White Rose of Kenya.’ She walks through the camps like a stripe on a skunk. With every step, she makes refugee hearts leap. Too bad it’s their stomachs that are the problem.”

Despite herself, Gwen laughed.

“Or would it be a limerick? There once was a girl in Dadaab. Whose mouth I want on my —”

“That doesn’t rhyme.”