6
IT TOOK HIM THREE HOURS to drive the hundred miles from Arisimbi to the Banque Commerciale and the Sabena ticket offlee in Kigali, and then three hours back, the road through Rwanda like nothing from past experience.
Get to the top of a long grade and look around, all you saw were hills in every direction, misty hills, bright green hills, hills that were terraced and cultivated, crops growing among groves of banana trees, the entire country, Terry believed, one big vegetable garden.
The red streaks on distant hills were dirt roads, the squares of red dotting the slopes, houses, compounds, a church. He cruised the twolane blacktop with all the windows in Toreki's Volvo station wagon cranked open. He drove with a sense of making his move, his life about to turn a corner.
The down side was getting stuck behind trucks on the blind curves and grades, trucks piled high with bananas and bags of charcoal, trucks carrying work crews, a big yellow semi with PRIMUS BEER lettered across the rear end that Terry stared at for miles. The trucks, and the people along the side of the road, people standing in groups like they were waiting for a bus and people going somewhere, women in bright colors carrying plastic buckets on their heads, clay pots as big around as medicine balls, boys pushing carts loaded with plastic chairs grooved together, goats grazing close to the road, Ankole cows with their graceful horns and tough meat taking their time to cross.
But no dogs. Where were the dogs? A roadside poster warned against AIDS. A sign on a Coca-Cola stand said ICI SALLON DE COIFFURE.
People strayed onto the blacktop and he would lean on his horn, something he never did at home.
Finally cresting a grade he descended toward Adsimbi, the village laid out below him left to right, the marketplace of concrete stalls on the offside of the main road, away from the sector office and the squares of red brick among plots of vegetation, the bar, the beer lady's house, the compound where Laurent's squad lived, the well, the charcoal seller's house, the compound where Thomas the corn man lived, all of it a patchwork of red and green leading up to the white church and the rectory in the trees.
Terry parked the Volvo wagon in front of the sector office and went in.
Laurent Kamweya in his starched camies looked up from the only desk in the room and then rose saying, 'Fatha, how can I be of service?'
Terry liked Laurent and believed he meant it. 'You know where I can find Bernard?'
It seemed to stop him for a moment. Laurent turned enough to indicate the window, the heavy wooden shutters open, the street outside that trailed through the village. 'You see the white flower by the door of the beer lady's house,' Laurent said. 'She has banana beer today, so that's where he is, with his friends. Tell me what you want with him.'
'Have a talk,' Terry said. 'See if I can get him to give himself up.'
'Persuade Bernard Nyikizi to confess to murder?'
'To save his immortal soul.'
'You serious to do this?'
I'll give it a try. Are you busy?' Terry said. 'There's something else I want to ask you.'
Laurent said, 'Please,' gesturing over his desk, the surface clean except for a clipboard holding a few papers. The brick walls of the office were as clean as the desk. A woven mat covered the floor. The place always looked the same, temporary, never much going on. Laurent was watching now as Terry slipped his hand inside his white cassock and came out with currency, ten five-thousand-franc notes, the new one illustrated with tribal dancers, and laid the money on the clean desk.
'Fifty thousand francs,' Terry said. 'I'd like you to do me a favor, if you would. Use half of this to pay for graves dug in the churchyard, forty-seven graves.'
'You have permission of the bourgmestre?'
'Fuck the bourgmestre, it's private property, the state has nothing to say about it.'
Laurent hesitated. 'Why do you ask me? You could see to it.'
'I'm leaving, going home.'
'For good?'
'For good or bad. This afternoon.'
'You have someone to take your place?'
'That's not my problem. Ask the bishop.'
'Will you continue to be a priest?'
Terry hesitated. 'Why do you ask that?'
'You seem different to other priests I've known. I say this as a compliment to you.' Laurent paused, waiting for Terry to tell if he would still be a priest. When he didn't answer, Laurent said,
'Twenty-five thousand to dig graves is very generous.'
'What does it come to,' Terry said, 'a dollar and a half each?' He picked up five of the notes and dropped them closer to Laurent standing behind the desk. 'This is for another favor. I need a ride to the airport.'
'Take the bus,' Laurent said, 'is much cheaper.'
'But what I'd like you to do,' Terry said, 'is use the Volvo. Bring it back and give it to Chantelle, or sell it in Kigali and give her the money.'
'I have to ask again,' Laurent said, 'why you want me to do it, not someone else.'
' 'Cause you're the man here,' Terry said. 'You may have your doubts about me, but I don't have any about you. If I'm wrong and you keep the car or the money for yourself, well, Chantelle's the one who's out. So it's up to you, partner.'
Let him chew on that.
Terry turned to the door, then looked back. 'I won't be long.' He paused again, remembering something, and said, 'Where're all the dogs? I've been meaning to ask that for a long time.'
'People don't like to have dogs anymore,' Laurent said. 'The dogs ate too many of the dead.'
The only difference between the beer lady's house and what was called the bar both mud brick with metal roofs the beer lady made her own banana brew, urwagwa, and sold it in used Primus litre bottles with a straw for five to fifteen cents depending on the supply.
The bar offered commercial brands, too, Primus, made with sorghum, and Mutzig, which Terry drank once in a while. He walked into the beer lady's house breathing through his mouth against the stench of overripe bananas and body odor, into a bare-brick room that could be a prison cell.
There was Bernard in his shirt, one of his buddies next to him, both against the wall behind a plywood table, both sucking on reed straws stuck into brown litre bottles, the Primus label worn off from reuse. The third one sat to the left of Bernard in a straight chair with his bottle and straw, the chair tilted against the wall, his bare feet hanging free. The fourth one was just now coming out of a back hall.
Terry waited until he was in the room-the same four from the market the other day-all of them watching him now, Bernard murmuring to them in Kinyarwanda. There was no sign of the beer lady.
Terry said to Bernard, 'Any more visions?'
'I told you in the Confession,' Bernard said, 'what thing is going to happen.' He spoke with the reed straw in his mouth, holding the bottle against his chest. 'I don't tell my visions in this place.'
'It doesn't matter,' Terry said. 'You told everyone at the market you saw me and I saw you. Talking about the time you came in the church with your machete, your panga. Your words, 'I saw him and he saw me.' Isn't that fight? I saw you hack four people to death, what you told me, and you saw me do nothing to stop you. Now you say you're gonna do it again. Cut anybody you don't like down to size, including me. Right? Isn't that what you said?'
'I speak only to my friends in this place,' Bernard said, still with the straw in his mouth. 'We don't want you. What do you come here for?'
'To ask you to give yourself up. Tell Laurent Kamweya what you did in the church.'
Bernard, smiling now, said, 'You must be a crazy person.' He spoke to his friends in Kinyarwanda and now
