exchange he gave me a playing card with a portrait of a President of the United States on the back. The President was Nixon.
“You ever go back without one of these, you die,” he told me. I gave the Nixon card to the man who called himself Brother Dust. He gave me a roll of shillings and told me to come back on Tuesday.
I gave two thirds of the roll to my mother.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, holding the notes in her hands like blessings.
“I have a job,” I said, challenging her to ask. She never did ask. She bought clothes for Little Egg and fruit from the market. On the Tuesday, I went back to the upstairs club that smelled of beer and smoke and come and took another load inside me to the spikey-haired man at the Embassy.
So I became a runner. I became a link in a chain that ran from legendary cities under the clouds of Kilimanjaro across terminum, past the UN Interdiction Force, to an upstairs club in Nairobi, into my body, to the US Embassy. No, I do not have that right. I was a link in a chain that started eight hundred years ago, as light flies, in a gas cloud called Rho Ophiuchi, that ran from US Embassy to US Government, and on to a man whose face was on the back on one of my safe-conduct cards and from him into a future no one could guess.
“It scares them, that’s why they want it,” Brother Dust told me. “Americans are always drawn to things that terrify them. They think these fullerenes will give the edge to their industries, make the economy indestructible. Truth is, they’ll destroy their industries, wreck their economy. With these, anyone can make anything they want. Their free market can’t stand up to that.”
I did not stay a runner long. Brother Dust liked my refusal to be impressed by what the world said should impress me. I became his personal assistant. I made appointments, kept records. I accompanied him when he called on brother Sheriffs. The Chaga was coming closer, the Tacticals were on the streets; old enemies were needed as allies now.
One such day, Brother Dust gave me a present wrapped in a piece of silk. I unwrapped it, inside was a gun. My first reaction was fear; that a sixteen year-old girl should have the gift of life or death in her hand.
Would I, could I, ever use it on living flesh? Then a sense of power crept through me. For the first time in my life, I had authority.
“Don’t love it too much,” Brother Dust warned. “Guns don’t make you safe. Nowhere in this world is safe, not for you, not for anyone.”
It felt like a sin, like a burn on my body as I carried it next to my skin back to Jogoo Road. It was impossible to keep it in our rooms, but Simeon in the metal shop had been stashing my roll for some time now and he was happy to hide the gun behind the loose block. He wanted to handle it. I would not let him, though I think he did when I was not around. Every morning I took it out, some cash for lunch and bribes, and went to work.
With a gun and money in my pocket, Brother Dust’s warning seemed old and full of fear. I was young and fast and clever. I could make the world as safe or as dangerous as I liked. Two days after my seventeenth birthday, the truth of what he said arrived at my door.
It was late, it was dark and I was coming off the matatu outside Church Army. It was a sign of how far things had gone with my mother and father that they no longer asked where I was until so late, or how the money kept coming. At once I could tell something was wrong; a sense you develop when you work on the street. People were milling around in the compound, needing to do something, not knowing what they could do. Elsewhere, women’s voices were shouting. I found Simeon.
“What’s happening, where is my mother?”
“The shambas. They have broken through into the shambas.”
I pushed my way through the silly, mobbing Christians. The season was late, the corn over my head, the cane dark and whispering. I strayed off the shamba paths in moments. The moon ghosted behind clouds, the air-glow of the city surrounded me but cast no light. The voices steered me until I saw lights gleaming through the stalks: torches and yellow naphtha flares. The voices were loud now, close. There were now men, loud men. Loud men have always frightened me. Not caring for the crop, I charged through the maize, felling rich, ripe heads.
The women of Church Army stood at the edge of the crushed crop. Maize, potatoes, cane, beans had been trodden down, ripped out, torn up. Facing them was a mob of shanty-town people. The men had torches and cutting tools. The women’s kangas bulged with stolen food. The children’s baskets and sacks were stuffed with bean pods and maize cobs. They faced us shamelessly. Beyond the flattened wire fence, a larger crowd was waiting in front of the market; the hyenas, who if the mob won, would go with them, and if it lost, would sneak back to their homes. They outnumbered the women twenty to one.
But I was bold. I had the authority of a gun.
“Get out of here,” I shouted at them. “This is not your land.”
“And neither is it yours,” their leader said, a man thin as a skeleton, barefoot, dressed in cut-off jeans and a rag of a fertilizer company T-shirt. He held a tincan oil-lamp in his left hand, in his right a machete. “It is all borrowed from the Chaga. It will take it away, and none of us will have it. We want what we can take, before it is lost to all of us.”
“Go to the United Nations,” I shouted.
The leader shook his head. The men stepped forward. The women murmured, gripped their mattocks and hoes firmly.
“The United Nations? Have you not heard? They are scaling down the relief effort. We are to be left to the mercy of the Chaga.”
“This is our food. We grew it, we need it. Get off our land!”
“Who are you?” the leader laughed. The men hefted their pangas and stepped forward. The laughter lit the dark inside me that Brother Dust had recognized, that made me a warrior. Light-headed with rage and power, I pulled out my gun. I held it over my head. One, two, three shots cracked the night. The silence after was more shocking than the shots.
“So. The child has a gun,” the hungry man said.
“The child can use it too. And you will be first to die.”
“Perhaps.” the leader said. “But you have three bullets. We have three hundred hands.”
My mother pulled me to one side as the shanty men came through. Their pangas caught the yellow light as they cut their way through our maize and cane. After them came the women and the children, picking, sifting, gleaning. The three hundred hands stripped our fields like locusts. The gun pulled my arm down like an iron weight. I remember I cried with frustration and shame. There were too many of them. My power, my resolve, my weapon, were nothing. False bravery. Boasting. Show.
By morning the field was a trampled mess of stalks, stems and shredded leaves. Not a grain worth eating remained. By morning I was waiting on the Jogoo Road, my thumb held out for a matatu, my possessions in a sports bag on my back. A refugee again. The fight had been brief and muted.
“What is this thing?” My mother could not touch the gun. She pointed at it on the bed. My father could not even look. He sat hunched up in a deep, old armchair, staring at his knees. “Where did you get such a thing?”
The dark thing was still strong in me. It had failed against the mob, but it was more than enough for my parents.
“From a Sheriff,” I said. “You know what a sheriff is? He is a big man. For him I stick Chaga-spores up my crack. I give them to Americans, Europeans, Chinese, anyone who will pay.”
“Do not speak to us like that!”
“Why shouldn’t I? What have you done, but sit here and wait for something to happen? I’ll tell the only thing that is going to happen. The Chaga is going to come and destroy everything. At least I have taken some responsibility for this family, at least I have kept us out of the sewer! At least we have not had to steal other people’s food!”
“Filth money! Dirt money, sin money!”
“You took that money readily enough.”
“If we had known…”
“Did you ever ask?”
“You should have told us.”
“You were afraid to know.”
My mother could not answer that. She pointed at the gun again, as if it were the proof of all depravity.
“Have you ever used it?”
