Hard As Kerosene

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research New York City College of Technology 2020 Hard As Kerosene Aaron Barlow CUNY New York City College of Technology How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/563 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Hard As Kerosene Aaron Barlow Second, Revised Edition Cover photo by Aaron Barlow Author photo by Brent Stiller Published by: Brooklyn, NY 2020 ISBN-13: 979-8639056208 PUBLISHED UNDER AN ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE To the Memories of John Elmer, Who I Knew and Loved, Poboye Konaté, Who I Wish I’d Known Better, and Jennifer Rubin, Who, alas, I Never Met And a thanks to Kerry Sly who always moves toward danger and who, without knowing, inspired me to complete this story. Now you wear your skin like iron, Your breath as hard as kerosene. – Townes Van Zandt For we beg the reader to understand that we only commit anachronisms when we choose, and when by a daring violation of those natural laws some great ethical truth is to be advanced. — William Makepeace Thackery Pendennis Falling Light blurred into faint hints of color. He opened his eyes. Hints of day crawled under the door, the wood and corrugated zinc coming into focus. Slowly. The dull sliding grays carried promise and threat as they moved over the cement floor. They reached tentative, translucent fingers through newly outlined cracks. Finding purchase, they pulled themselves into the room. “Furtive,” he muttered, not even half awake, “that's the word for them, or exploratory.” Spies and scouts, he imagined. for the army of daylight creeping in on him. He measured their advance through slitted, sleep-encrusted eyes. Cautious and silent, they spread ahead of the battalion into the cinderblock chamber where he’d been sleeping. Toward a brain in need of rest, not them. “It’s false dawn. Real day can’t come, certainly not so soon.” He closed his eyes, cracked lips forming soothing words: “Nothing dangerous here, not for a while.” A pause, but no more sleep. He sighed. “It shouldn’t be so bad, anyhow: merely one more start; another aching morning.” He groaned, remembered similar mornings and thought ahead to the approaching one. “Cool, yes, it is… for now, but calling down scalding sun.” A pause— expelled breath. “Just another another here in the Sahel.” He stretched and turning his head away from the door, trying to recover the quiet before the interruption of the light. But the world outside wasn’t going to allow it. It sent a merciless and uncaring, sudden, sharp and loud whoosh from the sky. A military jet, skimming low over his head, jerked his eyes wide, demolishing any sense of quiet he under the nearing African 1980s dawn. Pain spiked down from it into his forehead. Eyes now wide, he looked toward the ceiling, its outline now appearing through the lessening gloom. Given the evidence, he grimaced, he really was now awake. The pain in his head did not recede with the noise tailing away. Still, he pretended to rest. That was not going to be possible. Another jet followed close on the heels of the first and just as loud. Even the heaviest sleepers of Mopti, he imagined, were now wide awake. 3 Such a roar had to be rare in a place as quiet and remote as a sleepy Malian town just south of the Sahara, or so he told himself. Its seeming precarity on the bank of the Niger River was belied by its centuries of age, its changeless decades. The modern of jets was not part of its life. So he wondered if the jets would return. Slowly, he turned once more toward the door. A new and sudden, shooting pain pierced his left temple. Closing his eyes, he let it stab down into what remained of his collapsed life. It listed for him, on an imaginary blackboard with rasping chalk, just how much he’d drunk the night before. Until it all blurred under the eraser of overindulgence. Though his eyes had begun widening, his body hadn’t willingness to move. The faint grays from under the door, now yellowing, had reached his woven-reed mat. He listened. Outside silence could provide excuse to stay still. He could wait until it was replaced by signs of life in the bush-taxi yard beyond that door. No. He was straining, trying to hear something, anything that might provide him with a reason to stop lying there. He sighed and again mumbled at himself. “I have got to get going, got to get somewhere.” He remained flat on his back on the mat, his bladder now straining. He dozed anyhow. Once the yellow light had replaced the gray and had begun to brighten, he heard a new sound, a low, far away rumble. Soon, it was recognizable, a faint, distant hum growing steadily into the throb of a lonely, poorly tuned Peugeot engine, probably under the hood of a camionnette bâchée, a tarpaulin-covered (over the bed) 404 pick-up. Now loud and close, it churned rubber tires—certainly almost bald— into the silent yard outside, stirring up, he imagined, the dusty laterite and sand that made up the ground—and then died with a cough, a sputter and a slight squeak of worn brakes. Life of the morning was finally beginning; he would not be rising to wait—and wait for additional waiting that he knew could follow hard on that. And that probably would. This was Africa, anyway, where waiting is the game of life. Or of time. 4 There’s always a reason for waiting, he told himself, and not giving up: things eventually move. So, he paid attention to this new signal from outside, the one that he had needed, the one moving him to the life that would soon be going on all around him. The one that would see him through. “Yup. That’s it. Might as well get on with it now.” He grunted, jerked himself onto an elbow—careful: his head sharply reminded him again that it still suffered the night. It needed more sympathy than, he knew, it was likely to get. He surveyed the occupants of his austere little room. The ancient boy- scout backpack he’d bought—a find!—in the Ouagadougou marketplace some years before lay slopped against the cinderblocks next to a couple of large, green beer bottles, both empty. His cheap leather sandals waited at the end of his mat, placed as though he’d been tipped out of them into sleep. The pagna cloth he normally slept under rested in a wad next to the sandals. Some dust and a few cobwebs hung on the rough beams below the zinc roof. Otherwise, the room, which he had never before seen in the light, was empty. “At least it won’t take much time to pack.” Around him were, he thought as he started to get up, signs of a tenuous existence, a passing through. Grimacing, he heaved himself upright and into the sandals. Bending over, sighing with the pain in his head, he stuffed the pagna into the pack, rolled up his mat and strapped it on the top. No need to change clothes. No matter what he wore, after a few hours in an African bush taxi he would stink just as badly as now. He grabbed the pack, opened the door and stepped outside, leaving the empty bottles where they lay. Squinting against the early sun now making free about him, he identified the vehicle he’d heard. Yes, a canvas-backed pick-up that had come to rest amid a growing crowd of people at the far side of the yard. Market women, wrapped in a riot of pagnas much more colorful than the one now in his pack, were already handing parcels up to an apprentice standing on the rack above the canvas, high over the bed. A few meters from them, another woman had positioned a pushcart and was stoking a charcoal fire contained upon it, heating a conical pot half filled with oil, preparing to cook the beignets she would soon be offering for sale. Further in the distance, a clanking of bottles announced the arrival of another cart, this one pushed by a young man and, as the sound proclaimed, containing soft drinks and maybe even beer on ice. In Muslim Mali, the beer, if there at all, would be discretely placed, almost hidden. 5 A slight breeze, rising off the Niger River visible just beyond the wall at the edge of the yard, began to push stray bits of paper across the open space, their movements distracting him but the air cooling him. Though his head still hurt and his chapped lips cracked as they moved, he smiled, scanning the rest of the yard, eyes resting lightly on the browns, beiges, and tans, the pale colors that dominated the landscape before him. Alien though he was, they made him feel at home. He continued to look around, over the wall to the right to the flat tops of Mopti’s buildings running down to the river beyond the taxi gare, and up to the bowl of dust that ended well above the horizon and rimming the pale blue African sky straight up. As he scanned the distances, he forced his mind to practical concerns.

Load more