Silent Light by Mark Jacobs

Author:Mark Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781682194447
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Kawasaki two-stroke ran well. Roger piloted the bike through a flow of non-linear traffic heading for the road to Uvira, Smith behind him holding his go bag. The street they took out of the city was wide, as if it had been built to accommodate the gigantic yellow earth mover they came to, parked crossways at an intersection. There was no driver, no indication why it was there. Kids were using the bed of the half-raised dumper as a slide. Coming down, they scrambled to break their fall at the lip of the open metal maw. Some of them fell out, pushed by the weight of the kid behind them. The ones who fell picked themselves up from the ground, laughing and limping, and climbed back into the truck. They slid again.

As cars and motorbikes approached the intersection, they created a new traffic pattern around the earth mover, but trucks could not get past it. A man in a Zorro cape had taken it upon himself to reroute the trucks, waving a gnarled shepherd’s crook at the driver of every big vehicle that rolled into view. He lacked authority, and the truckers went their own way. The man in the cape harangued them until they disappeared from sight. The cape was long. It trailed on the ground. The ends of the black fabric were ragged and dirty, and the whole thing had a dull patina of dust.

Roger followed the flow. Over the whine of the engine Smith heard the caped man shouting at them. As they left the city the landscape opened up. Smith took in red dirt and green growth over low hills separated by sheer drops. The drops had been scalloped by titanic forces that predated the Belgians, the Congolese, the whole idea of time as something you could slice into edible epochs. The green was brilliant but had the cropped look of deforestation.

On the outskirts of the city they went by a market where the vendors had spread their merchandise on the ground, sitting alongside piles of manioc and melons, kids clothes and batteries and cell phone gear. Everyone was talking. It was not clear if anyone was buying.

They went past an open courtyard where the sun had cracked the hard dirt into a pattern of lines separating irregular oblongs, like a tile floor preserved for centuries until archaeologists uncovered it.

Once, where the road flexed an elbow, the ground on the left fell steeply away and they saw the lake filling up the distance. It was blue and calm and looked friendly. Men were fishing from narrow boats. The long poles they held, dipping to the water, had the nimble curve of suspension bridges.

A hundred yards on, along the west side of the road, they passed women in pagnes with buckets in their hands. Two of the women had dropped their buckets and faced off against each other over whose turn it was to draw water. The older one was thick in the middle. The younger one was slim and seemed to be ahead on points.

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