Chapter 7 #2
Something shifted in the yard while they hauled. Cole had been right. You couldn’t teach it. You could only put something difficult or painful enough in front of them that they had to work together to figure out how to get through it.
Cole had designed all four stations. Each one was built to break if you tried it alone.
Jomo was the one who surprised me.
He couldn’t haul the way Baraka could. But when the cargo net wouldn’t seat right on its pegs, Jomo crouched beside it and studied the problem for a full minute before he touched anything.
Then he drove a peg at an angle none of the others thought of, looped the netting through a figure eight, and the whole thing pulled taut.
At the wall, he rigged a rope seat so the last man over could be hauled up without a boost from below. Nobody asked him to. He just saw the gap and filled it.
I was standing far enough back to see the whole picture. Cole came alongside me.
“The little one,” Cole said.
“I see him.”
“Sharp mind.”
“Yes.”
We watched Jomo rig the island crossing. The others were debating how the planks were supposed to work. Jomo picked up a plank, laid it across the first gap at an angle that used the drum’s curve as a brace, and stepped back.
“Huh,” Cole said.
By late afternoon, they’d built all four stations and run each one badly enough to know how much work was ahead of them. They came into the dining tent that evening completely exhausted, and they ate without talking. One by one, they finished and drifted toward the bunkhouse without a word.
The three of us stayed. Andrew refilled his coffee from the pot the kitchen staff kept going and sat back down across from Cole and me.
“Zayn,” Andrew said.
“He’s a good leader,” Cole said.
“He coordinated the team pretty well. Fell into the role naturally, too.”
“And the others followed,” I said.
“Baraka surprised me.” Andrew wrapped both hands around his mug. “He carried more than anyone today and didn’t say a word about it. Yesterday, he was the loudest man in camp.”
“Give a man a job that fits him and he quits performing,” Cole said. “He’s not a leader. He’s a workhorse who thought he was supposed to be a leader because nobody gave him anything else to be.”
“What about Jomo?” I asked.
Andrew leaned forward. “That kid’s mind and spirit are something else. The net peg, the rope seat on the wall, the plank angle on the island crossing. He sees mechanical problems the rest of them walk past.”
“He finished the march last by twenty minutes,” Cole said. “But he finished it. Everything working against him and he kept moving.”
“There are men who went through our pipeline who would have quit,” Andrew said quietly. “With two good feet and half the distance.”
Nobody argued with that.
I looked across the tent. Sarah sat at one of the far tables, her auburn hair catching the lamplight, talking with Alyson. She didn’t turn around. She hadn’t looked my way since we’d sat down.
Paris felt like a year ago.
The giraffe came in at dusk.
I was sitting alone at the edge of camp where the last cabin gave way to open ground, the chair tipped back against the wall. The light was draining out of the sky, and I was content to sit there and bask in the dwindling light.
It came from the east, moving through the scattered acacias with the slow, rocking gait that made it look like it was walking on the bottom of an ocean.
Eighteen feet of animal, stepping through the scrub brush without bending a branch, its neck swaying with each stride.
It stopped thirty meters from where I sat and turned its head to look at me with dark, heavy-lidded eyes.
“Pretty amazing, right?”
Sarah had come around the side of the cabin. She stood a few feet away with her arms crossed, her face turned toward the giraffe.
“You mean that long-necked cow?”
It got a giggle out of her. “Yes, but I think it’s called a giraffe.”
She leaned against the cabin wall. The giraffe lowered its head, tore a mouthful of leaves from a low branch, and raised it again, chewing slowly.
“They come through camp a few times a week,” she said. “Mostly at dusk. The perimeter isn’t fenced, so the animals just wander in when they feel like it. I’ve had a zebra outside my cabin door at three in the morning.”
“That must have been something.”
“She was eating my laundry off the line. Specifically, my scrub top.” Sarah almost smiled. “I let her have it.”
“Then I guess we’re both down at least one shirt.”
She looked at me. The smile broke through all the way this time. “I really am sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. It’s more funny than anything.”
“It wasn’t funny at the time.”
“It’s funny now.”
The sky was going from amber to deep blue, and the giraffe stood dark against it, pulling at the branches like it had nowhere else to be. She was quiet for a moment, watching it.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Go ahead.” I stood, angling my body more toward hers.
“Why are you turning them into soldiers?”
I looked at her profile. She was still facing the giraffe.
“I saw you last night,” she said. “Coming out of the dark in that paint. And today, I watched you march them until they could barely stand and then work them the rest of the afternoon.” She paused.
“I’ve worked with some of these men for a year.
I know them. Zayn helps me with the animals before anyone else is awake.
Baraka carried a lame baby impala two kilometers back to the vet facility on his own because he couldn’t stand to leave it. They’re good people.”
“They are.”
“Then why are you doing this to them?”
“I’m not doing anything to them. I’m giving them the skills to stay alive.”
“They’re not in a war.”
“They carry rifles, and they guard animals that men will kill for. They need to be ready for what that means.”
She turned to face me, arms still crossed, jaw set.
“They are practically kids, Donovan. You marched them until they couldn’t stand and then made them build an obstacle course. Jomo could barely walk by the end of it.”
“They’re not kids, Sarah. They’re young men, and they need to be treated as young men. Every one of them volunteered to be here. They chose this.”
“I know that. But there’s a difference between training them and grinding them down.”
“I know what I’m doing. You wouldn’t tell someone in my profession how to treat a sick rhino.”
She held my eyes. I held hers. The giraffe pulled at another branch behind us.
“You’re right,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”
The way she said it, easy, agreeable, the kind of agreement that has nothing to do with actually agreeing, told me I’d stepped in it. She pushed off the wall, gave me a nod that was polite and nothing else, and walked back toward her cabin.
I stood there and listened to her footsteps fade.
The giraffe was gone. It probably left out of secondhand embarrassment of what an ass I had been.
She’d come to me with something real. About people she cared about, people she’d worked alongside for a year, and I’d compared her work to mine like hers was the one that didn’t matter.
I sat back down in the chair, and the quiet that had felt good ten minutes ago felt a lot lonelier now. Should I have stayed the strong, silent type and just shut the fuck up?
I thought about her face when she’d said their names. Zayn. Baraka. She knew the parts of them I hadn’t bothered to learn yet, and instead of hearing that, I’d told her she wasn’t qualified to have an opinion.
I sat there a long time, and what I thought about wasn’t whether I was right. I thought about the look on her face right before she decided I wasn’t worth the argument.