indicate Quinette’s dress, over which she now draped a green and white bead necklace. “What’ve you got, a date with the old goat? Going to show him what he’s been missing all these celibate years?”
Quinette hung her small gold crucifix over the necklace. “He’s taking me on his rounds of the Turkana villages. Guess I’ll be going to church in a way—so, my Sunday best.”
“Would you two kindly shut up? I’d like to sleep,” Anne Derby grumbled in the far bed.
Lily pushed her net aside and sat up. She was a short, broad-shouldered woman with lank brown hair and an almost-pretty face. Wearing a snug singlet and panties, she sat the way a man would sit, her squat legs spread apart. A few pubic hairs peered out from the crotch of her underwear.
“I know you know that the bloody Turkana killed four people just three days ago,” she said. “Shot ’em dead and left their wallets and money and took their shoes and clothes, and you’re going to go on a tour of their villages?”
“Malachy said I’ll be perfectly safe with him. They respect him. I mean, he’s been out here since before any of us were born, and he ain’t dead yet.”
“Who do we write if you don’t come back?” Anne asked. She swung out of bed, a wraithlike figure in her cotton nightdress, swigged from a bottle of Evian at her bedside, gargled, and then unzipped the front flap and spat noisily. “Mouth feels like the army marched through it in their socks.”
“Which army?” asked Lily.
“The bloody army. Who cares which one?” Anne took another drink. “ ‘Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.’ Byron.”
“Why, thank you. Should be ‘wine and men’ for us, but that doesn’t scan right, does it? How about this? ‘Heaven has sent us soda water as a torment for our crimes.’ G. K. Chesterton.”
“Happy hour the crime, a bad mouth and headache the torment. He was a cute one, that pilot with the guitar. Not a bad voice either.”
“My ex could sing twice as good and he was tenth rate,” Quinette said, slipping into her flip-flops. They didn’t go with the dress but were an improvement over sneakers or hiking boots.
“As a husband or singer?” Lily asked.
“Singer. As a husband, no rating, none, zero, zip,” Quinette answered in a tough, worldly voice. As a divorcée, she had a certain status in the eyes of her better-educated but never-married companions, and she tried to sound like a woman who’d been around whenever she had the chance.
She grabbed her minicamera and went out, hearing Anne call from behind her, “Ta! Say a prayer for us, will you?”
It looked as if the rains would fail again today. The sky was cloudless, and dust swirled and sparkled in the thin light air, reminding her of the soap flakes in those glass bubbles that are turned upside down to create an illusion of snowfall. Farm life had fine-tuned Quinette’s sensitivities to weather, and she knew that if she were a Turkana, she would curse this brilliant sky. “Their cows and goats are perishing by the dozen,” Malachy had said last Thursday, after news of the ambush spread from compound to compound. The bandit gang had waylaid four aid workers, two Kenyans and two white guys, as they were driving out to drill a bore hole. “What a bitter irony,” the priest intoned in his deep Irish voice, “that they should kill those trying to help them survive.” Quinette reckoned it was, though she didn’t understand how killing people for their clothes and shoes would fill a stomach or help anyone get through a drought.
She strode toward Hotel California’s mess hall, imitating the supererect bearing of a Dinka female. Back home she habitually slouched or crooked her knees to make herself look shorter, especially when she was around men of average height, but here she felt free to stretch herself to the max. “White Dinka Woman”—that’s what the people in Sudan had taken to calling her, and she cherished the nickname.
“Hey-ull, if that airstrip doesn’t have foxholes dug in it, I’ll land on the goddamned thing.”
It was the Texan, and he was sitting with four other people at one end of the dining room, which wasn’t a room really but a broad patio surrounded by a low stone wall under a vaulted grass roof with wooden poles running down from its center. There were Fitz Martin, Knight Air’s operation chief,