into his forehead in shallow V’s and his bottom front teeth missing. A custom, Santino had informed her an hour ago, when the soldiers appeared at the airstrip and grinned their hellos, the jagged gaps in their teeth startling her. They were Dinka tribesmen, and it was customary among the Dinka to have their bottom front teeth chopped out when they were ten years old. Santino didn’t know why, not being Dinka himself. That was the way they did things.
He was conferring again with Ken, in low tones. Ken set the airline bag down and pointed toward the river. Suddenly Quinette’s knees felt rubbery, and people and objects wavered before her eyes, as though a translucent curtain had dropped between her and them. Thinking she was about to faint, she sat down and leaned her head against the tree trunk and took in deep breaths, her heart beating as if it were trying to get out of her chest.
“Are you all right?” Jim Prewitt asked.
She nodded.
“You look white as a sheet.”
“Got woozy for a second. I’m okay.”
“It’s the heat,” Jim said, wiping his brow for emphasis. “Jet lag, too, I’ll bet. Maybe that malaria medicine. That can do it, too.”
She nodded again, although she knew, now that the vertigo was gone and her heart rate was returning to normal, that it wasn’t the heat, the malaria pills, or jet lag. It was the airline bag, stuffed with ten thousand dollars and Ken standing there so casually with it at his feet. It was the rebel soldiers with their fierce, scarred foreheads and missing teeth and the trees with green trunks instead of brown and the knowledge that she’d been plunked down in a place without electricity, telephones, highways, cars, TVs, or a single familiar thing. She’d left home only three days ago. Actually, she wasn’t sure if it had been three days. She’d lost track of time, flying from the small airport in Waterloo to Chicago O’Hare, from O’Hare all the way to Geneva, Ken and Jim meeting her there, then whisking her off to a connecting flight to Nairobi, where she’d tried to sleep but couldn’t, and then at dawn this morning winging on to Lokichokio in a twin-engine plane, stepping off it into the single-engine Cessna that had delivered her to this nameless place on the White Nile. Her mind and senses had been in suspended animation until that dizzying instant, moments ago, when they were awakened to the foreignness of her surroundings and to the reality of the incredible turn her life had taken. She who had been out of Iowa only a few times, never for very long and seldom very far, and who’d never done anything exceptional in her life, unless you counted the mess she’d been making of it until recently (and you really couldn’t because it had been an unexceptional mess—“trailer park trash, that’s what you’ve turned into,” her mother had scolded her, as if the commonness of her bad behavior was what made it offensive), had journeyed to a country at war in the heart of Africa, on a mission to liberate two hundred and nine black people from captivity. She felt inadequate to the task and completely out of place and a fleeting but intense longing to be home again, amid its everyday routines.
“Looks like we might be here for a while longer, so I might as well take advantage and do you two.” It was Phyllis, with her cameramen. She was done up in a Jungle Jane outfit—short-sleeve safari jacket with lots of pockets and green, lightweight pants and a wide hat over her long hair.
Phyllis motioned for her and Jim to come out into the light.
“I’ll start with you.” She indicated Quinette with a movement of her head. “You’re the reason I’m here. You’re the story.”
Quinette flinched and gave Phyllis a puzzled look. True, Ken had invited her to go on this particular mission and paid her travel expenses to draw attention to his cause, but she didn’t think of herself as the story.
“It’s the kids. They’re the story,” she began.
“Right. Sunday school kids from the American heartland, that’s the spin,” said Phyllis in her rough voice. “But you organized the campaign, right?”
“No. I helped out, but I—”
“Let’s make sure I’ve got your name right.” She took out a notebook from a side pocket of her Jungle Jane jacket and spelled out Quinette’s first and last names, and Quinette nodded that she had it right, and then was asked