stared back at it and forgot her fears as she imagined everyone she knew looking at her on TV. It was a little like sneaking into a room full of people viewing a home video of yourself. You saw them and your own screen image at the same time; you were both the observer and the observed. Her mother, Kristen, Nicole and Jake and her nephew Danny, Pastor Tom, Mrs. Hoge, Alice, Terry, and the pupils from Sunday school—she saw them all watching her, sitting in a dugout paddled by bare-chested tribesmen, with a croc-infested river in the background and an African rebel beside her, wearing his ferocious scars and garland of ammunition. The Quinette in that inner picture did not appear as out of her element as the real Quinette felt; nor did the papyrus reeds and fever trees and soldiers’ faces, framed by the flickering rectangle in her mind’s eye, look as foreign and weird as they did to the eyes in her head. Visualizing the scene as it would appear on TV, before all those familiar people, had somehow domesticated it. An odd and wonderful thing happened when she turned away from the camera’s hypnotic stare to gaze at the world around her: the mental image dissolved, yet its feeling of familiarity lingered. The soldiers’ faces had lost their exotic menace, appearing no more peculiar or frightening than the faces of punked-out kids back home, with their pierced tongues and noses and spiked, tinted hair. The strangeness of her surroundings and this whole experience, which had nearly made her faint, had dissolved completely, and the sense that she was a stranger here dissolved with it. The thing she was doing no longer struck her as bizarre but seemed perfectly natural, something she was meant to do. A gusher of joy sprang from her stomach into her throat, and for a second she thought it would fly right out of her mouth in a birdlike cry, like lyrics that made you so happy you could not contain them inside yourself but had to sing them out loud. All that kept her silent, as the boats drew close to shore, was the knowledge that she was to be here for a short time only—five days, that was how long Ken figured it would take. Then she would begin the journey home, back to the routines she had longed for barely half an hour ago and now, suddenly, dreaded.
They entered a cove where the water was only knee deep. The soldiers and paddlers got out and walked the dugouts ashore, swinging them parallel to the bank so the passengers could disembark without getting their feet wet again. There was a large tree atop the bank, and from beneath the umbrella of its branches, another squad of four guerrillas stood up suddenly, surprising Quinette as she was lacing up her hiking boots. Where had they come from? Who were they? Dinka, she observed, noticing the same chevrons slashing across foreheads, as if they’d been clawed by an animal with a sense of precision. The same gap-toothed grins. Not just a cruel custom, she thought, but a tragic one, because the Dinkas’ teeth were as white as their skin was black; if they were allowed to keep them all, they could blind you with their smiles.
“Quite a bodyguard. Expecting trouble?” Phyllis said to Ken.
“Expecting it? No. Ready for it if it comes, yeah,” he replied. “But we’ll try to avoid making you a war correspondent,” he added in a patronizing tone of voice.
“Sarajevo, the intifada, Afghanistan. Been there done that, so it would be no problem,” Phyllis shot back, and you could tell it wasn’t just bravado.
The guerrillas collected the team’s rucksacks and shouldered them. Jim Prewitt blew out his cheeks, relieved that he wouldn’t have to carry his tent and sleeping bag the rest of the way. The leader issued commands in Dinka, and half the men jogged out in front, rifles clattering. The rest brought up the rear, and then the column filed through the reeds. The air was still, thick, and rank with the odors of mud and decaying vegetation. A mosquito sang in Quinette’s ear, another bit her on the forearm. She slapped it, smearing her skin with blood, then got bug repellent from her fanny pack and sprayed herself liberally.
They followed the trail up out of the marshes and onto the savannah and trooped down a narrow, rutted laterite road that cut through high grass the color