film and her journal. Tom wanted her to give a talk and slide presentation at the church when she got back. She hadn’t exposed a single frame or made a single note, a situation she had better start rectifying right away.
“Excuse me, I have to get into my pack,” she said to the young soldier who’d been carrying it and was now using it as a pillow as he lay on his back, legs crossed at the knee.
She removed the camera from a side compartment, turned it on, and checked the frame counter on the lit-up display panel.
“Okay if I take your picture?”
The soldier pointed to himself, raising his almost invisible eyebrows.
She was pleased to see a silver crucifix hanging from his neck by a silver chain. “Yes. You.”
He stood, his stick limbs unfolding with movements that suggested the extension of a carpenter’s ruler, and posed as if for a guerrilla recruiting poster, a warrior’s scowl on his teenage face, his shoulders stiffened, rifle held crosswise over his front.
She flipped to the back pages of her journal and wrote “Roll 1” at the top and the number 1 at the side, and beside the number “SPLA soldier” and the date. Ken, Jim, and Santino were her next subjects. Taking the photographs, identifying them by frame number, was very satisfying. She was no longer a mere passenger on the expedition but someone with a real, active role to play. Already, she was starting to think about what she would say at her presentation and how she would say it. The thought of addressing a large crowd did not intimidate her. She had shone as a public speaker during her otherwise dismal high school career, never nervous when called on to recite in class. Her strong, rich voice, with its slightly masculine timbre, caught people’s attention. It made her feel poised and attractive, blurring the picture she had of herself as a rawboned girl with eyes set too far apart alongside a nose too long above lips too thin.
The group resumed its journey. Women at a well, one cranks the pump handle, a jet-black breast showing above the polka-dot robe knotted over the opposite breast. Click. Another woman farther down the road grinds grain by pounding it with a pestle the size of an oar in a wooden mortar. Click. Quinette would bring to them, those midwestern farmers and small-town folks, images from a world they’d never seen and probably never would, not even people like the Formillers, who owned something like six or seven thousand acres of corn and soybeans in Black Hawk and Grundy counties and had money to burn and had gone to Europe on vacation and taken cruises to the Caribbean. They would never cross the Nile in a dugout canoe or look upon Dinka boys herding belled oxen—click—or tribesmen squatting under a baobab—click.
“Sister, you would like to ride on my bike?”
He had come up from behind, a soldier, although he wore no uniform, only dark blue shorts and a ratty striped shirt. A Kalashnikov with a folding metal stock was slung across his back. He pedaled alongside her for a few yards, the front wheel jerking side to side because he was going so slowly; then he stopped to stand straddling the seat, and he was so tall that there were several inches of daylight between the seat and the V of his legs. He asked her name and she told him, and he said his was Matthew Deng.
“Bye-bye, Kinnit.”
“Bye-bye?”
“He means hello,” Ken called out. “A lot of times they’ll say bye-bye when they mean hello.”
“A woman should not be walking,” Matthew declared gallantly. He had buck teeth; or maybe he just looked as if he did because his lower lip was drawn in by the cavity where his bottom teeth had been. “You are doing so much for us, I must do something for you. I can take you the rest of the way. You’ll get there before everyone else.”
She looked at him and the vintage one-gear bike, with its rust-pitted rims and wide bald tires. “And just how do you know where we’re going?”
“Bush telegraph,” said Ken. “It’s faster than e-mail and you don’t need a modem.”
He told her it would be all right if she accepted the offer—the town was less than two miles away and this was a liberated area, firmly under SPLA control.
Matthew stripped off his shirt, folded it, and lay it on the carrier over the rear fender. She climbed on