and sat with her hands on the carrier for balance, her legs thrust out to keep her feet off the ground. They rode past fields of harvested sorghum; the strewn brown leaves and chopped stalks brought to mind her father’s lost acres, the memory causing her old grief to jab her with a keenness that caught her off guard; then the needle withdrew and the hurt passed from her. Trees bordering a stream, some tributary of a tributary, spun a filament of green across the sere grasslands. There were women bathing in the stream, skirts hiked up and knotted around their thighs, and they stopped and stared at the bike in shock, then doubled over in laughter.
“They have never seen before a lady on a bike,” Matthew explained.
“Dinka girls don’t ride bikes?”
“Oh my, no,” he said, as if she’d mentioned some inviolable taboo.
Standing up on the pedals, Matthew pumped hard to get over a gentle rise. The back side was steeper than the front, and they coasted down with alarming speed. He locked the brakes, the rear wheel slewed to one side, and Quinette flew off, landing on her rear end, clutching the camera close to her tummy, like a mother protecting an infant.
“Oh! Kinnet! You are all right?”
“No bones broken,” she said, and laughed, and the Dinka laughed with her.
“Please hold on to me the rest of the way,” he said, retrieving his shirt from where it had fallen and putting it back on the carrier.
She did as he asked, though she couldn’t see what good it would do if he lost control again. There was no fat on him. Holding him below the ribs, Quinette felt that she could have squeezed his narrow trunk like a toothpaste tube if not for the hard, tensile stomach muscles, moving under her fingers. His back, coated with sweat, had the sheen of a black lacquer table, and he gave off a strong but not unpleasant musk. She felt a stirring she knew she shouldn’t and let go of his waist and returned her hands to the carrier.
They entered the town. Well-swept dirt yards, pavement smooth and shrouded by mahogany trees faced each other across a street that was more like a cowpath, full of potholes and deep, meandering ruts made, she guessed, by rainwater sluicing through in the wet season. Some tukuls had religious petitions painted on their clay walls—“God Bless All Within,” “Christ Jesus Bless this House.” What was Phyllis talking about, saying that most of these people were heathen ancestor-worshippers? The bike ride ended in the marketplace. From stalls made of woven branches and sheet metal and roofed by plastic tarpaulins, men and women sat selling cigarettes, canned goods, amber bricks of soap, spices in small burlap sacks. There wasn’t a whole lot more—a few cotton dresses hanging from a door on wire hangers, hand towels, and flour in cloth bags stamped with a drawing of a white hand shaking a black one and a stars-and-stripes shield and the word USAID. She wondered how even those meager goods had found their way to such a remote place, and she thought of the mall where she worked, with more bounty in one square foot than in this whole market.
Matthew led her by the hand to one of the stalls and offered her a wooden stool to sit on and asked if she would like a cup of tea. She preferred coffee to give her a lift, for she was light-headed from exhaustion, but this didn’t look like the place to get picky. Matthew spoke to the woman sitting inside, in a darkness that would have been like a closet’s but for a kerosene lamp and the light infiltrating through the latticework of the twig-and-branch walls. In a few minutes, she set a small china pot and two cups on the counter, and Quinette’s chauffeur filled them and dipped a spoon into a bowl of brown crystalline sugar, asking how many she wanted. She said one.
“Your tea, mah-dam,” the Dinka said with a mock bow. “I was one time a waiter in the hotel in Wau.”
“Wow?”
The cup looked pretty dirty, but she decided to drink from it, to be polite.
“A big town to the south. Far away. Government town. I cannot go there now.” He swung the Kalashnikov from behind his back and slapped it. “SPLA! They would shoot me down!” His glance lifted quickly, toward a pair of men outside a stall across the way. They were watching Quinette and