Foreign Land Read Online Free Page B

had to be left out in the sun for two days before they could be burned.
    The fat men were buried in long columns in the cemetery on the hill over the bay: American whaling captains, Portuguese army lieutenants, English cocoa merchants, French mineral prospectors. But the thin men toughed it out. On the Coast, the
branco
or
toubob
(in the Wolof interior) was an attenuated, ectomorphic specimen who left the tallest locals somewhere down around his chest and shoulders. George, at six foot four, was all knuckles, knees and elbows. Any self-respecting mosquito would have scorned him as a poor ship’s biscuit of a dinner, and helicoptered off in search of something fleshier.
    Zapp!
Pause.
Whock!
Longer pause.
Flam!
George was working on Teddy’s backhand down the side wall.
    “Scumbag!”
    George had always been impressed by Teddy’s command of American vernacular. It seemed a lot to have brought back from two years at the Business School of the University of Wisconsin. Teddy, referring to his alma mater, called it Bizz-Wizz.George suspected Teddy of having made it up, just as he suspected that many of Teddy’s more colourful American obscenities might have raised blank looks if voiced anywhere within the United States. Did anyone really say—
    “Diddly-shitting corn-hole!”?
    George found it hard to believe so, and directed the ball at a soggy patch, and missed, and lost the point, but won the game a minute later.
    “Teddy—what can I get you?”
    Laughing, turbaning his head in a striped towel, the Minister of Communications said: “Me? I’ll sink a Sun Top. Make it two.”
    George’s legs felt rubbery. Victory always left him weaker than defeat; and for the last month he’d been on a winning streak. It had started on the day he learned from Vera that she and Teddy had shared a room at the Luanda Mar hotel at the congress in Angola where Vera had been Health and Teddy had been Transport. The two words were altogether too expressive for comfort. That wasn’t the first time, apparently, nor, George assumed sadly, had it been the last. Now, wobbling slightly as he made his way to the bar, George very much hoped that it was a new vein of pugnacity on his part that made him win, and not embarrassment on Teddy’s that obliged him to lose.
    The Armenian already had the dusty bottle of Chivas Regal waiting for him. “Is good?” He showed his set of very white and very loose false teeth. They had probably been bought on mail-order.
    “Yes,” George said, “that’s the one.” He was used to thinking of the barman as a relic left over from Montedor’s colonial heyday. In fact, only the shrunken jaw of the man was really old; the rest of his face was lightly lined and there was still black in his hair. He and George, two foreigners in a foreign land, were coevals. It was a nasty thought, and he strangled it as soon as it was born, spoiling the Scotch with a long splash of desalinated water.
    Teddy, sprawled in a chair, bare legs wide, his face framed inthe towel like a woman’s after a bath, said: “You went to Guia. That’s one helluva drive.”
    Vera had had to inspect the new hospital there. George had driven her in the Port Authority landrover. With Vera preoccupied and George depressed, it hadn’t been a successful trip.
    “Yes,” said George. “I met some of our new friends.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Teddy said carelessly, sucking at his Sun Top.
    He had been forced to leave the road to make way for a column of Soviet-built tanks. Montedor’s single American helicopter-gunship dickered in the sky overhead. Then, twenty miles short of Guia, they’d met a roadblock. The soldiers manning it had shouted to each other in Spanish. Though they wore the uniforms of the Republican Army of Montedor, they wore them with a kind of crispness and dash that was quite beyond the reach of the local militia.
    “The Hispano-Suiza brigade,” George said. “At a road block.”
    Teddy stopped sucking. “Who do you mean,