The Darling Read Online Free

all that, even if I was just being paranoid in that Liberian way, and none of it were true, and there was no warrant, no reward, and in the passage of time and the blur of alcohol and drugs and the intoxication of having ruled his tiny country with absolute power for so many years, Charles had forgotten me altogether, I was nonetheless a white woman alone, a sexual curiosity, spoilage, perhaps, at my advanced age, but with a little use still left to the madmen and crazed boys here in the madhouse.
    For the first time since leaving my farm in the Adirondacks, I wondered if somewhere along the way—going back to those early days in Mississippi and Louisiana and coming forward to the afternoon at the farm when I suddenly announced to Anthea that I was returning to Liberia to learn what had happened to my sons—I wondered if I had lost my mind. Not figuratively, but literally. I thought, I could be a madwoman . And I wondered if I was standing there in the dark by the side of a narrow, unpaved road in the eastern hills of Liberia because somewhere back there, without knowing it, I’d lost touch with reality. Lost it in small bits, a single molecule of sanity at a time in a slow, invisible, irreversible process of erosion, and couldn’t notice it while it was happening, couldn’t take its measure, until now, when it was too late.
    On the driver’s side of the truck, Mamoud was hurriedly unfolding a stiff, old tarpaulin and spreading it over the lumber and tying it down at the corners. He worked his way around to my side, and I darted four or five steps away from him, ready to make my escape. I looked toward the front of the truck, searching for a rock, a brick, something to injure him with.
    Mamoud said, “Checkpoints be comin’ up now, missy. Dem won’t bother me none, but mebbe best f’ you t’ hide back here.” He held up the corner of the tarp and indicated with a nod a hollowed-out area the size of a coffin in the middle of the cargo.
    “Oh! You want to hide me,” I said, relieved. “You don’t think that’s the first place they’ll look, under the tarp?”
    They wouldn’t look there, he explained, because they knew that that was where he carried the stuff he didn’t want them to see. Perfect Liberian logic. Surprised at the turnaround and a little shaky, for I had gone into fight or flight and my adrenalin was running high, I climbed onto the stacked lumber. When I had lain myself down in the hiding place, Mamoud drew the tarp over me and finished tying it at the corners, leaving a flap loose so I could peek out and breathe fresh air. A moment later, the truck was chugging along the rutted road and then trundling steadily downhill from the highlands towards the towns of the savannah and the cities of the coast.
    ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT I rode back there, stretched out between the boards, sweltering from the heat, jostled, pitched, and bumped, and every now and then I peered out from under the tarpaulin, and when I did I felt more borne down by the wet air than by the stiff canvas. A decade in the hills and valleys of upstate New York and I’d almost forgotten the moist weight, even at night, of the tropical air against my body, its nearly tangible density, as if, between the tarpaulin and the freshly planed planks that I lay upon, a large animal were holding me down. And the odor of the bleeding green lumber and of the canvas that hid me, old, patched, and smelling of rotten fruit and urine and wood smoke, made me nauseated and dizzy.
    My discomfort disappointed the puritan in me. I wondered if in those few years away I’d turned delicate and, traveling again in Africa, would have to hold a scented hanky to my nose. For that’s all this was, the same old smell of Africa and its sense-surrounding, watery heat and its sounds—the blat of a battered, out-of-tune diesel truck and, whenever the truck passed through a village or town or came to a crossing and slowed and the clatter of the engine eased, the