The Dark of the Sun - Smith Wilbur - Страница 9
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blue metal. "But look what they hold now!" Bruce stirred irritably.
He had not wanted to provoke another bout of Mike Haig's soul-searching.
Damn the old fool - why must he always start this, he knew as well as
anyone that in the mercenary army of Katanga there was a taboo upon the
past. It did not exist. "Ruffy," Bruce snapped, aren't you going to feed
your boys?"
"Right now, boss." Ruffy opened another beer and handed it to Bruce.
"Hold that - it will keep your mind off food while I rustle it up." He
lumbered off along the root of
the coach still singing.
"Three years ago, it seems like all eternity," Mike went on as though
Bruce had not interrupted. "Three years ago I was a surgeon and now
this.-The desolation had spread to his eyes, and Bruce felt his pity for
the man deep down where he kept it imprisoned with all his other
emotions.
"I was good. I was one of the best. Royal College.
Harley Street. Guy's." Mike laughed without humour, with bitterness.
"Can you imagine my being driven in my Rolls to address the College on
my advanced technique of cholecystectorny?"
"What happened?" The question was out before he could stop it, and Bruce
realized how near to the surface he had let his pity rise. "No, don't
tell me. It's your business. I don't want to know."
"But I'll tell you, Bruce, I want to. It helps somehow, talking about
it." At first, thought Bruce, I wanted to talk also, to try and wash the
pain away with words.
Mike was silent for a few seconds. Below them the singing rose
and fell, and the train ran on through the forest.
"It had taken me ten hard years to get there, but at last I had done it.
A fine practice; doing the work I loved with skill, earning
the rewards I deserved. A wife that any man would have been proud of, a
lovely home, many friends, too many friends perhaps; for success breeds
friends the way a dirty kitchen breeds cockroaches." Mike pulled out a
handkerchief and dried the back of his neck where the wind could not
reach.
"Those sort of friends mean parties," he went on. "Parties when you've
worked all day and you're tired; when you need the lift that you
can get so easily from a bottle. You don't know if you have the
weakness for the stuff until it's too late; until you have a bottle in
the drawer of your desk; until suddenly your practice isn't so good any
more." Mike twisted the handkerchief around his fingers as he ploughed
doggedly on. "Then you know it suddenly. You know it when your hands
dance in the morning and all you want for breakfast is that, when you
can't wait until lunchtime because you have to operate and that's the
only way you can keep your hands steady. But you know it finally and
utterly when the knife turns in your hand and the artery starts to spurt
and you watch it paralysed - you watch it hosing red over your gown and
forming pools on the theatre floor." Mike's voice dried up then and he
tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit it. His shoulders were hunched
forward and his eyes were full of shadows of his guilt.
Then he straightened up and his voice was stronger.
"You must have read about it. I was headlines for a few days, all the
papers But my name wasn" Haig in those days.
I got that name off a label on a bottle in a bar-room.
"Gladys stayed with me, of course, she was that type. We came out to
Africa. I had enough saved from the wreck for a down payment on a
tobacco farm in the Centenary block outside Salisbury. Two good seasons
and I was off the bottle.
Gladys was having our first baby, we had both wanted one so badly.
It was all coming right again." Mike stuffed the handkerchief back in
his pocket, and his voice lost its strength again, turned dry and husky.
"Then one day I took the truck into the village and on the way home I
stopped at the club. I had been there often before, but this time they
threw me out at closing time and when I got back to the farm
I had a case of Scotch on the seat beside me." Bruce wanted to stop
him; he knew what was coming and he didn't want to hear it.
"The first rains started that night and the rivers came down in
flood. The telephone lines were knocked out and we were cut off. In the
morning--" Mike stopped again and turned to Bruce.
"I suppose it was the shock of seeing me like that again, but in the
morning Gladys went into labour. It was her first, and she wasn't so
young any more. She was still in labour the
next day, but by then she was too weak to scream. I remember how
peaceful it was without her screaming and pleading with me to help.
You see she knew I had all the instruments I needed. She begged me to
help. I can remember that; her voice through the fog of whisky. I
think I hated her then. I think I remember hating her, it was all so
confused, so mixed up with the screaming and the liquor.
But at last she was quiet. I don't think I realized she was dead.
I was simply glad she was quiet and I could have peace." He dropped his
eyes from Bruce's face.
"I was too drunk to go to the funeral. Then I met a man in a bar-room, I
can't remember how long after it was, I can't even remember where. it
must have been on the Copperbelt. He was recruiting for
Tshombe's army and I signed up; there didn't seem anything else to do."
Neither of them spoke again until a gendarme brought food to them, hunks
of brown bread spread with tinned butter and filled with bully beet and
pickled onions. They ate in silence listening, to the singing, and Bruce
said at last: "You needn't have told me."
"I know."
"Mike-" Bruce paused.
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry, if that's any comfort."
"It is," Mike said.
"It helps to have - not to be completely alone. I like you, Bruce." He
blurted out the last sentence and Bruce recoiled as though Mike had spat
in his face.
You fool, he rebuked himself savagely, you were wide open then.
You nearly let one of them in again.
Remorselessly he crushed down his sympathy, shocked at the effort it
required, and when he picked up the radio the gentleness had gone from
his eyes.
"Hendry," he spoke into the set, "don't talk so much. I put you up front
to watch the tracks." From the leading truck Wally Hendry looked round
and forked two fingers at Bruce in a casual obscenity, but he turned
back and faced ahead.
"You'd better go and take over from Hendry," Bruce told Mike.
"Send him back here." Mike Haig stood up and looked down at Bruce.
"What are you afraid of?" his voice softly puzzled.
"I gave you an order, Haig."
"Yes, I'm on my way."
The aircraft found them in the late afternoon. It was a Vampire
jet of the Indian Air Force and it came from the north.
They heard the soft rumble of it across the sky and then saw it glint
like a speck of mica in the sunlight above the storm clouds ahead of
them.
"I bet you a thousand francs to a handful of dung that this Bucko don't
know about us," said Hendry with anticipation, watching the jet turn off
its course towards them.
"Well, he does now," said Bruce.
Swiftly he surveyed the rain clouds in front of them.
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