NGIRI’S CATCH

Aaron Polson 

Old men say the River breathes and throbs and eats just like a man, but the River is no man. The River is older and infinitely larger. Being so, its hunger aches more than that of a man; its experience of the world stretches from a highland jungle dawn to the fat delta at the rim of an Atlantic sunset. The River knows. The River suffers barges and smaller dugout boats on its skin, mere gnats to the Baobab, because it knows a time before man and its patience reaches beyond mankind’s twilight. It has seen black skies burning with ice and waits for the fire-capped end. The River is home to myth, and legends play in its current.

On the deck of a crowded barge, Ngiri crouches with pinched, focused eyes. He has become sick of the dance of the boat – the stench of the animals, the constant cackle of voices during the long daylight hours, the steady jostling for position – and wishes for a quiet moment in the forest near his village. But the Force Publique came a month ago with their bayonets and rifles, and there would be no peace in the village or quiet moment in the forest. Ngiri fled with his mother in the night and now, they are stuck on the barge bound for Leopoldville. Perhaps there, she hopes, they will find a life other than the disease and murder of the village.

Ngiri creeps forward, leaning on his toes, part-curious boy, part-predatory animal, part-war-displaced orphan. His prey, a tiny black-and-green beetle, scuttles across the grey-brown planks of the barge deck, skirting a line of shadow without breaking the invisible wall into the sun. Ngiri’s fingers stretch. He wets his lips with his tongue. For a few moments, he is oblivious to the bustle of livestock and other passengers, the bleating of goats, bartering of old men over a half-basket of fish, and rumours.

There are rumours of a missing man and murder.

Ngiri falls backward as a sandal comes down, crushing the beetle. A woman’s voice rumbles, washing over the cacophony of the boat.

“What is it now, little boy? Lost something?”

Her dress is bright, blue and red, so bright Ngiri squints at the brilliance of it. He lowers his face and frowns at the dirt caked on his bare feet. With his daydream burst, he shakes his head. “No. No. Just ....”

“Best be off. Find your mother, boy. The barge isn’t safe to wander alone. Stay close to your mother.” The woman turns away.

Ngiri swipes at the air with his balled fist. His eyes drop to the squashed bug. A shadow covers his back.

“Hello.”

Ngiri flinches at the sight of the old man.

The stranger’s voice rumbles like spring storm clouds. He kneels. “You’re quite the insect-lover.”

Even Ngiri’s grandfather, the oldest man he’d ever met, didn’t have a face so wrinkled and deep-set. In the stranger’s face, Ngiri finds the deep grooves of bark on a wattle tree. Wrinkles, Grandfather had always said, were marks of wisdom. Ngiri can’t help but imagine the near-black lines as strange tattoos, almost a map of rivers.

“I said, ‘Hello.’” The stranger smiles, showing the boy his mouth of teeth, impossibly white for a man of his age.

“Hello.”

“What’s your name, son?”

Ngiri shoos a fly from his neck. “Ngiri Mebengue,” he says.

“Ah, Ngiri. Hello. I am Amadi. Just Amadi.” The old man winks. “You are a fine collector of insects. I’ve been watching you all morning.”

The boy glances at his feet, again, then back to the old man. “Yes, sir. I was bored.”

“I’m an old man, Ngiri. Old and often bored, myself. I should thank you for the entertainment. In fact, I collect insects. Or I did, before ….” He holds up his left arm. Where a hand should be, only a stump remains.

“I – I’m sorry.”

“No need. I’m sure they’ve done as much in your village, too. The white devils. Their army. We are not safe in our own land ….”

“Yes. They ....” Ngiri’s voice is tiny and afraid. He glances over his shoulder, searching the river for one of the European steamers. “... killed my father.”

“We are under a dark cloud. A plague.” The old man’s eyes brighten. “Maybe you can help.”

Ngiri’s stomach knots. He feels a dryness in his mouth. On the barge, he is trapped. Ngiri looks past the old man. The woman in bright blue-and-red talks with other women. She places her hands against her hips, lets her head droop, and frowns.

“They’re talking about Martin Mwebe,” Amadi says, nodding his head slowly. His remaining hand points to the crushed insect. “Poor Martin.”

“Martin?”

“The man who vanished from the boat. He worked for the government. For the Belgians.” Amadi’s shoulders rise and fall, and a small breath escapes his lips. He reaches into the canvas bag hanging at his side and produces three small glass jars, each no bigger than a baby’s fist. He holds the jars toward Ngiri. “Would you help me, Ngiri?”

“Help? How can I help you?”

“With the beetles.” Amadi’s eyes flash as black as a beetle carapace. He holds out the jars for Ngiri. “I am an old man. A simple man. How many white devils are in your village?”

Ngiri tilts his head. “Ten, I think. Along with at least a hundred Africans. Soldiers.”

“It’s not our countrymen who worry me. Do you think you can find at least ten beetles on this boat?”

Ngiri reaches out with one tentative hand. He glances at the old man’s eyes and then down at the jars. Each has a dark, cork stopper. Each is clean and free of scratches, fine little baubles of glass. Ngiri’s fingertips touch the smooth, cool surface of one vial. “Beetles?”

“Yes.”

The boy looks at the jars and back to Amadi’s lined face. “How ... how will this help my village?”

“First, the beetles. Then I’ll explain.”

Ngiri sets his lips and nods.

Rumours spread on the barge. Martin Mwebe, a lithe man of twenty from Koiekoie, can’t be found. Several men insist they heard him cry out in the night. Others claim the night watch would have seen something. Ngiri hears only snippets of the gossip, suggestions that the man must have fallen overboard. Other rumours circulate, whispers of foul play because Mwebe sold out his own people to the white men.

Ngiri fills the jars with a dozen black, green and red beetles.

Once his jars are full, Ngiri picks his way through the maze of baskets, past the heavy odours of fish stew and green onions cooking over charcoal stoves. He climbs over several mountains of goods covered with dingy tarpaulins, tied down with yellowed rope. He avoids the eyes of the other passengers, clutching his small treasures close to his side until he finds the old man, Amadi, waiting under a mosquito net in a quiet corner near the back of the barge.

“Amadi,” he says.

The old man’s eyes open. “Ah, Ngiri. My hunter.” He studies the glass containers in the boy’s hands. “And a good day’s catch.”

“I brought twelve. You said ten, but –”

“It’s good. Better, just in case. You did this on your own?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good.” Amadi digs in a pouch hanging from his waist and holds out a few coins. “What was the name of your village?”

The boy hesitates. “‘T’nutu’. North of the big lake.”

“Yes. I know where it is. Your pay. You’ve earned it.”

Ngiri’s hand reaches out and takes the money. He examines it, screwing up his face. “I don’t recognize the language.”

“Very old,” Amadi says.

The boy nibbles his lower lip. He would have collected the insects for nothing but something to do, something to keep his fingers occupied and his brain away from the crowds and swaying of the barge. The coins feel strangely heavy; the tip of a thumb runs across the ridged edge of one, tracing each groove and indentation. “Thank you.” The boy doesn’t move.

“Is there something else, Ngiri?”

The boy’s fingers pull at the hem of his shirt. “Did Martin really fall from the boat?”

The old man scratches the side of his face with his gnarled fingers. “Martin Mwebe?”

Ngiri nods.

Amadi holds up a jar of beetles. The tiny occupants claw and scratch against the glass. Amadi leans forward, whispering. “Martin Mwebe is gone.” The word “gone” falls like a stone into the river.

Ngiri feels the heat in his face. His stomach drops.

“Have you heard of M’basui Gwandu? These Belgian dogs stirred M’basui from his sleep with gunpowder and blood. Do you know what that means, Ngiri?”

The boy shakes his head. Doubt hangs on his shoulders like a damp cloth. The old men of the village talk and tell stories, and Ngiri remembers bits and broken pieces of the name. M’basui Gwandu. The broken pieces force a shiver through his bones.

Amadi smiles. “Just as well. M’basui is hungry. We’ve known each other for a long time. He can help us purge our country of this European plague.”

Ngiri backs away, turning toward the sound of his mother’s calling voice.

“Stay safe, little one,” Amadi says. “Stay safe and stay with your mother tonight.”

The barge hums with the snores of sleepers. Ngiri wriggles from under his mother’s arm. Amadi planted a seed in the boy’s imagination, a seed which sprouted with the coming of twilight. Death, on a barge, is not unheard of. Men drown on occasion. He tries to paint the river abomination M’basui Gwandu in his mind, but doubt cools his fear. Ngiri rides on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, between believing and disbelieving. There surely could be no monster in the river, no ancient one as Amadi said. But, when he wakes, curiosity pricks him.

He waits, eyes open, as a river patrol passes. A white soldier calls out to the barge in French. Amadi’s voice answers, not the night watch. “All is clear,” he says. Ngiri’s muscles tense, as the patrol steamer chugs away to the north, and then he rises from his bed.

The old man stands at the front of the barge. The night watchman lies at his feet. Ngiri feels the push of blood through his excited heart. Amadi holds his arms out to each side, curved slightly toward the star-filled sky. The man whistles, slow and low, as if calling to a friend in the darkness. Ngiri lingers behind a stack of wooden crates, watching. The surface of the river glints with fragments of the moon and stars. Save for the snores and low whistles, the world is quiet. Even the river listens.

A sound rises like a dull knife sawing through a shawl. No, this noise is more than a dull rumble, more than a strange, incorporeal sound. Ngiri’s flesh puckers. The cold wraps him in its arms. The noise breaks into recognizable phrases, a rhythm. Words. Chanting from deep under the water. The pattern of the chanting falls in line with Amadi’s whistles. A dark shape rises from the river.

It is a night shape, an imagined monster of shadows and childhood fear, the brush of branches against the thatched roof of a hut, the strange shifting of light and dark in the quiet hours. Long, jointed legs push through the water’s surface. Ngiri draws a few steps closer, stumbling. He stops no more than twenty feet from the outstretched shape of the old man. The night watchman doesn’t stir.

The monster rises higher and moonlight flickers in its eyes, rows of them like a spider, black and glistening. A mouth opens. The barge jars and sways. Enormous wings blot the stars.

Amadi grunts.

The rumble starts again, this time like laughter, this time unbated by the depth of the river below Ngiri’s feet. The head of the thing bends lower. Unblinking eyes glitter like glass fragments in mud. Amadi grunts again, but this time, the guttural sound shapes into a word. No word Ngiri would recognize; only, the boy knows it must be a word. Shadows take the old man, pulling him into the maw of the river monster, and Ngiri feels the rush in his head, the dizzying pound of blood through his small body. Before he faints, he imagines a great winged thing, crossing the pale disk of moon. He crumples to the deck.

Travelers bustle from the barge, streaming down the dock into Leopoldville while white officers lead patrols of Force Publique through the throng. Ngiri clamps his fingers on his mother’s hand. The buildings press against them, brightly painted and gay, but close. Clotted with people, handcarts, and livestock, the city is much more claustrophobic than the open air on the barge.

The boy sees a memory shimmer in the crowd. He drops his mother’s hand and runs. She turns and shouts, but the boy is gone, woven into the human fabric.

The man walks away from Ngiri, but the boy runs faster and catches his shirttail. Amadi turns. A moment passes, dense with humidity and sweat from Ngiri’s forehead.

“Amadi,” he pants.

The old man kneels. “Yes?”

“You ... disappeared ….” The words float beyond the reach of Ngiri’s tongue. His memory dances with imagination, and he can’t cut the dream from reality. “I thought you’d been ... killed.”

Amadi holds up his good hand. The other arm is now severed above the elbow. The pink stump protrudes from his shirt cuff.

“Your arm –”

“Oh ... yes. M’basui Gwandu asks such a little price, don’t you think?” Amadi’s good hand slips into his pocket and takes out one jar at a time, handing them to Ngiri. “You were right. There were only ten.” The old man smiles.

“Ten?”

“In your village.”

Ngiri counts the tiny occupants of the jars. Ten beetles.

The old man’s face slackens. He nods slowly. “Yes. The beetles. Do with them what you will. M’basui enjoyed the taste of Belgian flesh, I daresay more than our African brother Martin. Now the beetles are yours.” His black eyes blink.

“The beetles ... I don’t understand.”

“M’basui took their bodies, but I saved the rest for you. Their souls.”

A strong hand wraps Ngiri’s arm.

“I’m sorry if my son is bothering you,” his mother says. “We were walking –”

Amadi holds up a hand. “No bother. He is a good boy. A faithful boy.” The old man starts to turn away.

“Amadi?”

“All M’basui asks is a small sacrifice. A promise with more to come.” Amadi rubs the stump of his shortened arm. “Not all wars are fought with spears and guns. You can fill those jars as often as you like. Fill them and call to the river when the moon is full.” With that, the man turns into the busy street and its current carries him away.

Aaron Polson currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, two sons and a tattooed rabbit. His stories have featured magic goldfish, monstrous beetles and a book of lullabies for baby vampires. His work has seen print in Shock Totem, Blood Lite II and Monstrous, with several new stories forthcoming in Shimmer, Space and Time and other publications. The Saints are Dead, a collection of weird fiction, magical realism and the kitchen sink, is due from Aqueous Press in 2011. You can visit Aaron on the web at www.aaronpolson.net.

The author speaks: “Ngiri’s Catch” was influenced by a recent radio diary from journalist Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, as she traveled the Congo River, and my memory of both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The tension between Africans and white, European colonists has haunted the continent for centuries; all I did was imagine dark forces in the ancient river and the story flowed from there. I chose a child for the protagonist, as I often do, to share a sense of wonder (and, at times, dread) with the reader, as the strangeness of that child’s world is revealed to him. The Force Publique mentioned in the story was a historic entity and they committed horrible atrocities against their fellow Africans under Belgian command.