American Trash

Fiction from my Africa Trip

Photo by Victor Furtuna on Unsplash

*If you like my travel fiction, check out this one from Finland a few months back.

~

He’s lying in bed, only a thin bedsheet over his legs—it’s summer in Zanzibar—his wife lying next him reading, and he’s staring lazily up at the fast-whirling ceiling fan, cool air trickling down onto him like a soft kiss. The fan is rotating so fast it looks as if the curved wooden blades are going two opposing directions, a wild manic blur. The soft thrumming sound the fan emits is tantalizing, relaxing.

He looks over at his wife who is reading a novel called “Stoner” by John Williams. Some novel from the mid-sixties. The book is open, spread wide, and she seems engrossed. For a moment he stares at her, seeing if she’ll sense his steely gaze. She doesn’t; or she does but doesn’t react.

Turning his eyes up again to the whirling fan he thinks about being here, in Tanzania, in East Africa, on the island of Zanzibar, staying in an apartment on the beach in Jambiani, along the Indian Ocean, far, far away from home. They came here for a safari in Serengeti, which they did, and then it was a week on the island before heading home to Montana.

He liked it, of course. Waking up at dawn to the indolent crashing waves, the choppy green sea right out their window, the kite surfers out there slashing through that green, Maasai tribal men meandering along the sand desperately seeking white tourists they can sell something to for some shillings, perhaps even their soul, but always with a fantastic fake smile. Fast friendship for cash. A game, a gimmick, a grotesque display of false camaraderie. This tension he loathed, the impoverished locals flocking to him every time he walked outside, clinging to him with their inauthentic grins and bestial capitalist need. He felt for them, but he disliked their approach, disliked their primal oozing need.

Outside, one of the ‘community’ dogs barked loudly, on the front deck butting up against the cool sand. He loved the feel of the sand squinching between his hot toes when he wandered outside. He checked the time on his phone: Almost midnight.

His wife, without him knowing it, had set her book down silently on her bedside table and turned her bedside lamp off. She was sleep; he heard her low, deep breathing, her black sleep-mask covering her eyes and half her pale cheeks. Only his own low-lit lamp remained on. He flipped his light off too and darkness enveloped him. He lay still in the darkness, silent, calm, hearing but no longer seeing the ceiling fan above. In the silence he picked up just the faintest sound of the small, languidly crashing waves outside.

Turning over onto his side he had just closed his eyes when the street dog outside started barking again. Louder this time. He tried to ignore the noise but it was impossible. Finally, he ripped the thin white bedsheet off his legs and, like an omen, a bad portent, a cosmic horror, he stood up too fast and nearly tripped. He regained his composure. He stood still as a Greek statue for a moment, naked, covered in the black void of darkness, and he waited, listening for the dog’s bark. At last, after a couple minutes of nothing, it arrived once more.

*

He steps slowly, meticulously, along the smooth concrete floor, littered with shallow bands of sand from outside, his warm feet feeling the tiny crystals like miniature cool diamonds jutting into his heels. Glancing back he watches his sleeping wife, her stomach rising and falling barely perceptibly, her head slightly turned away from him towards the wall, her sleep-mask covering half her face, under only the one thin white sheet due to the heat and humidity even with the fan and A/C both full-blast. Late January in Africa, their summer.

Back home in Bozeman, Montana, he knew it was in the high eighties and dry as a desert. He pictured their 2,000-square-foot craftsman home jammed up against the Gallatin Range mountains, with their perpetual snow up at their high peaks nearly year-round. He envisioned himself reading his favorite paper—The Bozeman Times—or one of his old miliary nonfiction books or presidential biographies (he’d read one on Nixon, LBJ, FDR and Lincoln) on their back porch, occasionally eyeing those grand mountain ranges, longing to go hunting with his buddies Rick and Tom, or else imagining the mountain lions up there, and the deep fast-rushing creeks he liked to fish from.

The dog barked outside yet again, this time emitting a noise which sounded nearly strangled, twisted somehow, even malevolent.

Still facing his wife he remembered first meeting her in a Bozeman bar, drunk and sweaty, she only 27 and he 32, them taking shots of Jim Beam together, and then Gin, and finally dancing to old Merle Haggard songs at the old honky-tonk country bar, the two of them drenched in sweat (it was late August) and laughing with each other, smiling dumbly, and then they were at a table just the two of them and the loud thrumming of the music and the happy, clashing chatter of dozens of packed-in voices all around them and the pulsing low red light in the bar and the clinking of pint glasses and then they’d suddenly been making out, feverishly, and then they were in his car and he drunkenly driving them to his place along the lonely, empty dark roads, and next they were naked and in his bed.

He stepped at last to the purple velvet curtain, one of those thick curtains with ridges and valleys along its surface, and he peered out a narrow crack he made by delicately tugging the two sides apart just an inch. There was darkness and a half orange moon, a river of orange shining down along the water all the way to the end of the horizon, it appeared. It was very low tide: It seemed as if one could walk all the way to that moon across the water.

The dog came up along the beach and, seeing him, barked. He glanced back one last time at his wife, then he unlocked the sliding-glass doors and stepped outside into the cooling humid air on the porch and, leaving the doors agape a couple feet, he walked to the edge of the porch.

The dog came to him, a small dog, maybe 40 pounds, a little cattle dog with brown short fur, a long mouth with black underneath, and long narrow ears. He looked vaguely like a feral fox but a little bit bigger. He remembered their safari, seeing the male lions with their massive red manes and the smaller female lions and the leopards and cheetahs and wildebeests and baboons and hippos and the like.

The beauty and shock of genuine, raw nature in all its non-human glory, the open fields and rugged dirt roads which the massive safari Land Cruisers drove along, bumping badly left and right, the Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti and the camps they stayed in and the sunsets and profound red dusks, the desert and open ranges of East Africa, the sparse brush and the wilderness and rain forests, the drives for hours up the narrow dirt roads of mountains to get between the two national parks, Maasai tribes and the little huts and villages in-between, the exhaustion and early mornings and dirt and dust sprinkled all over their bodies like some kind of pagan magic fairy dust.

Facing the sea he saw the tiny waves crashing, heard the clashing sound of water roiling and collapsing onto the wet hard sand, and he thought of his old days as a teenage surfer living in San Diego. He’d been born and raised in Bozeman, Montana, but had moved out on his own at 18, just after finishing high school, and had stayed in Pacific Beach, twenty blocks from the Pacific, for nearly a decade before moving back to Bozeman at 26. He’d loved surfing, the feel of catching and riding a wave, paddling out, spending hours in the water, parking in front of the beaches in his rattling ancient Ford he’d bought for $3,000 with his own saved-up money from working after school and on weekends all through high school as a server and busser at a trendy Bozeman restaurant. All he did for that eight-and-a-half years was surf and work.

And then he’d moved back at 26 and, at 32, six years later, again working as a server now in a different restaurant, he’d meet his wife, Gina.

A rush of cool wind raced through and it felt good against his skin. It even briefly produced goose-pimples. The dog started howling, as if to the big rising orange moon.

Suddenly he heard a voice, out of the darkness, which startled him and almost made him gasp.

“Hello,” the voice said. It sounded African, someone who usually spoke Swahili and/or their own ethnic language but was now speaking English he’d picked up from years of tourists.

He looked around left and right, frantically, but couldn’t see any human or non-human form. It was as if God had spoken to him from out of the orange moon, rising out of the dark sea mist.

“I am here,” the voice said, and the form suddenly appeared against the blackness. The moon now getting higher, he could see the form of a man and then, when the form stepped closer, he could visualize the dangling red robe and the basic rubber sandals and the long walking stick in his right hand, poking into the soft sand.

“Hi,” the Maasai man said, now grinning.

Swallowing, he said, “Hey. Are you alright? I keep hearing the dog bark. My wife and I are trying to sleep.”

The Maasai smiled more widely. “I am sorry for waking you. It’s a beautiful night is it not? The orange moon is like gold candy or like tasty fruit held up by the atmosphere.”

He rubbed his nose and his right eye for a moment, satisfying a mysterious itch, and then he said, “Yes. It’s very nice. But what do you want? Why are you out here so late, so close to our apartment? You’re making the dog bark which is keeping us awake.”

“Yes,” the Maasai said. “I see that.”

The man stood there, five feet away in the semi-darkness, erect, proud, his red robe gently swaying slightly when tufts of wind blew through.

“Well, what do you want?” he said. He was beginning to lose his patience. It was late. He was tired. His wife was sleeping. The doors were open probably letting in strange insects.

“What is your name?” the Maasai said.

Squinting, standing upright as tall as he could from his perch above the Maasai man on the porch, he said, “Dean. Dean Roberts. What’s yours?”

“Dean,” the Maasai said oddly, and smiled. “I like that name. Dean. My name is difficult for white American tourists like you to pronounce. People call me William because it’s easier.”

“What makes you think I’m American?”

William grinned. “The accent. My guess is the Midwest somewhere.”

Nodding, Dean said, “Right again. Montana.”

“What city?”

A slight splurge of adrenaline and cortisol exploded through his body and Dean said, feeling a little intimidated and yet also angry now, “Bozeman. Why do you ask?”

“What part of Bozeman?”

There was a strained silence for three or four long seconds and then Dean said, “I’m not going to tell you any more details about my life. Why are you asking me this. Should I call security? What do you want? Tell me or I’ll take action.”

William smiled again and the smile surfed lazily along his face before finally cracking into a laugh. He howled up at the orange moon as if he were the dog or a wolf in the wilderness or desert calling out to Nature.

“What is so damn funny?” Dean said, his heart thudding quickly in his chest like a hammer bashing down a stubborn nail that won’t budge.

“Everything is funny,” William said. “Americans are funny. White people are funny. Tourists are funny. You are funny. You and your western values and western privilege and western philosophy. We Maasai mix Christianity with pagan gods, and our own gods, myths, all of it. We take everything, Enkai and Christianity. You think you own the world, you Americans.”

Taken aback, somewhat shocked and off-kilter, Dean swallowed and said, while running his palm slowly along his goose-pimpled arm, “I guess there’s some truth to that. Americans are spoiled, that’s for sure. We’re very lucky, rich you’d call us.”

William smiled, his white teeth loud against the weakening darkness as the orange moon rose higher and higher and began to morph from orange into polished pearl-white.

“Listen,” Dean started saying, “What is it exactly that you want from me? I don’t understand your goal here. It’s nearly one in the morning. We’re trying to sleep. Is there something specific I can do for you, to somehow help you, get you to go away?”

Chuckling, William said, “You Americans always want us to go away. You always want everything to go away. Mostly you want death to go away. You hide yourself from the world’s suffering by distracting yourselves constantly, by staying busy, by the use of social media and technology, by starting wars you can’t finish, like Vietnam and Afghanistan. Americans are people who are scared of life and of death and of different cultures. Capitalists of the nastiest kind.”

Dean started to step backwards slowly. He said, “I am going to get security. I don’t know what your problem is, but I clearly cannot solve it on my own.”

“You will not get security,” William said.

And then, totally shocking him and massacring the boundaries of reality, as if reaching his arm through a concrete wall somehow, the Maasai man called William pulled a handgun out of his robe and pointed it at Dean.

Dean froze. His arms automatically went up like a white flag. His heart was pounding. He thought of his wife in there, asleep, her gentle, lucid beauty and her soft skin. God he loved her. He needed her. He’d never been with anyone like her. And he thought of Bozeman and about the mountains and about his past in San Diego, surfing all those years.

“What are you gonna do?” Dean said.

William laughed. “Shoot you dead, of course. A dead American is a good American. Do you believe in God?”

Trying to control his breathing Dean said, “No. I am an atheist. I come from a long line, a long heritage of atheists. My great-grandfather was a chemist, and same with my grandfather. My father was a math and biology teacher. They were all men of science and rational thinking, evolution, and Darwin.”

“So you think life evolved from a single cell billions and billions of years ago?”

“That’s right.”

Then William seemed much more serious and solemn and he almost sounded as if he were crying. He pointed the gun at Dean and his hand ever-so-slightly trembled.

“You don’t have to do this, William,” Dean said.

William’s dark eyes narrowed nearly to slits and he said, “Don’t tell me what I have to do. American trash, that’s what you are.”

And just in that moment, when Dean had somehow managed to accept his fate, William pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Only a dull, hollow click sound. William bent over himself, laughing like a madman. He laughed and laughed and laughed. Finally he stood upright again and, holding the gun, he let out the magazine and showed that it was empty. “It’s not loaded, American. I was just fucking with you.”

Laughing still, and without another word between them, William sauntered off into the night, soon becoming invisible down the beach. Dean stood there like a statue on the porch for a good five minutes, slowing his breathing, listening to his heart, and going over in his mind again and again what had happened. Then he turned around and went inside, closing the doors, locking them, and then tugging the velvet curtains closed. The room sat in total darkness. Only the sound of the whirring fan filled the silence.

Dean went to his side of the bed. He flipped his weak side lamp on for a moment, seeing his wife asleep. She hadn’t been aware of anything. He lay down next to her, turned his light off, lay awake a while, and at last he fell asleep.

When he awoke the next morning it was as if nothing had happened. As if it had all been a dream.