The Left-Handed Pencil Case, Part 2

Chapters 7-10

Chapter 7, A Weekend of Peace in the Shadowless Land of Used-to-Be

We didn’t see anything until the Monday of the following week.

In the meantime, though, on Friday afternoon, I won a big soccer game against another school, breaking the tie with the third of the three goals. Émile and the rest of the team cheered me and then tossed me up into the air. That felt really good until I glanced over and saw the big grey Peugeot sitting on the side of the road, quietly radiating hatred.

So, at that point, Émile and I still had two days of happiness left.

After we finished our duties at the school, we looked around in the creek for a while and then went back to my house to pick up my brother and head to the cassava patch. Émile already knew the story about the drunks so he also came armed with a machete.

The drunks were back in our garden and looking belligerent.

“Go get Mom and Auntie,” I told my younger brother. He took off running.

The men just smirked in response and asked if we were afraid to use our machetes.

“And tell her to bring along Josephine and Vivian and their little helper,” I yelled after him. He raised a hand in acknowledgement without slowing down or turning around.

I swung my hand in the universal braining gesture.

That put a big dent in their attitude, not so much the knowledge of how the sisters had put a big dent in their older brother’s head with that skillet, the injury sufficient to cause him to stop drinking with the Ivorian drunks for over a month, not because he wanted to, but because that cranial dent had left him too dizzy to walk and too prone to vomit without even getting drunk first. It was because those two sisters were the most notorious gossips in that neighborhood and serious devotees to the Sisterhood.

For a few minutes at least we had what I think Americans refer to as a Mexican stand-off; well, maybe not that because, as the minutes passed, our position was gradually being reinforced by what the drunks increasingly feared would soon be coming down the pike. That was evident by their increasing uncertainty and agitation and at least one of them starting to edge off. If they were actually found there, then they couldn’t deny that they had been there. So at least a few brain cells had escaped being pickled by their cheap booze.

“Remember the dead snakes,” I reminded them as they began to slink off along the path in the opposite direction my brother had run.

“And the shriveled balls,” Émile tossed in.

The least drunk of the four turned back to look at Émile.

“You’re sure to know all about shriveled balls from that great uncle of yours,” he said. “And we also know why you’re living with him. Everybody in the village knows.”

I didn’t know, but I saw Émile restrain himself. He gripped the handle of his machete so hard that the tendons of his hand stood out and his arm began to tremble, so he obviously knew.

But before I could ask him to clarify, I heard a shout up the path behind us from my little brother. A moment later he came jogging around the bend with my mom and aunt striding purposefully behind, followed by the wives of three of the four guys, and bringing up the rear, Josephine and her sister, Vivian, who was lugging the cast iron skillet.

I pointed in the opposite direction and said they went that way just a minute ago.

All the women except for my mom and aunt surged past us in the direction the drunks had gone.

My mom and aunt looked Émile and me over, performing their freakishly fast assessment, followed by closer scrutiny of Émile.

My mother looked at my aunt who had looked back to her from Émile and then announced that we would dig it all up today and leave nothing for those drunks but a bunch of chopped up plants.

So Émile and I got to work and cut the standing cassava plants down so my brother Arnaud could start trimming and bundling up the edible leaves under the supervision of my mom and aunt. And then Émile and I started digging up the roots.

Before we had finished, Josephine and the rest of the Sisterhood had returned to the clearing. They were laughing and looking satisfied in the same way Émile and I and the rest of our team did after winning a match. Vivian acted out her skillet swinging technique and the wives of the guys she had clocked laughed themselves silly, swaying forward and backward, no doubt in part over the additional pain they would inflict by rubbing in liniment under the guise of helping them.

Émile and I dropped the last few roots on the dwindling pile my mother and aunt were already dividing up—okay, were instructing Arnaud to divide up—and then told the other women to load it onto our backs. My mother told the women that Émile’s really big load was for them to divide after we got back. The women all busted a gut over that even more than they had over Vivian’s skillet skit and made a lot of remarks in a tribal language they evidently thought we couldn’t understand. Émile pretended not to hear. My brother looked like he was about to ask Émile what they were talking about. I started loading him down with cassava and whispered to him, “They will pepper you.” That shut him up.

Saturday and Sunday were comparatively uneventful.

On the advice of my mom and aunt, we stayed clear of the drunks’ houses as well as their usual hangouts. We decided to explore the creek behind the school down to where it began its rapid descent through the gorge toward the river.

That day and a half would be the last unalloyed good time any of us would have for a very long time.

Chapter 8, The Demon's Schemes: Part 2, The Angel Gets Brutally Fucked

Monday morning, my brother and I left early to go fetch Émile for our walk to school. Émile came out carrying a rolled up sheet of drawing paper. My brother asked what it was and Émile said only, “You will see.”

The subtext alone was sufficient to quell my brother’s curiosity.

As we drawing near the gate to the school, the big grey Peugeot roared out and passed us, throwing up a cloud of red dust. That was unusual because, in addition to François always being the first to leave school, he was also the last to arrive.

It was a couple hours after class began that I felt a sensation on the back of my neck and looked up from my math assignment to see François staring at me with a self-satisfied smirk. A couple of times he’d glance over to Émile, then laugh silently and shake his head. I sensed he already knew what he was going to do and that we’d soon see what it was.

Yes, we would see very soon.

Just after math started, the headmaster came to the door and indicated that he wanted to speak to Dr. Guillaud.

Dr. Guillaud left the room. We all strained to understand the murmur of voices in the hall. And then Dr. Guillaud returned and summoned Émile and François to accompany him into the hall. More unintelligible talk followed amongst voices all recognizable but one.

Dr. Guillaud entered the classroom alone and knelt before Émile’s desk. He looked inside it and then felt around with his hand. He glanced back over his shoulder toward the doorway and then, with a look of disgust, started removing and stacking the contents on top of Émile’s desk.

To Émile’s school books, I saw him add Émile’s little blackboard, a folded Greenpeace magazine that he had found somewhere to look at the nature pictures, a drawing book, a handful of the shiny pebbles we had found on Saturday and Sunday back beyond the soccer field in the creek that ran parallel to the river road and emptied into the river downstream of the bridge and François’s compound.

I thought they were diamonds, but Émile told me that if they were diamonds, the rebels would already have sold them to Charles Taylor to finance their operations. I asked him why the rebels would sell anything to Charles Taylor since he was trying to kill the rebels.

I remember that look he gave me for the briefest moment. And now I see it was that of a fourteen year old with more than twenty five percent more life experience being surprised by something clueless an eleven-year-old would say but loving him anyway and then explaining without trying to make him look stupid.

He had asked me if the government of Côte d’Ivoire was a close ally of Charles Taylor. I had thought for a moment and said I didn’t think so or my mom and aunt wouldn’t have come here to escape Charles Taylor.

He smiled and nodded over that and then asked if I thought the Liberian rebels and the Ivorian rebels were close allies.

I had said probably not or Charles Taylor wouldn’t do any business with the Ivorian rebels, such as giving them money for diamonds to finance their operation, if there was a chance it would come back to help those who were fighting against him.

Émile had laughed and told me I had caught onto the essentials of the situation very rapidly.

From Émile’s desk, Dr. Guillaud pulled out the rolled-up drawing Émile had carried to school that morning. He unrolled it and lifted it up.

On it, Émile had drawn a picture him with his arm around my shoulders with the score of the game appearing as numbers on our jerseys and the words “Discipline, humilité, et fraternité” below our feet like the foundation Dr. Guillaud had mentioned and, like a banner across the top: “Stephane, mon petit frère pour toujours.”

Émile must have made it at home the previous night. It was quite good. I had had no idea he was such an artist.

Dr. Guillaud paused many seconds, taking in that drawing before carefully rolling it up and setting it gently on the desktop.

He peered into the desk again and then shook his head. He rose and requested the headmaster enter and then exited to take the headmaster’s place, presumably to prevent Émile from fleeing.

Fools.

The headmaster looked over the few items on the desktop and then knelt on one knee to look into the desk, I supposed to examine the object in situ. From all the way in the back, the headmaster withdrew François’s silver pencil case. He looked at me and shook his head, stood, spanked off the dust from the knee of his trousers with his free hand, and left the room.

A few minutes later François returned and took his seat.

I looked at him.

François grinned at me.

“I told you that you’d see what would happen,” he said in a spiteful little voice.

I wouldn’t see Émile again for almost two months, though I and probably the entire school heard his cries as the headmaster beat him with a rattan cane and then expelled him from school.

Dr. Guillaud returned to the classroom and held the pencil case a few inches from François’s nose.

“Do not let this case out of your sight again,” he said with barely controlled fury and then slapped the case onto François’s desk.

François shrugged insolently and then picked up the case and pushed it into the front pocket of his shorts.

As soon as Dr. Guillaud turned to go to his desk, François favored me with another of those small, bitter smiles, and I knew his revenge was not yet complete.

After school that day, Dr. Guillaud didn’t leave to take his tea at the customary time. Instead, he returned to the classroom immediately with my younger brother in tow and motioned for him to take a seat beside me.

Dr. Guillaud sat on François’s desk and motioned for me to stand before him and explain what had led to the events of the day.

I told him what François had told us following Dr. Guillaud’s handling of François’s accusation of cheating on Friday and said that if we went to the headmaster and told him what happened, then maybe….

Dr. Guillaud shook his head sadly and said that the headmaster was already certain of what had actually happened. He said the headmaster was well-disposed toward Émile because when Émile used to work for the Renault dealer and washed the headmaster’s car Émile had always wiped it down so it would have no spots, but could do nothing nothing about this because François’s father was the chief of police. François’s father was in the position to cut off money for the school and to make a lot of trouble for everyone. Dr. Guillaud said he was sorry but that sometimes one person had to suffer so that many others wouldn’t have to. I told him I thought it was wrong for the guilty to get away with it only because his dad had enough power to hurt everyone else.

Dr. Guillaud agreed that it was wrong, but he said that it was expedient. I looked up that word later. The dictionary said, “convenient and practical although possibly improper or immoral.” Dr. Guillaud was always good at finding the mot juste.

He told me to go ahead and go home early and then picked up Émile’s drawing and held it out to me. He told me that after his beating Émile had asked him to give it to me.

“You were a good friend and brother to Émile. That will not be forgotten. You will see, Stephane. You will see.”

And that was the first time those words seemed like a promise rather than a threat.

My brother and I did not go directly home.

Chapter 9, In Africa there Is Always Someone Looking On

We went first to Émile’s house, but the place was empty. I mean literally empty.

I asked a neighbor woman looking on what had happened.

In Africa there is always someone looking on.

With a certain amount of gusto, she told us that Émile’s great uncle had gotten a message first thing that morning that the headmaster had caught Émile stealing the silver pencil case from the son of the chief of police. His uncle had raged about saying that Émile had spoiled his name and that he could no longer stay in the village.

She cackled and squirted a jet of spit through the gap in her front teeth into the red dust at her feet and said that after all the practice his great uncle had had at spoiling his name over the years, spoiling his name any further would have been an impossible task for Émile. She said his uncle took off a few hours later.

I realized that the “few hours later” would have been close to the time that the headmaster had called Dr. Guillaud out of the classroom.

The neighbor said she saw Émile return later in the day. The back of his shirt was bloody from the beating and he was crying. He had asked her where his great uncle had gone and then set out after him in the direction she had pointed. She said she had told him not to bother and to consider himself lucky to have the house all to himself. She said a big strong boy like him could always find plenty of work and then laughed in a way even my little brother found creepy.

I asked her again exactly when his great uncle had received the message from the headmaster. She said that not too long after Émile had left with my brother and me for school, the headmaster’s driver in a big grey Peugeot had stopped to give him the message.

We thanked her and left to backtrack to our house.

She shouted after us that there were always the rebels if Émile preferred to make war instead of love and then cackled so hard she fell into a coughing fit that was finally terminated with another geyser of spit shot into the dust.

My brother had asked what was wrong with her. I had deflected and said I thought probably tuberculosis.

And then I remembered having seen the big grey Peugeot sitting near the playing field after the game Friday afternoon. There was no telling how long it had been sitting there. Perhaps François had not been watching the game at all but had been using it as a pretext to stow the silver pencil case in Émile’s desk while our attention had been otherwise occupied.

I thought again more carefully about the incident with the headmaster at school and realized that François’s father had not been there. I hadn’t seen who was in the hall with the headmaster, but François’s father was a big, loud man and, had he been called in about this, the entire school would have heard him bellowing. So the person in the hall had probably been the driver. And given the description of the big grey Peugeot by Emile’s possibly consumptive cackling and cuspitory neighbor, it had to have been the driver pretending to have come from the headmaster hours earlier to give the news to Émile’s great-uncle. At the time, I wondered, incorrectly as it turned out, what kind of stuff François had on the driver to make him so compliant.

Then I looked at my little brother and realized why Dr. Guillaud had brought him to walk home with me early. Obviously he understood the psychology of hatred much better than I did and didn’t want Arnaud walking home alone. That showed me that François couldn’t hate Émile without also hating me, which meant that he’d hate my brother as well.

That was when I first had a glimpse of what people call ‘the bigger picture’ and it actually staggered me to the point that I had to stop walking.

My little brother asked what was wrong. I told him I had something stuck in the throat of my imagination.

He just stared at me, frowning.

“Going down,” he asked and then edged away a couple of steps. “Or coming up?”

Dr. Guillaud would have laughed long and hard over that but I never got a chance to tell him.

When I thought again about what had happened to Émile that afternoon, I had, in an instant of clarity, seen everything that had led up to it and everything that could result from it.

Along with that ghastly moment of perspective came a sick sort of realization that, up until that moment, I had only lived day to day, reacting to events, looking back at good times, worrying about threats but still looking forward to some kind of fun in spite of them.

I had had no consciousness that I was but one thread weaving in and out amongst many other threads with no understanding by any of us of the overall pattern—or even if there was any overall pattern.

I had had no idea of how easily we could find ourselves all tangled up in circumstances beyond our understanding or control. I had had no idea that there existed people who wanted nothing more than to jerk that tangle into such a tight knot that nothing could loosen it. And I had had no idea that there existed people who lived only for the pleasure of the hurt they could inflict on others.

Seeing it all suddenly spread out before me like that for the first time, I could immediately see some loose ends. François had snipped off one loose end named Émile. But my brother and I were still walking around free. I considered the possibilities and then took my brother home as fast as I could.

Chapter 10, Yeah, They Didn't See ME Looking on and How I Set Things Up

I had told Dr. Guillaud I would be back to finish my work after delivering my brother to my aunt. My mother was still at the hair salon and would stay there that evening until just before curfew. She usually got home late and then went right to sleep. I told my brother not to say a thing about what had gone on at school, probably unnecessarily because the gossip, no doubt, had already reached my mother before we had even left the school and by now the afternoon shadows were growing long.

So I left him with my aunt and said that I had to get back to the school to clean up a mess.

She told me to be sure to be home before curfew or she’d lay a slap up against my ear and I would cry blood.

But after what I had seen François do to Émile and what I was certain François would try to do to me, I saw that threat for nothing more than the habitual, toothless act of manipulation that it was.

I trotted back in the direction of the school in the falling dark.

I had just come to the intersection of my road with the river road when I saw headlights to the left off in the distance approaching from the direction of the school. I jumped off the road and hid behind a clump of brush.

The big grey Peugeot sped past, throwing up a cloud of dust. I noticed that in the moonlight the dust was not red.

So I knew I had been right.

I waited for a few minutes, slapping away mosquitoes, and then resumed my run to the school.

I was lucky. It was still too early for the night watchman to have started his rounds, but it was late enough that everyone else had gone home.

I crept into our classroom and felt my way to my desk.

I started to reach inside and then stopped.

What if François had put scorpions in my desk? But I decided that he would have been too cowardly even to try collecting them. I reached all the way to the back and then felt the cool heavy oblong of the pencil case.

Now, what to do with it?

I looked around the dim classroom. I was tempted to hide it in the space I had found behind the blackboard earlier in the year, but I saw immediately the inevitable chain of consequences flowing from that.

François would just say that I had taken it from the school and get his father involved and they’d tear my aunt’s place to pieces. And even if they didn’t find it, they’d still think that I had taken it because I was Émile’s little brother. I was the best friend and tutor of a disgraced thief who had been beaten and thrown out of school. And if, in desperation, I finally produced it, that would only be taken as confirmation of François’s lie that I had stolen it. And then I would be beaten and thrown out of school, and no telling what would happen to my mother’s job at the beauty shop.

No, it would be better just to move the case back deep into François’s own desk. Like that Edgar Allen Poe story, but in reverse. So that’s what I did.

I pushed it all the way to the back. As I did so, my hand passed over a bunch of junk I couldn’t see but that had a decidedly unscholastic feeling.

Then I made sure everything was exactly in the position I had found them and made my way back home, ducking off the road and hiding at the first hint of headlights coming from either direction.

Very early the next morning, I returned to the school with my brother. For the foreseeable future I was not going let him go anywhere alone. Who knew when that big grey Peugeot would be sent to pick him up on some bogus charge or what would happen to him when it did? Also, I was afraid that François might have returned earlier than I to check on the pencil case.

I was relieved to find it still missing from my desk and still in its place at the back of his. He still could have returned and found it missing from my desk without discovering it had been returned to his. I supposed his initial accusations would reveal that but concluded that as long as it was still in his desk, the outcome would remain substantially the same.

I was almost looking forward to his coming accusation. I knew I’d have to make sure that I didn’t look too unsurprised.

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