The moment he spoke his idea seemed a little drastic to him, but Parker and Louis both nodded, backing away like leaving thieves and closing the green door behind them.
Jerry's bundle was in his hands, his cap on his head, so what else in the world did he need? He put his free hand out to touch the enamel walls of the hallway. It was dark down below and as he descended he tried to step silently, though by doing so he got the feeling that this time he was getting into something that he might not be able to get out of again simply by taking off his cap.
The hallway had an elbow in it, a sharp turn after which he'd be visible to anyone waiting for him in the main room, but when he stopped and listened, his eyes closed, there was only silence. When he opened his eyes again, however, he saw the white wall opposite him in the quickly gone beam of a flashlight. It was a keyhole view, but it told him that someone was down there after all.
Jerry really did not know what to do. He might be shot if he stepped away from where he was, he might be wrestled to the ground and taken away again, put into a cell worse than the ones he'd been in before. But he saw the flashlight beam again and then he heard a voice. “Perhaps it was nothing,” the voice said, and it was Pamela's.
Jerry felt the surprising lightness of joy and he said, “Why are you sitting in the dark like that? Why hasn't anyone turned on a lamp?”
There was movement in the room and then someone turned the flashlight on again, this time finding him instead of the wall. “You got here safely,” Pamela said.
“Who's there with you?” Jerry asked. He shifted his bundle and walked into the room but he could not remember the layout of it very well, and he bumped into a chair, his bundle smacking the head of whoever it was who sat there. “Ouch,” said a man's voice. This was the man who held the flashlight, and he shined it into Jerry's eyes. “Ha,” he said, “they told me my mother had gotten to you.”
“Beany!” Jerry shouted. He didn't know the man well enough for such informality, but suddenly the name fit, and just as suddenly, as if the sound of the name had done it, Beany became the man everyone else had said he was all along. It was a stranger moment than any of the others Jerry had had, but he knew quite clearly then that Beany could have done it, he could have saved everything, he could have made Nigeria whole, if only he'd been given the chance.
Beany told Pamela to put the lamp on and when she did so Jerry saw that there was no one else in the room, the others, Pamela said, were in the city at large, trying to find out what they could about what was really going on.
Pamela and Beany had been sitting close together, and the sight of them made Jerry ask, “How is Nurudeen? How is Bramwell too?”
“They are safe,” Pamela told him. “They are still with their grandmother in the village.”
Nurudeen's face came into Jerry's mind and he said, almost as if he were speaking to himself, “You put that boy to such bad use. Both of you should be ashamed.”
Beany looked sharply up for a moment, but then he looked down again. “Sometimes there is a greater good,” he said.
Jerry did not know how/ to face this man so he bent over to untie his bundle. His feelings toward both of these people were still in turmoil and he needed the time to look away. But though Jerry had undone his bundle with only that purpose in mind, when the knot was open he automatically reached into the tree of life and pulled out that thorn carving he'd bought, all wrapped up inside Sondra's indigo gift. And when he moved the snapdragon aside and touched the thorn carving directly he knew, finally, why he had had to have it. The thorn carving was hot against his hand, aggravated by his touch. Never mind the bad purpose he'd put Nurudeen to, never mind the altered state of Jerry's own life, Beany's biggest crime was in this carving. Jerry brought it into the insufficient light. “Look,” he said. “This is what you've finally done. Nothing was accomplished but this.”
He'd had no intention of speaking so harshly; only a moment before, in fact, Beany's greatness had been clear to him. But the unexpected sharpness of his voice crackled in the room like kindling in a fire, making him put the thorn carving down on the bench beside Pamela. It was a wooden icon on an altar of tin, and though the light was bad they could all see perfectly the ebony woman leaning from her window on the building's soft side. Now, however, the woman was not looking down at an imagined crowd but seemed to be looking up into Beany's eyes, which, when Jerry looked at them too, appeared to be full of tears.
There was a long silence then, with Beany nodding and the others watching his face, which was surprised and thankful, constant and forlorn, all at the same time. Pamela had reacted to the thorn carving in a more subdued way than Beany had. She, too, had stared at it, but her expression had not changed. Now, though, when she looked at Jerry he could see worry in her eyes. “Surely this could have waited,” she whispered, and then she said, “A Nigerian would never have brought this back here.” She didn't speak again so Jerry covered the thorn carving, letting Sondra's snapdragon fall in such a way that its beckoning throat was projected toward them by the burning building's top. He brought the Power 99 out from the center of the tree of life and held it in his hands.
Jerry had bought the thorn carving because of the surprise he'd felt at its existence, because he'd had to have it at the time. But now, as he continued to watch Beany's face, he was transformed. Who but a fool could have thought that such a carving was made by accident, found by the accidental wanderings of a rootless man? It was true, a Nigerian, no matter what his background, could never have believed such a thing, and Jerry suddenly realized that the market lady, had she been forced to, would have given it to him for free.
“Burn it,” Beany Abubakar said.
Jerry was confounded by his own ignorance, it was true, but he didn't want to burn the carving. It was superbly made, its joints and glued pieces invisible, its draw as haunting as anything he'd seen before.
Jerry took the snapdragon back off the carving and saw the woman's beveled face again, staring up in its clear and harrowing way. The thing was too strange to destroy and he said, “Let's keep her, she can serve as a reminder, a tribute to the real woman who died in that fire.”
Jerry's voice was back to normal but it was hopelessly weak. Pamela took the snapdragon from him and folded it carefully, placing it back across his knees. “It isn't here to serve as a reminder,” she softly said.
Pamela's eyes were lively and deep now, the worry gone, the expression on her face sympathetic but strong. And though Jerry had not noticed her move, she was suddenly on her knees beside him, looking up. Jerry knew Beany was watching too, that he'd be able to see Beany's face if he lifted his eyes.
Jerry sighed then and nodded, allowing Pamela to speak again.
“Let me use some of this,” she said. She touched Jerry's left hand, and when he released his grip on it she took the Power 99 bottle, letting each of them share the sound that came from it as she cracked its cap. The aroma from the bottle seemed to brighten the glow of the kerosene lamp, making everyone's face jump in the uneven flame, but Pamela didn't wait. She squeezed Beany's face on the bottle and wet the thorn carving with the Power 99, watching as the wood darkened, as the woman's features took on an even grimmer look.
“That's medicine,” Jerry said, “a remedy for ailments, rashes, and the like.”
Pamela replaced the cap then and, reaching into a pocket somewhere, surprised Jerry one more time by producing that Zippo lighter, the one he had taken from LeRoY's room. She held the lighter lightly, its silver case compact in her palm, and then she lifted Jerry's hands from his knees and put the lighter gently into, one of them. “You do it,” she said. “This part of it is in your domain.”
Jerry felt the lighter's heat and weight, knowing, somehow, that she was right. He flipped the Zippo open and let its flame dance up as it always did, at one with the opening of the case, like a cobra from its basket, transparent at its base but yellow up where it licked at the uninspired air. Beany sat forward in his chair, Pamela back on her knees. “Do it,” Beany Abubakar said.
When Jerry touched the flame to the back of the burning building nothing happened at first. The thorn carving had been dry, and the thought crossed his mind that it would have burned better had Pamela left it alone. Now it was simply wet wood, Power 99 its prophylactic rather than its fuel. Jerry even thought to look around for a can of copy-machine toner, but at that precise moment the entire flame from the Zippo transferred itself to the carving, a transparent blue fire with a yellow hat on, climbing up the building's sides and working its way around to the top.
The Power 99 bottle had spoken to them when the cap came off, and now the building did too. When the flames got around to the woman, the blond wood, those other carved flames, did a little dance with the real ones, and then the woman seemed to sigh, turning her head all around before, like the dead head of a large match, it drooped toward the floor and disappeared.
It was astounding, but though the reburning of the ministry building and the sighs of the long-dead woman seemed spooky and bothered Jerry badly, they were a gift of such profound proportions to Beany that they soon brought him out of the funk he was in and let him smile with sad serenity at the other two people in the room.
“In the end Nigeria is all theater,” he finally said. “Perhaps the rest of the world is too.”
Beany stood then, walking up the opposite corridor to where Jerry had told him Parker and Louis waited to come back inside. Jerry had thought to go for the men himself, but instead he just sat there, watching the fire burn down. Even when the woman was no longer visible at the window he watched, even when the roof was gone and the walls had crumbled and the base of the building had flattened out against the enamel of the wash bench on which it stood. Perhaps it was the influence of the Power 99 after all, but this thorn-carved building burned like that other carving had, it burned with the blue flame of the Zippo, it burned hot, and it burned completely away.
Jerry had just looked up at Pamela, was about to try to say something that might bring her back into his life one more time, when they both suddenly realized that Beany had been gone too long, that too much time had gone by.
“It only takes a minute to walk out of this place,” Pamela said.
Jerry and Pamela stood then, rushing up the corridor so quickly that the sounds of their footsteps seemed to stay inside. And they were into the back of Smart's appliance store and had stepped through its main entrance into the outside world before they heard the voices, before they realized that they'd have done better to stay inside.
Louis and Parker were there, sitting on straight-backed chairs with their arms bound behind them, and Beany was there too, standing up but facing the young sergeant that Jerry and the others had faced at that other appliance shop downtown. The sergeant's motorcycle was beside him, the one he had used to follow along, to trail the three escapees deep into the heart of things.
“Oh no,” said Jerry Neal.
Whether or not the young sergeant recognized Beany, whether or not he knew him by name, was a question that Jerry would ask himself many times later on, but it was clear from the way he was acting that he did not like having to confront such an important-looking man whether he knew him or not.
“Sorry, sah, but you mus' leave dem tie,” he was saying as Jerry and Pamela came out.
Beany had a small knife in his hand, something he'd picked up from a merchant's table nearby, and he was standing by Louis and Parker, bending as if he was about to cut their ropes.
“They work for me,” Beany let the sergeant know, “they were out here waiting for me to call them inside.”
Beany's voice held a measured calm, and carried with it such authority that it made the young sergeant pause, though he held a small machine gun in his hands and would not, normally, have paused for anyone.
“Dem escapees, sah,” he said, “looters too. I had 'em in my truck downtown.”
Beany reached down and cut Louis's ropes. He did so easily and without letting any further tension build, but when Louis brought his hands around in front of him, holding them up and rubbing his wrists, there was tension in the air anyway.
“Don' cut de nex' man,” the sergeant said. His voice seemed now to plead, as if he knew that, even with a machine gun in his hands, he wasn't equal to the situation, but Beany cut Parker's ropes too, without looking up. And when Parker rubbed his wrists, using the same motion that Louis had, the young sergeant fired, squeezing the machine gun's trigger in a nearly accidental way, but sending three quick sounds into the air, three quick bullets into the breast pocket of Beany Abubakar's shirt.
Jerry and Pamela had been frozen in the long moment that preceded the firing of the gun, but the sound seemed to release everyone. The sergeant dropped the machine gun on the ground, and when Louis stood out of his chair, Beany sat down, falling so heavily into it that the chair would have tipped over had not the monkey cages been there. The chair leaned against the cages and two of the monkeys within them leapt forward, one to each side of Beany, reaching through the wire to take hold of the chair's two sides, stabilizing Beany and slowing everything down.
Beany's breast pocket was over his heart and when Pamela got to him she slipped her hand into that pocket as if she might be able to pull the bullets out. Until that moment there hadn't been much blood, but Pamela's fingers seemed to unplug things, and when she took her hand away, bringing it quickly to her face, there was a torrent, as if Beany were draining onto them, spreading out and covering the land.
Parker and Jerry and the young sergeant all went for the machine gun at the same time, but it seemed to lean away from the other two and into Jerry's hands.