Lit Fic 23: Heart of November Ch 14
The Australian, Amelia, confronts her rapist, Kurtz. Pain ensues.
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Amelia laid on the bed, feeling worse. Her shoulder ached and attracted flies. She kept her eyes closed to concentrate on healing; healing her shoulder was the easiest part. It needed gauze, antibiotics, and time. But the abuse? The beatings? The rapes? She didn’t want to descend into that depression. She didn’t want them to have any kind of hold over her. She was not going to let them control her; even with Tip dead, he reached his dead hand out to control her feelings, thoughts. Emotions. She didn’t want that.
But Kurtz. He was still alive. He was the jerk who lead her into Tip’s lair. He sold her to him. He handled her like a product; a profitable product in Tip’s dirty little world. Kurtz was responsible for all of that..
No, she mumbled to herself. She was partially responsible; she allowed herself to be seduced. She aided in him getting lucky. No, she shook her head. No, no, no. Wanting to get laid is not Not! the same as wanting to be beaten, raped, and sold into sex slavery. It was Kurtz. Kurtz! His fault. Kurtz’ plan from the beginning. She wished she could fall asleep and wake up in her bed in Adelaide; dreaming all this. But then, she had to smile, it would be like a bad TV show; she didn’t care. She wanted to not have lived during the last few weeks. She wanted peace.
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The three sat in a row on the bus. Sakombí and Amelia were asleep, their heads resting on each other. Hairball watched the landscape spin by like a fast-forward movie: small homes zipping by, kids running, old men sitting, women working, crowded streets replaced by open fields, open fields morphing into barren, over farmed, useless dirt crowded with kids playing soccer.
Once he saw a strange tableau: a gang of four kids standing motionless around a large, hopefully dead, constrictor. A woman in black knelt as if in prayer beside the constrictor’s head.
Then it was swept away by three quick red-and-white Coca Cola signs as the bus zipped passed a row of stores selling everything from rope to yams, from cotton cloth to imported beer; anything the owner could get her hands on cheaply.
Hairball, tired and his body trying to relax after the border crossing, the shooting, the horrors of his Congolese life, tried to determine why the woman would be praying at a dead snake. But fatigue and the rhythmic roar of the bus coaxed him to sleep.
The bus cranked to a stop in front of an old concrete building splattered with bullet wounds. The driver yelled something and everyone except Sakombí, Hairball, and Amelia grumbled their belongings — boxes, children, old suitcases, overstuffed bags, a chicken — together. As soon as everyone was off the bus, the trio picked up their backpacks and crawled off.
Sakombí pointed at a small store teeming with bus passengers and walked off while Hairball and Amelia sought shade and water.
“Gotta get you to a hospital” Hairball suggested, adding, “Going back to Australia?”
Amelia shook her head. “Maybe Europe. Got a friend in Prague.”
“You don’t think your parents will be worried about you?”
“Are yours?”
Hairball agreed, shook his head not in denial but in the realization that maybe they weren’t worried; at least not his father. On the other hand, he hadn’t called, texted, or even written them a “wish-you-were-here’ postcard since he boarded the flight from O’Hare to Paris.
“Besides,” Amelia said, sensing Hairball’s discomfort, “I don’t wanna be one of those women who runs home to mommy anytime a little trouble pops up.”
“Getting… prostituted out and shot is hardly … a little trouble.”
“No,” Amelia agreed, touched her bandaged wound, and looked at the road to Kigali with its international airport. It was long and busy with people rushing anywhere they weren’t. “But I want to …” she stopped. She watched a truck belch its way toward the Congo.
“Work things out for yourself?” Hairball asked and finished her sentence.
She nodded. “Hey, look.”
Sakombí waved with his free hand. In his other he had a bag of cold bottles of fermented banana beer, three brochettes, and a sack of beans, sweet yams, and three bottles of Coke.
“Lunch!” he smiled. “And food for the bus.”
“A damn near movable feast, Sakombí, thanks.”
“I have good and bad news.”
“Good,” Hairball said. “Keep the bad for yourself and share only the good.”
“Okeedoke, as you Yanks say, right?”
“Right.”
The three sipped their banana beer and breathed in the relatively cleaner air of the highlands. Amelia and Hairball wanted to put off hearing the bad news for as long as possible.
“Gorillas live near here, don’t they?” Hairball asked, directing the conversation away from the ‘good-news/bad-news’ scenario.
“The tourists gorillas want to see live over on that,” Sakombí said, pointing to misty mountains.
Amelia adjusted the sling over her shoulder, sipped more banana beer, and watched the traffic flow toward the Congo.
“What do you think they’re hauling that way?” she asked.
The two men looked at the transport trucks but neither answered. They watched, drank, and tried to forget.
“Okay, what’s the bad news?” Amelia asked.
“The bus? It’s broken. Fixable, don’t panic. But,” he smiled at them. “Not today.”
Hairball glared at him.
“Tomorrow,” he admitted.
“This isn’t bus food. It’s dinner,” Hairball complained.
“And breakfast,” Amelia added.
“Yes. Yes, it is. We spend the night here. There, actually,” Sakombí pointed at a one story concrete building with bullet marks and a scared wall that had survived a big fire.
“That’s a hotel?”
“And! We got the last room!”
“How many beds?” Amelia asked.
“Yeah,” Sakombí said quietly.
“You sound like you’re hiding something. What? The room is covered in spiders? No water? No toilet?”
“No, no. Nothing as bad as all that. No, no. Well, a shared toilet. But a shower in the room! Yeah. We are fortunate. Very, very,” he looked away from his two friends. “Fortunate.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
Sakombí watched a truck piled with freshly cut logs lumber its way toward the Congo before answering. “Two beds.”
His two friends stared at him.
“What’s the problem?” Amelia asked. “You jerks sleep in one. I’m in the other.”
“Two beds means, uh, four people.”
Hairball sipped his banana beer. Amelia stared at him.
“We share the room?” she accused.
Sakombí nodded. “But we got a room, at least. Yes? No sleeping on the sidewalk.”
“With who?”
Sakombí frowned. “She said it would be an English speaker.”
“Rwanda speaks English. It could be anyone,” Hairball observed.
“I’d kill for a shower.”
They gathered their food, packs, and drinks, and walked to the low building.
To Hairball it looked like an old 1950s-style two-story out-moded and soon-to-be-abandoned motel that rented rooms by the hour to streetwalkers, their pimps and customers.
To Amelia it looked like an abandoned cowshed the locals used for target practice. Jungle growth threatened the edges.
Sakombí lead them to their room. He fished the key out of his pocket and sprang open the metal door. With a gentlemanly bow, he allowed Amelia to enter first.
“Holy shit!” she screamed.
Kurtz smiled from the bed. A joint smoldered between his fingers.
“Hey,” he chortled. “Long time…”
“You ass!” Amelia screamed. She rushed the bed. She jumped.
Kurtz saw her fly in the air. He had to move. If she landed on him, with those knees, he’d be in pain. Lots of it. He knew that. His mind was frantic. His body? Not so much. He rolled to his right, away from the door, away from the flying bitch. Too late.
Her knees ground into his kidneys. Her fists cracked at his head.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” he shouted.
“Ass! Ass! Ass!” Amelia accented each punch, each knee, with a scream.
“Holy…!” Sakombí shouted.
Kurtz’s joint fell to the greasy carpet.
Amelia grabbed Kurtz around the throat.
Sakombí grabbed Amelia by her shirt. He pulled.
Amelia spun around, whacking Sakombí in the nose. He crawled on the floor, his nose spraying red all across the carpet.
Hairball rushed to help him while Kurtz scurried for safety by falling off the bed.
Amelia pounced again. She smashed both fists into Kurtz’s back.
“No! No!” Kurtz howled.
“Amelia!” Hairball shouted as he tried to stop Sakombí’s body from losing all its blood. “That’s enough!”
“No!” She punched Kurtz in the back again and again and again. “He’s not dead yet!”
“Stop it! Stop her! Please stop it!”
“Amelia!” Hairball screamed.
Panting, she stopped. She looked down at Kurtz. “Douche bag.” She looked over at Hairball. He had a bloody towel pressed against Sakombí’s nose. “Oh, crap. Sorry,” she apologized.
“We gotta go back to that doctor,” Hairball said. “You’d better come with us,” he said to Amelia.
“No,” she argued. “Douche bag has to go with you. I’m gonna take a shower.” She hopped off the bed, grabbed her bag, and hurried into the narrow shower stall room that held the shower, a small sink, and an unlockable door. “When I get out, that asshole has to be gone.”
“You’re not staying here,” Hairball said to Kurtz.
“Ain’t that the truth. But,” he pulled a first-aid kit out of his bag. “This might help. Maybe. I dunno.” He handed the kit to Hairball and sat on the bed.
Hairball ripped open the first aid kit. He grabbed bandages, swabs, and disinfectant. He squatted in front of Sakombí.
“This might sting a bit.”
“Oh, goody.”
Hairball daubed at the bloody nose. The blood slowed to a reasonable trickle. He dabbed more disinfectant before adding a touch of gauze and a bandage. He looked at his handiwork.
“I think you’ll live,” he said.
“Four times, Hairball. Four! Three since you came into my life.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that, Sakombí.”
Kurtz sniffed the air. “¡Hey! ¿Smell something burning?”
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