Page 39 of Soul on Fire
He drank enough to drown, almost gagging when the water splashed over his face. It cooled him, ran down his neck and back like a wave, for a moment cooling his burning skin. He’d never been so hot, not even in Iraq. It was as if the forest took the heat of the sun and distilled it to something even hotter, even fiercer, refracting the heat through a million drops of humidity.
“I found a village,” Ikolo said. “Matenda. They say there is no sickness here and no rebels. I’m going to talk to the village chief and ask permission to shelter with them for the night. Can you stay and watch the bike?”
He nodded, his movements slow, like his head was a bowling ball balanced on a bendy straw. Ikolo gripped his shoulders and steadied him. “I’ll be right back.”
* * *
Chapter Sixteen
Matenda
The Congo Forest
He cameto lying on the ground, his head in Ikolo’s lap, staring at a fire. The coals were a deep burgundy and covered in a fine layer of ash, and logs like the spokes of a wagon wheel spread out from the center. Flames teased over the burned ends of the logs. He watched Ikolo stir the coals and push a log into the center, refreshing the fire and sparking the flames to rise along his log.
Water boiled in a pot balanced on the logs near the coals. A woman carefully pulled it out and carried it to Ikolo’s side. “Asante sana,” Ikolo said.Thank you very much. She smiled at him and moved on, back to another fire ring in front of a different hut, and joined her family.
Elliot struggled to sit up. Outside the village, darkness had fallen like the world ended just feet away, the edge of the world where the light faded. Only the fires from the village provided any light, scattered in front of reed and mudbrick huts.
“Careful,” Ikolo said, pulling him back down. “You should have let me take care of your arm when you cut yourself. When did this happen?”
He sagged back into Ikolo’s lap, his head pillowed on Ikolo’s thigh. Ikolo held his arm, twisted his forearm forward and back, inspecting his bloody gash by firelight.
“It was one of the streams we crossed, when I fell.”
“You said you were fine. I asked you if you hurt yourself.”
“I am fine.”
“Do you know what is in the water here? You’re not fine, I promise you that.” Ikolo dipped a handkerchief in the hot water and rubbed it down Elliot’s arm. Elliot gritted his teeth, groaned as a white-hot pain knifed up his arm. “I have to clean it out. Your wound is filthy.”
He closed his eyes and sucked it up, each deep brush of the fabric over his torn skin raking fire down to his bones. The hot water opened his cut again, and lava-hot blood ran in watery trails down his arm and dripped from his fingers. Ikolo cleaned his wound thoroughly, washed his arm, and then pulled a bottle of iodine and a bandage from his bag behind him in the dirt. The iodine stung as he put it on his cut, but no worse than the debriding had been. Ikolo bandaged and wrapped his arm, tying the ends neatly inside his forearm. “Here,” he said, passing a packet of tablets to Elliot. “You will need these too. Antibiotics. I took everything we had left from the camp. Take two, morning and night.”
Elliot dry swallowed the pills. “Thanks.”
“Now, you rest. The chief here, Keise, says we are welcome to shelter for tonight, but he’s asked me to treat some of their people in return. I’ll ask about any travelers that have come up the track. They will know if Majambu passed by.”
“Good. We need information, some kind of lead. We’re blind right now.”
Ikolo nodded. “They will tell us everything they know. If they’ve seen him, they’ll say so. And, they are making us a meal now. It will be cassava.” Ikolo winked. “It is always cassava.”
Elliot propped himself against his pack as Ikolo took his medical kit and headed for the first fire ring. He smiled and sat with the family there, effortlessly sliding into their company, their village life.
His eyes followed Ikolo’s smile, watched it burst open, watched the way his whole face lit up when he laughed. The fire played in his features, curling in and out of his wide cheekbones and jaw. But it was always his smile that Elliot’s gaze returned to.
An ache built inside him. He closed his eyes.
He’d finally squared with himself before this deployment, sitting alone in his apartment and pounding out pushup after pushup after pushup, heaving himself in pullups until his arms wouldn’t move. The pain in his body numbed his mind, at first making it easier to push away, then easier to accept. When he was broken down and when he was shaking, when he couldn’t run from it anymore, there was nothing to do but face the truth.
He wasn’t entirely straight.
Elliot didn’t know when he’d first had the thought, but the suspicion creeped up on him through the years. Wondering if his admiration over another man’s physique at the gym was something more. His eyes tracing the bodies of men more than women. He’d thought it was his training, him taking in the world as part of his tactical awareness.
That didn’t explain the hunger. It had been building slowly, an unknown desire for more, for something he couldn’t name. It started with a question and turned into a conflagration, a bonfire that consumed his soul.Am I gay?
He didn’t know the answer yet. But he did know that he ached when a man caught his eye, when his gaze traveled their bodies and traced the lines of their legs, their waists, their chests, and up to their smiles. In some ways, it was like a finding a locked door inside him he’d never known was shut.
Thinking it and doing something about it were two entirely different things. The answer toam I gaycould be locked away and hidden forever. He didn’t have to do anything with that question. He didn’t have to go any further. He could end all the questioning, all the wondering. Never think it again.
