He sat in the back of the van, clutching his suitcase on his lap. It made him cock his head sideways, chin up against the suitcase handle. He had gotten it at Goodwill before he first came here, a worn faux-leather that helped him feel like a traveler. Now, the fake leather was cracked and peeling at the edges, from an afternoon in the rain on his first trip here, showing white underneath. It was the rainy season last time, and he had worn wet clothes for three days. That would not happen this time; June was the middle of the dry season. At least, it wouldn’t happen until September or October.
The blue and white minibus -- the taxis here in Zambia -- jittered and jumped over the cratered streets. The dead shocks made it feel like a cheap ride at the county fair. The sun was setting and it threw a blush of red over the scrub savanna, like the watered down communion wine at church. Yet, it was beautiful, he thought that, with the fields giving up their green in the depth of the dry season, he thought it was God’s country. As if every country isn’t God’s.
His khaki pants were wrinkled from the long flights, and worn on the knees and back pockets. He bought most of his possessions at Goodwill. His white shirt had coffee on it from the flight; they encountered turbulence over the Sahara. But, if he was honest, his shirt often got coffee stains, from any variety of knocking his cup over to splashing sugar in too quickly to his rather poor ability to drink hot liquids. Hannah laughed at him at first, with his penchant for spilling. She didn’t laugh as much now.
She was still in Chicago. They had been married for three years, almost four he told himself, but really three and a half. She was sick with he didn’t know what, and neither did she, and so she stayed in Chicago despite his assurances that everything would be okay if she came. He talked to her during his layover in London, but she breathed the words, “I’m sick, David, I have to-” and left the phone. He could hear her retching from ten feet and four thousand miles away. As the minibus galloped down the road he was still surprised she wasn’t next to him.
The smell of diesel fuel marked the entrance into Lusaka. The smell, and the heater spitting out heat despite the twenty people in an absurdly small space, and the little girl who kicked her legs next to him, and the little girl’s mother who saw no need to cover herself as she nursed her baby boy in public, it all forced David to breath deeply and pray for patience. He did not like traveling. The breath, he remembered, God is on your breath -- the Yah and weh as the Jews called him, the inhale and exhale. Even if you’re inhaling diesel fumes and can smell your own breath on the way out.
They drove down the wide boulevards of downtown, with widely spaced palm trees lining the middle. Stubby concrete walls ran alongside the streets, almost like the streets were canals, and they were floating through the ancient beauty of Venice. Except here the sidewalks were vacant, save for the occasional man standing and smoking in a heavy winter coat. When it drops below sixty degrees in Zambia, or about fifteen celsius, winter coats are standard. Along one of the stubby walls, in light blue lettering, were the words: Sex with a baby won’t cure AIDS. The people here believed sex with a virgin would cure AIDS. No one admitted they had AIDS in Zambia.
