The Other Hand

of his head too, I think. The pack of dogs skidded and stopped and they tore into the fallen dog. They were biting out chunks of the neck flesh while the back legs were still thrashing and twitching. I screamed. The guard was shaking.
    From out of the jungle, six men came running. They wore tracksuit trousers, all torn, and vests and running shoes, goldchains. They moved quickly up on us. They ignored the dogs. One was holding a bow, holding it drawn. The others were waving their machetes, daring the guard to shoot. They came right up to us.
    There was a leader. He had a wound in his neck. It was rotting—I could smell it. I knew he was going to die soon. Another of the men wore a wire necklace and it was strung with dried brown things that looked like mushrooms. When he saw Kindness, this man pointed at her, then he made circles on his nipples with his fingers and he grinned. I am trying to report this as matter-of-factly as I know how.
    The guard said, “Keep walking, mister and missus.”
    But the man with the neck wound—the leader—said, “No, you stop.”
    “I will shoot,” the guard said.
    But the man said, “Maybe you will get one of us, maybe two.”
    The man with the bow was aiming at the guard’s neck, and he said, “Maybe you get none of us. Maybe you should of shoot us when we was far away.”
    The guard stopped walking backward, and we stopped too. Little Bee and Kindness went around behind us. They put me and my husband between themselves and the hunters.
    The hunters were passing around a bottle of something I thought was wine. They were taking turns to drink. The man with the bow and arrows was getting an erection. I could see it under his tracksuit trousers. But his expression didn’t change and his eyes never moved from our guard’s neck. He was wearing a black bandanna. The bandanna said EMPORIO ARMANI . I looked at Andrew. I tried to speak calmly, but the words were crushed in my throat.
    “Andrew,” I said. “Please give them anything they want.”
    Andrew looked at the man with the neck wound and he said, “What do you want?”
    The hunters looked at one another. The man with the neck wound stepped up to me. His eyes flickered, rolled up inside his head, then snapped back down and stared madly at me, the pupilstiny and the irises bullet-hard and gleaming like copper. His mouth twitched from a smile, to a grimace, to a cruel thin line, to a bitter and amused disdain. The emotions played across his face like a television flipped impatiently between channels. I smelled his sweat and his rot. He made a sound, an involuntary moan which seemed to surprise him—his eyes went wide—and he tore off my beach wrap. He looked down at the pale lilac material in his hands, curiously, and seemed to be wondering how it had got there. I screamed and clasped my arms over my breasts. I cringed away from the man, from the way he looked at me—now patiently, as if encouraging a slow learner; now furiously; now with a pregnant, vespertine calm.
    I was wearing a very small green bikini. I will say that again, and maybe I will begin to understand it myself. In the contested delta area of an African country in the middle of a three-way oil war, because there was a beach next to the war, because the state tourist board had mail-merged tickets for that beach to every magazine listed in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, because it was that year’s cut, and because as editor I was first in the queue when distributors sent their own freebies to my magazine’s office, I was wearing a very small green bandeau bikini from Hermès. It occurred to me, as I stood there with my arms crossed over my tits, that I had freeloaded myself to annihilation.
    The wounded man stepped so close to me that I felt the sand sink under my feet from his weight. He ran his finger over my shoulder, over my bare skin, and he said, “What do we want ? We want…to practice…our English.”
    The hunters exploded into laughter. They passed around the bottle again. For a moment, when one of them raised the bottle, I saw something with a pupil staring out of it. It was pressed up against the glass. Then the man put the bottle down, and the thing disappeared back into the liquid. I say liquid because I didn’t think it was wine anymore.
    Andrew said, “We have money, and we can get more later.”
    The wounded man giggled and made a noise like a pig, whichmade him giggle more. Then his face set suddenly into an expression of