Sometimes the Darkness Read online

  Sometimes the

  Darkness

  Will Campbell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  Copyright

  This book is dedicated to my wife Tresa Davis-Weir

  I would like to thank the author Kathie Giorgio, founder of the All Writer’s Workplace & Workshop for her help in the development of my book. Without her guidance, this work would not have happened.

  After Kosti

  Her prayer was answered, but the language of answered prayers is God’s language. The nun had failed to understand God’s message. Much had been gained, but much had been lost.

  The plane, the tool she had hoped God would send, shook relentlessly, the children screamed and cried as the nun’s shoes slid off the pedals. Sister Marie Claire brought them back to the worn metal once more. Pushing as hard as she could, the nun applied the brakes while Hanley kept the plane on the roadway. Thirty seconds after touchdown the plane rolled to a stop. Hanley cut the ignition, silencing the roar and thrum of the big engines and slumped over, his wounded body failing faster now. Struggling out of her seat, the nun slowly pulled him upright. Taking water from a bottle, she splashed his face and patted it while saying, “Hanley, wake up. I’m going to check on the children and go for help.” She called out, “Aisha, are the children safe? Aisha?”

  Appearing behind the nun, carrying the smallest child in her arms, Aisha told her the children were frightened, but all right. Leaving Hanley, the nun turned and led Aisha and the children from the plane, sitting all of them on the ground beneath the Beech. The morning air was now warm and the shade comfortable.

  “I will go into Shambe for help. You will stay with the children right here. Do not leave or let any of the children leave. If someone comes near you, put the children back on the plane and close the door. Wait here until I return. Do you understand?”

  Aisha nodded and the nun immediately turned toward the village and started off at a trot. The girl watched until the nun was perhaps three hundred yards down the dirt track, then turned, counted the children, told them to stay where they were and entered the plane.

  Moving to the cockpit, she looked at Hanley, who was unconscious, his head again resting against the window frame, his mouth open, his breathing a shallow wheeze, his body shivering. A thin line of blood dripped from his brow staining his shirt sleeve. Turning, she took a blanket from the floor of the cargo hold, placed it over the American, tucking it around his shoulders and arms. Putting her lips to his ear, Aisha whispered, “You did it,” then returned to the children.

  1

  For Hanley Martin, time had become an obsession. The effect of time on his existence was maddening. An uncle, his mentor, told him years ago he would need, if he was lucky, to balance the scales, to account for any good fortune that came his way. It had and he hadn’t, and now he felt time was running out.

  He was fifty-one years old, felt older, was successful at business but not life. He tried to understand where that life had taken him. By all accounts he was lucky, but it was not the kind of luck that made him feel good, in fact it made him feel bad, especially of late. Years ago this feeling began to press against him, made him uncomfortable with himself. His twice daily walks with his old dog turned into self-analysis sessions used to deal with these feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

  His head seemed to always ache, the strain of trying to sleep wearing on him, the pain always dull, a hammer face pressed to his forehead. The Jack and water was not helping. The effects of his drinking and thinking made his nights sleepless. It’s not what he wanted, but is what he got.

  He sometimes felt poor, ridiculous for a wealthy man, the founder of three aircraft industries all bearing the name Martin. He owned airplanes. But this was not about money; he was poor of spirit, an empty soul, as empty and dark as his house.

  Hanley and his old Airedale Weed tried walking out his issues but only gained the exercise. He was unlucky with answers he sought, not knowing why fate had picked him and not someone else. Now he thought he knew what to do. He must take his search elsewhere.

  Fate stepped in to make him believe someone actually had the answer. Chance meetings over the past year revealed a woman, a Catholic nun, who might help him. She was good at it her friends said. Hanley could use the change and the opportunity to give to others through helping a charity in need. A new acquaintance, another nun, had given him her name. He now believed this woman of God could tell him what he needed to know about his fated life. Friends and family thought he had gone over the edge, but he believed it. It is the answer he needed to a question he chased around for years, and that answer is with her in Africa. Now he knew where to go and how to get there. It wouldn’t be easy but he welcomed it.

  There was now this belief, a correctness to what he was thinking, to his plan. The indecisiveness, the concern, the weight of not knowing, had been lifted from his shoulders. Things had fallen into place. He knew who to ask. He knew where to look. She was what he needed. When he was a child, he loved to dig to the bottom of a box of cereal searching for the toy buried there. She was the prize he hoped to find.

  ***

  Hanley fiddled with the cargo net, the fiddling a balm, a necessity, like an old woman in church working beads, keeping his mind focused on something other than the conversation he was having and his trip across the Atlantic next week. The trip would be arduous, even dangerous, but so was the conversation he was having that moment. Rocky looked good, he thought, smelled good too. Damn her, she’s not playing fair; women, by nature, he believed, never played fair, but, then, how could they?

  Rocky said, “I think you’ve become infatuated with her or fixated, whatever. You see her as your savior, almost mythical. The mythical Sister Marie Claire. You think she’ll tell you what you need to know, answer the big question. She doesn’t have the answer. For years you’ve wondered how to pay this great, cosmic debt you owe for your luck. You don’t owe anyone anything; you’ve earned your success. You’ve worked hard. There is no answer. She certainly doesn’t have it. She’s just a nun, that’s all she is, you know. A lonely old woman living in the bush in southern Sudan. I wish you had never heard of her.”

  Rocky Vicenti, Hanley’s next door neighbor, his widowed lover, sat on a folding chair in his large, dimly lit hanger facing him as he sat on the steps that formed the interior wall of the plane’s cargo door. It was March of 2001 and unusually cold in north-central Indiana. The hanger was built to house two planes and had, before Hanley crashed one when landing at the Russiaville Airport outside of Kokomo almost six months earlier.

  “She’s not that old,” Hanley said, trying to not so gently correct her. “She’s younger than me.”

  With a coarse black thread as heavy as a strand of dental floss, Hanley mended a weak spot on the border of the netting, which, once fixed, would stretch across the cargo hold of his old, meticulously restore Beech C-45, the plane he would hopscotch across the Atlantic
to Europe and then on to Africa.

  “Elizabeth called me again yesterday, the third call this week. She’s desperate you know. She thinks I have more control over you than she has. She’s begging me to make you change your mind. She cries every time we talk,” Rocky said, rubbing her left index finger with her right thumb. Hanley watched her as he passed the curved needle back and forth through the fabric, his finger sliding dangerously along the metal toward the point when the needle met resistance. “What did you tell her?” he asked.

  “I said what I always say, ‘Your father has made up his mind and no one can change it, not you or me,’ that’s what I told her. I wish I had something else to say to her but I don’t. I wish I had something else to say to you. I’ve run out of things to say. Obviously ‘I love you’ isn’t good enough,” she said.

  “You don’t need to say that. Listen, we’ve been through this enough. Elizabeth think’s I’ve lost my mind. I’m sure her mother has helped her with that decision,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to say anymore, really I don’t. You’re going to go no matter what anyone says. If your uncle were still alive I’d call him to talk you out of this but he isn’t and he’d probably support you in this decision. He’s the one that told you to always pay your debts in this life anyway. Did he use the word karma when he told you this?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Really? It doesn’t matter. You’re leaving to find another woman to help you understand life. I’m afraid you’ll travel ten thousand miles to learn she can’t tell you any more than I can. The trouble is, to sit at her knee or where ever you’ll be sitting, it will still be in a place that can kill you. Maybe that will be enough payment for you. I’ll be left to try to explain that to your daughter and granddaughter. Thanks for that.” Rocky said.

  ***

  Rocky left and now Hanley sat alone, watching an odd cocked rectangle of fall’s sunlight slide across the cement, a bright oddly shaped clock, pushed by the sun’s burning time, admitted through a high window to educate him-about what he wasn’t sure. The window was next to the large hanger door he used to take his plane to the tarmac, then the runway, then into the sky and to wherever he wanted. Flying was an expensive hobby, the plane an expensive toy. He love things of beauty, whether a meticulously restored airplane, a finely crafted table or a watch. He love to look at his plane, the shiny skin of the Beech, polished, reflective of both his money and his love of beautiful things, a mirror of this time of his life, the image there, distinguishable but flawed, no straight lines, no hard information, connected shapes, colors, post-modernistic life imagery that everyone saw differently. But the smooth skin of a woman reflected nothing back at him. A woman was that mirror he must now look to, knowing he would never see himself looking back, his image lost time and again. Hanley considered the conversation the past few minutes, the time spent with Rocky. It had told him nothing.

  ***

  After flying for three weeks, Hanley finally saw Africa in the distance. He could see a deeper haze, gray melting to brown, beneath which lay Egypt. The land before him was the vision he had in his head for two years. That vision would certainly not be the reality. Leaning forward, he stared hard at what he hoped would soon become familiar and yet believed would remain a mystery to him. He had given up much to be here at this moment and he still wasn’t certain why.

  He would enter Africa through Egypt, but his destination was Sudan.

  The plane, the noise, the squawk of the air traffic controller in his ear, the vibration of two four-hundred-and-fifty horsepower Pratt and Whitney R-985 engines coming through the steering pushed their way back into his head. The big engines thrummed, pulsing, grabbing air, pulling the old Beech C-45 Expeditor toward the coast. Hanley Martin thought about what he was about to get into. He smiled slightly and said aloud, “What have you done?”

  Ground haze obscured the coastline as Hanley approached Northern Africa. He began searching the coasts for landmarks. The late morning sun reflected off the blindingly polished aluminum skin of the plane’s engine housings, causing glints of light to bounce around the cockpit, off the crystal of his sport wristwatch, up to the surface of his sunglasses causing him some momentary visual disorientation. The nose of plane was painted a flat black, extending up to the cockpit windows, reducing the glare of the bright sun at altitude.

  The Beech cruised at one-hundred-and-seventy-five miles per hour. At eight thousand feet, Hanley could fly with his cabin unpressurized for hours at a time; enough to hop between Crete and Egypt. When distances permitted, he’d been doing that since leaving Kokomo, Indiana three weeks earlier. Hanley found flying in an unpressurized cabin less tiring, keeping him more alert.

  Turbulence bounced him off the seat. He tightened his grip on the old black bowtie-shaped yoke. The Beech maintained its trim through the mild turbulent air over the Mediterranean Sea. Checking his fuel, then his manifold pressure and his air speed, he reached for the red-knobbed throttle levers and pushed them forward, reducing his speed, adjusted his flaps and started a slow descent.

  Seeing the continent for the first time thrilled him more than he expected. He was in it now, he thought, pumped-up and scared at the same time. It caused his gut to tighten a bit just thinking about it. Before leaving Kokomo, Hanley spent some time talking to people who had business dealings in Africa, one man in particular that Sister Mary Kathleen put him in touch with. His name was Bobby Stein. He supplied oil companies with replacement valves and seals. Dealing primarily in Ethiopia and the Mideast, business was good for a while, but local politics caused too many problems. Bobby Stein switched his focus to the countries of the former Soviet Union. While certainly no picnic, dealing with the local Russian criminal element beat dealing with radical Muslims by a mile, he told Hanley. He rated doing business internationally at a three or four out of ten, he said. Doing some business outside America allowed him to keep his contacts in place and active. He explained that he at least hoped to create some balance as a hedge against the ever-increasing ups and downs of the American business cycle.

  Hanley remembered the one point that Stein kept coming back to; that no matter what Hanley’s experience had been in dealing with European-based businesses, nothing would prepare him for being in Africa. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced or will ever experience,” Stein said. “I’m from northern New Jersey and thought I was tough, at least I would never allow anyone to get the best of me. But Africa, it’s something else entirely. It’s not really being tough or even shrewd. It’s not even that the rules are different. It’s that there aren’t any rules. I don’t know you, Mr Martin. Our mutual friend tells me you’re really successful. I hope you are good at covering your back or have someone around that will. It’s not just a requirement, it’s closer to survival. Being an American outside of America is becoming a risky business.”

  Hanley thought of explaining what he would be doing there, but skipped it. It did not matter, at least not in this conversation. He was tired of explaining anyway. It was time to get on with it, he told himself.

  Flying alone gave Hanley time to reflect on his recent decision. As he aged, he realized choices were accompanied by a certain finality or at least a limited amount of time to correct them if the decisions were bad. His accumulated decisions began to haunt him. His financial success was not a comfort, but only added to the doubt he had about what he had become. Success was not really success, he believed. Conversations he had with his uncle when he was young began to come back to him as he shaved or lay in bed, unable to sleep. He even began to drift away during telephone conversations, back to when he spent his summers on his uncle’s farm, listening to the lessons being taught. Not lessons, at least they weren’t meant to be lessons, more like advice. They were lessons nonetheless.

  To Hanley, time became a package with a bomb inside. The package always had to be opened, but at what cost? Control of his life was lost. His daughter’s marriage and move to another state, his divorce
, his loneliness, the creases and blotches on his skin. He came to see the wastefulness of the life he was leading and was ashamed. That vision became a burden he carried, the many minutes, hours, days, months and years he wasted piled on his back. Family and friends defended him from himself. He would not accept their support. Soon, events began pointing him toward change and the decisions made to make that change. He thought he saw a design to the events, maybe looked too hard, thought fate played a hand. Again thought himself foolish.

  After landing in Heraklion on the island of Crete, he filed a flight plan that designated Cairo International Airport as his first stop after entering Africa. At every stop since leaving the US, he dealt with local customs officials, inspections and fees for landing, and parking while his plane was inspected. Most were polite or at least as polite as seemed reasonable in today’s world, Hanley thought. The farther south he went after leaving Greenland, the more difficult and time-consuming became the process. Apparently, the Beech C-45 was the type of plane every customs inspector south of France imagined a drug smuggler might use. So thorough and long was the inspection process in Crete that Hanley checked the inspection form for a section specifying a cavity search. Not finding it mentioned in English did not mean it was not covered in the Greek sections, he reminded himself. He was very relieved when asked to sign the form and saw it stamped several times by the inspector. Leaving Crete for Africa and Cairo brought a mixture of joy and apprehension.

  The coast of Egypt was flat and brown from an altitude of eight thousand feet. The green of the Mediterranean Sea turned to white as the sea ran to the land.

  The fastest route, the straightest, would take Hanley over the city of Baltim. Touching the coast at that point, he planned to turn south, from there to Cairo was approximately one hundred miles. That Cairo would be the first city in Africa he reached would be a blessing, he believed, being something close to normal. Some English would be spoken; customs would be similar, perhaps tougher, at least no worse than Crete had been. No coercion or overt extortion. The plane might not draw as much attention as it did in Crete. His papers were in order. The one thing that worried him was that, now that he was in Africa, in the Mideast region, how would officials react to the letter of employment he carried from a Catholic charity? Any customs agent he met from here on would probably be Muslim. He knew an American working for a Christian order would generate little enthusiasm from the locals.