The Coup by John Updike Read Free Book Online

madman about to be shot, was not clear from the quality of her kisses, which felt like the ticklings of a fountain at the base of a statue. From out of the anxious mob behind me, out of the stench of dung fires and stale sweat and the bad breath that goes with empty stomachs, there came, sharp as a honed sword, a sweet and vivid whiff, alcoholic and innocent, of hair tonic such as would blow from the open doorway of a barbershop in Wisconsin. It came, and went. In my trance I was too sanguine. I had underestimated the mischievous streak in my sergeant. He wanted that medal. "No resemblance," he pronounced aloud, in several languages, and I was being dragged away, Kutunda still ardently offering herself as an impediment underfoot, when my fate was dramatically reversed-put into reverse gear, one should say. The Mercedes clove through the crowd like the breath of Allah, and Opuku and Mtesa in their livery and armory of pistols and leather strapping put an end to the debate over my identity. Their guns said, He is Ellellou. In a matter of minutes my khaki uniform and NoIR sunglasses were upon me, the sergeant was prostrate before me, and the medal had been bestowed upon him in ironical pardon. Let me record, however, before proceeding to the climax of this adventure (whose details are, as I write, confounded with the tumbling of sea-smoothed pebbles), for the consolation of the less easily redeemed, that at the very moment of seizure, when it appeared I might be taken off to a summary execution or at best a prolonged interrogation more entertaining to others than to myself, that a merciful numbness and detachment seized me as well, and I saw myself as negligently as a sated hawk sees a jerboa scuttling to its hole in the desert floor. Vested in my dignity, I faced the apparition that loomed beyond the border: a pyramid of crates, sacks, and barbarically trademarked boxes. USA USA USA, they said, and Kix Trix Chex Pops. The twilight in our land is brief, after the flash of green, and I could not make out the legends on the topmost boxes; there seemed to be barrels of potato chips. Of how this mountain of fetchingly packaged pap had materialized in the desolate aftouh of Efu there appeared little trace; stretching away into the heavily subsidized depths of Sahel, straight as a jet-trail, a beaten track testified to the passage of wheeled vehicles, none of which was visible. Nor was there any sign of human activity around the prefabricated fort that stood opposite to our outpost within the symmetrical vacancies of our unallied nations. Only one man, a white man in a button-down shirt and a seersucker suit, showed himself, loping our way with that diffident, confident saunter that needs for setting an awninged main street during an American summer's lunch hour, when dozens of small businessmen, toothpicks between their lips, stroll, eye the competition, and glad-hand one another. This toubab had the tact, however, not to offer me his hand; days in the desert had wilted somewhat his certainty of being found lovable. His French was so haltingly and growlingly pronounced I switched our conversation into English. His eybrows lifted, under the boyish bangs with their obligatory touch of gray. "You have an American accent." "We are well trained in the tongues of others," I told him, "since no one troubles to learn ours." "Who'd you say you were again?" I felt I knew this man well. As is common in his swollen country, he was monstrously tall, with hands of many knuckles and fingernails the width of five-stw pasteboards. His age was not easy to estimate; the premature gray and show-me squint of these Yankees is muddled in with their something eternally puerile, awkward, winning, and hopeful. They want, these sons of the simultaneously most expansionist and most avowedly idealistic of power aggregations, to have all things both ways: to eat both the chicken and the egg, to be both triumphant and coddled, to seem both shrewd and ingenuous. I