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  One Man Dancing

  Copyright © 2016 Patricia Keeney

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover design and illustration: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Keeney, Patricia, author

  One man dancing / Patricia Keeney.

  (Inanna poetry and fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-273-6 (paperback). -- ISBN 978-1-77133-274-3 (epub). --

  ISBN 978-1-77133-275-0 (kindle). -- ISBN 978-1-77133-276-7 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8571.E4447O54 2016 C813’.54 C2016-904857-8 C2016-904858-6

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  One Man Dancing

  a novel by

  Patricia Keeney

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  ALSO BY PATRICIA KEENEY

  FICTION

  The Incredible Shrinking Wife

  POETRY

  Swimming Alone

  New Moon Old Mattress

  The New Pagans

  The Book of Joan

  Selected Poems of Patricia Keeney

  Global Warnings

  Vocal Braidings (with Penn Kemp)

  You Bring Me Wings (with Ethel Krauze)

  First Woman

  Orpheus in Our World

  TRANSLATIONS

  Selected Poems of Patricia Keeney (Hindi)

  Engenderings: Selected Poems (Chinese)

  Swimming Alone and Other Poems (Bulgarian)

  Nager Seule (Swimming Alone) (French)

  Le livre de Patrick (The Book of Patrick) (French)

  Le livre de Jeanne (The Book of Joan) (French)

  For Charles,

  for Abafumi

  Charles Tumwesigye and Patricia Keeney

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1. UGANDA

  2. MASKS

  3. ABAFUMI

  4. ON THE MOVE

  5. AMIN

  6. LEAP OF FAITH

  7. CANADA

  8. AFRICA

  IN FACT: SOME NOTES ON REALITIES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE: THE ROCKIES

  THIS IS CHARLES’ STORY. The story of an African man told by a North American woman. What he asked me to tell. What he let me see. What I saw.

  I don’t pretend to understand it all. Or know it all. I cannot reveal its meaning in an easy phrase. As though any phrase can express the meaning of a life. Can explain why some of us are allowed health and good fortune while others suffer every kind of physical and social assault. Why some of us are spared. Why some of us are singled out to be victims.

  Like Job, tested again and again.

  Why some of us keep struggling in the face of existential indifference and caprice.

  Like Charles. Always believing in some ultimate purpose.

  He stands alone. A man marooned on a mountain. Frozen in shock. Staring out. Swaying slightly.

  Time is his god here, keeping him rigorously attentive to the shifting of glacial moments. On top of this treacherous mountain Charles is a martyr to his own rigid limbs.

  Extreme exertion put him here, outrunning fear. Every morning he climbs the same mountain of ice, clawing at its hard face, willing himself up, desperate not to fall down.

  Again.

  A small-wheeled machine whirs below him in this cold, impersonal meat-packing plant. It is fast, darting at the great glinting rock, attacking it block by block, biting off chunks, chewing, swallowing. Relentless. Shrinking his mountain.

  As he pounds and splinters with axe and spade at the top of ice mountain, black against white, he dances and slips, drops. His sleek dark body churning, frigid, hurtling down a giant slide into frozen whiteness.

  Bound for refrigerated rooms.

  No.

  Packed cold around the bodies of dead animals.

  No.

  After a few months, he is moved to the other side of the mountain, chopping frozen carcasses free, wrenching and exposing the blues and reds of stopped life. He carries this cargo to room-temperature work stations where women clean and section. This they do methodically in their white coveralls and heavy hairnets, threads of gossip knotting and fraying and twisting as they extend, examine, and discard.

  Arranging death now as surely as they have arranged life.

  He admires women. Loves them. Superior creatures. Guardian angels who first taught him the joy of dance.

  His ancestors — slim, herdsmen clad in leopard skins and sandals — wandered among the curved horns of grazing cattle. Their wide brimmed hats casting great shadows against the sun; staffs resting easily on their shoulders. The whole scene, with its conical hills and puffy clouds rising pleasantly from plentiful grasslands, pastoral serenity.

  This ancestral Uganda is an image Charles continues to hold against the slaughter that now shunts along this brutal, bloody assembly line in this vast warehouse of animal sacrifice. Watching the line move, he is relieved that each carcass is “shrouded” in cloth, emerging smooth and lustrous into the light. Born again, he thinks.

  On the other hand, Korean Jim admires the efficiency with which the killing is carried out, fascinated even by the pistol that stuns the cattle as they enter.

  The two immigrant workers watch a carcass swing, hung on a hook by its hind legs so that arteries and veins can be severed and drained. Sure as a surgeon, thinks Charles, knowing the animal has long gone.

  Jim regales Charles with stories of his own sovereign ancestors in leisurely extravagance beside garden streams, drinking wine from precious cups, reclining on stone, beguiling time with poetry and song.

  Charles tells Jim about cows very much alive, cows both sacred and profane. One cow fell in love with his father. Followed him everywhere. Charles describes the special milk bowls. Carved and polished. With beadwork, patterns of waves, lightning bolts. “Animals are meant for use, not sentiment,” Jim chides.

  After work they turn their energies from friendly feuding to the serious business of pleasure. Charles is often invited for a meal cooked by Jim’s wife Angela. In his home, Jim plays at being yangban, the privileged noble to her kisaeng, the aristocratic concubine.

  On other nights Charles has a quick drink at a local bar with fellow workers, followed by supper with Beth — a Ugandan actress with whom he shares much of his life these days — and then goes out to the dance clubs, arriving in his battered black Ford, built like a tank. How he savours its cracked white vinyl seats, its miniature of St. Jude framed in fur dangling from the mirr
or. He caresses the knobbed steering wheel or whirls it flashily with one slender ringed finger to impress female passengers.

  On the dance floor he is mambo king, samba king, king of the twist and the monkey. Beer flowing, lights flickering, Charles jumps and spirals, catches every beam, twirls the most daring girls, watching skirts fly.

  Dance is his speaking.

  Once long ago, he wanted to be part of the King’s dance troupe, to be a court dancer, a bakisimba. In their village house, his mother and his aunts would gather to eat, drink and sing.

  Charles would begin to dance, arc himself into the air, his body defying space, tracing unexpected angles. Swaying gracefully from the waist, dissolving and beginning over and over. But rooted, always rooted to the earth. Charles’ body radiating effortlessly from that centre of his being, that irrefutable pull of gravity.

  Dancing was his passport. To the women’s rooms. Beyond the walls. To the king, the Omugabe, who appeared in his glaring white robe brandishing a beaded oxtail. Striding through his archway of reeds investing them with strength, magical power.

  Omugabe rode in a silver-finned Buick, swimming along the dusty road. Stiff and strong, glistening in blazing sunlight. And always the drummers pounding. Then Charles danced for the sovereign and was given a small drum that travelled with him everywhere. Girls were dazzled by his instrument. Then. Now.

  Even white women were dazzled. Like Polish Malgosha with skin the colour of blanched bone, with her red lips and glittery blue eyes. Or Swedish Ingrid whose hair shone bleach bright around her pale salty face, like a ghost from the sea. These were the women he first mated. Happily and exuberantly through his free-wheeling nights. These white women with their openness, their flirting, their kissing and caressing in public.

  Charles loved his women of the world and was loved by them — in their tight denims with blouses that plunged thrillingly over soft full breasts. In their flimsy, clinging dresses that drew his eyes over every curve causing him to imagine each secret perfumed place. Exotic brazen creatures walking half naked in sunlight, displaying for him, put on earth to please him.

  And the women of the world loved Charles back. Because he adored them.

  “You should be where you are,” Jim admonishes Charles this Friday afternoon as they rumble in Charles’ old car towards the Rocky mountain playground where, with Angela, they will spend a weekend. It is hot as they move along the road into flatlands, the sun turning dry stubble fields the colour of tangerines. Foothills thunder deeply among mountains named for natural forces. They cruise along smooth asphalt, a reassuring baseline under the extravagant scenery, slowly climbing, rising gradually as clouds.

  Charles dreams past the signs: “Raindrop Lake” and “Whirlwind Casino.”

  Jim flicks on the car radio and listens intently to a station filled with strange music and an unknown language. “Is that Korean?” Charles asks.

  “It’s actually Chinese,” says Jim. “Not as good as Korean.” And laughs out loud.

  The remark sets Angela off. “There’s nothing wrong with Chinese,” she admonishes. “Our language is based on it.”

  Jim just nods, patronizing her. “You should hear a soccer match in Korean,” he tells Charles. “A header through the goal is unforgettable.”

  “Did you know,” adds Angela, “that the first written reference to soccer can be found in a Chinese military text!”

  “Who really cares,” cries Jim. “I can kick a soccer ball better than any Chinese.”

  As they banter on, Charles watches the sky turn a thick, yellowy green. Drop lower and lower.

  Rain attacks their car. A sudden and violent barrage pelting from every angle. Pooling on the windows.

  The world is suddenly rattle and blur.

  They slow to a crawl, a tank in a battlefield, completely surrounded, seeing nothing, knowing nothing except the sounds around them. A million spears, thinks Charles, piercing everything in their path.

  “What’s happening?” shouts Jim. “It’s pitch black”

  “I don’t know,” yells Charles, frozen behind the wheel by pounding water and sudden wind. “But we are stopping.”

  There is nowhere to go. They are in the middle of it, whatever it is. Unable to see. They have crossed some invisible border into this country of storm, broken some law. The wind screams.

  Charles goes back. As a child, he saw lightning fry cattle in the fields. Once, in a village, fire bolts turned the ground to charcoal, striking again and again. A charred world of farmers and herdsmen. He heard the terrified stories of lightning, celestial fire, its essence speed and power, creation and destruction, illuminating, annihilating. He knows lightning can sear the earth to a dead husk, bald and empty. Now it is all around him.

  He thinks he hears someone whisper and then shout.

  “It’s a tornado!” screams Angela. “We’re in a tornado!”

  Suddenly the rain begins to bounce off the car like rocks. In Charles’ panicked mind, it is thunder flints, silver axe blades, glinting missiles. He lets out a cry. “It wants to come in. It wants to come in.” His demon drama has begun.

  The car is completely under attack. The storm flashing and growling, targeting them, following them, interested in no one and nothing but these three figures, exposed and helpless, determined in its blind blast to destroy them, send them scurrying into oblivion like squashed insects.

  Death must be chased back by Kyikuuzi, thinks Charles, back through the cracks in the asphalt, through the crust of the earth. Charles waits for the ground to open wide and swallow them now.

  Air tears up the valley. Wild air, air on the move, churning forward, slashing, grinding. They perch precariously, directly in the path of the oncoming whirlwind.

  Like the distant slitherings of a giant snake, ripping and pulling everything into itself, this huge cone of maddened air sucks violently, until viper becomes dragon, a lowering mass undulating across the sky, striking down and swallowing whole. A great deadly stirring of malevolence with furious winds belching out smoke from its belly. Surrounded by eerie white light.

  The black sky demon drops chunks of itself as it rotates, flaps and bangs, and crashes. Without a road, the car slides, amphibian, on water. Thunder explodes, the clapping hands of malevolent force, cosmic anger. Charles tries to think what he has done. Is it because he has ceased to believe in his old gods they have stopped believing in him as well? He knows lightning makes no mistakes. Seeks its target precisely. Aims and brands with accuracy.

  Charles reaches for the medal of St. Jude. Swinging crazily, his little silver saint is attached by a flimsy chain to the glass and mirror that stands between him and annihilation.

  The pounding of the rain continues.

  He tries to pray. St. Jude, the saint of hopeless cases and hopeless causes has always helped him. Charles has developed a special bond with St. Jude whose shrine glitters before his inner eye, willing him to stop the rocking and slithering of the car. Even the soldiers of Idi Amin solicited St. Jude for funds, calling him the Chairman of the Bank of Heaven. But St. Jude cannot hear him.

  Wind screeching and rain drumming everywhere.

  Like a child, Charles keeps repeating “please, oh please, father, please.”

  “Try the radio,” cries Angela. “Turn it up.” Static.

  The car is being bombarded now by missiles, crashing through the windows, bouncing off the doors. Shuddering intensity. Electric shocks through three rag doll bodies, their minds paralyzed in panic.

  Rain. Wind. Thunder. Lightning. All the elements unleash their fury.

  “What are you saying?” he cries out to Jim.

  “Free us, free us,” shouts his friend, his voice rising and falling in waves of hysteria. But Charles is alone with his own terror, unable to share his fear with them.

  Then he hears other words, fuzzy and uneven, surging and re
ceding randomly. The car radio has clicked on. Alarm is the base note. In and out. “A tornado … destructive rotating wind … massive storm clouds … dangerous only if it touches the ground.”

  Then, clearly, “Meteorologists don’t know a tornado has arrived until an eyewitness reports it.”

  The car twists madly now in cloud — a dense, inky pummelling mass that won’t let go. Are they really in the air?

  Simultaneously they realize that the sky has picked them up and is hurtling them in a circle. For a moment, he feels weightless inside a stillness that carries, almost cradles, him. He is a bird soaring, floating, gliding. Untouched within the wind.

  Looking out, he sees barbed wire. A bucket punched inside out in a jack-o-lantern grin. A calf charred by lightning. A barbeque, flapping open like the jaws of hell.

  Charles is suddenly calm, serene as rain cuts into him like knives, slashing through the windows, filling up the car until it is a boat pitching frantically before the smash of a tidal wave.

  All four doors tear off simultaneously.

  With enormous strain, he raises an arm to shield his aching face. Something to his right. Coming at him. A boulder. Through the window. No. Charles looks over and down. It is not a boulder. It is Jim. His head sliced by glass from his body.

  Pouring blood. Eyes open. Angela screaming.

  Charles is thrown against the roof. Upside down, he flails in an ocean of murky turbulence.

  Watching his soul leap out of his body. Lost.

  All goes silent.

  1. UGANDA

  LANDLOCKED UGANDA STRIDES across the equator five hundred miles from the Indian Ocean. Sloping gently downwards to the north and more steeply to the south, ringed by mountains and valleys, Uganda’s Mufumbiro volcanoes reach over four thousand feet and to the east, Mount Elgon — the cone of an extinct volcano — rises mightily from the plain, with ridges radiating thirty kilometers out from its gaping crater.

  In the late nineteenth century, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans joined the land’s indigenous population and settled in the territory creating a mix of religions and cultures. Hindus and Sikhs were later enticed to the country by money to build railroads. From other parts of Africa came Kenyans, Rwandans, Congolese, and Sudanese refugees fleeing violent conflicts in their own lands.