Drumbeats Read online

  The man was playing a drum.

  The boy cringed and looked away. Danny kept staring. The crowd seemed to shrink away from the strange man as he wandered among them, continuing his incessant beat. He wore his hair long and unruly, which in itself was unusual among the close-cropped Africans. In the equatorial heat, the long, stained overcoat he wore must have heated his body like a furnace, but the man did not seem to notice. His eyes were focused on some invisible distance.

  “Huit-cent francs,” the boy insisted on his price, holding the lukewarm bottle of water just out of Danny’s reach.

  The staggering man walked closer, tapping a slow monotonous beat on the small cylindrical drum under his arm. He did not change his tempo but continued to play as if his life depended on it. Danny saw that the man’s fingers and wrists were wrapped with scraps of hide; even so, he had beaten his fingertips bloody.

  Danny stood transfixed. He had heard tribal musicians play all manner of percussion instruments, from hollowed tree trunks, to rusted metal cans, to beautifully carved djembe drums with goat-skin drumheads—but he had never heard a tone so rich and sweet, with such an odd echoey quality as this strange African drum.

  In the studio, he had messed around with drum synthesizers and reverbs and the new technology designed to turn computer hackers into musicians. But this drum sounded different, solid and pure, and it hooked him through the heart, hypnotizing him. It distracted him entirely from the unpleasant appearance of its bearer.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Sept-cent francs,” the boy insisted in a nervous whisper, dropping his price to 700 and pushing the water closer.

  Danny walked in front of the staggering man, smiling broadly enough to show the grit between his teeth, and listened to the tapping drumbeat. The drummer turned his gaze to Danny and stared through him. The pupils of his eyes were like two gaping bullet wounds through his skull. Danny took a step backward but found himself moving to the beat. The drummer faced him, finding his audience. Danny tried to place the rhythm, to burn it into his mind—something this mesmerizing simply had to be included in a new Blitzkrieg song.

  Danny looked at the cylindrical drum, trying to determine what might be causing its odd double-resonance—a thin inner membrane, perhaps? He saw nothing but elaborate carvings on the sweat polished wood, and a drumhead with a smooth, dark-brown coloration. He knew the Africans used all kinds of skin for their drumheads, and he couldn’t begin to guess what this was.

  He mimed a question to the drummer, then asked, “Est-ce-que je peux l’essayer?” May I try it?

  The gaunt man said nothing, but held out the drum near enough for Danny to touch it without interrupting his obsessive rhythm. His overcoat flapped open, and the hot stench of decay made Danny stagger backward, but he held his ground, reaching for the drum.

  Danny ran his fingers over the smooth drumskin, then tapped with his fingers. The deep sound resonated with a beat of its own, like a heartbeat. It delighted him. “For sale? Est-ce-que c’est a vendre?” He took out a thousand francs as a starting point, although if water alone cost 800 francs here, this drum was worth much, much more.

  The man snatched the drum away and clutched it to his chest, shaking his head vigorously. His drumming hand continued its unrelenting beat.

  Danny took out two thousand francs, then was disappointed to see not the slightest change of expression on the odd drummer’s face. “Okay, then, where was the drum made? Where can I get another one? Où est-ce qu’on peut trouver un autre comme ça?” He put most of the money back into his pack, keeping 200 francs out. Danny stuffed the money into the fist of the drummer; the man’s hand seemed to be made of petrified wood. “Où?”

  The man scowled, then gestured behind him, toward the Mandara Mountains along Cameroon’s border with Nigeria. “Kabas.”

  He turned and staggered away, still tapping on his drum as if to mark his footsteps. Danny watched him go, then returned to the kiosk, unfolding the map from his pack. “Where is this Kabas? Is it a place? C’est un village?”

  “Huit-cent francs,” the boy said, offering the water again at his original 800 franc price.

  Danny bought the water, and the boy gave him directions.

  He spent the night in a Garouan hotel that made Motel 6 look like Caesar’s Palace. Anxious to be on his way to find his own new drum, Danny roused a local vendor and cajoled him into preparing a quick omelet for breakfast. He took a sip from his 800 franc bottle of water, saving the rest for the long bike ride, then pedaled off into the stirring sounds of early morning.

  As Danny left Garoua on the main road, heading toward the mountains, savanna and thorn trees stretched away under a crystal sky. A pair of doves bathed in the dust of the road ahead, but as he rode toward them, they flew up into the last of the trees with a chuk-chuk of alarm and a flash of white tail feathers. Smoke from grassfires on the plains tainted the air.

  How different it was to be riding through a landscape, he thought—with no walls or windows between his senses and the world—rather than just riding by it. Danny felt the road under his thin wheels, the sun, the wind on his body. It made a strange place less exotic, yet it became infinitely more real.

  The road out of Garoua was a wide boulevard that turned into a smaller road heading north. With his bicycle tires humming and crunching on the irregular pavement, Danny passed a few ragged cotton fields, then entered the plains of dry, yellow grass and thorny scrub, everywhere studded with boulders and sculpted anthills. By 7:30 in the morning, a hot breeze rose, carrying a honeysuckle-like perfume. Everything vibrated with heat.

  Within an hour, the road grew worse, but Danny kept his pace, taking deep breaths in the trancelike state that kept the horizon moving closer. Drums. Kabas. Long rides helped him clear his head, but he found he had to concentrate to steer around the worst ruts and the biggest stones.

  Great columns of stone appeared above the hills to east and west. One was pyramid-shaped, one a huge rounded breast, yet another a great stone phallus. Danny had seen photographs of these “inselberg” formations caused by volcanoes that had eroded over the eons, leaving behind vertical cores of lava.

  Erosion had struck the road here too, turning it into a heaving washboard, which then veered left into a trough between tumbled boulders and up through a gauntlet of thorn trees. Danny stopped for another drink of water, another glance at the map. The water boy at the kiosk had marked the location of Kabas with his fingernail, but it was not printed on the map.

  After Danny had climbed uphill for an hour, the beaten path became no more than a worn trail, forcing him to squeeze between walls of thorns and dry millet stalks. The squadrons of hovering dragonflies were harmless, but the hordes of tiny flies circling his face were maddening, and he couldn’t pedal fast enough to escape them.

  It was nearly noon, the sun reflecting straight up from the dry earth, and the little shade cast by the scattered trees dwindled to a small circle around the trunks. “Where the hell am I going?” he said to the sky.

  But in his head, he kept hearing the odd, potent beat resonating from the bizarre drum he had seen in the Garoua marketplace. He recalled the grayish, shambling man who had never once stopped tapping on his drum, even though his fingers bled. No matter how bad the road got, Danny thought, he would keep going. He’d never been so intrigued by a drumbeat before, and he never left things half-finished.

  Danny Imbro was a goal-oriented person. The other members of Blitzkrieg razzed him about it, that once he made up his mind to do something, he plowed ahead, defying all common sense. Back in school, he had made up his mind to be a drummer. He had hammered away at just about every object in sight with his fingertips, pencils, silverware, anything that made noise. He kept at it until he drove everyone else around him nuts, and somewhere along the line he became good.

  Now people stood at the chain link fences behind concert halls and applauded whenever he walked from the backstage dressing rooms out to the tour buses—as
if he were somehow doing a better job of walking than any of them had ever seen before.…

  Up ahead, an enormous buttress tree, a gnarled and twisted pair of trunks hung with cable-thick vines, cast a wide patch of shade. Beneath the tree, watching him approach, sat a small boy.

  The boy leaped to his feet, as if he had been waiting for Danny. Shirtless and dusty, he held a hooklike, withered arm against his chest; but his grin was completely disarming. “Je suis guide?” the boy called.

  Relief stifled Danny’s laugh. He nodded vigorously. “Oui!” Yes, he could certainly use a guide right about now. “Je cherche Kabas—village des tambours. The village of drums.”

  The smiling boy danced around like a goat, jumping from rock to rock. He was pleasant-faced and healthy looking, except for the crippled arm; his skin was very dark, but his eyes had a slight Asian cast. He chattered in a high voice, a mixture of French and native dialect. Danny caught enough to understand that the boy’s name was Anatole.

  Before the boy led him on, though, Danny dismounted, leaning his bicycle against a boulder, and unzipped his pack to take out the raisins, peanuts, and the dry remains of a baguette. Anatole watched him with wide eyes, and Danny gave him a handful of raisins, which the boy wolfed down. Small flies whined around their faces as they ate. Danny answered the boy’s incessant questions with as few words as possible: did he come from America, did black boys live there, why was he visiting Cameroon?

  The short rest sank its soporific claws into him, but Danny decided not to give in. An afternoon siesta made a lot of sense, but now that he had his own personal guide to the village, he made it his goal not to stop again until they reached Kabas. “Okay?” Danny raised his eyebrows and struggled to his feet.

  Anatole sprang out from the shade and fetched Danny’s bike for him, struggling with one arm to keep it upright. After several trips to Africa, Danny had seen plenty of withered limbs, caused by childhood diseases, accidents, and bungled inoculations. Out here in the wilder areas, such problems were even more prevalent, and he wondered how Anatole managed to survive; acting as a “guide” for the rare travelers would hardly suffice.

  Danny pulled out a hundred francs—an eighth of what he had paid for one bottle of water—and handed it to the boy, who looked as if he had just been handed the crown jewels. Danny figured he had probably made a friend for life.

  Anatole trotted ahead, gesturing with his good arm. Danny pedaled after him.

  The narrow valley captured a smear of greenness in the dry hills, with a cluster of mango trees, guava trees, and strange baobabs with eight-foot-thick trunks. Playing the knowledgeable tour guide, Anatole explained that the local women used the baobab fruits for baby formula if their breast milk failed. The villagers used another tree to manufacture an insect repellent.

  The houses of Kabas blended into the landscape, because they were of the landscape—stones and branches and grass. The walls were made of dry mud, laid on a handful at a time, and the roofs were thatched into cones. Tiny pink and white stones studded the mud, sparkling like quartz in the sun.

  At first the place looked deserted, but then an ancient man emerged from a turret-shaped hut. An enormous cutlass dangled from his waist, although the shrunken man looked as if it might take him an hour just to lift the blade. Anatole shouted something, then gestured for Danny to follow him. The great cutlass swayed against the old man’s unsteady knees as he bowed slightly—or stooped—and greeted Danny in formal, unpracticed French. “Bonsoir!”

  “Makonya,” Danny said, remembering the local greeting from Garoua. He walked his bike in among the round and square buildings. A few chickens scratched in the dirt, and a pair of black-and-brown goats nosed between the huts. A sinewy, long-limbed old woman wearing only a loincloth tended a fire. He immediately started looking for the special drums but saw none.

  Within the village, a high-walled courtyard enclosed two round huts. Gravel covered the open area between them, roofed over with a network of serpent-shaped sticks supporting grass mats. This seemed to be the chief’s compound. Anatole held Danny’s arm and dragged him forward.

  Inside the wall, a white-robed figure reclined in a canvas chair under an acacia tree. His handsome features had a North African cast, thin lips over white teeth, and a rakish mustache. His aristocratic head was wrapped in a red-and-white checked scarf, and even in repose he was obviously tall. He looked every bit the romantic desert prince, like Rudolf Valentino in The Sheik. After greeting Danny in both French and the local language, the chief gestured for his visitor to sit beside him.

  Before Danny could move, two other boys appeared carrying a rolled-up mat of woven grass, which they spread out for him. Anatole scolded them for horning in on his customer, but the two boys cuffed him and ignored his protests. Then the chief shouted at them all for disturbing his peace and drove the boys away. Danny watched them kicking Anatole as they scampered away from the chief, and he felt for his new friend, angry at how tough people picked on weaker ones the world over.

  He sat cross-legged on the mat, and it took him only a moment to begin reveling in the moment of relaxation. No cars or trucks disturbed the peace. He was miles from the nearest electricity, or glass window, or airplane. He sat looking up into the leaves of the acacia, listening to the quiet buzz of the villagers, and thought, “I’m living in a National Geographic documentary!”

  Anatole stole back into the compound, bearing two bottles of warm Mirinda orange soda, which he gave to Danny and the chief. Other boys gathered under the tree, glaring at Anatole, then looking at Danny with ill-concealed awe.

  After several moments of polite smiling and nodding, Danny asked the chief if all the boys were his children. Anatole assisted in the unnecessary translation.

  “Oui,” the chief said, patting his chest proudly. He claimed to have fathered 31 sons, which made Danny wonder if the women in the village found it politic to routinely claim the chief as the father of their babies. As with all remote African villages, though, many children died of various sicknesses. Just a week earlier, one of the babies had succumbed to a terrible fever, the chief said.

  The chief asked Danny the usual questions about his country, whether any black men lived there, why had he visited Cameroon; then he insisted that Danny eat dinner with them. The women would prepare the village’s specialty of chicken in peanut sauce.

  Hearing this, the old sentry emerged with his cutlass, smiled widely at Danny, then turned around the side wall. The squawking of a terrified chicken erupted in the sleepy afternoon air, the sounds of a scuffle, and then the squawking stopped.

  Finally, Danny asked the question that had brought him to Kabas in the first place. “Moi, je suis musicien; je cherche les tambours speciaux.” He mimed rapping on a small drum, then turned to Anatole for assistance.

  The chief sat up startled, then nodded. He hammered on the air, mimicking drum playing, as if to make sure. Danny nodded. The chief clapped his hands and gestured for Anatole to take Danny somewhere. The boy pulled Danny to his feet and, surrounded by other chattering boys, dragged him back out of the walled courtyard. Danny managed to turn around and bow to the chief.

  After trooping up a stair-like terrace of rock, they entered the courtyard of another homestead. The main shelter was made of hand-shaped blocks with a flat roof of corrugated metal. Anatole explained that this was the home of the local sorcier, or wizard.

  Anatole called out, then gestured for Danny to follow through the low doorway. Inside the hut, the walls were hung with evidence of the sorcier’s trade—odd bits of metal, small carvings, bundles of fur and feathers, mortars full of powders and herbs, clay urns for water and millet beer, smooth skins curing from the roof poles. And drums.

  “Tambours!” Anatole said, spreading his hands wide.

  Judging from the craftsman’s tools around the hut, the sorcier made the village’s drums as well as stored them. Danny saw several small gourd drums, larger log drums, and hollow cylinders of every size, all intri
cately carved with serpentine symbols, circles feeding into spirals, lines tangled into knots.

  Danny reached out to touch one—then the sorcier himself stood up from the shadows near the far wall. Danny bit off a startled cry as the lithe old man glided forward. The sorcier was tall and rangy, but his skin was a battleground of wrinkles, as if someone had clumsily fashioned him out of papier-mâché.

  “Pardon,” Danny said. The wrinkled man had been sitting on a low stool, putting the finishing touches to a new drum.

  Fixing his eyes on his visitor, the sorcier withdrew a medium-sized drum from a niche in the wall. Closing his eyes, he tapped on it. The mud walls of the hut reverberated with the hollow vibration, an earthy, primal beat that resonated in Danny’s bones. Danny grinned with awe. Yes! The gaunt man’s drum had not been a fluke. The drums of Kabas had some special construction that caused this hypnotic tone.

  Danny reached out tentatively. The wrinkled man gave him an appraising look, then extended the drum enough for Danny to strike it. He tapped a few tentative beats and laughed out loud when the instrument rewarded him with the same rich sound.

  The sorcier turned away, taking the drum with him and returning it to its niche in the wall. In two flowing strides, the wrinkled man went to his stool in the shadows, picking up the drum he had been fashioning, moving it into the crack of light that seeped through the windows. Pointing, he spoke in a staccato dialect, which Anatole translated into pidgin French.

  The sorcier is finishing a new drum today, Anatole said. Perhaps they would play it this evening, an initiation. The chief’s baby son would have enjoyed that. From the baby’s body, the sorcier had been able to salvage only enough skin to make this one small drum.