Free Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes by Patricia Highsmith Page B

day, remembered complimenting Doug on it. Now Doug was sealed up, probably, and if so, for ever. All the container rooms had been filled and the term used by Well-Bilt was “permanently and hermetically sealed.” Benny’s ulcer was no better, but no worse either, and he had managed the inspection day at Operation Balsam quite well: he had vowed to himself not to wince, not even to think about Doug Ferguson’s corpse maybe lying behind one of those square steel doors that he walked past that day, and he had succeeded.

Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee
     
    Nature and Lady Luck had smiled upon the broad and fertile land of Nabuti, in West Africa. Nabuti had rivers, lush plains, a seacoast of more than a thousand miles, and in the hills there was copper. For two hundred years Nabuti had been exploited by the white man, who had mined, and built roads and ports and railways to service them. Before the first half of the twentieth century was over, Nabuti had five thousand miles of paved roads, rivers had been dredged and banked for ships and boats, electricity and water systems installed, schools started. Malaria and bilharziasis had been conquered, general health much improved, and most of the many infants lived.
    Nabuti won its independence in the 1950s by merely asking for it. Independence was in the air all over Africa, like a champagne that could be inhaled. A cadre of whites stayed on for a while in Nabuti to make sure everything was functioning properly, that crews knew how to run the railroads, repair electric power plants, service machinery from tractors to bicycles, but the whites were not popular during this period. The sooner they left, the better was the idea, and the whites got the idea after being spat on in the streets a few times by idle youths, then—several of them—attacked and beaten to death. The whites left.
    There was a half-year-long party or festival then, while four or five contestants for leadership made speeches to the public, saying how they would run the country. Each of them promised a lot. They had to orate over the noise of jukeboxes and transistor radios. There was a voting of sorts, then a run-off between the two leading contestants, an argument about the vote-counting, and a husky young man in his twenties named Bomo came out the victor, because he was chief of police and the police were armed. The police, originally trained by the whites, would make a good cadre for the formation of a Nabutian army, the white administrators had said, and that is what happened. The police force became an ever-growing army, and with the millions of dollars bequeathed to Nabuti to launch it as an independent African state, and the yearly gifts and loans since, the purchase of snappy uniforms, rifles, machineguns and tanks was no problem at all. Bomo, who had never been awakened by a 6 a.m. bugle in his life, appointed himself General-in-Chief of the army, besides being President. Armed force, armed menacing was necessary, because Bomo intended to make his people work. Progress—the word to Bomo meant more comfort, higher medical standards, more exports of copper, more cars and TV sets—progress had to continue.
    A few white construction workers arrived by invitation to get some projects started: Bomo’s Government House for one, and his private dwelling, the Small Palace, for another, a few high-rise apartment buildings to house workers in the capital Goka, and also a bigger airport terminus and longer runways, because Bomo had tourism in mind. Wages for manual labor were at first good, attracting people from the farms to the cities. Then the inevitable happened: basic foods ran short, and Nabuti had to start importing food, not a terrible burden because rice, wheat and dried milk were fairly given away by an arrangement with a United Nations agency. Worst was the copper mines’ condition. The miners had grown ever more undisciplined, absenteeism could not be controlled, there was drunkenness on