©Anne Jacobs A former foreign service officer, Mark Jacobs has published more than 200 stories in magazines including The Atlantic, Playboy, The Baffler, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review. His story “How Birds Communicate” won The Iowa Review fiction prize. His story “Dream State” won the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Kafka Prize. His five books include A Handful of Kings, published by Simon and Shuster, and Stone Cowboy, by Soho Press, which won the Maria Thomas Award. His website can be found at www.markjacobsauthor.com.

It was the diamond that woke Smith. Even asleep, you could not say Congo without thinking diamond. Coming to consciousness he found himself jammed, flat on his back at the bottom of an unlit pit. He panicked, struggling to get up, but could not move. The knees of a demon kept him pinned to the black ground. Thanks to the rye, everything hurt. Then the diamond flashed, the demon let him go, and the stone’s clean light drew him to the surface. He grinned.

There was nothing wrong with getting rich. Fast or slow, it didn’t matter how you got there. Given the choice, Smith would pick fast. Diamonds, for example. Diamonds were fast. He had read up on the subject. The first thing you did if you acquired a bunch of diamonds was quit your shitty job. He was halfway there; he had the shitty job, ready and waiting for him to quit.

Lying on his back in bed he sang the first verse of “Jambalaya” because it made him think of home and because the hallowed image of first responders pulling Hank Williams’ misused body from a wrecked Cadillac Coupe Deville, sad as it was, had a storybook quality about it that never failed to lift Smith’s spirits. You could ruin yourself and achieve greatness.

He stopped singing after the first verse. He had been told by people whose judgment he trusted that he could not carry a tune. Any time he picked one up, it dropped and broke.

It was September, before the rainy season began but not much before. The hotel room in which he lay was in Brazzaville. Colonialism left Africa with two Congos. They are of vastly unequal size. Brazzaville is the capital of the smaller one. It stares out of the corner of its eye across the legendary river that separates it from Kinshasa, capital of the enormous Congo. Smith did not know much about colonialism, or the two Congos, or why Central Africa was the violent impoverished place it appeared to be. He was not stupid, or incurious, it was that his mind had a practical cast. He was good with machinery. He understood hydraulics and could fix just about anything that broke on an offshore oil rig. There had been little occasion in his life to think about broken countries or the people who lived in them.

Smith was thirty seven. A leopard was tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. He liked to say he was in Africa because his mother had sung French lullabies to him way back when, before exiting his life in search of a new one for herself. But that was a lie, intended to entertain anybody who would listen. The truth was one-word simple: escape. He had jumped at the chance to escape the trap of dead end mechanic jobs he was stuck in back at home. He couldn’t get any broker than broke.

©Anne Jacobs A former foreign service officer, Mark Jacobs has published more than 200 stories in magazines including The Atlantic, Playboy, The Baffler, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review. His story “How Birds Communicate” won The Iowa Review fiction prize. His story “Dream State” won the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Kafka Prize. His five books include A Handful of Kings, published by Simon and Shuster, and Stone Cowboy, by Soho Press, which won the Maria Thomas Award. His website can be found at www.markjacobsauthor.com.

It was the diamond that woke Smith. Even asleep, you could not say Congo without thinking diamond. Coming to consciousness he found himself jammed, flat on his back at the bottom of an unlit pit. He panicked, struggling to get up, but could not move. The knees of a demon kept him pinned to the black ground. Thanks to the rye, everything hurt. Then the diamond flashed, the demon let him go, and the stone’s clean light drew him to the surface. He grinned.

There was nothing wrong with getting rich. Fast or slow, it didn’t matter how you got there. Given the choice, Smith would pick fast. Diamonds, for example. Diamonds were fast. He had read up on the subject. The first thing you did if you acquired a bunch of diamonds was quit your shitty job. He was halfway there; he had the shitty job, ready and waiting for him to quit.

Lying on his back in bed he sang the first verse of “Jambalaya” because it made him think of home and because the hallowed image of first responders pulling Hank Williams’ misused body from a wrecked Cadillac Coupe Deville, sad as it was, had a storybook quality about it that never failed to lift Smith’s spirits. You could ruin yourself and achieve greatness.

He stopped singing after the first verse. He had been told by people whose judgment he trusted that he could not carry a tune. Any time he picked one up, it dropped and broke.

It was September, before the rainy season began but not much before. The hotel room in which he lay was in Brazzaville. Colonialism left Africa with two Congos. They are of vastly unequal size. Brazzaville is the capital of the smaller one. It stares out of the corner of its eye across the legendary river that separates it from Kinshasa, capital of the enormous Congo. Smith did not know much about colonialism, or the two Congos, or why Central Africa was the violent impoverished place it appeared to be. He was not stupid, or incurious, it was that his mind had a practical cast. He was good with machinery. He understood hydraulics and could fix just about anything that broke on an offshore oil rig. There had been little occasion in his life to think about broken countries or the people who lived in them.

Smith was thirty seven. A leopard was tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. He liked to say he was in Africa because his mother had sung French lullabies to him way back when, before exiting his life in search of a new one for herself. But that was a lie, intended to entertain anybody who would listen. The truth was one-word simple: escape. He had jumped at the chance to escape the trap of dead end mechanic jobs he was stuck in back at home. He couldn’t get any broker than broke.