Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (22 page)

“But, I was
sitting
on our katundu. How could anyone have stolen anything from underneath my bottom? I’m sure they’re not stolen. Let me help you look.”

“Did you have a tarpaulin over everything?” Connor asked.

“It was tied down with rope,” said K.

“Eh! In Mozambique. The black limbs of Satan, man. They will steal anything. Anything. I promise you. They can steal like no other people on this earth. It is their special God-given talent. Did you stop anywhere?”

I thought of the police stop and of the children who had sneaked up to the car and of how I had been distracted by my need to pee.

I said, “I am sorry, K.”

“I’ve had that knife and that bottle since the war,” K said. He sat down next to me and put his head in his hands. “Fucking gondies. I don’t care if they steal my fucking sleeping bag or my tent. But that water bottle and that knife . . .”

He began to tear through our belongings—my bag, his bag, the tin trunk—spilling everything out onto the floor. Connor and I watched in silence. “I am going to go back there and rip their fucking heads off,” K growled. His lips looked swollen and murderous. “Fucking savages.”

Connor, in a failed attempt to lighten the atmosphere, said, “I caught a pregnant puff adder once and when all the babies were born I thought I’d raise them and keep them to put inside empty briefcases. Then I’d go to Maputo and wipe out a few thieves with them. You see, when the black limbs steal a briefcase they run away from you, sticking their hand in the briefcase as they go, to get the money or whatever you have in there. Then they throw the briefcase away. Instead of loot, they’d have a puff adder dangling from their fingers. Wouldn’t that be great?” Then his face folded back into sobriety. “But the damn puff adder and all her babies escaped.” He glanced over his shoulder at the garden and said, carelessly, “They’re all out there somewhere.”

After K had shaken our clothes and food all over the dining room floor, torn the vehicle apart, and emptied out the back of the pickup, the knife and water bottle were found behind the seat where K had put them for safety. “I swear, I thought I put them in the back,” he said, having the grace to look a little sheepish. He sat down with his head in his hands for a few moments, and when he lifted his head he announced solemnly, “That’s a message from the Almighty.”

“What is?” I said.

K said, “That’s the Almighty telling me that I shouldn’t go ripping people’s heads off until I
know
they’ve done something wrong.”

Connor said, “Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that. Around here, you’re pretty safe ripping the head off anything with two legs and a pair of hands, with or without evidence. I’ve never met such a thieving bunch of bastards in my life as these lot. They’d steal the air from your tires if they could.”

IT WAS JUST before midnight when Connor led me to my room, showing the way from the dining room through a thin stand of trees with the aid of a flashlight. There are three small rooms built around the edge of the lake’s shore and I was staying in what is known as the Presidential Suite because it has its own shower and toilet (K, who was sleeping in a room to the south of me, had to brave the idea of puff adders to reach his ablutions).

“This was all under water when the floods came two years ago,” Connor said, kicking the door of my room open and revealing a simple cement cubicle with two beds, a sink, and a rickety bedside table. “Place was knee-deep in fish and snakes and frogs and scorps. Helluva mess.” A thin orange curtain sagged over the lower end of a screened window. The heat had settled itself like a great, hairy animal into every corner of the room, so it was breathless and stifling. “There,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be comfortable.”

“Thanks.”

“You need to keep the door shut,” said Connor, “or the snakes will come in here after the rats. Or the wild cats want to follow the rats
and
the snakes—and then they piss everywhere. Man, this place is solid with wild cats. I don’t know why.”

Perhaps the pervasive scent of fish in the air might have offered one explanation, but I felt it polite not to give voice to my suspicion. Instead, I thanked Connor for his generosity and watched through the window as his flashlight bobbed back toward the dining room.

The moon, which would be full within the week, pulsed huge and silver in a deep black sky. The lake, black and secret and long, stretched out as far as I could see, joining with the sky in a seamless circle of darkness. I pulled back the mosquito net, climbed onto the sheets, and stretched out to make the most of the flaccid breeze that puffed unreliably through the window. I listened to the calling frogs, the anonymous splashes coming from the lake, the intermittent baying of village dogs, and the shrill sawing of the crickets until sleep came.

IT WASN’T YET DAWN when K materialized next to my bed with a cup of tea.

“Bobo?”

I started out of sleep, battled with the mosquito net, and emerged with heart thumping and ready for flight. “What is it?”

“Good morning.”

“Bloody hell. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“I brought you some tea.”

I slumped back against my pillow and looked out the window at the sky, barely smudged gray with dawn. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s five o’clock in the morning.”

I groaned and felt around in the gloomy light for the tea. “I feel like I’ve been through a washing machine,” I complained.

“That’s what comes of too many beers,” K admonished.

“No. It’s what comes of not asking for directions and driving over minefields half the night,” I said, blowing on my tea.

“Do you want to come for a walk?”

“What? Right now?”

“Ja. Right now.”

“Okay. You bring the flashlight and I’ll bring the flares.” I struggled out of the net and fingered about for my clothes. “It’s not very civilized of you not to at least allow me to drink my tea.”

“You can bring it with you.”

I pulled on some shorts and a T-shirt.

“I couldn’t sleep,” K said as we made our way out of the camp and headed toward a path that seemed to lead from the lake’s shore into the mopane scrub east of us.

“Which does not necessarily mean that no one else shouldn’t,” I pointed out.

The sun, flat and dispassionate, had begun to filter over the horizon, a careless riot of orange, red, yellow.

“It’s going to be a hot one,” said K.

A herd of goats came tripping out of the trees and tottered down to the lake, heads bobbing, legs like thin sticks. Behind them, two fat black pigs scowled out at their world. One lay down with a depressed grunt in a smear of smelly black mud, upsetting a cloud of gnats into a swarm above his head.

“As soon as the sun rose,” said K, pulling aside a wait-a-bit bush so that I could pass, “the damn mopane flies were out.” He was speaking in a slightly louder than necessary, reminiscing voice (one that sounded slightly rehearsed to me, as if he had gone over and over these lines in his head for months, maybe years). “In your eyes, in your ears, in your nose. It was hell. And there was bugger all you could do about it—I mean, you had your gun in one hand and one hand free to clear the bush. You just had to get used to the flies crawling all over your face, or they’d make you crazy.”

I pushed the hair and sweat out of my eyes and several mopane flies were wiped to their deaths in the process. “I don’t know why you talk about the flies as if they were a plague of the past,” I said.

We brushed out into a clearing. The grass was flattened, as if livestock had spent the night here, or there had been wind bursts. Beyond the tips of the trees we could see morning fires belching smoke into the sky and then K suddenly stopped in a way that reminded me of a horse that has smelled or heard something that has put the fear of God into it. “Hear that?” he whispered.

I stopped panting and held my breath. It sounded like an ordinary early morning in Africa to me. Flies buzzed, cockerels crowed, goats bleated, and a chorus of dogs was howling furiously. “What?” I said.

“That.”

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Those fucking dogs,” K said. “Fuck. I heard them last night too. They must be everywhere.” He turned to me and grabbed my shoulders. “Let’s go.”

“What? You’re spilling my tea.”

“Quick.”

“They’re village dogs.”

“Not here, they’re not.”

We retraced our steps, although this time K did not bother with the chivalrous formalities of holding aside thorn bushes for me but shoved me ahead of him, like a shield, until we broke out onto the shore of the lake, where we frightened the goats with our sudden and hasty reappearance. K was gasping as if he had just run a great distance. He put his hands on his knees and stared at the ground and then he started to heave.

“Are you all right?”

K nodded. A silver yellow thread of vomit dangled from his mouth. He gagged again.

“Must have been the peanuts in green pepper sauce,” I said.

K stood up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Why don’t you sit down for a bit?” I suggested. “Here, have some tea.”

K put up his hand and shook his head. “Nah. No tea.”

“This is no time for fasting heroics, fergodsake, drink!”

K took a mouthful of tea, swilled it around, and spat it out into the sand. He rocked heel to toe, toe to heel. It was like watching a tree in a windstorm. Then he licked his lips, which had gone mauve and chalky.

“You okay now?”

“Ja.”

“Still queasy?”

K shook his head. “Fucking spook bit me is all.”

“Ja.”

“Those dogs,” said K. “Man, you forget. . . . Those were howling.”

“Dogs howl,” I pointed out.

K shook his head. “No.”

I followed K back to Connor’s camp, breaking into a run to keep up with him. Only once we were back in the open-air dining room did K stop breathing as if he had just finished a race.

I said, “Hounds of the Baskervilles stop chasing you?”

K said, “It’s not funny.”

“Sorry.”

K sat for a long time with his arms crossed and his lips tight and drawn. He didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Most probably just village dogs, hey?”

“Most definitely village dogs.”

“It’s been ages since I was here.”

“Twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Right.”

“Dogs only live . . . what?”

“Ten, fourteen years.”

“Ja.”

“Ja.”

“Things change.”

“They do.”

K leaned forward and ran his finger down my cheek.
“Sheesh.
I think it was the smell of the bush, and the way this land looks and then the dogs. . . . Shame, man. Are you square?”

“Smashing,” I said, pulling thorns out of my arms. “And I’m wide awake now.”

K laughed. Then he said, “I’m telling you . . . I had a major flashback.”

“Bloody hell. I’d say.”

“You know I told you, during the war no gondies were supposed to live here. If they were found by the Porks, or if we found them, we culled them.” K shook his head. “So they tore down their huts, killed anything they could eat, and they went and hid in the bush. But they must have found they couldn’t bring themselves to eat their dogs because those, they just chased them away.”

“How awful,” I said.

“Ja, so those dogs made huge packs of sixty or so animals, just like wild dogs, and they ran all through here and they ate anything they could catch. And”—K swallowed—“you know, I haven’t thought about this—not for years, not until just now. . . . I had only been in the war three months, maybe less. I still couldn’t see very well from the bazooka, you know, when the bloody thing blew up in my face. Anyway, we were over there one evening,” said K, pointing to the other side of the lake. “We had already grazed and we were on the move, trying to find a good place to spend the night and suddenly we
feel
—we didn’t hear them right away—these
things
closing in on us.

“And then the grass is rustling. For sure, we thought it was bloody gooks. So we all drop, man. And we’re all just waiting for the first shot, so we could see where the bastards were.

“And then old Bloodnut—that was our sarge, you know, he had red hair, so we called him Bloodnut—whispers, ‘I think we’re surrounded. I
feel
surrounded.’

“I say, ‘Me too.’ But I can’t see a thing because my eyes were shit enough as it was during the day but at dusk and in the dark, I was blind as a bat.

“Then Bloodnut sees this pair of yellow eyes looking at him through the grass—it’s almost dark by now—and he says, ‘It’s a fucking jackal.’

“Then suddenly there’s this shout, and one of the ous says,
‘Imbwas!
Fucking imbwas!’

“It was all these dogs, sixty of them . . . more—all creeping up on us, like lions. The ones at the back were trotting toward us, but the ones closest were crawling on their bellies. It was creepier than a whole herd of gooks, I can tell you that much.

“So Bloodnut says, ‘Fuck.’

“And I know what he’s thinking. If he opens fire, then every gook within a mile is going to hear us. But the dogs keep coming. So he opens up with the FN, just pa-pa-pa to scare them off and a few of the dogs are scribbled, but the others just keep coming. I mean, there were now fifty dogs, fifty-five, instead of sixty and there are four of us.

“So Bloodnut says to me, ‘Fucking let fire, or we’re fucked.’

“I start blasting with the bazooka and Bloodnut huzzes a grenade and the other ous are just letting fly, cha-cha-cha and there are dogs howling—I mean chemering—and bits of dog raining down on us and Bloodnut starts crying. Man, I look over and the guy’s whole face is wet, the guy is crying like a baby and I can’t tell if he’s shitting himself or if he can’t stand killing the dogs. But the dogs still keep coming and quickly and some of them are . . . Man, we were kicking at them, shooting them at our feet. And there are more, coming and coming.

“And so Bloodnut shouts that he’s going to hit them with napalm. He says, ‘Cover me!’ So we’re still blasting at the dogs that are close and Bloodnut fires one off into the dogs that were farther off. . . . Fuck! The dogs are running through the shateen with their skins burning off—and now they’re screaming like humans. It was like they were humans in dog skin. You’ve never heard anything like it. And then the dogs that were close to us, turn tail and they bareka, man! We could hear them for hours. Hours and hours.”