White Dog Fell From the Sky (17 page)

“Didn’t van der Post father a
child with a fourteen-year-old girl who was under his care on a sea voyage?”

“I don’t know. It’s likely
that he did. Not good form. But still, does that wipe out everything else he ever said
or did? The point is, people have lost their courage. They’ve gone for safety. No
one wants to be reminded what a tiny speck in the universe we are, but knowing
that’s the key to everything. We’re afraid of big spaces. We herd for
safety, and before you know it, you’ve got civilization. But in the wild, look
what happens. Which animals do lions choose to prey upon? Zebra and wildebeest. Animals
that travel in herds. The herd feels like safety, but it only makes us more
vulnerable.”

“Animals in herds
are
safer.
The chances for any individual’s dying is slim.”

“I don’t mean we need to wander
around in the desert by ourselves. I mean face how ridiculously small we are. Just look
at this sky. How many hundreds of billions of galaxies are we seeing, as big or bigger
than our own? Freedom comes from knowing you’re a dot. Smaller than a dot.

Sam and Motsumi had gone to their tent.
“Listen to me pontificating,” he said. “You were talking about your
father.”

“I’m done talking about
him.” She told Ian she needed to go to bed. She wasn’t tired, but something
between them was ratcheting up. She
was scared, actually. It had been
awhile since she’d talked to a man with even one idea in his head. There were men,
plenty of them, better looking than Ian, without the beginning of a paunch, without the
gold tooth, bottom left of center, but not who read books, and thought, and imagined,
and asked questions. She had an irrational desire to start a fight, drive him away.

“Are you married?”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“How long has it been?”

“Eight months.”

“You fell out of love?”

“Something like that. I didn’t
know what I was doing.”

“Who does? Who hasn’t fucked up
their life?”

It was an opening, but something kept her
from asking how he’d fucked up his. She didn’t want to know. They were
quiet.

“Have you ever been to Moremi?”
he asked.

“No.”

“Would you like to go?”

“How far is it?”

“We could get there and back in a day.
Nothing else is happening tomorrow. We’d have to ask if any of the others want to
go, of course.”

The “we” wasn’t lost on
her. “That would leave everyone else without a vehicle,” she said.

“Damn it, do you want to go or
not?”

“Sure I want to go.”

“Well, then, we’ll go.” He
left to talk to the others and came back saying they all wanted to stay here. How had he
put it to them? A long, grueling drive? Not much to see? Somehow she knew he’d
figured a way for them to be alone.

She tossed on her cot, the sound of her
heartbeat in her ear. Blood pumped through chambers and echoed. Her head was pillowed on
the lump of sweater she’d brought for chilly nights. The sound continued,
magnified, her head filled with it. She missed rain. She wanted it to
fall in torrents, for the dust to rise off the steaming earth.

She believed her parents had been deeply in
love. After her father died, her mother became a ghost. Once, she’d wondered out
loud whether Alice’s father had jumped from the bridge on purpose. It never would
have occurred to Alice if her mother hadn’t said it. Growing up, she tumbled
around in her mother’s anger. Much of it seemed directed at her, as though she
should have saved her father and hadn’t. She remembered Saturdays, rain-drenched
windows, rivulets forming and reforming on the glass, streaming down. A clock humming on
the wall, with its click to the next second, and the next.

Her mother was protective of her and
ambitious for them both, but she’d never led Alice to believe that happiness was
something within her grasp. After her father died, her mother went back to school and
became an English teacher.

“Why don’t you date anyone,
Mom?” Alice asked one night. Her mother was lovely still, with a southern European
kind of elegance. Eyebrows that arched upward and fell gracefully. Her nose, long,
slightly curved. Her skin, ivory and unmarked. It was her gray-green eyes, though,
particularly the melancholy in them, that carried her beauty.

“I’m not putting you through
that,” her mother said.

“Through what?”

“A string of losers, in and out of my
bed. I don’t know any man I’d want to date.”

“There are men around who aren’t
losers.”

“Show me one.”

Alice was reading
Jane Eyre
in a
fast-track sophomore English class. “Mr. Rochester,” she said.

“Mr. Rochester was a figment of
Charlotte Brontë’s imagination,” her mother snorted. “In real
life, her sisters and brothers died of TB. Then she married her father’s curate
and died in childbirth. Her husband was boring and selfish.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know the type. Someday,
you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Alice got off the cot and lifted the flap of
the tent. The half moon was heading downward, toward a clump of baobab trees on
the horizon, bare-limbed, their trunks broad and wrinkled. Somewhere in the distance was
the sound of two black-backed jackals, yips rising and falling, silence. And nearer, the
sound of her heartbeat in her ear.

The two of them left early the following
morning, conspiratorially, slipping out before the others had left their tents. She knew
there’d be talk, speculation about whether they’d shared a tent, but she
didn’t care. The baobab trees were bathed in saffron light as the mist rose off
the great plain to their east. The engine of the Land Rover was loud, alien in that
bird-filled air. Ian started up with the headlights off and then flicked them on after
they’d left the campsite. One beam was crooked and shone drunkenly into the
scrubby limbs of trees as the vehicle labored through the sand. She’d raided the
cook’s tent before they left, and she offered Ian coffee from a thermos. He waved
the cup away. “Have to pay attention or we’ll turn turtle.”

She poured some for herself and took a
sip.

“So, we got away,” he said.

“I feel a little guilty.”

“Do you often feel that
then?”

“No more than the next
person … Well, maybe a bit more.”

As a guinea fowl raced across the track,
Ian’s foot came off the accelerator for a moment and went back on. “Why did
your marriage come to grief?” he asked. “You don’t need to say if
you’d rather not.”

“Lawrence lied to me about an affair.
We could have withstood that, but then he kept lying. There was something dishonest at
the core of us. He was … is an economist. It seemed that’s all he could
talk about.”

“What did you like about
him?”

She looked out the window onto the tawny
grass, tufted around red
earth, the occasional termite tower rising
like a stalagmite. She thought of a time when she and Lawrence had done angel stands
together in the grass, he lying on his back with his feet in the air, she balanced on
his feet, flying through the night.

“Underneath it all, he has a kind
nature. Not courage, but kindness. He’s not just in this country for himself, but
because he wants to help. He believes he’s making things better.”

“Do you?”

“Probably not. But I’d say the
same for what I’m doing. I appreciate that it matters to him. But it’s good
that it’s over. I see that now. I felt half dead around him.”

“I’ve felt that kind of
dead,” Ian said, glancing at her. “It’s preferable to be all the way
dead.”

“I don’t want to be any kind of
dead.”

“What do you want for yourself
then?” he asked.

She watched the track, and him out of the
corner of her eye. His head was large, his hair dark with streaks of gray. One side of
his tortoiseshell glasses was mended with duct tape. Lawless eyebrows strayed down over
brown eyes. He was a bear of a man, with large hands. He was beginning to sag here and
there—the lower part of his face toward jowls, the skin over his eyes meeting his
eyelids in their downward journey.

“What do I want for myself?” She
searched out the black specks on the horizon, trying to make out the animals. “A
life that’s large, not small.”

“With someone or without?” He
was watching the animals too.

“It depends.”

He waited for her to say more.

There were hundreds in the herd, maybe
thousands, moving relentlessly forward. “I think they’re wildebeest,”
she said. They were driving along a rise, with the plain stretched beneath them. The
herd formed and re-formed, darkening the drought-swept ground. Their heads were down,
tails dangling, wind weariness in their bodies.

“Poor bastards,” he said.
“They don’t know what’s ahead of them.”

She pictured the fingers of the Okavango
Delta reaching into the
dusty plain. You could almost smell it, miles
away. There’s a way around that fence, she thought, at the same time she knew
there wasn’t.

When she was a girl, her mother had taken
her to places on weekends. An aquarium one Saturday, the Cincinnati zoo the next. A
shark tank in the center of the aquarium had extra thick glass you could press your
cheek against. It felt cool, and when you turned your head, it was as though you were
underwater. She remembered her mother screaming as a shark came up on the other side of
the glass and nosed the place where her cheek was.

What she remembered most about those
outings, though, was her mother’s melancholy—the collapse of a world, her daughter
a single thread connecting her to what went before. A young ape in the zoo held a banana
in one hand and sat close to the bars looking out. Kids came up and screamed.
“Hey! Hey!” Alice stood in front of him a long time waiting for him to look
in her direction. Their eyes met straight on. Then he lowered his head, peeled the
banana delicately, carefully, and dropped the peel at his feet. With a single motion, he
popped the whole thing into his mouth and swung away, up into the limbs of a fake tree.
He dazzled her, that beautiful young ape. She’d seen the wild in him, the great
forests, and for a moment she lived there too.

It was like that now.

Ian turned up a smaller track, headed
northwest. The herd was to their right now, and they could see the first animals about a
half kilometer from the fence. He stopped and fished a pair of binoculars out of his
knapsack, then started up the vehicle again. His face looked suddenly hard. He was no
longer driving in an ambling, relaxed way. She felt a kind of terror overtake her.

“Where are we going?” she
asked.

“I don’t want to involve you,
but there’s something I need to do.”

It was mad being out here with a man she
hardly knew, the nearest person too far to reach on foot even if she’d known where
she was.

“I’m going to try to cut the
fence,” he said quietly. “I could go to prison for it. You could go as my
accomplice. If you want, I’ll leave you here under a tree and come back for
you.”

It only took a second to say,
“I’m coming too.”

They drew closer, still unable to see the wire
but close enough to see the posts stretching endlessly in either direction. The first
animals in the herd were already close to the fence. It was too late, she thought, even
as she scrambled out of the Land Rover and Ian rummaged among the tools in the back.

He found a screwdriver, a claw hammer, a
pair of vice grips, a wrench, a funnel for oil, nothing useful. He grabbed the vice
grips and hammer, and they ran to the right of the area where the animals were headed.
When they reached the fence, he held the wire with the vice grips and twisted the claw
of the hammer around the wire, then rocked it back and forth. “Stand back in case
it snaps.”

The wire was thick, and the tools were
useless.

He tried again. And then he tried digging
around a post with a rock and the hammer, but the dirt was cement hard. The first of the
wildebeest arrived at the barrier about two to three hundred meters away. Others
followed. Some of the first were pushed into the fence and fell. Alice turned away. Ian
watched for a few moments and turned and slammed the hammer into a fence post. It flew
out of his hand, and he left it there and stalked back to the Land Rover. “Bloody
hell,” he muttered. “Bloody fucking hell …” She picked up the
hammer and followed him.

She was surprised to find him in the
driver’s seat with tears running down his cheeks. She climbed in, and he put the
vehicle in gear and drove away. They headed toward Moremi Game Reserve, their mood
somber. “It’s people like that cold fish,” he said, “responsible
for that. What has he ever learned in Milwaukee about this world? He’s frightened
of anything he doesn’t understand. Did you hear him last night?”

“Yes, I heard him. God knows how much
money he’ll be in charge of dispensing.”

“Or how he’ll use it. If he saw
what we just saw …”

“It wouldn’t make any
difference,” she said. “He’d find a way to justify it.”

They drove along for a while without
talking.

“We’re about ten kilometers away
from the park,” he said. “There’ll be mosquitoes. You’re on
chloroquine, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” What did he think she was,
an idiot?

In the park, they saw more wildebeest,
waterbuck with their tawny skin and white rumps, hundreds of impala, red lechwe, zebra,
giraffe browsing on trees, a family of warthogs, a saddlebilled stork. In the late
afternoon, a double rainbow spread over a wide plain of yellow grass, where a small herd
of sable antelope was grazing, their white cheeks and chins giving their faces a kind of
delicacy, their ringed horns swept back in great curves. She thought this was the most
devastatingly beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

He stood close to her, quiet, looking out.
“No lions today,” he said finally.