White Dog Fell From the Sky (26 page)

As they drove west, the
mopane
scrub opened out to clumps of palm, and then closed in again. They passed a few
springbok, a small herd of zebra. A lone male ostrich crossed the road in front of them.
A few kilometers later, she asked him to stop so she could pee, and she stumbled away
from the road over parched earth, swishing through yellow grass.

As they stood together at the northernmost
edge of the pan looking south, the desolation seemed even more unnerving than
before.

He said, “I’ve brought a
high-lift jack.”

“Do you think we’ll need
it?”

“Don’t know.”

As they proceeded across the pan, they were
baking inside an oven on wheels. Islands were dotted here and there, almost perfectly
round and covered with grass, some of them tiny, one large enough to host a small herd
of gemsbok. They bumped over a gravel bed. She thought of the fish who’d swum
here, small and great. The flamingos in such numbers they would have turned the sky the
color of sunrise.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my
life
. The words came to her suddenly, ones she hadn’t spoken since Sunday
school. Right behind them, she felt another force biding its time: something utterly
without mercy. It waited in the heat and stillness, the light that blinded. The forces
were one and the same, as though the whiteness had wiped clear every distinction on
Earth.

Ian stopped the Land Rover. “Need to
rest my eyes.”

“Know where we are?”

“The moon.” He turned to her and
brushed the hair from her face. “Okay?” The place tore words from her mouth
and replaced them with silence. She squeezed his hand and offered him an orange. He
peeled it and held out half to her. By early afternoon, they’d reached Kube.
Stunted baobabs dotted the surface of granite outcroppings. Yellow grasses blew in the
west wind, rippling, as though a hand were being drawn across them.

They pitched the two tents side by side in
the grass by the shore of the lake that once was. Ian rummaged around in the back of the
vehicle and brought out a tall aluminum billy can that he filled with water. Alice had
never seen anything like it. It had a hole in the center, all the way up. He put twigs
in the space under and inside the elongated doughnut hole, and lit a small fire. The
water boiled fast in this contraption, and a few minutes later, they sat in the shade of
the Land Rover in two folding chairs, looking west, drinking tea from tin cups.

“When I was a girl,” she said,
“I used to look at a picture book with my mom. There was a page with thousands of
pink flamingos on a salt lake somewhere in Africa. Every time we came to that page, my
mother would say how she longed to be in a place like that.”

“Do you long for places?”

“Not really. Melancholy is more my
thing. But that’s different.”

“Is it?”

“The way it floats. Without an
object.”

He touched her hand. “My longings have
been of a different sort. How to be alone with Alice and away from Arthur
Haddock.”

She smiled. “Here we are.”

“I thought you were going to hit me
when I called you ‘lovey.’”

“I thought I was going to hit you
too.”

“This one’s got some spunk, I
said to myself.”

“Oh you did, did you?”

The wind sounded thin through the baobab
trees, a kind of high, stretched-out sound. “I was thinking,” she said,
“about what Ngwaga said about you.”

“Do you mean, will I ever be
different?”

“I don’t want you to be anyone
but you, Ian Henry.”

“Are you asking, how would it ever
work if we were together?”

“Yes, I guess that’s what
I’m asking.”

“I don’t know. It’s never
worked before.”

She looked at him and dashed the dregs of
her tea onto the ground. “I don’t believe the past controls the
future.”

“Fair enough.”

“And the wind does get tired and have
to stop blowing every so often.”

He stood up, leaned over, and kissed her.
When she stood and pressed her body to his, her legs were weak from the wanting of him.
She pulled him toward the large tent. It was like entering a mouth, with the heat of the
sun gathered there. He left the large flap open to the wind and slipped off his shoes.
She hugged him toward her and lifted his T-shirt up over his shoulders and head. He
kissed her ear and her hair and her lips. She undid his belt buckle and fumbled him out
of his shorts. She brushed her lips against his nipple. He shuddered, ripped off her
shirt, unhooked her bra with one hand, arching her up against him as he unclasped her
pants. His mouth touched her neck. His body was no longer young. Hands on damp skin.
Here. And here. A scar
rimpled the skin of his shoulder. What she felt
was something like a hard rain: violence and brightness and beauty.

The wind sighed through the trees, but
neither of them heard it.

They lay back against the sleeping bag, his
arm under her head, her hair disheveled. His eyes were closed, his breath even. She
watched him, his chest rising and falling. Wrinkles creased his earlobes. His age made
him dearer to her. In some irrational part of her, she still thought she’d live
forever, but she could see that he would not. She closed her eyes and slept until the
heat made her stir. He woke and laid his palm against her hair. “Do you know the
story of Lynx and Morning Star?”

“Tell me,” she said.

He stopped and looked at her, ran his hand
forward through her hair.

“Morning Star wanted a bride, and out
of all the animals, he chose Lynx. He’d seen her walking alone at night and fallen
in love as he watched her move. Liquid, like a river.

“They were happy together, but no
sooner had their union taken place than a shadow entered their lives. With hulking
shoulders and hunger and jealousy, Hyena set out to break apart the marriage with her
dark magic. She transformed the food of Lynx into poison that would rob her of her will
to live. Lynx’s fur lost its shine. Her eyes grew dull. She no longer groomed
herself or cared for anything.

“Hyena threw Lynx out of her hut and
moved in. Lynx’s sister hastened to Morning Star and told him that the light of
his life was in danger. Morning Star’s rage was unbounded. He flew to Earth with
his spear in hand. Hyena saw him coming and rushed from the hut in terror. As Hyena
dodged to protect herself from his spear, her hind leg caught on the coals of the
cooking fire. She was burned so badly that from that day forward, she walked
lopsided.

“Lynx grew strong again. Morning Star
shone brightly between night and day, brighter than before because he knew he had to
stay vigilant against the forces of darkness in the universe.”

“Vigilant against the forces of
darkness,” she said. She lay with her back next to the tent wall, one hand under a
bunched-up pillow, facing him. She could smell old rainy seasons, sun, and wind in the
canvas. His
elbow was bent, his hand holding up his head. She caught
his index finger in her fist. “Are you afraid of anything?”

“Me?”

This amused her. As though someone else were
in the tent with them. “Yes, you.”

He kissed her hair. “When I was a kid,
I was terrified of great naked mole rats.”

She laughed.

“My father showed me a picture once in
a book. I used to dream about them and wake up screaming. My mum would come rushing in,
‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ and I’d say,
‘The Great Naked Mole Rats!’”

“What do they look like?”

“Tiny piggy eyes, so small they can
hardly see.” He sat up in agitation. “Their skin is a pinky yellowish gray
and all wrinkly, ending with a ratty tail; they have four huge yellowish buck teeth that
dominate their face. I was obsessed with them. I did research at the local library,
hoping to get to the bottom of it. It turns out their skin doesn’t have a
neurotransmitter responsible for pain, so you can paint them with acid and they feel
nothing. Their social life is like bees or termites. They have one queen and only a
couple of select males who can reproduce. The rest are workers, functioning in a kind of
caste system. Some are tunnelers, some are soldiers, protecting the colony. They tell
who’s friend or foe by smell. They roll around in their shit to update their
smell. When they’re cold, they huddle together in a disgusting hairless mass of
flesh. When they’re hot, they head into the nether reaches of their tunnels. They
live up to twenty years, longer sometimes, but a lot of that living is sleep.
They’re like some great jaundice-skinned Uncle Harry who came to Christmas dinner
and went to sleep on the couch and never left.”

“Do you have an Uncle
Harry?”

“No. But if I did … You
really wouldn’t believe how disgusting these naked mole rats are. I’ll have
to find you a picture. In my young dreams, they were enormous. In fact they’re
only a few centimeters long.”

She laughed again.

“Why? What’s so funny?”

She didn’t answer. “What about
now? Are you afraid of anything now? You ducked my question.”

“Did I?” He held her palm and
spread her fingers out one by one. He nibbled the webbed skin between her thumb and
first finger. “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of
bad people. But right now, at this moment, I’m afraid I won’t prove good
enough for you.”

“Why would you say such a
thing?”

“You don’t know me all that
well.”

“I know enough.”

He grew serious. “What do you
know?”

“I know you’re not easily
domesticated. That you have unusual passions. That you have little patience for
bureaucrats.”

“What you don’t know is that
I’m stubborn to the point of intractable. And underneath the nice guy, I’m
really a bit of a selfish bastard.”

She ran a finger around and over his nipple.
“I’ll take you the way you are, all of you.”

That night, they lay side by side in the
tent, exhausted. His hand was palm down on her belly, his eyes closed. By moonlight, she
watched his face as he went from light to heavier sleep, the laugh lines around his eyes
etched deep and then smoothing as he let go of the day. Heat radiated from his palm and
dampened her belly. She felt gratefulness for him beside her and an odd dread. She
didn’t trust that dread, knew its roots came from her mother. As a child, when
she’d ridden her bicycle down her street, her mother’s voice echoed in her
head, “Be careful!” while the wind blew free through her hair, singing a
different song. Ian’s breath deepened beside her, and he began to snore softly, a
gentle rasping sound.

Who could blame her mother? To say good-bye
to a young husband one night, to watch him climb into his police cruiser, to be woken in
the middle of the night with the news. It had been an exciting story to tell in school.
Sometimes she said her father’s police cruiser had exploded. All they found was
his badge. When she was older, she no longer told the story to anyone. She imagined her
father in his car, a
quarter moon in a dark sky. Venus and Jupiter
oddly aligned near the moon, Venus so bright, it nearly outshone the moon. And that
moment when her father leaped, believing he would land on solid bridge and finding only
air beneath him, he would have felt astonishment, perhaps not even fear.

What she wanted to keep alive were the
bright eyes of a father she’d seen in photographs, smiling next to her mother. And
if she was honest with herself, she wanted to share a piece of that awe, that largeness
as he fell through the night sky, a small comet, streaking down as most fathers do not.
She had known him only briefly. There were no particular memories to miss, only that
moment when he’d been almost as bright as a planet.

She turned and put her arm over Ian’s
waist. His eyes flickered as though he were still driving in deep sand, and then his
breath settled.

She first saw it as a red scratch the next
day, laying down a delicate path from her foot toward her ankle. She thought it was made
by a thorn. But later, her head throbbed and a fever began to rampage through her blood,
roaring into her ears, singeing bones, hollowing her eye sockets into dry craters. She
told Ian she was frightened. “I don’t know what’s the matter.”
Her vision blurred and scrambled—the tent roof turned in a slow circle she thought was
the sky. She threw the pillow away from her, as Ian tucked it under her head again. His
voice was magnified beyond bearing. When he spoke, tears came to her eyes. His face
pressed close to hers. “Tell me where you hurt.” The thought of answering
him—like vomiting up the center of the Earth. She was out of her head. She scrambled out
of the tent which enclosed her like a body bag. He brought out a mat for her to lie on
and laid wet towels over her chest. When darkness swept over them, she had no idea where
she was. The stars fell, growing brighter as they neared the campfire, hovering briefly,
then growing larger still, swirling in fiery reds and yellows and blues. She turned in
space, lifted from the ground, somersaulted and twirled like an astronaut without an
umbilical cord.

Ian said, “Did you get
bitten?”

“Where?” she screamed.

He held a flashlight, pointing at her feet
first. He was trying to vaporize them. She fought him with all her strength.

“Bloody hell!” he cried.
“Do I have to belt you one?!” He sat on her chest and held her arms. She
didn’t remember what happened next. Maybe he knocked her out. Later, he told her
that in the light of his flashlight, he’d found the red streak, all the way to her
thigh by then. And he dosed her with the antibiotics he always carried—wrestling her to
get them down.

She found herself in an endless dream,
trying to get a nest of snakes to a hospital. They were in a Pyrex custard cup, writhing
and spilling and shooting out over the lobby of a hotel. She kept gathering them, and
they’d shrink and pulse, then shoot out again. The dream went round and round, and
she began to cry, out of frustration and helplessness.