White Dog Fell From the Sky (29 page)

“I can’t leave right
now.”

“I love you, Alice.”

It made the breath go out of her. She said
nothing for a moment. “I can’t go, at least not now, with Isaac
missing.”

“Can you still come to Mahalapye this
weekend? We can talk about it.”

“You remember I’m supposed to be
at that government do after work on Friday?”

“I’ll be in Mahalapye Friday
night. Maybe you’ll manage to get away early.”

She whispered good-bye and set the phone
down. Back in bed, she lay awake in the dark. It was tempting to leave here, start a
life together elsewhere. She liked England, could imagine living there. And she could
imagine, almost, a life with Ian.

But Isaac would not have abandoned her, and
she wouldn’t abandon him. She thought how, at the end of each day, he and White
Dog headed up the road together, the dust in the air turning the contours of things
shimmery. It was possible he led a double life, but somehow, she didn’t think so.
She knew nothing, though, about him or the family he’d left behind. They were
shadows, the kind of caricatures that white people carry in their heads when they think
about Africa: no shoes, no school, no future.

Alice looked up from her desk on Friday
afternoon onto a blank concrete wall. She’d finished the position paper on land
use that she’d promised her boss, and delivered it. She pictured herself at the
cocktail party after work, holding a glass of wine, making small talk with people she
never wanted to see in the first place. The hell with it, she thought. She returned a
couple of phone calls, wrote a memo, and went out to her truck. A restless wind blew,
and before long, she was driving in rain so violent, it felt mythic. She made her way
north half as fast as normal, nearly blinded, through rivers of mud. By the time she
arrived it was nearly dark. She was drenched getting inside. The Dew Drop Inn felt damp
and deserted. She called out a hello. Ian appeared from the back and wrapped her in his
arms. He placed a small parcel in her hands and moved a strand of her streaming hair
behind her ear.

“What’s this?”

“I hope you like it.”

She unwrapped the package and found a wooden
object, a little bigger than the palm of her hand. She raised her eyebrows.

“A Bushman piano,” he said.
“Hold it like this and pluck the keys with your thumb.” It made a clanking
sound, accompanied by the rattle of ostrich egg beads strung onto a metal wire.

“I adore it.”

“An old man gave it to me. It’s
made from stolen fence wire. The wood was blackened over a fire.”

She kissed him on the mouth. She was about
to tell him it was the nicest present anyone had ever given her when Berndt, the owner,
appeared from behind a faded curtain, looking rumpled, as though
he’d been napping. He was sixty something, with a smell of cigarettes clinging to
him. Alice’s hand rested furtively on Ian’s ass, his on hers.

“Right, then,” Ian said quickly,
crisply, “time for us to get settled in.” He turned to Alice. “Berndt
has given us a
rondavel,
separate from the house, out back.” She could
tell he’d engineered this separate dwelling.

But Berndt wouldn’t hear of it.
“Dinner is served,” he said. “There’s no point going out in that
rain and then coming in again.” There’d be beef. That went without saying.
Potatoes. A mushy veg. And some kind of inedible pudding with custard sauce. That was
optimistic. She’d eaten here a couple of times before. She didn’t want
dinner, she wanted this man beside her.

Berndt led the way to a large room in the
central part of the inn, facing out to the darkness. Ian and Alice were the only
guests.

Then Boom Boom entered, an Australian woman
who’d taken over the kitchen at some point during the past year. Who knew how
she’d come to be here? She was large, loud, and wore a pink satin stole tipped
with fur, a long, flowing sequined skirt, and little yellow pumps that she’d
poured her feet into. Her lipstick, bright crimson, was applied in a great pointed
M
on her upper lip.

She’d hired five Batswana—boys she
called them—as helpers and cooks. Two of the boys stood out in the dining room, hands
clasped over their crotches, looking cowed, waiting to bring out the food.

They served tiny Korean pancakes with a
ginger sauce for appetizers, fresh bream for the main course. Boom Boom drank
steadily—tumblers of Irish whiskey—and played Strauss waltzes and orchestral potboilers
on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The door opened, and a man blew in whose
eyes were wild and dazed. Berndt invited him to sit down and have some dinner and asked
where he’d come from.

“Francistown.” He’d had
some work up there.

There was a silence. Francistown lay to the
north, and the only road between Francistown and Mahalapye crossed a single-lane bridge
with
no guard rails. Even on the sunniest day, the bridge was a horror
to cross, with its long drop to the river. But tonight, with the river rising to flood
level, the bridge would have been hidden, indistinguishable from water.

“How in the name of bloody hell did
you get over the bridge?” asked Berndt.

The man, a stranger to these roads, said,
“What bridge?”

They looked at him.

“You never saw the bridge?”
asked Ian. “You’ve got a bloody angel sitting on your shoulder.”

“I never saw anything,” the man
said.

“You need to thank your God,”
said Berndt, pouring him a Scotch.

The man downed it, his hands shaking.
“I have children,” he said, “six of them.”

Alice felt death’s cold breath on the
back of her neck. She thought of that rushing water, a man passing over a one lane
bridge through a gift of pure grace. He had a small mustache on a large, florid face.
His eyes kept saying, Why me, why was I allowed to live?

“You never know how you’ll
die,” said Berndt, “or when. I read once that more people are kicked to
death by mules …”

“Our friend here is thinking of his
children,” Ian interrupted.

There was an awkward silence.
“It’s all right,” said the man. “I didn’t die.”

“Thank God,” said Alice.

“You live a charmed life,” said
Ian, standing. “Good luck to you. And to your family.” He shook the
man’s hand. “I think we’ll be heading off to bed. First-rate dinner.
Our compliments to Boom Boom and her staff.”

They refused Berndt’s offer of an
umbrella—it would only have shredded in the wind. Holding hands in the darkness, they
tottered forward while the rain poured down their necks and streamed off their feet. Ian
caught her as she fell over the stone threshold in front of the door. She opened it and
pushed it shut behind them, and they grabbed for each other.

“I’ll light the lamp,” he
whispered.

“No.” Her body shook. She tugged
at his trousers and pulled his wet shirt off, her teeth chattering. He wrapped her in a
blanket, but it wasn’t cold she was feeling. She felt the mane of his hair, wet
around her face as he leaned over her on the bed, the smell of him, earth.

Was the world still here? Dark penetrated
every corner of the room. She stroked his hair and ran her finger over the outside of
his ear. His hand anchored her, held squarely in the center of her back.

“You’re amazingly lovely,”
he said.

“You can’t see me.”

“I can feel you.”

She burrowed her head lower until it lay
against his chest. The sheets held the smell of them, and under that, the remnants of
sun when they’d hung on the line to dry.

“I wonder what that poor bastard is
thinking right now.”

“That more people die from being
kicked by mules …”

He laughed. “It almost makes me
believe in some madman up there pulling the strings.”

She stroked his shoulder. “Did you
ever believe in a madman in the sky?”

“I had a devout period early on. But
then I broke our neighbor’s parlor window by mistake. My dad gave me a thrashing,
and I understood there was no God. The smashed window was an accident, and I thought God
should have known that and made my father forgive me.”

Smiling into his chest, she said,
“Maybe you were being tested.”

“I failed the test.” He got up
and lit the kerosene lamp. It sputtered and flickered and threw crazy shadows around the
room as the rain slashed at the window.

“You know the odd thing?” he
asked.

“What?”

“I believe in the gods who
aren’t my own more than I ever believed in the God I was supposed to believe
in.” He stroked her hair the way you’d stroke a cat. “Did you ever see
The Seventh Seal
?”

She nodded.

“That guy blowing in tonight reminded
me of the scene—remember? That little family of actors fleeing in the covered wagon
through the forest in the storm, death at their heels?”

“I remember.”

“I saw that film at least five times.
You remember the knight?”

“Yes.”

“
My life has been a futile
pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning.
And then he says
he’ll use his temporary reprieve from Death for one meaningful deed.”

“What would you do for a
reprieve?”

“I don’t believe in good deeds.
As soon as you call them good, they stop being good. I’d do what I’m doing
now. My whole life is a temporary reprieve, running out every day.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m not young.”

“Well, you can’t leave before I
do.”

“There’s an excellent chance I
will.”

“If you keep having showdowns with
ranchers, yes. Promise me you’ll stop.”

“I’ll think about stopping when
I’ve done one more section of the Kuke fence.”

“Please.”

“This matters to me,” he
said.

“I know. Those animals matter to me
too. But you matter more.”

They were quiet together a moment before he
said, “I’ve never before felt the way I feel about you. Not when I was with
Gwyneth, not with anyone ever before.”

She kissed him. “Do you still talk to
her?”

“To Gwyneth?” His eyes shifted
away from hers, and he sat up in bed. “Actually, I happened to run into her a few
weeks ago. She was up in Francistown on business. It wasn’t planned. It was the
day you left.” He hesitated. “I won’t lie to you, Alice. We spent the
night together.”

She felt hard slapped. “That very
night?”

“She was in bad shape.”

“So you thought you’d cheer her
up.”

“Alice.”

“You said it was over.”

“It
is
over.”

“How could you say what you just said
to me after spending the night with her?”

“What I said to you is true, true as
anything I’ve ever spoken.”

“I won’t be ‘the other
woman’ around the edges of your marriage.”

“Alice, please, you’re not
listening.”

“That very night you put me on the
train?”

“Darling, you’re being
foolish.”

“I’m not foolish.” She
crawled out of bed, threw on a shirt and a pair of shorts and headed into the rain.
She’d forgotten her shoes, and she wasn’t going back for them. The path was
a stream, and she was crying hard now. The lights of the main house were still on, and
she made her way toward them, over rough stones, and then beyond them, into her truck.
She sat behind the steering wheel and thought of driving home, but she wouldn’t
make it in this weather, and she’d left her purse and keys behind. Her body was
still warm from his, and then it wasn’t warm anymore. The water on her body and
clothes evaporated, and she began to shiver.

She thought of Ian sitting on the bed alone
in that little
rondavel
, and her heart went halfway out to him. After she and
Lawrence had split, hadn’t she told Muriel that the final straw wasn’t
Erika, but his dishonesty? Was that a crock, or had she meant it? Ian told her the
truth. So he lost his head one night. Was that a crime?

But the very night he’d put her on the
train? It felt as though their time on the pan had meant nothing to him. But that
wasn’t true, and she knew it.

He was sitting on the floor when she came
in, his back against the bed, his feet stretched straight out in front of him, his hair
every which way.

“Darling, you’re soaked,”
he said. He tried to wrap her in a blanket, but she shrugged him off, still crying, and
sat on the bed against the headboard. He sat back down on the floor. “Look, at
least let me tell
you. Gwyneth and I haven’t lived together for
four years. She’s with another bloke. But she’s been depressed. She needed
to talk. Yes, I was trying to cheer her up, and one thing led to another. It was a
one-for-old-time’s-sake kind of thing. It just happened.”

She looked at him. “It didn’t
just happen. You weren’t exactly a bystander.”

“I know that.”

“And how come you’re not
divorced if you haven’t been together in four years?”

“We haven’t gotten around to
it.”

“How could you not get around to
it?”

“It hasn’t been a priority. The
marriage is over. There were no worldly goods to divide, no children. I don’t need
a magistrate or a piece of paper to tell me it’s finished.”

“Are you planning to keep on fucking
each other?”

Angry now, he said, “I’m fond of
her, she’s fond of me. But it was a mistake … Maybe somewhere in me, I
knew how serious it was with you. Maybe I was a bit scared.”

“Do you want to be free? Because if
you do, you are.”

“Look, I’m sorry, my love. What
more can I say?” His tone softened. “I’ve gone raving bonkers over
you. If that’s not enough, then I’ll be off.”

She regarded him coolly. “It feels
sloppy to still be married. Sloppier still to spend the night with her.”

“I’m sloppy.”

There was an edge in his voice, something
she hadn’t heard before. Impatience, a touch of
if this isn’t good
enough for you, well, then fuck it.