White Dog Fell From the Sky (32 page)

“That way,
mma
.”

She thanked him and turned left at the tree
he’d indicated, but almost immediately, there was a choice of paths, one leading
beside a house made from a car chassis, the other to the right. She stopped and turned
around and stopped again. Her head hurt. Something dark pulled at her. Not fear,
something worse.

“Hello, madam,” a soft voice
said behind her.

She turned and found a young boy. “How
are you?” He laughed, hearing himself speak English.

“I’m fine,” she said,
smiling. “How are you?”

He laughed again, his eyes snapping bright.
“I am fine. How are you?”

“Fine,” she said again. She put
out her hand in greeting, and he took it, his hand smooth in hers. “Do you
understand English?” she asked.

His eyes clouded. “
Ga ke itse,
mma.
”

She loved that she was not strange to this
boy. As she walked along the path, he danced backward, facing her. He accompanied her
like this a few steps, then turned and charged away, jet-propelled.

She was lost in a maze of paths. The shimmer
of sun cast a strange glow over the landscape. A little girl in a red dress walked away
from her, down a path. The mother carried a white parasol. Two older girls came in her
direction, hand in hand, the taller one wearing a short blue dress faded on the
shoulders and sleeves, still bright under her arms where the sun hadn’t touched
it. “Where are you from, madam?” the tall one asked in school-stiff
English.

“From America.”

“New York?” asked the younger
girl.

Alice laughed. “No.”

“Empire State Building?” said
the taller one.

She pictured herself in the fist of King
Kong. “No,” she laughed again. “From Cincinnati.”

“Cin-cin-naa-ti!
Cin-cin-naa-ti!”

“Where are you going,
madam?”

“I want to find the house where the
shooting happened.”

The girls looked puzzled. Alice mimed
holding a gun, and they understood. The taller one took Alice by the hand and pulled her
down the path, turned right, left, and left again, skirted a shebeen, walked a little
farther, and pointed to a house. The girls disappeared, and she walked toward it. The
sun was low in the sky, shining on a naked tree; a woman at a distance scrubbed a
cooking pot with sand.

The house felt wounded, contaminated. She
peeked in the door and saw a room stripped nearly bare except for a whitewashed wall
splotched with something dark. A few pages from a glossy magazine were stuck to the wall
with nails. Her eyes returned to the spray of darkness on the wall. She stepped inside,
searching for something to identify its inhabitants. As she crossed the room, she
tripped over a loose chunk of concrete on the floor, which skittered away from her. The
second room contained a mattress and a battered cooking pot. The mattress was spattered
with the same darkness as the walls in the
first room. She’d
expected the house would tell her something, but it gave up nothing but its wounds. She
covered her mouth with her hand and stumbled out.

In her head, a phrase played behind her
eyes.
Blank and pitiless as the sun
. Yeats, that ferocious old man, lover of
women, singer of woes.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer …
Was there a
place in the world, had there ever been a place on Earth, where the strong didn’t
victimize the weak? Outside were Caterpillar tracks that stopped just short of the side
wall, as though someone had intended to bulldoze the house and then backed away.
Perspiration trickled between her breasts. She followed the retreating tracks, thinking
they’d lead her back to the main road. Under her sandals, she felt the undulations
of earth churned up by the teeth of the bulldozer.

In the distance, she heard an odd
plink,
plinking.
She walked toward it, not sure what it was. As she came closer, she
heard music, and then saw him. The old man’s face was deeply gouged and furrowed,
his eyes tight shut, his forehead pressed into ridges of concentration, his mouth open,
singing. His hair was a dusty gray; the stubble on his cheeks and chin and upper lip
also gray. His hands were huge, like those of a man seated with an anvil rather than a
one-stringed guitar. A single wire stretched from one end of a long, flat fingerboard to
the other. The lower end of the fingerboard was positioned between his knees. The other
end rested on his shoulder, topped off with a crumpled five-gallon drum, which added a
twangy resonance. With his left hand, he created the pitch on the string; with a curved
stick held in his right hand, he stroked the wire. As Alice stood and listened, it
seemed in those small strummings lay the hope of a small universe, a universe with no
place for a white woman, but still, hope is hope. It was only when he stopped playing
and opened his eyes that she saw he was blind.

Lying in bed that night, she thought again
of Isaac. She didn’t believe the South Africans would have set him free when he
crossed the border. She knew what they did to people in those prisons. Tortured, thrown
from high windows. Suicide they called it. He was bright
enough and
educated enough that a couple of ruffians would be only too happy to humiliate him, beat
him down, punish him to the very limits of what one man can do to another. She got out
of bed and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.

Standing by the sink, she recalled a place
she and her mother had once been in Hawaii, the only long trip the two of them had ever
taken together. They’d been told about the ruins of a temple, located near the
birthplace of King Kamehameha. The road there was heavily gullied and impassable, and
they set out on foot as the wind roared down a twenty-five-mile-wide corridor between
Maui and the Big Island. They had no idea what they were looking for, and then they saw
it, Pu’ukoholā Heiau, on a bare hillside. A wild desolation. You could feel
the power of the place even from a distance, fierce and implacable as a god.

They climbed the hill and entered a rock
enclosure. Inside was a great stone, cupped to hold a human body, a channel cut at heart
level for the letting of blood. Above, the sky was blue, without end.

She stood next to her mother, seeing the
high priests waiting with their knives, a young man or woman being led there, bound at
the wrists. Was it her imagination, or was the brutality of the world deepening, growing
more rapacious, the means of torture more elaborate than those ancient times when
they’d killed one man to save many? Isaac’s death, if they killed him, would
go unnoticed and save no one.

Near the Kuke veterinary fence on the
boundary of Ngamiland and the Ghanzi District, an old woman from the /Xai/Xai community
was out alone digging
hu’uru
tubers from the ground. It was early
morning, just after sunrise. Over her shoulder was slung a rough bag, made from the hide
of a duiker. The bag held two small tubers and a hollow shell of an ostrich egg. In her
left hand was a digging stick. Her feet were bare, her belly wrinkled with age. As she
dug, her small breasts swung in rhythm with her stick. Her skin was deep bronze, her
hair a rusty black, shot through with gray. If she’d been with her family at night
sitting around a fire, she would have smiled easily. Now, her face was without
expression except for a taut intensity around the mouth.

It was February, and no rain had fallen.
Perhaps there would be none this year. Food would soon become scarce, and water more
hidden. Next to a shrub she began to dig with her stick until she was crouched next to a
hole as deep as the length of her arm. At the end of a reed, she wrapped grass and
placed it upright in the hole. She pushed the sand back into the hole and pressed it
down around the edges of the standing reed. She sat patiently. When she sucked the reed,
a vacuum was created, and the water was forced up into her mouth. She swallowed a small
amount and dribbled the rest into the ostrich egg shell. When there was no more water
coming up the reed, she plugged the hole of the ostrich egg with grass and placed it
back in her traveling sack. The wind was coming up. She moved to another shrub and
repeated the process, although this time she took no water for herself.

Nearby, but out of sight and earshot, Ian
worked. The day had not yet heated up. Wisps of mist rose from the earth. A dove called
from a tree with its mournful, repetitive song. He’d walked about half a kilometer
from his vehicle and was making his way back, cutting cable as he went. It went faster
than it had at the beginning, but he was also seeing fewer live animals. As he wielded
the huge wire cutter in the heat, he thought that rarely in his life had he been able to
answer what exactly he was doing or why. In spite of what Alice had said, it often felt
to him that his life’s purpose was unsteady. You could easily spend your whole
life scattering your energies across the landscape. “Keep your eye on the
ball,” his father used to say, not meaning cricket or rugby. But which ball was
the question.

Snap
, went another cable.

The rock paintings waited. He was aware of
falling into what one of his anthropology professors warned against—mistaking social
action for research. Still, unless you had a heart of gunmetal, how could you come to
know a people without also coming to know their needs and desperations? A small group of
buffalo rummaged in the brush behind him. One rubbed on an anthill, trying to rid itself
of parasites. An oxpecker bird sat on its back. There were no young ones among them.

He moved along the fence meditatively,
snapping wire as he went. He thought of Alice, her anger, her body, her blue gray eyes
like the sea on an overcast day. Was it so terrible to spend one night with a former
wife? Well, technically still a wife. She was right—he was sloppy, untidy. He
couldn’t really blame her for flipping out. But if she’d known his heart,
she would have seen Morning Star and Lynx clear enough.

He snapped another cable, which twisted back
and nearly struck him in the face.

He hadn’t told Alice the whole story
of their night in Francistown. Gwyneth had said she still loved him, that her life would
never be right again. He’d replied that she’d forgotten all their troubles.
She’d sat in bed, not speaking, shaking her head, her short hair sticking up in
spikes. She looked like a patient in Bedlam. He hadn’t meant to say it: “You
chopped off all your beautiful hair.”

“I was done with it,” she said.
Once upon a time she’d said the same about him. He wished he’d never met
her, that he’d had the sense to run. But she’d intrigued him with her wintry
aspect, her dark hair falling over her white face like a shelf. She frightened him too,
and in that fright lay some dark, sexual energy that he couldn’t put his arms
around. He knew now what a sitting duck he’d been. He knew nothing about
depression, had never felt that hopeless, subbasement mildew of spirit. She reminded him
of a child whose knees are drawn up to her chin, who thinks there will be no end to it.
How do you walk away from that kind of despair without feeling like a complete
bastard?

Snap
, went another cable, and
another.

In the rhythm of destruction, he felt a
confirmation of purpose. But thirst was catching up with him. He had only a small amount
of water left in his plastic bottle, and he was a long way from his vehicle.

Xixae dug again for water and placed her
reed upright. This time, only a few drops came to her lips.

Long ago, when she was a young woman, she
had taken her eyes off her young daughter and walked behind her shelter to talk with a
friend. Her little girl had taken a burning stick from the fire and thrown it onto the
dry bedding grass. There had been no rain. The shelter exploded in flames. By the time
they were able to get to her, her skin was flayed, her hair smelled like a veldt fire. A
powerful healer had done his best, but after two days, the ancestors came for her.

Her small band of people buried her daughter
near the campsite and moved to another site. Xixae thought that she too would die. But
they didn’t want her yet in the realm of Kauha. Her womb went as dry as the earth
around her. Her husband would no longer lie with her. He told her that she had become an
old woman overnight. Time passed. She could laugh again now, but the laughter was
wrapped around tears.

A puff of dust spread out over the dry
savannah and then a distant rumble, softer and longer lived than thunder, floated into
the air. Ian thought little of it, until he saw them at a distance, running, closing the
distance between him and them.

The buffalo he’d seen rummaging behind
him were the advance guard of a large herd. Had they felt in some part of their beast
brains the uncoiling of the wire? They were coming this way in a fast-kindled, heedless
frenzy. Closer now, he made out their small, cranky eyes, low ears, and shelf of horn
laid flat across their foreheads, parted down the middle, and swept up like a handlebar
mustache.

The front beasts were close now. Impossible
to outrun them along the fence. The herd stretched too wide. The big ones, he knew,
weighed close to a ton. He had no gun with him. Nothing to scare them but his wildly
waving arms and puny man voice.

Dumb as hell, they seemed to be following a
large male that ran in zigzag fashion, as though dodging bullets.
FUCK OFF!
he
heard his tiny voice yell.
BUGGER OFF!
And then he knew he’d die.
He’d watched buffalo charge lions, elephants even. They’d run him over
without even seeing him. The dust was in his nostrils now. All thought ceased. He was
aware of the sky, the socks riding down his ankles into his shoes, the heavy tool in his
hand. Fifteen meters from him, the wrinkled forehead of the lead buffalo bulged. It was
coming straight for him. At the last moment, Ian lunged sideways as the brute swerved in
the other direction. It rammed his left side with its shoulder, not intent on injuring
him, just oblivious to everything but its own urgency. Ian was thrown backward toward
the fence. He scrambled from the ground toward a fence post, and hung on.