White Dog Fell From the Sky (35 page)

She stared at him.

“I’m so sorry.” He gave
her Ian’s wallet. She opened it and saw his picture.

He told her as much as he knew. And he told
her the name of the baby that had been born.

Her eyes slipped from his face, and tears
ran down her cheeks. She pounded her fist against the cinder-block wall, over and over.
She made no sound except that rhythmic beating. She climbed into the knee hole under her
desk and curled up, knees to forehead. He stood at a distance and waited. He went away
and came back with a cup of milk tea. “Drink this,” he said, setting it near
her foot. Her hand swept it to one side.

He sat on the floor near the door, and still
she didn’t move. When it grew dark, he lay down on his side and put his head on
his arm. His eyes were open. He pictured the road he’d traveled in the dark last
night, the strangeness of the light falling from the moon, the 430 kilometers south, the
endless dust. He felt her love for Ian like something alive. She cried fitfully, was
quiet a while and then he heard her again. Finally he slept.

He woke in the dark to the sound of her
shuffling free of the desk. She brushed past him into the hall. When she returned from
the bathroom, he said, “I’m here. Don’t be frightened.” She sat
on the floor, knees drawn up, her arms hugging them. Her hair had fallen partway over
her face. The night was very hot. He saw from her face that she knew the truth of what
he’d told her, all the way down to the bottom of it. He could just see one eye,
like the glow of an animal crossing a road. “I’m sorry,” he said
again.

She cried softly, the sound muffled by her
knees. “Do you know where they buried him?” she asked.

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t
know.”

At dawn, he left her sleeping. He laid the
keys of Ian’s Land Rover on her desk with the license plate number and a note
saying it was hers now, that he’d parked it at the side of the ministry building.
He walked
to the train station, drank a whiskey, bought breakfast, and
waited for the next train to Francistown.

She woke with a start out of a dream and
found herself on the concrete floor of her office. Her limbs felt numb, dead. She
pictured Ian as she’d seen him that last night in Mahalapye. He’d drunk too
much. He couldn’t stop talking. He talked about strangeness, about how
“civilized” people had the appetite for it educated out of them. He’d
thrown his arm around her waist, bearlike. She’d been irritated without knowing
exactly why.

She got up off the floor, disembodied. The
San people had buried him. She’d never know where. It could be anywhere in that
endless sand.

Her mind raced. That night, they
hadn’t made love. He’d talked about how he’d slipped between two
worlds. He’d seen his grandfather coming toward him, walking down a column of
light.

That last morning, he was sleeping on his
back, his hair thrown around the pillow. His left hand was fisted near his face, his
right hand open at his groin. She’d decided not to wake him. She looked at him,
whispered for him to be safe before she rolled from the bed. Later, he would have woken
alone, wondered for a moment where she was, and then remembered she was gone.

Loss swallowed her. She heard people moving
around out in the corridor, arriving for work. At some point Thabo would be bringing the
tea cart around.

She called her boss, but he didn’t
answer his phone. She called again and again. She held the telephone away from her ear
and let it keep ringing. She pushed her hair away from her eyes with the palm of her
hand while she waited for a voice to answer and was struck by the ordinariness of the
gesture. People lived ordinary lives.

“Hello?” she heard on the other
end of the phone.

Her words would not come.

“Hello?” he said once more.

“Is that you, C.T.?”

“Alice?”

“Ian died.” To say it was to
believe it.

“Where are you?”

“My office.” She set the phone
down in its cradle.

Her boss found her there, standing with the
tips of her fingers on the phone as though it connected her to something.

“When did it happen?” he
asked.

She shook her head. She saw the pity in his
eyes and how he paused before he came and put an awkward arm around her.

“I left Mahalapye without saying a
proper good-bye. They say he was in a buffalo stampede. The San buried him. His friend
left this.” She picked up the wallet to show him, she held the keys to his Land
Rover in her hand. She thought, some of his molecules have passed from his wallet to my
hand.

“Have you been here all
night?”

“Yes.”

“Can I take you home?”

“I was going. I wanted to tell
you.”

“I think I’d better drive
you.”

She heard the sound of the tea cart rattling
down the hall toward her office. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

“Yes, I understand.” He stepped
out into the hall and the tea cart rattled past the door.

“Let me take you.”

“What will I do?”

“Alice. Let me drive you.”

“What will I do?”

“Want me to call someone for
you?”

“I don’t know. You better take
me home.”

They drove down the road in C.T.’s
car. She was aware of his discomfort. He was a shy man. She was sorry to put him in this
position.

White Dog was there at the entrance to the
driveway, waiting, her paws crossed over each other. “I’m okay now,”
she said to C.T. Before he could wonder what to do, she got out of the car. “Thank
you so much,” she said. “I’ll try to come to work tomorrow if I
can.”

He got out of the car and came around to her
side. “You take
whatever time you need.” He put his arms
around her. She didn’t want to sob into his shirt, but she couldn’t help
herself. Finally she pulled away and told him she was all right, that he should go back
to work. He got into his car and started to back out, then stopped and leaned out the
passenger side window. “I could stay a while. Make you a cup of tea.”

“Thank you, C.T. Itumeleng will be
here. Thank you.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said,
sliding back toward the driver’s seat. She watched him back out and disappear down
the road. She sat down in the dirt next to White Dog and put her head on her fur. She
heard White Dog’s breath going in and out next to her ear. In her mind’s eye
she saw the sand swept by wind across the floor of the desert where he lay, grains
lifting and falling. She saw Ian’s shaggy head, his large warm hand, the rain
pounding outside, felt the pulse of his love inside her. She saw the three hills where
they’d never go now: the male, female and child, the dent in the rock where the
first soul had knelt.

The broad back of Ian receding, his head set
at an expectant angle, the creak of oars, the boat crossing the river and coming back
empty. The key to his Land Rover in her hand. Don’t go, my darling. Where are you
now? Where in all the vast places have you gone?

Itumeleng had already finished for the day,
and Alice called no one. She’d spoken the words once to C.T., and she
couldn’t speak them again. When she fell into bed that night, White Dog followed
and sat in the doorway of a house she’d never before entered. At some point, Alice
woke in the dark to find a moist snout on her arm. And then a fist to the throat when
she remembered. She turned on a small lamp and made her way to the bathroom. The moon
shone through the windows, and she turned on no more lights. As she came into the
bathroom, she caught a glimpse of something in the mirror. Not herself. The afterimage
of something. She looked more closely, but the mirror was empty.

She walked back through the darkened living
room into the bedroom and lay down. White Dog, unsure of her welcome, climbed onto the
bed one foot at a time, slowly, keeping herself as flat as possible. “It’s
okay,” Alice said, smoothing her neck. Her voice was strange to her. Everything
was filled with strangeness, the air as though quivering, the stars as though singing
backward songs, their light flowing back into their own immensity.

In the morning, Itumeleng came into the
kitchen and Alice told her. She called Will and Greta after that, and had hardly put
down the phone when Greta was there beside her. “Oh, poppet.” She put her
arms around her. “I’m so very sorry. You’d found someone to love, to
love with everything in you, the rarest thing …”

“Please don’t,” she said.
“If I start crying, I’ll never stop.”

“Those beasts were desperate for
water, I suppose.”

“Ian was cutting the fence.”

“You knew this?”

She nodded. “He couldn’t bear
it … their thirst.”

“I only want to say one thing, which
may make you cry. Will and I were wrong about him.”

“I know.”

“What can I do?”

“I’m not sure. Take me to work
this morning when you get the kids off to school? I need to retrieve his Land Rover.
It’s at the ministry. His friend Roger brought it down.”

“Where’s your truck?”

“Also there. C.T. drove me home
yesterday.”

“Do you want me to bring your truck
home for you? I can leave ours for Will. I dropped him off this morning.”

“If you would.” She dug
Ian’s keys out of her purse. “I’m going to Maun.” She’d
only just realized it.

“When are you going?”

“Today.”

“You wouldn’t be better off
waiting?”

“I have to go.” She pictured Ian
buried somewhere in that vast land south of Maun, sand blowing sideways, covering up all
traces of where he lay. Her ears rang with a crazy urgency. She imagined her hands,
digging.

“Shall I come with you?”

“Thank you, no. I’ll take White
Dog to keep me company.”

“Shall I feed the cats for
you?”

“There’s only one cat now. Horse
went missing again. I’ll ask Itumeleng.”

There was no earthly point to it, she knew.
But she packed a bag for herself, dog food for White Dog, talked to Itumeleng, and left
from the ministry after Greta dropped her and White Dog off. The cars and trucks on the
north-south road pushed her to drive faster than she wanted to. A percussive rhythm
between the wheels and the road corrugations intensified, and the Land Rover slid
sideways as she fought
with the wheel and brought it back into line.
White Dog’s nose inched out the window as she grew more confident. A slow-moving
hornbill passed in front of the windshield.

Inside his Land Rover, Ian was everywhere.
The leather case for his sunglasses. A gauge for checking tire pressure. A can opener.
His long-sleeved bush shirt. A cap, darkened from sweat. On the floor, a rumpled copy of
Botswana Notes and Records
, a couple of water bottles, a discarded paper
bag. In the far back, a large container of water, canned goods, the two tents he’d
put up on the Ntwetwe Pan, a rock he’d picked up from there. His notebooks.

North of Mochudi, she got stuck behind a
bush drag. She saw it from a distance, like a beast on the horizon. Underneath that
crazy cathedral-high swirl of dust, there would be a lone man, with a kerchief over his
mouth and nose, bouncing along on a tractor that pulled a mountain of thorn bushes
weighted down with old tires. When Ian had taken her to the train in Francistown,
they’d gotten held up behind a similar bush drag. An old man was driving the
tractor. His hair was white, his back and shoulders lean. Ian had called him “a
one-man commotion.” He liked that word, commotion. He’d used it when
he’d told her about knocking down Mrs. Cratchley’s flower beds as a kid. Her
eyes filled to hear the sound of his words in her ear. She suddenly wished to die on
this road. The thought shocked her. She could feel the desire already risen inside her
like an exotic flower blooming in dust. She turned the wheel and pulled out into that
brown cloud to pass the bush drag, more than half expecting to meet someone head on.
Something like disappointment passed through her as she pulled back safely in front of
the tractor. And then anger at herself. Kill yourself, but don’t take other people
with you. Or an innocent dog either, for that matter.

White Dog sat straight up on the seat. For a
moment, Alice envied her ability to live in an eternal today. But no, that wasn’t
true. Why else would she have sat for weeks at the end of the driveway? She thought,
I’d sit at the end of the driveway too if it would bring him back. Her eyes swam
again, and the road disappeared. She pulled off onto a small track.
Where are
you?
she asked into the dusty air. Her belly hurt from
crying. White Dog thrust her nose under her elbow and pushed up, and she reached out
and patted the top of her head. It felt as though part of her had gone with him, some
chasm yawning between the here and the beyond. She looked out onto the landscape with
its parched grass and flat-topped acacias with their thirsty gray green leaves. A single
cloud floated in the sky. She thought of a Bushman story she’d once read about how
the wind takes away our footsteps when we die. And then she thought about what Ngwaga
had said about Ian. He could blow anywhere now. Maybe some part of him was still on
Earth. Maybe he’d gone elsewhere. Maybe he’d just returned to matter, spent,
nothing more than that.

But I’m alive, she thought.
You’ve left me here. Her mother had run after a dead man all those years, wearing
away a deep gully of grief under her feet. She shuddered. There was no point driving to
Maun. She sat a moment longer, turned the Land Rover around, and headed back the way
she’d come. She was clear-eyed now. Where there’d been tears was now
emptiness.

She pulled in the driveway and shut off the
engine. Itumeleng greeted her, brought her a cup of tea, and understood that she wanted
to be left alone. Alice went out into the garden and sat on the rock by the huge aloes,
where she’d seen Isaac sitting. It was quiet and wild and the aloes with their big
fleshy gray green spikes bulged with living moisture they’d gathered and stored to
carry them through the dry seasons. Out of their centers, crazy stalks of orange flowers
rose to a height of twelve or fifteen feet.