White Dog Fell From the Sky (36 page)

She heard something behind her, turned, and
saw White Dog sitting at the base of the rock. And when Alice got up to return to the
house, she trailed her, taking up her position outside the door.

That night, a letter addressed to Isaac sat
in one of three bulging canvas mail bags in the Mafeking train station. The bags were
slumped, secured with heavy metal buckles at the top, each with a hole for a tag,
sitting beneath a painted tin sign:

VIR GEBRUIK DEUR
BLANKES
FOR USE BY WHITE
PERSONS
THESE PUBLIC PREMISES AND THE
AMENITIES
THEREOF HAVE BEEN RESERVED FOR
THE
EXCLUSIVE USE OF WHITE PERSONS
.
By Order
Provincial Secretary

Inside the bags, letters from white and
nonwhite persons were jumbled together, pressed against each other. Words from courts of
law, lovers, mothers, car dealers, ministers, swindlers. Outside on the train platform,
three lightbulbs shone at a distance from one another. The air was moist, the lights
ringed with fog.

Nowhere can he find the man he once knew
inside him. He’s nothing now, less than a bug. His lips are cracked, they’ve
broken his thumbs. When he eats the food they slop into a bowl, he must hold his spoon
between two fingers. Often it is too dark to see. He thinks, there is nothing that a man
will not do to another man. Every moment, he is afraid. It is what they’ve wanted
all along.

Fear is the mystery. If he can conquer that,
he is no longer theirs. But
he is unable to make his mind bend away
from the place where a small animal inside him is cornered and terrified.

Sometimes he remembers his brothers and
sisters. He remembers caring for them when his mother was taken away for the passbook
violations, how he looked for food day and night, until he had turned into a sniffing
dog-boy, food-hunting machine.

He has nearly forgotten the letter he wrote
to his mother and her employers before he was deported, saying that he would care for
his sister and two brothers. Those he loves have all but disappeared, squashed thin and
hard and cold as glass in the small place he has managed to keep alive inside. It will
not be possible much longer. Soon the hyena men will have all of him.

Something in his head hums ceaselessly, low
in pitch. He feels the terror like a pit inside him. He forces his mind to crawl out of
it.

He turns the pages of his medical textbook
over in his mind, reviewing the bones of the hand. The wrist: scaphoid, lunate,
triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate, arrayed in two rows of
four, nestled in a bowl created by the hollow between the ulna and the radius. The five
metacarpals of the palm. The fourteen digital bones, or phalanges, three on each finger
(digitus secundus manus, digitus tertius, digitus annularis, digitus minimus manus), two
on each thumb.

A small shaft of light comes in through the
slit in the door. He looks at his right hand in the dimness. His thumb is swollen and
blue. His other fingers also are swollen. He looks away.

Then the intrinsic muscle groups: the
hypothenar and thenar muscles, the interossei muscles, and the lumbricals. The abductor
pollicis brevis, opponens pollicis, flexor pollicis brevis, adductor pollicis brevis and
opponens digiti minimi brevis, flexor digiti minimi brevis, abductor digiti
minimi …

He hears footsteps, a metallic click.
“Get up,” a voice says. “They want you.”

To the north, apartheid sympathizers had
poisoned five hundred Umkhonto we Sizwe trainees at the Novo Catengue camp in Angola.
Amen, who’d escaped the bombing in Gaborone, had been away at a meeting the night
the tainted beans and porridge were served. He couldn’t help notice that it was a
pattern for harm to pass him by while it struck those he loved.

Tonight, he sat alone on a hill overlooking
the camp. Below him, figures straggled in and out of tents. The camp looked like a
wounded organism. Many of his friends were in the hospital. Without thinking, the palm
of his right hand stroked the dusty ground beside him, as it once stroked the shoulder
of his wife. For the first time since he’d undertaken this work, he doubted his
strength to continue. His joy, his life, were gone. There was no way to find Ontibile
without risking arrest.

He had heard no news of Isaac and assumed
that he too was dead. It was one more regret, piled on a sea of regrets. He should have
been there, as he should have been beside his sister in Soweto when they opened
fire.

That night, Alice slept fitfully.

She was crawling over a trestle bridge made
of sticks, north of Mahalapye. She felt a train approaching through the vibrations in
her feet. She climbed to one side of the trestle and pushed her body over the edge. A
river was rushing below. She counted to herself as she hung on: seven, eight, nine. A
light rain began to fall. She watched as it settled on the backs of her hands, the fine
hairs glistening with drops of water.

She woke into a land of grief, a ship adrift.
Ian’s death had opened channels into decades of remembered and forgotten sorrows.
The sky lightened along the horizon. She sat up in bed and then lay back down.

Wildly, she thought perhaps Roger had been
lying. For reasons of his own, he’d stolen Ian’s wallet. Ian was poking
among the rocks in the Tsodilo Hills, just setting out this morning with the dew still
held in the shadows of the hills. This was the weekend they would meet in Mahalapye.
They’d worked it out the night before they’d parted last time. She’d
drive up on Friday, leave work a little early, probably get there before him. She could
feel the gladness of his hands on her back, pulling her close.

But how had Roger gotten his Land Rover?

If she could reverse time, she’d go
back to the day they’d set out for Moremi, just the two of them. She remembered
that predawn light, their stealth. She’d offered him a cup of coffee. He’d
asked how her marriage had come apart. She’d told him that Lawrence was a decent
man but she’d felt dead around him.

I understand that kind of dead,
he’d said.
It’s better to be all the way dead
.

From the moment his eyes rested on those
thirsty animals and he’d said,
Poor bastards,
he was doomed. A lesser
man—no, a different man—would have said there was nothing that could be done. He
wasn’t that sort of person. He never could have been. It’s one of the things
she loved in him, and it’s what killed him. Not the stampede, but his desire to do
what was right, not in the eyes of the law but in the eyes of something bigger than
himself.

An arrow dropped to Earth, stuck fast. Its
shaft quivered.

She imagined what he might have done had he
lived. On their way back to Francistown when she was still feverish, he’d spoken
to her about his wish to find something in those hills that was big enough to wake the
world up to the significance of the San people. He believed there were caves in the
Tsodilo Hills where one could find evidence of the world’s first religion. She
imagined he’d been right about what was there, but it would be too late by the
time someone stumbled upon it.

What she and her boss were doing was puny in
the face of the forces
arrayed against the San: cattle, drought,
poachers, the encroachment of farmers and western culture, the disillusionment of San
teenagers, tuberculosis, the loss of language, tourism, the list went on.

White Dog buried her snout in Alice’s
bent elbow and urged her up and out of bed.

Itumeleng was in the kitchen already,
scrubbing a pot with salt. She’d burned beans in it a couple of days before. Magoo
was waiting for breakfast.

Today she would call Muriel. And her mother.
Tell them. The words came to her.
It’s a fearful thing to love what death can
touch.
Her mother would understand with her whole being. Muriel would
understand less.

Her mother’s voice came to her
distantly, as though an ocean current were flowing through the phone line. Only a couple
of weeks before, Alice had written her mother that she’d fallen in love with
someone she felt she could love forever. Today, she told her that Ian was dead. Across
oceans, she cried. Her mother offered to get on the next plane, and Alice told her
no.

“I’ll quit my job, take a leave
of absence.”

“No, Mom.”

They went back and forth. She heard her
mother’s stifled crying. “You’re so far away.”

“I’ll find my feet
again.”

“Come home.”

“I can’t, Mom. Not now, not
yet.”

The connection went dead. She tried calling
back but couldn’t get through. She didn’t want to return to Cincinnati. Out
the window she saw White Dog sitting by the driveway. She thought of Checkers, the black
and white dog of her childhood who used to sit beside her bed all night.

Her bedroom had been on the second floor of
an old house. A huge silver maple grew in her neighbor’s yard, its limbs stretched
toward her window. When the night was still, the leaves whispered, and when the wind was
shrill, the branches tossed and banged against the house, like a raging old man.
Let
me in, let me in!
A squirrel built a nest she could see from her window, lined
with shredded bark and grass. Baby squirrels were born hairless, their eyes closed.
Their parents rushed around
all day and brought them sumac fuzz to
eat. The nest turned fuzzy pink. The babies grew and ran about on the limbs. New people
bought the house next door, and they had the tree cut down. The great limbs lay on the
ground like fallen elephants. By the end of the week, only sawdust and a stump
remained.

That kind of sorrow was what waited for her
in Cincinnati. What would they do all day? Cry? Every morning she’d wake up to the
memory of a loss. One loss would give way to another, the way a fire travels underground
after lightning strikes a tree, the roots of one tree igniting the next.

She tried calling her mother again without
success. There was something she needed to say.

She remembered as a teenager thinking,
It’s easy enough to love a dead man
. They require no understanding.
They aren’t unreasonable or moody or demanding. They want nothing but loyalty.
Well, your daughter’s alive. She’s living under your nose. Try loving her,
why don’t you?

She’d been unfair back then. Her
mother had loved her and still loved her. What more could she ask for? She’d like
to tell her that she’d been as good a mother as she knew how to be. But she still
didn’t want to be in Cincinnati.

Her mother called back the following day and
asked her once again to come home.

“I can’t leave right now, Mom. I
need to ride this out here.”

“Because he’s buried
there?”

“That’s part of it.”

“I understand.”

“You’re the best mother anyone
could have. I just need to be here. And I want you to be living your life
there.”

“I’ll worry about you every
moment.”

“Mom, I’ve got to get to work.
Please don’t worry. I’m going to be all right. I have friends here who care.
Will and Greta. Muriel. My neighbor, Lillian.”

“I miss you, darling. You’re too
far away.”

“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. I love
you.”

They said good-bye, and Alice sat for a
moment by the phone. One
of her earliest memories was sitting in a
kitchen sink, her mother holding a bar of Sweetheart soap and running her hands over the
bones of her shoulders. Never again would the love between them be that
uncomplicated.

A letter arrived that day, addressed to
Isaac, postmarked Pretoria. She hesitated to open it but then did. It was written in
Afrikaans.
Hoe gaan dit met jou?
How are you? Beyond that, she had no idea what
it said. There were numbers in the text, which was all she could decipher. It was signed
Hendrik Pretorius. She walked back to her truck, trying to think of someone who knew
Afrikaans.

Lillian had a friend. She’d been over
for dinner on a night Lawrence and Alice had been there. She tried to recall the name.
Like a mosquito repellent. Petronella, that was it. Pet for short. Pet Steyn. She
couldn’t remember Pet’s husband’s name, but he treated her as though
she didn’t have a brain in her head. Maybe she didn’t, but she could
probably translate the letter. On the other hand, what if it contained information that
shouldn’t be shared? But no one with any sense would send incendiary information
across the South African border. Pet lived off the Outer Ring Road, and Alice drove
straight there. She didn’t want a “no” over the phone.

Pet answered her knock wearing a lime green
leisure suit. She was thin, nearly anorexic, the top of her arms corded. Her face was
heavily made up, giving her fine features a certain coarseness.

Alice explained about Isaac’s
disappearance.

“So you want this
translated.”

Alice nodded. Pet went into the kitchen and
brought back a tray with two glasses of iced tea and set it down on a low table in the
living room. “I’m not very literary,” she said, sipping from her
glass.

“It doesn’t matter, don’t
worry.” The house was cool, still, empty. Alice couldn’t imagine what Pet
did all day while her husband was at work. A blank, clean, crushing life. She took a
gulp of tea. “Don’t worry,” said Alice again.

Pet put on her reading glasses, looked over
the first page, and began. “The items you requested will be on the northbound
passenger train,
arriving 9:02
A.M.
, May 26 in Mafeking
station. Gaborone, at 3:42
P.M.
The items are unaccompanied. For obvious
reasons, it is important that you meet this train.”

“What items are those?” asked
Pet, laying the letter down in her lap.

“I don’t know,” said
Alice.