White Dog Fell From the Sky (42 page)

When she picked up Moses and Lulu after
school, she thought of telling them where she’d be going Tuesday, but she
couldn’t bear to disappoint them. She turned to look at them sitting side by side
on the seat of the truck. Lulu had ripped her uniform and scraped her knee. A white
gauze pad, already dusty, covered the scrape. Moses said in broken English that someone
had pushed her and he’d pushed that someone. Alice turned to Lulu.
“I’m sorry someone was mean to you.”

She smiled crookedly.
“
Mma?
” She didn’t understand.

Tuesday morning, Alice drove the children
to school and started south toward the Ramatlabama border gate. There was almost no
traffic, and no dust. Every rock on Kgale Hill stood out. She saw a boy out early with
two goats, and two schoolgirls with bows in their hair. Her hands on the wheel shook
with the deep corrugations in the road. By sunset, it would be all over, one way or the
other, when the border gate closed for the night.

She passed through Lobatse, and on toward
the border. From a distance, she could smell the Botswana Meat Commission’s
abattoir, stinking of blood and fire. Some of those poor beasts trekked hundreds of
kilometers to get here, with no idea where they were going.

She made her way south of Lobatse, and far
away, she saw the border. At the Botswana gate, she told the guard that she would not be
passing through to South Africa, that she was waiting for a South African who’d
been granted political asylum. She pulled the documents out of
the
envelope, together with a copy of a document from Quett Masire’s office. The guard
looked over the pages and passed them back to her. “
Go siame, mma.
”
Okay.

Driving toward the South African side, she
spotted two white guards standing sentinel in the shade of an ugly building, one just
inside, one outside. They wore khaki uniforms—shorts and kneesocks, crisp, short-sleeved
shirts. Both had guns in shoulder holsters. A third man, a black African, worked at a
distance from them, washing an official car with a rag and a bucket. He was in the open,
the sun so hot it was shouting now, moving his rag slowly over the bumper, and back
again, then over the curve of the fender.

Alice parked the truck and walked toward the
two guards. The one closest to her watched her, shifting uneasily. He reminded her of an
animal in the wild. Approach them in a truck, and they’re calm enough, but out of
your vehicle, you’re to be feared. She carried her purse over one shoulder, the
large envelope between her elbow and side. Instinctively, she put her palms out so
they’d see she was unarmed and harmless.

She greeted them in English. “Good
morning to you,” and got an unenthusiastic greeting back. “Do you know
English?” she asked. One nodded. “I won’t be crossing the border.
I’m waiting for someone who has received political asylum.” She gave them
Isaac’s name. “I have some documents.” She held out the envelope to
them. The tall guard looked at the contents briefly and asked, “When’s he
coming?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll have to wait over
there.” The tall man pointed to a patch of open ground near where the man was
washing the truck. Bastards. There was shade elsewhere but not a scrap of shade where
he’d indicated. A pickup traveling fast from the South African side approached the
gate. It stopped, and the shorter guard left the shade of the building to talk to the
driver. There was a brief conversation, and the gate lifted. Alice went to move her
truck, facing it toward the South African gate. It was too hot in the cab of the truck,
even with both doors open. She got out, and a tiny, almost imperceptible breeze stirred
her blue dress as she stood. A dove sat on the roof of the fortresslike building where
the
guards stood. Alice loved the song of nearly every bird in the
world, including the sarcastic go-away bird. But not this dove. From the moment
she’d first heard it, she’d found its call depressing and oddly
claustrophobic. Hearing it was like being on a long bus ride, sitting next to someone
who complained incessantly. She thought, I can ignore it, just pay no attention. But
before long, she wanted to hurl stones at it.
Shut up! Shut up!
It went on and
on.

She’d told Will and Greta where she
was going and asked if they’d pick up the children if she wasn’t back by
three. Will had offered to drive down with her, but she said she thought it best to go
on her own, there was no telling whether Isaac would even make it. Her stomach turned
over. She felt the evil smell from here, through those gates, felt it in the starched
complacence of the guard’s khaki uniforms, in the short-cropped hair, in the
pathetic eagerness of the black man washing the car in the sun. She took a swig of water
from a gallon jug she’d brought with her.

A large truck roared up to the gate from the
Botswana side, sounding like a bull in rut, something wrong with its gear-shifting
mechanism. She began to count vehicles. Four from the South African side. Seven from the
Botswana side, six more from South Africa, three more from Botswana.

Isaac heard the key in the metal door and
the creak of the hinge. Light poured in, and his hand went over his eyes. It was a
different guard. Never before had he seen this person. He had a neck as big as a
bull’s, bulging out of his collar.

“Get up,” the man said.

Isaac got slowly to his feet.

“
Fok, kaffir,
you
stink.”

He could no longer smell himself.

The guard attached shackles to his ankles.
As though he could run.

“Get going.”

He clambered to his feet and shuffled out
the door. He was too numb to feel the sun on his face. It was the first time he’d
been outdoors since they’d brought him in; he could now see that his cell was
part of a long tunnel of cells that stretched along a desolate scrape
of ground.

“Where am I going?”

In Afrikaans, “You’ll find out
soon enough.”

“Please tell me where you’re
taking me.”

“
Hou jou bek
.” Shut
your mouth.

He felt a stick prod him from behind. He
slowed his steps. He would, damn it all, die in dignity, not prodded like a fucking ox.
One of his knees no longer bent. He rounded the corner and limped along a path leading
to a road. A car waited there, its motor idling. He imagined they would take him to
police headquarters where they’d push him out a high window and call it suicide.
He thought of his mother. It grieved him terribly to think of her. He stumbled, felt the
stick in his back.

The bitter heart eats its owner, she’d
told him. To be bitter, he knew now, one must feel something personal in the hatred that
comes at you. He didn’t feel anything like that. The ugliness around him flailed
like a goat drowning in a flooded river. If a leg of that goat happened to strike you,
it has just struck, that’s all. The Earth had a habit of begetting monsters,
hatched from ignorance and greed. They had schooled him in hatred these months, and it
now lived in him, like a fact you can’t forget. Perhaps it was as well for him to
die. The world did not need more hate. He thought of Boitumelo—her beauty, her goodness,
her skin so perfect you could lap it like milk. Tears came to his eyes, the first
he’d felt in weeks.

“Get in,” the guard told
him.

His legs wanted to run, but they had no
running in them. He climbed into the back of the car. There was a man behind the
steering wheel. The first guard opened the front door on the passenger’s side and
sat down as heavily as a sack of mealie meal. The car started. He felt his bowels
loosen, prayed not to shit his pants. “Where are you taking me?”

“Keep quiet,
jou lae
donner
.” Dirty bastard.

“
Fok,
” the driver said,
“it’ll be past nightfall before we’re back.”

The guard grunted. Instead of winding
through city streets toward
police headquarters, the car headed out of
town. Soon they were on open roads. Isaac saw signs to Krugersdorp. “Let me
out,” he said. “I need to shit.”

“You’ll shit when we say
shit,” said the driver.

The sun was so bright his eyes watered. He
felt a numbness in his soul. He remembered in school his teacher telling him about
Socrates drinking the cup of poison hemlock. At first the poison went to his ankles,
then his calves. As the numbness reached his waist, Socrates said to his friend,
“We owe a cock to Asclepius. Don’t forget to pay it.” That was a true
man, to remember even as he was dying what was owed.

Isaac’s body heaved. “I’ll
have to shit in the car if you don’t stop.” He no longer cared. He’d
shit in their damned car. The two men spoke to each other. The driver slammed on the
brakes. “Get out,” he said.

Isaac limped out of the car, hurried behind
a low shrub, and let fly all the noxious poison in him. He was disgusted to the marrow
of his bones. He didn’t care how they killed him. He would never eat another
morsel of food from the hands of men like these. He pulled up his trousers and got back
into the car. His hatred was pure, flowing through him cleanly.

They passed through the outskirts of
Krugersdorp. On the other side of the city, he shaded his eyes and saw a small sign to
Olifants Nek and behind it, small
rondavel
s like his grandmother’s. A
rooster, three hens, children crouched in the dust. He thought of his younger brothers
and sister. The eagerness in Moses’s eyes, his small body in sleep.

He nodded into a stupor and woke as the car
was pulling to a stop. Terror flooded his legs and arms. Halfway inside a dream, he
suddenly pictured a snub-nosed revolver, arms dragging him out to a desolate spot filled
with low
mopane
scrub and the droppings of wild goats, the last sweet, pure
sound of a bush shrike before he was reduced to nothing. But the car had stopped at a
shack for food. He could smell the fat popping out of the
boerewors,
the rancid
smell of oil. His guts churned. He was starving, and he would eat nothing at the hands
of these men. Not that he’d be offered anything. The fat-necked guard ate two
sausage sandwiches, stuffing them into his mouth. They swilled a beer each, the fat man
farted, and they got back into the car.

“Where are you taking me?” Isaac
asked.

“We told you, shut your trap.”
The driver slowed down and speeded up again. For a few heady moments, he thought they
might dump him out on the side of the road. But why would they go to all the trouble of
driving so far? They skirted Rustenberg, Swartruggens, Groot Marico. The rains had
greened the landscape. He remembered once feeling gladness at this sight, but that old
feeling was frozen inside him, like a postcard sent long ago, faded beyond
recognition.

She was terrified for him. Say he made it
out alive. How would they have broken him?
Coo, coo, ca-koo, cu-coo
, went the
dove.
Coo, coo, ca-koo, cu-coo
.

Last night her mother had called and asked
Alice where she saw herself next year. Alice had snapped back, “You sound like a
job interviewer, Mom. I don’t know. I don’t know about next week.” Her
mother had gone quiet. Alice imagined her standing in the hallway, gripping the phone in
her left hand, a shaft of light from the window halfway up the stairs striking her hair.
She pictured the slight stoop of her shoulders, her vulnerability and love.

I’m sorry, she wanted to tell her now.
She’d been hunting for the electric bill just before the phone rang. She’d
opened a dresser drawer, thinking she might have stuck it in there for safekeeping, and
found the Bushman piano Ian had given her. She’d picked it up, plucked a few tinny
notes, and found herself kneeling on the floor, her knees buckled under her.

Coo, coo, ca-koo, cu-coo
. She
counted forty iterations before it stopped. She stared down the road on the South
African side. The heat shimmered on its surface. Any car coming that way would look as
though it were swimming toward the border. The sun was directly overhead now. She
searched the ground for a stone, picked it up, and weighted down one end of a towel on
the roof of the truck and draped it over the open doorway to create shade. Her eyes
burned and her thoughts melted and ran here and there.

Her heart went out to Isaac’s mother.
One by one, she’d lost her children. Isaac, Nthusi, Moses, Lulu. If they ever let
him out of prison,
he’d never again be allowed back over the
border to visit her. And she’d never legally make it to Botswana.

The two men in the front of the vehicle
were holding a conversation in Afrikaans that Isaac couldn’t understand. He
gathered that it had to do with him, but he felt nothing but a vast indifference.
“This side of Zeerust,” the one with the thick neck said.

He had seen a signpost not far back: 27
kilometers to Zeerust. Whatever was going to happen to him would happen within
twenty-seven kilometers. Something fluttered inside him, a bird trying to rise, and sank
back down. About fifteen kilometers out of Zeerust, the driver said, “This will
do.” The car turned off the main road, took another side road, until they were
alone on a stretch of track so sparsely traveled as to hardly be a track. Low, rounded
hills overlapped at a distance. A small herd of cattle and goats grazed in the middle
distance.

“Get out,” said the driver.

The large-necked man held a gun.

Isaac tried to take a deep breath to steady
himself, but his broken ribs stopped him. “Please,” he said, “I need
to take another shit.”

They seemed to consider this for a moment,
and the driver said, “Go on then,” not unkindly. And then,
“Don’t try anything.”

He staggered behind a thorn bush, his
stomach roiling. He thought of running, but it was useless. They’d overtake him in
two strides. He squatted and let loose, too scared to be disgusted. He checked the
ground for a rock, anything that might serve as a weapon, and found nothing.