by Norman Rush
Were events like this extraordinary to the local population or were they the equivalent of leaf storms in September in Massachusetts? It felt to him like a what, a genuine abomination, Miltonic, an epiphany or revelation about some underlying corruption pressing up, the earth rotting from the heart outward and breaking the surface and the flies pouncing, summoned from everywhere, some conceit like that, some nonsense like that. It was getting darker, amazingly. Iris had to be free. He thought, If only you could pluck certain thoughts out of your head like thorns, via machine, if there could be a device for that like the blackhead extractors that used to be advertised in comic books, bastard things. He had owned one and it had produced little bloody wounds and scabs on his face, essentially. Why had he persisted with it for so long, refusing to credit that the thing was worthless and having to explain his face downstairs in the morning, his purchase?
He thought he was detecting a scorched smell in the air. It reminded him of something from his past, and he knew what it was. The dead past is forever, he thought. But he knew what it was, it connected to his brother’s asthma, when he had been delegated to watch a pot boil containing water and chopped-up grapefruit rinds stewing to make a home remedy for Rex, a thick liquor. His family had loved home remedies as opposed to quick going to the doctor and paying something, no, the thing was to go endlessly with home remedies and time would pass and all would be well for free. And he had gone off to read while he was waiting, one of the Fu Manchu books, and he had gotten engrossed in it and the elixir had boiled down to a foul gum and then scorched, sending a stench into the bedroom, where his mother sat incessantly stroking his brother’s forehead while he coughed histrionically, giving her a fit. It’s amazing what stays with you from childhood, not to mention what doesn’t, he thought. Recently he had been embarrassed to have to admit to Iris that he had forgotten what his first words were, or word. He must have known at one point. But with age the fabric of the mind started to develop blank spots here and there, like cigarette burns, as it had been described to him once upon a time. His mother might remember what his first word had been, or she might not.
It was unbelievably dark.
Ray thought, She is my light, my nightlight, my pilot light, and she is out, going out, out and about.
Keletso was looking at him. Obviously he had done it again.
“Nothing,” Ray said.
Sudden commotion from the front seat brought Ray sharply awake. The flies were behind them. It was sunrise, still dim, and Keletso seemed to be half out of the cab flailing one leg violently against the side of the vehicle, why? And he was cursing, which was unheard of, another shock. Ray bent across into the front in order to help, to do something, and grasped that Keletso was fighting a snake. In terror he climbed over the seat and lunged for the storage pocket on the right front door where there should be a machete, unless they had moved it. They had. Then it would have to be in among the miscellany of infrequently used tools and oddments under the seat. He found it. They had never used the thing and it was still tight in its canvas sheath but he had it and freed it and flourished it as he got out of the vehicle on the passenger side shouting, “Here I am.”
He ran around to Keletso, who was spread-eagled, gripping the top of the open door with one hand and the edge of the cab roof with the other and kicking out so violently that his undershorts were slipping off. A dark green snake about as long as a boy’s arm was somehow fastened to the heel of Keletso’s right boot, the heel proper if he was seeing correctly, below the foot, and he was wagging the snake in the air like a pennant and groaning terrifyingly with the effort. I brought this man here, he thought, guilt rearing in him.
Ray was shouting at the snake, intending to be helpful and obviously failing, since Keletso, seeing him in his shorts and barefoot, was raging at him to get back into the vehicle and to stop dancing, which was what he was doing no doubt looked like. He couldn’t help it. He was trying to find an opening to use the machete. He had to do something. Keletso was worried about other snakes. He had a point. Ray was being as careful as he could. What did Keletso want? What should he do?
With a cry of triumph, Keletso brought the snake down hard against the doorframe sill, where he managed to pin it with both boots. Instantly Ray was beside him with the machete, ready to strike but finding it impossible with Keletso so much in the way. Ray forced himself to seize the still-lashing tail of the snake with his left hand, stretching it down against the chassis. Crouching, he gained the scope for a clean maximum blow. Keletso’s legs were vibrating. His undershorts had fallen to his ankles. The snake’s skin was dry. The beast was powerful. Ray hacked at the snake with all his strength and it came apart. Bright, sweet-smelling blood spat into his face from the wound. He had gotten a third of the snake, it looked like. He had no idea what the top part of the snake could still do, the head. Now he knew why Keletso always slept with his boots on and why that was such an excellent idea.
Keletso had gotten his shoulder under the top rim of the doorframe and, braced so, was able to exert decisive force downward. Blood gouted up between his boots. It was okay.
Keletso leapt free of the vehicle. He dragged his boot along the ground and the battered ruin of a snake came away from it at last. Ray was still holding his third of the snake in his hand. It seemed to twitch, and he dropped it.
They were fine. His right hand was numb but that was nothing. Ray looked around. They had passed the night in what was a beauty spot, for the Kalahari … a low, level, sandy spot near a stand of magnificent, mature cloud trees. The sun was up. In the early morning you could love the sun and not hate it.
Keletso was winded. He gestured vehemently at Ray’s bare feet. It was past time to dress for the day. He realized that, but he wanted to examine the snake and identify it if he could before Keletso buried the carcass, as he was evidently preparing to do.
Ray returned to the vehicle and dressed hurriedly. It occurred to him that it would be interesting to save the head and take it in for identification at the university.
For some reason Keletso had chopped the snake up further, into six pieces or so. And he had scraped a shallow trench in the sand. The snake’s head was already in the trench, at one end. The wide flat head and the black underjaw meant that it was an adder of some kind. The head was damaged but would still make a curio, once it was dried. But Keletso was laying out the chunks of snake in the trench in a semblance of their original order. Clearly he was following some Tswana protocol or other. Ray wanted the head but felt unable to take it or ask for it. Something he disliked was keeping him from acting. He knew what it was and he disowned it. It was a feeling that he might not be going back. He disowned it. He disowned it.
Keletso kicked sand into the trench, burying the carcass as far as the head. He paused. He composed himself. He spoke hotly under his breath in Setswana. He took something out of his shirt pocket. Ray was baffled. Keletso squatted, snatched up the head of the snake, and with a nail file dug out the snake’s eyes and flicked them aside, away from the trench. His hands were trembling. He thrust the mutilated head back into the trench and shot to his feet. Still imprecating, if that was what he was doing, Keletso gestured for Ray to participate as the trench was finally filled in.
Ray assumed he had just witnessed something customary, some ritualization of snake-hatred related to the practice of cutting down and burning any tree a snake had been caught in, which had struck him as extreme when he’d been told about it, considering the importance of trees for shade and shelter in arid Botswana. Noga meant snake, he remembered. The cry Noga! would bring villagers running with torches and hoes and axes. Or so he had been told.
Cleaning themselves up, and then later eating breakfast, they seemed to have nothing to say to one another.
En route again, Keletso asked Ray to go through the snakes section of the Safety Book, his name for a skimpy, anodyne pamphlet on safety in the wild issued by one of the safari camps. Ray didn’t know offhand where the pamphlet was.
At one point Keletso had strung a rawhide thong through it and worn it around his neck. Keletso thought it must be in the glove box and it was. Plainly Keletso was laboring against the apprehension that he had fallen short in his duties to take care.
“Can you find some advices, rra, as to snakes coming for shelter beneath trucks at night?”
The booklet had a faintly rank smell. Ray began scanning it, but he was distracted. He was full of dark feeling. Maybe I should have committed suicide and gotten out of the way when I was in the mood, he thought. In early adolescence he had briefly been suicidal. There had been a philosophical dimension to it. But paradoxically the outrages of his brother and the rivalry and injustice that went with it had dragged him back toward life, life the necessary condition for revenge. He wouldn’t mind telling Iris about this someday, but he wondered what she would think of it if he did. Life was odd. He believed it was his indignation at the outrageous favoritism of his mother toward Rex that had relit his will to live. The drive to penetrate that impenetrable behavior had given him a vocation, or the seed of one. The agency, whatever else it was, was the nemesis of mystery, plots, secrets, the hidden. I hate a mystery, he thought. That was the story, in any case. Suicide was best for the young. Once dependents appeared on the scene it was impossible.
He was unhappy to be thinking about his temptation to not exist, that period of his life. It hadn’t come into his consciousness for years. The Kalahari was bringing it back because the Kalahari was saying something to him. It was saying to die, actually. He was being notional and he knew it. But in the first stillness of dawn, especially, there was an infinitely faint ambient whine or hum detectible. He had to hold his breath to hear it. A similar thing was alleged to happen in the Arctic. In the Kalahari he assumed insect song or activity to be the thing behind the whine, but that could hardly be the case in the Arctic. It didn’t matter. No, what the desert was saying was that you would die if you got out of your iron bubble of food and water and first aid. Nobody could live in such a terrain except the Bushmen and they died at what ages, early, worn out by the effort to exist. Everyone said they were happy in that place, liked it.
Keletso was impatient. Ray began browsing in earnest. The message of the pamphlet was not to worry. Wild dogs were pack hunters, were mostly nocturnal and not interested in humans unless excited, whatever that meant. And wild dogs were getting scarcer in the Kalahari in any case. He presumed that it was the dogs that had to be excited in order to be dangerous, and not their human prey.
“Rra, we must not excite the wild dogs,” he said to Keletso.
Leopards were nocturnal but rarely did they attack man. The implication seemed to be that any predator that was nocturnal could be forgotten about because at night the traveler would be sensibly sealed up in a vehicle or a tent with a floor lining. Also, leopards were in decline and were scarce, very scarce, in the dry parts of the Kalahari, which seemed to Ray to be all of it, that he had seen. And Cape buffalo were placid animals not interested in humans. But it was advisable not to be caught in the path of a stampede, and the same was true for all of the larger ungulates. Ray agreed completely.
Lions, again, were nocturnal hunters, but best of all they were very lethargic during daylight hours. Although if you stepped in amongst them while they were at rest the chances were that you would be eaten.
“Have you found about snakes as yet?” Keletso asked.
“Nearly there.”
Here was yet another reiteration of the warning against ever taking food into your tent. Even normally man-aversive animals like caracals would claw their way in if they smelled food. Chacma baboons were distinctly no problem unless teased. He came to the snakes section.
Only six types of snake were depicted, in a set of crude sketches. None of the drawings resembled the creature they had killed. Two of the sketches were identical, an obvious error.
He was up to a sentence he loved. It should be remembered that only half the snakes natural to Botswana are poisonous. And more good news was that one of the commonest snakes, the shaapsteker, even if it struck you would only leave you with a severe headache, so weak was its venom. There were no cautions given about checking under vehicles in the morning. Keletso seemed relieved. They had done everything they should have. They had avoided overhanging branches and they always made a sort of fuss and racket wherever they walked. They had the three antivenins listed, hypodermics, everything.
Keletso seemed morose. He wanted Keletso to cheer up, but he couldn’t think of how to make that happen. Death-thoughts were poisoning the atmosphere. Death where is thy stingalingaling was from something Irish, but what? What he really wanted was to tell Keletso how unhappy he was. But of course he couldn’t do that. Soon enough he was going to have to send Keletso back to safety. It was almost time to do that. And until then he would need Keletso to think all was well with him. Otherwise he would resist. So he had to cheer up, himself.
He wanted to be light. He said, “When I get back to the States and somebody asks me what the main thing I learned in Africa was, it’s going to be never to take food into your tent, not under any circumstances.”
“Ehe,” Keletso answered, blankly, unresponsively. He hadn’t thought it was amusing, it was clear to see.
It was like a marriage, in some ways, with Keletso. Because in marriage when one partner was radiating dejection and discontent it turned life into a waiting period, a null time. There were times in a marriage when for one reason or another it was impossible to just wait for the mood to dissolve on its own. Action had to be taken. They were in a perilous place and action had to be taken. The problem was to know what would work. One route that was blocked with Keletso was humor. What did the Batswana find funny? What?
He was at a loss. He did know they thought it was funny to say of a man married to a harridan that he ate his overcoat. That gave Ray nothing. And he had been told that they thought it was funny to say that the penis was always landing up in trouble because it had only one eye. That was all he’d been able to glean. American jokes eluded the Batswana, was his distinct experience. It was conceivable that a whole people would find nothing funny in the jokes of their what, their oppressors, their colonial masters, their laughing masters, among whom he would be included, of course. It was possible there was nothing universal about humor.
Being read to was something Iris loved. It was almost magical, the effect it could have on her spirits. Undoubtedly what was happening when she was being read to was that she was regressing to experiences in her childhood that had been consistently pleasant. It was excellent to have pleasant tracts of childhood to regress to. He must have some. Of course he did.
They were proceeding slowly over level ground, so reading something aloud to Keletso wouldn’t be impossible. He pulled his sack of reading matter out of the back and sat with it on his lap, planless until the uneasy thought came to him that it was past time to dispose posthaste of all his Kerekang briefing materials. They were a liability, a potential threat to his imposture, should he and Keletso have to endure some hostile scrutiny, which could happen. He couldn’t believe that he had let it go for so long. Now he was anxious. He had to jettison this material as soon as he could manage it, and in some way not too peculiar and alarming to Keletso. They were getting closer to the epicenter of the trouble. It would be natural to slide the material into a cooking campfire. But they had been using the Coleman stove for cooking. Ray didn’t want to leave the material intact out in the desert. He knew there was a solution and that he was magnifying the problem out of anxiety. Ray had dispensed with campfires in the interest of maintaining general low visibility. He liked campfires.
“The kippers are finished,” Keletso said, gloomily.
Keletso loved kippers. They were a delicacy to him. Sometimes he would eat them twice a day. They were low on pilchards, too. The tinned fish was running out. He’s collecting grievances, Ray thought. That was a process that could get out of control and that he needed to interrupt.
There were three issues of Kerekang’s Kepu/The Mattock in his net bag. He extracted them. They were crude things, cyclostyled. He should just crush them up and bury them off in the bush when they made the next rest stop. An odd feeling of resistance came over him at the thought. He didn’t want to do it.
He strongly didn’t want to do it. He was surprised. He felt incapable of doing it. What was it, though? And then he knew. Kepu contained the only poetry in the iron bubble. Iris had forgotten to be sure his Modern Library Milton was in his reading midden. There had been the TLS back issues. But he had gotten rid of the TLSes as he’d finished them, not that he usually read the contemporary poetry they contained, but with the TLSes in the vehicle there had been poetry of some sort within reach.