by Norman Rush
He got up to go. Closing time was like a guillotine blade coming down, with doors slamming and bolts shoved home and lights doused and help dissolving away into whatever obscurity was available. He would join Keletso in the bath shed. He had to get his pulsing knee into hot water and he had to thank Keletso again. He had to thank him better.
The bathing shed was a sort of rude crib structure with oddments of canvas hung haphazardly over it. He announced himself. His torch was weak.
Lo! he thought as the main building of the Golden Wing complex went dark, or virtually so. There was a faint glow showing in the rearmost room, Makoko’s quarters. And then even that was gone. And the garage, where they had gotten refueled, was silent and dark, too.
Keletso said, “Rra, you must come to this water whilst I leave.”
“What do you mean, rra?”
“They say there is only one fire for two, rra.”
Ray walked around to the donkey boiler. It was an oil drum sitting on a metal stand over what were now only embers, a remnant of fire, shreds, nothing, not embers, even. The pipe leading from the bottom of the oil drum into the bathing shed was slightly warm. He knocked on the drum. It appeared to be empty. It didn’t matter.
So he would take whatever was in the tub. His knee was screaming.
Keletso said, “Rra, there is no soap. The woman has taken the soap, since I said to her yes I have used it and then it was gone and she was gone.”
“It doesn’t matter. Here I come.”
Night wants me, Ray thought. He shook his torch. Its light was weaker yet. He shook it more, to no effect.
“There is no towel, rra. That woman left some mere rags, and not clean ones.”
“It’s no matata,” Ray said.
Keletso was finishing up in darkness. Ray set his torch down on the ground, its weak beam pointed discreetly away into the yard. Staff from the Golden Wing were leaving en masse and with a celerity that made it seem they were fleeing something. Celerity was another one of those perfectly good words destined for the bone pile. It was ghostly, the women rushing through the dark, no torches no candles, muttering, a ghostly experience but over in a shot.
Ray undressed. Keletso wanted him to hurry. The water was cooling.
He got into the soiled bathwater, which wasn’t exactly the term he wanted. He didn’t care that he was second. If he had been offered the chance to precede Keletso he would have declined, out of respect, abject gratitude, everything. Keletso had held him up, hauled him along like a baby half of the way back from the cattle post to the Land Cruiser. And Keletso had cleaned him up, as best he could, before stuffing him into the Cruiser and driving like a banshee on fire away from there and back to the trunk road and the safety they expected to enjoy in Nokaneng, should they get there and not die in a crash en route. He submerged himself in the tepid water and rubbed his limbs. He would have to find something to tie around his knee for a day or so. And next time he came to the bush he would carry a pumice stone for eventualities like this. He would get Iris to find one, except that he wouldn’t, couldn’t. She was not going to be available. She was better at cutting his toenails than he was. There was a craft element to the way she did it. Half the time it needed to be done she would offer to do it, out of love. You can’t step into the same river twice, he thought. He would be cutting his own toenails now, forever, if he was right about things. He was afraid he was. He knew he was.
And then they had arrived in supremely strange and negligible Nokaneng. It barely existed. You were on twisting, sandy roadway and then you were on a segment of graveled road and there was the Golden Wing complex on one side and, opposite it, a cinderblock cube supposedly housing a suboffice of the Northwest District Council, shuttered, showing every sign of being not in use, and then another cube, the health post, also locked up and visibly empty, nothing in it, no furniture, and then spreading away in the dusty haze to the west a scattered handful of widely separated household compounds, many of them in disrepair, unoccupied, and then near the road a long sloping dome of maize husks, small stock fodder, glimmering in the gloaming, and then the raw sand road began again, twisting north. A general furtiveness characterized the few inhabitants they had managed to interact with so far, it would be fair to say. People had seemed eager to avoid them or to deal as briefly with them as they could get away with, given that some of them wanted their business. The tall, sinister-looking Rra Makoko, who had claimed to be both the proprietor of the Golden Wing and then, later, not the proprietor at all but a factotum for a German named either Gaster or another name like it that he couldn’t remember, the real proprietor, who lived far away in either Gobabis or Walvis Bay over in SouthWest. Makoko’s eye patch had put him off. And initially Makoko had had no difficulty transacting with him in English, and then it had become more difficult, and then everything had had to go through Keletso, in Setswana.
Still, certain things had been accomplished, certain difficulties overcome. Tomorrow Keletso would be out of this and Ray would proceed on his own, alone. He had produced a letter for Keletso to present to his superiors at the Transport Office pronouncing that Keletso had performed superbly in all his assignments and that he was no longer needed by Ray, whose only remaining task was to find a restful place where he could collate the materials he had collected, prepare his final report, and then return to the capital via the main roads, which were so much less difficult to traverse. His chief trouble in writing the letter of reference had been to control the ragged beast his handwriting had become. The idea of sending along a letter for Iris, entrusting it to Keletso, was something he had considered. But he had dismissed it because … there were too many reasons not to. She would be alarmed at his penmanship. She would see through anything he wrote. She would grill Keletso without mercy and she would make the most alarmist interpretations of what she got out of him. He had no idea what to put down. Of course he wanted her reassured that he was physically all right. Keletso could call her. That would be the best. The idea of writing filled Ray with uncontrollable anxiety. Partly that came out of his furious sense of betrayal. And partly it came out of a sordid desire to punish her with his absence, with worry about what might have become of him. And then also there was the pathetic ingredient, id est, the shard of hope that his absence and the shadows of danger hanging around it would bring her back to her senses, back to loving him, violent scenes with Morel, showing him the door, scenes he could imagine. Keletso expected him to write something for Iris. He knew it and he knew Keletso would think ill of him, seriously ill of him, if he didn’t write something for his own wife. There was no way to avoid it. He had toyed with the idea of sending a dummy letter, an envelope containing a couple of sheets of blank paper, sealed up tight. That would appease Keletso’s feelings. But it would be an impossible event for Iris, opening it. He couldn’t do that. As it stood, Keletso was to convey to Iris that all was well and that Ray would be back sometime soon. And there would be no mention of the cattle post raid. But Keletso was still expecting him to hand him a letter. There it was. He couldn’t do it.
Keletso was dressed and waiting. Ray got out and, still damp, entered his clothes. This was his last pair of clean dungarees. The clothes bloodied at the cattle post were balled up and cached someplace under canvas in the back of the Cruiser. He had worn the most presentable of his accumulated dirty clothes into Nokaneng. He might try to arrange to get some laundry done tomorrow or he might not. He had to be on his way, alone, there was no alternative.
At loose ends, they stood together by the roadside. Ray wanted to do something, even if it was only taking a walk, before they retired. The Cruiser was parked next to the district council office cube and they were going to have to sleep in the damned vehicle again. They had been looking forward to getting some kind of normal accommodation that night. But that hadn’t gone right.
Other important things had gone right. They had gotten loaded up on petrol and oil and other necessities, by the skin of their teeth, before the Garage an
d Panelbeaters Golden Wing Proprietary had closed up, earlier than the restaurant, with a clangorous display worthy of grand opera, slamming, locks snapping. Something strange had been going on longdistance between the garage and Makoko on the veranda. He had been giving hand signals and whistling in an eerie way when he wanted the garage foreman’s attention.
“I want to walk a little,” Ray said.
“Rra, your knee is not strong.”
“No, but walking will be good for it.”
Ray liked to have destinations when he strolled.
He pointed out a substantial termite mound a little way into the bush just beyond the graveled stretch of road. It would do for a destination. It gleamed in the starlight. He had the idea he would like to sit on it or climb on it. Termite mounds were amazing things. This one was the size of a sedan, white, smooth. Thine alabaster cities gleam, would be an appropriate comment to make to a termite.
He started off and Keletso came with him, reluctantly, hoveringly, poised to catch him if he stumbled. One object of taking a short walk was to convince Keletso that his knee was improving enough for him not to be concerned. He put his mind to it.
Keletso’s resistance to letting him continue alone tomorrow had been prodigious. It had taken some heavy argument. The matter was closed. Apparently the cattle post scene had shaken Keletso less than it had him. Their argument had concluded with a certain amount of white lying, so to speak, about what he was planning to do next, the final stage of his mission, that is, that he would be resting up and working over his notes and sketches and maps. To start with, it was a lie that he had a mission. What he had was a trajectory and a trajectory that it was his fate to feel he absolutely had to complete. And that was true. It was remarkable how well he and Keletso had gotten on within the shell of deception the expedition had involved. They had lived companionably within the necessary lies. Keletso was a man.
Cooking fires wagged in some of the lolwapas. Some people in this extreme part of the world were at home, just then. They were kicking their sandals off and saying “Ah.”
He had misused his time in Botswana in so many ways. He hadn’t sunk into the particularity of the place, and there was plenty of that. He hadn’t, for instance, concentrated really closely on what the Golden Wing represented, what it was … a weird relic of a fantasy time of white overlord-ship. He knew what the green-tinged irregular windowpanes of the Golden Wing reminded him of. It was a particular brook in Tilden Park, a particular run, perfect water flowing gently wrist-deep over beds of dark gold sand. And of course that was a line surviving from the part of his life he had wasted in the assault on poetry. It didn’t matter.
The termite mound was more like an inflated seal than a sedan. It had a chimney or necklike projection at its high end, which registered the height it had reached in consuming utterly the tree it had claimed, or they had claimed, the termites.
“It seems you must be forever roaming, rra,” Keletso said.
“No more tonight, though. We can turn in.”
“Yah, but I will go again for a place in that house for us. I will make a fracas and see about it.”
“You can try, I guess. But it won’t work, rra. He doesn’t like us.”
They started back.
Keletso farted softly. He said, “Ke ditiro tsa Modimo.”
He said it because it always made Ray laugh. As Keletso had explained it, he was saying God did this, or That was a deed of God’s.
“Shame on him, then,” Ray said.
Certain things had gone well. The Wildlife connection he had made had gone just right. He let himself relive it. Approaching Nokaneng, a government bakkie coming from the opposite direction had appeared and blasted right past them. But some instinct had prompted Keletso to swing perilously around and roar after it, pressing the hooter nonstop, shouting. And Ray, jolted awake, had contributed by rolling down his window and pounding on the door. And it had worked, the angelic Keletso driving like a devil from hell and the racket they had produced together had worked. The bakkie had pulled over.
Keletso had seized the moment. Carpe diem should be your personal motto because you carp about one thing or another every day, Iris had once said to him in a moment of joke pique. He should write down her bons mots and whatnot sometime but it would be too pathetic of him. Ideally it would be a thing they would undertake together. She would remember certain things and he would remember certain things and out of that would come his little anthology. The time to do it had passed him by. Life is a scream would be in it.
Keletso had explained that he had sprung into action on the hunch that this might be their only chance to make contact with some goromente employee, a chance they should not pass up, since goromente was so little in evidence around there, no police, no army, no veterinary trucks.
So then Ray had machinated smoothly with the Wildlife officers who had been going somewhere in the bakkie. He had quickly gotten out the news of the raid. They had been electrified. They knew the place. They had seemed capable. He had dealt mainly with the senior man, a tough, leathery character. Of course it had started out awkwardly with them, but he had overcome it. Striding over to greet them, he had been struggling to contain a fit of coughing caused by the volumes of dust he’d taken in during the chase. And he had tried to spit, preparatory to trying to machinate. But unfortunately his saliva was less than normal. He had tried to spit just casually and it had been an embarrassing moment because his saliva was viscous and the spittle hadn’t detached normally via its own weight and he had had to pinch it off his lip, in front of people, to get it to drop. Diet was affecting his saliva. He needed vegetables. And he needed peaches, if he could get some. That was what he thought.
But then he had worked it all out. They would come back the next day for sure and pick up Keletso and carry him down to Maun. In Maun goromente was still functioning and Keletso would be fine. He would have no trouble organizing transport down to the capital. Ray had given them an enormous deposit of fifty pula and thrown in another twenty rands and he had promised Keletso would give them the same amount when they returned for him. It was settled. They were burning to get away to inspect the raided cattle post. They were fearless, apparently. They were competent men, or seemed to be. They had yards of maps to consult. He didn’t doubt that their eagerness to get to the raid site had to do with salvage, the opportunity to field-dress the fresh carcasses, assuming the Cape vultures had been detained in arriving. But he was guessing about that. Cape vultures had come up in their exchanges and, as he understood what they were saying, the Cape vultures were becoming very scarce, along with other carrion birds.
They had thanked him profusely for the information. Clearly they were unafraid of the people who had been responsible for the raid, but then, of course, they had armloads of rifles, Enfields, on board, a regular arsenal. They had everything they needed that he could think of. They had roof-mounted spotlights, camping gear. There was a smell of drink coming from them, which was not something so far out of the ordinary that he had to draw any conclusions, negative ones, from it, necessarily. And then he had been relieved when it had become evident that it was the junior man who had been drinking. Ray felt he had handled the negotiations well, clinching the deal by making it clear that the payment he was making for Keletso’s passage was not something that would need to be reported to anyone.
Keletso was determined to make one last appeal to Makoko. Ray trailed along as Keletso prowled noisily around to the back of the Golden Wing and began knocking on windows.
“You have to say who you are,” Ray said. Keletso understood why. They wanted to avoid Makoko taking it into his head to start shooting at intruders. Keletso amended his campaign of harassment immediately.
The building was voluminous. There was obviously plenty of space, corners for two people to stretch out in. Makoko was the sole occupant. They knew that. There had been reference made earlier both to sleeping rooms and to a sleeping cabin, not by Makoko but by one of the serving
women. Keletso had taken the matter up with Makoko while Ray was concerned elsewhere and had been told, as Keletso reported it, that the sleeping facilities were not “functual.” And they had decided to drop it because Makoko was already acting generally so peculiarly toward them. Ray thought he knew some of the reasons why. He and Keletso might be anybody. The property Makoko was in charge of, whether it was his or belonged to someone else, deserved expanded protection while unrest was raging in the neighborhood, naturally. Ray had been unwilling to press for lodgings because the booking process could easily have required him to produce his passport. Even in remotenesses like this one, it might have been requested. And it would have made no sense to whine for lodgings while there were other things they sorely needed from Makoko outstanding. So the time to go for lodgings had passed. Essentially, Keletso was playing. It could go on for a while without doing any harm. Keletso hadn’t been reconciled to sleeping in the vehicle one more time. This was ventilation. It could go on a little longer. Keletso would feel better.