by Norman Rush
Something was bothering him.
It was the crank. The crank would make him look like an organ grinder. That would be the first impression. He didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him.
He had to get rid of the crank. When he appeared he would just hold his fist in a significant way at the side of the bundle and that would do it. It would have to.
He brought the rifle up onto the step he was standing on and got it between his left leg and the casing, holding it there by pressing his weight against it. With his right hand free, he pulled at the crank. It was difficult. He had done an excellent job of jamming it in among the tapework.
A wavering shadow fell over him as he struggled. He looked up.
It was too literary, or did he mean Gothic? There seemed to be a bird of prey, a vulture, clutching the rim of the opening at the top of the staircase, looking down at him, raising and lowering its wings, shivering them. It was small. Vultures were bigger. It must be a buzzard.
He wasn’t afraid. Everything was extreme. He was out of his element.
Because of the brightness he was staring up into he was getting more an impression of the beast than a clear image of it. A string of liquid dripped down from the bird, narrowly missing him. It was vile, whatever it was.
The crank he had been worrying and tugging at came free just then and he flung it underhand as hard as he could, blindly, in the direction of the bird. He hit the thing. It made a feminine-sounding utterance and jerked away and was gone.
Ray continued climbing. He felt urgency. He wanted Quartus. He wanted to bet someone that Quartus was there for him, on the roof.
He crawled out onto the roof. He had his rifle with him. He had dragged it up subtly behind him and now it was with him. The sky was very bright. The roof was a burning plain of white pebbles enclosed by a low ornamental parapet with regularly spaced embrasures, like the roofline of a medieval castle. The parapet was seamless along the edge of the roof.
He looked around as well as he could, keeping flat.
There were veins of smoke in the sky. Before, there had been streams of smoke, sheets of it.
He could see something of where he was and he was in luck. This sector of the roof, at the midpoint of the long transverse connecting the outward wings, was in the hands of the witdoeke. That much he could tell. He was in the midst of a group of witdoeke-wearing fighters, for which he thanked God. He was among them but to the rear of their main position. He counted about a dozen, exactly a dozen, fighters.
The pebbles were burning hot. He needed gloves. He needed water, also.
The fighters were disposed in an arc to his left, west-facing. They were utilizing everything available to them for cover while they fired. The shooting was sporadic but too loud when it came, too loud for him. These were his friends, shooting.
The core of the position was a complex of low-built galvanized iron utility sheds and a pair of absurdly large wooden water tanks set on a raised concrete foundation. No one was paying the least attention to him. The position they were defending was highly improvised. Men were dodging around, firing or just aiming, from beside the service sheds, from behind piled-up sacks of gypsum, if he was reading the lettering on one of the sacks correctly. One of the three sheds had been half kicked down and its siding appropriated and jammed in among the struts supporting the water tanks, augmenting the cover provided by the waist-high concrete base under the tanks. It was all very motley and ragged and people would have to be careful when they shot past their own forward positions.
He had to see more. He stood up. This was the obvious choice for a defensive position. The rooftop ran away blankly, featurelessly, on either hand all the way to the ends of the wings, so far as he could tell.
He wanted to see who was here. He wanted to shake people by the hand and tell them they were doing well, putting up a good fight, which seemed to be the case. He needed to introduce himself.
Standing, he could see where the villains were. They were around the elbow of the building and out at the end of the western wing, collected together there behind their own improvised barricade of ammunition lockers. He thought he saw Nemesis, but he couldn’t be sure because of the distance, which had to be at least a hundred yards, and because of the heat-shimmer rising from the roof. He thought he could see some heavy weapons, tripod-mounted machine guns. They were more exposed than the witdoeke, but the range of their weapons was superior. He realized that having to fire at an angle toward the center disadvantaged the villains because they had to thread their fire through the crenellated parapet at two points.
Someone was yelling at him. He couldn’t tell who.
He decided to kneel. That would be nonthreatening. The roof surface was littered with spent shells. The witdoeke were miscellaneously armed. Some had hunting rifles but most were using assault rifles, the ones with the curved magazines whose name escaped him. He wondered where the witdoeke had gotten them. He had paid poor attention during firearms training at the agency and now he regretted it, but not much. He didn’t know if people were shouting at him, to him, he meant, or about him, to one another. There was a lot of shouting.
Someone was gesturing violently at him from beside one of the sheds. He raised his hands over his head. He hoped that was what they wanted.
He had a theory of what had happened with the villains. They were stuck. His theory was that originally they had gone up and installed themselves on that part of the roof in order to rain fire on attackers coming from the direction of the pan. And that would have been an ideal site for an emplacement. But then somehow Kerekang had gotten a team into the building and up onto the roof by stealth. And now the villains had their backs to the pan, from which some light gunfire was still proceeding. And something was keeping them from rappeling down the building, which surely they were equipped to do, although possibly not. But of course that would mean abandoning equipment they couldn’t let fall into Ichokela’s hands, Kerekang’s people’s hands. And then likeliest of all was that Kerekang had shooters on the ground close enough to make rappeling unthinkable. That was his theory of the situation.
He thought he should push his rifle farther away from him. He leaned toward it, reaching, which led to actual screaming from some of the witdoeke. He was being misunderstood. He had wanted to give a reassuring sign.
“Dumela,” he shouted.
He pointed at his forehead. “Witdoek, ke witdoek,” he shouted.
Someone came up behind him and pressed a gun barrel into his back.
Impulsively, he stood up and turned around.
A young man, a boy, really, was pointing a pump-action shotgun at him. He was in a state of alarm and confusion. He was retreating a few steps. Ray realized he knew the boy, from the university. He was wearing bush shorts, and a tee shirt from the main craft shop in the capital. It was a sky-blue tee shirt and bore the legend Keep Botswana Tidy. Iris had bought three of those shirts to give as presents. The young man was wearing his witdoek, like his comrades. I would like to have comrades, Ray thought.
Ray said, “Dumela, rra. I believe I know you from university. I am a teacher, rra. I am from St. James’s. Ke mang St. James’s.”
The boy was thin. The combat boots he was wearing belonged on sturdier legs than his. It was wrong for this boy to be here. It was altogether wrong. He had to do something. The boy was moving further back. He slid the pump action forward and back. Obviously it was the bundle on Ray’s chest. It had to be that.
Ray slapped the bundle, prompting the young man to drop to a crouch, a firing stance.
“No,” Ray said, slapping the bundle even more heartily and forcing himself to smile.
Two other fighters, older and rougher and more rustic-looking men, approached, their rifles aimed at him. It was peculiar, because everyone in the encounter was hunched over, stooping to one degree or another, out of prudence. And that reminded him that he needed to get his head down too. He was taller than any of the three people he was dealing with. He dou
bted that the two new arrivals spoke English. He would tell them he was with them, that he was their friend.
“Ke tsala. Witdoek. Ke tsala.”
The older men wanted him to do something about the bundle. He wasn’t going to. The damned loops around his neck were cutting into his flesh and it would be his pleasure to get the whole thing off him just for ten minutes but there was no way he was going to relinquish it in the circumstances he was in.
He addressed the boy, the student, whose name was coming to him. It was Kevin. And his last name was coming to him and it was Tsele. He had been a member of the Student Representative Council. They had spoken. Kevin had been a firebrand of some kind.
Ray said, “Kevin, listen to me. I am Professor Finch. I am here to help you. Look, this is only a manuscript, here. You can feel it. I will hold my hands all the way up, like this. You feel it. I know what you think. But this is paper in here, a book.”
Cautiously, Kevin approached, saying something to the two other men. He lightly punched the bundle. Then he pried at it.
Kevin said, “It is like a bomb, rra, to my eye. But so why are you carrying it about in this way? And rra, you are naked, I see.”
“Because it is a precious thing of my brother’s. It is a keepsake. It is a very long story, Kevin. He is just dead.” Ray was using locutions from Botswana English. Normally he didn’t. But he wanted to be completely comprehended. Because he wanted to find Quartus and get him and he wanted to shake Kerekang’s hand and help him get out of this and begone, be somewhere else, if he would go, walking around with all his limbs working, somewhere else with snow and lakes.
“Ehe, then come away. You must have to explain why you have come amongst all this. But you may do that in time, rra. Because we are in a spot. But you are naked.”
“I know it,” Ray said forcefully.
Kevin led him away to crouch in the lee of the water-tank foundation. Kevin was uneasy with him, naturally. He reminded Ray to keep his head low. This was the safest area in the whole position, Ray realized. He appreciated being put there.
The two older men were returning to their places. They were taking his rifle along with them. They were staring at him. He wanted them to know that there was only one bullet, that it was chambered, and that he had no more ammunition. He thought the word for bullet was lerumo but he wasn’t certain. He was tired. They could come back to him if they wanted more information.
Kevin sat down next to him. He said, “Rra, you know these men who are killing us, they are killers from Namibia, koevoet. We will send them back to that place. They have killed in Namibia from before. So we have to kill them. We are taking their weapons.”
Ray explained about Wemberg’s rifle and its solitary round.
Kevin said, “I want to know how is that old man. We said to him he must stay back, but he came following behind us and then we saw he was all blood. We sent him down, then. And when I went to look he was gone.”
“Yes, that’s a man I know from Gaborone, a very good man. No, I hope he’s okay. He’s being seen to. There is a doctor. We were held by koevoet, but we got free. The old man is my friend.”
There was a violent fusillade. The tanks were hit. Bits of shattered wood showered on them. The tanks were dry.
“They are hitting high, you see,” Kevin said.
“That’s heavy ammunition.”
“Ehe, and now we see they have their second gun back to use again. For a time they had only one big one to use. We have got to go and kill them. Come and I’ll show you something.”
Kevin crept over to the parapet. Ray crept behind him and joined him there.
“We have done this,” he said. He directed Ray to put his head through one of the embrasures and look down.
Below was the vast courtyard filling the space between the arms of the U. Koevoet had made the mistake of turning the area into a car park and, obviously, not guarding it securely. Ray was looking into a well of destruction. There were ten vehicle carcasses, some still smoking, most of them trucks of different sizes. But at least one armored personnel carrier was among the wrecks. It was a brilliant example of what guerrillas could do with a box of matches, if they got a chance, if the wrong door was left open. It was astonishing that the building hadn’t gone up too. Apparently there had been enough distance between the clustered vehicles and the building walls to keep it from happening before some form of firefighting had taken place. He could see places where the walls were blackened. He didn’t want Ngami Bird Lodge to burn. And he was making a mental inventory of the damage he was observing. It was a reflex.
Kevin brought him back to the place under the tanks. Ray wanted to know where the water had come from to fight the courtyard fire if the rooftop tanks were empty. He asked Kevin about it and was told that there were two deep wells out near the pan that fed directly into another set of tanks under the kitchen.
“I am going to kill these evil things,” Kevin said, aiming his shotgun skyward.
He meant the buzzards. Three of them were circling low over the roof.
He said, “You see what they do, these koevoet. We saw it. If one of their comrades dies they push him off onto the ground to lie there. So as to keep these birds down there.”
“I saw one of them. I took his boots.”
“You should have taken his trousers … I was shooting down these birds, but our chief said I must stop.”
“To save on ammunition, you mean.”
“Ehe.”
“So who is in charge of this group?”
“Nyah, rra. We cannot discuss about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“We are forced to be secret. We can take any name. We are not giving names to be reported. And when you return to Gaborone you must never say you saw Kevin Tsele.”
“So what name are you using, then?”
“Myself, I am Lesheusheu, if you know that word.”
“No idea.”
“It is a scorpion. The big yellow one.”
“Ah, those. So is Rra Kerekang with us here?”
“Rra, you see in ISA we cannot speak about who is leading us. Because that is what koevoet wants to know, where is Setime. They want to take him away.”
“Setime is fire-thrower, am I right, means fire-thrower, or means incendiary, arsonist?”
“Ehe. We are laying fire everywhere. We will chase Domkrag away from here. We will burn this place.”
“This building? You don’t want to do that.”
“We do.”
Ray wanted to argue, but he was too tired for it. He had to husband himself for what he was going to do. He was going to make a contribution. He was going to perform an act. He needed water. He had to get clear about Quartus, where he was. He needed his binoculars. He shifted his position in order to keep himself squarely in the shade of the tanks.
Kevin wanted him to come away to another part of the position. Ray didn’t want to leave the shade. Kevin wanted him to follow him into one of the service sheds. He was explaining why. Someone in the shed needed to see him, their chief. He needed to say what would be done as to him, Ray. He was being summoned.
It was true. Somebody was waving urgently from the shed doorway. Ray couldn’t see him. It was dark in the shed. He wanted it to be Kerekang. He wanted to see Kerekang and convince him to get away from this before he was caught, get the hell out. He wanted to go to the shed but he didn’t know if he could manage. If someone promised he could get iced tea in the shed he would be able to manage.
A new blast of gunfire shook the tank above him. He was shaking. He was looking at Kevin. A splinter had been driven into his neck. The tank had been struck at a lower level than before. The villains were improving their aim, getting it lower.
Kevin was cursing, which was a good sign, Ray hoped. Ray went to him. He wanted to be the one to pull the splinter out. He was afraid Kevin would be too abrupt about it and break it off or not get all of it out.
“Don’t touch it,” he said to Kevin.
The boy was frightened. He could die, Ray thought.
Ray nipped the splinter with his thumb and all four fingers where it went into the boy’s neck. He didn’t know if it was more a shard or a splinter. It wasn’t really a splinter because it was bigger, it was the size of a what, a thing much thinner than a pencil but still not a splinter. The question was how far it had gone into this child’s neck.
“Close your eyes,” Ray said. He was being an automaton. Kevin obeyed.
Ray repeated himself. “Close your eyes,” he said even more forcefully as he pulled the splinter out, jerked it out, and pressed the wound closed.
“It’s fine, really is,” Ray said, feeling faint. It was a small wound, but it was bleeding a lot. An antiseptic was needed.
Kevin was being compliant.
Thank God it’s regular bleeding, not a vein, not an artery, so thank you sweet God, thanks a lot.
He was afraid to let go of the wound, but did.
They crawled toward the service shed, Kevin wiping at his wound.
He had to do something. He was being overwhelmed by the wrongness of things. And there was something else. What he was going to do had to be done soon, because he was not a black person and the sun he was getting on the roof, amplified by its white pebbled surface, was going to fry him. It would be beyond sunburn. He needed a hat. He needed his pants. He needed his shirt. He was an idiot. His dead skin would slough off like his brother’s, in the old days, in his youth.
It would be great if suddenly the sky were full of flying saucers, fleets of them, all the same size, metallic, confounding everyone, and then there would be a voice on the media the radio the television everything saying there was a person who was designated to say what should be done to fix up the wrongness of the world and it would be him. And maybe a beam would come down from one of them, the main one if there was a main one, and touch him and he would rise up, full of power.
He felt better than he had. He was going to be part of history. Somebody would be interested in this what, skirmish, these events, and he would be part of the story, some part of it. People found him terrifying, with his brother’s manuscript on his chest. He wanted to look terrifying. He stood up and shook himself. He was still going to be part of it. He was going to. No one was stopping him. And when the beam touched him he would have the power to turn any weapon every weapon of every kind including the most secret, most mountainous weapon into shit.