Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He stood up and stretched. He needed to look as tall as possible for what he was going to do. He was tired of hunching over.

  It felt like all the witdoeke were shouting at him at once from various points around the position. “Lower yourself,” someone shouted. And they were giving shrieking whistling. It was a campaign to get him to get down and go into the shed. He had never mastered the art of sticking his fingers into his mouth in a certain way and producing a sound so piercing his mother would come and say to quit, immediately. His brother had. And his brother had refused to show him how it was done.

  Kevin was in the shed. Ray wanted to follow, go in and say hello and shake hands. He wanted to say hello to the chief, assuming the chief was there and available. He thought, By now Kevin will have explained me, explained who I am, a bystander but on their side, a friend of Wemberg, a naked friend of Wemberg, all of that. The feeling of wanting to shake hands with everybody was something he had to stop. It made no sense.

  He wanted to shake hands with the chief and he wanted the chief to be Kerekang, his friend Kerekang. He had to go in there.

  The shed was a windowless crude squat structure built so low that it was impossible to stand up in it. There was light coming in from a long horizontal gap in the west wall, where the siding had been dislocated and wrenched downward to make a firing port. A witdoek was sighting his gun through it but not, Ray thanked God, firing. Because the sound of firing in the enclosed space of the shed would be enough to drive anyone insane, and he was already insane. He noticed something that made sense. Witdoeke in the shed had shredded cloth jammed into their ears, threads hanging down. That included the chief, with whom he wanted to have a chat.

  I have to get out of here before they begin shooting, he thought. And that was because he wanted not to be deaf in his next life.

  The chief was not Kerekang. He had a long face. He was about forty. He had one good eye and one half-shut, scarred eye. With his bare hand he was dabbing gasoline on Kevin’s splinter wound.

  Kevin said something, indicating the chief. Mokopa, was what it had sounded like, which would no doubt be the chief’s nom de guerre. Kevin said it again. Ray didn’t know what mokopa meant. One guess would be that it meant an animal, a ferocious one. Ferocious creatures were popular when you were renaming yourself and getting into violent undertakings.

  “Mokopa is the black snake, the long one, rra.”

  “Dumela, rra,” the chief said, reaching to feel the packet on Ray’s chest. The man had terrible body odor. Someone in the shed did. Maybe everyone in the shed did. The chief was wearing a cowhide vest stained black under the arms and a pair of somebody else’s khaki slacks. They were huge on him. He wanted to lock away in his mind a decent description of this man. He was good at description, but he was apprehending people generically or in outline, not individually, because now fear was not letting him concentrate and also because he wanted to get as far away from this man’s effluvium as he could. These people were individuals, and when he arrived at writing about them someday he wanted to have distinct images. But he felt he had to get out of the shed immediately and get on with his plan, such as it was.

  He could see that what they were doing was making gasoline bombs, Molotov cocktails. They were decanting gasoline into Castle lager bottles and then stuffing torn-up cloth wicks into the mouths. They had produced seven or so of them. The enterprise going on there constituted another good reason for him to exit and get on with his own plan, solo. It was dangerous, what they were doing. Some kind of spark and he could be an ingredient in a fireball. Also the shed was an oven.

  Another witdoek came over and began investigating Ray’s packet, but too roughly. These friends were not realizing something. They were jerking at his packet and laughing. But they were overlooking something. His packaging was weakening if not yet unraveling, exactly. But it had a limited life span, like everything except rocks and sand and death itself, which went on forever, so far as anyone could tell. He could imagine a situation where he would be presenting himself as the terror of the earth and his bundle would come apart and reveal that he was terrifying everyone with pages and pages and pages of this and that, text, pages fluttering, flying around him like doves, the stupidest bird in the animal kingdom, if he remembered correctly. Already he was having to hold it together more. And there would be laughter, hideous. But in the shed everyone was accepting, no doubt thanks to Kevin, and that was nice, but it had to be adieu pretty soon. They were seeing him as an eccentric but good person of some sort. They trusted him. That was fine but he had to get out of there. The witdoeke were looking at each other, patronizing him kindly, evidently, so far as he could tell in this pocket of hell he was in. No one was looking at his penis.

  “I am going to try something,” Ray said to Kevin, but including the chief in his zone of discourse, with his glances.

  “What is it, rra?” Kevin asked.

  “First, does Rra Mokopa understand English, or will you have to translate?” Ray felt foolish asking the question but he had decided it was a better choice than asking Mokopa directly and having him shake his head no, which was to say that as a choice it was less shaming, but only if he was right and the man’s English was going to be rudimentary. The Batswana were preternaturally sensitive to things they thought were insults, he was sorry to say, but it was true.

  Kevin said, “Rra, he can understand you, but he will not speak it except a little, at times.”

  “Gosiame. Okay here is my plan.” Ray was glad to be talking about his plan because it would allow him to discover what it was, in fact. What he had was parts of a plan.

  Ray said, “First do you have any pistols among you, handguns?”

  Kevin said something to the chief, who said something to the others, and the answer that came back was no. So that was one part of the plan he could forget, using a pistol or two in his grand advance, his great act.

  Kevin said, “Rra, you must be more quick and we must all of us be quick. Because they can be summoning help from Omega, helicopters. We think they have some radioing equipment with them there. So we must crush them in some way, and very soon. But if we go over there they will slaughter us, and if they come down this way we will kill them one by one. So they must stay with their heavy guns. We are both stuck. We have more witdoeke behind the pan and a few on the ground nearby, a few only. But our comrades behind the pan are held down by koevoet, by the heavy guns. There are twenty left, koevoet, after we killed some. And they have no escape. We have burned their transport …”

  Mokopa was clearly following. In the country of the blind … Ray thought, not needing to complete the quotation. And he thought he was detecting a gleam from Mokopa’s good eye suggesting interest, suggesting that this lakhoa might be able to do something insane but useful. He obviously wanted to know what it was Ray wanted to try. I am a fox, Ray thought. He needed help, for his plan, a more appropriate weapon than the Enfield, covering-fire, anything they could do.

  A new blast of firing shook the shed. Ray noted the pinging sounds of bullets striking metal, not the shed but the piping and the understructure of the water tanks. Everything was telling him to hurry.

  He pulled out the witdoek he had stuffed under his wrappings and tied it on, nonchalantly, he thought, like a nonchalant samurai. It was an association he couldn’t resist and why should he? Iris loved Toshirô Mifune. She had loved him as a young actor and she loved him middle-aged, so she claimed, nothing had diminished in him, which was the way the eye of love should work.

  It had been a good idea, putting on the witdoek. His comrades liked it. That was good. Although he was taking a chance wearing it, because there was a way in which if he had to approach the killers at the end of the roof with the witdoek as an identifier it might cut down the time he could get close enough to them to let them interpret his bomb costume and feel fear and trembling and the urge to surrender and throw down their arms. He had every reason so far to think he was a convincing simulacrum of a hu
man bomb. I am a triumph, he thought.

  He had to hurry. He said, “Here is my plan. There is a man among the koevoet, their chief, I want to capture and take away. His name is Quartus. He has a big chin. I believe he is there. It makes sense that he is there.” There was a murmur among his friends. He thought it meant that they were affirming that Quartus was there. But they weren’t being absolute about it. Because he kept saying he was going to give them his plan and he hadn’t done it yet. All he could think of was catching Quartus and putting him in a sack and taking him back to Gaborone and opening the sack and letting him out and asking him politely how he had come to be in this fine country Botswana and what he had been doing in it and who had paid him and what else he had done in Namibia and elsewhere.

  “Rra, we are going to kill them, to a man,” Kevin said.

  Ray said, “I don’t think you should. I know you want to. I tell you, though, this man is important. He knows things that can make big trouble for Domkrag. If I can catch him, you can ask Kerekang, ask Setime. I am telling you he will agree with me. We can hold this man for Setime, if I can catch him. But here is my plan.”

  He was improvising furiously. He said, “This is what I need. I am going to creep on my hands to the corner of the roof and then you will fire at them to keep their heads down while I run close … And, I don’t know, you could throw one of these fire bombs, maybe, just to distract them. You see I have to surprise them …”

  He had a theatrical image of how it could be. There would be confusion. There would be obscurity, smoke, distraction, and he would step out of the obscurity and be fearsome, striding at them, possibly shouting something he hadn’t yet decided on.

  Kevin was translating. Mokopa was listening but seemed to be smiling, or controlling smiling, would be more accurate.

  There was more to it. “Listen, you will have to lend me an AK.” That was essential. He would need a respectable weapon to reinforce his command of things, if things went his way, at all. The Enfield was no threat. It was more trouble than it was worth, just for the one big shot it could deliver.

  Kevin said, “You say you can frighten them.”

  “Oh I think I can. I’ll tell them they can live, we will spare them.”

  There was a sharp, quick exchange in Setswana between Kevin and the chief. Something was being kept from him.

  The thing was to do something great, a great act. Ray could feel himself entering the act, getting ready, believing he could do it and crushing away any thought of what it would be like if his act failed, which was easy because that would be endless night.

  The chief signaled to one of his soldiers that he should turn over his assault rifle to Ray. Ray couldn’t believe it. He had to remember the drill with the AK. He had fired them in the past. It was coming back to him. His hands were trembling. Everyone was looking at him. The AK was much lighter than the Enfield.

  I am a bomb, he thought. He scuttled backward out of the shed, delighted to be in the terrible sunlight again.

  If this was going to work, it was going to work like a dance. Once he got to the corner it would become a dance and he would have to stop thinking and dance it through. It would be a ballet, starring him, or a musical, starring him. He hated musicals. Iris liked them and probably so did Morel.

  Ray could feel a vague rearrangement going on among the witdoeke. There were more of them than he’d thought, tucked away in various niches. They were emerging to get a better look at him, it seemed. Mokopa had come out of the shed and was crawling here and there consulting with his men or telling them what to do, all with reference to Ray. He was feeling honored that they had so readily turned over one of their prime weapons, the AK-47, to him. But he was realizing something. They had a surplus of the weapon. He saw one fighter carrying three of them in his arms, cradling them, pushing himself along backward in a sitting position, taking the guns to the command shed.

  Ray examined the AK-47. It was an intelligent machine. It went together intelligently. Everything was fine with it. The magazine was heavy. He hated it. He could spray death all over the place with it, killing idiotically. He wanted to avoid that if he could. The rifle was going to play a secondary role. He slipped the shoulder sling around his neck and shifted the rifle well back, along his left side. It would just be there, available, when he needed it. But it was more like a prop. That was what he hoped it would be.

  He had worked his way over to the parapet on the north side of the roof. Kevin had come out of the shed and was crawling to join him. The boy had a strip of cloth tied around his neck, covering the wound. He didn’t look well. He looked gray. All of this would be changed one way or another.

  Kevin caught up with Ray. He had a Molotov cocktail with him. His pockets were stuffed with something, probably shotgun shells. Ray hadn’t noted that before. But Kevin had come without his shotgun. He had only the one task of creating a bloom of fire Ray could dance around in his role as the angel of death. It would be best if he could actually appear out of it, emerge out of a cloud of flame, but that was not imaginable. He would burn up, for one thing.

  Behind them a thunderous blast sounded. They looked around and could see a sheet of metal like a wing flying off and over the side of the building. One of the three sheds was now roofless, not the command shed. One of the heavy machine guns had done its work well. Everything was combining to tell Ray to go.

  “I have to go now. When you see me at the corner and you see I am standing up, straight up, that is when you pitch that thing out as far in front of me as you can. Where are your matches?”

  Kevin held up a lighter.

  “Gosiame. Wish me luck, Kevin.”

  Kevin saluted, which surprised Ray. I like it, Ray thought.

  “Wait, rra. This also. When you see it explode you must wait and count to five, Mokopa says, to let us fire on them before you advance, so they don’t shoot you down from a distance. It will give you some seconds to go forward.”

  “Very good.” He saluted Kevin. It seemed appropriate, although odd because Kevin was still with him as he crawled toward the elbow of the roof. He was at his heels. Saluting had been saying goodbye, but Kevin was right there. And of course it made sense for Kevin to be as close to the emplacement as he could get, so that he could plant the fire bomb well down the roof. Nothing mattered.

  It would be a relief to stand up. But he was not standing up quite yet.

  He put his head out around the turn of the roof, put it out more minutely and slowly than he would have believed possible. When he could see he made himself freeze. The headband was performing a function. It was helping keep sweat out of his eyes. He definitely could see the enemy.

  He didn’t know if the emplacement was as formidable as it looked or if it was mainly the comparison with the, he would have to say, rather freeform ad hoc picture the witdoeke position represented. Everyone he was seeing was in fatigues. The men operating the heavy guns were wearing helmets or some sort of protective headgear. There was a substantial barrier fronting the position, consisting of presumably empty ammunition lockers for the most part, which looked better than it could possibly be. It was a Potemkin barrier. Maybe sand had been poured into them. If the number of lockers piled up in front of the position meant anything, the villains had lots of ammunition to play with. They were also well equipped otherwise, to the extent that they had parasols they were using. The heavy-caliber guns looked extremely nasty. Two were aimed at him directly, it felt like. They could fire in a broad arc, and had been firing at the extreme north end of the arc, picking the witdoeke position to pieces, until just now, when they seemed to be trained specifically on the field in which he was about to dance. He could make out Quartus. He was seeing a man urinating over the side of the building and it was Quartus. That was all he needed. He would dance.

  Goodbye, then, he thought. He stood up.

  He could see Botswana all around him. It was a temptation, the vista was. To the west Botswana was yellow and brown and rumpled, in the sou
th it was yellow and flat, to the north it was impossible to say because smoke was in the way, and to the east it was yellow and flat and then it turned gray-green at the horizon that was the delta. He liked this country. He filled his lungs and began to run.

  He ran crouching, keeping close to the parapet.

  He had to think of what he was going to say. He had been assuming it would be obvious to him. So far nothing was suggesting itself. He was going to announce himself as what? Think, he thought.

  He saw the fire bomb, lit and smoking, curve through the air. It landed and exploded brilliantly to his left, ahead of him. The heat from the burst struck him. In fact he had been splashed with fire and was burning in one spot on his bundle. Frantically, he slapped the fire out, and reminded himself to run more slowly because there would be some helpful shooting in five or was it ten or was it twenty seconds. The blaze was a success. It was big. In fact it was not one fire but several separate ones. He was going to be able to run between the fires and appear out of their midst exactly as he had wanted. He slowed down.

  You have to slow down, he thought. Definitely he was hearing shots coming steadily from behind, from his friends. That came to an end.

  He stepped away from the parapet and stood up and shouted hello. He moved out to the center of the roof and entered the garden of flames, as he thought of it.

  He was going to approach walking. That would flummox them, or some of them. I am a bomb, he thought. There was the song from a musical that went Be a tree be a sled be a purple spool of thread. Be a bomb, he thought. I am dead, he thought.