Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Can you help me take this off? I need to take it off now.”

  Kevin insisted Ray sit down again, out of the way, against the parapet on the south side of the roof. He began to disentangle the bindings but stopped when he saw that skin was coming away in places as he lifted the tape away.

  “This is going to be bleeding, rra.”

  “I don’t care. Just pull it off.”

  “Ehe, but I’ll pull it fast, like that. Be ready.”

  “I am ready. Do it.”

  Kevin had a knife, a small thing. He sawed the bindings apart. The bundle fell into Ray’s lap.

  “Now I am pulling,” Kevin said, and then he did and it was hot pain again but mainly unbearable around his neck. The tape came away more easily from his back. Certain spots were bad, little hells, on his back. He needed something, some Vaseline, some sort of balm. But at least the weight was gone.

  He wanted to get up and join in the effort to scavenge the roof for anything useful for killing. That was what his friends were doing. They were furious because the mounted guns were bolted to wooden skids and there was no time to find tools, wherever they might be, to use in dismantling them, because the building was on fire behind them. Trying to stamp it out had been a gesticulation. They were letting the building go. But it was not something to argue about.

  They had the hatch to the end set of stairs up and were pitching whatever they could lay their hands on that they wanted down the stairwell. They had discovered those stairs without him, which was fine, but he had wanted to be the one to lead them to it, or if not that point it out to them, at least.

  Ray got up, the bundle under his arm.

  He knew what he was going to say to Morel when he saw him. He was going to say You may draw my bath. That seemed very funny to him, but it was also what he wanted most from anyone who could provide it.

  Mokopa wanted him to leave the roof, go down the hold, go downstairs. He was being urgent about it.

  Ray went over to the stairs. He didn’t want to go. Mokopa was praising him in Setswana and he understood enough to know he didn’t want to go until Mokopa was through doing that. And then he was through. And then Mokopa’s attention was elsewhere, off over toward the pan. He was yelling joyously. People were yelling back. People were coming down into the pan, a line of them, waving. Mokopa came and got him as he was about to descend the stairs and pulled him over to the parapet facing the pan and raised his arm and waved it for him. “Tau” was something Mokopa was saying in reference to him, which Ray knew meant lion, and then it was “Dilau” over and over, which Ray was going to have to ask someone about. It was just another thing on his list. He wondered who anyone thought he was, out there, what the people in the pan thought.

  He hated leaving the roof, the scene. He wanted to delay if he could a little. He wanted Morel to appear and see what he had done, or the results of it, see him waving. He wanted to shout along with his friends. So he shouted “Dilau dilau dilau,” picking that word out of Mokopa’s praise of him, and produced unexpected hilarity in the men around him. That was fine. Everything would be revealed.

  Someone was calling him from the direction of the fire. Ray couldn’t tell who it was. There were two kinds of darkness over the roof, the darkness of the smoke itself, coming in blurts, and then the darkness of the shadow of the smoke. And there were the buzzards but not only the buzzards. There were smaller birds, some sort of carrion bird specializing in the leftovers of the buzzards and vultures. He knew nothing about birdlife. He had never been interested. And neither had Iris. She had been invited to birdwatch with a birdwatcher and had said to the birdwatcher, What I say is let the birds watch me. The birdwatcher had taken it the wrong way, missing the funniness.

  It was Morel calling him, calling and coughing at the same time, bursting through the smoke barrier. He was carrying his medical bag. There were two new witdoeke with him, new to Ray, not from the roof team.

  Kevin had Ray by the elbow, which Ray didn’t want, especially now. He pulled himself free and drew himself up.

  Morel looked battered and befouled. He had soot on his face and his safari suit was chaotically stained. He was trying to maintain some kind of presence. Ray was sorry for him. I don’t care how I look, Ray thought.

  Morel came up to him. He was out of breath. He snorted.

  “Christ, look at you,” Morel said.

  “I know.”

  “We need to clean you up.”

  “You may draw my bath now.”

  “Oh very funny. What’s wrong with your voice?”

  “I’ve been shouting at people.”

  “Let me look at your neck. And when did you get new pants?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The new witdoeke had been mingling with members of the roof team and now returned to stare at Ray. Morel was beginning to understand. “Dilau,” they said.

  “They thought you had a bomb, you ran around like that with that thing. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Roughly.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Roughly.”

  “Well do I get any credit?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I gave you the idea.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “I gave you the idea when you scared the shit out of me when you walked in with that thing on your chest.”

  “Okay I give you credit. Are you happy?”

  “You’ve got to tell me how you did it, man, everything. But how is everybody up here?”

  “I think mostly okay. What is dilau, by the way? You’re the linguist.”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  “Because they’re saying I’m dilau, I think.” “Rra, I can tell you,” Kevin said. “What does it mean?”

  “Rra, it is saying you have the lerete of the lion.”

  “What is that?”

  “It is the genitals, rra. Dilau. The genitals of the lion.”

  “Thank you,” Ray said to Kevin.

  “Quite a compliment, man. But you need to sit down and we need to get out of here.”

  “Stop telling me to sit down. Everyone’s doing it. I’m okay.”

  Ray could see, as the smoke shifted, the fire like a vast bright claw gripping the roof. They did have to go.

  They had to go especially because the faintness was coming back. He didn’t know if he would be able to quell it this time. He might lose consciousness, and it was impossible to tell how long a spell of unconsciousness might last, not excluding forever. There was something on his mind. At some point Iris would be notified about the outcome of all this, by someone, notified about who had survived. That moment would come. She would be waiting for it. Probably she would rather hear that Morel was alive. Or at best she might want to know equally. But in fact he knew her heart and if she had a button to press that controlled the news of their respective fates with one button telling his fate and the other button telling Morel’s fate she would punch the Morel button first. It would be a reflex. She wouldn’t be able to help it. He could see her doing it. She wouldn’t want him to see. But that was what he would see.

  He was on the stairs. He was descending carefully. He was holding his bundle against his chest. Kevin was descending backwards, holding lightly on to him, which he didn’t approve of. Going backwards down the stairs was dangerous for his friend Kevin.

  “Wemberg, the old man, is dead, Ray,” Morel said. Morel was just behind him on the stairs.

  So that was another entry on the list of things he could do nothing about. The world was turning white.

  “Catch him,” was the last thing he heard as he sank into vibrating whiteness, all the way into it.

  He came awake looking at something like the sun and realizing he was being conveyed roughly away from the brilliant thing he was interested in. He was in a blanket turned into a hammock or sling in which he was being dragged somewhere else. His behind was suffering, which was only fair since unlike other main p
arts of his body nothing had been done to it to make it hurt. Two people were moving him along.

  His mind was on the thing it had been on just before this, it was on Dwight Wemberg. It was important. He wanted to get up and get out and do something. The man had a history that had to be honored and it was unthinkable that his body might be left in the terrible desert. It couldn’t be allowed to happen, because it had been the agony over his wife’s body, being unable to reclaim it, that had led him out into extremis and his own death. There was some kind of parity that had to be honored. Wemberg’s body had to go back to Gaborone, his body at least had to go where Wemberg would have wanted it to go, undoubtedly to where Alice was buried, to Gaborone.

  Two men were hauling him along. One of them was Kevin. He could communicate with Kevin. The other man was a stranger. He was wild-looking, a rustic, very thin, wearing seedpod armlets. He was straight out of the bush.

  Kevin would understand about Wemberg. And if he didn’t, there were others he could inform about the problem. Except that he was being dragged away from the center of things, because of the fire.

  He didn’t like to look at the fire, but he was facing it so he had to. He would never be able to come here with Iris, assuming that the world could have evolved in some inconceivable way, their world, and that Ngami Bird Lodge existed in that world … It was burning to the ground before his eyes, they could never come here. This would have been if she was through with Morel or he was through with her, if by some unimaginable turn of events either one of those things had happened and he had somehow heard about it.

  The entire roof was in flames, it was a platform for spikes and leaping snakes of fire. It was crownlike. And smoke was beginning to leak and pour from the windows of the second floor, and that would be because burning stuff from the roof would be dropping down and setting the wainscoting, the carved wainscoting he had liked so much, and the other carved appurtenances, on fire. It would all burn. The furniture would burn, the beds, the bolsters, the rugs.

  “Stop,” he said to Kevin.

  “We must go as far as that,” Kevin answered, pointing. Ray couldn’t see where that was.

  “This is far enough, isn’t it?”

  “No, rra.”

  Explosions, five or six of them, very loud, caused Kevin and the other man to speed up. The explosions had come from the east end of the burning building.

  “It is ammunition, now,” Kevin said.

  So it was prudent to get well away. Obviously there hadn’t been time to extract all the munitions or other gear the witdoeke might have wanted.

  “I can walk, Kevin, rra. I can.”

  At least he thought he could. He looked down at himself. He had been tended to, somewhat. There was oil on his skin. Someone had put a longsleeved shirt on him, not a clean shirt, a filthy one, but that was all right. It wasn’t oil on his skin, it was Vaseline. He had his boots, still. His bad knee was crimson, but it was nothing but Mercurochrome, the redness, on Quartus’s bite mark there. He felt his bad knee. He had to suppress a groan. Still, he knew he could get around. He had a knobkerrie. It was somewhere. Probably it was in the building and on fire itself. So he didn’t have a knobkerrie to prop himself up with.

  “Stop here,” Ray said, jerking on the blanket.

  They obeyed. Ray wanted to jump up. He couldn’t, quite. He rolled out of the sling he was in and got on all fours and laboriously got erect.

  “You see,” he said, and immediately fell down.

  They put him back in his hammock and dragged him along to the sound of even greater explosions. The entire building was going. He could see people running around like ants. Sobeit, he thought. And he went into darkness again.

  …

  He was awake. He was on a slight incline, he was beyond all the outbuildings. It was getting late.

  He was by himself. He had been left there like a turd on a doily.

  He stood up. He had the bundle under one arm and he was clutching the waist of his shorts tight. He thought he could manage his right leg.

  And the conflagration was absolute, nothing would be saved. It was peach and black. He needed Kevin.

  Things were going on near the conflagration he needed to be part of. He had to hobble toward the event.

  It was hard, going there.

  And his comrades the witdoeke were doing something that had to be stopped. They were throwing bodies into the flames and one of those might be Wemberg’s. He didn’t know. He needed to discuss Wemberg with them.

  He needed to find Kevin, Morel too.

  “Hey,” he shouted, entering the heat from the conflagration.

  He saw people he knew.

  “Here I am,” he said to Morel and Kevin and, there he was, Kerekang.

  It was Kerekang, sitting on an overturned washtub, exhausted-looking, gray in the face, his hair grown long. He was wearing a witdoek, appropriately enough. He was wearing a fur vest and he had bandoliers crossed over his chest. He looked Mexican somehow. His arms were sinewy but too thin. He was wearing cargo pants whose pockets were loaded with things. He was wearing sandals. He was looking at the ground.

  Ray went up to Kerekang. He cleared his throat. He had too many things he wanted to say.

  “Dumela, rra,” he said. Kerekang looked up.

  “We have met,” Ray said.

  Kerekang stood up. He looked at Ray and then looked differently at him. He had heard about Ray’s exploit, it was obvious.

  Kerekang strode up to him and embraced him too hard. Ray was in danger of losing his balance, briefly.

  The dead had been collected into a heap and a pair of men with bandannas over their faces were taking one body at a time and running with it through the zone of heat around the building and getting as close as they could to the flaming doorway Ray and Morel had entered after their escape from the shed and hurling the body into it. The bodies had been stripped. The work had just begun. There were fifteen bodies, at a first rough estimate, waiting to be incinerated.

  Kevin was with him. Ray asked him how many bodies had gone into the flames and Kevin held up three fingers.

  Kerekang was sitting again. He seemed to be in a kind of reverie. He looked caved-in, was the way Ray described it to himself.

  Ray needed a belt. Kevin would help him.

  “Kevin, can you get me a belt?”

  “Ehe, rra.” He seemed to have an idea. Ray saw what it was. Kevin was going to the litter of clothing taken from the dead. You’ll have your choice of belts, Ray thought.

  And it was so. Kevin brought him three belts to choose from. He took the shortest one and threaded it through the belt loops. But with the tongue in the last punch hole, the belt was still too slack, so he discarded that belt and took the longest one instead and secured it with a knot. He felt ready then.

  He considered the tableau he was part of. They were in an open space beyond the outbuildings, one of which had been his prison. Which reminded him that Morel was not in evidence. He was full of anxiety. There was Kerekang, on the washtub, now bracketed by armed men. More fighters were filing in from the pan, their legs and shoes and lower pants legs covered with white dust like tooth powder. The pan was dry as bones. But where was Morel?

  The staff people from Ngami Lodge were present. All the faces he had seen in his moments on the first floor were there. They had survived. That was good. He would talk to them later, if he could, say something, thank Dirang and the old man again.

  Salvaged weapons and ammunition were being sorted in the area just in back of Kerekang, and certain items were being brought to Kerekang’s attention from time to time and he was nodding in precisely the same manner to each item presented for his reaction. He was an automaton.

  Ray went up to him. He bent down and touched Kerekang’s shoulder, to get his attention. The armed men bristled and one of them put the barrel of his rifle in Ray’s stomach. He had white legs. He was a newcomer, from the pan. He wouldn’t necessarily know about dilau, that he was dilau. Kerekang s
aid something rapidly and the rifle went away.

  Ray said, “Rra, excuse me. Listen, this burning of bodies … Listen to me, you have to let me find Rra Wemberg. He is among the dead and I know you know the man you love him you loved his wife Alice, and Dwight needs to be buried with his wife, rra. I can take him, you can give him to me. I will do something. And do you know where my friend is, the doctor? He will agree with me. Do you know where he is?”

  The men surrounding Kerekang, which Ray couldn’t help thinking of as a chorus, were saying something, chanting something, and it was Setime. Ray thought he knew what was up, which was that he had to use the right term of address, which was Setime, bringer of fire, fire-thrower, whatever it was.

  Ray began again, “Setime, man, please tell them to stop until I can find our friend.”

  Setime nodded, mechanically, not looking up.

  Ray was at the pile of bodies.

  The pile was smaller.

  Anything can happen, he thought, and he was thinking a body he might find would be Morel’s. The king on the throne was just nodding, Kerekang on his washtub.

  He thrust his hands into the mass of dead bodies, pulling the topmost ones aside. He wanted to see if Quartus was there, but he didn’t care what happened, now, to his body. He needed a better framework for what he was doing, because it was too terrible. The bodies had been piled midway between Kerekang and the building, and that had been a mistake. Because Ngami Bird Lodge was dying in a roar, the fire was a roaring thing, a beast. Every window was sprouting horns or prongs of fire. The conflagration was tending in one direction, to the east, coming to a furious point to the east. Another clutch of explosions went off. He was getting bloody again. Whoever had cleaned him up had wasted his time. He was sorry not to know more about the dead he was pushing out of the way, but he only wanted one thing, he was sorry to say. The original team of body-tossers had withdrawn because of the heat. That was sane of them. He saw a white foot, a white leg. It was Wemberg. He was on the bottom tier.

  He needed help, but where was help? And where was Morel? That was next, after this.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Morel said. Morel was there, had found him.