Mating

by Norman Rush

  Spikes of Alarm

  I strode due north, desperate under every heading and incredulous that everything in my life, every maneuver, had combined to make it absolutely necessary that I march out directly into the jaws of death, alone, no one beside me, replicating the one experience I had learned was the one above all I should never again undergo—that is, being in a place where you were on the same footing with vicious wild animals, or rather where they are the superior power. I wanted to be out of the reach of the eyes of Tsau, not to be visible to anyone there.

  At the last minute a young girl had brought me a rifle and shells, issued just as I was leaving by Dineo. The gun depressed me because it was confirmation that what I was doing was hazardous and because it was heavy. I weighed the idea of sending it back. Slung over either shoulder it was unwieldy and would slow me down. Finally I put it transversely through the top of my backpack, and that was better.

  In only two or three miles it was already grueling going. The ground was softer, thanks to the rain, than during my previous expedition, at least in certain tracts it was. I was wearing the wrong kind of socks: they were Nelson’s, not mine, and they had a tendency to inch down into my boots. At least I was away from Tsau, and the world could relax into boring vistas, an occasional baobab constituting an extreme of interest.

  I used my binoculars. There were too many inscrutable objects scattered around the landscape. In one case I went a long distance off my route of march to examine something that turned out to be a crumpled sheet of rotting tarpaulin. I was looking for too many different things. The remains of a fire, a body, his, or the carcass of a horse, a tent—he had taken my pop-up tent at my insistence—or some other piece of improvised shelter: these were all the kinds of things I was scanning for. I kept having spikes of alarm each time I thought I saw something. So far everything seemed to be innocent, on inspection, although inspection consisted in too many cases of simply staring harder and longer at the particular thing.

  Gradually I became demoralized when I realized I had done my own version of On s’engage et puis on voit. I had no forward plan. This was about as far as I could get from Tsau before I would have to stop and go back, in order to be in Tsau before nightfall. I had no tent. On foot, I could never make it to Tikwe in less than three days, especially with all the scanning I was doing. I wasn’t a Bushman who could sleep in a tree. I had been planning, self-evidently, on finding something in my first thrust. I was a fool. The best that could be said of my mission was that it had been a way of ascertaining if Nelson was lying hurt or dead close enough to Tsau to be recovered from our end.

  I was sure he was dead and then alternately that he was alive, lying somewhere with my name on his lips. The impasse I was in led to the bizarre urge to write things down about him that were coming to me now and that I realized were not in my compilation. Of course, this was no time to be writing. It was irrelevant. But I hadn’t gotten down Nelson saying Unhand my behind, followed by Do I have a way with words, or not? Or that when he was in an enamored state over a junior high school classmate, a young woman referred to as the Blond Dago, he had gotten into the shower with his pajamas on. There were other, more intimate things I knew, that I’d left out out of sheer decorum. This had been wrong. Also I had very little in my compilation about marriage. I remembered something that was probably key. He had said I never get married unless someone asks me. I needed to be in a library, the only one at my table, my polished blond parquet table, wonderful light, foliage swaying outside the window with normal birds in it.

  Horsemen

  I was so self-involved that when an actual anomaly appeared I failed to notice it until it was on top of me. Horsemen came threading through the brush toward me. They had been approaching for some time. There were six of them, coming very slowly. They were Baherero, looking rakish as usual, miscellaneously dressed, some with leather slouch hats, others with fur hats or rag turbans. The lead rider was lapped in cartridge belts about the torso. In fact all of the horsemen were armed. Something was exciting them: my gun was. I had taken it out of my pack and was leaning on it.

  They can tell me something! was my first thought. But that would only be if they knew Setswana. There were enough Herero women in Tsau who would have been willing to tutor me in Saherero, but I’d never taken the opportunity to learn, largely because I thought that when the Herero dispute with the Botswana government over their cattle was solved they would pull up stakes overnight, including our Hereros. The only Saherero I knew was the greeting, Wapenduka. They nodded when I said it, but they wanted something more. They indicated they wanted me to lay my rifle down and step away from it, which I did, not gladly. A seventh rider was bringing up the rear, traveling even more slowly: something bulky was being dragged behind the horse on travois poles. I had to see what it was, even though I was telling myself it would have to be supplies, not to assume more. I was shaking. Two men dismounted. They wouldn’t let me move until one of them had his foot on my rifle.

  The dismounted men spoke a peculiar and meager Setswana. I realized why it was peculiar. They had had their mesial incisors knocked out, per the cultural requirement of their tribe. Even before they said the word mmobodi, meaning sick man, I knew what was on the travois. I ran to the travois. I pushed back the flap at the top of the long canvas bundle slung between the poles and it was Nelson, looking inhuman but breathing, his face terribly swollen, sunburned, white crusts around his lips. I had to look away. I looked back at the double track the points of the travois poles had cut in the sand. He must have been immobilized for some time in the sun, but clearly he had found a way to keep his eyes and forehead shaded, because above the root of his nose the burn was less severe. I wanted to unwrap him, feel his limbs, give him water, but just as I was reaching to unlace his shrouding the rider moved, pulled him away. I yelled something. I made them halt long enough for me to see how hot his forehead was. It was not extreme, if my touch could be trusted. But then, amid a lot of shouting, the rider started up again, pulling away from me. They were making for Tsau. With the burden that horse was slow, I gathered they were saying. Gomela go shwa, He is sick but will recover, someone said, pushing me back from the travois. I think this is what they said. I was insane. I wanted to push the travois.

  I was saved. He was alive. These people knew what they were doing, and my mission was not to become a handful and prevent them from doing what they were doing, which was making for Tsau with Nelson as fast as they could manage. I began apologizing. They began leaving, as a body. I think one was asking me how far was Tsau, but I had no idea. I think one offered to have me ride behind him, but I said no, thinking that I would slow things up, and the best thing was for them to get to Tsau as fast as they could, to our enemy the nurse. I would jog along behind the travois, since it was going the slowest, and with luck I should be able to keep it in sight. I had to jog pretty quickly, from the start, and even then I fell behind, which maddened me, because I wanted to urge the lead rider to go ahead alone, at a gallop, to let Tsau know and get help coming from the opposite direction. I jogged harder.

  I was saved, but I was steadily falling behind, courtesy my Enfield, so I decided to relieve myself of it intelligently. The riders were too far ahead of me to signal anything to. They could have taken the rifle for me. But good luck to that, since they were far ahead and I was falling farther back, since the travois was going faster than had seemed likely. So an intelligent thing to do would be to discard the rifle by depositing it in the branches of a tree, a tree in some way distinctive, one of the larger white thorn trees, possibly. The Baherero would stop and look back for me occasionally, which I was desperate that they stop doing. In no time there was the right tree, one I would always remember, smack on the due north heading to Tikwe, nonproblematic, so I stuck the rifle into its branches as high as I could reach and good riddance. I could find it again, no question I could.

  I was saved, but had Nelson been conscious or only semiconscious? He had said something when
I said his name and my name, I was sure. But had he? He might be saying things no one was paying the slightest attention to as they pulled him along like luggage. I could catch up. In fact I was closer than before I’d ditched the rifle. So now off went my backpack and this and that, everything except for my canteens. I had two. I realized shortly I needed only one. My binoculars were nugatory too now. I dropped them. I drew closer to Nelson. There should be a universal language. English was taking too long. I would tell Nelson this. I had always thought Esperanto and Volapük and all of them, Basic English, were jokes or rackets meant to create sinecures, but that was wrong. I could have been adequate if the horsemen had been able to communicate with me in more than nine words, and I with them. Maybe Esperanto was not the answer, maybe something simpler was. I would never mock the proposition again. It could be made compulsory, universal. I could work on it with Nelson from someplace like Bern or Carmel. I ran toward Tsau.

  Now He Was Perfect

  When my lagging got more extreme, one of the riders was detailed to wait for me and insist I get up and ride with him. The main party, with Nelson, went on ahead. It took awhile for my man to work out the drill. He had to improvise some cushioning for me, using a putrid blanket, since his position was that we couldn’t both fit in the same saddle, which was in fact nonsense. He decided to jettison and cache one set of heavily loaded saddlebags from among the several he was carrying, but then changed his mind and put everything back the way it had been. He was very agitated regarding the whereabouts of my rifle. It bothered him that I didn’t have it, and it was evident he felt it was up to him to do something about it, like going back and trying to retrieve it. It was worth a fortune, of course. All our transactions were conducted ninety percent in sign language, which slowed us seriously. Finally he gave up on the rifle. I think he was convinced I was crazy, not someone he wanted on his docket for longer than was absolutely necessary. We set off and arrived not much more than half an hour after the others.

  Nelson was already in bed in a compartment in the infirmary. There was unguent all over his face. He seemed to be asleep. I lifted his sheet and he was naked, which irrationally bothered me. Fortunately his penis was nothing to be ashamed of. His left arm was splinted and bandaged, and there was a shorter splint on his right leg, near the ankle. I’m ashamed to say that his loss of weight was one of the first things that registered with me, not because it was alarming but because now he was perfect, his ribs defined but not overdefined, his belly slightly concave: he was the weight I’d been willing or wheedling him toward since we got together. I went over him again. There were bad abrasions on his right leg and his back and neck. Kakelo, for all her reservations about Tsau, was being impeccable and even slightly tender, I thought, in her ministrations, although her tenderness may have been a cover for the collective guilt they were all going to have to bear for not listening to me about sending help sooner. Everything had been done for him except for cleaning up his feet, which she let me do. I wanted to be reassured that he could talk, but she preferred me not to press that, saying it was urgent that he be let to sleep. He had taken juice, and he had recognized everyone, was the story. I was very faint and cold and was intermittently under the impression that I couldn’t make out colors. Kakelo read off everything she’d found wrong with him so far. The main injuries were a broken left arm, which he’d set himself very cleanly, and a broken ankle. There was some infection in the scrapes above the ankle, but not very much. There was sunpoisoning. His temperature was just above one hundred degrees. His collarbone might be broken, but perhaps not, we would see.

  A chair was brought in for me, and then a pallet, and then beef tea. There was a crowd outside, I knew.

  I thought I might lie down for a minute, and did, but wrenched myself up when I realized that before I did anything else I should go to the octagon and bring back a pair of clean undershorts and cover his shame with them. I knew it was ridiculous and I knew all there was to know about Tswana casualness toward nudity of every kind, but I felt impelled, partly because he was too beautiful. His beard was beautiful and when he was well I was going to make him let it grow high into his cheeks like this. He was the Idea of himself.

  After I’d reclad his loins my breathing normalized.

  I slept fitfully, getting up a few times for the purpose of putting my face against his chest, listening to his heart.

  There were birds nesting in the infirmary thatch, something I’d never noticed.

  Fantasies Vis-à-Vis His Seed

  The next day I was an obstruction to everyone. I don’t know if his imago was igniting martyr and saintly prisoner associations in me or what it was, but I was full of fiery feeling for Nelson. I was militant when someone came in with a libation she refused to characterize for me but which turned out to be beef blood, or largely that. It was worse when Kakelo was noncommittal and refused to bar this person or this remedy forever from Nelson’s sickroom.

  Also I had an agenda for them: I wanted them to make him awake and alert and talking. I was tired of hearing how well he had talked to everyone last night, before I got there. He had slept enough. While they carried out my agenda I would be there monitoring and managing to be physically in contact with Nelson, by touching him or taking his hand, at intervals of between ten minutes and a half hour. I was overflowing with helpful either/ors, on the order of either he says something intelligent by noon and not just someone’s name or we arrange for a medical evacuation. We had medevaced a woman with bleeding fibroids, I pointed out, but here we had the founder of this place in an unknown condition and were not getting on the transmitter because Kakelo was saying he only had some breaks and exhaustion. She got out a medical book to prove to me that he wasn’t concussed. I wouldn’t read it, not a paragraph, not a sentence. I wanted a rule made that no one could come into the room other than Kakelo or me unless I said all right. This was connected with desperate fantasies I was having vis-à-vis his seed, assuming the worst had happened. It humiliates me to admit that I was wondering if I could get him erect and then get over him and capture his seed. I could only contemplate doing this if first I established I could get him erect. And I could do that only if we had privacy. I would think of a ruse to get Kakelo off the scene.

  Now comes the ultimate with me. When you’re on the borders of shock you have waves of intense sense perception, it seems. I had one, and it involved the way I smelled and ipso facto must look. A spear entered my mind. I was too fat, not good enough for him physically, not equal, the way he looked. My triceps were going to hang down like hammocks, about which nothing could be done, it was already happening. Excuse me, I said. I went running to the octagon. People wanted to speak with me, but I shook them off. He was an icon of beauty, and what was I? I got home and found whatever I had in the way of makeup and made myself up, meaning just lipstick and mascara, I hope. I don’t know exactly today what I did to make myself beautiful. My dread was that he would wake up and see me and hate me and either die or turn to someone else. This was the state I was in. At that time I was probably at most ten pounds over my high school weight, to give an indication of how askew my perceptions fundamentally were. Obviously how I looked had taken precedence over how I smelled, because I did nothing about that. Also, walking, or, as I was given to then, running, was extremely painful, because I’d neglected to remove my boots after my excursion, and my feet were swollen because of Denoon’s socks not fitting. The problem had been that his socks had been clean and mine hadn’t, because once I moved in it became prime for me to see he always had clean things, and I had slipped when it came to myself.

  In my makeup I caused a hush.

  Nelson had, yet again, been awake, coughing this time, in my absence. But lo, he was asleep again. And in fact they wanted me to sleep or rest or wait in another compartment, if I wouldn’t mind. But first they wanted me to eat and to take something that would calm me. I ate porridge, refusing pills of any sort, but they had outsmarted me and put powders in the malted drink
I drank, sleeping powders. I went straight to my new room and had vertigo and was gone.

  His Hands in His Lap, Palms Up

  There he was, sitting up in a chair in the shade outside Sekopololo. He face was still glistening with unguent, but the swelling was much better. He was wearing pajama bottoms, there was a white cotton throw over his shoulders, his chest was naked, his hands were in his lap, palms up, one hand nested in the other in an odd style. You can use the word delighted all your life and never know what it means truly, or inly, as he occasionally liked to say. But then I knew. I ran to him and crouched down and put my arms around him. I was weeping. He looked at me, but nothing more demonstrative than touching my hair was done, I gathered because there was a crowd of fifteen or twenty people around, paying their respects, saying hello, just watching, keeping us company for a while, and he wanted to be decorous. Several women told me to be soft because his collarbone was bruised hard.

  Are you all right? I asked, the inevitable question.

  I am, he said. His voice was fine, steady and low.

  I pressed my cheek against his mouth and he made a kiss, but not right away.

  I was stringing disparate questions and sentiments together: Can I get you anything? Thank god, thank god. You look good, you look well. When can we go home? I elicited smiles and murmurs from him.

  Instantly it was time for Nelson to go back in. Kakelo was there with Dineo.

  Dineo said He has answered every question as to how he comes to us as he is. And when he closes his eyes it means to cease talking while he can rest.