Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

by Alexandra Fuller

  Mum looks up from Violet’s body and pushes hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, which means a smudge of blood up her nose and above her eyebrow. She says, “I wish you’d wait for backup.”

  But Dad kicks his motorbike alive, and I watch the red taillight wind down the hill and around the corner, humping as it goes over the big culvert at the corner, and then the sound of the two-stroke engine is absorbed by the night.

  “Hold on,” says Mum to Violet, into the silence left by the disappearing roar of Dad’s motorbike. She says, “Don’t die. Hold on.” The lamp hisses and there are the usual singsong, rasping calls of frogs from the pool. The dogs scratch and whine as they stretch and recurl themselves into comfortable positions and there is the rhythmic, slip-slap, of some of the dogs licking their balls. Usually Mum says, “Hey, stop that!” when she hears them licking their balls, but not now.

  Dad comes back from the compound. Mum has emptied one drip into Violet’s arm. While the drip has been emptying into the nearly flat vein, Mum has scrambled to the front of the Land Rover and turned on the mobile radio. She has called for backup. She says, “HQ, HQ. This is Oscar Papa 28, do you read?”

  There is a small, crackling pause. Then, “Oscar Papa 28, this is HQ. Reading you strength five. Go ahead. Over.”

  “We need mobile medics. We have one African female in critical condition. Over.”

  “Have you been under terrorist attack? Over.”

  “Negative. It appears to be . . . domestic in nature. Over.”

  There is a hissing pause of disappointment, and then the voice comes back at us. “Sending mobile medic team to Oscar Papa 28. Over.”

  “Thank you. Over and out.”

  Dad comes back. He says, “It was July.”

  Mum straightens up and stares at Dad. “What?”

  “The boys haven’t seen him since this morning. He’s not in his hut.”

  “Fucking kaffir,” says Mum.

  “The boys are coming with me. I’m going to catch him.”

  “The boys” are Dad’s most loyal laborers. Duncan is the boss-boy. He has a handsome open face, with a long nose and wide-set eyes. Cephas is a small squat man whose father, Chibodo, is our witch doctor. Chibodo has very long nails and is very, very old. He smells as old as an ancient tree, like burnt bark. He doesn’t talk very much, but when he opens his mouth he has only a few teeth (black and brown pegs) and his tongue looks very pink, thin and alive and wet. He sits at night in the watchman’s hut, right up against the hills, and watches the maize, scaring off the baboons that come to steal corncobs. He has an old plow disk hanging from a tree which he beats with a simbe, like the old woman in the TTL who warns terrorists when a convoy is coming. Cephas has learned secrets from his father: he can track animals that have passed by days before. He can smell where terrorists have been, see from the shift in the landscape where they are camping. He can put his mind inside the mind of any other living thing and tell you where it has gone. He can touch the earth and know if an animal has passed that way. But he can’t tell you why. Philemon, the cattle boy, can read tracks, but he can’t read tracks as well as Cephas. Philemon is the one who can quiet a cow in labor and sing the calf into life when it is born too sick to stand. Cloud is the man from the workshop who whittles wood with a lathe into salt and pepper pots, spice racks, eggcups. He smells of the shiny paint he sprays onto the wood and his eyes are always burning red from the ganja he smokes.

  “I’m going into the hills. He’ll be trying to get to Mozambique.”

  “He’s armed,” says Mum. July has stolen knives. “And he’s not alone. He couldn’t carry all that stuff on his own. You’ll need backup.”

  Dad says, “I’ll be okay.”

  “At least call.”

  Dad radios for backup but no one will come with him. This is not a military emergency, it’s only a robbery. We have not been attacked by terrorists. Dad’s friends tell him not to go into the hills. There are terrorists in those hills, and the hills themselves are unsafe: they are edged by minefields.

  Dad settles on his haunches and smokes. Violet moans.

  The men—Dad’s “boys”—arrive on foot. I see them running steadily up the hill to the house; they have lit the branches of a tree for light. They have a conference with Dad and decide to wait until just before first light before leaving for the hills. They don’t want to run into a terrorist camp by mistake. Dad gives the men a packet of cigarettes each. They are talking in low, intense voices to one another in Shona; their words are like water over rocks, bubbling, soft, incessant. Dad packs food and water, a shovel, a hatchet, matches, and a gun. They will drive as far as they can into the hills and then walk toward Mozambique from there.

  Before first light, before Dad leaves, the mobile medics arrive. By the time they reach the house, Violet has had three drips, one in one arm and two in the other, and her eyes have fluttered open once or twice, but each time the pain washes over her again and drags her back deep into a blessed, dark, empty place. Near death.

  Mum says, “Fergodsake, hold on. You can make it.”

  The first medic, a man, hops out of the Land Rover, gun slung over his shoulder, and comes over to look at Violet. He turns away and vomits behind the flower bed in which our gardener has allowed some cannas to live. The second man comes out. He waves a cigarette at Dad.

  “Howzit?”

  Dad says, “Okay.”

  The medics swarm around the back of the Land Rover. Mum crawls out. Her hands and clothes are covered with blood. “She’s going to make it,” she says.

  The medics stare. “Shit, I dunno, hey. She looks pretty bad,” says one.

  Another says softly, “Jesus Christ!”

  The medics roll Violet onto a stretcher. She is soft and heavy. The stretcher sags under her weight. They put her into the back of their Land Rover.

  Mum says, “Will you have a drink?” It’s almost light. “Or a cup of tea?”

  They accept tea out of tin cups and drink it quickly as the eastern sky softens with dawn. And then they drive away and we never see Violet again. We hear later that she got out of hospital and went back to her village. Afterward the Umtali Post writes a story, “Farmer Saves Maid’s Life.”

  Mum says, “The farmer had nothing to do with it. It was the farmer’s wife.”

  The sky is starting to streak vigorously now, pink-gray. Dad and his gang head off for the hills.

  Mum says, “Why don’t you take the dogs, at least?”

  Dad shakes his head. “Too much noise.”

  Mum goes into her bedroom but she does not sleep. Vanessa and I don’t sleep. We stay on our beds, with the dogs, and our eyes sting and our mouths are dry. It is breakfast time but there is no one to feed us. Violet is sliced and bleeding in the back of the medics’ Land Rover, heading for hospital; July is running for Mozambique with all our clothes and money and Mum’s rings. Mum is not talking. Dad has gone to kill July.

  “Let’s play cards,” says Vanessa.

  “I can’t. I’m too hungry.”

  “I’ll make you some Pronutro,” says Vanessa. “Then will you play cards with me?”

  “Okay.”

  Vanessa mixes the powdered soybean meal into a paste with some milk and sprinkles sugar on the top for me. She puts the kettle onto the woodstove for tea. The fire has gone out and we try to make another one but the fire from the newspapers we shove into the stove’s mouth generates only a thick, oily, black smoke.

  Vanessa says, “We’ll have to wait for tea.” She finds some bottles of Coke, which we are ordinarily allowed only on Sunday, and opens one.

  “We’ll get into trouble, hey.”

  “We’d better share,” she says, pouring the contents of the bottle into two plastic cups. Warm Coke and Pronutro for breakfast. It feels like camping.

  We sit opposite each other at the dining room table. Vanessa patiently builds a barrier around me because she can’t watch me eat. She puts the milk jug in front of my face an
d sits back down and says, “Not enough.” She fetches a coffee can and some boxes and bottles from the pantry. From behind the barrier she says, “I can still hear you. You should try and eat more slowly.” But I’m too hungry to slow down, I hurry food into my drum-tight empty stomach, which swells with the pasty, cold porridge and the warm Coke.

  Then Vanessa brings the cards and dismantles the barrier, and we play war.

  Dad’s story comes out in bits and pieces, and I catch it from the stories told around the bar at the Club. And sometimes, when I’m older, around campfires in Malawi and Zambia, there will be quiet after supper when we are full and heavy and drinking and staring into the fire. And Dad will be smoking a cigarette and suddenly he will clear his throat and say, as if it were still relevant, “Best damned tracker I ever saw was that Cephas.” And he tells me the story of that night.

  Dad and his boys—the men—park near Ross Hilderbrand’s old farm. Before the war, there were white farmers all over these hills. They were high enough above the hot, steamy valley to grow coffee in thick red soil. But the farmers here were intimidated by their proximity to the border and they were attacked by terrorists and their labor were abducted and taken to Mozambique. All those farmers have left the area. Now, quick-growing bougainvillea and Mauritius thorn have started to hang thickly from the verandas of those old farmhouses. In the gardens, cannas have spread over the edge of their beds and the grass has grown like long untidy hair and the windows have had rocks thrown through them. Bats shit on the floors and hang upside down from the ceilings, where yellow-brown stains from rat pee spread like tea spills above them. The whitewashed sitting rooms where dinner parties (with proper place settings and flowers on the table and servants in white uniforms, stiff with desperate civilization) took place are creeping green with mold. The irrigation ditches that fed the cow troughs are swollen with buffalo bean.

  Cephas is the lead tracker; he takes off at a run, watching the ground steadily, not hesitating, reading soft signs in the dew-crushed earth which tell him secrets. The other men hang back and let Cephas lead until he is steadily, confidently on the track. He has found the place, he says, where the men have gone. He says, “There are two.”

  To begin with Dad can’t see how Cephas can tell which way July and his companion have gone—and he is not sure how Cephas can be so sure of himself—but then they find things that the cook has dropped. A cooking pot, a dress, some packaged food. July or his companion is wearing Dad’s gumboots. When the men come to a muddy place, they can see the tracks clearly. And then they find the gumboots, discarded in the grass. Cephas laughs: “His feet are getting pain.” July is not used to gumboots. He is given a new pair of Bata tackies every year but he chops the toe out of them and ties the laces loosely so that his dry-cracked feet will fit in them even when they swell in the heat.

  When the men come to a river, wide and deep enough that it would soak them to their waists, they hesitate. Cephas shakes his head. “They didn’t cross here,” he says, and then he sees that there is an old bridge upstream. The path that used to lead to and from the bridge has long ago been swallowed by thick ground cover. Small shrubs and baby trees have started to fill in the swath cut by the cleared old growth. Cephas says, “They saw the bridge, too.” He holds up his hand and the men drop behind him. He has gone crouched and his energy is forward and is like something you can almost feel—like wind when it moves the leaves and grass. He creeps over the bridge silently and the other men follow him and then suddenly Cephas stops and shakes his head. In one sweep he retraces his steps back to the middle of the bridge and jumps up and down on it.

  “They are under here,” he says. “See? This bridge should bend. It does not bend.”

  Dad’s “boys” scramble into the river and pull July and his companion out from under the bridge, where they have been hanging on to the old, half-rotten beams with their fingernails. They haul them onto the bank. For some minutes Dad’s “boys” beat the thieves, kicking them and punching them, until Dad says, “Let’s get them back to the car.”

  Dad radios Mum from the car. “Oscar Papa 28, Oscar Papa 28, this is Oscar Papa 28 mobile. Do you read, over?”

  Mum runs from her bedroom, but Vanessa and I have heard the Agricalert crackle into life, too. “Tim? Oscar Papa 28 mobile? This is Oscar Papa 28. Are you all right? Over.”

  There is a pause and then Dad’s voice, hissing with static, “I got the bastards. We found your rings. Over and out.”

  Mum shouts, “Wa-hoo!”

  And Vanessa and I spontaneously perform our version of a Red Indian War Dance around the veranda—“Wa-wa-wa-wa”—we skip on alternate legs.

  By the time Dad comes back with July and his companion, both the cook and his accomplice have swelling eyes and lips and hard bonelike lumps on their faces. Vanessa and Mum and I are standing in the yard. When Mum sees July get out of the car, she runs at him. She is screaming, “Fucking kaffir! Murderer!” She starts to beat him but Dad pulls her back.

  He says, “Let the boys deal with him.” He nods to the “boys.” The militia who have come to arrest July and his companion turn and look the other way.

  Dad’s “boys” kick July and in one soft sound, like a sack of mealie meal hitting concrete, he buckles to his knees. And then they kick him again and again. July curls himself up and covers his head with his hands but the feet find holds to flip him back on his belly and prize open his arms to expose his belly and ribs, which I can hear cracking like the branches of the frangipani tree. His skin splits open like a ripe papaya.

  Then Dad says, “That’s enough, hey.”

  But they don’t stop.

  Dad says to the militiamen, “You’d better pull them off before they kill the fucking bastard.”

  The militiamen break the “boys” from the tight scrummage of kicking. They put July and his accomplice in the back of their white pickup. The accomplice folds over himself like a collapsible chair, but July grips blindly to the edge of the truck, perching on bloodied legs. He has been handcuffed and his eyes are almost shut with swelling. As the militia drive off down the road, he makes one last attempt to escape, flinging himself from the moving car and hitting the dirt road; it seems impossible he doesn’t burst on impact. Two of the militiamen explode out of the front of the truck and then dust kicks up and the white truck and the men and July vanish from view for a moment. When the dust clears, they are dragging July behind the truck by a rope. He runs, his legs spinning like an egg whisk, until he is jerked off his feet and then he is pulled twisting behind the vehicle until it reaches the end of the driveway. After that, the militiamen throw him in the back of the truck and he does not try to jump out again.

  Bubbles, Bobo, and Vanessa

  SELLING

  What I can’t know about Africa as a child (because I have no memory of any other place) is her smell; hot, sweet, smoky, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass. When, years later, I leave the continent for the first time and arrive in the damp wool sock of London-Heathrow, I am (as soon as I poke my head up from the intestinal process of travel) most struck not by the sight, but by the smell of England. How flat-empty it is; car fumes, concrete, street-wet.

  The other thing I can’t know about Africa until I have left (and heard the sound of other, colder, quieter, more insulated places) is her noise.

  At dawn there is an explosion of day birds, a fierce fight for territory, for females and food. This crashing of wings and the secret language of birds is such a perpetual background sound that I begin to understand its language. A change in the tone, an increase in the intensity of the birds’ activity, will break into my everyday world and I will know that there is a snake somewhere, or I will look skyward (the way a person might automatically, almost subconsciously, check their watch against the radio’s announcement of time) and confirm a hovering hawk.

  In the hot, slow time of day when time and sun and thought slow to a dragging, shallow, pale cra
wl, there is the sound of heat. The grasshoppers and crickets sing and whine. Drying grass crackles. Dogs pant. There is the sound of breath and breathing, of an entire world collapsed under the apathy of the tropics. And at four o’clock, when the sun at last has started to slide west, and cool waves of air are mixed with the heat, there is the shuffling sound of animals coming back into action to secure themselves for the night. Cows lowing to their babies, the high-honeyed call of the cattle boys singing “Dip! Dip-dip-dip-dip” as they herd the animals to the home paddocks. Dogs rising from stunned afternoon sleep and whining for their walk.

  The night creatures (which take over from the chattering, roosting birds at dusk) saw and hum with such persistence that the human brain is forced to translate the song into pulse. Night apes, owls, nightjars, jackals, hyenas; these animals have the woo-ooping, sweeping, land-traveling calls that add an eerie mystery to the night. Frogs throb, impossibly loud for such small bodies.

  There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night. This is when we are startled awake by Dad on tobacco-sale day. This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing, and when terrorists (who know this fact) are most likely to attack.

  Dad shakes my shoulder. “Come on, Chookies.”

  I startle awake, in the quick, gasping, suddenly alert way of all people who have lived in a war (and for which there is no cure, ever, not even now).

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” says Dad (who naturally suffers a more extreme version of this where’ s-the-danger response to being shaken awake).

  Vanessa is awakened by my quiet panic. “What?” Her urgent hiss reaches across to the jumping black shadow of Dad against candlelight.