White Dog Fell from the Sky

16



Twilight. An old woman was fishing in the dam, thin legs stretched down over the bank, her head bowed toward the water. Alice was there with her friend, Muriel, walking on the lip of the dam, just the two of them on that scar of earth, bulldozed like a bowl to collect water. The sun glowed red against the edge of the sky, the breath of wind still hot.

Alice and Lawrence had known Muriel in graduate school back in Providence. One of those odd quirks of fate had brought them to Botswana at the same time. When Alice had first met her, Muriel was happy in herself, happy to please anyone who crossed her path. Her hair went halfway down her back, and she was slender and willowy, her eyes magnified by large, round, rimless glasses. In the eight years since then, she had the same glasses, but her face was worn, less eager. Her husband Eric had come to Botswana as a hydraulic engineer, partly responsible for the building of this dam. Muriel was a librarian at the National Library.

Alice had asked to meet her after work.

The old woman landed a fish, popped it in a bucket, and walked down the path. Alice and Muriel stood next to each other, looking toward the dam, watching a flock of sacred ibis feed. The birds were very tall, white except for black tail feathers and black necks and heads. In the water’s reflection, their legs looked twice their actual length.

“So what’s going on?” asked Muriel.

“Lawrence and I are getting a divorce.”

Muriel stopped in her tracks. “Oh, Allie, I can’t believe it. You’ve always seemed perfect together.”

“Not so perfect, it turned out.”

“I’m really, truly sorry.”

“Lawrence got involved with someone. Erika Lunquist.”

“I don’t know her.”

“You’d probably know her if you saw her. I didn’t tell you before you went on leave. I thought it would blow over. I stayed at the Gordons’ a couple of weeks, and then Lawrence and I agreed we’d try and start over. He stopped seeing Erika, at least that’s what he said.

“I can almost respect a man who’s got enough passion to love two women at once. But it turns out I’m not the sort of person who can share. It tore me up, and I told him he had to choose. He chose to stay married. He said it was over with Erika, that it had been more about sex and fascination than love. Those weren’t his words, but that’s more or less what he said.

“So we took up life together again. But a couple of weeks later I ran into Hasse, Erika’s husband. He asked how I’d weathered the camping trip. ‘What camping trip?’

“‘The one our spouses were on together.’ I thought Lawrence had been working.

“When he got home from work, I lost it. He told me the trip had been planned for a long time, and they’d needed to say good-bye. Good-bye! That’s all you needed to say, I told him. One word. It didn’t require four days together. He said he understood why I was upset, he was sorry he’d hurt me, and that he’d never, ever lie to me again.

“But then it happened again. The third time, I told him it was over. I couldn’t be married to someone I couldn’t trust. In fairness, I can’t altogether blame him.”

“I can,” said Muriel.

“No, listen. My body didn’t want him, and he knew it. Who doesn’t want to be desired? Maybe I’d have done the same thing. The point is, the marriage was dying. And now it’s dead.”

The sun was half above, half under the horizon. It traveled down the sky slowly, and then seemed to plummet. The ibis began to move differently, their attention no longer underwater. They appeared to be listening for something, some signal. Suddenly they rose as one bird and spread across the sky in a long line. It felt like a kind of holiness, white wings dipped in black. Alice looked out over the calm, darkening waters of the dam and began to cry. She threw a rock hard toward the water, and it landed with a splash. The sky was deep purple except for a rising sliver of moon.

“Will you stay here?”

“I don’t know. I’m still in our house in the Old Village. He moved out with Daphne.”

“You gave him your beautiful Daphne?”

Don’t, she wanted to say. “Yes, I gave him Daphne. We’d better head back.”

Muriel walked in front of her, and every so often she turned around and said wise things, half of which Alice didn’t hear: “You’ll be happy again, you’ll see.”

Tears leaked out in the darkness. The path widened and soon they were walking side by side over a rutted track toward the place where they’d parked the truck. They held hands to steady each other in the dark.

Muriel started the truck and drove toward the Old Village. “You know,” said Alice, “you and Eric don’t have to stop liking Lawrence.”

“Are you kidding? I never want to see him again.”

Part of her was glad to hear those words. She never wanted to see him again, either.

At home, Muriel said good-bye, and her truck lights disappeared down the road. Alice opened a can of sardines for the cats, and Magoo purred and rubbed against her ankles. “Where’s Horse?” she asked. The long-legged, cross-eyed one.

She picked up the soapstone carving of the boy’s head she’d bought on that first trip here. The boy’s face was innocent, hopeful, as she’d been. The soft stone was greenish gray with small scratches and dents. She held it in her hands and thought about something she’d once said to Lawrence. They were lying in bed. He turned to her, hoping to make love, and she told him she couldn’t—her body felt nothing for his. It was true, but an unforgivable thing to say.

Once upon a time, she couldn’t have imagined a day without him, and now she shuddered to think of his hands touching her breasts, shuddered to think how she’d taken off her clothes while his eyes traveled the geography of her nakedness.

What scrap heap in the world could hold all the loves once felt, now vanished?

She set the sculpted head back on the table, got up, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed. The first issue of Botswana Notes and Records was on the bedside table. Her boss from the Ministry of Local Government and Lands had asked her to have a look at it before she completed the position paper on land use and the San people. She checked the table of contents and turned to an article about the hunting practices of the !Kung San. When a man is ready to hunt, she read, he smears a nerve toxin from the pupae of a small beetle along the upper shaft and point of an arrow, which is then wound with sinew and hardened over a fire; if he nicks himself with the poisoned arrow tip, he dies.

The San hunt in pairs. They position themselves downwind from the herd and choose an animal. The stalker moves forward while the other man watches and gives hand signals. When the stalker is within fifteen meters or so, he rises and shoots an arrow into the animal’s stomach. Depending on the freshness of the poison, it can take one to three days for an animal to die. The hunters see by the spoor when the animal is weakening. A gemsbok will grow sick unto death, stagger, and fall to its knees.

She lay the article facedown on her chest. Once, she’d held a Bushman arrow in her hands. The husband/wife anthropologist couple in Lobatse had showed her the arrow. Its head was made of fencing wire, pounded flat, the shaft was made of reed, the haft about ten centimeters long. A bone joint fit into the shaft and was bound with sinew to the head. It was very light, a thing of beauty.

She’d drafted this paper about land use, knowing far too little. Because she had a degree, because she could put words down on paper, she was helping to make decisions about people’s lives she knew next to nothing about. Of what possible benefit were her words to them?

She called Horse once more. Magoo, who thought it was a call to a second supper, rushed in from the garden. She went back to bed and turned the page to another article, about the great Sechele, chief of the Bakwena, who was born in the early 1800s. She read about how Sechele’s father had been murdered by his half brother, Moruakgomo, a villainously ambitious man. Moruakgomo had also murdered his half-witted brother, Segokotlo, his last obstacle to power. The brothers went out in the bush together, and Moruakgomo told his simple-minded brother that they were going to pray for locusts to come so their people would not die of hunger. “Here,” said Moruakgomo. “Here is where the gods live.” Poor Segokotlo bent down to put his head into a fresh ant bear hole, and Moruakgomo cut off his head with a hand axe.

Power and cruelty. Cruelty and power. The same old story. She turned off the light and lay there. In the darkness, tiny soft footsteps fell on the floor, closer, closer. She knew the sound, but somehow the steps filled her with dread. Mr. Magoo jumped on the bed and stood on her stomach, his eyes staring into the dark like a haunt. “Where’s Horse?” she asked. He rubbed his chin on hers and purred, his paws imprinting her throat and chest.