White Dog Fell from the Sky

30



Ian had already loaded the Land Rover with tents and food and tools and supplies before Alice was up. They left for the Ntwetwe Pan at five in the morning. The moon was gone, but a couple of stars still shone overhead.

“You look wonderful,” he said, taking her hand and touching the back of it to his cheek.

“Last night,” she said, “I bathed from stem to stern.”

“That makes two of us. You should have seen the drain. Like a mud bath. In about an hour, we’ll be as grubby as before.” He sounded happy at the prospect.

He climbed into the vehicle after her. “I thought we’d go to Kube Island and camp there, if you agree,” he said. “It’s between Ntwetwe and Sowa, on the southern end. We’ll drive across the pan as we did before, but we’ll go farther in. I think there’s still a track from near the island to Mopipi and Lake Xau. I brought two tents—the bigger one’s for you.”

As they drove west, the mopane scrub opened out to clumps of palm, and then closed in again. They passed a few springbok, a small herd of zebra. A lone male ostrich crossed the road in front of them. A few kilometers later, she asked him to stop so she could pee, and she stumbled away from the road over parched earth, swishing through yellow grass.

As they stood together at the northernmost edge of the pan looking south, the desolation seemed even more unnerving than before.

He said, “I’ve brought a high-lift jack.”

“Do you think we’ll need it?”

“Don’t know.”

As they proceeded across the pan, they were baking inside an oven on wheels. Islands were dotted here and there, almost perfectly round and covered with grass, some of them tiny, one large enough to host a small herd of gemsbok. They bumped over a gravel bed. She thought of the fish who’d swum here, small and great. The flamingos in such numbers they would have turned the sky the color of sunrise. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. The words came to her suddenly, ones she hadn’t spoken since Sunday school. Right behind them, she felt another force biding its time: something utterly without mercy. It waited in the heat and stillness, the light that blinded. The forces were one and the same, as though the whiteness had wiped clear every distinction on Earth.

Ian stopped the Land Rover. “Need to rest my eyes.”

“Know where we are?”

“The moon.” He turned to her and brushed the hair from her face. “Okay?” The place tore words from her mouth and replaced them with silence. She squeezed his hand and offered him an orange. He peeled it and held out half to her. By early afternoon, they’d reached Kube. Stunted baobabs dotted the surface of granite outcroppings. Yellow grasses blew in the west wind, rippling, as though a hand were being drawn across them.

They pitched the two tents side by side in the grass by the shore of the lake that once was. Ian rummaged around in the back of the vehicle and brought out a tall aluminum billy can that he filled with water. Alice had never seen anything like it. It had a hole in the center, all the way up. He put twigs in the space under and inside the elongated doughnut hole, and lit a small fire. The water boiled fast in this contraption, and a few minutes later, they sat in the shade of the Land Rover in two folding chairs, looking west, drinking tea from tin cups.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “I used to look at a picture book with my mom. There was a page with thousands of pink flamingos on a salt lake somewhere in Africa. Every time we came to that page, my mother would say how she longed to be in a place like that.”

“Do you long for places?”

“Not really. Melancholy is more my thing. But that’s different.”

“Is it?”

“The way it floats. Without an object.”

He touched her hand. “My longings have been of a different sort. How to be alone with Alice and away from Arthur Haddock.”

She smiled. “Here we are.”

“I thought you were going to hit me when I called you ‘lovey.’”

“I thought I was going to hit you too.”

“This one’s got some spunk, I said to myself.”

“Oh you did, did you?”

The wind sounded thin through the baobab trees, a kind of high, stretched-out sound. “I was thinking,” she said, “about what Ngwaga said about you.”

“Do you mean, will I ever be different?”

“I don’t want you to be anyone but you, Ian Henry.”

“Are you asking, how would it ever work if we were together?”

“Yes, I guess that’s what I’m asking.”

“I don’t know. It’s never worked before.”

She looked at him and dashed the dregs of her tea onto the ground. “I don’t believe the past controls the future.”

“Fair enough.”

“And the wind does get tired and have to stop blowing every so often.”

He stood up, leaned over, and kissed her. When she stood and pressed her body to his, her legs were weak from the wanting of him. She pulled him toward the large tent. It was like entering a mouth, with the heat of the sun gathered there. He left the large flap open to the wind and slipped off his shoes. She hugged him toward her and lifted his T-shirt up over his shoulders and head. He kissed her ear and her hair and her lips. She undid his belt buckle and fumbled him out of his shorts. She brushed her lips against his nipple. He shuddered, ripped off her shirt, unhooked her bra with one hand, arching her up against him as he unclasped her pants. His mouth touched her neck. His body was no longer young. Hands on damp skin. Here. And here. A scar rimpled the skin of his shoulder. What she felt was something like a hard rain: violence and brightness and beauty.

The wind sighed through the trees, but neither of them heard it.

They lay back against the sleeping bag, his arm under her head, her hair disheveled. His eyes were closed, his breath even. She watched him, his chest rising and falling. Wrinkles creased his earlobes. His age made him dearer to her. In some irrational part of her, she still thought she’d live forever, but she could see that he would not. She closed her eyes and slept until the heat made her stir. He woke and laid his palm against her hair. “Do you know the story of Lynx and Morning Star?”

“Tell me,” she said.

He stopped and looked at her, ran his hand forward through her hair.

“Morning Star wanted a bride, and out of all the animals, he chose Lynx. He’d seen her walking alone at night and fallen in love as he watched her move. Liquid, like a river.

“They were happy together, but no sooner had their union taken place than a shadow entered their lives. With hulking shoulders and hunger and jealousy, Hyena set out to break apart the marriage with her dark magic. She transformed the food of Lynx into poison that would rob her of her will to live. Lynx’s fur lost its shine. Her eyes grew dull. She no longer groomed herself or cared for anything.

“Hyena threw Lynx out of her hut and moved in. Lynx’s sister hastened to Morning Star and told him that the light of his life was in danger. Morning Star’s rage was unbounded. He flew to Earth with his spear in hand. Hyena saw him coming and rushed from the hut in terror. As Hyena dodged to protect herself from his spear, her hind leg caught on the coals of the cooking fire. She was burned so badly that from that day forward, she walked lopsided.

“Lynx grew strong again. Morning Star shone brightly between night and day, brighter than before because he knew he had to stay vigilant against the forces of darkness in the universe.”

“Vigilant against the forces of darkness,” she said. She lay with her back next to the tent wall, one hand under a bunched-up pillow, facing him. She could smell old rainy seasons, sun, and wind in the canvas. His elbow was bent, his hand holding up his head. She caught his index finger in her fist. “Are you afraid of anything?”

“Me?”

This amused her. As though someone else were in the tent with them. “Yes, you.”

He kissed her hair. “When I was a kid, I was terrified of great naked mole rats.”

She laughed.

“My father showed me a picture once in a book. I used to dream about them and wake up screaming. My mum would come rushing in, ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ and I’d say, ‘The Great Naked Mole Rats!’”

“What do they look like?”

“Tiny piggy eyes, so small they can hardly see.” He sat up in agitation. “Their skin is a pinky yellowish gray and all wrinkly, ending with a ratty tail; they have four huge yellowish buck teeth that dominate their face. I was obsessed with them. I did research at the local library, hoping to get to the bottom of it. It turns out their skin doesn’t have a neurotransmitter responsible for pain, so you can paint them with acid and they feel nothing. Their social life is like bees or termites. They have one queen and only a couple of select males who can reproduce. The rest are workers, functioning in a kind of caste system. Some are tunnelers, some are soldiers, protecting the colony. They tell who’s friend or foe by smell. They roll around in their shit to update their smell. When they’re cold, they huddle together in a disgusting hairless mass of flesh. When they’re hot, they head into the nether reaches of their tunnels. They live up to twenty years, longer sometimes, but a lot of that living is sleep. They’re like some great jaundice-skinned Uncle Harry who came to Christmas dinner and went to sleep on the couch and never left.”

“Do you have an Uncle Harry?”

“No. But if I did … You really wouldn’t believe how disgusting these naked mole rats are. I’ll have to find you a picture. In my young dreams, they were enormous. In fact they’re only a few centimeters long.”

She laughed again.

“Why? What’s so funny?”

She didn’t answer. “What about now? Are you afraid of anything now? You ducked my question.”

“Did I?” He held her palm and spread her fingers out one by one. He nibbled the webbed skin between her thumb and first finger. “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of bad people. But right now, at this moment, I’m afraid I won’t prove good enough for you.”

“Why would you say such a thing?”

“You don’t know me all that well.”

“I know enough.”

He grew serious. “What do you know?”

“I know you’re not easily domesticated. That you have unusual passions. That you have little patience for bureaucrats.”

“What you don’t know is that I’m stubborn to the point of intractable. And underneath the nice guy, I’m really a bit of a selfish bastard.”

She ran a finger around and over his nipple. “I’ll take you the way you are, all of you.”

That night, they lay side by side in the tent, exhausted. His hand was palm down on her belly, his eyes closed. By moonlight, she watched his face as he went from light to heavier sleep, the laugh lines around his eyes etched deep and then smoothing as he let go of the day. Heat radiated from his palm and dampened her belly. She felt gratefulness for him beside her and an odd dread. She didn’t trust that dread, knew its roots came from her mother. As a child, when she’d ridden her bicycle down her street, her mother’s voice echoed in her head, “Be careful!” while the wind blew free through her hair, singing a different song. Ian’s breath deepened beside her, and he began to snore softly, a gentle rasping sound.

Who could blame her mother? To say good-bye to a young husband one night, to watch him climb into his police cruiser, to be woken in the middle of the night with the news. It had been an exciting story to tell in school. Sometimes she said her father’s police cruiser had exploded. All they found was his badge. When she was older, she no longer told the story to anyone. She imagined her father in his car, a quarter moon in a dark sky. Venus and Jupiter oddly aligned near the moon, Venus so bright, it nearly outshone the moon. And that moment when her father leaped, believing he would land on solid bridge and finding only air beneath him, he would have felt astonishment, perhaps not even fear.

What she wanted to keep alive were the bright eyes of a father she’d seen in photographs, smiling next to her mother. And if she was honest with herself, she wanted to share a piece of that awe, that largeness as he fell through the night sky, a small comet, streaking down as most fathers do not. She had known him only briefly. There were no particular memories to miss, only that moment when he’d been almost as bright as a planet.

She turned and put her arm over Ian’s waist. His eyes flickered as though he were still driving in deep sand, and then his breath settled.

She first saw it as a red scratch the next day, laying down a delicate path from her foot toward her ankle. She thought it was made by a thorn. But later, her head throbbed and a fever began to rampage through her blood, roaring into her ears, singeing bones, hollowing her eye sockets into dry craters. She told Ian she was frightened. “I don’t know what’s the matter.” Her vision blurred and scrambled—the tent roof turned in a slow circle she thought was the sky. She threw the pillow away from her, as Ian tucked it under her head again. His voice was magnified beyond bearing. When he spoke, tears came to her eyes. His face pressed close to hers. “Tell me where you hurt.” The thought of answering him—like vomiting up the center of the Earth. She was out of her head. She scrambled out of the tent which enclosed her like a body bag. He brought out a mat for her to lie on and laid wet towels over her chest. When darkness swept over them, she had no idea where she was. The stars fell, growing brighter as they neared the campfire, hovering briefly, then growing larger still, swirling in fiery reds and yellows and blues. She turned in space, lifted from the ground, somersaulted and twirled like an astronaut without an umbilical cord.

Ian said, “Did you get bitten?”

“Where?” she screamed.

He held a flashlight, pointing at her feet first. He was trying to vaporize them. She fought him with all her strength.

“Bloody hell!” he cried. “Do I have to belt you one?!” He sat on her chest and held her arms. She didn’t remember what happened next. Maybe he knocked her out. Later, he told her that in the light of his flashlight, he’d found the red streak, all the way to her thigh by then. And he dosed her with the antibiotics he always carried—wrestling her to get them down.

She found herself in an endless dream, trying to get a nest of snakes to a hospital. They were in a Pyrex custard cup, writhing and spilling and shooting out over the lobby of a hotel. She kept gathering them, and they’d shrink and pulse, then shoot out again. The dream went round and round, and she began to cry, out of frustration and helplessness.

And then her skin began to cool. Her eyes opened and fell onto Ian. No disintegrating heavens, just the two of them camped under a couple of dwarf baobab trees, the sun coming up warm and bright over the pan, doves making their mournful sound in the trees. His face was deeply lined, dark bags under his eyes.

“You’re back,” he said, holding her.

“What do you think it was?”

“Tick bite fever.”

“How do you know?”

“Between your toes. I found the evidence last night. There’s a streak of red running up your leg.”

“If it had reached my heart, would I have died?”

“No. No, you wouldn’t have. I was going to pack you straight into the Land Rover, but I didn’t know if I could find my way in the dark.”

“What did I say to you last night?”

“Best goes unrepeated. You were a wild animal …”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re all right, my love, that’s what matters. What do you want for breakfast? I’m thinking we should eat and then go get a proper antibiotic for you.”

“What did you give me?”

“Erythromycin, I think.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Sometimes I switch the bottles.”

“Well, it’s working … and I don’t want to go. Why should we?”

“It seems like a good idea.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“All right, but what do you want for breakfast?”

“A cup of tea?”

“And what else?”

“Some porridge?”

“And what else?”

“That’s it.” She held out her hand to him.

He grabbed it and grew quiet. “Don’t ever do that … I couldn’t bear it, Alice … ”

He turned to go, but she hung onto his hand. “It goes both ways.”

They stayed there that day and another night. He made stew, and they sat in the shade on the camp chairs, watching the birds come and go, the light shift over the pan. “If that tick hadn’t gotten me,” she said, “we would have left this morning and we would have missed all this.”

Toward nightfall, she said, “I’ve been thinking that I’m not going to be able to come with you after all. My legs are weak as noodles. There’ll be another time. I’d like you to drive me back to Francistown tomorrow and put me on an overnight train.”

“I’d carry you up those hills if you want.”

She touched his lips.

“Or I can drive you back to Gaborone.”

“The conductor will bring a blanket roll. I’ll be rocked all night. I’ll call my neighbor and ask her to pick me up on the other end.”

“I want to drive you.”

“I want you to be doing what you were planning to do. You’ll tell me about it. Maybe we can meet halfway in a couple of weeks when you come back.”

“It’s what you want?”

“It’s what I want.”

That night, they lay together in the big tent. She was still feverish, and when he came into her, she felt his coolness against her heat. She would have liked him to stay there forever. They moved together gently, peacefully, stopping, beginning again, her fever knocking down the borders between them.

They slept, and woke early. Morning Star was brighter than ever, hope on the horizon, the howl of the hyena banished. Ian drove across the pan, then northward, back to Gweta and east to Francistown. They ate dinner together, and he walked her to the platform where the southbound passenger train waited. “Stay here tonight,” he said, “and let me drive you in the morning.”

“No,” she said, kissing him. She let him go, and he put his arms around her again and kissed her harder. She climbed up the steps into the train. When she opened the window of the compartment to wave, he was already walking down the platform. He didn’t turn.