White Dog Fell from the Sky

34



Alice looked up from her desk on Friday afternoon onto a blank concrete wall. She’d finished the position paper on land use that she’d promised her boss, and delivered it. She pictured herself at the cocktail party after work, holding a glass of wine, making small talk with people she never wanted to see in the first place. The hell with it, she thought. She returned a couple of phone calls, wrote a memo, and went out to her truck. A restless wind blew, and before long, she was driving in rain so violent, it felt mythic. She made her way north half as fast as normal, nearly blinded, through rivers of mud. By the time she arrived it was nearly dark. She was drenched getting inside. The Dew Drop Inn felt damp and deserted. She called out a hello. Ian appeared from the back and wrapped her in his arms. He placed a small parcel in her hands and moved a strand of her streaming hair behind her ear.

“What’s this?”

“I hope you like it.”

She unwrapped the package and found a wooden object, a little bigger than the palm of her hand. She raised her eyebrows.

“A Bushman piano,” he said. “Hold it like this and pluck the keys with your thumb.” It made a clanking sound, accompanied by the rattle of ostrich egg beads strung onto a metal wire.

“I adore it.”

“An old man gave it to me. It’s made from stolen fence wire. The wood was blackened over a fire.”

She kissed him on the mouth. She was about to tell him it was the nicest present anyone had ever given her when Berndt, the owner, appeared from behind a faded curtain, looking rumpled, as though he’d been napping. He was sixty something, with a smell of cigarettes clinging to him. Alice’s hand rested furtively on Ian’s ass, his on hers.

“Right, then,” Ian said quickly, crisply, “time for us to get settled in.” He turned to Alice. “Berndt has given us a rondavel, separate from the house, out back.” She could tell he’d engineered this separate dwelling.

But Berndt wouldn’t hear of it. “Dinner is served,” he said. “There’s no point going out in that rain and then coming in again.” There’d be beef. That went without saying. Potatoes. A mushy veg. And some kind of inedible pudding with custard sauce. That was optimistic. She’d eaten here a couple of times before. She didn’t want dinner, she wanted this man beside her.

Berndt led the way to a large room in the central part of the inn, facing out to the darkness. Ian and Alice were the only guests.

Then Boom Boom entered, an Australian woman who’d taken over the kitchen at some point during the past year. Who knew how she’d come to be here? She was large, loud, and wore a pink satin stole tipped with fur, a long, flowing sequined skirt, and little yellow pumps that she’d poured her feet into. Her lipstick, bright crimson, was applied in a great pointed M on her upper lip.

She’d hired five Batswana—boys she called them—as helpers and cooks. Two of the boys stood out in the dining room, hands clasped over their crotches, looking cowed, waiting to bring out the food.

They served tiny Korean pancakes with a ginger sauce for appetizers, fresh bream for the main course. Boom Boom drank steadily—tumblers of Irish whiskey—and played Strauss waltzes and orchestral potboilers on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The door opened, and a man blew in whose eyes were wild and dazed. Berndt invited him to sit down and have some dinner and asked where he’d come from.

“Francistown.” He’d had some work up there.

There was a silence. Francistown lay to the north, and the only road between Francistown and Mahalapye crossed a single-lane bridge with no guard rails. Even on the sunniest day, the bridge was a horror to cross, with its long drop to the river. But tonight, with the river rising to flood level, the bridge would have been hidden, indistinguishable from water.

“How in the name of bloody hell did you get over the bridge?” asked Berndt.

The man, a stranger to these roads, said, “What bridge?”

They looked at him.

“You never saw the bridge?” asked Ian. “You’ve got a bloody angel sitting on your shoulder.”

“I never saw anything,” the man said.

“You need to thank your God,” said Berndt, pouring him a Scotch.

The man downed it, his hands shaking. “I have children,” he said, “six of them.”

Alice felt death’s cold breath on the back of her neck. She thought of that rushing water, a man passing over a one lane bridge through a gift of pure grace. He had a small mustache on a large, florid face. His eyes kept saying, Why me, why was I allowed to live?

“You never know how you’ll die,” said Berndt, “or when. I read once that more people are kicked to death by mules …”

“Our friend here is thinking of his children,” Ian interrupted.

There was an awkward silence. “It’s all right,” said the man. “I didn’t die.”

“Thank God,” said Alice.

“You live a charmed life,” said Ian, standing. “Good luck to you. And to your family.” He shook the man’s hand. “I think we’ll be heading off to bed. First-rate dinner. Our compliments to Boom Boom and her staff.”

They refused Berndt’s offer of an umbrella—it would only have shredded in the wind. Holding hands in the darkness, they tottered forward while the rain poured down their necks and streamed off their feet. Ian caught her as she fell over the stone threshold in front of the door. She opened it and pushed it shut behind them, and they grabbed for each other.

“I’ll light the lamp,” he whispered.

“No.” Her body shook. She tugged at his trousers and pulled his wet shirt off, her teeth chattering. He wrapped her in a blanket, but it wasn’t cold she was feeling. She felt the mane of his hair, wet around her face as he leaned over her on the bed, the smell of him, earth.

Was the world still here? Dark penetrated every corner of the room. She stroked his hair and ran her finger over the outside of his ear. His hand anchored her, held squarely in the center of her back.

“You’re amazingly lovely,” he said.

“You can’t see me.”

“I can feel you.”

She burrowed her head lower until it lay against his chest. The sheets held the smell of them, and under that, the remnants of sun when they’d hung on the line to dry.

“I wonder what that poor bastard is thinking right now.”

“That more people die from being kicked by mules …”

He laughed. “It almost makes me believe in some madman up there pulling the strings.”

She stroked his shoulder. “Did you ever believe in a madman in the sky?”

“I had a devout period early on. But then I broke our neighbor’s parlor window by mistake. My dad gave me a thrashing, and I understood there was no God. The smashed window was an accident, and I thought God should have known that and made my father forgive me.”

Smiling into his chest, she said, “Maybe you were being tested.”

“I failed the test.” He got up and lit the kerosene lamp. It sputtered and flickered and threw crazy shadows around the room as the rain slashed at the window.

“You know the odd thing?” he asked.

“What?”

“I believe in the gods who aren’t my own more than I ever believed in the God I was supposed to believe in.” He stroked her hair the way you’d stroke a cat. “Did you ever see The Seventh Seal?”

She nodded.

“That guy blowing in tonight reminded me of the scene—remember? That little family of actors fleeing in the covered wagon through the forest in the storm, death at their heels?”

“I remember.”

“I saw that film at least five times. You remember the knight?”

“Yes.”

“My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning. And then he says he’ll use his temporary reprieve from Death for one meaningful deed.”

“What would you do for a reprieve?”

“I don’t believe in good deeds. As soon as you call them good, they stop being good. I’d do what I’m doing now. My whole life is a temporary reprieve, running out every day.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m not young.”

“Well, you can’t leave before I do.”

“There’s an excellent chance I will.”

“If you keep having showdowns with ranchers, yes. Promise me you’ll stop.”

“I’ll think about stopping when I’ve done one more section of the Kuke fence.”

“Please.”

“This matters to me,” he said.

“I know. Those animals matter to me too. But you matter more.”

They were quiet together a moment before he said, “I’ve never before felt the way I feel about you. Not when I was with Gwyneth, not with anyone ever before.”

She kissed him. “Do you still talk to her?”

“To Gwyneth?” His eyes shifted away from hers, and he sat up in bed. “Actually, I happened to run into her a few weeks ago. She was up in Francistown on business. It wasn’t planned. It was the day you left.” He hesitated. “I won’t lie to you, Alice. We spent the night together.”

She felt hard slapped. “That very night?”

“She was in bad shape.”

“So you thought you’d cheer her up.”

“Alice.”

“You said it was over.”

“It is over.”

“How could you say what you just said to me after spending the night with her?”

“What I said to you is true, true as anything I’ve ever spoken.”

“I won’t be ‘the other woman’ around the edges of your marriage.”

“Alice, please, you’re not listening.”

“That very night you put me on the train?”

“Darling, you’re being foolish.”

“I’m not foolish.” She crawled out of bed, threw on a shirt and a pair of shorts and headed into the rain. She’d forgotten her shoes, and she wasn’t going back for them. The path was a stream, and she was crying hard now. The lights of the main house were still on, and she made her way toward them, over rough stones, and then beyond them, into her truck. She sat behind the steering wheel and thought of driving home, but she wouldn’t make it in this weather, and she’d left her purse and keys behind. Her body was still warm from his, and then it wasn’t warm anymore. The water on her body and clothes evaporated, and she began to shiver.

She thought of Ian sitting on the bed alone in that little rondavel, and her heart went halfway out to him. After she and Lawrence had split, hadn’t she told Muriel that the final straw wasn’t Erika, but his dishonesty? Was that a crock, or had she meant it? Ian told her the truth. So he lost his head one night. Was that a crime?

But the very night he’d put her on the train? It felt as though their time on the pan had meant nothing to him. But that wasn’t true, and she knew it.

He was sitting on the floor when she came in, his back against the bed, his feet stretched straight out in front of him, his hair every which way.

“Darling, you’re soaked,” he said. He tried to wrap her in a blanket, but she shrugged him off, still crying, and sat on the bed against the headboard. He sat back down on the floor. “Look, at least let me tell you. Gwyneth and I haven’t lived together for four years. She’s with another bloke. But she’s been depressed. She needed to talk. Yes, I was trying to cheer her up, and one thing led to another. It was a one-for-old-time’s-sake kind of thing. It just happened.”

She looked at him. “It didn’t just happen. You weren’t exactly a bystander.”

“I know that.”

“And how come you’re not divorced if you haven’t been together in four years?”

“We haven’t gotten around to it.”

“How could you not get around to it?”

“It hasn’t been a priority. The marriage is over. There were no worldly goods to divide, no children. I don’t need a magistrate or a piece of paper to tell me it’s finished.”

“Are you planning to keep on f*cking each other?”

Angry now, he said, “I’m fond of her, she’s fond of me. But it was a mistake … Maybe somewhere in me, I knew how serious it was with you. Maybe I was a bit scared.”

“Do you want to be free? Because if you do, you are.”

“Look, I’m sorry, my love. What more can I say?” His tone softened. “I’ve gone raving bonkers over you. If that’s not enough, then I’ll be off.”

She regarded him coolly. “It feels sloppy to still be married. Sloppier still to spend the night with her.”

“I’m sloppy.”

There was an edge in his voice, something she hadn’t heard before. Impatience, a touch of if this isn’t good enough for you, well, then f*ck it.

There didn’t seem to be anything more to say. But it also didn’t seem possible to go on. A door slammed inside her head, but it wasn’t she who’d slammed it. Something in him. Some hard indifference: Don’t try to change me, or there’ll be trouble. Registering it, she backed off.

She lay back against the pillow, wrapped in misery. She loved this man, and there he was sitting on the floor. Take him, warts and all, or leave him was what he was saying.

She patted the bed. “Come on up here,” she said. “What are you doing down there?”

They slept late the next day. The rain and wind had stopped by the time he opened his eyes. The sun traced its way from the right side of a red lacquer chest and made its way toward a hideous umbrella stand made from an elephant foot. Ian peered into Alice’s face as she slept. She’d kicked off the covers and wore only a white T-shirt. He loved her small breasts, the androgynous appeal of her body.

He shifted quietly in bed, saw the striations of light coming in the window, and thought of snow, the long shadows of trees out his window when he’d lived in Norway with Gwyneth years ago. He’d wake in the middle of the night and look out a small window by their loft bed. Sometimes the moon would be there, sometimes the wind, sometimes utter silence. He missed the cold, the way it narrowed thought down to the pinch of survival. But he didn’t miss the crowding, the small rooms, the two of them huddled in front of a double bar electric fire.

He regretted the night in Francistown for Alice’s sake, but it had also felt right at the time. He hadn’t tried to explain this to Alice, but he didn’t believe in the sharp edges of endings. That’s really why he hadn’t bothered with the divorce. Gwyneth had needed him that night. They still understood each other, and it had happened. They’d still be together if they hadn’t fought so much. She was a good sort underneath all that mess of depression and self-delusion and self-involvement, but he couldn’t take the fighting and the continual mood shifts.

Alice stirred and opened her eyes. She smiled when she saw him. And then folded her arms over her breasts.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked softly.

“I don’t know.”

He watched while she got out of bed, pulled off the T-shirt and pulled on a different shirt and shorts, and splashed water on her face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Why?”

“You look far away.”

“I’m still half in a dream.”

He searched her face for signs of trouble. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know. Other people’s dreams are boring.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“I was standing at the bottom of a ravine looking up at the lights of a vehicle, way up high at the lip of a cliff. Suddenly the lights plunged over the top, bounced down the first incline. The truck careened over the next lip and picked up speed. I thought at first it was a man alone in the driver’s seat. But a young woman sat beside him, slid over on the seat all the way next to him. Her mouth was partway open, as though she was too terrified to scream.

“I don’t remember the truck turning over until it was upside down in water. Their heads were underwater, upside down.”

“God,” said Ian. “What was all that about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you and I all right?”

She looked at him as though she was trying to make up her mind. “Yes.” The air after the rain felt newly scrubbed, a faint smell of wet dog.

He kissed her on the mouth. “I’m sorry to upset you.”

She touched the top of his arm with two fingers, tentatively, down, up, down. They got back under the sheet together. Her body felt familiar and kind to him, then ravishing, an eloquence of heat, strange and lovely.

Afterward, they lay together, sweaty. He asked, “Remember Ginsberg?”

“Hmmm?” Her eyes were closed.

He crooned in her ear. “The world is holy! The skin is holy!”

“People don’t use that word anymore.”

“Holy?”

“It’s a good word.”

Later, they ate what Berndt called “a proper English breakfast.” Fried tomatoes, fried sausages, fried bread, eggs over lightly, toast with jam. Boom Boom was nowhere in sight. After breakfast, they went for a walk; then Ian worked on a paper he was writing on geometrics for the Center for World Indigenous Studies. Alice read a trashy novel that she’d found lying in a corner of the room. Late in the afternoon, they crept into bed again.

She’d planned to leave that afternoon—she’d asked to meet with Gaborone’s chief of police the next morning at eight—but she decided to get up early to give them one more night together. She told Ian she was anxious about the meeting with the police chief.

That evening, she wasn’t hungry when the food came. Ian ate pork chops and mashed potatoes and half of her dinner. She poked at a pile of glazed carrots, garnished with parsley. Ian drank a Castle Lager and before he’d finished one glass, asked for another. Vaguely, she wondered if he was an alcoholic. Two glasses didn’t add up to anything, but then he had a third, and finished up half of hers before they stood up and made their way back to the room. Drink had made him garrulous. His noisy intelligence spilled out, his large, affectionate hand swept around her waist. She felt vaguely irritated.

He was large in every way. It wasn’t out of ego that he took up so much space, she thought, although sometimes it felt that way. It was out of enthusiasm, his own commotion and curiosity about life. She wouldn’t wish that away, not for a moment. In bed, he asked how did a seer know the whereabouts of a herd of game? In traditional cultures, he said, people recognized the importance of those liminal, in-between states. But the more “civilized” a culture became, the less reverence people had for strangeness and ambiguity. The time he’d gone through to the other side, he’d seen his grandfather coming toward him. So strange, so beautiful, he murmured. He was practically weeping, telling her.

She put her arms around him and held him. His heart beat fast, as though he was in the grip of some urgency. He went to sleep all at once, as though someone had hit him over the head with a rock. She lay beside him and watched him for a while, exhausted, as though she’d been half consumed. In that fire, though, something had taken hold of her, a love she couldn’t really account for. She thought of the world he loved: where the wind harbored words that foretold danger; footsteps disappeared in storms of sand; animals and people changed shape; mirages appeared and flickered into nothing; invisible stars sang. What she knew was that with him, the world was large, chaotic, and generous; without him, small and starved and, somehow, wrong.

She woke at three thirty without the alarm and propped herself up on one elbow. Ian was lying on his back, his mouth partway open. His face, for the first time, looked old to her. His hair was thrown around the pillow. One hand was fisted near his cheek, the other open at his groin. Her heart went out to him. Be safe, she whispered, before she rolled softly from the bed.