White Dog Fell from the Sky

36



The road was empty when Alice set out that morning, darkness with a hint of light in the east but not enough to see by. The rain had gouged huge gullies into the surface of the road. In the shadow caused by her headlights, she hardly saw the holes until she was on top of them. Normally, she’d be traveling eighty or ninety kilometers an hour, but not this morning. She hated this road. Dozens of people died on it every year. If it wasn’t erosion, it was sliding sand that turned you over before you knew what happened, trucks barreling out of nowhere, passing and leaving a thick fog of dust behind them.

Behind her, through the rearview mirror, she saw a light coming toward her. She thought of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the little family of actors with death at their heels, their caravan rattling and swaying pell-mell through the forest. The lights were gaining on her. Her heart beat into her eye sockets. The wide lights of a truck.

It was breathing down her neck now. She wanted to pull off to the side, but the road was like a riverbed with high banks. There was no stopping or getting away. Her little Toyota swayed in the sand, and she held her breath as the monster behind her swung out, skimmed past, and swallowed the road in front of her. The sun had risen. The morning sky was smeared with haze. A hornbill lumbered through the air across the road, looking as though it was more pterodactyl than bird.

She thought about the courage it had taken Ian to go to that place where he went. She doubted she could have done it. As a child, she’d been terrified of hypnotism. It seemed to come down to trust. How much, she wondered, had she ever trusted another person—body, mind, and soul? How could she know that what she felt for Ian was not, somehow, shot through with illusion? She could give her life to him and find suddenly that she’d been mistaken. Or, their love could erode until one day she’d wake up and realize she no longer loved him.

It seemed utterly impossible that this could happen, but hadn’t it seemed equally impossible with Lawrence? Not exactly. She and Lawrence had slid into each other’s lives in simple, naive faith. She knew now how love could vanish, and she believed with all her heart it would not happen again. She’d felt something last night she’d never felt with anyone on Earth. She had only the crudest words for it. It was connected to a depth of intensity and to something as ancient as the fossilized knee prints of the spirit who’d knelt to create the universe.

Ian was far from perfect, anyone could see that. He talked too much, drank too much, was helpless in the face of his appetites. He was immoderate in his opinions and enthusiasms, at times outrageous. But there was courage in him to spare, and integrity. He wasn’t the sort to slip things under the carpet. She could count on his imperfections, and she thought she could even count on loving them, or at least loving him in spite of them, maybe even because of them. Life with him would be surprising, changeable as wind. They would be unlikely to have a child, unlikely to ever live in the United States. There would be stretches when he’d be away from her. She’d be pushed to make something equally large of her own life.

She passed through Debeeti as the acacia trees began to be lit by sun. Then Mosomane and Mochudi. It was a marvel how this landscape, so brown, had entered her. How she’d grown accustomed to the taste of dust in her mouth from June to December. It was hard to imagine the woods in Ohio anymore, home to green moss, deep layers of fallen leaves, robins. When had she last heard a robin sing? Or a white-throated sparrow? Or seen a field of green grass combed by wind? Could she bear it if she never again lived in her own country? She hadn’t missed her mother when she’d first come out here, but she did now. And she missed the ring of spring: peepers singing in the swamp. And the trudging sound of a city bus. And oddly, Walter Cronkite. She missed snowy Sunday afternoons, newspapers with editorial pages, grocery stores with well-stocked shelves.

She missed how the swing that hung from a maple tree in her mother’s yard could flood her with recollections, the way one memory led to another: the feel of her girl-thin body as she pumped her way into the sky, the toes of her Buster Brown shoes—scuffed, blunt-toed, homely as moles—straining to touch one high leaf of that tree.

Here, she lived only in the present and the future. At times, it was a relief to escape the past. But forever? How bad the margarine tasted here, like rendered fat. And the smell of butchered beef everywhere, tough, overripe. But then there was beauty: women carrying square cans of water on their heads, the way their bodies moved under the weight of the water. The wild thorns bursting into blossom when the land around them was dry as dung. On Sundays, a scattering of men walking to church with dusty, beaten black hats held in their hands. Women wearing the uniform of the Congregationalists: dark skirts and white blouses, with bright blue sashes and white turbans around their heads. And their singing, voices swooping slow and deep.

She passed through Phakalane and Mogoditshane. A boy herded five goats across the road in front of her. His shirt was dust colored, his young body looked dazed with sleep. She was supposed to go to dinner at Muriel’s tonight, but she’d need to beg off. It would be a triumph just to make it through the day.

When she drove in, exhausted, White Dog was there at the end of the driveway. The tip of her tail moved slightly in recognition. As far as she knew, White Dog hadn’t left her post since Isaac had disappeared. Alice brought her breakfast and fresh water and set it next to her. She went back into the house and stood in front of her closet and stared at the clothes hanging there. She felt vaguely off center—it was no longer possible to imagine a life without Ian. And yet a life with him did not include even the barest prospect of calm domesticity. What was their life together? Islands of ravenous love surrounded by oceans of separateness.

She went into the bathroom and couldn’t get the the toilet to flush. The tank was high up, and she pulled the chain, klunk, waited, pulled the chain three more times, and still nothing happened. It infuriated her. She yanked the chain four more times, and on the fifth pull, the water rushed down the pipe. She filled the bathtub until the water no longer ran hot from the faucet, turned it off, and climbed in. There was no time to sink into the pleasure of it. She lay back a moment, then lathered up and rinsed off. Toweling herself dry, she felt unaccountably close to tears. She grabbed a blue gray, short-sleeved dress, close-fitting, cut fairly high at the neck.

She had no hair dryer. She combed her damp hair, pinned it back, fed Magoo (still no sign of Horse), grabbed a piece of bread, stuffed a few work papers into a canvas bag, put on her sandals, and went out to the truck. It occurred to her as she slammed the door that the chief of police might like to see some tangible piece of evidence that Isaac existed. She ran back inside to the room where he’d slept, and picked up a letter written by his mother.

As she backed out the driveway, White Dog got to her feet. “Yes, I’m going to see about him,” she said.

“Please, madam,” he said, indicating a chair on the far side of a battered desk. He was drinking tea but didn’t offer to get her a cup. He had a long, weary face, as though the collective misdeeds of his fellow men had made his jowls heavy. She felt herself in the presence of someone who would believe the worst about you and ask questions later.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, his question obligatory rather than encouraging.

“My gardener is missing.”

“Yes?”

“He’s not the sort of person to disappear.”

“People can surprise you,” he said.

“I was away on a trip up north, and he was minding the house and garden. When I returned, he was gone.”

“Did you find anything missing?”

“No. And his dog was still there. He loved that dog. He would never have left her.”

“What makes you so sure, madam?”

“I know.”

She could see this was insufficient.

“He is a Motswana?”

“A South African.”

“Here illegally?”

“Ee, rra, I believe so.”

“Name?”

“Isaac Muthethe.”

He stopped a moment. She noticed with a start that he had a glass eye. Between the real eye and the glass eye was a deep worry line. The glass eye didn’t look in her direction. Floor, wall, anywhere but where the other eye looked. “And your name?”

She told him.

“Excuse me a moment, madam.” He went to his filing cabinet and opened a drawer. He brought a manila folder to his desk and pored over it for a few moments.

“I recall the case now. I am sorry to say, madam, your gardener was a double agent, working both for the ANC and the South African Defense Force. I interviewed him myself. He pretended that he did not know what a double agent was. He is a clever chap.”

“He is an intelligent man,” she said, “but he is no double agent. He was in medical school in South Africa before coming to Botswana. He is a good, decent man.”

“Then why was he here?”

“I don’t know. I assumed his life was in danger back home.”

“So you see?”

“See what?”

“You see that you do not know. When I asked him how he had entered Botswana, he said he had come by car. When I pressed him further, he said that he had traveled under a casket. Madam, people do not enter this country traveling under a corpse.” He laughed, a small, dry laugh that sounded as though it had been living in a dark closet.

“Where is he?”

“He is not in Botswana.” The chief’s eye slid away from her. “He is in South Africa. I signed the deportation order with my own hand.”

“You deported him? You deported him?”

“Individuals such as this one, madam, are a danger to our country. We have no army. We have only our brains and common sense.”

“What evidence did you have?”

“One of my officers found him at the scene of the shooting, one day following, taking money from the floor of the house. He himself had been living in that ANC house.”

“Where was this house?”

“In Naledi, madam. An officer found him in this very house in the middle of the night and brought him in. After interviewing him, I was convinced of his guilt and deported him. He was not at the house when the shooting occurred. Do you know why? Because he knew it would happen. He saved himself and let the women and children die.

“I wondered whether you and your husband were involved. I did some background checks on you and found nothing.”

“At least you checked before accusing us. But your hasty speculations about Isaac Muthethe couldn’t have been further from the truth. He wasn’t there because I’d asked him to stay at my house in the Old Village while I was away.” A flicker of doubt crossed the chief’s features.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know, madam. My men delivered him into the hands of the South African Defense Force.”

“Oh, dear God.” She stood up abruptly. “What have you done?”

“I did my duty, madam. That is all I have done. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Do you know the names of the South Africans who took him away?”

“No, madam.”

“You’ve made a serious mistake,” she said, her voice shaking with anger.

“No, madam. You don’t understand. He will be in no danger there. He has a good relationship with the police.”

“With all due respect, rra, you have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s a good chance you’ve condemned an innocent man to death.”

She picked up her bag and left. Her whole body trembled with rage. Modimo, nthusa, she heard those women’s voices sing, slow and deep like wind. Help me, God. She had never, not since she was eleven or twelve, believed in a Being of that sort, with fingers in every human pie, but she wanted Him now.

She put the truck in gear and exploded out of the parking lot. She drove out of town, yelling, “Bastard!” Her voice reverberated through the truck cab, puny, impotent. The sky was blue and cloudless, and its complacency inflamed her further.

She turned right at the road to the dam, not trusting herself to drive safely, and pulled over to the side. She pictured Isaac puttering about the garden, his hands cupped around a plant. She saw him drag thorn bushes around the base of the half-dead tree to protect the crested barbets from the cats. When she compared Isaac to just about anyone she knew, herself included, he came out a notch above. Humility in spades, a natural dignity, the sort of person you’d trust in the hardest times, the sort of human being who ought to be peopling the Earth. But he was smaller than small now. If he’d been accused of double dealings … no one likes a liar and a cheat. And where he’d gone, he sure as hell wouldn’t be innocent until proven guilty. She remembered the day when he’d killed the black mamba. That quick ferocity. So what if he had been with the ANC. Who could blame him? But she’d bet her two feet he wasn’t a double agent.

She turned the truck around, sick at heart, and drove back to her office. Her boss was on the phone when she went to find him. He indicated a chair. A picture of his three children and his wife, Susan, smiled from a bookcase on one wall. Susan was grinning bravely, but underneath the smile was something else. Alice had been to their house a couple of times, a tidy, well-run home, bursting with kid energy, barely contained. Susan had the look of a woman whose life was permanently on hold. Alice imagined her catching up with herself around sixty, when there’d be hell to pay. And C.T., a kindly, nonassertive man, a little over his head in every sphere, would hardly be equal to it.

He got off the phone and greeted Alice warmly. “Haven’t seen much of you since you returned. Are you better now?”

“Yes, thanks for asking.”

“Tick bite fever’s no joke.”

“No. But I’m sorry I was a few days late with the position paper.”

“It couldn’t be helped.” However, his eyes said it could have been helped if she hadn’t gotten it into her head to run off with that fellow who was still married. “I’ve got a few changes to suggest,” he said. He dug around in a tower of documents and handed the paper to her. “But you’ve done an excellent job. Just those few corrections and we’ll ship it off to the permanent secretary and minister.” Coming from him, this was high praise.

“C.T., I’m afraid I’ve got to go home.”

“You’re not well?”

“My gardener has been apprehended and deported to South Africa. The chief of police seemed to think he was a double agent.”

“And is he?”

“Definitely not.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. But at this point I’m afraid there’s not much to be done.”

Anger throbbed behind her eyes. A wildness overtook her. “If this were Susan, would you say there was nothing to be done?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to attack you.”

“I just want to caution you not to do anything you’ll regret.”

She thought of asking him to quit the avuncularity. It annoyed her that he seemed to have pegged her as a hotheaded nitwit. “I’m going to try to locate his family, that’s all. I think they need to know. I’ve got to go through his papers, see if I can find an address.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll have those changes done for you by tomorrow.”

“No worries.”

She greeted White Dog and patted her on the head. The bed in Isaac’s room was made in rumpled fashion. Under it, in a cardboard box, were a few clothes, most of which she’d passed on to him from Lawrence. At the bottom of the box were four letters, three in the same hand, one in a different hand, all from Pretoria. She opened one of the three. It was written in Setswana, but she recognized a few words, piecing together the news from his mother that Isaac had told her earlier: his brothers unable to attend school because they had no shoes. There was no return address on the envelope, but there was a post office box address inside, at the top of the letter. Alice opened a second letter, and the same address appeared inside. She jotted it down, replaced the letter in the envelope, and put both letters back at the bottom of the box under his clothes.

She wrote to his mother in English, expecting she’d be able to find a translator. In it, she explained what had happened and asked where Isaac was likely to have been taken. On her way back to work, she dropped the letter in a mailbox and prepared herself to wait a couple of weeks for a reply.

That evening, she drove to Naledi, the air so hot it knocked the breath out of her. Heat oozed from every blade of grass, from every parched, shriveled, hapless leaf. She parked and walked into a rabbit warren of paths. In front of a cardboard house, a young boy pushed a little wire car with tin can wheels. Goat droppings littered the way. She passed a man going the other way. She greeted him, and he stood long enough for her to ask directions to the house the South Africans had targeted.

“That way, mma.”

She thanked him and turned left at the tree he’d indicated, but almost immediately, there was a choice of paths, one leading beside a house made from a car chassis, the other to the right. She stopped and turned around and stopped again. Her head hurt. Something dark pulled at her. Not fear, something worse.

“Hello, madam,” a soft voice said behind her.

She turned and found a young boy. “How are you?” He laughed, hearing himself speak English.

“I’m fine,” she said, smiling. “How are you?”

He laughed again, his eyes snapping bright. “I am fine. How are you?”

“Fine,” she said again. She put out her hand in greeting, and he took it, his hand smooth in hers. “Do you understand English?” she asked.

His eyes clouded. “Ga ke itse, mma.”

She loved that she was not strange to this boy. As she walked along the path, he danced backward, facing her. He accompanied her like this a few steps, then turned and charged away, jet-propelled.

She was lost in a maze of paths. The shimmer of sun cast a strange glow over the landscape. A little girl in a red dress walked away from her, down a path. The mother carried a white parasol. Two older girls came in her direction, hand in hand, the taller one wearing a short blue dress faded on the shoulders and sleeves, still bright under her arms where the sun hadn’t touched it. “Where are you from, madam?” the tall one asked in school-stiff English.

“From America.”

“New York?” asked the younger girl.

Alice laughed. “No.”

“Empire State Building?” said the taller one.

She pictured herself in the fist of King Kong. “No,” she laughed again. “From Cincinnati.”

“Cin-cin-naa-ti! Cin-cin-naa-ti!”

“Where are you going, madam?”

“I want to find the house where the shooting happened.”

The girls looked puzzled. Alice mimed holding a gun, and they understood. The taller one took Alice by the hand and pulled her down the path, turned right, left, and left again, skirted a shebeen, walked a little farther, and pointed to a house. The girls disappeared, and she walked toward it. The sun was low in the sky, shining on a naked tree; a woman at a distance scrubbed a cooking pot with sand.

The house felt wounded, contaminated. She peeked in the door and saw a room stripped nearly bare except for a whitewashed wall splotched with something dark. A few pages from a glossy magazine were stuck to the wall with nails. Her eyes returned to the spray of darkness on the wall. She stepped inside, searching for something to identify its inhabitants. As she crossed the room, she tripped over a loose chunk of concrete on the floor, which skittered away from her. The second room contained a mattress and a battered cooking pot. The mattress was spattered with the same darkness as the walls in the first room. She’d expected the house would tell her something, but it gave up nothing but its wounds. She covered her mouth with her hand and stumbled out.

In her head, a phrase played behind her eyes. Blank and pitiless as the sun. Yeats, that ferocious old man, lover of women, singer of woes. The falcon cannot hear the falconer … Was there a place in the world, had there ever been a place on Earth, where the strong didn’t victimize the weak? Outside were Caterpillar tracks that stopped just short of the side wall, as though someone had intended to bulldoze the house and then backed away. Perspiration trickled between her breasts. She followed the retreating tracks, thinking they’d lead her back to the main road. Under her sandals, she felt the undulations of earth churned up by the teeth of the bulldozer.

In the distance, she heard an odd plink, plinking. She walked toward it, not sure what it was. As she came closer, she heard music, and then saw him. The old man’s face was deeply gouged and furrowed, his eyes tight shut, his forehead pressed into ridges of concentration, his mouth open, singing. His hair was a dusty gray; the stubble on his cheeks and chin and upper lip also gray. His hands were huge, like those of a man seated with an anvil rather than a one-stringed guitar. A single wire stretched from one end of a long, flat fingerboard to the other. The lower end of the fingerboard was positioned between his knees. The other end rested on his shoulder, topped off with a crumpled five-gallon drum, which added a twangy resonance. With his left hand, he created the pitch on the string; with a curved stick held in his right hand, he stroked the wire. As Alice stood and listened, it seemed in those small strummings lay the hope of a small universe, a universe with no place for a white woman, but still, hope is hope. It was only when he stopped playing and opened his eyes that she saw he was blind.

Lying in bed that night, she thought again of Isaac. She didn’t believe the South Africans would have set him free when he crossed the border. She knew what they did to people in those prisons. Tortured, thrown from high windows. Suicide they called it. He was bright enough and educated enough that a couple of ruffians would be only too happy to humiliate him, beat him down, punish him to the very limits of what one man can do to another. She got out of bed and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.

Standing by the sink, she recalled a place she and her mother had once been in Hawaii, the only long trip the two of them had ever taken together. They’d been told about the ruins of a temple, located near the birthplace of King Kamehameha. The road there was heavily gullied and impassable, and they set out on foot as the wind roared down a twenty-five-mile-wide corridor between Maui and the Big Island. They had no idea what they were looking for, and then they saw it, Pu’ukoholā Heiau, on a bare hillside. A wild desolation. You could feel the power of the place even from a distance, fierce and implacable as a god.

They climbed the hill and entered a rock enclosure. Inside was a great stone, cupped to hold a human body, a channel cut at heart level for the letting of blood. Above, the sky was blue, without end.

She stood next to her mother, seeing the high priests waiting with their knives, a young man or woman being led there, bound at the wrists. Was it her imagination, or was the brutality of the world deepening, growing more rapacious, the means of torture more elaborate than those ancient times when they’d killed one man to save many? Isaac’s death, if they killed him, would go unnoticed and save no one.