Mortals (65 page)

He had on a longsleeved denim shirt, which he buttoned to the neck. There was no time to enjoy the amazing colors this landscape displayed, the mustard-yellow southern reaches, flat as a lake … one of Rex’s similes. He realized that he had two new central priorities in his activity here. One was to see that Keletso came to no harm. He had to get him out of this. And the other was to see that
Strange News
survived and got back into safe hands. He was going to do what he could for this what, concretion, of his brother, do it not because it was a great manifestation in itself. To his shame, he was relieved at how minor the sensibility gesturing in
Strange News
was. It was minor, but it was not nothing, and it was Rex and it was true that certain bits and pieces of Rex’s collation were sticking like burrs in his consciousness, some because they were striking but obscure,
The Tree with Square Leaves
, some for no particular reason, like
The Bloom Too Ponderous for Its Stalk
, some of Rex’s odd titles for unwritten works. Ray drove the cuffs of his jeans deep inside the tops of his boots. He applied sunblock lavishly to his face and neck. He put on a broad-brimmed canvas hunter’s hat and fastened the chin strap tightly against his jaw. Keletso handed him a pair of work gloves. Ray had to be wary of ticks and any other upward-leaping insects that might be lying in wait.

There were thousands of species of uncataloged insects in the Kalahari, he’d heard. What some of them might be capable of was a matter of conjecture. He got out his darkest sunglasses. Keletso sprayed insecticide from a canister over Ray’s pants legs. Then there was nothing to do but get going. He had already impressed on Keletso that
Strange News
was to be safekept, as Keletso had put it when they’d talked about it. Ray was ready. The drill for snakes he had down pretty well. It was time to go.

Keletso was fidgeting around unhappily. Ray knew what it was about, but he had decided definitely to go unarmed. Initially that had been because he hadn’t wanted to alarm Keletso unduly about what he might be getting into. But then it had been a cloudier thing. It was that he had forfeited whatever authority or right he had ever had to kill anybody and that was because, because of killings the agency had superintended that he had looked aside from, or something like that. It wasn’t exactly that in an abstract way he deserved to die. He didn’t think he did, really. But that was all the time he could spare for this interesting question. And he was going unarmed. And he knew it was unnecessary to one more time tell Keletso to safeguard
Strange News
, but he wanted to, because of a notion that was getting too ponderous for its stalk to the effect that Rex had been so urgent about getting this olla podrida to him because Ray would be able to appreciate it, because he, Ray, was the one in the family who was supposed to be a writer, based on the stupid prizes he had won, his love of English, his power to memorize poetry, trivial shit like that.

Keletso wanted to have a conference. There was no time for it. Ray willed himself fully into an overruling demeanor he had never used with Keletso before. That was too bad.

There was a curt session. Ray made clear how it was going to be. Keletso would wait in that exact spot for not longer than three hours. If Ray hadn’t returned within that period, Keletso would drive on to Nokaneng, four hours away, and find a way to report the situation to whatever authorities he could find. But Keletso had to understand that this was never going to be necessary. Ray tried to be light. But Keletso knew, Ray could tell, that there was improvising going on. It had been evident for a good while that Keletso had been living with the knowledge that Ray’s site-inspection mission was a fiction, a pantomime, a cover for something else that was not necessarily Keletso’s business.

Ray summed up. The vehicle had to be guarded because if anything happened to it they would both be in peril. Ray promised he would get no closer to what was happening over the ridge than he had to in order to ascertain the facts of the situation. He would be sly and he might not
even show himself and he would be back to the vehicle like a shot. Keletso asked Ray if he wanted him to get his clipboard for him. It was not a serious question. But he was serious that Ray had to not forget the knobkerrie and to lash it around well in the grass as he proceeded. Ray knew the protocol for snake avoidance. He accepted the knobkerrie. They consulted their wristwatches to see that both were registering the same time. They were.

Ray set off, outwardly purposeful, inwardly the opposite. He was operating according to necessity. He had an act to complete, in this landscape seething with exotic and largely sinister life through which he would have to go on hands and knees finally, when he got to the last ridge. He had an act to complete and it was impossible to have an opinion about some better alternative now that he was launched. It was like being in the ranks during a war when it was time to get up out of the trench and charge the enemy lines, even though the strategy behind the order was obviously stupid or cockeyed. It was like that. He decided that proceeding inexorably on a ludicrous or unnecessarily dangerous excursion made the actor feel like he was made out of cork, would be one way to put it, not made out of the usual flinching prickling flesh stuff that reacted and recoiled and would make him give up, go back. He felt buoyant, which was logical if he was made out of cork. He would be able to walk fully upright at first, then he would have to walk crouching more and more, and then it would be time to crawl.

The brush was dense, and forging through it was work. There were no paths. A burnt smell was coming to him fitfully, along with another odor, acrid and chemical. It was conceivable he could be shot, he supposed, if there was shooting going on and his luck was foul. He didn’t know why, but he was confident that that was not going to happen. He was going to approach the scene of the crime exquisitely, cringing forward, as his brother might put it. And secondly, he just knew it wasn’t going to end that way for him. He was going to float through this business, like a cork. That was his assessment.

In the noise reaching him from his destination there were no identifiably human cries. That was favorable, probably, he thought. He did not want to find anyone screaming in pain. And he hadn’t brought his first aid kit, except for the antivenom pouch that was part of it, selfishly. There seemed to be a gonglike, booming sound. Someone was banging on an empty tank. He would rather find dead bodies than living suffering bastards
he would have no idea how to help, God help him. That was the truth. We are our limitations, he thought.

An elaborate beetle, big, a scarab, materialized on his wrist. Violently he struck and crushed it with his fist, leaving his arm throbbing. He knew that scarab beetles had something to do with death, according to the ancient Egyptians. One image he had to suppress was how his beloved, his Iris, would look when she got the news that some ultimate thing had happened to him, not that it imminently would. But no, if he concentrated on all the injustice she had created through her involvement with Morel, it could help his effort, it could, not much but some. Because he loved her like hell. Life is a scream, she had once said, his darling had.

Walking bent forward was a strain, to the degree that crawling would be a relief for however long.

He was at the base of the final ridge. He went to all fours. Burning makes noise, he thought. Things were actively burning, hissing, just ahead. Threads and flakes of soot were wafting down.

Flat down, he inched his way to the ridge crest, gouging up loose earth and pushing it ahead of him, building a hump he could use for partial cover when he emerged into visibility. Raising his head, he told himself to move
minutely
. In training in the dim past the importance of avoiding abrupt movements during surveillance exercises had been impressed on him. Take forever, he told himself.

The ruinous scene before him was frightening. He had to go down into it. He sank back out of sight while he gathered himself. He was close to the scene, right on top of it, really, fifty or sixty yards from it at most. This was a fresh scene. He looked again.

He could see four dead beasts. He was scanning for bodies, animal or human. Nothing had bitten him. There was nothing to prevent him from descending into the scene. Nothing had bitten him or struck him or injured him en route in a way that would have made it necessary for him to return to Keletso to save himself, nothing. He was fine. He was seeing something he had to check. He was seeing a naked human leg projecting from the doorway of a burning rondavel. There were two rondavels, both burning, by which he meant that their thatch roofs were burning, just the roofs, which had fallen in, burning, dropping like hells into the interiors of the pitiful, impossibly pitiful, huts. Dead cattle, beasts, he could deal with, but he wanted the leg to be an error, a roof pole, something that looked like a leg.

What he should do was approach circuitously, but he couldn’t bear to do that. He had to walk straight in. Anyway, the scene seemed empty,
fresh but empty. It was quiet and there were no actors that he could see. He got to his knees.

This was a small cattle post. Every structure had been touched with destruction, the rondavels, a dip tank gashed and gouting streams of greenish liquid, a tin pump shack now a mere shell around a violent oil fire. He had to get to the leg. He stood up. The dead beasts were in the kraal. Weak black smoke was rising from the borehole mouth, and the piping connecting it to the pump shack had been disrupted, half smashed. He had to get to the casualty.

He started down. He would go looking as innocent as he could. He would appear as a passerby.

“Hallo,” he shouted, Britishly, not quite sure why he was choosing that mode. It was true that many Batswana seemed to like the racist British more than they did the what, the better Americans. The Brits got more loving care in the hospitals than Americans, as a rule, if he could believe a certain person who had the bad luck to get treatment in the Princess Marina Hospital in a ward where Brit patients were being fawned over whilst, as the Brits would put it, the Batswana nurses mocked the Americans behind their backs for their attempts at egalitarian camaraderie toward them.

“Hallo,” he said again, striding as properly as he could down the rough far slope of the ridge.

Kerosene had been splashed liberally around everywhere in pursuance of arson, but the attempt had obviously been hurried and on some recalcitrant surfaces the kerosene had simply burned off, as it had on the kraal at the center of the cattle post. They had not gotten it to burn. It was an oval kraal made of gnarled sections of log meshed with smaller tree limbs all locked together with windings of different calibers of wire. It was not one of the classic traditional kraals, which were works of art, the logs set deep into the ground and artfully interlinked with the tree limbs into mighty fencing that could resist the worst lunges of irritated cattle, but interlinked without resort to any supplementary binding material. It was a dying art, like thatching. Thatching was being wretchedly done, according to the elderly.

God would help him now. There were two rondavels side by side. He ran to the leg and bent over and pulled on it. The victim was face down. A body followed the one leg. As he pulled, the other leg bent, and folded up under the abdomen. It was a man. It was a man, grown, not old. Something had crushed the left side of his head. He was wearing khaki shorts and a ragged tee shirt. He was shoeless. He was a small man. Ray turned
him over. His eyes were open. Someone had to bury this man, to keep wild animals from getting at him, or the body had to be put under something or into something to keep it intact. He would figure it out.

Ray held his forearm across his mouth and nose and entered the rondavel, probing the burning thatch on the floor with his knobkerrie. The interior was full of burning or half-burned items of bedding, furnishings. Anything the size of a man he probed at. He retreated, satisfied that there were no further bodies there.

The second rondavel was a problem. The interior was pure fire. He got as close to it as he could manage and pointlessly shouted into the fire, saying in Setswana both “I am here” and “Are you in there?”

He tried to tell by the smell of the fire in the second rondavel if flesh was being consumed by it. It was all futile and he was taking in too much smoke. He didn’t know how to proceed, except that it seemed to him urgent to pull the body of the dead man farther out, into the yard, and lay it out with the legs straight and together and the arms crossed, until he could think what to do to protect this shell of a human being. And it was even more urgent to find something to wrap around his wound so that he could look at this dead, thin person.

As soon as the conflagration in the second rondavel got less he would tackle it. Ray had a bandanna crammed into his back pocket. He had tied it across his lower face earlier during his transit through the beds of brush between the ridges but had decided against sporting it when he arrived at the site, on the theory that it might not be helpful to look at first glance like a bandit, to whomever he might encounter. He used the bandanna to cover the dead man’s wound.

He guessed that the victim was a Mokgalagadi, basing that on the elaborate initiation scars on his cheeks and on a yellowish tendency in his complexion. He was somewhere in his thirties. He had a small face. His soles and palms were thickly callused. The whites of his eyes were charged with blood, but whether that was related to the way he had died or represented some prior condition was unknowable. He was thin but not emaciated. The man had been brained. He was a herder, probably the only one in a post of such modest size, he had lived a life of unremitting toil, he had all his front teeth, he had lived in unimaginable solitude, now he was dead. He appeared to be staring at something that displeased him, was how Ray would have to describe his expression. There was nothing to identify him in the pockets of his shorts. There was no time for communing. He
wanted to apologize. There was no time. “I apologize,” he said. He felt fairly safe, fairly sure that the malefactors were off and away, that this had been a hit-and-run affair, fairly sure of that but not certain. Someone might be aiming at him from anywhere. Let them, he thought. There were fresh treadmarks in the sandy track leading out of the compound and away ultimately to the same road he and Keletso were following. The good idea came to him of putting his knobkerrie down lest someone from a distance mistake it for a firearm. He had to finish, he had to look into the kraal, had to add things up and quickly, because he was tiring. His knees hurt. He hadn’t been noticing, but they were painful.