Mortals (67 page)

A washtub caught his eye. He could use it. He pressed the dog bundle into it and overturned it and placed it next to the drinking trough tomb, under the kraal gate. It was pointless. Nothing could stop the legions of carrion eaters for long. Everything is a gesture, he thought.

Now it would be interesting to see if he had the strength to get back to the Land Cruiser. He was filling up with hollowness, if such a thing was possible. It was his right knee that was problematical. If he could go slowly enough he was sure he could manage, but if he went slowly he ran the risk of getting back to the road just in time to see Keletso driving off toward Nokaneng. He had twenty minutes, he calculated. He had to start off immediately. There was no time to do more than he had. He retrieved his knobkerrie. He could go.

A terrible cry alarmed him. There was more happening. Someone was screaming somewhere. He had to hide, but he had to go as well. It was too much. His knee was bad, hurting.

Another berserk cry came, as a figure appeared on the crest of the ridge he had to cross to get back to safety, a figure waving an ax. But then it was fine, a fine thing.

It was Keletso, disobedient man, angelic man, trying to terrify any antagonists there might be.

T
hey were in Nokaneng. They had made it by early dusk. They were in Nokaneng, eating.

Nothing is perfect, Ray thought. They were under pressure to finish eating with dispatch. There was a bathing shed attached to the Golden Wing Restaurant and General Dealer and he and Keletso had booked hot baths and the donkey boiler was heating up as they ate, but the proprietor, Rra Makoko, wanted them to eat and bathe and begone, so that he could close shop on time. Closing on the dot was a ritual in Botswana. Ray wanted to relax over his food and in fact
dine
for a change. His meal seemed delicious. It was rice with chicken gizzards in powerful peri-peri sauce, with bread rolls and Pine Nut soda. And tea was coming. Nothing was bothering him much, not even the outrageous five-pula charge for the load of cow chips and kindling that would be consumed in heating their bathwater. The help wanted him to finish. An elderly woman, barefoot, in a blue housecoat and white headscarf, was circling their table, at a distance, it was true, but still it was unnerving, as it was meant to be. Iris knew how to stop that when they did it. She would make a scene if she had to. She was bold. He loved her.

He sent Keletso off to bathe. Ray’s exhaustion, which had abated during the drive from the cattle post, was back, toweringly back. He wanted to put his head down on the table for a few beats, but that would give the impression he was drunk. The proprietor was a severe sort. He watched his plate being taken away. He had almost been finished. He held tight to his half-full tumbler of soda.

He liked the dim light in this room. He liked the Golden Wing. He found it interesting. It consisted of an old colonial residence much
repaired and added to and attended by huts and outbuildings and derelict vehicles and parts of vehicles. The residence was a low, rambling wooden structure whose exterior was covered with green-painted panels of metal stamped with geometric designs and whose corrugated iron roof was painted rouge red, in mimicry of terracotta roofing, Ray supposed. There were numerous windows, all heavily barred, and some of the windowpanes clearly dated from the turn of the century or earlier, if that was what the thickness and irregularity in those panes meant. There was a broad veranda and there was a cactus garden flourishing, if that was the word, on three sides of the place. The store or dealership took up what had been the front parlor and dining room of the colonial house. It was aromatic because the wooden shelving, the wide plank floors, the wainscoting were all kept in a state of high polish. The grounds of the place looked like a cyclone had tossed things around. There was no external upkeep. But indoors there were armadas of women constantly mopping and oiling and dusting. He knew the pattern. And probably it made sense to concentrate on the struggle for interior cleanliness and amenity against the ceaseless intrusions of dust and sand and whatnot the Kalahari could be counted on to deliver. Nothing could be done about the Kalahari, the outdoors. This was a desolation, after all. Nokaneng had been founded in a particularly bleak part of the desolation. Trees of any kind were scarce thereabouts.

They had been served in the main room of the store, at a refectory table placed near the front. Three gas refrigerators, industrial-size units, took up most of one wall. The shelves were well stocked, but the selection was, he would say, on the limited side, featuring the usual staples, sacks of mealie and sorghum and rice, tinned pilchards and beef tongue and beetroot, cooking oil, boxes of Joko tea, containers of paraffin, packets of fruit salts. Four candles were burning on the counter near the baroque, gleaming, antique cash register. A woman, a different woman than the one waiting on them, emerged and pinched out two of the candles and retreated into the back, smartly. It was as though pinching out candles made up her particular work assignment. The other woman could have taken care of it, since she was mainly occupied in waiting for him to down his scalding tea, which yet
another
woman had just set before him. Ludicrous overstaffing was normal in rural outfits like this one because labor was so cheap and because nobody was checking. He would be willing to bet that most of the Golden Wing staff worked for rations. And the very casual meal service the Golden Wing provided was without question a derivative of the staff’s morning, noon, and night preparation
of food for itself, an overflow from that. There was no menu. He hoped the five-pula note he was leaving in payment was right. It would be. It was a lot.

He got up to go. Closing time was like a guillotine blade coming down, with doors slamming and bolts shoved home and lights doused and help dissolving away into whatever obscurity was available. He would join Keletso in the bath shed. He had to get his pulsing knee into hot water and he had to thank Keletso again. He had to thank him better.

The bathing shed was a sort of rude crib structure with oddments of canvas hung haphazardly over it. He announced himself. His torch was weak.

Lo! he thought as the main building of the Golden Wing complex went dark, or virtually so. There was a faint glow showing in the rearmost room, Makoko’s quarters. And then even that was gone. And the garage, where they had gotten refueled, was silent and dark, too.

Keletso said, “Rra, you must come to this water whilst I leave.”

“What do you mean, rra?”

“They say there is only one fire for two, rra.”

Ray walked around to the donkey boiler. It was an oil drum sitting on a metal stand over what were now only embers, a remnant of fire, shreds, nothing, not embers, even. The pipe leading from the bottom of the oil drum into the bathing shed was slightly warm. He knocked on the drum. It appeared to be empty. It didn’t matter.

So he would take whatever was in the tub. His knee was screaming.

Keletso said, “Rra, there is no soap. The woman has taken the soap, since I said to her yes I have used it and then it was gone and she was gone.”

“It doesn’t matter. Here I come.”

Night wants me, Ray thought. He shook his torch. Its light was weaker yet. He shook it more, to no effect.

“There is no towel, rra. That woman left some mere rags, and not clean ones.”

“It’s no matata,” Ray said.

Keletso was finishing up in darkness. Ray set his torch down on the ground, its weak beam pointed discreetly away into the yard. Staff from the Golden Wing were leaving en masse and with a celerity that made it seem they were fleeing something. Celerity was another one of those perfectly good words destined for the bone pile. It was ghostly, the women rushing through the dark, no torches no candles, muttering, a ghostly experience but over in a shot.

Ray undressed. Keletso wanted him to hurry. The water was cooling.

He got into the soiled bathwater, which wasn’t exactly the term he wanted. He didn’t care that he was second. If he had been offered the chance to precede Keletso he would have declined, out of respect, abject gratitude, everything. Keletso had held him up, hauled him along like a baby half of the way back from the cattle post to the Land Cruiser. And Keletso had cleaned him up, as best he could, before stuffing him into the Cruiser and driving like a banshee on fire away from there and back to the trunk road and the safety they expected to enjoy in Nokaneng, should they get there and not die in a crash en route. He submerged himself in the tepid water and rubbed his limbs. He would have to find something to tie around his knee for a day or so. And next time he came to the bush he would carry a pumice stone for eventualities like this. He would get Iris to find one, except that he wouldn’t, couldn’t. She was not going to be available. She was better at cutting his toenails than he was. There was a craft element to the way she did it. Half the time it needed to be done she would offer to do it, out of love. You can’t step into the same river twice, he thought. He would be cutting his own toenails now, forever, if he was right about things. He was afraid he was. He knew he was.

And then they had arrived in supremely strange and negligible Nokaneng. It barely existed. You were on twisting, sandy roadway and then you were on a segment of graveled road and there was the Golden Wing complex on one side and, opposite it, a cinderblock cube supposedly housing a suboffice of the Northwest District Council, shuttered, showing every sign of being not in use, and then another cube, the health post, also locked up and visibly empty, nothing in it, no furniture, and then spreading away in the dusty haze to the west a scattered handful of widely separated household compounds, many of them in disrepair, unoccupied, and then near the road a long sloping dome of maize husks, small stock fodder, glimmering in the gloaming, and then the raw sand road began again, twisting north. A general furtiveness characterized the few inhabitants they had managed to interact with so far, it would be fair to say. People had seemed eager to avoid them or to deal as briefly with them as they could get away with, given that some of them wanted their business. The tall, sinister-looking Rra Makoko, who had claimed to be both the proprietor of the Golden Wing and then, later, not the proprietor at all but a factotum for a German named either Gaster or another name like it that he couldn’t remember, the real proprietor, who lived far away in either Gobabis or Walvis Bay over in SouthWest. Makoko’s eye patch had put him off. And initially Makoko had had no difficulty transacting
with him in English, and then it had become more difficult, and then everything had had to go through Keletso, in Setswana.

Still, certain things had been accomplished, certain difficulties overcome. Tomorrow Keletso would be out of this and Ray would proceed on his own, alone. He had produced a letter for Keletso to present to his superiors at the Transport Office pronouncing that Keletso had performed superbly in all his assignments and that he was no longer needed by Ray, whose only remaining task was to find a restful place where he could collate the materials he had collected, prepare his final report, and then return to the capital via the main roads, which were so much less difficult to traverse. His chief trouble in writing the letter of reference had been to control the ragged beast his handwriting had become. The idea of sending along a letter for Iris, entrusting it to Keletso, was something he had considered. But he had dismissed it because … there were too many reasons not to. She would be alarmed at his penmanship. She would see through anything he wrote. She would grill Keletso without mercy and she would make the most alarmist interpretations of what she got out of him. He had no idea what to put down. Of course he wanted her reassured that he was physically all right. Keletso could call her. That would be the best. The idea of writing filled Ray with uncontrollable anxiety. Partly that came out of his furious sense of betrayal. And partly it came out of a sordid desire to punish her with his absence, with worry about what might have become of him. And then also there was the pathetic ingredient, id est, the shard of hope that his absence and the shadows of danger hanging around it would bring her back to her senses, back to loving him, violent scenes with Morel, showing him the door, scenes he could imagine. Keletso expected him to write something for Iris. He knew it and he knew Keletso would think ill of him, seriously ill of him, if he didn’t write something for his own wife. There was no way to avoid it. He had toyed with the idea of sending a dummy letter, an envelope containing a couple of sheets of blank paper, sealed up tight. That would appease Keletso’s feelings. But it would be an impossible event for Iris, opening it. He couldn’t do that. As it stood, Keletso was to convey to Iris that all was well and that Ray would be back sometime soon. And there would be no mention of the cattle post raid. But Keletso was still expecting him to hand him a letter. There it was. He couldn’t do it.

Keletso was dressed and waiting. Ray got out and, still damp, entered his clothes. This was his last pair of clean dungarees. The clothes bloodied at the cattle post were balled up and cached someplace under canvas
in the back of the Cruiser. He had worn the most presentable of his accumulated dirty clothes into Nokaneng. He might try to arrange to get some laundry done tomorrow or he might not. He had to be on his way, alone, there was no alternative.

At loose ends, they stood together by the roadside. Ray wanted to do something, even if it was only taking a walk, before they retired. The Cruiser was parked next to the district council office cube and they were going to have to sleep in the damned vehicle again. They had been looking forward to getting some kind of normal accommodation that night. But that hadn’t gone right.

Other important things had gone right. They had gotten loaded up on petrol and oil and other necessities, by the skin of their teeth, before the Garage and Panelbeaters Golden Wing Proprietary had closed up, earlier than the restaurant, with a clangorous display worthy of grand opera, slamming, locks snapping. Something strange had been going on longdistance between the garage and Makoko on the veranda. He had been giving hand signals and whistling in an eerie way when he wanted the garage foreman’s attention.