Dust (30 page)

Nyipir, dully: “ASTU.”

“Eh!”
Aaron’s eyes shone with awe. “Anti-Stock Theft Unit!”

Inside the tin shack, with sparse thatch on its roof, Aaron shoved a pile of assorted confiscated items and cultural paraphernalia to the ground, hunting for his imitation pith helmet, adjusted its insignia, and wiped his wrinkled uniform. Law-by-correspondence-school books were on the floor against the metal walls. A sixteen-year undertaking. The holes in the tin allowed in a rare breeze. The heat was already unbearable. A faded Kenyan flag slouched on a too-small brass pole. A framed map of Kenya with colorful pins sticking in a perpendicular pattern barely hangs onto the wall. A shelf with some school and world literature stood in the back of the room, and two blue lanterns, one with a broken glass cover, sat on a table next to it. The color portraits of three presidents formed a triumvirate. Next to this was a picture of Aaron in a topi hat, with a hand on his blue-frocked wife and two boys and three girls, who wore maroon-and-white school uniforms. The camera had captured the sense of family occasion.

“Sit! Sit! Sir!”

Nyipir took the wooden stool, adjusted it, and sat. No preamble. “My home was invaded, my animals stolen, dry season grass burned. Nothing left. If we leave now, we can find the animals.”

Aaron’s cleaning efforts ceased as he retreated into a torrent of regret, self-pity on its heels. He had been reduced to serving in this wind-wailing blot of landscape. His chief purpose was to hunt for lost cows. Being here had amplified his aversion to cows. The way they looked, chewed grass, and mooed. Their sense of entitlement, ambling around and expecting people to move or worship them, their gross dung. He would use his salary to import ravenous lions from Amboseli and dispatch these to every homestead. He also despised camels—they looked down on him with a superior grin. He longed to pluck out their eyelashes before setting them alight. He would soak the beasts with paraffin first. And if he could without being lynched, he would stomp every goat he met to death. He regretted their existence. He detested sheep, their dumb silliness and stupid, startled looks. He had to check his pistol every time one of those things crossed his path. Sheep shooting could be a national sport. He was indifferent to donkeys, even though he considered their braying diabolical. He was confused about his unresponsiveness to donkeys; he thought about it a lot. Maybe they were a last-resort means of trotting out of town.

Aaron had plenty of time to regret many things. The absence of regular fruit. Few opportunities to speak proper English, no one with whom to explore motivations in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He found great solace in the words of Browning’s “Chorus of Eden Spirits,” but he regretted that there was nobody to tell about the meaning of this relief. Most of all, he regretted that Thursday in August, on an extension of the Naivasha–Nakuru road, when he, a traffic policeman, and three others, who had prosecuted random traffic offenders without a receipt book for three years undiscovered, were found out.

In the three honeyed years, he had reaped sufficient sums to extend the boundaries of his farm and buy a Chinese lorry. But that Thursday, new zealous plainclothes officers of the Anti-Corruption Authority had driven past his special roadblock, in an aged red farmer’s van.

Easy prey, he had thought. He had handed over the shakedown to one of the others. But the trap was sprung. Hearing a commotion, he had realized what was happening, and tiptoed behind the van as his fellow officers were being rounded up. He climbed up a nearby fossil-looking weeping-willow tree and stayed there all night. When he clambered
down, very early the next morning, and made his way to work to attempt some damage control, he discovered that the officer commanding his division had already arranged for his transfer to the outer northern margins of Kenya.

Aaron had left without protest. He still had a job. He needed the pension to extend his banana plantation and plant guava trees.

“One day at a time,” his wife, Domtilla, had comforted him.

He snapped into alertness, shifting under Nyipir’s red-eyed scrutiny.

“Ehe?”
He urged Nyipir’s story out, grateful to be able to speak English in complete sentences. The stories, however, depressed Aaron. For some reason he was expected to insert himself into the narratives as “primary problem solver.” Such stories invariably featured cows. He hated cows. He lifted his hand for a pause.

“Insurance?” he chided, using his teaching tone. No one here bothered with livestock insurance. But he asked the question anyway to “help locals change their behavior.” Nyipir’s glare rather curdled his blood. Never mind. Some people were “late adopters.” “Go on,” he urged Nyipir. And then the words “Wuoth Ogik” chimed like a bell inside his skull.

Hope struck Aaron. Wuoth Ogik was synonymous with his predecessor, Ali Dida Hada, in security parlance. Aaron now reached across his table to tap the 1960s radio unit. He
could
make this Nairobi’s problem. Maybe Ali Dida Hada could return, and he, Aaron, could negotiate a posting to Kinangop or Masaba or Nyakach, where grass was green and streets were lined with guavas and oranges. And pineapples. And bananas. And tangerines.

Static.

He nodded at Nyipir, wrote notes—one of the few humans left in the world who give time to cursive writing. His output was like a medieval text. Shame about the Kasuku writing pad he had to use.

Thus he listed Nyipir’s losses:

Missing items.

Two bulls. One red dance-ox. (Name, Jayadha)

Twenty camels, one named Ubah, the other Kormamaddo.

A hundred and eighty-two cows.(☺) Two herding dogs (names, Simba and Nyarnam). Forty-three sheep. (☺) Sixty nameless goats.

About two tons drought grass (burned).

Missing person Akai Lokorijom (wife)

Injuries, Raro Galgalu (like my son)

Recommendation: Officer Ali Dida Hada returns to lead retrieval efforts and use previous knowledge to address rustling menace.

That last sentence caused Aaron to gurgle in happiness. “Now, sir, your signature on the abstract!” he warbled to Nyipir.

Nyipir’s breath caught.

His head throbbed.

He relented. He struggled to sign his name; his thumb was stiff. “What’ll you do with this?” he asked when he had finished.

Aaron said, “We shall now communicate with Nairobi.”

It has been two hours. The two men sit in silence while a radio wheezes static. Nyipir is clutching his head. The strain showing on his fingers.

“Maybe you should go to Omoroto?” Aaron offers for the seventh time.

Nyipir asks again, “Why?”

Aaron leans forward. “They take stolen livestock there.”

The Northern Frontier Stock Exchange
. Nyipir grimaces. He was one of the first to transfer rustled livestock through Omoroto more than fifteen years ago. There would certainly be a new holding area now. Rustlers were always five years ahead of the state’s security apparatus.

To Aaron, “Is that so?”

Aaron nods his head like an agama lizard. “Now I shall radio ASTU. But you, you go on ahead.” Aaron pulls out a large black-and-white map. He stretches it out and points at Fort Banya.

“Here!” His finger taps a black squiggle on the map.

About a fortnight’s walk away.

Nyipir watches Aaron as the uniformed creature taps a ballpoint pen against his teeth, repeating, “Fort Banya, Fort Banya.” Nyipir had not realized that such men existed and, more significantly, could be integral to any nation’s security system.

“Hire herdsmen,” Aaron suggests.

Nyipir’s sigh-laden voice, “My animals’ tracks go right past your rear window.”

“What?” Aaron jumps up and lurches to the hole in the wall—his
window. He discerns the tracks, wrings his hands. “What do we do now?” Aaron collapses into his seat. “
Aiee!
Is it the rainy season already?” he whispers.

Aaron had already experienced three rainy seasons. In two of them, a parade of raiders, rustlers, and other frightening elements strolled through his outpost, not even bothering to load their magazine clips, leading stolen livestock away. When Aaron heard the stomping of livestock, the bleating of goats, the braying of donkeys, he would ease back the cardboard and newspapers scattered on the floor, take his government-issue gun and a soft bog coat, open the trapdoor in the floor, lower himself into the bunker, shut the trapdoor, and light one of the lanterns down there.

There was also water stored in a large plastic tank, a sack of doum nuts, extra paraffin, two other hurricane lamps, two buckets, the Holy Bible, the Holy Quran, and three Elizabeth Browning anthologies—Aaron’s contribution to the pile. Forty-eight hours later, he would poke his head out. If there was silence, he might pull the rest of his body out. When the old white van used to work, he would drive to the shopping center, a one-and-a-half-day trip away, and hire a room from where to prepare his field report, which confirmed that he had neither seen nor heard anything out of the norm. A year and six months ago, when he was just three months in the post, a reportedly dead six-foot-seven rustler from Suguta, with a bandolier and a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun, had barged into Aaron’s office, where Aaron’s shoeless feet were propped on the desk as he reread a Standard newspaper from one month earlier.

The giant at once spotted Aaron’s AK-47 leaning against his desk.

He had simply pointed to it.

In his haste to give up his gun, Aaron dislodged something. Bullets ricocheted off the tin roof and Aaron dropped the gun and became a blob of jelly trying to raise its hands into the air while also attempting to stand on the tips of his toes to underline his total surrender.

The giant took the gun from the floor. He also smiled at Aaron, revealing pink gums where his two lower teeth were missing. He sat on the table, clipping and unclipping cartridges.

He complained about the weather—
Jua kali!

“Tutaonana,”
he grunted to Aaron on his way out, we’ll meet again.

Never
, Aaron had vowed.

Forty-eight hours later, when he could at last speak, Aaron radioed a report to headquarters. He emphasized that he had barely escaped alive from the raid. Which was true. In the hours spent under the table, hearing the man clip and unclip cartridges, Aaron had known that fear is a cause of death. He was hoping for compassionate leave. To his sorrow, two weeks later, Aaron was made acting district security officer, with a reputation for dealing effectively with belligerent nomads.

Five months later, the new regional commandant of the Anti-Stock Theft Police had asked for his help. Tough and experienced reinforcements were needed.

Aaron had said,
“Ndio, afande!
At once,
afande.”
He had smartly set off in the opposite direction, the pursuit of peace his primary objective. In this he was most successful.

Outside, the wind stirred scant shrubs, and then it barked in the lowest note of a contrabassoon.

“What do we do now?” Aaron asks, his eyes white and wide.

Nyipir’s hands now prop up his chin. Head angled, eyes asquint, he sees sweat soak Aaron’s clothes.
Who had said a person was best known by the questions he asked?
Watching Aaron, his bewildered humanity, his open surrender to fear, something within Nyipir at last relinquishes his wars.

Numbness creeps in.

When he can disentangle himself from Aaron’s wind-haunted isolation, Nyipir leaves, hobbling homeward by way of night. He rests during the broiling day to return to his journey at sundown. Ten kilometers from
Wuoth Ogik
, Nyipir suddenly stops. He turns toward the stumpy summits he has not glanced at in more than forty years. Those silence-storing red caves with an underground stream bubbling lyrics of ill-kept secrets. Memory peers through distant thick scrub, bushes, and fallen rocks that hide a portal.

Walking again.

When he pushes open
Wuoth Ogik
’s gates and sees the rusting iron cowbell that belongs to his red dance-ox, it had fallen off during the raid, instead of lifting it from the dust, he lies down next to it, his body shivering in a nameless fever.

24

IN THE CENTER OF NAIROBI, A FLOWER MAN LUGS A GIANT
bunch of carnations, marigold, roses, tiger lilies, tuberoses, orange roses, yellow roses, and rosemary across the street. Somewhere outside, a husky-voiced evangelist with a faux-American accent is peddling eternal life, threat, and “Jeeheeezuz.”

A visiting stranger turns from ogling unfiltered Nairobi existences though a restaurant window to browse through a newspaper filled with post-election violence, hand wringing, and nonaction. He flips through the obituary pages on his way to the sports section. He freezes. A photo. It is a man whose broken smile on full lips belies his urgent gaze. Compelling. Sculpted features, a beautiful man. He reads:

Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda of Kalacha Goda. 1964–2007. Cherished son of Nyipir and Akai, only beloved brother of Arabel Ajany. Lover of water, rugby, and Kenya. Father-to-be. So deeply missed. So terribly longed for.

He shakes his head and leaps up, his hands knocking over the steel-plated salt-and-pepper shaker.

Isaiah dodges cars, keeps his eyes on approaching faces. Arms spread out. His destination: a 1970s-style office block that would slot right into Cold War Eastern Europe. He sucks in air, then enters Vigilance House’s dark, humid interior, glances at the large concrete coat of arms with the legend
Utumishi Kwa Wote
—Service to All—hovering over his head like the sword of Damocles. He walks into a capsule of tight conversations, explosive, abrupt laughter, busy footsteps, and quick, squint-eyed assessing looks.

The place is packed, murmuring like a town-hall meeting. It takes fifteen minutes for Isaiah to reach an old brown desk behind which lean two men in uniform, their caps on the counter. One of them doodles in a tattered brown occurrence book. A surly “Yes?”