Dust (46 page)

A pale tree stump, dry and carved by water, leached by sun, warped into a humanlike face with its nose pointing north in the direction of the water’s flow. Its shorn branches point skyward. Ali Dida Hada strokes the bark. He rocks it until the loam loosens. Above, sulky clouds approach in phalanx. Ali Dida Hada murmurs, “Rain.” The tree stump rolls forward. “It’ll flow.” He watches the wind bend the low-lying, yellowed grass.

Isaiah and Ali Dida Hada hike northward. Silent men, in the moment, in their thoughts. A
whooooo
sound stops them five hours later. A shared grin. The scent of water. The angle leaves a view of wavelets on a recently formed temporary lake, child of a flash flood. The land has split into two. The animal tracks they were following end there. Assorted birds balance on reedlike shrubs. Not yet dusk.

“So?” Isaiah asks, considering the water.

Ali Dida Hada strips off his clothes and slides into the water.

Isaiah tugs at his shoes, preparing to follow.

Ali Dida Hada says, “Crocodiles here. Small ones.”

“You’re joking?” Isaiah shouts.

Ali Dida Hada snorts.

“I’ll build a grave of stones for your remains,” Isaiah proposes, wading on the muddy shore, examining the water for reptile-looking shapes.

Ali Dida Hada submerges himself.

Later.

They resume their journey, turning northeastward, and descend into a rain-season river valley that is now dry. Ocher-tinted earth. Below, near a pale-brown monolith where a weak sliver of a tributary of the Omo River touches Anam Ka’alakol, they halt and collapse to the ground.

Isaiah, lying on his back, looking at dusk’s clouds, remembers exactly how the mood changed, the electric sense of not being alone, of being watched.

Ali Dida Hada had adjusted his sarong and located his gun; he signaled stillness to Isaiah, who stiffened. They waited.

When Akai Lokorijom walks into sight, Ali Dida Hada drops his gun and gasps.

She has aged. So many lines crisscross her face. Her gaze still burns, and her mouth, though softened, still has its sarcastic twist. She smells of the land, its age, heat, and hardness. Wizened hands. And she says, “You are here.”

He is silent.

“You’re angry,” she says.

He does not speak.

Isaiah understands that he will never again mistake Akai Lokorijom for Ajany. Here is the elemental thing that had obsessed Hugh and—he glances over—possesses Ali Dida Hada.

Her eyes skim over him. He immediately closes his.

Angular features, dark-skinned, a life form that seems to pour itself into the object of its focus. He wants to touch her skin, to know its texture. He imagines all kinds of warmth. He watches Akai Lokorijom glide over and cup Ali Dida Hada’s face.

Ali Dida Hada is unmoving. “I’ve been looking for you,” he says in Gabbra.

Behind, a volley of barks.

They turn.

One of Wuoth Ogik’s herding dogs.

“The animals?” Ali Dida Hada asks.

Akai hunches, looks away to the left. “Gone.”

“The red dance-ox?”

Silence.

Ali Dida Hada asks, “What do you want to do now?”

He is tired of arguing with phantoms.

Tired of losing.

He steps back and lowers his head.

Akai understands the exhaustion of bleeding life one love at a time, of trying to keep a step ahead of threat, dread, fear. Struggling not to need, not to crave more, trying to ignore the hunger to contain an other, always battling not to swallow her own.

He is here.

The only man whose stillness gives her peace.

And he grasps her world, and when he recites his poems, it is as if he can see as she does and she is not alone inside her imagining.

Akai says, “Bakir, I’m tired.”

Ali Dida Hada rubs his eyes, and then his head.

“You’re old,” she tells him.

Silence.

A movement.

Akai pivots again.

Watches Isaiah watching her.

She asks, “Is that Abdulkadir’s son? The chicken thief?”

Ali Dida Hada glances at Isaiah.

Malice. “No. That’s Isaiah William … Bolton. Son of Hugh Bolton.”

Isaiah understands the word “Bolton.” He sees Akai cover her mouth. Her eyes narrow.
Are those tears?

Ali Dida Hada feels Akai’s body’s heat, a thrumming force.

The smell of fear.

Isaiah shuffles under Akai’s stare, scratches his arm, imagines even his pores are being probed.

She moves closer to examine Isaiah.

She walks around him.

She strokes the skin of his arm.

She says, “Your mother’s in you. I see her.” She reaches up and turns his head this way and that. A sly smile, a snort. “
Selena’s
son.” Without looking over, she asks Ali Dida Hada, “Why did you bring this one here?”

“He’s come for his father.”

Akai studies Isaiah.

Ali Dida Hada says, “Akai?”

She drops Isaiah’s face and strides to Ali Dida Hada and looks him up and down.

Ali Dida Hada tugs at her arm, her forearms in a clinch. His jaw firms up. They are almost nose to nose. “Where is he?” Akai pulls away and spits. “Shall I tell you?”

She pivots, watching Ali Dida Hada.

“He is now buried at Wuoth Ogik. Nyipir’s brought in his bones from inside a cave. He’s buried next to your son.”

Akai tumbles backward, shrinks, hugs her body, bends, and breathes in rhythm to inaudible sobs.

Ali Dida Hada reaches for Akai.

She slaps his hand away.

She turns to Isaiah and grabs his shirt. In her version of English, “I’m woman in Hugh pictures.”
Hoo
, she pronounces it. She looks into him. “I see your mother, Selena.” He waits. “She come for Hugh. But Hugh want me, not her.” Isaiah is mesmerized. “Your father? He is not Hugh. OK?” She taps his face. “Your father, he someone else. Not Hugh. Look your color, see?” Akai gargles. Shakes her head. “Not Hugh. Selena—
ai!
—she’s mad.” Akai claps her hand. “Good revenge. Hugh …” She glares at Isaiah. “A bad, bad man.” She sneers. “Be happy Selena mad.” Another gurgle. “Or your hair be red like stupid.”

Isaiah’s eyes get brighter and brighter until the land blurs. He hears Akai’s triumphant gloat. She is crying with laughter. “Oh, Selena!”

Akai pirouettes, half dancing toward Ali Dida Hada. With her arms outstretched, she leans toward him. “Recite something, Ali.…”

Ali Dida Hada will not.

But then he groans, eyes fixed on distances.
“Deluged, I breathe by praying your name.…”

Akai eavesdrops.

Shuts her eyes.

Isaiah had watched Ali Dida Hada
inflate
—as soon as Akai touched him. Power like that has no use for lies. There is certainty in the spite of her laugh. With slow steps, Isaiah starts off eastward.

Promising that he will walk to death.

Wild flourishes of landscape.

Intensity of existence outside this discord.

Isaiah.

Trying to suck in air.

What do I know?

No certainties.

He has known.

Puzzle pieces falling into place.

Selene determined that he abandon his quest for Hugh.

The second and third glances of relatives.

Selene steering away the queries of those who met him.

“His father?” he once heard. “My first husband,” Selene had answered in a cold voice.

Not waiting for the end of his grandmother’s funeral service. “Too many nosy types around.” Selene had marched him down the church steps and into their car, leaving Raulfe behind.

His skin had always been of a darker shade than the rest of the family, but, as Selene used to say—not that anyone had asked—“Throwback gene. Your great-grandfather was a Hindu.”

Selene’s plea: “Stay. There’s nothing there for you.”

Now.

Akai Lokorijom’s ribald laughter.

Mocking him.

No, mocking Hugh and Selene.

What is true?

Months after she left Wuoth Ogik, waiting and waiting for Hugh to come back to her, Selene, gutted by stomach-aching anguish, could not sleep. She wandered naked in the echoing Naivasha house. Could not remember when low keening became an audible wail.

Needing to go home to England but not wanting to leave without Hugh. Why live? What was the point? Haunted. Wanting warmth in
July. Hurting for her husband’s body, his soul, his laugh, hers. His laugh was hers. Mucus on her face. “I don’t belong to anything,” she told the wall. “Not even to myself.” Body-shuddering weeping.
What do I need?

A deep-voiced answer came from within the room. “I’m here, memsahib.” And from that moment until the night of the next day, it was all she needed to know and touch and feel and smell and have.

Selene’s plane left Kenya. She took only what she needed. Her plane circled the plains with the stragglers of the Rift Valley wildebeest migration, black pockmarks on the ground.
Migration instinct
. Selene smiled before she closed her eyes.

The baby was a boy. Selene named him Isaiah William Bolton.

Her mother, who was blind in one eye, peered at the newborn baby and said, “A significant throwback. Not as English-looking as he could be.” She cackled through the opening phrase of “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

“He’s mine,” Selene answered.

More than a year later, a divorce decree for Hugh Bolton was dispatched to Kenya.

No reply.

She waited.

And waited.

Selene forged Hugh’s “no contest.”

Done.

Three years later, Selene acquired a new husband. Raulfe Greenwich. A man from a popular rather than a distinguished military family that made its money illegally trading in Darjeeling tea. A diffident third-born son with a penchant for order and walking dogs in the park. In Selene, Raulfe found a foil to his blandness. In Isaiah, the son he had hoped to have. He became aware that he also had Hugh’s ghost to contend with, and that he dealt with in his own way.

40

SUNDOWN. AKAI
’
S AND ALI DIDA HADA
’
S BODIES TOUCH
.

Akai says, “Another song?”

Ali Dida Hada stares across the fire. “No,” he says.

“A song?”

He snaps, “Only hyenas walk the same road twice.”

“You’re not a hyena.” Her voice is a whisper.

Ali Dida Hada lifts his forefinger, touches each of Akai’s eyelids. “Bring me Nyipir’s red dance-ox.”

The fire crackles.

A throbbing tension engulfs all.

It is the first time Nyipir’s name has been mentioned.

Akai grabs dust and throws it at Ali Dida Hada.

Ali Dida Hada pushes her to the ground, his hands gentle around her neck. He says, “The red dance-ox.”

Akai tears at Ali Dida Hada’s hands. “Let me be.”

Ali Dida Hada spits out flecks of dust.

“What do you want?” he shouts.

Akai turns away to look into the night. “How’s my husband?”

Ali Dida Hada lifts himself from her. “
He
sent me to you.”

Akai’s head spins. Tears. She rolls over and gets up, wiping her thighs. “He …”

Ali Dida Hada continues: “He wants
only
his animals back.”

Akai’s eyes shimmer; her mouth opens and closes.

Lowers her head.

Nyipir had waited for her. He had always waited for her. She needed his waiting. She was used to his waiting. All she had ever needed to do was show up, and he would be there.

Then.

He had sent his rival to find her.

Nyipir had stopped waiting.

Quivering breath, scratchy throat.

Nyipir had stopped waiting.

The knowledge causes Akai’s world to become unsteady. She sits down, stunned.
Only his animals back
. She will not cry.

Ali Dida Hada moves away.

He stops at the margins of the light.

He returns at once to her. Impatient voiced. “A poem. Do you want to hear it?”

She nods, tears in her eyes, scattered thoughts, ringing ears.

In Tigrinya, Ali Dida Hada sings,
“Seed of song hidden in the single eye of an old star …”

Akai feels the end of Nyipir’s waiting as if she had fallen into a bottomless hole.

Now Ali Dida Hada’s forehead touches Akai’s.

Gray-hair-flecked skin, wrinkles and scars.

Ali Dida Hada croons the rest of the tale into Akai’s ear, and as he speaks, her head moves closer and closer to his shoulder until it reclines.

“Where’s the ox?” Ali Dida Hada asks.

“Gone,” she mutters.

“The car?”

“Gone.”

“The animals?”

“Gone. A dog remains.”

A lone jackal races to Isaiah’s left, a small creature’s white feathers clogging its mouth. Isaiah, still bemused, hears the water before he sees it. When he finds it, he stops. He quivers before he pulls off clothes, unbuttons his khakis. He hears the snapping of rusted chains, sees the falling to earth of a rain of ash, and smells that rancid after-burn of
spent matches. There would be a moon in the sky that night. Isaiah drops into the water, submerging himself and then propelling himself to the surface.