Memory Wall: Stories (10 page)

Luvo lifts away more rocks, sweeps away gravel and dust
with his hands. The skeleton is fully articulated, looped into the stone. It is perhaps ten feet long. His heart skids.

With the hammer it takes Luvo only about two hours to break the skull free. Little chips of darker rock fly off as he strikes it and he hopes he is not damaging the thing he has come to find. As big as an old box-television, made entirely of stone, even once it’s free of the matrix surrounding it, the skull seems impossible for him to lift. Even the eyeholes and nostrils are filled with rock, a lighter color than the surrounding skull. Luvo thinks: I won’t be able to move it by myself.

But he does. He unzips the sleeping bag and folds it over the skull, padding it over on all sides, and using the walking stick as a lever, begins to roll the skull, inches at a time, toward the road. It’s dark and Luvo is out of water before he gets the skull to the bottom of the retaining wall. Then he goes back to the rest of the skeleton, covers it again with rocks and gravel, marks it with the walking stick, and brings his camp up to the road.

His legs ache; his fingers are cut. Rings of starlight expand out over the ridgeline. The insects in the grass around him exult in their nighttime chorus. Luvo sits down on his duffel bag with the last of his oranges in his lap and the skull waiting six feet below, wrapped in a sleeping bag. He puts on his bright red parka. He waits.

The moon swings gently up over the mountains, huge, green, aswarm with craters.

R
ETURN

Three English-speaking Finnish women stop for Luvo after midnight. Two are named Paula. They seem mildly drunk.
They ask shockingly few questions about how ragged Luvo looks or how long he has been sitting on the side of one of the most remote roads in Africa. He keeps his hat on, tells them he has been fossil hunting, asks them to help him with the skull. “Okay,” they say, and work together, pausing now and then to pass around a bottle of Cabernet, and in fifteen minutes have heaved the skull over the wall and made room for it in the back of their van.

They are traveling across South Africa. One of them has recently turned forty and the others are here to celebrate with her. The floor of their camper van is knee-deep with food wrappers and maps and plastic bottles. They pass around a thick, half-hacked-apart shank of cheese; one of the Paulas cuts wedges of it and stacks them on crackers. Luvo eats slowly, looking at his torn fingernails and wondering how he must smell. And yet, there is reggae music washing out of the dashboard, there is the largeness of these women’s laughter. “What an adventure!” they say, and he thinks of his paperbacks sitting in the bottom of his duffel. When they stop at the top of the pass and pile out and ask Luvo to take their photograph beside the beaten brown sign that reads
Die Top,
Luvo feels as if perhaps they have been sent to him as angels.

Dawn finds them eating scrambled eggs and chopped tomatoes in the rickety and deserted dining room of the Queens Hotel in a highway town called Matjiesfontein. Luvo drinks an ice-cold Fanta and watches the women eat. Their trip is ending and they show each other photos on the camera’s screen. Ostriches, wineries, nightclubs.

When he’s done with the first Fanta Luvo drinks another one, the slow fans turning above, and the kind, sweaty smiles of the three women turn on him now and then, as if in their worlds black and white are one and the same, as if the differences
between people didn’t matter so much anymore, and then they get up and pile into the van for the drive back to Cape Town.

One of the Paulas drives; the other two women sleep. Out the windows communication wires sling past in shallow parabolas from pole to pole. The road is relentlessly straight. Paula-the-driver looks back now and then at Luvo in the backseat.

“Headache?”

Luvo nods.

“What kind of fossil is it?”

“Maybe something called a gorgon.”

“Gorgon? Like the Medusa? Snakes for hair, all that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, those are the gorgons all right. Medusa and her sisters. Turn you to stone if you look them in the eyes.”

“Really?”

“Really,” says forty-year-old Finnish Paula.

“This gorgon is very old,” says Luvo. “From when this whole desert was a swamp, and big rivers ran all through it.”

“I see,” says Paula. She drives awhile, tapping her thumb on the wheel in time with the music. “You like that, Luvo? Going out and digging up old things?”

Luvo looks out the window. Out there, beyond the fencelines, beneath the starlit, flat-topped hills, beneath the veld, beneath the dwarf scrub, beneath the endless running wind of the Karoo, what else remains locked away?

“Yes,” he says. “I like it.”

T
HE
T
WELVE
A
POSTLES
H
OTEL

Paula parks the van outside Chefe Carpenter’s stucco wall and the four of them get out and Luvo waves at the security camera
but nothing seems to happen so they sit on the curb waiting. Not ten minutes later Chefe in his robe comes up the street walking his two collies. He regards Luvo and then the women with their matted hair and wrinkled shirts and when they open the back of the van and lift away the shredded remains of Luvo’s sleeping bag, he looks at the fossil for a full minute without saying anything. His eyes seem both incredulous and dreamy, as if he is not entirely sure that what is happening is real. With his trembling lip and soft eyes he looks to Luvo as if he is about to cry.

Twenty minutes later they stand in Chefe’s spotless garage drinking coffee with the skull sitting naked on the painted floor. This one huge head retrieved from the past and stripped from its context. Chefe makes a call and an Indian man comes over and looks at the skull with his hand on his chin and then makes several more telephone calls. His excitement is obvious. Within an hour three more men come in to look at the skull and the three yawning Finnish women and the strange boy in the wool cap.

Eventually Chefe disappears into the house and reemerges dressed in a trim blue suit. He says he can offer 1.4 million rand. The jaws of the Finnish women drop simultaneously. They thump Luvo on the back. They shriek and jump around the garage. Luvo asks what he can give him now and Chefe says, “Now? As in today?”

“That’s what he said,” says one of the Paulas. After another half hour of waiting Chefe gives Luvo 30,000 rand in cash. There is enough money that he has to give it to Luvo in a paper shopping bag. Luvo asks that the remainder be sent in a complete sum to Pheko Garrett, B478A, Site C, Khayelitsha.

“All of it?” Chefe asks and Luvo says, “All of it.”

“How do we know you’ll do that?” asks Paula, and Chefe
Carpenter looks up at all three of them, taking his eyes off the skull for the first time in several minutes, as if he is not sure who has spoken. He blinks his eyes once. “You can go now,” he says.

Three blocks away Luvo says goodbye to the Finnish women, who hug him each in turn and give him their email addresses on little white cards, and one of the Paulas is crying softly to herself as they watch Luvo climb out of their rented camper van.

Near the entrance to the Company Gardens is a little English bookshop. Luvo walks inside with his paper shopping bag full of money. He finds a paperback of
Treasure Island
and pays for it with a 1,000-rand note.

Then he flags down a waterfront cab and tells the driver to take him to the Twelve Apostles Hotel. The driver gives him a look, and the woman at the desk at the hotel gives him the same look, but Luvo has cash and once he has paid she leads him down a hundred-meter-long cream-colored runner of carpet to a black door with the number
7
on it.

The room is as clean and white as it was in Alma’s memory. Off the balcony jade-colored waves break onto a golden beach. In the bathroom tiny white tiles line the floor in diamond shapes. Crisp white towels hang on nickel-plated rods. There’s a big, spotless, white toilet. White fluffy bathmats sit on the floor. A single white orchid blooms in a rectangular vase on the toilet tank.

Luvo takes a forty-five-minute shower. He is somewhere around fifteen years old and he has perhaps six months left to live. After his shower he lies on the perfect white sheets of the bed and watches the huge afternoon sky flow like liquid out the window. Rafts of gulls sail above the beach. He thinks of Alma’s memories, both those carried inside his head and
the ones somewhere out in the city—Cabbage will have traded them away by now. He thinks of Alma’s memory of this place, of the movie about the fish, gliding out into the great blue. He sleeps.

When he wakes, hours later, he stares awhile into cobalt squares of night out the windows and then he turns on his lamp and opens
Treasure Island.

I remember him as if it were yesterday,
he reads,
as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man…

T
HE
G
ORGON

It takes six weeks for a crew of six men to excavate the skeleton. They work in daylight only and park their cars two bends away from the easiest route and when they have to bring in the crane they do it at night. They bring it back to Cape Town in an unmarked truck. The dealer who buys it from Chefe Carpenter brings it to a blackmarket auction house in London. In London it is cleaned and prepared and varnished and mounted on a titanium brace. It sells at an anonymous cloak-and-dagger auction for 4.5 million dollars, the fourth-highest sum anyone has ever paid for a fossil. The skeleton travels from London on a container ship through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean to Shanghai. A week later it is installed by trained preparators on a pedestal in the lobby of a fifty-eight-story hotel.

No fake vegetation, no color, just a polyvinyl acetate sprayed along the joints and a Plexiglas cube lowered down over it. Someone sets two big potted palms on either side but two days later the hotel’s owner asks for them to be taken away.

P
HEKO

In late February Pheko goes to the post office behind the spaza shop and in his mailbox is a single envelope with his name on it. Inside is a check for almost 1.4 million rand. Pheko looks up. He can hear, all of a sudden, the blood trundling through his head. The ground swivels out from underneath him. Madame Gecelo, behind the counter, looks over at him and looks back at whatever form she is filling out. A bus with no windows passes. Dust rides up over the little post office.

No one is looking. The floor steadies. Pheko peeks again into the envelope and reads the amount. He looks up. He looks back down.

On the subject line the check says,
Fossil Sale.
Pheko locks his post office box and hangs his key around his neck and stands with his eyes closed awhile. When he gets home he shows Temba his two fists. Temba looks at him through his little eyeglasses, then looks back at the fists. He waits, thinking hard, then taps the right fist. Pheko smiles.

“Try the other one.”

“The other one?”

Pheko nods.

“You never say to try the other one.”

“This time I say try the other one.”

“This isn’t a trick?”

“Not a trick.” Temba taps the left hand. Pheko opens it. “Your bus card?” says Temba. Pheko nods.

“Your bus card?” repeats Temba.

They stop in the market on the way to the station and buy swimming shorts, red for Pheko and light blue for Temba. Then they ride the Golden Arrow toward the city. Pheko
carries the plastic shopping bag containing the swimming trunks in his right hand but will not let Temba see inside. It is a warm March day and the edges of Table Mountain are impossibly vivid against the sky.

Pheko and Temba disembark at the Claremont stop and walk two blocks holding hands and enter a branch of the Standard Bank of South Africa two storefronts down from Virgin Active Fitness. Pheko opens an account and shows his identification and the clerk spends ten minutes typing various things into his computer and then he asks for an initial deposit. Pheko slides the check across.

A manager shows up thirty seconds later and looks at the check and takes it back behind a glass-walled office. He speaks into a phone for maybe ten minutes.

“What are we doing?” whispers Temba.

“We’re hoping,” whispers Pheko.

After what seems like an hour the manager comes back and smiles at Pheko and the bank deposits the check.

Ten minutes later Temba and Pheko stand in the glaring, cloudless sunlight in front of the glass walls of Virgin Active Fitness. Above them they can see people on treadmills, toiling away, and straight ahead, down through the walls, through their own reflections, they can see the three indoor pools, swimmers toiling through lanes, lifeguards in chairs, and children shooting through the channels of the twisting green waterslide.

At the entry Pheko gives the attendant a 1,000-rand note and she grumbles for a minute about change but passes some over and Pheko fills out a form on a clipboard and then they walk into a big locker room, lined with mahogany-fronted lockers, a few men here and there shaving or lacing tennis shoes or knotting ties and here comes Pheko with Temba
trotting behind, adjusting his little eyeglasses with a happy incredulousness, and Temba chooses locker number 55 and they pull on their brand-new swim trunks, red for Pheko and light blue for Temba. Then they pass through a tile hallway lined with dripping showers and descend twelve steps and step through a glass door and into the roiling, chlorinated air of the indoor pools.

Temba whispers something to himself that Pheko cannot hear. Lifeguards in red polo shirts sit in chairs. The slide gushes; the shouts of children echo off the ceiling.

Pheko leads Temba up the long waterslide staircase, holding his little hand, the pools below growing smaller, the pink backs of the children in front of them wet with drops of water. Toward the top there is a short wait, each person in front of them climbing into place, then releasing, shooting down the slide, sweeping through the turns, and within a minute Pheko and Temba have climbed the last few steps and they stand together at the top of the waterslide.