Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (3 page)

“How are the children?” Marie asked.

“Fine,” I replied, missing the two small creatures I had left back in Wyoming.

“You should bring them home to visit next time you come,” Alex scolded.

“I will,” I lied, slapping a mosquito off the back of my neck.

“And Charlie?” asked Katherine. “Is he well?”

“Very,” I said.

“Do you like America?” Alex asked. I had lived in America seven years by then, but he still asked in the sort of doubting, tight voice you might use to ask someone “Do you like hell?” or “How is your incarceration?”

“I like it fine.”

“We watch American shows on the satellite television,” said Marie, as if that proved something.

We took our places around the bar. In acknowledgment of the proximity of Christmas, there was a strand of hairy green tinsel hanging above our heads. And above the cash register, a silver sign (scattershot with flyshit) read, MERRY XWAS (the
M
had twisted back on itself and no one had bothered to right it). A real tree frog (a large white one) crouched as still as marble on the rafter above a shelf of soldierly, brown brandy bottles—the frog wasn’t a decoration, but he could have been.

Marie, who had been on the verge of taking herself off to bed-in-a-minute since I was last here a year ago, said, “I was just heading off,” but instead she accepted another glass of sweet sherry (the kind that leaves a smeary trail on the edge of the glass) and added, “In a minute then.” The dog at her feet, a handsome Rhodesian Ridgeback, had shredded legs from a crocodile attack earlier in the year. Marie kept a protective hand on his head, and he exuded a mild smell of flesh-rot. In the damp heat, the wounds from the crocodile attack were constantly wept open by the prying proboscises of flies. The dog did nothing to help matters with the insistence of his licking tongue.

We were on our second drink when the next round of rain came. It was dark outside by then so that we had not seen the clouds leave the edge of the escarpment and billow with stealth above our heads. There was a sudden cannon roll of thunder and then the world around us was a solid wall of water again. Conversation was impossible and there was only the task of drinking and of staring out at the silver-soaked night. But after half an hour of pounding rain, the storm subsided into a crackling hymn, like a stuck vinyl record left too long on the player. Our voices, once again, had power.

“That’s some rain,” said Dad, lighting his pipe and blowing a fragrant bloom of smoke at the rose beetles that were dive-bombing his brandy.

“Yup,” said Alex. “I bet the gorge on K’s place has flooded by now,” and everyone squinted out in the shimmering night, which had taken on a dancing quality, as if we were able to confirm Alex’s suspicion from the safety of a bar stool.

“Who’s K?” I asked.

“Zimbabwean chap at the bend in the river,” said Marie, pointing upstream toward the west. She took a swallow of sherry (her frailty is such that one expects to see the sherry light up her throat in a fire-red stream). “He’s miles from anywhere,” she said, “and in the rains—like this—his road is impossible. And when the rains really set in, he’s stuck for real. Sometimes it’s days and days when he can’t get a lorry off his farm.” She sucked in her lips and added, in a sad, knowing voice, “God, things must get pretty lonely on the farm for him.”

Dad shook his head and grunted into his pipe, “Tough bugger, that.”

“He doesn’t drink,” remarked Alex, which, in this part of the world, is newsworthy in and of itself.

“It’s just as well,” said Katherine. “He told me once that he’s a violent drunk.”

Marie said, “God forbid, he’s a violent enough teetotaler.”

“He’s good-looking though,” said Katherine, “but born again.” Her head jerked up, the way an impala jerks its head to dislodge a persistent fly. “Isn’t that typical? We finally get a half-decent-looking man down here and he turns out to be a bloody holy roller.”

We went back to watching the rain play itself out against the dark night and drinking in silence.

Then Katherine said, “He almost killed some guy on the road to Lusaka the other day. A huge South African who wouldn’t move his lorry because he was in a fight with some other driver who had nicked his side mirror. K had a lorry load of bananas that needed to get into town and this South African had stalled traffic for days on the escarpment. There were lorries all the way from there”—Katherine stretched her arms wide to indicate the hundred kilometers of tarmac road that stretch from the mountains to the valley—“to here.” She flicked the ash off her cigarette decisively onto the floor and added, “K had the guy pinned up against his bull bars in about three seconds flat. He got his bananas to town, I can tell you that much.”

“Did you see the fight?”

Katherine shook her head, and bent her neck to capture the end of her cigarette with her lips. She took a deep pull and blew smoke at me. “No,” she said, “but everybody knows about it. The police think it’s lekker having K here. Finally, someone who can sort out hassles. The police—you know how it is—never have transport, half of them are nearly dead from AIDS, they’re scared to death of the truckers. They’re not going to get themselves hurt trying to clear the escarpment. Now, if there’s someone who needs to be sorted out, they just wait for K to arrive on the scene.”

“He’s a bloody good fighter,” said Alex.

Dad grunted and knocked out his pipe on the heel of his shoe to show that he wasn’t impressed.

But I said, “Really?”

“Well, that’s what they say.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

Alex paused. “Come to think of it, K himself says.”

Then Marie, fingering her gun, said, in a vague, unpromising way, “I’ll be taking myself off to bed then in a minute,” but she didn’t move. Each member of this family carries a pistol to bed, and it is only when they are all armed (pistols wrapped in white canvas bank-bags) that they falter off into the night for their various chalets that are dotted around the grounds of the lodge. I keep waiting to hear about the string of accidents and misunderstandings that will lead, one day, to a major family shoot-out, like an episode of
Bonanza
-gone-
Addams-Family.

Dad made a sound in the back of his throat and gave Marie an abbreviated bow. “Interesting evening. Thanks very much. Time for us to depart, Fullers all.” He spoke with abrupt grace, as if he were some minor member of the royal family taking his leave from an obscure aboriginal ceremony in an overlooked corner of the British empire. Mum and I finished our drinks and hurried after him into the night. Out here, beyond the reach of the electric glare that spread from the rondaval, the witching darkness was so turbulent and vaporous with freshly hatched life and with its immediate contemporaries, death and decay, that the air seemed softly boiling with song, and with rustling wings and composting bodies.

Worms and War

Soldier at target practice

MIDMORNING THE FOLLOWING DAY, I was drinking orange juice at the picnic table and reading when the dogs suddenly spilled off my lap, as one indignant body, and scrambled up the steps toward the top of the camp in a hail of furious yelps. I looked up and there, under the arch (over which Mum had trailed a healthy vine of passion fruit), stood a man who seemed to straddle an unusually wide span of space for one person.

“Huzzit?”

“Hi,” I said back, putting my book above my eyes as a shield against the high beat of light that scorched from the pale sun.

He said his name. I said mine. And then, for a long moment, I stood by the picnic table looking up at him and he stood under the passion fruit vine looking down at me and neither of us said anything.

Even at first glance, K was more than ordinarily beautiful, but in a careless, superior way, like a dominant lion or an ancient fortress. He had a wide, spade-shaped face and wary, exotic eyes, large and khaki colored. His lips were full and sensual, suggesting a man of quick, intense emotion. His nose was unequivocal—hard and ridged, like something with which you’d want to plow a field. His thick hair was battleship gray, trimmed and freshly washed. He had large, even, white teeth.

He looked bulletproof and he looked as if he was here on
purpose,
which is a difficult trick to pull off in this woolly climate. He looked like he was his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation—a living, walking, African Vatican City. As if he owned the ground beneath his feet, and as if the sky balanced with ease on his shoulders.

He looked cathedral.

What is a man of your obvious beauty and talent doing in a place like this?

And then K took the steps that separated us, from the arch to the tamarind tree, in great strides like a man accustomed to consuming vast tracts of land in one helping. I noticed he was barefoot, but barefoot with a confidence born of familiarity rather than necessity, as if defying Africa to rear back and bite him. The dogs scattered and Mum’s Barberton daisies bowed their heads as he marched toward me.

We faced each other over the picnic table. He stood, legs apart, as if trying to hold his balance against the unstable wobble of Earth’s orbit. His smile, when it came, was surprisingly shy.

“Tea?” I asked.

K looked over his shoulder and hesitated.

“Mum and Dad are down at the tanks, sexing their fish.”

“Doing what?”

“They’re British,” I reassured him. “I am sure it’s less fun than it sounds.”

K ran thick fingers through his hair. “Ja
,
well in that case . . . Cheers, I’d love some tea.”

I went into the kitchen and shuffled the big black kettle over the hottest part of the fire, jiggling the branches over the glowing embers to give them fresh life. K leaned against one of the pillars that holds up the roof over the kitchen, like a piece of architecture himself; six foot two and 190 pounds. He watched me in silence. The branches spat and belched unruly smoke into the kitchen. My eyes spurted tears.

“Oh dear,” I said, feeling ridiculous.

The turkey that had been roosting on the kitchen wall scuttled out into the garden gobbling her displeasure.

“Wood’s wet,” I explained.

K came over and crouched in front of the fire. He grasped a hot coil in his fingers and moved it, not quickly, but thoughtfully, as if arranging something artistically, to the front of the fire, then he pulled the branches to one side and blew gently over the wood. In a few moments a red-yellow flame lapped the bottom of the kettle.

“Wet wood’s not a problem,” said K. “Fire needs to
breathe.”

“Right.”

“You can burn water grass if you just let the air in.”

Perhaps I didn’t look convinced because K said, “In Bangladesh, the curry munchers burn cowshit.”

“Do they?” I said.

I brought the tray into the shade of the tamarind and K followed me from the kitchen. We sat opposite each other on camp chairs and the dogs picked their targets and scrambled up onto our laps.

“They said you’d be rained out by now,” I said, pouring two cups of tea and handing one over to K.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“At the lodge. We were there for a drink last night.”

K smiled and rubbed his lips together. “Ja, ja,” he said. “Well it’s bloody sticky, but I could get through.” He drank half the cup down and then sighed, as if the tea had fulfilled some thirst deeper than anything physical. Then he turned back to me and asked, “You don’t live here anymore, do you? Where do you live now?”

“America.”

K grunted, as if absorbing this information, then he said, “What do they call their munts over there?”

“You mean African Americans?”

“No, I mean your original munts.”

“Native Americans,” I said.

K laughed.

I frowned.

“But they still shot them in the back the first chance they got.”

“Who?”

“The wazungu. It doesn’t matter what they
call
them, they still shot them in the back and shoved them in compounds.”

“Reservations.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s complicated,” I agreed.

“No, it’s not.”

I lit a cigarette.

“They hide behind their bullshit by calling it something else, but bullshit still smells like bullshit to me.”

I scratched the crop of mosquito bites that was flourishing on my ankles.

“There’s bad malaria here,” K warned.

“I know.”

“You should eat dried pawpaw seeds. Works better than anything for most hu-hoos. Even malaria.”

“Really?” I said.

K blinked at me, then he suddenly leaned forward and, sweeping aside the formalities of small talk, seized my finger and led it to a place just under the sharp rise of his right cheekbone. “Feel that? Can you feel that?”

I couldn’t feel anything, but I thought it impolite not to say yes.

K tightened his grip on the end of my finger. In the humidity, K’s skin was slick with a light film of sweat. He had an organic, unadulterated smell, not at all unpleasant, but slightly acid-sweet, like salted tomatoes.

“Two years ago I started getting these moving, jumping lumps under my skin,” K continued, pressing my finger deeper into his flesh. “There. See?”