White Dog Fell From the Sky (15 page)

A wolf spider sat on the wall by the kitchen
pipes, hairy, fanged, as big as a small plate. She clapped a pot over it and slid the
top on. She felt brave, capable. Out in the garden, she set the pot down, took the
lid off and made a run for it. As she headed for the house, she heard a cat yowl behind
her. She turned, and the ghost of Horse walked toward her on rangy, long legs. He was
twice as gaunt as before. “Where the hell have you been?” Horse followed her
into the kitchen, inhaled
a can of sardines, and another, before
settling into a rattling purr. “Where were you?” But he only purred and
purred. Mr. Magoo came into the kitchen to investigate, hissed and put his back up. Then
some ancient memory surfaced. His tail went up, and he dragged it under Horse’s
nose.

In the wild part of the garden behind the
tall aloes, the flat rock stored its coolness in the shade of the jacaranda trees. Out
here, he could think, and Itumeleng could not find him to shout her sillinesses. When he
put his palm on the rock face, he felt connected to something beneath, all the way to
the center of the Earth. He’d been in Botswana for seven months now. He’d
had three letters from his mother and one from his mother’s employer, Hendrik
Pretorius. He wondered if Boitumelo were yet married. He tried not to think about her.
It made him half crazy, but his mind went there like a wandering goat.

Still, it was something else he’d come
to this rock to think about. This morning, as he was leaving Amen’s house to go to
work, he asked his friend, “Where’s the bicycle?”

“I sold it,” Amen said. “I
needed the money.”

Isaac couldn’t believe his ears.
“You sold it? It’s not mine.”

Amen had lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
“A bicycle is nothing to a European. Tell her that it was stolen, and she’ll
buy another, and then you’ll have a bicycle again.”

Isaac punched him. It was the first time in
his life that he’d punched another man in the face. Amen took a step back, not
quite falling to the ground. He was a big man, but he didn’t strike back.
He’d prefer, Isaac saw, to catch him off guard. He didn’t know when
he’d retaliate, but it would come. Living with Amen, there would be no rest now.
He’d need to be watchful, and Kagiso—he saw it in her eyes—would be watching too.
He felt bad for her, the way each day another sparkle fell out of her eyes onto the
ground.

It would take a year of wages to save enough
for a new bicycle. He needed to find another place to live, but there was no place to
go. He’d need to confess about the bicycle. He was late for work this morning, and
she’d noticed he hadn’t ridden it. He’d told her that he had to mend a
puncture. It is said that the end of an ox is beef, at the end of a lie is grief. That
lie slipped off his tongue before he could bring it back. Now he needed to decide if he
must tell her that he’d lied as well as lost the bicycle. He thought he must tell
her everything. If you climb a tree, you must climb down the same tree. But he would
wait a few days.

He left the rock and cleared the lemon tree
of weeds and checked the six chili peppers, which were in little pots, waiting to be
transplanted into the garden. He gave each pot water and touched the plants. Somewhere
he’d heard that plants respond to touch, even to love. She who must not be called
madam had asked whether he could grow hot chili peppers. The old man had given him eight
seeds in a folded paper. Six seeds had germinated, one had not. He’d kept the last
seed for Kagiso to plant, but it was lost. Each of the six pepper plants now had strong
green leaves. He wanted to take a leaf on his tongue to see if there was fire in it, but
to take one would be to damage the small plant, so he only imagined the flames in those
leaves. In three or four days, he would transplant the peppers next to the tomatoes in
the garden.

With a watering can, Isaac poured water on
the lettuces and spinach, filled the can, and watered each tomato plant, then went down
the row of onions. The carrots were just coming up with their feathery leaves, and he
watered beside them so he wouldn’t drown the young carrots. He tried to make his
mind like the mind of a plant. He went back to the onions and watched as their stems
stirred. When they turned one way they were green, another way and they were blue gray.
They rustled against one another like the sound of a man walking through long grass.

Late that afternoon the madam asked to talk
to him. His heart sank. But instead of talking about the bicycle, she told him that
she’d be going on a long trip, probably for two or three weeks. Would he live in
the house and watch over things and feed the cats?

He asked whether Itumeleng would not be here,
and she said that Itumeleng would be going home with her daughter to see her mother.

“Then I’ll stay in the
servant’s quarters?”

“I thought you would stay in my
house.”

“I would rather stay in the
servant’s quarters.”

“Wherever you stay, I’ll pay you
extra while I’m gone.”

“I’ll look after your house with
pleasure,
mma,
but I don’t want extra pay.” It was too good to be
true. Before he left for the day, he learned that Itumeleng didn’t want him living
in her room. She said that she’d had too many men there already, and it had
brought nothing but bad fortune. Isaac laughed. He would stay in the little room near
the kitchen in the main house.

She left on a Saturday. That night, White
Dog slept just outside the kitchen door. For the first time in Isaac’s life, there
was no other breath sighing near him at night. So much stillness, it felt like the space
between stars. In Pretoria, there were voices outside, radios, drunks, people arguing,
singing, footsteps going by, and inside, whisperings, snorings, murmurings of sleep. Now
he felt he might be the last man on Earth. He got out of bed, walked outside, and looked
up the large trunk of a syringa tree, into its boughs holding the sliver of a new moon.
He imagined that he could hear a low sound coming from the stars and from the great
black space around them, a low deep sound: the vast engine of the universe. He had never
seen the ocean, but he imagined this sound to be similar to the sound of the sea when
it’s rumbling, the great waves gathering and falling.

White Dog did not understand what he was
doing out there in the dark. She put her head on one side and looked up to see what he
was looking at. He wondered, could she hear what he was hearing? White Dog knew things
from the other world, things that most dogs don’t know, but perhaps it all came
through her nose. Dogs are one big nose.

He left the door open to the night air to
let the heat of the day out. The polished concrete floor at the entryway was cool on his
feet. Through the darkness, he felt his way toward the bedroom with his
hands and bumped into a wall. When he stopped, he still heard that low, deep hum. He
lay in the small bedroom with his eyes open and imagined the thousands and millions of
people on Earth who would never be alone the way he was alone tonight. Every sound he
heard was large: the wings of a moth, the donkey boiler outside the window groaning as
the water inside its tank cooled, the creak of the floor in the living room.

The room where he slept was the same size as
the house he’d once shared with his mother and five brothers and sisters. In this
house, there were still six more rooms, some of them much larger than this one. A
screened veranda ran the length and width of the house on two sides. A small village
could sleep here.

In the morning, just after dawn, he heard a
sound like a mouse across the floor. He got up and walked in the direction of the noise.
A crested barbet, covered in chimney soot, wooffled over the open screen at the living
room window, looking for a way out. Isaac recognized it as one of two birds that sang at
the top of the tree outside the kitchen door. He went back into the bedroom to put on
his trousers, and when he came out, Horse had it in his jaws. The wings were flapping.
He pressed his fingers outside the cat’s mouth to release the jaw, and the bird
flew up onto the curtain rod. He picked up Horse, put him outside, and closed the door.
Back in the living room, the bird looked down from the rod.

Every day he was in the habit of speaking to
this bird at the top of the tree: “Good morning, and how did you spend the
night?” But this morning, he said, “I go to the trouble of putting thorns
around the trunk of your tree to protect you from the cats. But now you must fall down
the chimney and put yourself in the mouth of the cat? How many times do you expect to be
saved?” The bird looked at him from the top of the curtain. He was very dirty and
his feathers were sticking up untidily. When Isaac went to him, the bird seemed to
understand he would do him no harm. Or perhaps he was too frightened from being in the
jaws of a cat and could only stare. Isaac picked him up with two hands and opened the
outside door. “Pshhhh! Pshhhh!” he said to
Horse, who ran
under the aloes. Isaac opened his hands, and the bird stood there a moment before
flying. He weighed almost nothing, and his feet felt friendly on Isaac’s palm. His
mate was waiting on the branch of the tree when he flew up next to her, making the alarm
call
puta puta puta!

Alice’s hair was stiff with grit and
dust, and she’d never felt happier. Only the dusty road before her existed, the
bush and the sun and the bright, wide horizon. She thought of home, the large kitchen
sink, the screen on the veranda where the geckos ran up and down chasing flies, Isaac
pottering about in the garden, Itumeleng calling over the fence to friends. She could
picture these things, but Gaborone felt a million miles away.

The group had been on the road a day and a
half already, having set off from Gaborone in two government Land Rovers and a three-ton
truck driven by Sam, Motsumi, and Shakespeare. The idea was for them to gather
information about the interplay between livestock, wildlife herds, and the !Kung San
that would enable them to draft a national policy that would protect all three. They
were to talk with !Kung San leaders, visit cattle posts, view a veterinary boundary
fence, take in the Tsodilo Hills, stop off in Shakawe, and return home. Everything was
arranged for them—drivers, food, cook tents, cots, sleeping bags.

Representing the Ministry of Local
Government and Lands were Alice and C.T., her boss. The Ministry of Agriculture had sent
their new assistant permanent secretary, Arthur Haddock, who’d recently arrived in
Botswana from Wisconsin, plus Ole Olsen from the Division of Veterinary Sciences, and
Will Vreeland, a wildlife specialist and a friend of Alice’s. A British guy who
was studying !Kung San paintings in the Tsodilo Hills would be meeting them east of
Maun.

She was traveling in one of the Land Rovers
with her friend Will and the new assistant permanent secretary. Arthur Haddock knew how
to greet people with a
dumela, mma
or
dumela, rra,
and that was about
it. This must have been his first trip out, but it didn’t stop him from telling
Sam, the driver, how to do his job. “Aren’t you even going to stop?”
he asked, when a hornbill collided with the windshield.

“Very dangerous to stop,
rra.
Anyway, the bird is dead.”

Thirty kilometers down the road, the vehicle
got a flat tire. Mr. Haddock said that there needed to be a more systematic regulation
and monitoring of government vehicles. Alice wanted to say,
Hey, buster, this
isn’t Milwaukee.

Sam glanced at him. “Many thorns on
the road,
rra.
You have a new tire, she goes over a thorn, and boom!
Flat.”

They stayed in Francistown that night and
went on toward Maun the following day. Deep sand tracks made the driving treacherous.
One false move and the vehicle would jump the track and they’d turn upside down.
It was already December, and there’d been no rain here. Next to the track, cattle
stumbled over the earth, their rib cages hollow.

By midafternoon, they’d reached Nata,
two hundred kilometers west of Francistown, where they stopped to meet up with Ian
Henry, the specialist in San rock paintings. They inquired after him, but no one in the
village seemed to know where he’d gone. A national measles and vitamin A campaign
was under way beneath a shade tree; schoolchildren in faded gold uniforms with brown
collars were being dragged there for vaccinations.

“Where the hell is he?” asked
Arthur Haddock.

“He probably got tired of
waiting,” Alice said. “We’re half a day late.”

Ian Henry did appear a couple of hours
later, saying he’d needed to talk to a man who lived farther up the Nata River.
Alice remembered then that she’d met this fellow the previous year, after
he’d written a proposal for a permit to work in the Tsodilo Hills. Her first
impression of him had been of someone disorganized and borderline cavalier. To that was
added the word combative, after he and Arthur Haddock got into a discussion after dinner
over San trance dances.

“Pagan rituals,” said
Haddock.

“Pagan is a pretty loaded word,”
said Ian. “Not that far from ‘nigger.’ And where do you get your
information?”

“I saw a film before leaving the
States.”

“Ah, a film. A very dependable and
rigorous source. Did you ever talk to a San healer?”

“It’s obvious what’s going
on.”

“Obvious? How?”

“I’ve seen that same sort of
mumbo jumbo in the States.”

“This is not mumbo jumbo. Healers risk
their lives to cure others. When they enter a trance, they’re often in
excruciating pain—and they believe they may not return to the world. They do it for each
other, and for their community. When was the last time you had that sort of
courage?”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Your mind is as closed as a cuckoo
clock.”

“You’ve had too much to
drink.”