Whites (14 page)

It was nothing self-evident. Was it a new piece of clothing or something from the sea freight that had just arrived? Her hair was the same as recently. He resented having to guess. He was already fully tasked. Also, there were echoes of Elaine involved—Elaine’s fury the times he had failed to notice some crucial purchase or that she’d bleached her lanugo.

“Carl, I can breathe through both nostrils at once! Look, my sinus thing is gone one hundred per cent! It was just about four this afternoon. It’s just
gone away
. I feel like I’m just flooded with air.” Her eyes were bright and moist. It was important.

She embraced him a little fiercely. He was already elsewhere. His mind was back on his mission. Ione had found a
sangoma
in a village fifteen minutes from Gaborone—a
sangoma
who seemed to know all about how to deal with problems like the dogs. So Carl had been right. Ione was giving him credit for guessing there had to be some ultimate mechanism in the culture for dealing with unbearable situations—whether
it was witchcraft or not. In the United States it would be the Mafia. Ione had been skeptical at first. Now she was excited.

Lois was being grateful, pressing against him. She was easing his shirttails out. He was getting the idea. Lois slipped off a sandal and rubbed her heel against his calf. I can do only one thing at a time, he thought. There was no time for this.

“Don’t be so tired,” Lois said, pleadingly.

But tonight he had to get a dog bowl from Letsamao’s yard, somehow. He needed to plan. The
sangoma
had said to get hold of some object common to all the dogs. Carl needed to reconnoitre.

Lois was hurt. “You could at least put your briefcase down,” she said.

He did. “I don’t think you grasp how tired I am,” he said. He was all apology.

She was badly upset. She was liable to go to the bedroom, which would be perfect if she would stay put there long enough for him to get outside and spot the last locations of the dog bowls before night fell. Then he could recoup with her.

Lo announced that she was going to lie down for a while. She was giving him another chance. The implication was that if he was as tired as he was saying, it would make sense for him to lie down along with her. He acted blank. She left. The bedroom door closed loudly.

In the yard, he wandered along the fence, pausing to pick bits of refuse out of the mesh. The dogs were dining. There was the bowl he needed. It was white enamel. When the dogs were through, the bowl was twenty feet from where he stood. He needed an instrument. He needed an instrument that didn’t exist, except in comic books—a pair of monster accordion tongs. He would have to go over or under
the fence in the dead of night. There was no other choice. It would be safer to go underneath. He could excavate in the guise of filling in tunnels dug by the dogs. A shallow trench would do it, something just deep enough to let him roll under the sharp bottom tips of the fence. Would he ignite the dogs when he got over there? He would have to see. He wasn’t physically afraid of the dogs, except for the two ridgebacks. The dogs were cowards, basically. Pretending to pick up a rock would make them shy off. Even if they did bark, he would be there and back so fast there shouldn’t be any danger. Also, the dogs knew him. And best of all, nobody at Letsamao’s paid any attention to the dogs, whatever they did. It would be safe. He would wear heavy stuff on his arms and legs, and heavy gloves, just in case. He wound a twist tie around the fence wire at the point closest to the dog bowl. He was set.

This would be work. It was manual labor. He wouldn’t mind it. The real beginning of the end with Elaine had been when he overheard her refer to herself as “labor” and to him as “management.” Naturally, he had let her snake out of it, believing her when she claimed she was only calling him “
the
management”—a different thing. Then, during the divorce, it had turned out that calling him “management” was nothing—it was praise, compared to other things she’d said.

Everything tonight had to be kept from Lo. He was grateful it was Lo that things had to be concealed from, not Elaine. Elaine would have been a participant, because she would have found out what was going on. Elaine was temperamentally a Roman empress. And especially in her tastes—she had worn herself out trying to force her needs through the eye of a needle: himself. Lo wanted less than he could provide. And she was still economizing. He would have to be certain she was asleep when he struck tonight, like a commando.

In the garage he examined the spade he would use. If Elaine had been a Motswana, she would be the richest woman in the country. More Africans should be like Elaine. It was too bad there had been no way she could go into business for herself—for the wife of a foreign-service officer, that had been impossible. Mostly she had been able to get only trivial jobs, like doing property inventories or managing the commissary, except for the one job she had done everywhere and done magnificently—writing the post-differential-payment report. Her reports were masterpieces. She could prove that any foreign-service post in the world was enough of a hellhole to justify twenty to sixty per cent more income in the form of hardship allowances for all hands. Everywhere they had gone, Elaine had been given the differential report to do. Nothing escaped her: windy seasons so brief that no one else noticed them, cheese shortages, mildew problems, no dry cleaning, obscure local diseases lying in wait. The differential report had spoken to her genius at faultfinding. He could imagine what she would have done with the dog problem: she would have turned it into gold for the entire mission. She could take an earthly paradise like Blantyre and make it sound like Pompeii in its last ten minutes. People confessed things to her, like unreported rapes and embarrassing ailments. When she was in the presence of concealed information, she knew it. In fact, if he had ever missed two staff meetings in a row in Elaine’s time, she would have known it and it would have meant cold meals, no sex—the whole works. It was bothering him that there might be some simple means of getting the dog bowl that would have been obvious to Elaine which he was overlooking. It couldn’t be helped. Tonight he would be a thief in the night, like the Thief of Baghdad, which he had just realized was the best movie he had ever seen.

•    •    •

Carl attacked the ground. Botswana was sand. Lo was sound asleep, knock wood. Carl worked hunched over, trying to remain alert for any sign of activity at Letsamao’s. His body felt light. The dogs were watching him. It was moonless, knock wood.

He felt partly brilliant and partly absurd. He was wearing war-surplus paratroop boots he had carted all over Africa and never used, a watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows, a black, wet-look windbreaker Elaine had insisted on buying for him in the Marais. He hated it. The only reason for buying it had been to enable her to name-drop the point of purchase. With any luck at all, he’d wreck the jacket in the raid tonight. He had to be careful about Lo’s black mittens, though, and get them back unnoticed into her glove drawer. She was frighteningly well organized. In the right-hand pocket of his windbreaker, ruining it, was his secret weapon—lumps of raw beef to throw to the dogs to distract them. He had to get things over with because he was stifling inside his action costume, which was what it was.

The trench was too short. Until this moment in life he had always enjoyed being taller than anybody around. He should have hired someone to do the trench, like the street boys who washed your car behind your back and against your instructions and then demanded money. It hadn’t occurred to him. He continued digging. The bottom teeth of the fence went down less than an inch into the soil, he had been happy to discover.

He lay down and rolled under the fence easily. The bowl gleamed at him. He stood up as a wave of dogs, muttering, rolled toward him. He flung the meat in an arc just over their heads, and they wheeled. It was like magic. He had the bowl! The dogs were after the meat, breaking up into vicious knots here and there. This was Letsamao’s karma for underfeeding them. Maybe their whole problem was being underfed.
He was back in the trench and rolling home. He stood up, shaking himself. He collapsed the lips of the trench and swept loose earth into the hole, enjoying everything.

He was curious to know why he felt physically light, so light. He felt almost removed from his victory, standing aside. It was amazing. What he had done was amazing. He had forestalled the dogs. He felt fine, he felt amazing. Everyone said forestall this, forestall that, but how many people knew the term came from rebel merchants setting up markets outside the authorized markets run by the barons and bishops and so on, in England? How many people knew it came from the history of marketing? England was conquering the world in the guise of her language. Poor devils here in Botswana had to abandon their own languages in order to get a degree. Suppose he’d had to learn German at a tender age in order to get anywhere? The people we deal with day in and day out are all linguists, he thought. He slipped the bowl inside his jacket, zipped up, and went in.

The phone rang. It was Ione, at last. He had been waiting for days. She got directly to money. It was two hundred pula. At the current rate, that would be about two hundred and fifty dollars. Then she gave him instructions. She was breathless. At the end, she said, “Carl, I want only one thing out of this, and it’s fine with the
sangoma
, and that’s to be present—be there for it. This is a whole new step for me. So, I’m hoping to God you have no objection. And also you owe me this. And it’s a good idea for me to be there, just in general. And he understands absolutely about confidentiality.”

He said he wanted her to be there. She was relieved.

The instructions were easy. He was supposed to be “clean in his person” and to wear clean clothes.

•    •    •

Ione was trying to modulate everything. Let her, he thought. As she drove, she was trying to keep him relaxed and positive. She was driving especially carefully, suppressing her impatience whenever she had to stop and get out to let them through cattle gates. She wouldn’t let him help. She wanted him to rest, which was all right with him, because last night the dogs had been straight from hell itself. Ione had even brought a pillow for the small of his back.

There were a lot of mountainous clouds. She had pointed out some odd cloud forms. It was balmy. The little hills above Ramotswa were greener and more normal-looking than the ones he was used to—like the steep hills around Lobatse that looked like piles of rubble or cobblestones. Was she worried that he was going to back out, still? He smiled to himself. On his lap in a paper bag was the dog bowl. He was holding on to it with both hands.

Ione was following directions written neatly on an index card. These back roads were rough. He wasn’t sure where they were, at this point. The last landmark he’d paid attention to had been a garage—a panel-beaters place near the main road, a good while back. He liked the way Ione dressed. Today she was wearing a long-sleeved khaki blouse and matching pantslike things whose name would come to him. Lo would look like a Brownie in Ione’s outfit, but on Ione it was just right. Sometimes Lo bought clothes in youth-wear. The only thing against Ione was her eyebrows, which were too thin and not in their original location. But that was nothing. He couldn’t help admiring her calves as she worked the brake and clutch. She had muscular calves, like a dancer. Culottes, she was wearing.

They arrived. She seemed not to like the looks of the place, and told him to stay in the car while she scouted around. There was a mud-block storage building standing
alone at the edge of a deep ravine. Where was this? They had come down into a valley with bad gully erosion everywhere he looked. The building was windowless. The roofing was motley—boards and sheet metal held down with stones. A line of elephant grass grew around one side and the back of the structure. There were no other buildings anywhere in view.

Now Ione was motioning him to come over. He got out. The entrance was at the back—a hole probably originally intended to receive a doorframe. The void was covered with a tarpaulin, which Ione pushed aside with a stick. Candles burned in several places inside. They entered.

It was difficult to see much. Where was his night vision? Something like a heap of rags in one corner rose up and walked. Ione jumped. Carl was steady. It was the
sangoma
approaching.

How usual was this? The
sangoma
was dressed in an assemblage of light and dark rags, pinned together, and he was masked. Toweling was wound around the top half of his head, ending just below the nose. The eyehole edges were ragged. A headband secured the toweling, and feathers hung down from it on one side. The
sangoma’s
arms were bare. There was nothing imposing about him. There was something sad. He looked frail. He seemed to be alone. The place had been neatened up in a rough way, the earth floor raked. There were ramps of earth and debris in two corners. Some penetrating smell hung in the air. There were sacks of something along one wall which could be sat on in a pinch. It was all right. He didn’t love the ceiling beams, which were studded with white pods—some of them as big as doorknobs—which he knew were spiders’ nests. He could make out a cot and a small table at the head of the room. He was ready anytime.

•    •    •

Carl lay on the cot, waiting. First, Ione had insisted on checking the cot for stability. Then she had insisted on dusting the cot off with some tissues she had. Then it had been O.K. to lie down. And now she had run out to the car to get him the pillow she’d brought. She was taking more of a hand in things than anybody else present liked. There had been trouble over the money, when she made Carl keep half of it until the procedure was over. And that had led to the
sangoma
’s first request that she consider waiting outside, which she had resented. Now he had the pillow, and there was a compromise: she would sit on a sack at a reasonable distance from the scene of the crime.

The thing began, at last. He wanted to tell Ione to relax, and to remind her that there were such things as trade secrets and that from his standpoint, the
sangoma
was already being pushed around. This man was an entrepreneur, when you came down to it. Also, it was Carl’s money, and so far he felt like he was getting his money’s worth—some dance steps and swaying as the
sangoma
circled around him, some business with bones in a pouch, some pouring of liquids into and out of the dog bowl. How could she expect to be allowed to scrutinize everything? They weren’t there to make a documentary. It was too dark for that, and this kind of thing was along the lines of a séance. He wanted to tell her that people didn’t take flashlights to séances and sit there shining them around. Besides, a good part of the ceremony was going on behind a screen made from sacking. Maybe the
sangoma
hadn’t liked Ione explaining at the beginning, over and over and over, in what would have to be called Basic English, what Carl’s problem was and what the ritual was supposed to be putting an end to. From what Carl had seen during the money imbroglio, the
sangoma
spoke perfectly good English, although maybe that was strange. Carl was satisfied, was the point. The
sangoma
was humming. For a moment,
Carl felt he knew the tune, from South African radio. But that was impossible. He liked this thing. It went on.