Norman Rush - Whites

Letsamao was a rough customer he had a right to be afraid of. The Minister of Labor had oversight of all expatriates working in the country. Letsamao was a power in the ruling party. Moreover, he was a favorite of the AID mission director and the ambassador, largely because of a reputation as a strong administrator. Carl thought of the Batswana as an unusually agreeable people, so long as you remembered to greet them properly with dumela . Letsamao was atypical. He was permanently expressionless. He was short, thickly built, hard-looking. He was cicatriced, with three faint scars like cat scratches on each cheek. Carl had never seen Letsamao in casual dress.

He was approaching Letsamao’s house. The gates in the high front walls were ajar. Carl had a flash of irritation. Letsamao’s front yard, with its oblong of chive-green lawn, was beautifully landscaped and tended, but the backyard, which faced the front of Carl’s house through a wire fence, was a wasteland of bare earth, flailing laundry, children, dog life. Servant Theatre was what Elaine had called a similar scene they had lived with briefly, in Blantyre.

The coach lights on either side of the gate came on. That meant Letsamao was expected imminently. On impulse, Carl stopped. He would wait at the gate to intercept Letsamao. He had time. It would be pleasant. Because of the drought, mosquitoes were scarce. The first stars were out, twitching.

Letsamao’s silver Peugeot appeared at the bend in Sefhare Road, traveling briskly. Carl waved. The Peugeot swung toward the driveway. Carl stepped into the middle of the drive, one hand up, smiling hard. Letsamao stopped — more abruptly than he had to, Carl felt.

He went around to Letsamao’s window and tapped. Letsamao sat looking at him for a moment before lowering the window very slowly halfway. Carl noted that Letsamao was playing the clutch, keeping the car moving slightly forward. Carl was off balance. He did remember to begin with dumela , but then he rushed. There was too much to convey. He said he was getting sick. He used the word “insomnia,” which he had decided against using. When he said he thought it was time for an indaba , he could see Letsamao stiffen. Carl knew the term, meaning “powwow,” from reading the Rand Daily Mail . The term was Zulu and was supposed to be lingua franca all over southern Africa — but was it? Had he patronized Letsamao?

Letsamao cut him off in a voice that was high-pitched, almost strangulated. “Mr. Schmoll, dumela , you must not trouble me with this matter time and again! I must have my watchdogs. In fact, my dogs are giving you protection, if you can understand, because they are alert as to your place as well. So, really, you must leave this! Because really my dogs are watching over you, yet I must feed them. Mr. Schmoll, you must consider your position.” He drove on. Carl was now on Letsamao’s grounds. Two yardmen, anxious, ran up to usher him out. Letsamao’s last words had been spoken heavily, meaningfully.

It was dim in the police station. Why was it so damned dark in Africa, indoors, where people had to work? Carl thought of the artisan workshops in Mombasa — coffin-makers and metalsmiths laboring in cavelike slots lit by one light bulb or fluorescent tube. Maybe because people grew up in windowless rondavels, a little light seemed like a lot. The cost of electricity was probably nine-tenths of the explanation. Decent lighting would do wonders for productivity, he would bet. He ought to write something on it when this was over and he felt less half dead. There was such a thing as his career.

Carl sat down on a bench among silent Batswana. They were the poor. Some of them looked banged-up. There was no conversation. There was nothing to read. He decided that he had never seen a Motswana he would describe as nervous. The room was an oven.

An hour passed. The station commander would see him. Carl had already spoken to the charge officer, whose English was poor. Carl was hoping he had misunderstood the charge officer’s advice.

But the station commander only reiterated what the charge officer had said. There were no laws to protect Carl. The barking of watchdogs could never be seen as a nuisance under the law. There was nothing in the law to limit the number of animals a man could keep on his grounds. All Carl could do was slay these dogs when they set foot on his plot. He could shoot them. But the best was to lure them with meat, and poison them — taking care that the poison was given within his plot. And it would be best if the animals, once they were slain, could be found on his plot as well, although that was sometimes difficult and was not essential. The station commander recommended an arsenic compound available from a stockist near the railway station. Carl was assured that this was a thing commonly done.

The skirl of the hot comb ceased. Carl sampled the soup Lois had made for dinner. It was dawning on him that Lois — all her sympathy re the dogs to the contrary notwithstanding — felt deep down that his real problem was crabbéd age. The soup was a case in point. It was dense with powdered kelp or lecithin or some other additive she’d looked up in her health library. She was doctoring his soup because he was at the outer limits of what a human being could be expected to ingest in the form of pills. The soup had a medicinal tang. He would deny it. He served the soup. Lois came in, damp and pink, in her bathrobe. Her eyes looked a little red. His report of the police-station incident had obviously upset her. They sat down.

He still needed to talk about the business with the police. He couldn’t believe that poisoning dogs was commonplace. On the other hand, when it came to considering such an extreme proposition, not everybody lived next door to the Minister of Labor.

Lo had nothing to say. Her problem was that she loved animals. He had even caught her patting Letsamao’s dogs once or twice, when she’d found them nosing around the house during the day.

Carl said, “And what if you poisoned some meat and it got into the wrong hands, kids picking it up? Kids eat paint and bark — all kinds of things. It’s called pica. This soup is delicious.”

It was evident Lo wanted to change the subject. He knew he was being compulsive. He said, “And how do you even go about it? Do you marinate the meat in it, or do you sprinkle it on like salt?” Lo was barely eating.

“It’s ironic,” he said. “Because I like dogs all right. I had dogs as a kid. But these dogs make me physically ill, almost, when I see them. Especially the ringleader bitch, who’s pregnant again, by the way. Her nipples stick out like thumbs.”

He had to get off the topic, and now. He was an adult who was aware that he couldn’t have everything, such as a wife who was both cheerful and depressed on his behalf in the same instant of time. She was still on the verge of tears. He realized that he’d seen Lois really crying only once in Africa, so far — when Letsamao’s dogs had gotten into the yard and torn up the parsley she’d planted. The parsley had been dedicated to Carl, for his clotting-factor needs. She had been horrified to find that weeks could elapse without parsley showing up in the markets. She loved him. He apologized for bringing up the police nonsense again.

“It isn’t that,” she said, pushing her soup away, definitely crying.

She said, “Oh, Carl. It isn’t about that. But, Carl, today I found out that Scott Nearing died.” She waited. Her voice was faint. “I just found out that Scott Nearing died.”

Carl said, “I don’t know the name, I don’t think.”

She was surprised. “Well, he wrote some wonderful books with his wife, about living and diet and so forth, that I really loved. I don’t even know why this upsets me and I’m crying like this. Well, he was wonderful and he was really old, about in his nineties. And he had a wonderful life in Maine. I don’t know. I guess partly it’s because I just found out he died a few months ago, because I’m in Africa. You can’t experience your feelings for a person when they make transition at the time they do if you didn’t even know about it at the time. But now Helen is all alone.” Her tears coursed down.