Norman Rush - Mortals

They had been served in the main room of the store, at a refectory table placed near the front. Three gas refrigerators, industrial-size units, took up most of one wall. The shelves were well stocked, but the selection was, he would say, on the limited side, featuring the usual staples, sacks of mealie and sorghum and rice, tinned pilchards and beef tongue and beetroot, cooking oil, boxes of Joko tea, containers of paraffin, packets of fruit salts. Four candles were burning on the counter near the baroque, gleaming, antique cash register. A woman, a different woman than the one waiting on them, emerged and pinched out two of the candles and retreated into the back, smartly. It was as though pinching out candles made up her particular work assignment. The other woman could have taken care of it, since she was mainly occupied in waiting for him to down his scalding tea, which yet another woman had just set before him. Ludicrous overstaffing was normal in rural outfits like this one because labor was so cheap and because nobody was checking. He would be willing to bet that most of the Golden Wing staff worked for rations. And the very casual meal service the Golden Wing provided was without question a derivative of the staff’s morning, noon, and night preparation of food for itself, an overflow from that. There was no menu. He hoped the five-pula note he was leaving in payment was right. It would be. It was a lot.

He got up to go. Closing time was like a guillotine blade coming down, with doors slamming and bolts shoved home and lights doused and help dissolving away into whatever obscurity was available. He would join Keletso in the bath shed. He had to get his pulsing knee into hot water and he had to thank Keletso again. He had to thank him better.

The bathing shed was a sort of rude crib structure with oddments of canvas hung haphazardly over it. He announced himself. His torch was weak.

Lo! he thought as the main building of the Golden Wing complex went dark, or virtually so. There was a faint glow showing in the rearmost room, Makoko’s quarters. And then even that was gone. And the garage, where they had gotten refueled, was silent and dark, too.

Keletso said, “Rra, you must come to this water whilst I leave.”

“What do you mean, rra?”

“They say there is only one fire for two, rra.”

Ray walked around to the donkey boiler. It was an oil drum sitting on a metal stand over what were now only embers, a remnant of fire, shreds, nothing, not embers, even. The pipe leading from the bottom of the oil drum into the bathing shed was slightly warm. He knocked on the drum. It appeared to be empty. It didn’t matter.

So he would take whatever was in the tub. His knee was screaming.

Keletso said, “Rra, there is no soap. The woman has taken the soap, since I said to her yes I have used it and then it was gone and she was gone.”

“It doesn’t matter. Here I come.”

Night wants me, Ray thought. He shook his torch. Its light was weaker yet. He shook it more, to no effect.

“There is no towel, rra. That woman left some mere rags, and not clean ones.”

“It’s no matata,” Ray said.

Keletso was finishing up in darkness. Ray set his torch down on the ground, its weak beam pointed discreetly away into the yard. Staff from the Golden Wing were leaving en masse and with a celerity that made it seem they were fleeing something. Celerity was another one of those perfectly good words destined for the bone pile. It was ghostly, the women rushing through the dark, no torches no candles, muttering, a ghostly experience but over in a shot.

Ray undressed. Keletso wanted him to hurry. The water was cooling.

He got into the soiled bathwater, which wasn’t exactly the term he wanted. He didn’t care that he was second. If he had been offered the chance to precede Keletso he would have declined, out of respect, abject gratitude, everything. Keletso had held him up, hauled him along like a baby half of the way back from the cattle post to the Land Cruiser. And Keletso had cleaned him up, as best he could, before stuffing him into the Cruiser and driving like a banshee on fire away from there and back to the trunk road and the safety they expected to enjoy in Nokaneng, should they get there and not die in a crash en route. He submerged himself in the tepid water and rubbed his limbs. He would have to find something to tie around his knee for a day or so. And next time he came to the bush he would carry a pumice stone for eventualities like this. He would get Iris to find one, except that he wouldn’t, couldn’t. She was not going to be available. She was better at cutting his toenails than he was. There was a craft element to the way she did it. Half the time it needed to be done she would offer to do it, out of love. You can’t step into the same river twice, he thought. He would be cutting his own toenails now, forever, if he was right about things. He was afraid he was. He knew he was.

And then they had arrived in supremely strange and negligible Nokaneng. It barely existed. You were on twisting, sandy roadway and then you were on a segment of graveled road and there was the Golden Wing complex on one side and, opposite it, a cinderblock cube supposedly housing a suboffice of the Northwest District Council, shuttered, showing every sign of being not in use, and then another cube, the health post, also locked up and visibly empty, nothing in it, no furniture, and then spreading away in the dusty haze to the west a scattered handful of widely separated household compounds, many of them in disrepair, unoccupied, and then near the road a long sloping dome of maize husks, small stock fodder, glimmering in the gloaming, and then the raw sand road began again, twisting north. A general furtiveness characterized the few inhabitants they had managed to interact with so far, it would be fair to say. People had seemed eager to avoid them or to deal as briefly with them as they could get away with, given that some of them wanted their business. The tall, sinister-looking Rra Makoko, who had claimed to be both the proprietor of the Golden Wing and then, later, not the proprietor at all but a factotum for a German named either Gaster or another name like it that he couldn’t remember, the real proprietor, who lived far away in either Gobabis or Walvis Bay over in SouthWest. Makoko’s eye patch had put him off. And initially Makoko had had no difficulty transacting with him in English, and then it had become more difficult, and then everything had had to go through Keletso, in Setswana.

Still, certain things had been accomplished, certain difficulties overcome. Tomorrow Keletso would be out of this and Ray would proceed on his own, alone. He had produced a letter for Keletso to present to his superiors at the Transport Office pronouncing that Keletso had performed superbly in all his assignments and that he was no longer needed by Ray, whose only remaining task was to find a restful place where he could collate the materials he had collected, prepare his final report, and then return to the capital via the main roads, which were so much less difficult to traverse. His chief trouble in writing the letter of reference had been to control the ragged beast his handwriting had become. The idea of sending along a letter for Iris, entrusting it to Keletso, was something he had considered. But he had dismissed it because … there were too many reasons not to. She would be alarmed at his penmanship. She would see through anything he wrote. She would grill Keletso without mercy and she would make the most alarmist interpretations of what she got out of him. He had no idea what to put down. Of course he wanted her reassured that he was physically all right. Keletso could call her. That would be the best. The idea of writing filled Ray with uncontrollable anxiety. Partly that came out of his furious sense of betrayal. And partly it came out of a sordid desire to punish her with his absence, with worry about what might have become of him. And then also there was the pathetic ingredient, id est, the shard of hope that his absence and the shadows of danger hanging around it would bring her back to her senses, back to loving him, violent scenes with Morel, showing him the door, scenes he could imagine. Keletso expected him to write something for Iris. He knew it and he knew Keletso would think ill of him, seriously ill of him, if he didn’t write something for his own wife. There was no way to avoid it. He had toyed with the idea of sending a dummy letter, an envelope containing a couple of sheets of blank paper, sealed up tight. That would appease Keletso’s feelings. But it would be an impossible event for Iris, opening it. He couldn’t do that. As it stood, Keletso was to convey to Iris that all was well and that Ray would be back sometime soon. And there would be no mention of the cattle post raid. But Keletso was still expecting him to hand him a letter. There it was. He couldn’t do it.