Norman Rush - Mortals

Keletso was dressed and waiting. Ray got out and, still damp, entered his clothes. This was his last pair of clean dungarees. The clothes bloodied at the cattle post were balled up and cached someplace under canvas in the back of the Cruiser. He had worn the most presentable of his accumulated dirty clothes into Nokaneng. He might try to arrange to get some laundry done tomorrow or he might not. He had to be on his way, alone, there was no alternative.

At loose ends, they stood together by the roadside. Ray wanted to do something, even if it was only taking a walk, before they retired. The Cruiser was parked next to the district council office cube and they were going to have to sleep in the damned vehicle again. They had been looking forward to getting some kind of normal accommodation that night. But that hadn’t gone right.

Other important things had gone right. They had gotten loaded up on petrol and oil and other necessities, by the skin of their teeth, before the Garage and Panelbeaters Golden Wing Proprietary had closed up, earlier than the restaurant, with a clangorous display worthy of grand opera, slamming, locks snapping. Something strange had been going on longdistance between the garage and Makoko on the veranda. He had been giving hand signals and whistling in an eerie way when he wanted the garage foreman’s attention.

“I want to walk a little,” Ray said.

“Rra, your knee is not strong.”

“No, but walking will be good for it.”

Ray liked to have destinations when he strolled.

He pointed out a substantial termite mound a little way into the bush just beyond the graveled stretch of road. It would do for a destination. It gleamed in the starlight. He had the idea he would like to sit on it or climb on it. Termite mounds were amazing things. This one was the size of a sedan, white, smooth. Thine alabaster cities gleam, would be an appropriate comment to make to a termite.

He started off and Keletso came with him, reluctantly, hoveringly, poised to catch him if he stumbled. One object of taking a short walk was to convince Keletso that his knee was improving enough for him not to be concerned. He put his mind to it.

Keletso’s resistance to letting him continue alone tomorrow had been prodigious. It had taken some heavy argument. The matter was closed. Apparently the cattle post scene had shaken Keletso less than it had him. Their argument had concluded with a certain amount of white lying, so to speak, about what he was planning to do next, the final stage of his mission, that is, that he would be resting up and working over his notes and sketches and maps. To start with, it was a lie that he had a mission. What he had was a trajectory and a trajectory that it was his fate to feel he absolutely had to complete. And that was true. It was remarkable how well he and Keletso had gotten on within the shell of deception the expedition had involved. They had lived companionably within the necessary lies. Keletso was a man.

Cooking fires wagged in some of the lolwapas. Some people in this extreme part of the world were at home, just then. They were kicking their sandals off and saying “Ah.”

He had misused his time in Botswana in so many ways. He hadn’t sunk into the particularity of the place, and there was plenty of that. He hadn’t, for instance, concentrated really closely on what the Golden Wing represented, what it was … a weird relic of a fantasy time of white overlord-ship. He knew what the green-tinged irregular windowpanes of the Golden Wing reminded him of. It was a particular brook in Tilden Park, a particular run, perfect water flowing gently wrist-deep over beds of dark gold sand. And of course that was a line surviving from the part of his life he had wasted in the assault on poetry. It didn’t matter.

The termite mound was more like an inflated seal than a sedan. It had a chimney or necklike projection at its high end, which registered the height it had reached in consuming utterly the tree it had claimed, or they had claimed, the termites.

“It seems you must be forever roaming, rra,” Keletso said.

“No more tonight, though. We can turn in.”

“Yah, but I will go again for a place in that house for us. I will make a fracas and see about it.”

“You can try, I guess. But it won’t work, rra. He doesn’t like us.”

They started back.

Keletso farted softly. He said, “Ke ditiro tsa Modimo.”

He said it because it always made Ray laugh. As Keletso had explained it, he was saying God did this, or That was a deed of God’s.

“Shame on him, then,” Ray said.

Certain things had gone well. The Wildlife connection he had made had gone just right. He let himself relive it. Approaching Nokaneng, a government bakkie coming from the opposite direction had appeared and blasted right past them. But some instinct had prompted Keletso to swing perilously around and roar after it, pressing the hooter nonstop, shouting. And Ray, jolted awake, had contributed by rolling down his window and pounding on the door. And it had worked, the angelic Keletso driving like a devil from hell and the racket they had produced together had worked. The bakkie had pulled over.

Keletso had seized the moment. Carpe diem should be your personal motto because you carp about one thing or another every day, Iris had once said to him in a moment of joke pique. He should write down her bons mots and whatnot sometime but it would be too pathetic of him. Ideally it would be a thing they would undertake together. She would remember certain things and he would remember certain things and out of that would come his little anthology. The time to do it had passed him by. Life is a scream would be in it.

Keletso had explained that he had sprung into action on the hunch that this might be their only chance to make contact with some goromente employee, a chance they should not pass up, since goromente was so little in evidence around there, no police, no army, no veterinary trucks.

So then Ray had machinated smoothly with the Wildlife officers who had been going somewhere in the bakkie. He had quickly gotten out the news of the raid. They had been electrified. They knew the place. They had seemed capable. He had dealt mainly with the senior man, a tough, leathery character. Of course it had started out awkwardly with them, but he had overcome it. Striding over to greet them, he had been struggling to contain a fit of coughing caused by the volumes of dust he’d taken in during the chase. And he had tried to spit, preparatory to trying to machinate. But unfortunately his saliva was less than normal. He had tried to spit just casually and it had been an embarrassing moment because his saliva was viscous and the spittle hadn’t detached normally via its own weight and he had had to pinch it off his lip, in front of people, to get it to drop. Diet was affecting his saliva. He needed vegetables. And he needed peaches, if he could get some. That was what he thought.

But then he had worked it all out. They would come back the next day for sure and pick up Keletso and carry him down to Maun. In Maun goromente was still functioning and Keletso would be fine. He would have no trouble organizing transport down to the capital. Ray had given them an enormous deposit of fifty pula and thrown in another twenty rands and he had promised Keletso would give them the same amount when they returned for him. It was settled. They were burning to get away to inspect the raided cattle post. They were fearless, apparently. They were competent men, or seemed to be. They had yards of maps to consult. He didn’t doubt that their eagerness to get to the raid site had to do with salvage, the opportunity to field-dress the fresh carcasses, assuming the Cape vultures had been detained in arriving. But he was guessing about that. Cape vultures had come up in their exchanges and, as he understood what they were saying, the Cape vultures were becoming very scarce, along with other carrion birds.