Norman Rush - Mortals

“Oh God ,” he said, unintentionally. He hated himself for it. It had been fervent.

Uno looked at him with interest. He wondered if Uno was religious and if some specious bond had been accidentally forged between them by his outcry. He wondered if something could be done with the impression, which he could amplify, that they were cobelievers, if one had been created. There was no conflict between being a murderous thug and being a believer, being a pious thug. They were everywhere. His intuition was that there was something here to work with. But he was tired. What he wanted was to get out of the sun.

A drumfire of unintelligible exclamations was coming from the associates as they rummaged through everything in the Land Cruiser. Uno seemed not to be attending much to them, though.

“Oh God,” Ray said again inadvertently.

Uno regarded him oddly.

“Yah, God sees us.” Uno’s tone was interesting.

“He sure does,” Ray said. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to say. What he wanted to say on the subject of theology was something more like If God existed he would turn every scene of impending violence into electrifying tableau, he would drench every scene of impending murder with X rays that would show all parties that they were gesturing skeletons, brothers under the skin, pathetic. He could imagine it, imagine something like a phosphorus shell going off and making everything transparent and leaving all concerned too bemused to kill each other. He wanted to express something like that, but it would take more energy than he had to spare.

“Jesus must come,” Uno said.

Ray couldn’t think of how to play this intelligently. He wanted his hat back. His other nemeses, who were manhandling his goods in the Land Cruiser, had evidently found something exciting. They were Ovambo, definitely. They were unintelligible to him. He was missing some opening with Uno. His mind was everywhere. Far away to his right off in the haze he could see tiny white objects he believed were marabou storks, four of them. People traveled long distances to see marabou storks. The storks were moving around fitfully. They were carrying out their mission in life.

Ray said, “Yes, Jesus is coming soon, they say. And it will be judgment for all.”

Uno was nodding vigorously. He seemed mournful. He stood up. He was being summoned to the Land Cruiser.

“Come right back,” Ray said. He was reaching the point of being nonsensical. It was the sun doing it. It was torture, pure and simple. He could probably amble over to retrieve his hat and get away with it, but he wouldn’t do it. Obedience was the ticket, for the moment anyway. And there was another consideration arising. He had to think of Iris. It would be impossible for her if anything really terrible happened to him. She didn’t need that. He hadn’t really thought clearly enough before about what it would do to her if anything genuinely terrible came to pass with him. His thinking was too volatile. He was leaving things out. One way you could tell if baldness was starting to pluck at you was if you noticed that for the first time when you happened to pat your head after you’d been out in the sun it was tender, or if your wife happened to pat your head affectionately then.

Uno trotted past, not looking his way, clutching to his chest the consolidated Strange News manuscript. They had the whole thing now.

Sol Invictus was the Roman name for the sun, which they’d worshiped. He could understand worshiping something powerful and inexorable that there was nothing you could do about, he supposed.

The storks were gone. He had been right, they were storks. It was important to be right.

Uno had disappeared around the curve of the road. Ray waited.

Finally Uno reappeared. Another figure, a stocky man in regular military kit but wearing a kepi, came out into the road. He was holding Strange News . He was Caucasian. His face was ruddy. He was too far away to make out clearly. You’ll see him again, closer up, don’t worry, Ray thought.

Uno returned, trotting again, carrying a blindfold and plastic handcuffs.

He was a bundle in a bakkie. He was being conveyed somewhere. He was blindfolded, his hands were cuffed behind him, he was a bundle bouncing on the naked metal bed of a bakkie. He could sit up, just. The cap affixed over the bakkie bed was low-rise. It was work trying to keep himself braced into one corner so that the bouncing around would be less violent. It was difficult. He hated his trick knee. His captors were driving at speeds that made him love Keletso all over again, love his moderation.

But if he was right, this wouldn’t go on for very long. He had a good idea of where they were taking him. Time would tell.

It should never be said that there’s no progress, he thought. Clearly, restraint technology was marching on. The cuffs were of a design new to him. His hands were bound under notched plastic strips secured in a keyless ratchet locking mechanism. The cuffs were firmly but not painfully cinched.

And his blindfold was also a novelty to him. It was a standardized manufactured product, obviously, made out of a hybrid fabric more like neoprene than cloth that had a propensity to cleave to human skin. Foam rubber pods were sewn into the eye-socket-covering segments of the blindfold. It was a successful design. He could see nothing down the sides of his nose. Someone had shaken the hand of the designer of the damned thing and said Well done!

What would it have taken for one of his captors to throw a blanket into the back, for cushioning? He was bruising up, with the jolting he was taking. They were brutes and he wasn’t. He thought, Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, by the living God that made you, I’m a better man than they are Gunga Din. What was it about Kipling? He had more Kipling than he did Milton. Kipling was in the pores of his mind.

And while he was on the subject, how in hell could belted you and flayed you, by the living God that made you, et cetera, but flayed you, get into a poem taught in junior high schools all over the world? Flaying , for God’s sake, meant lifting strips of living skin off a living body. Was the narrator of the poem flaying somebody? Apparently so.

He had to remember that they were being gingerly with him so far, inflicting their indignities in a mannerly way. Someone had pitched his hat into the bakkie after him before locking him in. There was that. They had given him a little water to drink and they had invited him to urinate before cuffing him. And he had done that.

They had stowed him briefly in a hot tent, where he had devoted himself to listening heroically, or at least with heroic concentration, for leakages of information, anything. He hadn’t extracted much. He had counted voices as well as he could. He estimated that there were seven malefactors active in his aural vicinity. There was one Boer, who was addressed as Kaptein by the rank and file but as Quartus, twice, by Uno, when the two of them were presumably alone together. Quartus could be a nom de guerre, maybe having some reference to ranking position. It sounded numerical. But he did know that Quartus was an actual Boer Christian name, like Fanie or Bastiaan. In any case, it was a nugget.

They had broken into the weapons compartment in the Cruiser and Uno had come into the tent shouting questions about licenses, where might they be? In Botswana it was a serious offense to be found in possession of unlicensed weapons. It could get you eighty-sixed in a flash, gone, out of the country. Uno made that point. Ray had protested his ignorance about guns and licenses, both. He was improvising.

And worse, and genuinely surprising to him, too, they had found smoke grenades in the compartment, two of them. He was too worn out to be enraged at Boyle or whoever the quartermaster had been who had equipped the vehicle. The smoke grenades had been somebody’s idea of a useful extra. They hadn’t bothered to mention them to him. Of course, he hadn’t been as scrupulous about inventorying the gun compartment as he should have. He had been slipshod. He hated guns.