Norman Rush - Mortals

Ray decided that they should go for a stroll, to wrap this up. Pony was agreeable.

Outside, Ray steered them in a direction that would take them away from the frequented parts of the campus and toward a feature of the place that could always be expected to be clear of humanity of any kind, the piggery. The stench of the facility, which was being incompetently managed, guaranteed privacy. They kept hiring and losing people who claimed to be competent as pigherds, or whatever the correct job title was. The wire-fence enclosure containing the two remaining pigs, sows, was in need of replacement, although in their present state of lethargy, the pigs hardly seemed to need containment at all. The piggery had its uses, and Ray had voted against closing it, the last of the school’s small-stock projects, siding with Curwen, who had a sentimental ruralist streak stemming no doubt from his jolly childhood on the great estate in Northumbria his family owned. The piggery was raggedly shielded by a horseshoe planting of dry gray elephant grass reaching to a height of seven or eight feet. As they approached the site, Ray noted that Pony put his hands in his pockets to raise his pants cuffs well clear of the pismire, which was what it was, extending far outward from the pen, which had been moved around the area in the past.

There were two parts to the deal with Pony. One had to do with a bad investment he’d made in a haulier. Pony had advanced money to a friend for the purchase of a used Bedford. The truck and the friend had slipped south across the very porous border with South Africa near Ramotswa. Pony had information that the truck had been licensed and registered for business in Mafeking instead. In exchange for Pony’s help with his project, his operation, Ray would cover Pony’s four-hundred-pula loss, as a grant, in addition to arranging, through unspecified friends at the American embassy, for Pony to receive exact information on his absconded friend’s whereabouts, so that a face-to-face meeting could occur, something Pony desperately wanted.

For Ray’s part, he decided to tell Pony he was asking for help because certain people at St. James’s were concerned that, through Rra Innis or others, there might be formed at the school a cell of students sympathizing with the very unclear and possibly dangerous ideas of one Samuel Kerekang, who had recently founded a cyclostyled journal, Kepu/The Mattock , copies of which had been spotted circulating among the upper forms. There had been, as Pony knew, a confidential struggle, long-standing, to keep another, older, political group, the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Society, out of St. James’s, if only to prevent the students from attaching themselves through hot feelings and idealism to an idea whose time had come and gone and in the process being stamped with an association that could dog them forever, when, as many of them would, they applied for government posts. The school had been successful to date in the struggle against MELS. An aspect of this problem involved the Bakalanga students in particular. As Pony well knew, they faced enough difficulty in working themselves upward in government without taking on anything else that might come to constitute a drawback. Pony understood clearly. That had been an important touch.

That was the larger design. His object being to secure Pony without nakedly making him a pure asset, this design had seemed best. There was a light breeze coming from the west. They maneuvered to keep themselves upwind of the pen.

The school needed to know much more about this person Kerekang, but he was very secretive in the way he was forwarding his program. He was closely vetting the people he invited to his little meetings here and there. It would be unwise for Pony to go directly into these meetings, even if it could be arranged. The school was anxious to learn all it could, even if only to determine that this man’s materials were innocent. But indirection was needed. The idea was that Pony should be brought together with Kerekang by seeming accident, in another venue he was lately being seen in, lecture meetings being given by an American against God and religion. Kerekang was active in these meetings. Ray wanted Pony to become an attender and to secretly tape the colloquies and presentations, especially those where Kerekang made some points. Even if Kerekang was not present, Pony should tape these proceedings, just to supply background. They needed a full picture. They needed to know what the relationship between these men was. In any case, Pony would form a connection to Kerekang, enough of a connection so that the school could determine what he was about. And when he became known to Kerekang, Pony would consult with Ray and they would see what should come next. If there was more to do, Pony would be compensated for his time. But it might all be done with very quickly. There was nothing complicated about the taping process. The recording unit was a Sony M5 the size of a deck of cards, something Pony had seen Ray use in preparing students for declamations and recitations, except that this model happened to be voice-activated.

There was one last element to the deal still outstanding. It had to be finessed. They were inside the elephant grass hedge, effectively hidden. The sows were asleep. Ray hoped they were asleep. The wind had relented.

Pony wanted to sign something, by which he meant he wanted something signed, a letter in his file saying that he had attended these meetings in behalf of the school and not because he was drawn to them for any other reason. He wanted to sign something, or rather he wanted to put his signature chop on something. Many educated Batswana signed documents and letters with complex ideograms only distantly related to the letters composing their names. Pony’s chop was the most extravagant Ray had ever encountered, a vast scrawl executed in a flash and always, strangely enough, identical, document to document. Pony had a need for that act. It would have to be circumvented, for obvious reasons. The operation had to be traceless. The operation he was constructing served his own needs perfectly. He would be able to mollify Boyle with the appearance of circumspect action against Kerekang. And he would have the beginnings of what he needed for his private campaign against Morel. Boyle would surely see the supposed logic of all this. He would frame it differently for him, of course, but Boyle would have to go for it because he wanted Kerekang so much. Ray would get Morel, and sooner rather than later. He wanted his essence. He wanted Morel’s essence on a stick, proof of what he was. Pony was referring to the authorizing document he wanted from Ray as a charter.

Pony said, “So you can see, rra, why I must have this charter.”

Ray answered, “Of course, rra, just as I would in your place. But consider that, as to material in the files at school, really how safe is anything from prying eyes … you see?”

“Rra, I take your point.” Pony thought for a moment. “So then I might take this for my personal holding, someway like that?”

“No, because no matter how safely you think you have hidden a thing, strange things can happen.” Ray was improvising. This had to go away. He was thinking of fantasy solutions like drawing up a document in vanishing ink. He would have to come up with a stall.

He was being reflective. While he reflected, he extracted a packet of pula from his hip pocket and slid half the packet into an envelope. He was going to offer two hundred pula, half of the amount agreed on, as a down payment or rather surety, as they would call it here.

Ray said, “May we do this? Once you attend for a time or so and bring me some material, we can sit down and see if you still want some kind of charter. You may not. There may be nothing to any of this. In the meantime I can think of what’s best, whether I should hold some document for you in my files, or what. And meantime let me give you surety, now, for half what we agreed on.”