White Dog Fell From the Sky (11 page)

She felt him pulling back. Had he thought
she could be something to him? They seemed to realize simultaneously that they were not
destined to become each other’s saviors. They’d been shot out of cannons,
two hurtling objects meeting in midair. “I’ll drive you home,” he
said.

“No, please, I want to walk.
It’s a beautiful night.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“No, I feel quite safe. Thank you,
you’re very sweet to offer.” Her eyes told him it had been good with him,
and it was over. She kissed him again and shut the door behind her softly.

There was something necessary about putting
one step in front of the other in the shadows of moonlight, her flashlight searching for
movement at her feet. Puff adders were the most dangerous snakes at night: sluggish in
the cool of dark and unable to move out of the way. Along the road, she wondered, What
just happened? Did I go there to even the score? She hoped that wasn’t true. She
didn’t think it was. She was drawn to the music in him. He made love the way he
made music: sensitively, expressively, holding more than a little in reserve. However
much had been held back, though, she felt deeply grateful to him, as though she’d
been seen again.

She found her mind tracing the pathways that
had brought her to this road on this night—as though each step could be unraveled and
retraveled—the men who’d touched her, taught her something, and left.

Michael was the first. In the spring of her
junior year, they’d both quit their cross-country teams, and every day after
school, he took her home to his room. He was shy, tender, perfect. For the junior talent
show, he came on stage in his thick glasses and dirty white sneakers and a baggy
Sherlock Holmes double-breasted raincoat. He carried his cymbals, one in each hand, his
glasses glinting in the spotlights like fevers of the brain. When he clanged the cymbals
together, the audience
went wild. She felt in that moment that she
loved him as much as it was possible to love anyone. But she was wrong. Then there was
Drew with the bad reputation, and Zachary, the aesthete, and Brandon with the beautiful,
sad eyes. And a while later, Lawrence.

She undressed and lay in bed, with the moon
passing across the window. The lights of the Gordons’ house shone across the
boundary fence. She thought of Hasse, his kindness, his sweet lovemaking. And then an
image of Erika and Lawrence flashed into her mind. She imagined a hotel room, and her
face grew hot with shame and fury. Her heart pounded, and finally it slowed. The moon
passed out of sight, and she slept.

The following day, Alice came home from
work at lunchtime. Isaac was still among the missing. The house was very still, except
for the trilling of the crested barbet in the tree. Daphne was asleep, visibly pregnant.
Alice patted her, asked her how she was while Daphne thumped her tail against the floor
and panted, too hot to stand up.

Alice sat down at the wooden table in the
kitchen with a glass of water, gulped it down, and refilled the glass. She was losing
weight, not because she wanted to. Her head, her whole body, was dizzy with memories. In
those early days of being together with Lawrence, her love for him had been a spring
colt, a shiny, shy thing. He was a man for whom words came hard, like water at the
bottom of a deep well, with only one bucket to the top. She’d been patient,
thinking there would be words worth waiting for.

In graduate school, they’d moved into
a scantily winterized outbuilding ten miles outside of Providence, part of a
nolonger-working farm. The windows rattled in the wind. In May, the lilacs dwarfed the
building they lived in, dwarfed everything in sight. They were almost frightening when
they bloomed, throwing their scent into the air so insanely, there was nothing to
breathe that wasn’t lilac.

Lawrence was in a doctoral program in
economics. Alice was in anthropology. Lawrence’s extended family sprawled like the
lilacs. She loved them, perhaps more than she loved him. His sister, Wren, his brothers,
Howard and Jeremy, his empty-headed young niece, Dahlia,
his bulky
aunts and rumbling uncles, and especially a caustic great uncle who lived alone not far
from them and dressed impeccably, a silk cravat hiding his stringy old neck.

After Lawrence had successfully defended his
thesis, his adviser told him of a job in newly independent Botswana in the Ministry of
Finance and Development Planning. As soon as Lawrence told Alice it would be good for
his career, she knew he’d be going. He left Providence in June and asked her to
visit the following summer when she’d be working on her thesis.

After he left, his letters were full of his
work, and when she thought back on them, not very interesting. But something in her
wouldn’t let him go. It all felt promising. She went to Botswana that next summer
to visit a man she thought she might marry. From Providence to London, from London to
Johannesburg. From Johannesburg, she boarded a night train to Mafeking, and in the
morning changed trains for Gaborone. When she woke somewhere between Mafeking and the
border of Botswana, a bleached and pitiless landscape stretched forth, with no sign of
human habitation. Only when the train stopped at small stations could she see that the
land was peopled with children, dozens of them, selling beads and
mopane
worms
and carved wooden statues stained with mahogany-colored shoe polish. Few people on the
train bought anything, but the children’s voices were high and loud and their
hands empty of food. From a young sculptor, she bought a soapstone carving of a
boy’s face. The chin was long and eager, the lips full, with small vertical cracks
carved into them.

When the train arrived in Gaborone, she
caught sight of Lawrence before he saw her. He was wearing a safari suit and moved with
an ease she hadn’t seen in him before. His face had filled out, and he looked
large and healthy. His straight brown hair, which had once hung in his eyes, was combed
back from his forehead.

He held her carefully by the shoulders, and
they kissed each other on the lips. The veldt had slipped into his eyes. For some reason
she thought she might have gotten the wrong person, that perhaps she was kissing
Lawrence’s brother. She touched his cheek and mouth with two fingers, like a blind
woman.

She was dazed by the strangeness around her:
women carrying their babies on their backs, tightly bound to them like bandages, the
sound of Setswana, the train station with its tea shop, the dust that hung in the air
and caught in the throat, the smell of rotting vegetables. Sights and sounds and smells
poured through her. A boy gnawed on a long piece of sugar cane. A donkey stood tethered
to a cart loaded with wood, its eyes clotted with flies.

Lawrence took her elbow and led her to his
pickup truck. His flat was undistinguished, part of a Type I government building that
adjoined another flat and another after that, with an enclosed piece of ground in back
where a clothesline hung. Underneath the clothesline was baked dirt, swept clean of
vegetation and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, the government-issue furniture
was tinted the same shoe polish color as the wooden carvings the children had been
hawking on the train platform.

While Lawrence went to the bathroom, she sat
at the table and took the covers off the food that Dikeledi, his servant, had cooked.
Strips of beef sat sullenly in a metal bowl beside another bowl that held white rice,
scooped into a sticky ball; in another were little round squashes cut into halves. On
the far end of the table was some kind of tinned fruit with a pitcher of custard sauce
beside it. Lawrence sat down, and they served themselves. Dikeledi was in the kitchen,
and then the door shut behind her, and Alice heard her shouting to friends in the
backyard.

She felt suddenly forlorn.

The beef was tough and dowsed with black
pepper. She told Lawrence it was good. In those days, she didn’t set out to tell
lies, but the truth was often buried under politeness. In fact, the rice was without
salt, the squashes watery like something that had been strangled and drowned. Lawrence
held her hand after lunch and led her to the bedroom. An hour later, he was on his way
back to work.

He’d taken a job as an underling in
the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning and had already been promoted twice.
His friends were mostly economists, and their principal topic of conversation, apart
from where to get good marijuana, was development. She didn’t
know what they were all talking about. The word was one she’d heard before only
in relation to breasts. Except for Lawrence, she was offended by these economists who
talked as though Botswana had been a great emptiness before they’d arrived.

During the days he was at work, she toiled
away at her thesis. It was winter in the southern hemisphere, with rainless warm days
and cool nights. In the evenings, she and Lawrence read around a small electric fire.
She looked up from her book at the two glowing rods and there he was. After the sun went
down, the stillness in him was different from his daytime self. Occasionally they
stepped outside to the little closed-in area by the clothesline and looked at the
Southern Cross and he put his arm around her waist and drew her close. She didn’t
ask what she was doing there, or what she was doing with him. His body was sturdy, like
an answer. She looked into eyes that mirrored that wild, parched veldt and saw infinite
space stretching before them that she mistook for their life together.

Lawrence and she shared a single bed, which
encouraged feats of athleticism; they each slept half on and half off the mattress, like
cheetahs. They woke in the cool of the night and made love, sometimes three or four
times. They were young, and it cost them nothing. She remembered the dark, rushing
desire in her ears, the furious fumbling out of sheets into each other’s arms.

Some days, Alice tried to speak with
Dikeledi, but they knew only a few words of the other’s language. She felt awkward
being waited upon and found herself smiling too much, dropping things, over-thanking.
Dikeledi was short of stature and tireless; her movements were like humming—unconscious,
tuneful, at peace. Her skin was dark, coffee-colored, and her eyes forceful. Her bottom
lip was full and her mouth good-humored. She lived behind the flat, in the small
tin-roofed servants’ quarters, and on Sundays, she put on a red polka dot dress
and a white hat shaped like a pancake and walked to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in
the old part of Gaborone.

A few times, Alice went across the road to
escape the flat, but what was out there frightened her—the blind blue sky and
unrelenting sun. Thorns, tinier than the smallest hooked claws of a cat, waited under
dusty leaves. They caught in her hair and plucked at her sleeves like
beggars.

By the end of the summer, Lawrence and she
were engaged. What did she know? Nothing. Yogi Berra once said, “If you come to a
fork in the road, take it.”

After the water explosion, Isaac ran into
the bush, afraid that the police would find him and deport him. Toward nightfall, he
crept out and walked back to Amen’s house. He knew the gardening job was finished.
One of the first things he’d been told was, “My husband does not like water
to be wasted.” It was a misfortune that her husband should have come home and seen
the water shooting into the sky. And there she was, shouting at her husband and his
friend when the person she should have been shouting at was himself.

He did not respect people who ran away, and
now he’d done it twice—once from his country, and once from his job. Fleeing was
like lying: you do it once, and you’ll do it again. But, he told himself, I will
not do it again.

Every day now, Amen was saying, “You
must go for training in Angola. You are doing nothing now. Think of the country where
you were born. Your country is like your mother. You would not turn your back on your
mother.”

He needed to find somewhere else to live,
away from Amen’s badgering, but he had nowhere to go. He did not want to train
with the MK, of that he was sure. And he would not turn his back on his own mother
who’d given him life and breath and suckled him and taught him what was right and
wrong. He had disappointed her, he could not embrace her, maybe not for many years, but
he would keep her and his sisters and brothers in his heart. Several weeks ago
he’d bought a pencil and paper and an envelope and posted a letter to ask her
forgiveness and to tell her that he was safe in Botswana. Before he’d sent it, he
asked she who must not be called madam if he could use her post
office box address. Any day now, he was expecting a return letter from Pretoria.

After he’d stayed out of sight for ten
days, he thought, I will not hide any longer. What happens will happen. On a Saturday
morning, he set out for the Old Village to inquire about the letter and to say again
that he was sorry.

All along the road, people were making their
way here and there. He thought of the divided stairways back home, the divided bus and
train stations, the divided public toilets. All the time, all the time, you were
watching for where black people were forbidden. Heaven help you if you set your black
foot on sacred white ground. Even after you died, you’d go to a
nie blank
cemetery: no one wanted your black ass anywhere near a white person, even though
everyone was dead. Here, he could see no signs, not one, but the watchfulness had not
died in him.

When he came to the house in the Old
Village, the great hole he’d dug was as he’d left it. The water was gone and
the mud looked like cracked china. Some of the dirt he’d shoveled out and taken to
the top of the hole had slumped down after the water had poured over the top. To see
this hole gave him a great sense of shame. It felt to him that White Dog even hung her
head. The garden was empty of any person. He called “
Koko?
” No
sound came from inside, and just as he was at the point of going away, Itumeleng came
out of the servant’s quarters. “
Ijo!
” she said,
surprised.