White Dog Fell From the Sky (2 page)

He wanted to tell the woman in the cardboard
house these things, but he couldn’t; his silence was the silence of an old lion
that’s been left behind. And then he thought, no one has left you behind. You are
the one who’s left everyone behind.

The woman returned, and he told her,
“
Ke batla tiro.
” I must find work.

“Do you know English?”

“Enough.” He didn’t tell
her he’d finished four years of university back home and started medical school.
What was the point? He had no papers, no one would believe he had anything to offer but
the strength of his back.

“Then you must go into the town and
ask for gardening work at each house. Do you know how to say this in English?”

“I can say it.”

“But they won’t hire you,”
she said. “You are too dirty. Take off your shirt and give it to me.” She
went around the side of her house and poured water out of a five-gallon oil can into the
coffee tin she’d used when she’d tried to wash her boy.

Isaac felt light-headed from the sweet tea
and porridge. He couldn’t see properly. He went to push up his glasses, but he
found now that they were lost, probably in the bottom of the compartment under the
casket. A single crease of worry marked the skin between his eyes, as though a thumbnail
had carved it. He ran his hands over what remained of his hair, which, in his doubt and
fear about leaving, he’d shaved, as though the straight razor moving over his head
had been a holiness, the marking of an end, a kind of benediction. He was a solidly
built man, eyes a deep well of intelligence, eyebrows like a bush. His ears were at a
slight angle from his head, as though curious. His bottom lip was full, his top lip not.
In his face was a kindness mixed with a certain ferocity.

The woman slapped Isaac’s shirt
against a rock, dipped it in the coffee can and slapped it again. She must have been
pretty once. Her breasts were large and her bottom was firm. He thought her husband was
a lucky man. She was a brightness in this place called Naledi.

He stood shakily and went around the back of
the house to relieve himself. The white dog followed and stood by his side. High above
his head, a black-shouldered kite circled. The bird did a great arc in the sky, turning
its head with small jerks. Isaac peed into the hot dirt. His head felt wooly, his
thoughts scraped down to bone.

When he returned, his shirt was draped over a
post, and the woman had disappeared.

He went back and sat on the stool, and she
crept up behind him and poured the shirt water over his head. He leapt up in anger, and
then his anger trickled down his breast and onto his belly as laughter. The woman
fetched more water and told him to wash. She gave him a stick to brush his teeth, and
when he’d finished he smiled into her face, and she smiled too, and then she
looked away and banged the coffee tin with the heel of her hand and yelled for her son.
But the boy was gone, running wild over the goat paths with his friends.

“
Leina la gago ke
mang?
” he asked her.

“Luscious Moatlhaping,” she
said. “That is my name.” She didn’t ask his.

“When it dries,” she said,
pointing her chin at his shirt, “you will go.” But he couldn’t think
about that yet, could hardly keep his chin from falling onto his chest.

He lay down in the sun and dreamt troubled
dreams, of pursuit, of open veldt that gave no cover or shelter. When he woke, sweating
and confused, there was no sign of the woman, only the dog keeping watch. His head hurt.
The wind had blown his shirt off the post. As he put it on, he faintly smelled the
woman. It gave him strength. He wanted to give her something before he left, but he had
nothing. In the suitcase, his brother had packed three shirts, a pair of pants,
mhago
for the journey—oranges and sweet biscuits. The undertaker who
transported the dead would be eating the food and wearing his brother’s
shirts.

His feet were unsteady when he set out. From
a distance came the sound of shebeen music. He pictured cartons of Chibuku strewn about,
the taste of sorghum beer, raw and sour with the haste of brewing, old men with red
eyes. The music grew louder. He felt someone following him, turned around, and there was
the white dog, trotting behind, just close enough to keep him in sight.

“
Tsamaya!
” he said,
flinging his arms in the air. The dog cowered and crouched down.

“
Tsamaya!
” he yelled
again. Go away! He stooped down and pretended to pick up a rock, and she slunk away,
looking over her
shoulder. He set forth again, but when he turned, there
she was, trotting the same distance behind him.

The shebeen was close now. Then he saw them:
sitting on their rickety
kgotla
chairs in the shade of an acacia were the same
sorts of old men he’d seen a hundred times at home in South Africa.

“
Dumelang, borra,
” he
greeted them. They stared suspiciously. “
Lo tsogile jang?
” How are
you?

“
Re tsogile,
” said the
oldest, continuing the greeting.

He pulled up a three-legged stool and sat a
little distance from a man with grizzled salt and pepper stubble on his chin. On the
radio, a new group was singing, a woman wailing. Her voice sounded like the yelping of a
wild dog. So much animal. You’d want to know that woman. You’d also want to
keep your distance.

“Which way to town?”

“Go that way,” said the oldest
man. “Follow the path, and there is the road. Northward is the town.” He
waited for Isaac to say where he came from and where he was going but was met with
silence. The less people knew about where he’d come from, the safer for everyone.
Isaac rose to his feet, thanked them, and was gone.

The path was strewn with goat droppings and
cans. Behind him, the music grew fainter. He heard a rumble in the distance, and as he
emerged from the bush he was enveloped in the dust of a three-ton truck traveling south
in the direction of Lobatse, sliding through the sand like a wounded beast. With every
step, he shed parts of himself—friends he’d never see again, debts of kindness
he’d never repay, empty hopes, his biochemistry notebook, his anatomy and
physiology book as thick as a fist. He was surprised how fast that life was dropping
from him. He thought how soon he’d be unable to imagine himself walking on the
streets that had been his home, how even the memories would fade to ghosts and then to
nothing. He wanted to chase after them, but he would be running backward.

The future was blank. Only two days ago, it
had been inhabited with obligations and dreams, by soft-eyed Boitumelo, by his mother,
and by Moses and his other brothers and sisters; it had been pointing the way
to sweetness like a honey badger running toward a hive. He pictured his
little brother Moses sitting on the ground, his hands fashioning a car from bits of tin
can and wire he’d found here and there. You hold the future for others, not only
for yourself.

His mind swirled, became confused,
remembered things he didn’t want to remember. Back home, a few months before he
left, he’d walked out one late afternoon to buy a half loaf of bread, and
he’d seen a crowd catch a middle-aged man suspected of complicity with the South
African Defense Force. They took that man, and they beat him with sticks and tire irons;
they kicked him in the belly, and when he was unable to stand, they sat him in the
middle of the road, forced a tire over his head, drenched it with gasoline, and lit it.
There was nothing to do but turn away.

The sun was becoming hotter now. The path
scrubbed along beside the main road, a road for feet. A group of men were coming his
way, kicking up sand. He sensed trouble, but there was no time to get out of their way.
He walked slowly to one side to let them by, dropping his eyes. He saw two large, flat
feet pass by, then smaller dark feet in flip-flops. The third set of feet, wearing black
leather shoes without socks, stopped in front of him.

“What the hell are you doing
here?”

Isaac pushed past.

“Stop!” said the voice.

He broke into a run, but the hunger made his
legs sluggish. He tried to push his body forward but it refused, and then he felt his
shirt pulled backward.

“Isaac Muthethe!”

No one knew him here, he knew no one. How
did the police get his name? He chopped at the hand holding him.

“What the fuck,” said a voice,
half laughing.

He turned to find Amen, an old classmate
from secondary school.

“I thought you were the
police.”

“You beggar,” Amen laughed,
“do we look like police?” He picked up Isaac’s hand and held it.
“This is my friend,” he said to the others.

Isaac looked into Amen’s face, which had
changed, hardened. He’d had no idea he was here and suspected he was doing ANC
work. He’d grown a beard, a scraggly “O” around his mouth which crept
from his chin to his ears, partly covering a dimple in his right cheek—a feature that
had made him look mock-innocent in school but now looked mistaken.

“Kopano is dead,” Isaac said.
“I was beside him when they killed him. It’s no longer safe to stay back
home.”

“I didn’t know.”

They walked a few steps. “So you will
avenge his death.”

Isaac stopped. “What does that mean to
avenge a death—kill once, twice, three times more? Where does it end?”

Amen’s eyes were set wide, one looking
left while the other looked straight ahead so that it was impossible to escape his
gaze.

“I’m saving my own life,
that’s all.”

“If you’re saying you’re a
coward, Isaac Muthethe, you’re not the Isaac I once knew. Where are you
staying?”

“I have no place.”

“Where did you stay last
night?”

“I was over the border last
night.”

“Come to my house. I have a wife now.
And a little girl. Also with us are three comrades, and another woman and her child.
What’s one more?” He looked at the white dog. “Did you bring this one
with you?”

“No.” The dog moved back a few
paces and hunched beside a bush. The word “comrades” meant that it was true:
Amen was working with MK, the military wing of the ANC. Botswana was the staging area
for violent acts against the South African Defense Force across the border. It was not
work he himself could do. Not because he was afraid to die. Was that true? Maybe he
couldn’t spare his own precious life for something bigger. Why else had he fled?
“Yes, I’ll come with you,” said Isaac. Later, he’d look back and
see that this moment led to another that led all the way down a road he’d never
meant to travel.

“First we must see someone,”
said Amen.

The group walked back into the twisted paths
of Naledi. Again, the
white dog trailed at a distance. The music of the
shebeen grew louder again. The same men still sat under the tree.

Beyond the packed dirt where the old men
drank, Amen took a path to the right. After five minutes, they turned left, and then
right, and then right again. Then down a smaller path, a single rut, finally stopping in
front of a door—really a piece of rubber from a truck bed that was tacked over an
opening. “Wait here,” said Amen to Isaac while the rest went inside.

Isaac sat in the dust, looking in the
direction of Kgale Hill. There was talk, low in the throats of the men inside, and the
sound of one man speaking, first contemptuously, then pleading. It seemed he owed them
something. His voice reminded Isaac of the way people back home implored a policeman: a
voice stripped of its manhood, a faltering don’t-hurt-me sound, an eating-dirt,
empty ragman voice. He thought about lifting the piece of rubber to see what was
happening. And then the sounds grew worse. If it had been one man to one
man … but that wasn’t what it was.
Meno a diphiri.
The teeth of
hyenas.

The dog whined.

“
O a lwala,
” he told
her. He’s sick, that man in there. “Soon he’ll be better …”
A fist or shoe bore down. The man groaned. He’d heard that Botswana was a
peace-loving country, that you could sleep safely in your bed at night. Now things had
gone quiet, and he felt afraid.

The rubber door trembled. “Pah!”
said Amen, slapping out. “He shat his pants!”

Isaac turned away. That meant he was alive,
he supposed. The others moved away from the door.

He looked at Amen. “What did you do it
for?”

“He was one of us, and he tried to
turn his back.”

“So what will happen?”

Amen spat and started down the path.
“He’ll go home,” he said over his shoulder.

“And be arrested,” Isaac
said.

“Maybe not, it doesn’t
matter.”

“It does matter,” said Isaac.
“You won’t live to be thirty if you keep using your fists.”

Amen stopped and turned to face him.
“This isn’t what I choose either, understand? But you like what’s
happening back home? You like it? Then go back there, man. Ha! Go back and enjoy the
life they’ve carved out for you. Live in a little rotting box. Scuttle out onto
the street like a cockroach.”

I’ll stay with him for a few days,
Isaac thought. Only a few days.

Kagiso was cooking when they reached the
house. “My wife,” said Amen. She smiled shyly, bent her knees a little, and
clasped her two hands together. When she looked up, her mouth was open in a wide smile,
as though she were saying WAH! Her face was still girlish, her mouth plump, her teeth
very white. She wore a light cotton dress made from navy blue material and a scarf tied
over her head, knotted behind her neck. As she stirred beans over a fire,
straight-legged, bent at the waist, thumping the sides of a three-legged pot with a big
wooden spoon, the breeze stirred her dress. The moment filled him with desire, not just
the smell of beans and goat trotters coming from the pot, but also—Isaac had to look
away—the smooth skin at the back of her legs, the hair curling out from under her scarf
at the nape of her neck.