White Dog Fell From the Sky (24 page)

“You thought I
wouldn’t?”

“I wanted to give you space to change
your mind.”

“I’m here,” she said.

“I found you a room. Normally I sleep
in a friend’s storeroom when I come this way, but I didn’t think you’d
want to sleep amid the rubble.” He pushed a bit of hair out of her face and held
her by the shoulders. The light was in her eyes, and he turned so she’d not have
to squint. “You look uncertain.”

“I don’t know what I’ve
done.”

“You’ve done nothing except not
go back today. Nothing’s irrevocable. You can still take the evening train if you
want.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll feel better after
you’ve eaten lunch.”

He took her to the old hotel, and they
climbed up the creaky wooden steps into the dining room. A few regulars were there,
tables already littered with beer bottles. The place felt slovenly, enervated. The
waitress, an older white woman with about five watts of energy, hobbled here and there
on bad legs, clattering cutlery, swearing under her breath.

Ian introduced Alice when she straggled
over. “Bet, Alice. Alice, Bet.”

“Charmed,” said Bet, whipping
out a greasy pad of paper and the stub of a pencil from her apron pocket.
“We’re out of the hunter’s stew, and there’s one more bowl of
the soup.”

“I’ll have the tripe and
trotters,” said Ian.

“I’d like the stewed
chicken.”

Bet paused. “I wouldn’t if I
were you.”

Alice laughed.

“It’s been around the barn and
back again.”

“A cheese omelet then.”

“To drink?”

“Whatever you’ve got for
beer.”

“The same,” Alice said.

Bet stumped off.

“Nice of her to warn me.”

“She’s a trouper.” He
picked up her hand and held it. “What made you stay?”

She thought a moment, then smiled.
“When you said you were a foul-mouthed and calumnious knave. If I were a dog,
I’d have me put down. And my own tent … You know, I never wanted to see
you again.”

“That was clear enough.”

“I’ll probably live to regret
it.”

“Do you mean that?”

“No.” She looked at him hard.
“No, I won’t regret it.”

They ate lunch, and the place emptied out.
They paid, and Bet clattered dishes and set tables around them. “You mind if we
stay?” Ian asked.

“Be my guest,” said Bet.
“Just as long as you don’t ask for anything.” She got out the broom,
gave the floor an indifferent swipe, and left.

“I want you to see something before we
go,” he said. He opened his pack. There were a half dozen notebooks there, all the
same size, thin, square, bound with thick unlined pages, battered around the edges and
numbered in consecutive order. He passed her number one, written in his neat hand, and
she read,
The place is called The Rock That Whispers. People have lived in these
hills for over one hundred thousand years. There are over four thousand rock
paintings here, some of them twenty thousand years old. The San people say this is
where the world began. Near the top of the male hill, the spirit who created the
world knelt to pray when the rocks were molten. The imprint of his knees is still
there. What they call the female hill is nearby, and the child hill not far from
that. The fourth hill is unnamed but said to be the male hill’s first
wife.

She looked up to find him watching her. Many
of the pages in the
notebook contained likenesses of rock paintings,
neatly copied with a fine black pen. Most were of animals. Some were stylized human
figures, and the rest geometric shapes, either rectangles with appendages that seemed to
represent arms, legs and penises, or circles which enclosed grids.

“Every one of these paintings has a
place in the cosmology of the San. It’s likely that the majority represent visions
of shamans in trance states.”

“Like what you experienced.”

“No. I experienced pain and visual
distortions, but nothing like … It’s entirely different. When
!kia
—that’s their word for an altered state—is very deep, healers
cross what they believe is the threshold between the living and the dead. They travel to
the dwelling place of the gods to plead for the health of a member of the community, or
the community as a whole. The danger is great. Their souls may be taken away by the
spirits forever. They wail, they howl, they pull that terrifying sickness into their
hands and throw it into the darkness, back to the spirits.”

“When you enter
!kia,
your
body becomes light, the base of your spine tingles, you feel as though your belly is on
fire, as though you have no bones, you tremble all over and lose control of your legs.
You can walk on coals without being burned.”

She pointed to the geometric designs.
“So what’s the connection with these?”

“They probably represent
trance-induced entopic phenomenon. Images that come from oddities within the fluid of
the eye itself—you know, like when you look up at the sky and see floaters.

“At the first stages of trance people
see zigzags, grids, wandering lines, dots. Then they hallucinate animals. Deeper still,
they
become
animals. On rock paintings, you often see animals fused with human
beings.

“Until recently, people thought the
art was a literal representation of everyday life. For instance, there’s an
eastern Cape rock painting of a dying eland with blood falling from its mouth. You could
see this just as a dying animal, but in its larger context, eland are animals of the
gods, and when they die, they release their supernatural potency to
shamans.

“What makes you care the way you
do?”

He looked pensive for a moment. “I
suppose it’s because these paintings go right down to the nub of what we are:
powerful testaments to the way humans connect to a larger universe. Whether you believe
in God or not, the artists understood that they weren’t at the center of the
universe, that humans are a small part, surrounded by the power and beauty of the whole.
And the fact that the rain each year is rubbing these paintings out, in the same way
that the forces of civilization are rubbing out the culture itself, it makes me half
crazy.”

He stopped suddenly and looked at her as
though he’d forgotten her in his torrent of words. “I’m glad you
stayed. It was brave of you.” He took her hand. “I had a strong impulse to
save you from me, to get away from Maun, not even to say good-bye, but I couldn’t
do it.”

“It turned out I didn’t want to
be saved.”

They took him to the prison in Johannesburg
called Number Four, the place his heart feared most. He had known of many black men
dying here—and women dying nearby in the Old Fort near the Constitutional Court.
Suffocated, beaten beyond recognition, hung, burned, flayed, electrocuted.

A large door opened under the slab of
building, the van entered, and the door closed behind them. The meaty security officer
unchained him from the floor of the van and yanked him out by his shirt collar.
“You’ll be taking off your
broekies
here,” said the other
one. Women’s underwear.

They delivered him to Starkers, a short man
with a blunt tool of a head and a smile to make one’s flesh crawl. They gave him a
stinking pair of rubber sandals and took his brother’s leather shoes. He would
never see Nthusi’s shoes again. Modimo was nowhere on the premises, nowhere on
Earth for that matter, the God who’d once caused the noise of a great rushing, the
noise of wings and of wheels whirling in air. The God who’d made the tree of life,
the heavens and the Earth and all therein. There was only silence now.
Yea, though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death …
If he was anywhere, He
was the God of suffering. The God of injustice, of fruitless hope.
He maketh me to
lie down in green pastures …
A white man’s God.

Starkers took his name, mashed his fingers
into ink and then onto paper, told him to strip, pulled him roughly here and there, made
him bend over so his cavernous eyes could inspect. Starkers wrote “communist
threat” on a sheet of paper and sent him to be hosed down.
From
there it was
emakhulakhuthu,
the dark hole. Tiny concrete isolation cells lined
up one after the other off a filthy corridor roofed in barbed wire, each a dunghill of
human squalor and suffering. If he didn’t die from malnutrition, or at the hands
of a man like Starkers, he’d die of typhoid fever. He was given a blanket that
smelled of piss, and the door swung shut behind him.

After Will returned to Gaborone, he drove to
Alice’s house. The first thing he noticed was White Dog just inside the gate,
lying half upright, half on her side, barely able to lift her head. He thought
he’d seen this dog with Isaac, and it gave him a bad feeling,
hair-sticking-up-on-the-back-of-his-neck bad. He returned to his house, picked up a
cricket bat and an open can of dog food from the refrigerator. He didn’t tell
Greta why he was making a second trip, or what he was taking with him.

The dog was in the same place when he came
back. Will parked his truck just inside the gate, held out his hand and called.
“Here, girl.” She was too weak to rise.

Greta had said there’d been a short
rain since he’d been away, and the evidence was still here—a bowl half filled with
water, branches down from the wind, a bucket under a tree with water in the bottom, a
drowned mouse floating. He tipped out the water, threw the mouse into the underbrush,
and upended the dog food into the bowl. “Good girl,” he said. “I
won’t hurt you.” Her nose twitched with the smell of meat, and she tried to
get up. “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ll just set it down here
for you.” He brought it close and placed it in front of her. She leaned forward
and ate, sitting with her paws flat on the ground. Will crouched nearby and watched her.
She was scoured down to bone, hunger pouches under her eyes. It tore his heart to
see.

The light was fading, and he wished it had
been morning. He didn’t want to face what he thought he might be facing, as dark
was beginning to push down from the sky. “I’ll be back,” he said to
the dog.

He grabbed the bat and carried it toward the
house. “
Koko?
” he said at the door. “Anybody home?” He
wasn’t a fretful, fearful man, but it took a gathering of courage to make himself
enter. “Isaac?” he called. “Isaac! Are you there?” When
he’d met him that once, he’d thought him a decent, reliable sort. Not one to
go clattering off. He felt the cold creeps traveling along his spine as he entered the
kitchen and found the spoiled porridge on the big wooden table, as though someone had
left in haste. Something rubbed against his leg, and he jumped a foot sideways.
“Christ!” Mr. Magoo swished through his legs, doing a figure eight in and
out. “You’ve taken twenty years off me! Where’s the other
one?”

He went into the spare bedroom near the
outside door and found Isaac’s bed unmade, his few clothes in a pile on a chair.
His shoes weren’t there. The house was darkening, and he made a quick tour through
it, heart pounding, finding nothing amiss, before he returned to the kitchen. Magoo
trailed him, and he opened a tin of sardines and tipped the whole thing into a bowl. The
cat ate in a frenzy. A bag of cat food was ripped open, its contents gone. The milk in
the refrigerator was sour, but he filled another bowl with water and left it on the
floor, with the door open to the outside.

He carried out another bowl of canned food,
along with a bucket of water, to where White Dog sat. When she’d finished the
second bowl of food, she lapped a little water and lay down again on her side with a
small groan. “Do you want to come with me?” he asked. The tip of her tail
lifted and fell. He thought of his five young savages at home. “On second thought,
you’ll be better off here. Best not to eat any more tonight. Your stomach
won’t handle it. I’ll be by with more in the
morning … You’re waiting for him, aren’t you. For
Isaac.”

At the sound of his name she lifted her
head. She watched Will open the door to his truck and get in. Through the rearview
mirror, he saw her following him with her eyes until he was out of sight.

Will returned the following morning and
found White Dog sitting in the same place where she’d been lying before. The water
beside her was nearly gone. He gave her two cans of food and more water, and
she stood to eat, her tail wagging softly. When she’d finished,
he said, “I’m going to see if I can find Isaac. In the meantime, I’ll
be by every day. You’ll stay here, all right?”

He fed Mr. Magoo and went through the house
again for signs of anything out of order. Among Isaac’s things was a letter
postmarked from South Africa, but he didn’t feel right checking the contents. Out
in the garden, he found the lettuces pretty well dead. The tomatoes had hung on, along
with some low plants, still alive. He touched the skin of a tiny pepper and placed his
finger on his tongue. Hot. He turned on the hose and gave them all water, then returned
home and talked to Greta.

They agreed he should stop in at the police
station on the way to work, see Roland, one of Greta’s countrymen who worked
there. Not the sharpest tool in the shed but decent enough. Will was out the door when
he thought he should try to ring up a wildlife assistant in Sepopa to see if he could
get a message to Alice. He came back in, and his youngest son rushed him and grabbed his
knees. Will hobbled over to the phone and placed the call, but it didn’t go
through. Just as well. There was nothing she could do from there. Leave her in peace. He
threw his son up in the air, caught him, set him down outside the kitchen door, and was
off.

It turned out that Roland was in Francistown
helping to orient three new officers and wouldn’t be back for a week. Will asked a
middle-aged officer at the front desk if he could see the deputy chief. “His
mother is ill,
rra.
He has gone to Mochudi.”