White Dog Fell From the Sky (30 page)

There didn’t seem to be anything more
to say. But it also didn’t seem possible to go on. A door slammed inside her head,
but it wasn’t she who’d slammed it. Something in him. Some hard
indifference:
Don’t try to change me, or there’ll be trouble.
Registering it, she backed off.

She lay back against the pillow, wrapped in
misery. She loved this man, and there he was sitting on the floor. Take him, warts and
all, or leave him was what he was saying.

She patted the bed. “Come on up
here,” she said. “What are you doing down there?”

They slept late the next day. The rain and
wind had stopped by the time he opened his eyes. The sun traced its way from the right
side of a red lacquer chest and made its way toward a hideous umbrella stand made from
an elephant foot. Ian peered into Alice’s face as she slept. She’d kicked
off the covers and wore only a white T-shirt. He loved her small breasts, the
androgynous appeal of her body.

He shifted quietly in bed, saw the
striations of light coming in the window, and thought of snow, the long shadows of trees
out his window when he’d lived in Norway with Gwyneth years ago. He’d wake
in the middle of the night and look out a small window by their loft bed. Sometimes the
moon would be there, sometimes the wind, sometimes utter silence. He missed the cold,
the way it narrowed thought down to the pinch of survival. But he didn’t miss the
crowding, the small rooms, the two of them huddled in front of a double bar electric
fire.

He regretted the night in Francistown for
Alice’s sake, but it had also felt right at the time. He hadn’t tried to
explain this to Alice, but he didn’t believe in the sharp edges of endings.
That’s really why he hadn’t bothered with the divorce. Gwyneth had needed
him that night. They still understood each other, and it had happened. They’d
still be together if they hadn’t fought so much. She was a good sort underneath
all that mess of depression and self-delusion and self-involvement, but he
couldn’t take the fighting and the continual mood shifts.

Alice stirred and opened her eyes. She
smiled when she saw him. And then folded her arms over her breasts.

“Why’d you do that?” he
asked softly.

“I don’t know.”

He watched while she got out of bed, pulled
off the T-shirt and pulled on a different shirt and shorts, and splashed water on her
face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Why?”

“You look far away.”

“I’m still half in a
dream.”

He searched her face for signs of trouble.
“Tell me.”

“I don’t know. Other
people’s dreams are boring.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“I was standing at the bottom of a
ravine looking up at the lights of a vehicle, way up high at the lip of a cliff.
Suddenly the lights plunged over the top, bounced down the first incline. The truck
careened over the next lip and picked up speed. I thought at first it was a man alone in
the driver’s seat. But a young woman sat beside him, slid over on the seat all the
way next to him. Her mouth was partway open, as though she was too terrified to
scream.

“I don’t remember the truck
turning over until it was upside down in water. Their heads were underwater, upside
down.”

“God,” said Ian. “What was
all that about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you and I all right?”

She looked at him as though she was trying
to make up her mind. “Yes.” The air after the rain felt newly scrubbed, a
faint smell of wet dog.

He kissed her on the mouth. “I’m
sorry to upset you.”

She touched the top of his arm with two
fingers, tentatively, down, up, down. They got back under the sheet together. Her body
felt familiar and kind to him, then ravishing, an eloquence of heat, strange and
lovely.

Afterward, they lay together, sweaty. He
asked, “Remember Ginsberg?”

“Hmmm?” Her eyes were
closed.

He crooned in her ear. “
The world
is holy! The skin is holy!
”

“People don’t use that word
anymore.”

“Holy?”

“It’s a good word.”

Later, they ate what Berndt called “a
proper English breakfast.” Fried tomatoes, fried sausages, fried bread, eggs over
lightly, toast with jam. Boom Boom was nowhere in sight. After breakfast, they went for
a walk; then Ian worked on a paper he was writing on geometrics for
the Center for World Indigenous Studies. Alice read a trashy novel that she’d
found lying in a corner of the room. Late in the afternoon, they crept into bed
again.

She’d planned to leave that
afternoon—she’d asked to meet with Gaborone’s chief of police the next
morning at eight—but she decided to get up early to give them one more night together.
She told Ian she was anxious about the meeting with the police chief.

That evening, she wasn’t hungry when
the food came. Ian ate pork chops and mashed potatoes and half of her dinner. She poked
at a pile of glazed carrots, garnished with parsley. Ian drank a Castle Lager and before
he’d finished one glass, asked for another. Vaguely, she wondered if he was an
alcoholic. Two glasses didn’t add up to anything, but then he had a third, and
finished up half of hers before they stood up and made their way back to the room. Drink
had made him garrulous. His noisy intelligence spilled out, his large, affectionate hand
swept around her waist. She felt vaguely irritated.

He was large in every way. It wasn’t
out of ego that he took up so much space, she thought, although sometimes it felt that
way. It was out of enthusiasm, his own commotion and curiosity about life. She
wouldn’t wish that away, not for a moment. In bed, he asked how did a seer know
the whereabouts of a herd of game? In traditional cultures, he said, people recognized
the importance of those liminal, in-between states. But the more “civilized”
a culture became, the less reverence people had for strangeness and ambiguity. The time
he’d gone through to the other side, he’d seen his grandfather coming toward
him. So strange, so beautiful, he murmured. He was practically weeping, telling her.

She put her arms around him and held him.
His heart beat fast, as though he was in the grip of some urgency. He went to sleep all
at once, as though someone had hit him over the head with a rock. She lay beside him and
watched him for a while, exhausted, as though she’d been half consumed. In that
fire, though, something had taken hold of her, a love she couldn’t really account
for. She thought of the world he loved: where the wind harbored words that foretold
danger; footsteps disappeared in storms of sand; animals and people changed shape;
mirages appeared and flickered into nothing; invisible stars sang.
What she knew was that with him, the world was large, chaotic, and generous; without
him, small and starved and, somehow, wrong.

She woke at three thirty without the alarm
and propped herself up on one elbow. Ian was lying on his back, his mouth partway open.
His face, for the first time, looked old to her. His hair was thrown around the pillow.
One hand was fisted near his cheek, the other open at his groin. Her heart went out to
him. Be safe, she whispered, before she rolled softly from the bed.

Three hundred seventy kilometers to the
south, deep-voiced thunder rumbled outside the prison. It was his twenty-seventh day of
solitary confinement. Any day, he expected they would come for him. His mind was wooly,
exhausted, fragmented, his heart full of sorrow. A few hours ago, he’d vomited up
something that smelled like it had once been fish. His bowels had turned liquid. His
body smelled as rancid as bad meat.

Earlier that night, a guard had stood
outside his cell. Isaac heard him shuffling around and then Afrikaans muttered through
the food hole. “I’ll make things easier for you. Get you real food. A
shower.” What the man wanted was sex. With his bad skin and rotten teeth and bald
head and white skin.

He heard footsteps leaving.

Not far away, the sound of the man they were
breaking. Through the slit in the door where they passed him food, he’d seen this
young man being led away. Now he heard him crying for his mother, crying out to God.
When the man went still, Isaac stood in his cell, his back against the damp cement, and
prayed. Some night, that man would be still for good, and they’d come for him.

He thought of Botswana, the journey under
the hearse, the choking dust. Waking up to White Dog and the woman, her kindness, the
way she threw water over him and laughed. Setting out down the path, the bad luck of
meeting Amen. He pictured White Dog, the way she crossed her paws when she waited, the
single black dot on her muzzle,
how she seemed to gaze into the sky as
though her planet was up there. He saw the madam’s hair, like the wild hair of an
African woman who’s never braided it. He remembered her anger at her husband, that
time when the water was shooting up, and he understood that she was not a person who
would forgive or forget easily. But there was something else in her, a certain patience,
slow to come to the boil. Her eyes looked at you, straight at you, unlike the eyes of
most people.

He imagined her disappointment with him. She
would have found another gardener by now. Maybe she would have gone back to her country.
It was possible. She had nothing to hold her.

If White Dog were alive, she’d be
waiting. Mostly bad things fell from the sky, but this small one with the black dot on
her muzzle and the faraway look in her eyes was here on Earth for some good reason. And
in that truth was a kind of hopefulness.

He heard breathing outside his cell. He
lifted his head and could smell that guard once more. It made him sick that a man like
that would be looking for him.
Go away, rubbish man.

“
Wat is u naam?
” the
guard whispered.

He gave his prisoner number, not his name.
“
Vyf sewe twee vier een
.” 57341.

“
U naam
,” the voice
said, impatient. There was no further sound, only constricted adenoidal breathing. He
could imagine the mouth open, expectant. Then, “They’re coming for you
tomorrow. I can save you.”

“No one can save me.”

“I can make things better for
you.”

You touch me, and I’ll kill you.

The voice was low now, saying what he wanted
to do.

Isaac’s innards turned over. He
thought of the last meal he’d eaten, the small chunks of rancid meat floating in
mealie meal, and vomited again before he was over the pail.

“Go away,” he said.
“I’m sick.” The mess on his feet, stench of rot. A blessing. The man
moved on.

Isaac heard the whisper several cells down,
felt himself want to retch
again. With a blast of will, he kept it
down. A cell door creaked open. He wondered if the guard had told the truth, if
they’d come for him tomorrow. He considered how he might die, not by their hands,
but by his own when it got to that. It might be the only thing he’d trade for sex,
a length of rope.

The road was empty when Alice set out that
morning, darkness with a hint of light in the east but not enough to see by. The rain
had gouged huge gullies into the surface of the road. In the shadow caused by her
headlights, she hardly saw the holes until she was on top of them. Normally, she’d
be traveling eighty or ninety kilometers an hour, but not this morning. She hated this
road. Dozens of people died on it every year. If it wasn’t erosion, it was sliding
sand that turned you over before you knew what happened, trucks barreling out of
nowhere, passing and leaving a thick fog of dust behind them.

Behind her, through the rearview mirror, she
saw a light coming toward her. She thought of Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh
Seal
, the little family of actors with death at their heels, their caravan
rattling and swaying pell-mell through the forest. The lights were gaining on her. Her
heart beat into her eye sockets. The wide lights of a truck.

It was breathing down her neck now. She
wanted to pull off to the side, but the road was like a riverbed with high banks. There
was no stopping or getting away. Her little Toyota swayed in the sand, and she held her
breath as the monster behind her swung out, skimmed past, and swallowed the road in
front of her. The sun had risen. The morning sky was smeared with haze. A hornbill
lumbered through the air across the road, looking as though it was more pterodactyl than
bird.

She thought about the courage it had taken
Ian to go to that place where he went. She doubted she could have done it. As a child,
she’d been terrified of hypnotism. It seemed to come down to trust. How
much, she wondered, had she ever trusted another person—body, mind,
and soul? How could she know that what she felt for Ian was not, somehow, shot through
with illusion? She could give her life to him and find suddenly that she’d been
mistaken. Or, their love could erode until one day she’d wake up and realize she
no longer loved him.

It seemed utterly impossible that this could
happen, but hadn’t it seemed equally impossible with Lawrence? Not exactly. She
and Lawrence had slid into each other’s lives in simple, naive faith. She knew now
how love could vanish, and she believed with all her heart it would not happen again.
She’d felt something last night she’d never felt with anyone on Earth. She
had only the crudest words for it. It was connected to a depth of intensity and to
something as ancient as the fossilized knee prints of the spirit who’d knelt to
create the universe.

Ian was far from perfect, anyone could see
that. He talked too much, drank too much, was helpless in the face of his appetites. He
was immoderate in his opinions and enthusiasms, at times outrageous. But there was
courage in him to spare, and integrity. He wasn’t the sort to slip things under
the carpet. She could count on his imperfections, and she thought she could even count
on loving them, or at least loving him in spite of them, maybe even because of them.
Life with him would be surprising, changeable as wind. They would be unlikely to have a
child, unlikely to ever live in the United States. There would be stretches when
he’d be away from her. She’d be pushed to make something equally large of
her own life.