Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He had misread Pony, deeply. On that he stood convicted. And four, step four, had been Pony discovering that he was not made for the simple life, if he ever had been, and deciding to finance his future after his departure from Endure to the End by an act of embezzlement. He had taken not only the petty cash but another large sum lying around that had been destined for purchases of agricultural equipment and building materials, a loan. Kerekang had torn up the vicinity looking for Pony, without luck, because Pony had taken the money for the all-consuming central purpose of life in Botswana, cattle acquisition, and split to the opposite side of the country and in fact beyond, to his own cattle post at Pandamatenga, half of which overlapped into Zimbabwe, where he was unreachable. Pony was in fact Ndebele. He had misrepresented himself at St. James’s. A crash audit of the bursar’s office was in progress. The crime had crystallized Kerekang’s hatred of the national passion for cattle. He saw the drive to convert money into flesh in the form of cattle as violently deformative and out of control in Botswana, a position he had belabored in all his publications but with special intensity in his latest pamphlet, The White Ants, which Ray, after realizing Kerekang was its author, had read closely. If you had money, in Botswana, you turned it into cattle and cattle would multiply your money biologically, through sheer reproduction, and you could just watch it happen and watch your prestige grow at the same time. It was the herder mentality so utterly opposed to the townsman’s idea that you took money and put it out at interest or bought a machine to make products to sell. Of course the townsman ideology was in need of correction too, according to Kerekang, but it was not flatly insane, socially and otherwise, like cattlemania, where the decision to sink everything into beasts ran crashing against the facts of recurrent drought, disease, and the ecological unsuitability of most of the land area of Botswana for cattle raising.

  So Kerekang had briefly turned Ichokela into a posse to hunt Pony down, and that had failed and the commune had failed. Earlier, Kerekang struck out at the passion for cattle through attacks on two ranches near Toromole, fenced ranches with titles widely considered bogus, owned by big men, absentees.

  It was conceivable that Kerekang had meant his actions to be symbolic or at worst cautionary, gesticulations against the continuing spread of illegal commercial ranches in his area, where they had been late to arrive. His raids had involved some property destruction, but nothing major, and no injury to anyone. But a fire had been lit. There was tinder everywhere. It had been the wrong act at the right time. Mimic attacks, arson attacks, had occurred, radiating outward from Toromole. Three boreholes had been dynamited.

  The ground was layered with the receptive aggrieved, in fact. Bushmen being paid for their labor with salt and tobacco, smallholders finding traditionally common waterpoints being closed to them, incorporated into the commercial spreads.

  They had stopped, in full sun as usual, up on the shoulder of the road, tilting moderately. Next Keletso would get out his parasol.

  The fifth step had been Boyle going into a raging panic at the first reports of disturbances in the northeast and immediately taking Toromole as Kerekang’s Yenan and the springing of arson attacks as the beginning of an unstoppable jacquerie, expecting to see the safari camps in flames next, whites driven out, Armageddon, the governing party overthrown and Botswana propelled into an Anschluss with South Africa by radical forces, a South Africa by then in the hands of the African National Congress, itself in the hands of the South African Communist Party, and seeing Mugabe in Zimbabwe joining the new union, and presto, a new race-based world communism emerging with its Vatican in Johannnesburg and gold, diamonds, and palladium piling up in its treasury—and all of it getting started on Boyle’s watch, the end of the world on his watch.

  Step five had led instantly to step six, this excursion.

  Ray had been sent out because Boyle had needed above all to be seen as acting, machinating, furiously taking steps. He wondered how many other contract officers, stringers, assets of all types and kinds, had been hurled into notional missions like the one he was on. Step six was this, the present, himself in the lap of nowhere, bearing a false identity as a school sites assessor, which was an invented job description that would presumably justify his poking around anywhere in the bush. His letter of authorization, jointly signed by the Ministries of Education and of Local Government and Lands, commanded all district council and school staff to accord him “all support in his endeavors to examine all about every place as to school building and placing of schools at some time.”

  Getting him launched had been a miracle of speedy improvisation … the requisitioning and equipping of the Land Cruiser, arranging temporary duty for Keletso, concocting the stupid code terminology he was supposed to use when he reported back through the radiophone links he was expected to locate and get access to through a district council or police facilities. And his task was, well, merely to find out what was behind everything, really behind everything, and right away. He felt leaden. He felt like a projectile aimed at nothing. And Boyle had insisted on issuing him a stupid damned Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver and two boxes of bullets, no matter what he’d said. Nothing had been thought through, but here he was. It didn’t matter. Kerekang was doomed … he had performed in the flesh the act that the local wretched of the earth had until then only allowed themselves to imagine. That was the way things came apart. Kindness was on the cross, where they were going. And the heaviest and stupidest injunction he was carrying was, whatever he did, to help this eruption disappear without becoming public knowledge, no less.

  There were some historical models for making that happen, making insurgencies disappear silently and tracelessly, that he knew of. Guerrero in the seventies was a case in point, and there had been two lesser cases in Nigeria. So far nothing was showing in the press or on Radio Botswana about the unrest in the northeast. The feat to be accomplished was stopping the trouble and erasing the news about it at the same time.

  Certain measures were already being taken. The army and the police were being deployed very delicately, if at all. In fact they were probably being pulled back all through the Nokaneng-Mohembo corridor, where he and Keletso were bound, because soldiers talked. So did police. Something subtler might be on order, obscure forces, if it got bad. These would be identified as “bandits,” and they would strike and it would be hellmouth and they would be gone in the morning and it would all end in mystery and confusion and forgetting. Cupping, it was called.

  The bandits would be mercenaries from Namibia. It was something the authorities knew very well how to arrange, in extreme circumstances. The authorities, the hired security people, were brilliant. He felt like a fool, but of course he did because he was an idiot. He was still an idiot. He had never in his career been anywhere near a cupping exercise. Cupping had nothing to do with him. Tonight the moon would arise and drag into erect states millions of penises worldwide, but that was idiotic because it was simply the shadow line coming over mankind night after night that did it, darkness, not the moon itself, unless it was the stars, but what ees the stars? The stars burn, he thought. The Bushmen thought the stars were the campfires of the dead.

  They always had to stop in the open because Keletso was afraid of the trees, such as they were. For shade, Keletso had sawed the handle off a large parasol and jammed a long metal rod, sharpened at both ends, into the hollow shank. The resulting item, stabbed into the sand, was impossibly top-heavy when the canopy was opened up and had to be firmly held on to by someone to keep it from keeling over. But it served. They took turns keeping it upright. The parasol fabric was bright pink. They took their refreshment while they sat on camp stools. Keletso was in charge. Tea was sun tea. Every morning Keletso sealed up four Joko tea bags in a jar of water, which he then secured under the ropes binding the load in the truckbed, on top, where it would be exposed to the sun. A square of canvas, with a hole at its center for the umbrella support, was always laid down to sit on. The formality of it was bemusing.
It was domestic. He had no attitude about it. It was fine. The trees were objects of fear because the soil in their shade was often infested with populations of a large, flat, violently aggressive tick. Tampans, they were called, and when any warmblooded animal trod the soil under the trees the vibrations would alert the tampans and then the effluvium of the beast would electrify them and they would shoot up out of the ground and fasten themselves on the hapless intruder, sucking viciously. Their modus operandi was to extract as much blood as they could from the animal before it could shuffle back into the sun, where the temperature was inimical to the ticks and they would have to drop off and stagger back to their cool underground burrows. Typically they attacked in volleys, in the hundreds at a time. They could leap. Supposedly they could get so much blood in their first volley that the animal would faint. It was possible. This was Africa. He thought, O Africa, beware the sun, beware the shade … Be careful.

  In any case, that was the whole story. He was through with himself. He was definitely through with himself. The thing now was to proceed, do no harm, and get back home in one piece to face the bitter music playing there, sinfonia domestica playing just for him. It was urgent to proceed without thinking about Iris. He could do it. He ought to be able to treat this business as a vacation, given that people came from all over the world, paying thousands of dollars to be up in this wilderness, although the thousands were paid for vacations well to his right, in the Okavango swamp, the delta, the only succulent part of Botswana, not for this dryness stretching without relief all the way to the Atlantic. Ahead of him was a beheaded river, which is what the delta truly was, and to his left, if you went far enough, was the Skeleton Coast, with its decor of shipwrecks. It was possible to make out the swamp, if you used binoculars and got on top of the Land Cruiser’s cab, as a green line to the east. That was where the giraffes et cetera were.

  He was through with himself, and with the fantasy conviction that if he could just find Kerekang and reintroduce himself and speak man to man he could talk him out of what he was doing, on some basis or other, on past acquaintance and their love of poetry and on an extensive apology about Pony, his part in that, something like Stanley and Livingstone. That kind of fantasy could go away now. Life is what? he thought. In all his years in Africa Livingstone had converted exactly one African to Christianity, one.

  But he was through with himself. It was pointless to envy people like Keletso their simpler existences and pointless to go to the ultimate question of whether the world would be better off, net, once the main effort of your life had been added up, and especially pointless in his case because the main effort of his life had been to collaborate with others in preventing certain events from transpiring, so that his work product consisted of a null set, a sequence of zeros, unevents, very difficult to judge to say the least. His life was like the medals the agency gave its heroes and put into a vault and told nobody outside the agency about. Of course the true main effort of his adult life was and always had been to have Iris’s love, which sounded selfish put in that way, selfishly concentrating on his well-being, in essence, and not hers. But this subject was outside the realm of things he could deal with now, in the desert. And then there was poetry, Milton, where he had done something … a little something. But that was enough about him. He was through.

  But speaking of poetry, he was having the odd feeling that poetry was trying to reassure him, poetry acting as a kind of fraternal entity. I came na here to view your works in hopes to be more wise/But being that I’m gang to hell it shall be na surprise, Burns of course, had come to him while he was scanning a particularly bleak piece of the territory. And then riding along in depression, the lines Zeno’s arrow in my heart/I float in the plunging years, author unknown, had lightened his misery. Very little Milton was showing up, which was strange given the surroundings. Of course he could summon Milton up anytime he needed him. Even poetic fragments of his own invention were declaring themselves, like The Stars Also Burn, a title, obviously, appropriate for a certain type of middlebrow crap novel. The drop that wrestles in the sea/Forgets her own locality was from Emily Dickinson, a poet he hadn’t read attentively enough, since clearly she had something to say to him. There was a lot of Dickinson manifesting. Of course her main subject matter was death, so the less said about that the better. Death was bad, but not as bad as someone else licking your wife’s cunt. Stop, he thought. That was the kind of thing lines of poetry were leaping up to quench. Poetry, his past reading, was turning out to be a god for him. The conceit forcing itself on him was that poetry was an autonomous friendly composite, interested in capturing his predicament favorably to him, a thing like an Arcimboldo portrait, but alive and not composed of different kinds of fruit but made out of friendly sentiments and aperçus jostling for his attention, like puppies in a basket playing and jumping up eagerly. The urge to declaim accompanied particular surges of poetry, especially in moments when he was off by himself. Urinating, he had found himself saying loudly I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above/Those that I fight I do not hate/Those that I guard I do not love. It had felt like a retort to what, to the Kalahari, to the heat. Keletso had probably noticed something, but he would assume it was religious. Keletso said things under his breath from time to time, often it was the Lord’s Prayer. For reading matter, Keletso had brought a Bible, that was all, and in fact it was the Olive Pell Bible, a version created for the use of girls in finishing schools and stripped of all the sex and violence. He had bought it at a jumble sale, for its compactness, and he kept it on his person at all times.

  Ray was perforce becoming an authority on the left side of Keletso’s face, but not on much else about the man. Keletso’s ears were heavily wrought, the upper rims so thick they made the ear tips bend faintly downward. He needed to not exaggerate this tireless man’s qualities to a religious level. Not only was he tireless but he had the ability to fall asleep within seconds of lying down in unlikely positions, the unlikeliest, an ability no doubt attributable to the soporific effects of a spotless conscience. But of course that was an assumption. What he could say was that he was developing cracks in the corners of his mouth and Keletso wasn’t. It was stress, was all. Now it was time to get out and have tea. There were four minuscule bananas left, from the supply they had picked up back in Ghanzi. He wanted Keletso to have them all. He wasn’t hungry.

  He stood next to their vehicle, actively appreciating it, patting it, honoring an impulse that kept renewing itself. It was supplicatory, partly. They needed good luck with their machine, their steed, their ship of the desert. The Japanese Land Cruiser was displacing the British Land Rover everywhere in Africa. It was a rout. The Land Cruiser was a superior machine, an oversized pickup truck with a shortened but still adequate open bed and a tall, roomy four-door cab that elevated its occupants high above the road, a crucial advantage in negotiating dangerous terrain. Land Rovers were earth-colored, uniformly. Their Land Cruiser was electric blue, very jolly. The back seat in the cab was narrower than the front seat, but it was still wide enough for sleeping on. They had been reduced to sleeping in the Land Cruiser a couple of times, and there would be more of that. They had agreed to take turns on the back seat. The ingenious Keletso had come up with a way to shroud the propped-open doors of the cab with mosquito netting, which allowed the sleeper to lie full length from time to time, feet extended out into the darkness. But generally they kept the doors closed, out of general fear, even though the received wisdom was that all animals shied away from motor vehicles. He needed to have the door open more frequently than Keletso. They had mosquito screens that fit into the space left by half-open windows and they used them faithfully at night, vigorous ventilating being the necessity it was for lives being lived at such close quarters. Keletso never needed to get up at night. Ray was discovering that his occasional needs in that direction had entirely evaporated, no doubt in response to the fear of being eaten alive and the like.

  They should be all right. They
had everything they could conceivably need, it seemed to him. In fact, there was too much. Keletso knew where everything was in the swollen load in back, under the tarps that covered it. Ray was developing his own mental map, against the day he sent Keletso home. They had water in a hundred-gallon drum, and paraffin, petrol, and motor oil in smaller drums. They had extra tires, an extra battery, various other automotive spares he needed to catalog for himself one more time, a mechanic’s tool kit, a foot pump, a winch, flares, mats for getting out of sand traps. They had hatchets, axes and extra ax handles, machetes, shovels, trenching spades, torches, lanterns. Bolted to the rear base of the cab was the general tool chest. It had a false bottom, beneath which his revolver and ammunition were kept, along with packets of rands and pula, about a thousand dollars’ worth in each currency. The false bottom was a chore to free and raise. It had to be pried out in a particular way. There had been a plan to devise access to the secret space through a slot behind the backrest in the rear seat, but there had been no time to get that done. They were hugely overequipped for camping. They had a tent, bolts of mosquito netting, multiple drop cloths, folding camp furniture, sleeping bags and blankets, both. They had metal cookware, a reflector oven and a Coleman stove, miscellaneous grills, enough plates and tableware for a festivity. They had a washtub and smaller basins, laundry powder, a steel mirror, a full crate of toilet paper. They had a portable shower unit, a black rubber bladder to be filled with water and fixed to something high up and out in the sun. The instructions that came with it advised that before releasing the sun-heated water the potential bather should lather up and be prepared to speedily rinse off. Like the reflector oven, the shower unit remained unused. The idea of standing naked in the Kalahari was something neither he nor Keletso was ready to embrace, at least not yet. The massive food locker contained, in addition to sensible goods like canned food and dry cereals, a silly array of condiments. There were three kinds of chutney. There was an aluminum cooler which would be useless unless they stumbled over an iceberg in the Kalahari. They had four down pillows. There were three air mattresses and a patching kit that went with them. They had both mosquito coils and citronella candles. They had spools of nylon rope, soft wire, and twine. The first aid chest was the size of a camp trunk and they had it just inside the tailgate where they could get at it instantly. Its contents were frighteningly comprehensive. Their personal gear, in two large duffel bags for Ray, a single suitcase for Keletso, was stowed on the floor in the back seat. There was a sewing basket. Everything was new. The tarps had a powerful, fresh, resinous odor. America, you are rich, he thought.