Mortals (58 page)

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.

They were inching north. They were tacking. They were tacking deeper toward the west than toward the east. They were vamping. They were finding veterinary roads, old trek routes, taking anything leading off
the main north-south road and following it until they decided not to follow it anymore. Then they would camp. Or they might return to the main road, where at least they had the comfort of seeing, although at rarer intervals the farther north they got, passing trucks with people in them. Now Ray was fighting the lunatic conviction that he would know the moment when his betrayal definitely occurred, that there would be a sign, that he would feel something. It was possible that this was a useful lunatic conviction, because there had been no sign so far, which meant that nothing had happened. It meant she was resisting and he could be happy. What the sign would be, he had no idea.

He had had about enough for today. Keletso hated to drive at night, so it made sense to turn around now while they had a chance of making it back to Route 14 in daylight. They would have to sleep in the vehicle again, unless the attraction of some halfway normal accommodation in Sehithlwa, the next settlement up Route 14, would be enough to motivate him to drive at night, against all his better judgment. Ray realized he had no idea what he meant by halfway normal accommodation. Sehithlwa was a Baherero village. One thing that that meant was that everybody went to bed early. No one would be up when they got there. So it was likeliest that they would get back to Route 14 and just pull off and eat and sleep. Of course the sign that Iris had betrayed him was likelier to come at night than during the day, which meant it might come in the form of a dream, a nightmare. More betrayals took place at night, of course, that was obvious. He didn’t think he’d had any particularly striking dreams since leaving Gaborone. That was good.

Whatever Keletso thought of Ray’s site-assessment performances, he was keeping it to himself. He was a good soldier. Ray was putting less and less effort into his performances, his imposture. He would signal for a stop, descend, make sure his pants cuffs were jammed solidly into his boot tops, spray his lower self with insect repellent, pull the brim of his hat down all around, and set off with his binoculars and clipboard for some spot in the range of one hundred yards from the vehicle. They were within the baobab zone now and he had been selecting locations near particular specimens to carry out his site-assessment charades on. The species had come to fascinate him. They looked untenable, massive gray columns tapering upward and splitting and finishing at the apex in a frenzy of spindly limbs and branches bearing derisory foliage. He hadn’t yet observed anything resembling a grove of baobabs. They seemed to thrive in isolation, although perdure would be a better term for what they did. Birds seemed to avoid them for nesting purposes, if his limited familiarity
with the tree could support such a conclusion. The hard, smooth bark of the baobab invited stroking. They inspired affection, of a certain sort. Whatever they were, they were perfect.

Ray signaled Keletso to stop. He saw a baobab he liked. He and Keletso had evolved a considerable repertoire of hand signals that saved them a lot of surplus talk. In lower gears, the engine made enough noise to render conversation effortful. And he and Keletso shared a preference for silent travel anyway. Ray amplified his hand signal to indicate that Keletso should turn the vehicle around for the return leg, while Ray was doing his assessing. Turning could require some art, depending on road conditions. They had been proceeding in what was in essence a broad, shallow ditch, sticking to the ruts, spoors as they were called, pressed into the soft sand by whoever had preceded them. There was a lay-by, or something like one, just ahead, where a turn could be managed. They had been wrong in choosing the road they had, misled by the fact that the first few kilometers had been freshly groomed, in the usual way, by a government truck dragging a monster bouquet of thornbushes along the surface. So it had seemed promising. But the grooming task had been abandoned. The thornbush bouquet had been jettisoned and pushed up on the shoulder. The government truck curved off straight into the veld, possibly in pursuit of opportunities to do some poaching. Keletso had detected duikers moving through this neighborhood, in the distance, twice.

Ray leaned against the baobab and watched Keletso delicately maneuvering the Land Cruiser for the return journey. How long these monumental vegetables lived was something he should be able to find out. They looked ancient. He wouldn’t mind being buried under one of them, being drawn up molecule by molecule into the ridiculousness and permanence they represented, if they were, in fact, longlived, like sequoias. He loved these goddamned things. They were like monuments, but slightly gesticulating monuments, when the breeze rattled their silly branches. He wasn’t being mordant. Everybody had to be buried someplace. He assumed he was going to be cremated when he died, but ashes had to go someplace too, and under a baobab would be fine with him. Molecules weren’t the smallest particles, though, nor were, what, electrons. All he could think of were monads, which came from Leibnitz and philosophy and not physics. He thought, Au fond we are monads, with gonads. He moved around to the far side of the baobab, where he was out of Keletso’s sight line.

The realization that you, yourself, are going to die, in fact, declares
itself in funny ways, he thought. He could give a new example. Iris, in assembling the mountain of reading matter she wanted him to have, had included three months’ worth of unread
Times Literary Supplements
. And as he was reading through them, in the desert, he had noticed that his reflexive impulse to tear out and save advertisements for books he might want to read at some point was gone. A year or so back he had given up clipping titles from the Books Received listings of the
TLS
, which he could see had been precursory to this. Something was letting him know that there was enough on his forward reading list to occupy him for the rest of this life. In fact, there had been a longer progression. He had been serious about bibliography, cutting out ads neatly and gluing them to index cards color-coded for urgency. Then he had devolved to tearing ads out. And so on down. And now he had enough in his stuffed folders, enough. He had been serious. He had thought of literature and Milton in particular as subjects he would conquer like Shackleton or whoever it was had gotten to the Pole first, but not Shackleton, Peary or Amundsen, who? Definitely not Shackleton, he thought, shivering. He was getting old. He thought, In my time machine I would probably, before I went to Milton’s deathbed, go to Shackleton and the other one, Scott, and say Don’t go, leave the wastelands of the world and stay home … Grow old and perish at home in the arms of your wife … Goodbye and good luck.