The collected stories (38 page)

All this gabble from my simple question; and I kept thinking, The tide is falling.

'Ned,' I said. 'The word "parenting." What's it all about?'

'It's a gerund,' he said, with his hands out.

'It is no such thing. It is not even a word.'

He insisted it was, I swore it wasn't, and finally to clinch his argument he said, 'Any noun can be verbed, Stanley.'

'Now I've heard everything,' I said and just walked off as he called out Don't go away mad - but who wouldn't? It was low tide by the time I got to the landing.

I was still thinking about Skip and Larry, why they hadn't written in so long, and trying to heave my boat across the mud-flats when I looked up and saw my children, both of them, standing there on the shore watching me; Skip and Larry, exactly the way they were when they were eight and ten, in their bare feet and bathing suits, with their skinny arms and bony shoulders, except they were black.

I said, 'Don't just stand there.'

They didn't move.

'Give me a hand,' I said. 'Look alive.'

Anyone could see that I was about to lose forty feet of line that had slid off the stern cleat as I plowed the skiff forward through the mud. And I was angry: low tide, because of all that business at the post office.

'Pick it up,' I said.

'The rope?'

'It's not a rope, son. It's a line. If you're going to mess around in boats - grab it!'

He scooped up the line and at the same time moved across the mud to me on stepping-stones, finding one after another, his brother behind him, following him just as Larry used to follow Skip.

I took an end of the rope and tied a bowline through a hole in the breasthook and said, 'Give me some slack.'

He just stood there.

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'Pay me out some slack/ I said.

I thought: 'I've been giving English lessons all morning.' It was as though I had found myself on another planet, and at low tide it seemed that way.

'Let go of the line, sonny.'

He threw it at me.

'Doesn't anyone speak English anymore?' I said.

This made him very solemn and attentive, just like Skip waiting for me to set him straight. His face was smooth, his head shaved, the whites of his eyes were slightly flecked, and his skin black beneath little scaly ashes. His brother was a smaller version of him. They looked to me as children do - waterproof and unsinkable and unfinished - unfinished most of all. So many things they didn't know, so much they couldn't do. How would they ever learn? The world was all tall strangers to them. And their being black only made it all worse. Who had ever shown them compassion?

'Hop aboard,' I said.

They didn't move. Onshore, a big bearded man in shorts yelled 'Wallace and Ferdy! Get over here!'

They tensed, looking very compact, as they prepared to leap back on the stepping-stones.

'No problem,' I said. 'They want to come with me.'

Only then did this bearded man look at me. 'You sure?'

'I've got two of my own,' I said. I settled my oars into the oarlocks and eased the stern towards the boys. 'Get in. One at a time. Hold tight.'

They glanced back at the bearded man as they did so, and I could tell they were relieved to get away from him. There was something tyrannical-looking about his beard, and the way he walked, those shoes. He watched us row away through the weedy water.

'Ever been in a boat before?'

'Nope,' the big boy said.

'Scared?' I said.

He looked up sharply and denied it.

The little one said, 'Hey, mister - that a Chinese boat?'

A gaff-rigged 40-footer was passing us. Red sails - and so the boy had drawn a simple conclusion. I told him what it was and made him repeat it, and then I held up a line and said, 'What's this? 1

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'Rope,' the little boy said.

'Line,' I said and got them chanting. After they had stopped I said 'Don't worry. You'll learn. It took my kids years to learn these things. We'll have to cram it all into a few hours today. But I'll make you into two sailors, you'll see.'

'Where are your kids, mister?'

Something bothered me about being called 'mister' like that.

'Call me captain,' I said. They nodded and went quiet. 'Which one of you is Wallace and which is Ferdy?'

The big one was Wallace, and the little one said that Ferdy was not short for anything. It was his whole name.

I said, 'Got any brothers and sisters?'

'Four,' the little one piped up.

'Six,' Wallace said, and when the little boy challenged him with a look, Wallace said, 'LaToya and LaRetta.'

I asked them to spell these names, and they did so.

'They's the twins,' Wallace said. 'They's living with my father.'

'Was that your father on the beach?'

'Nope.'

'"No, Captain.'"

'No, Captain. That's the Reverend. Of our church. Heavengate Baptist.'

'Boston?'

'Roxbury.'

Hot streets, black gangs, crazed Irishmen in cars racing by and screaming abuse at them, boarded up storefronts and brick tenements, junked vans and jalopies rusting by the roadside, radios playing too loud and planes descending overhead - never mind the rape, the murder, the mayhem - just the simple visible facts were bad enough; and they knew they were in heaven here, being rowed across the harbor.

They were sitting together, big and little on the thwart.

'How old are your kids?' Wallace said, and when I did not reply he added 'Captain.'

'That's it, son. You're learning,' I said. 'Twenty-one and twenty-four. They're big now. But they were once your age, sitting there, just like you. They went to California. Why is it that people who go to California never seem to come back? And they don't write letters. That's not a California thing, is it? But they're different.

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Know why? Because I raised them to be different. I taught them how to be clean-cut. Yes, sir. No, sir. I taught them the fundamentals. I kept them off the streets and on the water. You never learn any harm on the water. You give me a week or two - I could set you straight. I could teach you to row. Skip and Larry could row like demons. I had them sprinting across here, from the beach to the tip of the jetty. They didn't learn that at school. Of course not. There was a smoking room at school. Imagine. For 15-16-year-olds. They had driver education. Naturally. So they could use their parents' car. That was very hard on Alice. But, you know? I went up to the school and saw the principal. Henry T. Wing. I explained everything very carefully to him, the pressure we were under, the strain that driver ed was putting on our vehicle. I told him about Alice's condition. Her hair had started to fall out in bunches, and nothing is more troubling to a woman than losing her hair. I'm dead sure that contributed to it. Notice how I am just dipping the oars into the water. Not trying to overdo it - just sinking the blades and gliding and lifting, and feathering slightly because of the wind.' I took three more long pulls. 'Does that answer your question?'

They had gone silent - we were in the channel and I was fighting a short breaking chop that had been whipped up by the westerly wind smacking the last of the ebbing tide.

'What are the other ones called?' I said.

They just stared.

'Your brothers and sisters,' I said.

'Shonelle, Shanice, Valia, and Troy,' Wallace said.

'Interesting,' I said, but privately I found the names heartbreaking, like brands of floor polish or shampoo.

'Shonelle got married,' Ferdy said.

'Would you like to get married?' I asked Wallace.

'Maybe,' he said.

'You're going to have to be more definite than that, son. If you meet the right woman there'll be no question,' I said. 'A marriage isn't ]iist a romantic thing. Oh, sure. You're all fired up at first, but you have to look at that woman's face at breakfast the next morning. You're going to have to plan and save. You want to keep your life shipshape. Like this boat. Notice how I coil the line? We had a knot in that line. Remember how I undid it before I coiled it? Marriage is like that. Think about it.'

This made a definite impression on Wallace, but then Ferdy

LOW TIDE

smirked and said, 'If you get married you can see her panties.'

I cut him off with, 'We don't need that kind of talk on this boat.'

'Shut up, Ferdy,' Wallace said, and looked towards shore.

'Your wife belongs on a pedestal, and you don't put her on a pedestal just so that you can look up her dress. Respect, that's what I'm talking about. You don't have to take your clothes off just to have a good time, sonny. What are you looking at, Wallace?'

'Thought I saw the Reverend,' he said. 'I was going to axe him a question.'

'No, you weren't.'

He seemed hurt - baffled, anyway.

'You were going to ask him a question.'

'Mister, I have to go to the bathroom,' Ferdy said.

'You should have thought of that before we left,' I said. 'You'll just have to hold on to it. I know it's hard but it's for your own good. See, next time you won't make that mistake, will you?'

He winced at me and put his knees together, and I knew that no one had ever put it like that to him. He needed to be told that in just that way. I felt that I had nipped a bad habit right in the bud and I saw again Skip and Larry on that same thwart, and all the lessons they had learned in this boat.

'What were you going to ask the Reverend? Something about the church service?'

'Yup.'

'"Yes, Captain.'"

'"Yes, Captain.'"

'How did I know that you were going to ask him about the church service?' I said. 'I guess I read your mind, didn't I? See, when you get to be my age and been around like I have you don't have to be told things. You know what a person is going to say before he or she opens his or her mouth. Used to amaze Skip and Larry. "Don't tell me," I'd say. "You're hungry. You've got to see somebody. You're going out of town." Whatever. I'll bet you're in the choir.'

'Yes, Captain,' Wallace said.

'I'll bet you've got a lovely voice,' I said.

'Yes, Captain.'

'Want to sing something for me? I love gospel music'

He seemed to be thinking this over, and then he said, 'Captain, Ferdy's crying.'

*75

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That's because he's learning a lesson. Sometimes tears are a good teacher. And the more he cries the less he'll pee.'

The child was shuddering. No jokes from him now. None of this If you get married you can see her panties nonsense.

'What's wrong, Wallace? Why don't you want to sing? Would you rather do it tomorrow?'

'Yes, sir, Captain,' he said eagerly.

'Suit yourself,' I said.

We were now parallel to the end of the jetty, at the mouth of the harbour. 'This is a steep and confused sea,' I said, as the boat pitched. 'What if we went over?'

And a wave slapped the stern and wet the boys as I spoke.

'What if we just got swamped? What's the first thing you'd do? Would you swim for shore?'

'I sure would,' Wallace said and became gray at the thought of it.

'You'd be making the biggest mistake of your life,' I said. 'You never leave your craft. You never swim for shore. You stay with your craft until help comes.'

'We gonna drown, mister?' Ferdy wailed, and he began to sob.

Wallace said, 'Captain, we got church.'

'And I suppose you want to turn back?'

'Yes, Captain.'

'But you want to come out tomorrow, don't you?'

'Yes, Captain.'

'You want to learn a thing or two about seamanship?'

'Yes, Captain.'

'What about you, Ferdy?'

'Yes, Captain,' the little boy said.

I was still rowing, and I thought how precisely like Skip and I airy they were at this moment, sitting in the stern nodding and agreeing. They were showing manners. And how long had we been out? No more than forty-five minutes. Give me a week with them - just a week, Reverend - and I will give you back two adults.

With that, I turned the boat and rowed back towards shore, still righting the tide. But I made use of the time. We aint got but one, Wallace said, speaking of his parents. I explained the grammatical mistake and I thought; 'No - you can count on me, and that makes two.' I told them what had happened that morning at the post

LOW TIDE

office, of the business with the leaflet, and 'parenting,' and Any noun can be verbed. We had a good laugh over that.

'Be here tomorrow at nine sharp, so we can catch the tide,' I said.

They said ' Yes, sir' - all politeness now - and scampered off the boat and up the beach. I didn't see the Reverend but I suppose he was putting on his dog-collar. I wasn't happy, but I was satisfied. I felt I had rescued the day and kept it from being a waste, and maybe saved a few young lives in the process.

That was yesterday. Today I went back, launched the boat and waited. Nine - ten - eleven. No sign of them. So I went out alone. It's not funny when the water recedes and shows bottles and old rope and clam shells and crab claws and dead weeds on a long shore of mud.

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White Rhodesians confided in me: 'Don't stay at the Jameson. They're taking Africans there now.' In Bulawayo I fell in with an English plumber who was living in South Africa. He gorged on french fries, got roaring drunk, then collapsed, and when he woke up he vomited hugely. He said he usually spent Christmas doing that. 'So, how about it, mate. Let's go back to that poxy chip shop.'

I did not think I would. Christmas was still a few days off. I took a train to Victoria Falls and onward to Lusaka. On the Rhodesian section the whites were drunk, singing their hearts out, and the Africans (all in Second Class) very silent. When the train crossed from white Rhodesia into black Zambia, at Livingstone, the Africans from Second Class entered the bar coach and they quickly became drunk and abusive. 'Happy Christmas! You!' they would say to the whites. 'Buy me a Christmas present!' Bottles of beer went back and forth.

We arrived in Lusaka at about noon on Christmas Eve, and that was how I happened to be speaking to the African couple, the brother and sister.

In this African bar, with a dirt floor that stank of dampness and cat piss, some of the people held old rinsed-out oil cans on their knees, which they raised from time to time, to drink African beer. Sour and thick, the consistency of porridge, it was plopped from a plastic bucket into the cans. The rest of us drank warm bottled beer. There was nagging music and smoke and shouting, and occasionally the squalling of babies, because the women wore their children on their backs, slung like papooses. Every so often a fight would start, but before they became dangerous the men went outside, and fought there. Even then, Zambia was well known for its beer-party stabbings.

Around midnight, the brother said, 'Happy Christmas. My sister wants you to come with us.'

'Happy Christmas,' I said, drunkenly, and shortly afterwards we were in the back seat of an old car bumping on a back road. It seemed a long ride and when we arrived, and I was swaying, blinded by the headlights, the brother said, 'Happy Christmas. You give him money.'

I gave some money to the taxi driver and when he was gone we were in darkness. They led me to their hut. The sister took my hand. And then I was lying on a damp mattress, by candlelight,

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and thinking: There are other people in this room. I heard them but I could not see them.

The following morning I saw who they were, small children - three or four of them - tangled in blankets on the floor, and snoring in a heap like kittens in a basket.

'Happy Christmas,' the sister said. She was squirming into her red dress. She was slim, she had a brown scowling face, she never went out without a turban that matched her dress.

It was then that she told me her name - Nina; and her brother was George. I slowly put together the chronology of events that had led me here to this African hut on Christmas morning. I felt ill, I was hung over, unshaven, and my tongue felt like a dead mouse. I had been wearing a tan suit that was now rumpled, and a shirt that had wilted. I dressed, yawned, and said, 'I have to get back to town.'

George put his head into the room. He looked fairly dapper, in a suit. He had brown flecks on the whites of his eyes. 'Happy Christmas. We have breakfast.'

They took me down the dusty village road to a ramshackle building. It was about nine in the morning, a day that was already hot; radios playing plonking Christmas music, children shouting. I had no idea where this village was, except that it was some distance from Lusaka.

'Happy Christmas,' George said in the bar, signaling and muttering to the bartender. The bar, much seedier than the one of the night before, stank of kerosene. In Africa kerosene always meant no electricity and breathing the fumes gave me a headache.

'What do they have to eat here?'

But the ragged barman had already begun to open three bottles of warm Lion Lager.

'I don't want beer,' I said. 'I'd like something to eat.'

'Christmas!' George said fiercely and thumped a bottle against my chest until I grasped it. Nina was swigging hers, as though to show me how.

The bartender asked for money. When I hesitated, George said, 'Christmas!' and I paid.

I sipped the beer, I bought a pickled egg from a cloudy bottle of them that looked like a museum exhibit, and ate it. Long before

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I had finished my beer, George was ready for another, and so was Nina. I bought them, I sipped, I felt very ill.

'Where's the chimbudziV

'Come with me,' George said.

It was a roofless shed behind the tin-roofed building, upright planks and poles enclosing a shallow hole that was furious with struggling maggots. George was waiting when I left it, retching.

Back in the bar, he introduced me to various Africans. 'My brother . . . Also my brother . . . My sister - same mother, same father,' and he called to the barman to serve us. Now, when he opened his mouth to say, 'Christmas,' I hated his grin and the spittle on his teeth. And his brown-flecked eyes seemed sinister. But I paid.

Nina sat beside me, as though we had overnight become a couple and had an understanding. Several hours passed in this way. George demanded that the radio be turned louder. He recognized the melody, and he sang,

Jungle bells, Jungle bells, Jungle all the way . . .

'Sing,' he said to me. He made a tyrannous insisting face.

I was too weak to do anything but listen. And I began to feel ill again. When I got up, Nina said, as though to a small child, 'Where are you going?'

'Outside,' I said.

'George,' she said, nodding at her brother.

And then George was by my side.

'To the chimbudzi.'

'I go with you.'

'I don't need you,' I said, and walked outside.

He scowled at me and poked my chest with his finger the way he had with the beer bottle. 'If I no come with you, you run away.'

I said, 'I have to go back to Lusaka.'

'No. You stay.'

Sometimes in Africa, faced by Africans, I felt very pale, very skinny, very weak, and almost incoherent. This was one of those times.

George was drunk. I had made him drunk. I tried to calm him,

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but he was already suspicious and irritable and hovered around me like a jailer. When we got back inside the bar, the others demanded more beer, and I paid, and I again tried to think how I might get away from them. I especially wanted to leave when a group of Africans near us began making remarks about the mzungu - I was the only white man in the bar - and Nina infuriated them by answering back.

By late afternoon, I had begun to drink again and became less alarmed; then I was as drunk as everyone else and we went back to the hut, where I fell asleep on the mattress that lay on the dirt floor.

I woke in darkness, and I wondered whether it was still Christmas. I remembered: Jungle bells. I contemplated sneaking away, but I had no idea of the way to Lusaka, and I was further worried by the barking dogs I heard. In African villages, dogs are mainly dangerous to white people. I imagined my hotel room in Lusaka, my bag where I had left it two days ago, the bed I had not slept in.

In the morning, I looked at the children on the floor of the hut, damp and sighing in a little heap, and was silently grateful to them for being there. As long as they slept there Nina would keep her distance. My financial entanglement was bad enough; so far, thanks to the sleeping children, I had avoided a sexual entanglement.

Two of them were Nina's children. So she was married?

'Yes. To you,' she said, with a horrible greedy face, patting her turban.

That made my heart sink. I said, 'I'm leaving.'

'No,' Nina said. 'It's Boxing Day.'

It was the first time in my life I had ever heard that unusual pairing of words. I did not have the slightest idea of what they meant. I put on my clothes again - the same clothes: grubby suit pants, stained jacket, clammy shirt.

George was waiting for us outside the hut.

'We go,' he said. His smile meant: You do what I tell you to do. 1 He poked my lapel with his yellow fingernail. 'Boxing Day. 1

At the bar down the road I bought two pickled eggs and beer for the three of us, and I smiled, and we clinked bottles, and we toasted Happy Boxing Day, and I thought: Get out of here.

The others showed up, the four from yesterday, a few more. I bought them all beer, and I reflected that there was no conversation.

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They drank, they mumbled the words of the songs from the transistor radio playing loud on the bar, they did not speak to each other. They drank, they scowled, they grunted; their faces seemed to thicken with incomprehension and obscure anger.

They clamored for more beer, provoked by George, and no one noticed that I had not drunk any of my beer. Yesterday a couple of them had bought a round of beer. Today, it was all mine. They drank, I paid; they drank again, I paid again. The cranky men came back. They made remarks, Nina scoffed at them, they replied; she shouted back, defending me, abusing them. A man stood up and yelled directly at her. That made me very nervous.

Soon, there was more shouting, some of it mirthful, and the group of Africans I sat with had ceased to notice me, except when they wanted more beer. It was about two in the afternoon of a very hot day and I felt a rising sense of panic.

Til be right back,' I said.

'George,' Nina said.

I did not protest. I laughed. I said, 'I don't need George to show me the chimbudzi.'

'He will not come back,' Nina said, and I realized how shrewd she was in her witchlike way.

'Of course I will,' I said. I took off my suit jacket and folded it on the bar. 'Here's my jacket, here's some money. Buy me a beer, get some for yourselves, and hand over that jacket when I get back.'

Before they could reply, I walked away, left the bar. I did not hurry. The sun was overhead, the trees so thin there was no shade, the soil was pale dust. I glanced back; no one had followed me.

It was then that I ran, in a desperate flight, realizing that I had very little time. I made it to the edge of the village. Some children playing on the road looked up, startled.

The village road intersected with another road. I was gasping, still jogging along. A car approached. I waved to it.

'Taxi?'

'As you like,' the driver said.

'Lusaka,' I said, and got in. I rode, continually turning back, to see whether we were being followed.

At the hotel I asked the driver to wait. I retrieved my bag and paid my bill and got back into the car.

'Let's go,' I said.

'Where?'

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'Just drive - there,' I said, and pointed to a road.

'That's south, to Kafue.'

'How many miles?'

'Maybe twenty.'

'Take me to Kafue.'

There was a motel at Kafue, by the side of the road. I stayed there and though there was little nighttime traffic, each time my room was raked by the yellow glare of headlights I grew worried, and trembled with a fugitive's fear, feeling that they had come for me.

The next day, after I hitch-hiked out of the country, back to Rhodesia, my fear eased, and later all I remembered were the children, and wondered what became of them - the sleepers who had protected me, and the surprised ones who had seen me running. It was an uncommon, even remarkable, sight in Central Africa, in 1964, a white man running in the bush.

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available, but were they healthy? Some had parasites, others had drugs in their system; some were diseased or brain-damaged, some were unbalanced. Many had no papers - twice the Raths had been caught that way, offered smuggled infants by brokers. You could not trust anyone, which was why Arvin had discreetly advertised for his own broker and ignored all the ones who had come to him through the network, having heard that the Raths were desperate.

When Hella told him that it was across the bridge, he did not wince as their friends had at the thought of the East Bank.

Hella said, 'It's one of those neighborhoods.'

Arvin had not said anything, so she knew he had a plan. You needed a plan. The East Bank police were private, but that was only part of the problem. Many of the neighborhoods were sealed, like fortress villages, and were dangerous to outsiders. These days only humans had money value and so some were valuable and some were cheap, and a child might cost anything.

The prospect of getting a child gave the Raths the courage to risk the bridge. They knew that what they were doing was illegal; that what they were planning was an abduction. Yet a child meant everything to them, not only because they were sterile: a child was the future.

They had not told anyone of the broker. Which of their friends knew anything about the East Bank anyway? The previous eight disappointments had been shared and piteously clucked over. Even the persistent party talk - 'We got one in Poland,' 'The Goldstones found one in Mexico,' all that - did not draw them out. You might have thought they were talking about puppies. The Raths, who had had many, were sick of pets and were no longer comforted by warm dogs.

Nor were they dismayed by the adoption stories which had turned out badly - the Benee's Romanian infant girl who had been diagnosed as a veetor after a year, and had to be destroyed; the Feeiicks' boy Ivor, from Russia, who had shot himself in a motel

on his twelfth birthday; all the tales of runaways, adoptees who

had tied to places like the East Bank and lived like the drifters they

Called Skells, or the squatters known as Trolls.

'1 can test tor epilepsy, 1 can find viruses, 1 can look into heredity,

I can diagnose depression and potential malfunction, 1 van do brain Scans, I van isolate a veetor/ Ar\in said. 'I van rind anything. 1 He had confidence in his tests, but where was the child who

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could pass them? His sophisticated instruments meant frequent disappointment. Five times he had examined infants in brokers' offices and found dysfunction or systemic problems. And there were the two without papers.

Arvin was a lighting engineer, Hella an architect. Their apartment, an entire floor of a Kingsbury tower, was vast and beautiful, it lacked a child, but that was all. They had the virus but that was no disgrace - it wasn't fatal. Half the people they knew had it. You were inconvenienced by it, you were sterile; you lost your teeth, but the new implants were less trouble.