of yellow grass, the crickets sprang forward in overlapping arcs, reminding him of drops splashing from a puddle. Furry whips of grass lashed at his legs, embedding seeds in his skin, like the worms that burrowed into his feet and that his mother plucked out with tweezers. Would she be worried? She didn’t pay much mind to his whereabouts these days but he’d never strayed this far from home. Jacob was just considering turning back when he caught sight of the monstropolous beast.
He slowed and crept up to it. Its gargantuan nose, an orange cone with a black tip, pointed down like it was sniffing the ground. Above the nose were four square eyes, one intact but clouded with sunset sky, the other three empty. As he neared, one of those blank eyes gained sight: a black oval appeared, balanced on its bottom edge. The eye blinked and the oval vanished – it was a crow. Jacob tracked it as it took flight, beating its wings up and up, going from a splotch to a cross to a speck to nothing. Then he turned back to the beast that it had fled.
It was a wreck. Not the whole aeroplane, just the cockpit. The body and wings must have been cleared away already. The grass around the plane was short and black and stubbly. Jacob stepped carefully over it, picking through ruptured, melted metal, burnt seats, white stuffing, fragments of plastic, a plastic pamphlet. He found a blue seat belt with a silver buckle, which he tied around his waist. He was strong and limber for a ten-year-old, but he slid down several times before he managed to scale the nose. Finally, he smeared spit and dirt on his feet for grip, backed up to get a running start, and dashed up the incline. Just as he was about to slip off again, he grabbed the frame of a broken window. ‘Tchah,’ he winced as the glass cut his palm, but he kept his grip and clambered gingerly inside.
The floor of the cockpit was a nest of grass and wire and glass. There were dirty puddles and green and white bird droppings everywhere and a blue curtain fluttered in the back. The pilot chairs sat like thrones before the array of buttons on the console. Jacob sat in one, damp seeping into his shorts, the cuts in his palm whistling with pain. He looked straight ahead, surveying the land before him and the sky above. The sun had been swallowed by the ground but its last gasps of light were turning the clouds a neon pink. Jacob tapped at some crudded buttons, pulled at a rusted lever, and roared…
An echo from below: a shout. Jacob stood and looked down. Two men stood in the black grass underneath, looking up at him grimly. One of them was pointing a gun.
* * *
Dr Lee Banda got tangled up with the missing boys by accident. He had stopped by the Kalingalinga clinic to see to an infected mother whose infant had croup. Lee showed her how to feed the baby with the dexamethasone syrup, angling the spoon past the lagoon of saliva-snot around its mouth. Lee fought the urge to wipe the baby’s face – Musadabwe had scolded him fiercely the last time he had shamed a mother this way. Instead, Lee turned to the patient and asked after her older son, who was Virus-negative but had looked malnourished the last time Lee had seen him.
‘Mabvuto? Ah, who knows?’ the woman said sadly, then went on to complain. ‘He acts up when he is not at sukulu. He runs around! How would it be if only I had money for the school fees?’
The baby barked softly in commiseration. The question the woman was asking had an answer – it was in Lee’s pocket. Out of a misplaced sense of indignation, he offered a different one: ‘Why don’t I go and look for Mabvuto and bring him home in time for supper?’
‘Oh-oh? Okay, thank you please,’ his patient replied with dull eyes.
He left her soon after and walked around the compound, making a survey of the place – the church, the woodyards, the dump – but there was no sign of Mabvuto. Lee was walking back to his pickup, resigned to doling out charity money to his patient, when he came across a circle of worried mothers. Their boys were missing too. Mabvuto was no doubt among them. They directed Lee to the airport, the