sing with foul mouths that a man is nothing but his blood. Elders are stupid and their beliefs are old. Try a new belief. I try a new one every day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stay with family and blood will betray you. No Gangatom looking for me. But I envy you.”
“Fuck the gods, what is there to envy?”
“To know family only after they are gone is better than to watch them go.”
He turned in to the dark corner of his hut.
“How did you know the ways of woman and man?” I asked.
He laughed.
“Watching the new men and women in the bush. Luala Luala, the people above the Gangatom, have man who live with man like a wife, and woman who live with woman like a husband, and man and woman with no man or woman, who live as they choose, and in all these things there is no strangeness,” he said.
How did he know since he was not yet a man, I did not ask. In the mornings we went to river rocks and painted what sweat washed away in the night. In the night I knew him as he knew me, when he wanted to sleep, his belly touching my back when he breathed. Or face beside face, his hand between my legs scooping my balls. We would wrestle and tumble and grab and jerk each other until lightning struck inside both of us.
You are a man who knows pleasures, inquisitor, though you look selfish with yours. Do you know how it feels, not in the body but in the heart, when you have made a man strike lightning? Or a woman, since I have done so with many. A girl whose inner boy in the fold of her flesh was not cut out is blessed twice by the god of pleasure and plenty.
Here is my belief. The first man was jealous of the first woman. Her lightning was too powerful, her screams and moans loud enough to wake up the dead. That man could never accept that the gods would gift the weaker woman with such riches, so before every girl becomes a woman, man sets up to steal it, cut it away, and throw it in the bush. But the gods put it there, hid it deep so that no man would have business going to find it. Man will pay for this.
I have seen more than these things.
The day was out, but the sun was hiding. Kava said we go into the bush and shall not be back for more than a moon. I thought good, for everything in me was growing sick from the thought of family. Of anything Ku. I thought if I stayed here much longer I would turn myself into a Gangatom, and start killing until there was a hole in the village as big as the hole I see when I close my eyes. A dead thing never lies, cheats, or betrays, and what was a family but a place where all three bloom like moss. “As long as it takes for my uncle to miss me, then,” I said.
I hoped it was a hunt. I wanted to kill. But I was still afraid of the viper, and Kava stepped through bowing trees and kneeling plants and dancing flowers as if he knew where to go. Twice I was lost, twice his white hand pushed through thick leaves and grabbed me.
“Keep walking and shed your burden,” Kava said.
“What?”
“Your burden. Let nothing stop you and you will shed it like snakeskin.”
“The day I heard I have a brother is the day I lost a brother. The day I learned I had a father is the day I lost a father. The day I heard I had a grandfather was the day I heard he was a coward who fucks my mother. And I hear nothing of her. How do I shed such skin?”
“Keep walking,” he said.
We walked through bush, and swamp, and forest, and a huge salt plain with hot cracked white dirt until daylight ran away from us. Every moment in the bush jolted me and I fell asleep and jumped awake all night. The next day, after some long walking, and me complaining about long walking, I heard footsteps above me in the trees and looked up. Kava said he had followed us since we turned south. I did not know we were heading south. Up above us in the tree was a black leopard. We walked and he walked. We