White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,132

contents briefly and asked, “When’s he coming?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll have to wait over there.” The tall man pointed to a patch of open ground near where the man was washing the truck. Bastards. There was shade elsewhere but not a scrap of shade where he’d indicated. A pickup traveling fast from the South African side approached the gate. It stopped, and the shorter guard left the shade of the building to talk to the driver. There was a brief conversation, and the gate lifted. Alice went to move her truck, facing it toward the South African gate. It was too hot in the cab of the truck, even with both doors open. She got out, and a tiny, almost imperceptible breeze stirred her blue dress as she stood. A dove sat on the roof of the fortresslike building where the guards stood. Alice loved the song of nearly every bird in the world, including the sarcastic go-away bird. But not this dove. From the moment she’d first heard it, she’d found its call depressing and oddly claustrophobic. Hearing it was like being on a long bus ride, sitting next to someone who complained incessantly. She thought, I can ignore it, just pay no attention. But before long, she wanted to hurl stones at it. Shut up! Shut up! It went on and on.

She’d told Will and Greta where she was going and asked if they’d pick up the children if she wasn’t back by three. Will had offered to drive down with her, but she said she thought it best to go on her own, there was no telling whether Isaac would even make it. Her stomach turned over. She felt the evil smell from here, through those gates, felt it in the starched complacence of the guard’s khaki uniforms, in the short-cropped hair, in the pathetic eagerness of the black man washing the car in the sun. She took a swig of water from a gallon jug she’d brought with her.

A large truck roared up to the gate from the Botswana side, sounding like a bull in rut, something wrong with its gear-shifting mechanism. She began to count vehicles. Four from the South African side. Seven from the Botswana side, six more from South Africa, three more from Botswana.

Isaac heard the key in the metal door and the creak of the hinge. Light poured in, and his hand went over his eyes. It was a different guard. Never before had he seen this person. He had a neck as big as a bull’s, bulging out of his collar.

“Get up,” the man said.

Isaac got slowly to his feet.

“Fok, kaffir, you stink.”

He could no longer smell himself.

The guard attached shackles to his ankles. As though he could run.

“Get going.”

He clambered to his feet and shuffled out the door. He was too numb to feel the sun on his face. It was the first time he’d been outdoors since they’d brought him in; he could now see that his cell was part of a long tunnel of cells that stretched along a desolate scrape of ground.

“Where am I going?”

In Afrikaans, “You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Please tell me where you’re taking me.”

“Hou jou bek.” Shut your mouth.

He felt a stick prod him from behind. He slowed his steps. He would, damn it all, die in dignity, not prodded like a fucking ox. One of his knees no longer bent. He rounded the corner and limped along a path leading to a road. A car waited there, its motor idling. He imagined they would take him to police headquarters where they’d push him out a high window and call it suicide. He thought of his mother. It grieved him terribly to think of her. He stumbled, felt the stick in his back.

The bitter heart eats its owner, she’d told him. To be bitter, he knew now, one must feel something personal in the hatred that comes at you. He didn’t feel anything like that. The ugliness around him flailed like a goat drowning in a flooded river. If a leg of that goat happened to strike you, it has just struck, that’s all. The Earth had a habit of begetting monsters, hatched from ignorance and greed. They had schooled him in hatred these months, and it now lived in him, like a fact you can’t forget. Perhaps it was as well for him to die. The world did not need more hate. He thought of Boitumelo—her beauty, her goodness, her skin so perfect you