White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,134

opened a dresser drawer, thinking she might have stuck it in there for safekeeping, and found the Bushman piano Ian had given her. She’d picked it up, plucked a few tinny notes, and found herself kneeling on the floor, her knees buckled under her.

Coo, coo, ca-koo, cu-coo. She counted forty iterations before it stopped. She stared down the road on the South African side. The heat shimmered on its surface. Any car coming that way would look as though it were swimming toward the border. The sun was directly overhead now. She searched the ground for a stone, picked it up, and weighted down one end of a towel on the roof of the truck and draped it over the open doorway to create shade. Her eyes burned and her thoughts melted and ran here and there.

Her heart went out to Isaac’s mother. One by one, she’d lost her children. Isaac, Nthusi, Moses, Lulu. If they ever let him out of prison, he’d never again be allowed back over the border to visit her. And she’d never legally make it to Botswana.

The two men in the front of the vehicle were holding a conversation in Afrikaans that Isaac couldn’t understand. He gathered that it had to do with him, but he felt nothing but a vast indifference. “This side of Zeerust,” the one with the thick neck said.

He had seen a signpost not far back: 27 kilometers to Zeerust. Whatever was going to happen to him would happen within twenty-seven kilometers. Something fluttered inside him, a bird trying to rise, and sank back down. About fifteen kilometers out of Zeerust, the driver said, “This will do.” The car turned off the main road, took another side road, until they were alone on a stretch of track so sparsely traveled as to hardly be a track. Low, rounded hills overlapped at a distance. A small herd of cattle and goats grazed in the middle distance.

“Get out,” said the driver.

The large-necked man held a gun.

Isaac tried to take a deep breath to steady himself, but his broken ribs stopped him. “Please,” he said, “I need to take another shit.”

They seemed to consider this for a moment, and the driver said, “Go on then,” not unkindly. And then, “Don’t try anything.”

He staggered behind a thorn bush, his stomach roiling. He thought of running, but it was useless. They’d overtake him in two strides. He squatted and let loose, too scared to be disgusted. He checked the ground for a rock, anything that might serve as a weapon, and found nothing.

He stood.

“Get over here,” the driver said. The thick-necked man tied his hands behind his back and put a canvas bag over his head. It smelled of dust and the unpleasant sweetness of nitrogen fertilizer. They led him a short way from the road and told him to kneel. He felt the muzzle of the gun pressed to the side of his head and shut his eyes under the darkness of the bag.

He stopped breathing and waited.

Instead of an explosion, he heard laughter. They left him kneeling while they laughed and laughed. He heard them slapping their thighs, imagined them elbowing each other, their necks swollen with laughter. The driver ripped off the bag and untied his hands. Hahahaha, guffawed the large-necked man. The man couldn’t get hold of himself. He took a piss behind a shrub and came back, still laughing.

“Let’s get moving,” said the driver, finished with the joke.

Isaac climbed back into the car. The fat-necked man chuckled and muttered to himself: “… like a scared bloody rock rabbit.”

Dully, he understood that what they’d done was as cruel as anything a man can do to another man, but he knew it only through a great numbness, as though his rage was unhinged from his heart, perched on a hillside. He was neither relieved to be alive nor wishing to be dead. An Earth he had once loved floated before him like an inert picture of an Earth. He looked out the window and saw nothing.

He closed his eyes as the car moved. The road became more rutted and bumpy. He heard traffic passing, large trucks and a few cars, but he didn’t open his eyes until the car slowed. Instinctively, he hunkered down low in the seat. In front of them was a large metal gate, and on either side of it, barbed wire stretching as far as the eye could see. Inside, an ugly concrete building stood like a stockade on