White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,4
was becoming hotter now. The path scrubbed along beside the main road, a road for feet. A group of men were coming his way, kicking up sand. He sensed trouble, but there was no time to get out of their way. He walked slowly to one side to let them by, dropping his eyes. He saw two large, flat feet pass by, then smaller dark feet in flip-flops. The third set of feet, wearing black leather shoes without socks, stopped in front of him.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Isaac pushed past.
“Stop!” said the voice.
He broke into a run, but the hunger made his legs sluggish. He tried to push his body forward but it refused, and then he felt his shirt pulled backward.
“Isaac Muthethe!”
No one knew him here, he knew no one. How did the police get his name? He chopped at the hand holding him.
“What the fuck,” said a voice, half laughing.
He turned to find Amen, an old classmate from secondary school.
“I thought you were the police.”
“You beggar,” Amen laughed, “do we look like police?” He picked up Isaac’s hand and held it. “This is my friend,” he said to the others.
Isaac looked into Amen’s face, which had changed, hardened. He’d had no idea he was here and suspected he was doing ANC work. He’d grown a beard, a scraggly “O” around his mouth which crept from his chin to his ears, partly covering a dimple in his right cheek—a feature that had made him look mock-innocent in school but now looked mistaken.
“Kopano is dead,” Isaac said. “I was beside him when they killed him. It’s no longer safe to stay back home.”
“I didn’t know.”
They walked a few steps. “So you will avenge his death.”
Isaac stopped. “What does that mean to avenge a death—kill once, twice, three times more? Where does it end?”
Amen’s eyes were set wide, one looking left while the other looked straight ahead so that it was impossible to escape his gaze.
“I’m saving my own life, that’s all.”
“If you’re saying you’re a coward, Isaac Muthethe, you’re not the Isaac I once knew. Where are you staying?”
“I have no place.”
“Where did you stay last night?”
“I was over the border last night.”
“Come to my house. I have a wife now. And a little girl. Also with us are three comrades, and another woman and her child. What’s one more?” He looked at the white dog. “Did you bring this one with you?”
“No.” The dog moved back a few paces and hunched beside a bush. The word “comrades” meant that it was true: Amen was working with MK, the military wing of the ANC. Botswana was the staging area for violent acts against the South African Defense Force across the border. It was not work he himself could do. Not because he was afraid to die. Was that true? Maybe he couldn’t spare his own precious life for something bigger. Why else had he fled? “Yes, I’ll come with you,” said Isaac. Later, he’d look back and see that this moment led to another that led all the way down a road he’d never meant to travel.
“First we must see someone,” said Amen.
The group walked back into the twisted paths of Naledi. Again, the white dog trailed at a distance. The music of the shebeen grew louder again. The same men still sat under the tree.
Beyond the packed dirt where the old men drank, Amen took a path to the right. After five minutes, they turned left, and then right, and then right again. Then down a smaller path, a single rut, finally stopping in front of a door—really a piece of rubber from a truck bed that was tacked over an opening. “Wait here,” said Amen to Isaac while the rest went inside.
Isaac sat in the dust, looking in the direction of Kgale Hill. There was talk, low in the throats of the men inside, and the sound of one man speaking, first contemptuously, then pleading. It seemed he owed them something. His voice reminded Isaac of the way people back home implored a policeman: a voice stripped of its manhood, a faltering don’t-hurt-me sound, an eating-dirt, empty ragman voice. He thought about lifting the piece of rubber to see what was happening. And then the sounds grew worse. If it had been one man to one man … but that wasn’t what it was. Meno a diphiri. The teeth of hyenas.
The dog whined.
“O a lwala,” he told her. He’s sick, that man in there. “Soon he’ll