a water hole. Two women sat outside, one with a baby at the breast. Several children played near a small fire. She recognized Ngwaga’s name as Ian greeted the group in a language of clicks and pops.
“They say he’s coming back soon,” he told Alice. An old woman joined the group and looked at them curiously. Her small breasts hung flat on her chest. Her eyes were small, intelligent, distant-looking. One of the younger women offered them a cup of tea and biltong. The tea tasted like ashes, like red dust and sun.
She looked at Ian, squatting companionably near the three women. He wasn’t handsome in any conventional sense, but his eyes were extremely blue. Blue enough to disarm, to take up space of their own. She guessed he was somewhere between ten and fifteen years older than she was. She hadn’t bothered to ask. He offered cigarettes to the group, and they smoked together companionably as the color seeped slowly out of the sky. Ngwaga finally returned with a skin bag slung over one shoulder and embraced Ian. He was a healthy-looking man with a small white scraggle of a beard, deep horizontal lines running across his forehead, and a ready laugh. When he went to shake Alice’s hand, he held out just his fingers, warm and leathery. They set out in the Land Rover, the three of them sitting side by side, making their way slowly over darkening scrub, back to the main track. At one point, Ngwaga pointed to her and laughed, nudged her leg with his skinny thigh.
“What did he say?” she asked Ian.
He didn’t answer her.
“Tell me.”
“That my woman has long legs like an ostrich.”
She laughed. “Big feet like one too.” She let the “my woman” go.
She had no idea how Ian found his way. It was night when they returned, with the others already eating dinner around the fire. “Any food left?” Ian asked.
“Goat stew,” said Shakespeare. “Plenty left.” He’d returned with the replacement fuel line.
She sat on the other side of the fire from Ngwaga and Ian, who passed a bottle of wine between them. The darkness took up all the space around them. The moon was a curved palm low in the sky. Alice couldn’t take her eyes off Ngwaga. He sat in a circle of firelight, disturbing nothing, in harmony with fire, night, stars. He spoke with his hands, his tongue clicking as he formed words. He filled a small pipe with tobacco and lit it. When he’d had a few puffs, he turned to Ian and spoke for a while. When he’d finished, Ian nodded, grew quiet, and stared into the flames. A few minutes later, Ian crossed to the other side of the fire and sat down next to Alice.
“Okay?” she asked.
He nodded. “You?”
“Yes, what was he saying just now?”
“A story his grandfather had told him. About how the wind used to be a man. But then Wind no longer walked as he used to do, he no longer slept with his wife. He flew about. ‘That is how the wind behaves,’ he said. ‘It flies about. It goes from place to place to place, always moving, never standing still. You are a man like that. A man who is part wind.’”
“Do you think that’s true?”
“Yes.”
“Does it worry you?”
“To be so entirely transparent?”
“I mean the wind part.”
“I’ve never been otherwise. But I guess it serves as a warning.”
“For me? I already knew it.”
Across the fire, Sam said, “Ngwaga wants to know what happens to the spacemen who walk on the moon when the moon becomes smaller.”
“What do you think happens?” Ian asked him.
“They must only take trips to the moon when the moon is full,” Ian translated. “They must hurry to accomplish their work. And as it grows smaller, they must run to the side without the bite out of it. And when it’s time to come back, they wait until the moon is setting, and then they jump to the Earth.”
“You’re not going to let him keep thinking that,” said C.T.
“Why not?” asked Ian. “Why shouldn’t he think that?”
“Because it’s wrong.”
“You explain it then,” said Ian. “Alice and I were just going anyway.”
It was not gracefully or graciously done. And part of her didn’t like that he’d spoken for her. She excused herself, said good night, and left the light of the fire. She found Ian standing in the shadows, halfway to the tents.
“You’re a bit of a hothead, aren’t you.”
“That was boorish of me,” he said. “But