White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,99

and stopped again. Her head hurt. Something dark pulled at her. Not fear, something worse.

“Hello, madam,” a soft voice said behind her.

She turned and found a young boy. “How are you?” He laughed, hearing himself speak English.

“I’m fine,” she said, smiling. “How are you?”

He laughed again, his eyes snapping bright. “I am fine. How are you?”

“Fine,” she said again. She put out her hand in greeting, and he took it, his hand smooth in hers. “Do you understand English?” she asked.

His eyes clouded. “Ga ke itse, mma.”

She loved that she was not strange to this boy. As she walked along the path, he danced backward, facing her. He accompanied her like this a few steps, then turned and charged away, jet-propelled.

She was lost in a maze of paths. The shimmer of sun cast a strange glow over the landscape. A little girl in a red dress walked away from her, down a path. The mother carried a white parasol. Two older girls came in her direction, hand in hand, the taller one wearing a short blue dress faded on the shoulders and sleeves, still bright under her arms where the sun hadn’t touched it. “Where are you from, madam?” the tall one asked in school-stiff English.

“From America.”

“New York?” asked the younger girl.

Alice laughed. “No.”

“Empire State Building?” said the taller one.

She pictured herself in the fist of King Kong. “No,” she laughed again. “From Cincinnati.”

“Cin-cin-naa-ti! Cin-cin-naa-ti!”

“Where are you going, madam?”

“I want to find the house where the shooting happened.”

The girls looked puzzled. Alice mimed holding a gun, and they understood. The taller one took Alice by the hand and pulled her down the path, turned right, left, and left again, skirted a shebeen, walked a little farther, and pointed to a house. The girls disappeared, and she walked toward it. The sun was low in the sky, shining on a naked tree; a woman at a distance scrubbed a cooking pot with sand.

The house felt wounded, contaminated. She peeked in the door and saw a room stripped nearly bare except for a whitewashed wall splotched with something dark. A few pages from a glossy magazine were stuck to the wall with nails. Her eyes returned to the spray of darkness on the wall. She stepped inside, searching for something to identify its inhabitants. As she crossed the room, she tripped over a loose chunk of concrete on the floor, which skittered away from her. The second room contained a mattress and a battered cooking pot. The mattress was spattered with the same darkness as the walls in the first room. She’d expected the house would tell her something, but it gave up nothing but its wounds. She covered her mouth with her hand and stumbled out.

In her head, a phrase played behind her eyes. Blank and pitiless as the sun. Yeats, that ferocious old man, lover of women, singer of woes. The falcon cannot hear the falconer … Was there a place in the world, had there ever been a place on Earth, where the strong didn’t victimize the weak? Outside were Caterpillar tracks that stopped just short of the side wall, as though someone had intended to bulldoze the house and then backed away. Perspiration trickled between her breasts. She followed the retreating tracks, thinking they’d lead her back to the main road. Under her sandals, she felt the undulations of earth churned up by the teeth of the bulldozer.

In the distance, she heard an odd plink, plinking. She walked toward it, not sure what it was. As she came closer, she heard music, and then saw him. The old man’s face was deeply gouged and furrowed, his eyes tight shut, his forehead pressed into ridges of concentration, his mouth open, singing. His hair was a dusty gray; the stubble on his cheeks and chin and upper lip also gray. His hands were huge, like those of a man seated with an anvil rather than a one-stringed guitar. A single wire stretched from one end of a long, flat fingerboard to the other. The lower end of the fingerboard was positioned between his knees. The other end rested on his shoulder, topped off with a crumpled five-gallon drum, which added a twangy resonance. With his left hand, he created the pitch on the string; with a curved stick held in his right hand, he stroked the wire. As Alice stood and listened, it seemed in those small strummings lay the hope of a small universe, a universe with no place