Mortals

existing thing. Because he felt he’d known for twenty or thirty minutes before the blast that it or something like it was about to happen. Keletso was unhappy. They had to pull over and see what could be seen, and Keletso was showing his unhappiness at having to do that. But they had to.

Ray got out. He climbed onto the cab roof and stood up on it carefully, his feet placed precisely over the reinforcing rods whose locations he had early on ascertained by probing the fabric lining the cab ceiling with his forefinger. He was determined to return this particular piece of government property in unchanged condition. That was important to him. He didn’t know why, unless it was because doing the small things right when the central thing he was supposed to be doing was so undefined, undefined but hazardous and probably stupid, seemed essential.

Using his binoculars, he studied the terrain to the north. It was high noon. The heat was insane, as usual. The horizon appeared to be writhing. He grimaced violently, to dislodge the little scabs in the corners of his mouth, which Keletso, who was watching him closely and with apprehension, mistook for an expression of fear. He shook his head to reassure Keletso, but clearly he was failing in that. He couldn’t do everything.

There had been a significant explosion in the vicinity and it had produced a ball of inky smoke, which was now dissolving. The site was reachable, not distant, not more than three or four kilometers to the north. They were aimed east. Everything to the south and west was dead flat. To the north he could distinguish a succession of very modest ridges, three of them, bare along the crests, thick brush packing the intervals between them. There had to be a settlement or more likely a cattle post just beyond the horizon ridge. More smoke was rising, from several sources. The explosion had been unusual, manifesting more like a gigantic insuck of breath than like an outward push of air. He could make out a palm tree, just the top of it, in the smoky area, and as he studied it he thought he saw flames in the… not leaves and not spikes and not fangs, no, in the fronds, fronds, bright flame. The palm tree meant water. It would be a cattle post. He had to get over there, and now he was sorry he’d gotten rid of the mouth scabs, because now there were visible traces of blood where the scabs had been, no doubt making him look like a vampire just when he wanted to make a good impression. He knew what he needed, exactly what he needed, and didn’t have. He needed a styptic pencil. He doubted they were even manufactured anymore. The ridges he would have to cross were reddish, gravelly-looking, with some glinting element here and there, probably mica. He had to get over there. He climbed down from the cab roof.

He readied himself to go alone cross-country. There would be a spur road into the post, a track at least, but he was hardly going to boldly drive up as big as life. He would have to go in subtly and alone, and that would mean leaving Keletso behind, with the vehicle, like it or not.

He had on a longsleeved denim shirt, which he buttoned to the neck. There was no time to enjoy the amazing colors this landscape displayed, the mustard-yellow southern reaches, flat as a lake… one of Rex’s similes. He realized that he had two new central priorities in his activity here. One was to see that Keletso came to no harm. He had to get him out of this. And the other was to see that Strange News survived and got back into safe hands. He was going to do what he could for this what, concretion, of his brother, do it not because it was a great manifestation in itself. To his shame, he was relieved at how minor the sensibility gesturing in Strange News was. It was minor, but it was not nothing, and it was Rex and it was true that certain bits and pieces of Rex’s collation were sticking like burrs in his consciousness, some because they were striking but obscure, The Tree with Square Leaves, some for no particular reason, like The Bloom Too Ponderous for Its Stalk, some of Rex’s odd titles for unwritten works. Ray drove the cuffs of his jeans deep inside the tops of his boots. He applied sunblock lavishly to his face and neck. He put on a broad-brimmed canvas hunter’s hat and fastened the chin strap tightly against his jaw. Keletso handed him a pair of work gloves. Ray had to be wary of ticks and any other upward-leaping insects that might be lying in wait.

There were thousands of species of uncataloged insects in the Kalahari, he’d heard. What some of them might be capable of was a matter of conjecture. He got out his darkest sunglasses. Keletso sprayed insecticide from a canister over Ray’s pants legs. Then there was nothing to do but get going. He had already impressed on Keletso that Strange News was to be safekept, as Keletso had put it when they’d talked about it. Ray was ready. The drill for snakes he had down pretty well. It was time to go.

Keletso was fidgeting around unhappily. Ray knew what it was about, but he had decided definitely to go unarmed. Initially that had been because he hadn’t wanted to alarm Keletso unduly about what he might be getting into. But then it had been a cloudier thing. It was that he had forfeited whatever authority or right he had ever had to kill anybody and that was because, because of killings the agency had superintended that he had looked aside from, or something like that. It wasn’t exactly that in an abstract way he deserved to die. He didn’t think he did, really. But that was all the time he could spare for this interesting question. And he was going unarmed. And he knew it was unnecessary to one more time tell Keletso to safeguard Strange News, but he wanted to, because of a notion that was getting too ponderous for its stalk to the effect that Rex had been so urgent about getting this olla podrida to him because Ray would be able to appreciate it, because he, Ray, was the one in the family who was supposed to be a writer, based on the stupid prizes he had won, his love of English, his power to memorize poetry, trivial shit like that.

Keletso wanted to have a conference. There was no time for it. Ray willed himself fully into an overruling demeanor he had never used with Keletso before. That was too bad.

There was a curt session. Ray made clear how it was going to be. Keletso would wait in that exact spot for not longer than three hours. If Ray hadn’t returned within that period, Keletso would drive on to Nokaneng, four hours away, and find a way to report the situation to whatever authorities he could find. But Keletso had to understand that this was never going to be necessary. Ray tried to be light. But Keletso knew, Ray could tell, that there was improvising going on. It had been evident for a good while that Keletso had been living with the knowledge that Ray’s site-inspection mission was a fiction, a pantomime, a cover for something else that was not necessarily Keletso’s business.

Ray summed up. The vehicle had to be guarded because if anything happened to it they would both be in peril. Ray promised he would get no closer to what was happening over the ridge than he had to in order to ascertain the facts of the situation. He would be sly and he might not even show himself and he would be back to the vehicle like a shot. Keletso asked Ray if he wanted him to get his clipboard for him. It was not a serious question. But he was serious that Ray had to not forget the knobkerrie and to lash it around well in the grass as he proceeded. Ray knew the protocol for snake avoidance. He accepted the knobkerrie. They consulted their wristwatches to see that both were registering the same time. They were.

Ray set off, outwardly purposeful, inwardly the opposite. He was operating according to necessity. He had an act to complete, in this landscape seething with exotic and largely sinister life through which he would have to go on hands and knees finally, when he got to the last ridge. He had an act to complete and it was impossible to have an opinion about some better alternative now that he was launched. It was like being in the ranks during a war when it was time to get up out of the trench and charge the enemy lines, even though the strategy behind the order was obviously stupid or cockeyed. It was like that. He decided that proceeding inexorably on a ludicrous or unnecessarily dangerous excursion made the actor feel like he was made out of cork, would be one way to put it, not made out of the usual flinching prickling flesh stuff that reacted and recoiled and would make him give up, go back. He felt buoyant, which was logical if he was made out of cork. He would be able to walk fully upright at first, then he would have to walk crouching more and more, and then it would be time to crawl.

The brush was dense, and forging through it was work. There were no paths. A burnt smell was coming to him fitfully, along with another odor, acrid and chemical. It was conceivable he could be shot, he supposed, if there was shooting going on and his luck was foul. He didn’t know why, but he was confident that that was not going to happen. He was going to approach the scene of the crime exquisitely, cringing forward, as his brother might put it. And secondly, he just knew it wasn’t going to end that way for him. He was going to float through this business, like a cork. That was his assessment.

In the noise reaching him from his destination there were no identifiably human cries. That was favorable, probably, he thought. He did not want to find anyone screaming in pain. And he hadn’t brought his first aid kit, except for the antivenom pouch that was part of it, selfishly. There seemed to be a gonglike, booming sound. Someone was banging on an empty tank. He would rather find dead bodies than living suffering bastards he would have no idea how to help, God help him. That was the truth. We are our limitations, he thought.

An elaborate beetle, big, a scarab, materialized on his wrist. Violently he struck and crushed it with his fist,