produced seven or so of them. The enterprise going on there constituted another good reason for him to exit and get on with his own plan, solo. It was dangerous, what they were doing. Some kind of spark and he could be an ingredient in a fireball. Also the shed was an oven.
Another witdoek came over and began investigating Ray’s packet, but too roughly. These friends were not realizing something. They were jerking at his packet and laughing. But they were overlooking something. His packaging was weakening if not yet unraveling, exactly. But it had a limited life span, like everything except rocks and sand and death itself, which went on forever, so far as anyone could tell. He could imagine a situation where he would be presenting himself as the terror of the earth and his bundle would come apart and reveal that he was terrifying everyone with pages and pages and pages of this and that, text, pages fluttering, flying around him like doves, the stupidest bird in the animal kingdom, if he remembered correctly. Already he was having to hold it together more. And there would be laughter, hideous. But in the shed everyone was accepting, no doubt thanks to Kevin, and that was nice, but it had to be adieu pretty soon. They were seeing him as an eccentric but good person of some sort. They trusted him. That was fine but he had to get out of there. The witdoeke were looking at each other, patronizing him kindly, evidently, so far as he could tell in this pocket of hell he was in. No one was looking at his penis.
“I am going to try something,” Ray said to Kevin, but including the chief in his zone of discourse, with his glances.
“What is it, rra?” Kevin asked.
“First, does Rra Mokopa understand English, or will you have to translate?” Ray felt foolish asking the question but he had decided it was a better choice than asking Mokopa directly and having him shake his head no, which was to say that as a choice it was less shaming, but only if he was right and the man’s English was going to be rudimentary. The Batswana were preternaturally sensitive to things they thought were insults, he was sorry to say, but it was true.
Kevin said, “Rra, he can understand you, but he will not speak it except a little, at times.”
“Gosiame. Okay here is my plan.” Ray was glad to be talking about his plan because it would allow him to discover what it was, in fact. What he had was parts of a plan.
Ray said, “First do you have any pistols among you, handguns?”
Kevin said something to the chief, who said something to the others, and the answer that came back was no. So that was one part of the plan he could forget, using a pistol or two in his grand advance, his great act.
Kevin said, “Rra, you must be more quick and we must all of us be quick. Because they can be summoning help from Omega, helicopters. We think they have some radioing equipment with them there. So we must crush them in some way, and very soon. But if we go over there they will slaughter us, and if they come down this way we will kill them one by one. So they must stay with their heavy guns. We are both stuck. We have more witdoeke behind the pan and a few on the ground nearby, a few only. But our comrades behind the pan are held down by koevoet, by the heavy guns. There are twenty left, koevoet, after we killed some. And they have no escape. We have burned their transport…”
Mokopa was clearly following. In the country of the blind… Ray thought, not needing to complete the quotation. And he thought he was detecting a gleam from Mokopa’s good eye suggesting interest, suggesting that this lakhoa might be able to do something insane but useful. He obviously wanted to know what it was Ray wanted to try. I am a fox, Ray thought. He needed help, for his plan, a more appropriate weapon than the Enfield, covering- fire, anything they could do.
A new blast of firing shook the shed. Ray noted the pinging sounds of bullets striking metal, not the shed but the piping and the understructure of the water tanks. Everything was telling him to hurry.
He pulled out the witdoek he had stuffed under his wrappings and tied it on, nonchalantly, he thought, like a nonchalant samurai. It was an association he couldn’t resist and why should he? Iris loved Toshiro Mifune. She had loved him as a young actor and she loved him middle-aged, so she claimed, nothing had diminished in him, which was the way the eye of love should work.
It had been a good idea, putting on the witdoek. His comrades liked it. That was good. Although he was taking a chance wearing it, because there was a way in which if he had to approach the killers at the end of the roof with the witdoek as an identifier it might cut down the time he could get close enough to them to let them interpret his bomb costume and feel fear and trembling and the urge to surrender and throw down their arms. He had every reason so far to think he was a convincing simulacrum of a human bomb. I am a triumph, he thought.
He had to hurry. He said, “Here is my plan. There is a man among the koevoet, their chief, I want to capture and take away. His name is Quartus. He has a big chin. I believe he is there. It makes sense that he is there.” There was a murmur among his friends. He thought it meant that they were affirming that Quartus was there. But they weren’t being absolute about it. Because he kept saying he was going to give them his plan and he hadn’t done it yet. All he could think of was catching Quartus and putting him in a sack and taking him back to Gaborone and opening the sack and letting him out and asking him politely how he had come to be in this fine country Botswana and what he had been doing in it and who had paid him and what else he had done in Namibia and elsewhere.
“Rra, we are going to kill them, to a man,” Kevin said.
Ray said, “I don’t think you should. I know you want to. I tell you, though, this man is important. He knows things that can make big trouble for Domkrag. If I can catch him, you can ask Kerekang, ask Setime. I am telling you he will agree with me. We can hold this man for Setime, if I can catch him. But here is my plan.”
He was improvising furiously. He said, “This is what I need. I am going to creep on my hands to the corner of the roof and then you will fire at them to keep their heads down while I run close… And, I don’t know, you could throw one of these fire bombs, maybe, just to distract them. You see I have to surprise them…”
He had a theatrical image of how it could be. There would be confusion. There would be obscurity, smoke, distraction, and he would step out of the obscurity and be fearsome, striding at them, possibly shouting something he hadn’t yet decided on.
Kevin was translating. Mokopa was listening but seemed to be smiling, or controlling smiling, would be more accurate.
There was more to it. “Listen, you will have to lend me an AK.” That was essential. He would need a respectable weapon to reinforce his command of things, if things went his way, at all. The Enfield was no threat. It was more trouble than it was worth, just for the one big shot it could deliver.
Kevin said, “You say you can frighten them.”
“Oh I think I can. I’ll tell them they can live, we will spare them.”
There was a sharp, quick exchange in Setswana between Kevin and the chief. Something was being kept from him.
The thing was to do something great, a great act. Ray could feel himself entering the act, getting ready, believing he could do it and crushing away any thought of what it would be like if his act failed, which was easy because that would be endless night.
The chief signaled to one of his soldiers that he should turn over his assault rifle to Ray. Ray couldn’t believe it. He had to remember the drill with the AK. He had fired them in the past. It was coming back to him. His hands were trembling. Everyone was looking at him. The AK was much lighter than the Enfield.
I am a bomb, he thought. He scuttled backward out of the shed, delighted to be in the terrible sunlight again.
If this was going to work, it was going to work like a dance. Once he got to the corner it would become a dance and he would have to stop thinking and dance it through. It would be a ballet, starring him, or a musical, starring him. He hated musicals. Iris liked them and probably so did Morel.
Ray could feel a vague rearrangement going on among the witdoeke. There were more of them than he’d thought, tucked away in various niches. They were emerging to get a better look at him, it seemed. Mokopa had come out of the shed and was crawling here and there consulting with his men or telling them what to do, all with reference to Ray. He was feeling honored that they had so readily turned over one of their prime weapons, the AK- 47, to him. But he was realizing something. They had a surplus of the weapon. He saw one fighter carrying three of them in his arms, cradling them, pushing himself along backward in a sitting position, taking the guns to the command shed.
Ray examined the AK-47. It was an intelligent machine. It went together intelligently. Everything was fine with it. The magazine was heavy. He hated it. He could spray death all over the place with it, killing idiotically. He wanted to avoid that if he could. The rifle was going to play a secondary role. He slipped the shoulder sling around
