Mortals

his neck and shifted the rifle well back, along his left side. It would just be there, available, when he needed it. But it was more like a prop. That was what he hoped it would be.

He had worked his way over to the parapet on the north side of the roof. Kevin had come out of the shed and was crawling to join him. The boy had a strip of cloth tied around his neck, covering the wound. He didn’t look well. He looked gray. All of this would be changed one way or another.

Kevin caught up with Ray. He had a Molotov cocktail with him. His pockets were stuffed with something, probably shotgun shells. Ray hadn’t noted that before. But Kevin had come without his shotgun. He had only the one task of creating a bloom of fire Ray could dance around in his role as the angel of death. It would be best if he could actually appear out of it, emerge out of a cloud of flame, but that was not imaginable. He would burn up, for one thing.

Behind them a thunderous blast sounded. They looked around and could see a sheet of metal like a wing flying off and over the side of the building. One of the three sheds was now roofless, not the command shed. One of the heavy machine guns had done its work well. Everything was combining to tell Ray to go.

“I have to go now. When you see me at the corner and you see I am standing up, straight up, that is when you pitch that thing out as far in front of me as you can. Where are your matches?”

Kevin held up a lighter.

“Gosiame. Wish me luck, Kevin.”

Kevin saluted, which surprised Ray. I like it, Ray thought.

“Wait, rra. This also. When you see it explode you must wait and count to five, Mokopa says, to let us fire on them before you advance, so they don’t shoot you down from a distance. It will give you some seconds to go forward.”

“Very good.” He saluted Kevin. It seemed appropriate, although odd because Kevin was still with him as he crawled toward the elbow of the roof. He was at his heels. Saluting had been saying goodbye, but Kevin was right there. And of course it made sense for Kevin to be as close to the emplacement as he could get, so that he could plant the fire bomb well down the roof. Nothing mattered.

It would be a relief to stand up. But he was not standing up quite yet.

He put his head out around the turn of the roof, put it out more minutely and slowly than he would have believed possible. When he could see he made himself freeze. The headband was performing a function. It was helping keep sweat out of his eyes. He definitely could see the enemy.

He didn’t know if the emplacement was as formidable as it looked or if it was mainly the comparison with the, he would have to say, rather freeform ad hoc picture the witdoeke position represented. Everyone he was seeing was in fatigues. The men operating the heavy guns were wearing helmets or some sort of protective headgear. There was a substantial barrier fronting the position, consisting of presumably empty ammunition lockers for the most part, which looked better than it could possibly be. It was a Potemkin barrier. Maybe sand had been poured into them. If the number of lockers piled up in front of the position meant anything, the villains had lots of ammunition to play with. They were also well equipped otherwise, to the extent that they had parasols they were using. The heavy-caliber guns looked extremely nasty. Two were aimed at him directly, it felt like. They could fire in a broad arc, and had been firing at the extreme north end of the arc, picking the witdoeke position to pieces, until just now, when they seemed to be trained specifically on the field in which he was about to dance. He could make out Quartus. He was seeing a man urinating over the side of the building and it was Quartus. That was all he needed. He would dance.

Goodbye, then, he thought. He stood up.

He could see Botswana all around him. It was a temptation, the vista was. To the west Botswana was yellow and brown and rumpled, in the south it was yellow and flat, to the north it was impossible to say because smoke was in the way, and to the east it was yellow and flat and then it turned gray-green at the horizon that was the delta. He liked this country. He filled his lungs and began to run.

He ran crouching, keeping close to the parapet.

He had to think of what he was going to say. He had been assuming it would be obvious to him. So far nothing was suggesting itself. He was going to announce himself as what? Think, he thought.

He saw the fire bomb, lit and smoking, curve through the air. It landed and exploded brilliantly to his left, ahead of him. The heat from the burst struck him. In fact he had been splashed with fire and was burning in one spot on his bundle. Frantically, he slapped the fire out, and reminded himself to run more slowly because there would be some helpful shooting in five or was it ten or was it twenty seconds. The blaze was a success. It was big. In fact it was not one fire but several separate ones. He was going to be able to run between the fires and appear out of their midst exactly as he had wanted. He slowed down.

You have to slow down, he thought. Definitely he was hearing shots coming steadily from behind, from his friends. That came to an end.

He stepped away from the parapet and stood up and shouted hello. He moved out to the center of the roof and entered the garden of flames, as he thought of it.

He was going to approach walking. That would flummox them, or some of them. I am a bomb, he thought. There was the song from a musical that went Be a tree be a sled be a purple spool of thread. Be a bomb, he thought. I am dead, he thought.

He held his arms out like Christ on the cross. He made a roaring sound, a nonsense sound, which was the best he could do. He had to be slower. He had to stride, even strut. He kept going.

The garden of fire was relaxing, shrinking, he was glad, because he had been afraid it might set the whole roof on fire and then the building would go and then he would fall through fire. He had almost come here with Iris, which might have been lovely and changed everything between them. Who knows? he thought.

And now he would be a gem for her, his beloved, a thing in a locket in her mind if anyone could be counted on to record or remember what he was doing, however it went. There was going to be a story in any case whether he won or he lost, and if he lost, it would be Morel downstairs, safe, fucking around, who would tell it. Because he wanted to be a brave thing on her cheating heart forever, the locket of her heart. They could fuck themselves.

He was close, he was close to the emplacement. This was it. “Go back,” he said.

And then he said something like Ho, fiercely.

And then he said, “Go back go back. I have a bomb, go back.” And he said it, shrieked it, again. He hardly recognized his own voice. His voice was a separate thing, separate from him.

Smoke from the fire-bomb blaze came with him, helping him.

He wanted to be large, straight as a post, and full, full of obvious danger.

He stopped ten or so feet from the emplacement, amazed to be still alive, still standing.

A bullet kicked up pebbles from the roof near his feet, but it came from behind him, from his friends. He wished they would stop now. Everything was up to him. They could stop.

“Go back,” he shouted again, unnecessarily, because they seemed to have already done that.

He hesitated about climbing up onto the barrier of ammunition lockers. His instinct was to surmount it gradually, but that was wrong and he knew it. He had to be the opposite of cautious because he was in possession of death. He pulled two of the lockers out of the stack, so he could enter this new district of hell. The lockers were empty. They were heavy things but they were empty. They were fakes.

He expected to be dead shortly. He climbed through the breach in the lockers.

“Go back and put your guns down. Throw them down,” he shouted, arriving among the enemy.

They were cowering back and there were fewer of them than he had calculated there would be.

“I will blow you to death,” he shouted, embarrassed at the formulation.

They were believing him, the seven or eight villains, no only seven, that were there packed in around their cumbersome big artillery which was now useless to them, couldn’t be aimed at him, because he was there and they were believing he was the angel of death.

“You don’t want to die,” he said. He said it to Quartus. Quartus was to the rear of the position, near the third heavy gun. He was wearing sun goggles. He was not smiling.

Ray had to stop telling them to put their guns down, he realized. Because they had only been employing their mounted guns, one at the back and two at the front, and relying on their superior force and range to keep the witdoeke back and bit by bit chop their position to pieces. Their automatic rifles were stacked to one side. They had