Mortals

cigarette burns, as it had been described to him once upon a time. His mother might remember what his first word had been, or she might not.

It was unbelievably dark.

Ray thought, She is my light, my nightlight, my pilot light, and she is out, going out, out and about.

Keletso was looking at him. Obviously he had done it again.

“Nothing,” Ray said.

Sudden commotion from the front seat brought Ray sharply awake. The flies were behind them. It was sunrise, still dim, and Keletso seemed to be half out of the cab flailing one leg violently against the side of the vehicle, why? And he was cursing, which was unheard of, another shock. Ray bent across into the front in order to help, to do something, and grasped that Keletso was fighting a snake. In terror he climbed over the seat and lunged for the storage pocket on the right front door where there should be a machete, unless they had moved it. They had. Then it would have to be in among the miscellany of infrequently used tools and oddments under the seat. He found it. They had never used the thing and it was still tight in its canvas sheath but he had it and freed it and flourished it as he got out of the vehicle on the passenger side shouting, “Here I am.”

He ran around to Keletso, who was spread-eagled, gripping the top of the open door with one hand and the edge of the cab roof with the other and kicking out so violently that his undershorts were slipping off. A dark green snake about as long as a boy’s arm was somehow fastened to the heel of Keletso’s right boot, the heel proper if he was seeing correctly, below the foot, and he was wagging the snake in the air like a pennant and groaning terrifyingly with the effort. I brought this man here, he thought, guilt rearing in him.

Ray was shouting at the snake, intending to be helpful and obviously failing, since Keletso, seeing him in his shorts and barefoot, was raging at him to get back into the vehicle and to stop dancing, which was what he was doing no doubt looked like. He couldn’t help it. He was trying to find an opening to use the machete. He had to do something. Keletso was worried about other snakes. He had a point. Ray was being as careful as he could. What did Keletso want? What should he do?

With a cry of triumph, Keletso brought the snake down hard against the doorframe sill, where he managed to pin it with both boots. Instantly Ray was beside him with the machete, ready to strike but finding it impossible with Keletso so much in the way. Ray forced himself to seize the still-lashing tail of the snake with his left hand, stretching it down against the chassis. Crouching, he gained the scope for a clean maximum blow. Keletso’s legs were vibrating. His undershorts had fallen to his ankles. The snake’s skin was dry. The beast was powerful. Ray hacked at the snake with all his strength and it came apart. Bright, sweet-smelling blood spat into his face from the wound. He had gotten a third of the snake, it looked like. He had no idea what the top part of the snake could still do, the head. Now he knew why Keletso always slept with his boots on and why that was such an excellent idea.

Keletso had gotten his shoulder under the top rim of the doorframe and, braced so, was able to exert decisive force downward. Blood gouted up between his boots. It was okay.

Keletso leapt free of the vehicle. He dragged his boot along the ground and the battered ruin of a snake came away from it at last. Ray was still holding his third of the snake in his hand. It seemed to twitch, and he dropped it.

They were fine. His right hand was numb but that was nothing. Ray looked around. They had passed the night in what was a beauty spot, for the Kalahari… a low, level, sandy spot near a stand of magnificent, mature cloud trees. The sun was up. In the early morning you could love the sun and not hate it.

Keletso was winded. He gestured vehemently at Ray’s bare feet. It was past time to dress for the day. He realized that, but he wanted to examine the snake and identify it if he could before Keletso buried the carcass, as he was evidently preparing to do.

Ray returned to the vehicle and dressed hurriedly. It occurred to him that it would be interesting to save the head and take it in for identification at the university.

For some reason Keletso had chopped the snake up further, into six pieces or so. And he had scraped a shallow trench in the sand. The snake’s head was already in the trench, at one end. The wide flat head and the black underjaw meant that it was an adder of some kind. The head was damaged but would still make a curio, once it was dried. But Keletso was laying out the chunks of snake in the trench in a semblance of their original order. Clearly he was following some Tswana protocol or other. Ray wanted the head but felt unable to take it or ask for it. Something he disliked was keeping him from acting. He knew what it was and he disowned it. It was a feeling that he might not be going back. He disowned it. He disowned it.

Keletso kicked sand into the trench, burying the carcass as far as the head. He paused. He composed himself. He spoke hotly under his breath in Setswana. He took something out of his shirt pocket. Ray was baffled. Keletso squatted, snatched up the head of the snake, and with a nail file dug out the snake’s eyes and flicked them aside, away from the trench. His hands were trembling. He thrust the mutilated head back into the trench and shot to his feet. Still imprecating, if that was what he was doing, Keletso gestured for Ray to participate as the trench was finally filled in.

Ray assumed he had just witnessed something customary, some ritualization of snake-hatred related to the practice of cutting down and burning any tree a snake had been caught in, which had struck him as extreme when he’d been told about it, considering the importance of trees for shade and shelter in arid Botswana. Noga meant snake, he remembered. The cry Noga! would bring villagers running with torches and hoes and axes. Or so he had been told.

Cleaning themselves up, and then later eating breakfast, they seemed to have nothing to say to one another.

En route again, Keletso asked Ray to go through the snakes section of the Safety Book, his name for a skimpy, anodyne pamphlet on safety in the wild issued by one of the safari camps. Ray didn’t know offhand where the pamphlet was. At one point Keletso had strung a rawhide thong through it and worn it around his neck. Keletso thought it must be in the glove box and it was. Plainly Keletso was laboring against the apprehension that he had fallen short in his duties to take care.

“Can you find some advices, rra, as to snakes coming for shelter beneath trucks at night?”

The booklet had a faintly rank smell. Ray began scanning it, but he was distracted. He was full of dark feeling. Maybe I should have committed suicide and gotten out of the way when I was in the mood, he thought. In early adolescence he had briefly been suicidal. There had been a philosophical dimension to it. But paradoxically the outrages of his brother and the rivalry and injustice that went with it had dragged him back toward life, life the necessary condition for revenge. He wouldn’t mind telling Iris about this someday, but he wondered what she would think of it if he did. Life was odd. He believed it was his indignation at the outrageous favoritism of his mother toward Rex that had relit his will to live. The drive to penetrate that impenetrable behavior had given him a vocation, or the seed of one. The agency, whatever else it was, was the nemesis of mystery, plots, secrets, the hidden. I hate a mystery, he thought. That was the story, in any case. Suicide was best for the young. Once dependents appeared on the scene it was impossible.

He was unhappy to be thinking about his temptation to not exist, that period of his life. It hadn’t come into his consciousness for years. The Kalahari was bringing it back because the Kalahari was saying something to him. It was saying to die, actually. He was being notional and he knew it. But in the first stillness of dawn, especially, there was an infinitely faint ambient whine or hum detectible. He had to hold his breath to hear it. A similar thing was alleged to happen in the Arctic. In the Kalahari he assumed insect song or activity to be the thing behind the whine, but that could hardly be the case in the Arctic. It didn’t matter. No, what the desert was saying was that you would die if you got out of your iron bubble of food and water and first aid. Nobody could live in such a terrain except the Bushmen and they died at what ages, early, worn out by the effort to exist. Everyone said they were happy in that place, liked it.

Keletso was impatient. Ray began browsing in earnest. The message of the pamphlet was not to worry. Wild dogs were pack hunters, were mostly nocturnal and not interested in humans unless excited, whatever that meant. And wild dogs were getting scarcer in the Kalahari in any case. He presumed that it was the dogs that had to be excited in order to be dangerous, and not their human prey.

“Rra, we must not excite the wild dogs,” he said to Keletso.