Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [5]
This kept up for five days. Finally, on the fifth evening, when the sun had wrapped up the day and folded it into the Pepani Escarpment for the night, we decided that the misery of our own company could not be endured for another moment. The rain had, for the time being, cleared off, so we drove out of camp to find a dry place to drink a cold beer.
MALIDADI LODGE IS THE sort of place that is more comfortable for its familiarity than for its amenities. Dogs curl up on the floor of the thatched open-air rondavel that houses the bar and a few metal picnic tables. The lights in the bar are un-apologetically bright and thousands of insects dash themselves to death on the naked bulbs before sinking into the bar patrons’ hair, glasses of beer, and clothes (a cleavage is a liability in this climate). The formal dining room is a lozenge-shaped room painted Strepsil green. It is a room dominated by a massive satellite television and half a dozen stark tables. Less lively by far than any of the other taverns we pass to get to the lodge, Malidadi is a quiet, gently dissolving drinking hole mostly frequented by the tavern owners up the road (who are exhausted by their own noisy establishments) and by customs officials, businessmen, the local chief and his entourage, policemen, and commercial fishing guides.
On this night we—my parents and I—swelled the clientele of the bar by double (the other clients being the family of three that own the place).
I kissed everyone hello. Alex, the father, had just returned from the dead (by way of the Italian mission hospital) after a dose of particularly savage malaria. Marie, his wife, had given up smoking five or six years before, but she had smoked with such ferocity until then that she was still a pale shade of nicotine yellow and she was as fragile as a shard of ancient ivory. Katherine, the willow-thin daughter, pale and beautiful in a tragic, undernourished way, had been divorced for some years and she swallowed down her bitterness with repeated, tall glasses of neat vodka. They were generous people, made brittle with heat and disease.
“How are the children?” Marie asked.
“Fine,” I replied, missing the two small creatures I had left back in Wyoming.
“You should bring them home to visit next time you come,” Alex scolded.
“I will,” I lied, slapping a mosquito off the back of my neck.
“And Charlie?” asked Katherine. “Is he well?”
“Very,” I said.
“Do you like America?” Alex asked. I had lived in America seven years by then, but he still asked in the sort of doubting, tight voice you might use to ask someone “Do you like hell?” or “How is your incarceration?”
“I like it fine.”
“We watch American shows on the satellite television,” said Marie, as if that proved something.
We took our places around the bar. In acknowledgment of the proximity of Christmas, there was a strand of hairy green tinsel hanging above our heads. And above the cash register, a silver sign (scattershot with flyshit) read, MERRY XWAS (the M had twisted back on itself and no one had bothered to right it). A real tree frog (a large white one) crouched as still as marble on the rafter above a shelf of soldierly, brown brandy bottles—the frog wasn’t a decoration, but he could have been.
Marie, who had been on the verge of taking herself off to bed-in-a-minute since I was last here a year ago, said, “I was just heading off,” but instead she accepted another glass of sweet sherry (the kind that leaves a smeary trail on the edge of the glass) and added, “In a minute then.” The dog at her feet, a handsome Rhodesian Ridgeback, had shredded legs from a crocodile attack earlier in the year. Marie kept a protective hand on his head, and he exuded a mild smell of flesh-rot. In the damp heat, the wounds from the crocodile attack were constantly wept open by the prying proboscises of flies. The dog did nothing to help matters with the insistence