Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [6]
We were on our second drink when the next round of rain came. It was dark outside by then so that we had not seen the clouds leave the edge of the escarpment and billow with stealth above our heads. There was a sudden cannon roll of thunder and then the world around us was a solid wall of water again. Conversation was impossible and there was only the task of drinking and of staring out at the silver-soaked night. But after half an hour of pounding rain, the storm subsided into a crackling hymn, like a stuck vinyl record left too long on the player. Our voices, once again, had power.
“That’s some rain,” said Dad, lighting his pipe and blowing a fragrant bloom of smoke at the rose beetles that were dive-bombing his brandy.
“Yup,” said Alex. “I bet the gorge on K’s place has flooded by now,” and everyone squinted out in the shimmering night, which had taken on a dancing quality, as if we were able to confirm Alex’s suspicion from the safety of a bar stool.
“Who’s K?” I asked.
“Zimbabwean chap at the bend in the river,” said Marie, pointing upstream toward the west. She took a swallow of sherry (her frailty is such that one expects to see the sherry light up her throat in a fire-red stream). “He’s miles from anywhere,” she said, “and in the rains—like this—his road is impossible. And when the rains really set in, he’s stuck for real. Sometimes it’s days and days when he can’t get a lorry off his farm.” She sucked in her lips and added, in a sad, knowing voice, “God, things must get pretty lonely on the farm for him.”
Dad shook his head and grunted into his pipe, “Tough bugger, that.”
“He doesn’t drink,” remarked Alex, which, in this part of the world, is newsworthy in and of itself.
“It’s just as well,” said Katherine. “He told me once that he’s a violent drunk.”
Marie said, “God forbid, he’s a violent enough teetotaler.”
“He’s good-looking though,” said Katherine, “but born again.” Her head jerked up, the way an impala jerks its head to dislodge a persistent fly. “Isn’t that typical? We finally get a half-decent-looking man down here and he turns out to be a bloody holy roller.”
We went back to watching the rain play itself out against the dark night and drinking in silence.
Then Katherine said, “He almost killed some guy on the road to Lusaka the other day. A huge South African who wouldn’t move his lorry because he was in a fight with some other driver who had nicked his side mirror. K had a lorry load of bananas that needed to get into town and this South African had stalled traffic for days on the escarpment. There were lorries all the way from there”—Katherine stretched her arms wide to indicate the hundred kilometers of tarmac road that stretch from the mountains to the valley—“to here.” She flicked the ash off her cigarette decisively onto the floor and added, “K had the guy pinned up against his bull bars in about three seconds flat. He got his bananas to town, I can tell you that much.”
“Did you see the fight?”
Katherine shook her head, and bent her neck to capture the end of her cigarette with her lips. She took a deep pull and blew smoke at me. “No,” she said, “but everybody knows about it. The police think it’s lekker having K here. Finally, someone who can sort out hassles. The police—you know how it is—never have transport, half of them are nearly dead from AIDS, they’re scared to death of the truckers. They’re not going to get themselves hurt trying to clear the escarpment. Now, if there’s someone who needs to be sorted out, they just wait for K to arrive on the scene.”
“He’s a bloody good fighter,” said Alex.
Dad grunted and knocked out his pipe on the heel of his shoe to show that he wasn’t impressed.
But I said, “Really?”
“Well, that’s what they say.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
Alex paused. “Come to think of it, K himself says.”
Then Marie, fingering her gun, said, in a vague, unpromising way, “I’ll be taking myself off to bed then in a minute,” but she didn’t move. Each member of this family carries a pistol to bed, and it is only when they are all armed (pistols wrapped