Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [66]
Evening fell as we drove, and the relative cool of night released into the air the smells of the bush. K shuddered. “Boy, that smell.” He turned to me. “That’s the smell of being on patrol. Smell that?”
Mostly, I could smell us: two sweaty travelers who have spent too long together in the humid steam of February at low elevations and on bad roads. So I hung my head out the window and took in a lungful of outside air and was rewarded with the fragrant scent of mopane scrub and the chalky smell of dust (the powdery white soil that mopane trees favor).
I said, “It smells like the lowveldt to me.”
“Man, and the gun oil and the sweat and the kak.” K shook his head. “I’m telling you, you’ve never smelled people until you’ve been in the shateen with them for three weeks. We used to hum. Mm-mm. I’m sure the only thing that stopped the gooks from smelling us is that they smelled just as bad themselves.”
We drove in silence for a while and then K said, “We were just like the gondies, the way we hid out in the bush and never slept in the same place twice and never ate where we slept. We used to stop, just as it was getting dark, and we made our supper over those little gas stoves that just got the food puke-warm and made everything taste like lighter fluid. We couldn’t cook with a fire—the smell of wood smoke carries too far.”
“But you smoked cigarettes.”
K shrugged. “Ja, we would have died without our cigarettes. We had to have something. But we smoked carefully, hey. Everyone lit up at one time, to limit the amount of time the smoke was in the air. It dissipates quite quickly out here, hey? And it was those old toasted cigarettes—they don’t have such a strong smell as those things you buy today that are all chemicals and full of shit.”
“Did you ever get attacked at night?”
“Oh ja. Some ous used to sleep in full gear because of that, but not me. Those fart sacks were clammy enough as it was.”
We drove along in silence for another half an hour or so. By now, there was no light at all. The brilliant sunset that had speared, in slices of orange and bleeding red, through the mopane trees had turned sullen. There was, as yet, no moon. The mopanes flashed past us, tall as soldiers, briefly illuminated and then shrinking quickly back into the homogeneous oblivion of the world beyond our headlights that sliced through the black world in front of us in two plunging beams. K and I were on a lonely, mad mission. The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.
Before complete darkness had fallen, we had caught sun-slurred glimpses of the lake but now it seemed to me that we had veered in a direction likely to take us farther from the lake.
“Do you think we’re going in the right general direction?” I tried timidly.
“Of course we are.”
“It’s just,” I went on weakly, “we don’t seem to be getting there.”
“It’s a big country,” said K.
“Yes, but we don’t need to make it bigger than it already is by driving over every square inch of it.” I looked out the window and said, in a carefully casual voice, “We could always stop and ask someone.”
K glared at me. “I know this place like the back of my hand,” he said. “I’ve walked all over this land. Shit, I’ve crawled over half of it on my belly.”
We dodged off the track we were on and started to crash our way down something that resembled a goat trail and continued along in this fashion (weaving our way, more or less arbitrarily, it seemed to me, from one narrow path to the next as trees allowed) for another half an hour or so, passing through several villages and, once or twice, narrowly missing an off-guard pedestrian or laboring cyclist.
“Look at all the villagers,” I said at last, “who are just waiting for an opportunity to tell us where we are.”
So that, at last, K stopped and asked someone, in Shona, where Mr. Connor