Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [7]
Dad made a sound in the back of his throat and gave Marie an abbreviated bow. “Interesting evening. Thanks very much. Time for us to depart, Fullers all.” He spoke with abrupt grace, as if he were some minor member of the royal family taking his leave from an obscure aboriginal ceremony in an overlooked corner of the British empire. Mum and I finished our drinks and hurried after him into the night. Out here, beyond the reach of the electric glare that spread from the rondaval, the witching darkness was so turbulent and vaporous with freshly hatched life and with its immediate contemporaries, death and decay, that the air seemed softly boiling with song, and with rustling wings and composting bodies.
Worms and War
Soldier at target practice
MIDMORNING THE FOLLOWING DAY, I was drinking orange juice at the picnic table and reading when the dogs suddenly spilled off my lap, as one indignant body, and scrambled up the steps toward the top of the camp in a hail of furious yelps. I looked up and there, under the arch (over which Mum had trailed a healthy vine of passion fruit), stood a man who seemed to straddle an unusually wide span of space for one person.
“Huzzit?”
“Hi,” I said back, putting my book above my eyes as a shield against the high beat of light that scorched from the pale sun.
He said his name. I said mine. And then, for a long moment, I stood by the picnic table looking up at him and he stood under the passion fruit vine looking down at me and neither of us said anything.
Even at first glance, K was more than ordinarily beautiful, but in a careless, superior way, like a dominant lion or an ancient fortress. He had a wide, spade-shaped face and wary, exotic eyes, large and khaki colored. His lips were full and sensual, suggesting a man of quick, intense emotion. His nose was unequivocal—hard and ridged, like something with which you’d want to plow a field. His thick hair was battleship gray, trimmed and freshly washed. He had large, even, white teeth.
He looked bulletproof and he looked as if he was here on purpose, which is a difficult trick to pull off in this woolly climate. He looked like he was his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation—a living, walking, African Vatican City. As if he owned the ground beneath his feet, and as if the sky balanced with ease on his shoulders.
He looked cathedral.
What is a man of your obvious beauty and talent doing in a place like this?
And then K took the steps that separated us, from the arch to the tamarind tree, in great strides like a man accustomed to consuming vast tracts of land in one helping. I noticed he was barefoot, but barefoot with a confidence born of familiarity rather than necessity, as if defying Africa to rear back and bite him. The dogs scattered and Mum’s Barberton daisies bowed their heads as he marched toward me.
We faced each other over the picnic table. He stood, legs apart, as if trying to hold his balance against the unstable wobble of Earth’s orbit. His smile, when it came, was surprisingly shy.
“Tea?” I asked.
K looked over his shoulder and hesitated.
“Mum and Dad are down at the tanks, sexing their fish.”
“Doing what?”
“They’re British,” I reassured him. “I am sure it’s less fun than it sounds.”
K ran thick fingers through his hair. “Ja, well in that case . . . Cheers, I’d love some tea.”
I went into the kitchen and shuffled the big black kettle over the hottest part of the fire, jiggling the branches over the glowing embers to give them fresh life. K leaned against one of the pillars that holds up the roof over the kitchen, like a piece of architecture himself; six foot two and 190 pounds. He watched me in silence. The branches spat and belched unruly smoke into the kitchen. My eyes spurted tears.
“Oh