Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [71]
“And then the grass is rustling. For sure, we thought it was bloody gooks. So we all drop, man. And we’re all just waiting for the first shot, so we could see where the bastards were.
“And then old Bloodnut—that was our sarge, you know, he had red hair, so we called him Bloodnut—whispers, ‘I think we’re surrounded. I feel surrounded.’
“I say, ‘Me too.’ But I can’t see a thing because my eyes were shit enough as it was during the day but at dusk and in the dark, I was blind as a bat.
“Then Bloodnut sees this pair of yellow eyes looking at him through the grass—it’s almost dark by now—and he says, ‘It’s a fucking jackal.’
“Then suddenly there’s this shout, and one of the ous says, ‘Imbwas! Fucking imbwas!’
“It was all these dogs, sixty of them . . . more—all creeping up on us, like lions. The ones at the back were trotting toward us, but the ones closest were crawling on their bellies. It was creepier than a whole herd of gooks, I can tell you that much.
“So Bloodnut says, ‘Fuck.’
“And I know what he’s thinking. If he opens fire, then every gook within a mile is going to hear us. But the dogs keep coming. So he opens up with the FN, just pa-pa-pa to scare them off and a few of the dogs are scribbled, but the others just keep coming. I mean, there were now fifty dogs, fifty-five, instead of sixty and there are four of us.
“So Bloodnut says to me, ‘Fucking let fire, or we’re fucked.’
“I start blasting with the bazooka and Bloodnut huzzes a grenade and the other ous are just letting fly, cha-cha-cha and there are dogs howling—I mean chemering—and bits of dog raining down on us and Bloodnut starts crying. Man, I look over and the guy’s whole face is wet, the guy is crying like a baby and I can’t tell if he’s shitting himself or if he can’t stand killing the dogs. But the dogs still keep coming and quickly and some of them are . . . Man, we were kicking at them, shooting them at our feet. And there are more, coming and coming.
“And so Bloodnut shouts that he’s going to hit them with napalm. He says, ‘Cover me!’ So we’re still blasting at the dogs that are close and Bloodnut fires one off into the dogs that were farther off. . . . Fuck! The dogs are running through the shateen with their skins burning off—and now they’re screaming like humans. It was like they were humans in dog skin. You’ve never heard anything like it. And then the dogs that were close to us, turn tail and they bareka, man! We could hear them for hours. Hours and hours.”
K put his head in his hands. He said, “Ja. I’ve seen some shit in that war. I’ve seen some shit. But that was . . .” K was quiet for a long time and then he put back his head and howled, high and long and with so much pain that the hair on my arms stood up. “It was like that. All fucking night.”
We Just Don’t Know Where We Are
My bed—Mozambique
LATER THAT MORNING, over a breakfast of eggs and fruit, I asked Connor what other commercial fishing ventures were on the lake. “A whole lot of Zimbabweans came here when Mozambique opened up after the war. But they thought they could fish without a permit and the authorities deported a bunch of them. At one time, hell, there must have been twenty or thirty operations up and down this lake. Now there are a dozen of us, eighteen families at the most. If you include the mad bastards on the islands.”
“Who are the mad bastards?”
“Oh, we have a couple of crazy bachelors that live out there,” said Connor, waving out