Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [87]
“Then the sarge checks me. He says, ‘Give me your water.’
“I refuse, ‘No, sir.’
“He says, ‘Soldier, I am ordering you to give me water.’
“ ‘No, sir.’
“ ‘This is a direct order. Give me some water.’
“I say, ‘If you touch my water, I will kill you, sir.’
“He stands there. The other guys are watching and I can see they are saying to themselves, ‘No, man. This is it. Goffle is going to scribble the sarge.’
“The sarg looks at me and he looks at my water and I can see the old thought process. He’s wondering, If I grab his water, is this mad bastard really going to snuff me?
“And I don’t know. Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t have. I’ll never know.
“He says, ‘I’ll have you for insubordination.’
“I laugh. I tell him, ‘Who has the water?’ I mean, it seemed to me that whoever had the water was the boss, ja? I say, ‘If you’d said “please” I might have considered it.’
“So the sarge, he licks his lips and his tongue is white, you know, like chalk. He says, ‘Please?’
“I say, ‘Too fucking late for that now, sir.’
“It took us another two days before we found water. I let the other two guys have a sip, but not the sarge. He was the idiot that got us out that far to begin with. And we lost the gooks. Anyway, when we got back to headquarters, the sarge recommended me for a promotion. He told the CO, ‘He’s too damned headstrong to keep as a troopie.’ ”
Mapenga gave a noise in the back of his throat, like a laugh. I looked up. He was pressed against the white sash of cliffs. He had taken off his hat, which he held by his side, and his head was thrown back. He was looking at the eagle, which was still sashaying across the sky on the waves of scorched air.
“Ja,” he said. “Imagine getting to the point you’d kill someone on your own side for a sip of water. Imagine that. We weren’t animals. No animal would behave like we did. We were worse than animals.”
Then he dropped off the cliff into the gully below him and for a second it seemed that the heat pressing up from the earth would sustain him in flight. He hung on the pale throb of sunlight, and then the air gave way and he sank and tumbled off the mountain. We could hear the gully rushing behind him, a dry avalanche of rocks and thorn bushes and chunks of cliff.
I stood up.
White clouds of dust kicked up.
K said, “I’m not carrying him out if he sprains an ankle.”
“It’s his neck I’m thinking about.”
“Well, if he breaks his neck, then we leave him for the birds.”
I edged over to the gully and peered down it. The earth was settling back over itself. Mapenga had disappeared.
K and I took it in turns skidding down a less steep route. We grabbed rocks and trees and shrubs as handholds. Mapenga was waiting at the bottom, picking his teeth with a stalk of grass and staring at his shoes. “Come on, my Chinas,” he said without looking up. “What took you so long?”
“That was fucking stupid,” said K, wiping the dust off his lips with the back of his hand.
Mapenga laughed and scrambled to his feet. “Man, I am parched. How does a cold beer sound to me?”
K was already ahead of us, as silent on his feet as an owl is on the wing. He walked like a dancer, deliberate with his feet even while he was apparently unconscious of them.
Mapenga winked at me. “Remember, rule number one of flying.”
“What?”
“Don’t think about whether it’ll kill you or not. Just spread your wings and drop.”
I Don’t Remember Getting Here
A road
THE ROADS WE WERE ON, and the towns we were driving through, did not appear on any map. They hadn’t been forgotten. They were never remembered in the first place. They were the new