Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [96]
K said, “I don’t like you like this. I liked you the way you were before.”
“I am the same person.”
K shook his head.
“Yes, I am.” I lit a cigarette. “I am, like it or not.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I took over driving. We hurried west in silence. Three hours into driving I sniffed and hung my head out of the window. “I’ve been smelling burning rubber,” I said. “Can you smell anything?”
K said nothing.
“And look,” I said, tapping the instrument panel, “we seem to have used a lot of fuel.”
K looked out the window.
“That’s odd, don’t you think?”
Silence.
I sang, “I talk to the trees, but they won’t listen to me.”
Nothing.
“Fergodsake, man. Speak! Is anyone home?!”
“Hand brake’s on,” said K.
“What?”
K pointed to the emergency brake. “You’ve been driving with the brake on.”
“Ah-ha. Well that explains a whole lot.” I took the emergency brake off and the pickup surged forward. “Look at that. Miracle of engineering.”
K looked out of his window again.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
K scowled.
I started to laugh, trying not to, so that the sound welled up in my chest and burst out of my nose. Then I was shaking with laughter and tears were pouring down my cheeks and I couldn’t see the road. I pulled over, got out of the car, and I laughed. I laughed until I looked and sounded like St. Medard, until I was gasping for air and clutching my sides. I laughed until I wept. I laughed until K got out of the car. He sniffed at me. Then he smiled and then there was a gradual sound in the back of his throat, like a growl, and suddenly he was laughing too and then the two of us were howling and holding on to the back of the pickup and laughing, our knees weak.
“Come on,” he said at last. “I’ll drive. You drink beer and tell me what’s happening on the side of the road. You’re very good at that.”
“Okay.”
“Peace?”
I wanted to say that I’d never been at war. Instead, “Peace,” I agreed.
A great storm was gathering in the west and it tumbled toward us. It towered up over our heads and reached into the tops of trees and when we met it, we were swallowed in a wall of water and energy. The pickup was buffeted and pummeled and it planed unsteadily across the slick surface of the road. Other vehicles—few as they were—were almost invisible, materializing only once they were upon us, like ghostly apparitions. We drove on, shouting to each other over the sounds of the storm—roaring rain and a high, wailing song of wind. I felt strangely exhilarated, liberated, by the rain. It had forced us to roll up our windows. It had forced us—two unlikely souls brought together by a spectacular series of accidents that went back long before we were born—back into that necessary sense of partnership. If nothing else, we had brought each other this far, and now we were obliged to get each other home.
We turned off at Mkuti and wound our way back down to Lake Kariwa, leaving the storm rocking and thundering behind us. At Kariwa, K retrieved his gun from his colleague. Then, instead of heading back to Sole immediately, he started to drive to the top of the town, taking a road that wound around the shantytowns (buildings stitched together from used turbines discarded by Kariwa’s hydroelectric project) and through a lush, high-walled suburb until we were on the summit of a cone-shaped hill.
K got out of the car. “I want to show you something.”
I climbed out and followed him to the edge of the road.
“Look,” he said. He pointed down to one of the houses that lay below us. It was a large white building, sandblasted and whitewashed, with a copper roof that gleamed a warm apricot. A vast garden rolled out from beyond the house: a cropped lawn, palm trees, bougainvillea hedges, honeysuckles and creepers cascading golden blooms. A delicious monster plant wrapped itself around a jacaranda tree and a hedge of hibiscus separated a neat vegetable garden that had been fenced in against monkeys. A regiment of poinsettias and snowball bushes lined a meticulous brick driveway. Two gardeners were tending a rock garden, which