“Oh, don’t encourage them, Tim,” Mum said, lifting her head out of her book. “Or they’ll never leave.”
Then at the end of March 2009, toward the close of a particularly rainy season, a tanker-ship-sized chunk of the new Chinese-built road collapsed, leaving a massive hole between the hill on one side and a steep, high embankment on the other. Traffic was backed up for days; Mum and Dad were stranded on the farm. “Zhing-zhong construction,” the regional press jeered. But Dad’s support of the Chinese remained unwavering. “Very bad luck. Could have happened to anyone,” he said.
“Not to the Romans, it couldn’t,” Mum countered.
Dr. Quek’s clinic was in a little whitewashed house down an unmarked, refuse-lined lane in the eastern part of town. When we arrived, the doctor was relaxing in a bottomed-out chair, her legs thrown girlishly over one of its arms. She was watching a South African game show that seemed to involve very excitable contestants trying to gain the cooperation of profoundly perplexed chickens. “Ah, Mr. Fuller,” the doctor said, glancing away from the screen. She waved her hands around her head where little explosions of white hair mushroomed. “Go lie down. Bed waiting. Nurse coming.” I followed Dad down a short passage. Gray streaks on the walls showed where the roof had leaked during the rains. Floor tiles had peeled up. A few flies hung drowsily midair.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked.
“A hundred and ten percent,” Dad said.
We went into a room in which there was an old single bed like the sort Vanessa and I had slept in at boarding school, and a gurney upholstered in heavy plastic. Dad stretched out on the bed, exposed his inner arm, and shut his eyes. A nurse came in and set up an IV. She said I could rest on the gurney if I liked. So I got up on the plastic mattress next to Dad’s bed and lay down. Dad appeared to doze off. A colorless liquid fed into his veins. At the end of the hall I could hear the muffled rapture of the television set. Outside, starlings chattered in a droughty bougainvillea. Once in a while, the nurse came back into the room, fiddled with the IV, and killed a fly or two with her plastic swatter. It was all very serene. I felt a surge of affection for Dr. Quek.
It was rare for my father to admit to any illness bad enough to warrant a visit to a clinic. He believes most accidents and ailments—hangovers, heart attacks, and backaches, for example—can be fixed with a couple of aspirins and tea and/or brandy. My mother isn’t much different. Aside from medicine for her bipolar (“mad pills, happy pills, panic pills, and sleeping pills”) and inhalers for both my parents’ asthma (“our puffers”), Mum believes Epsom salts will cure everything from constipation to a difficult labor. The shelf in their bathroom reflects my parents’ medical austerity. Aside from aspirin and Epsom salts, there is Dettol for scrapes and scratches, and Andrews liver salts for indigestion. “Ninety-nine percent of what ails is all up here,” Dad said, tapping his head.
“Unless there’s actual blood,” I argued.
“Even then,” Dad said.
Several years ago, one late midweek morning, not so far from the farm, three armed men had jumped into the front of Dad’s pickup and without much in the way of an overture began beating him with their fists and the butts of their guns. They took his watch, what little cash he had in his pockets, and then left him bleeding by the side of the road, having stolen his pickup. “Must’ve thought I was someone else,” Dad said.
“Who else could you possibly have been?” I asked.
Everyone on the road between the Kafue confluence and the Chirundu turnoff knows my father. “He is most famous for five hundred miles,” a Chirundu shopkeeper told me when I went to the market to get groceries and supplies for the farm. “Because of his good deeds and his kindness, his humanitarian acts.”
“Good deeds?” I said, unconvinced. “Humanitarian acts? Are you sure you’re not confusing my father with the Italian nuns?”
The shopkeeper became animatedly defensive then. He expounded on Dad’s acts of service to the community. “He doesn’t say anything,” the shopkeeper insisted. “But he shows pity when there is a catastrophe.” My father was there with fish and bananas when there were cholera epidemics, he told me. He arrived in the pickup to help clean up when a fire swept through the market. He ferried stranded villagers when the river breached its banks. “He is an angel of mercy,” the shopkeeper concluded, hyperbolic with emotion.
“Well that’s very nice for all of you,” I said. “But I’m not sure he’s ever been an angel of mercy to me.”
“Then you must not have had a catastrophe yet,” the shopkeeper said.
For some time after being thrown out of the pickup by the thieves, Dad sat under the lacy shade of a mopane tree by the side of the road thinking things through. He concluded that no one short of an East African Rally driving mechanic would get very far with his car because, like most vehicles he had owned, it was temperamental and required the loving understanding of a dedicated owner. Villagers, a crowd of children, and a man on a bike stopped and expressed concern. Dad, remembering his manners, stood up and mopped the blood off his face with his red-spotted handkerchief as best he could. “Bwanji?” he asked.
“Bwino,” everyone replied.
Then, refusing the offers of help—the man with the bike suggested ferrying my father home on his handlebars—my father made shakily by foot for the nearest bar. The man with the bike and the other concerned villagers followed him, like supporters at the end of a marathon. Once at the bar, Dad ordered Cokes and beers for his new friend and eleven brandies for himself. “That’s a medicinal quantity,” Dad explained afterward.
As he had predicted, the pickup had stalled as soon as it reached the deep sand close to the Chirundu turnoff. The thieves had fled north on foot, into the millet fields that lined the road just there. Villagers near the market, seeing my father’s vehicle veer wildly up the road, had given chase shouting, “Bwana Fuller! Bwana Fuller!” Two of the culprits had been caught, one already wearing my father’s watch. The police put the thieves in custody, and indefinitely retained my father’s watch as evidence. “So it all worked out in the end,” Dad said. “Other than the watch.”
But I couldn’t get used to my father’s new profile: his once straight nose buckled sideways in the center where it had been broken, a ribbon of pink in the middle of his scalp where it had been torn, a missing tooth where it had been shaken loose. Every time I caught myself being surprised by his altered appearance, I felt a flutter of anxiety. Now, lying there in the steamy calm of Dr. Quek’s clinic with Dad dozing next to me, I recognized a common, irrational impulse. I wanted to stop what would happen next, whatever it was. We were okay here, now. Now. Now. Now. I watched the pulse in my father’s temple beat time.
After twenty minutes or so, Dr. Quek came into the room. She felt Dad’s wrist and made him show her his tongue; she broke needles out of sterile packets and gave him slow, fat injections of some sluggish liquids of various toxic-looking shades. She jiggled the emptying bag of IV fluids and said something neither of us could understand. After that, she left and the nurse came back in, this time without her flyswatter, and detached Dad from the lines leading into his veins. She told us we were welcome to lie where we were, in the clinic, until the sun wasn’t so hot.
Dad sighed and lay back against the pillow, eyes closed again.
“You know if you read the whole verse of Psalm ninety ten, threescore year and ten isn’t the end of the story,” I said. “There’s a whole other bit.”
Dad opened his eyes and said, “I thought you were a Muslim.”
“Lapsed vegetarian,” I said.
“Oh. What do they believe again?”
A fly buzzed in through the open window and circled our heads in lazy figure eights. “I’m just saying, if you read past the first line, it says you can live till eighty. ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years
, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and away we fly.’”
Dad swung his legs off the bed, stood up, and waggled his hips. “You mean I have another decade?”
“At least,” I said.
“Well then, I should start misspending my youth. What do you think?” He lit his pipe and clouds of smoke filled the little room. “Hooray! How about I take Mum on holiday? The last tango to Paris!”
LAST CALL ON THE AFRICAN QUEEN
Like one of those dogs trained to sense low blood sugar in diabetics, or to detect an imminent seizure in epileptics, Vanessa has uncanny radar for trouble, knowing before anyone else when things are about to start falling apart. It was a skill developed partially out of self-preservation, partially from early if unintended training, and partially as a way to bypass suffering. If I had long ago run out of whatever chemical resets to calm, Vanessa had long ago run out of whatever tolerance she may once have had for upsets. So before I had even said anything about my marriage collapsing, Vanessa’s supernatural powers had detected trouble and she set about fixing Charlie and me, attempting to cement us into each other by way of a family outing on the single day in which we overlapped on our trips to Zambia.
“Right, Al, we’re all going on the river houseboat,” she said. “As a treat. I’ve organized the whole thing.” She glared at me. “The Kafue is a fabulous river, my absolute favorite. And you’ll like the boat. There’s a bar and a braai. We’re going to have a fabulous time.” It sounded more like a stern command than a happy promise.
I said, “Of course.”
Dad demurred, citing an allergy to any body of water not sufficiently diluted by quantities of alcohol. And Richard fled for work, citing urgent business. The rest of us—Vanessa, her youngest three children, Mum, Charlie, and I—showed up on the banks of the Kafue River at midday. It was wide and brilliantly blue just here, covered with large swaths of dinner-plate-sized water lilies. Egrets, startlingly white, lifted and resettled in the grass along the river’s edge. The boat—a double-decker with tables and barstools above and a smoking charcoal grill below—lurched gently on its moorings.
“This will be fun,” Vanessa insisted again, and my heart broke a little bit because I knew she could feel trouble brewing, the way she always had, and I knew it was possible I was going to let her down.
Then some young women in impractically short skirts and impressively high heels teetered up the gangway ahead of us. “Look,” Mum said. “How lucky, we even have our own prossies.” Next a film crew showed up and a young cameraman, dressed, as if for war, in a flak jacket and a back-to-front baseball cap, flung himself on the bank, aiming a camera at us. Mum waved and smiled. The cameraman pushed his cap around impatiently. “You must move out of the way,” he said, making a motion like he was trying to rid his eyes of a disturbing vision. “We’re filming here.”
“Oh please no, kissy-kissy one kwacha,” Vanessa said.
But the alleged prostitutes turned out to be actresses for a South African soap opera. They walked up and down the gangway a few more times, stopping occasionally to stare moodily out into the middle distance. Meantime, Mum darted back and forth behind them, and encouraged Vanessa’s children to do the same. “We’ll be on tele, ek se,” she said. “We’ll be famous.” She stopped occasionally to bestow well-aimed if terrifying grins at the cameraman. “What do you think? Which would you say is my best side?” which made her laugh so uncontrollably she collapsed into a wheezing asthma attack.
“Oh dear God please save us,” Vanessa implored, really meaning it.
At last, the camera crew and the actresses left in an SUV with tinted windows—“What a pity, there goes the nightlife,” Mum said, taking a few gasps on her inhaler—and we set ourselves up on tables on the top deck near the front. Mum bought a round of drinks. “Here’s to us!” she cried, raising her sweating glass. We chugged upstream toward the gorge, into more and more lovely territory. Music piped out of speakers, and a fellow passenger with a poorly concealed pistol poking out the top of his shorts shouted approximate lyrics over the sound of the engine.
Charlie and I danced around the deck, relieved to be wordlessly in each other’s arms, out of Wyoming, and away from the collapsing U.S. economy. The river appeared sparkling and perfect; the sky was blameless and forever, and Mum’s gin and tonics lit us all young and hopeful again. Our nieces shrieked their embarrassment and covered their eyes. Vanessa put her hand over her mouth, as if she had suddenly happened upon locals behaving lewdly while in her Englishwoman-on-vacation-in-the-tropics guise. Charlie and I laughed.
Moments like this made it easier to be romantic, to feel in love, chosen, celebrated, alive. This vision of Zambia was the Africa of tourist brochures, with a smattering of wildlife, genuinely friendly people, and time oddly morphed to fill more than twenty-four hours on any given day. Here, from our slightly tipsy point of view, a kind of freedom blossomed around us, as if any miraculous thing were possible. “If you fall in love in Africa, don’t trust it until you’ve gone back to the States,” a Kenyan friend told me. “Because in Africa, none of it’s real.” By which he meant not only the passion two people might generate on the continent, but also the Africa that fostered that passion.
Anyone who knew what was behind the pleasant view of our Kafue River understood that things weren’t nearly as perfect as they looked. By any number of reliable accounts, this water was among the most polluted in the country. Pulp-and-paper mills, fertilizer plants, abattoirs, and mines all disposed of their unprocessed waste in the river. Villagers reported that fish had developed strange and unpalatable flavors; diseases were appearing—blotchy skin, ulcers, stomach problems. And above the river, hidden by tall curtains of reeds and bulrushes, forests were being chopped down at the highest per capita rate in the world, second only to Indonesia. Unchecked topsoil bled red whenever it rained, leaving deep eroded gorges.
Later, on her veranda having wine before supper, Vanessa grilled me. “Are you and Charlie doing all right? Because I really can’t handle it if you aren’t.” By the glare of the bare bulb hanging above the veranda door, I could see where a lifetime of grief, worry, and fear had accumulated in a web of fine lines around her eyes the way dreamcatchers are supposed to catch dreams. She ran her fingers along the lines now, counting her multitude of sorrows. “All I want is love and peace, and everyone getting along. No more war.” Then she spelled it out: “P-E-A-C-E. Right?” She leaned forward as if she didn’t want the space around us to hear what she was saying. “Dancing in public’s not natural,” she said, her voice tight with suspicion. “People only dance in public when they’re having problems.”
“Or when they’ve just had a double gin and tonic,” I pointed out.
Vanessa pursed her lips. When we were children, this expression usually heralded an imminent death threat as a way to divert me from real or imagined danger. “You’ll die of a snakebite if you go in the bamboos,” or “Terrorists will chop you to pieces if you leave the security fence,” or “If I say you have to get in the cupboard then you have to jump in right away.” Which isn’t to say Vanessa was happy about her role as my protector-in-chief: there was her childhood broken, flooded with too much responsibility too soon, and there was annoying little me still alive and more or less well thanks to her. And instead of being grateful and well-behaved in exchange for Vanessa’s caretaking, I used her hypervigilance as a wall from behind which to shout my discomfort and my alarming observations. “Shhh man,” Vanessa said. “Why do you always have to be such a loudmouth?”
Now she sighed and lit two cigarettes. She handed me one. “Quick,” she said. “You’d better smoke it before Charlie catches you.” I took a few guilty puffs, and then wafted fresh air around my hair like we were teenagers again. In adolescence, Vanessa made up for her early years of caretaking and preemptive death threats by acting on all the sibling rivalry she had been thus far forced to suppress??
?“That was hilarious, Al. Remember when I tried to throw you out of the pickup in Malawi?” But finding it harder to bump me off than she had hoped, she decided to craft a shaky alliance between us using whatever pilfered contraband was at our disposal. “Let’s have a fag, Al. And a beer.” Since then, except when one or both of us has temporarily given up, we have passed cigarettes and alcohol to one another in the event words have failed us; they are our sealed pact, our memorandum of understanding, our truce.
“Anyway, you can’t split up with him,” Vanessa said. “You’ll never find anyone else, will you? Who will look after you?” By which she meant, who would take over as my protector if I rejected the person who had replaced her in that role? As she spoke, I could hear Charlie playing with her children in the kitchen. He had bought them a toy helicopter that really flew, and was showing them how it worked. “Plus, see?” she said. “He’s so good with my kids.” But I wasn’t soothed by the idea of Charlie as uncle, or even as father. On the contrary, the sight of us as a family—this supposedly impenetrable entity of self-containment—made my heart plunge with panic because our house was falling and I knew it was only a matter of time before we blew apart. “What were you hoping for, Al? This works, doesn’t it? You’ve been good together, haven’t you?”
It’s true that for a while we had functioned well enough as a couple: me unconventional by Middle American standards, and too loud and outspoken for ordinary comfort; Charlie increasingly orthodox, containing us with his rational resoluteness. Both of us united in our love for our children. And then for years, even when kindness and trust between Charlie and me had eroded to the point of occasionally open hostility and days of silence, my mantra had remained, “But I’m in love with this unit.” Now, though, I had begun to suspect that our uncoupled marriage was its own kind of violence, sure to hurt one of us, or our children, or everyone. Unit. United. Untied.