JUST SOUTH OF THE Limpopo River. After dusk.
The scattering of stars reminds Jabulani of fishing pontoons at night on Lake Kariba: the way they lure kapenta with a dazzling light.
He drops from the acacia to his feet and runs on in the loping stride of a distance runner.
He has always run. Run the long dusty miles to school as a boy. Run on the track at the university in Harare. Run at dusk for years to calm his mind after another day of teaching and marking papers.
He runs hour after hour in fear of a snake fanging him or a bullet felling him. And as he runs he recalls how he used to put his feet up for a pipe smoke after putting his son and daughter to bed. He’d let the cat doze on his lap and tune into Billie Holiday. It was at such times, as smoke floated up from his pipe through the overhanging fever tree to the Southern Cross, that he tallied up his good luck:
The magic of drifting into dreams as he lay in the dark against Thokozile’s spine.
Tendai coolly hula-hooping at dusk under the papaya, hardly a hint of lackadaisical lilt in her hips. The way she drew butterflies and angels in fluid lines without lifting her pencil from paper. The way she saw him as her hero for carrying her high on his shoulders through the flaring bazaar, for catching moths and spiders in his bare hands, for reading to her in a range of voices.
Panganai finger-picking Bob Marley on his guitar in the hope of dazzling the girls who drifted by. The way he lost himself so deep in a novel he’d not feel mosquitoes stinging him or the cat rubbing her fur against the soles of his feet.
As Jabulani runs on through a dark savannah under a winking sliver of moon, he thinks: Bob Marley had held out such high hopes for this free Zimbabwe. And now Zimbabwe’s gone to the dogs.
One time he has to sidestep a black cow shifting out of shadow.
A monkey-thorn draws a red thread across his forehead.
He hears shots in the distance. The farmers are out hunting.
The shots recall how, years ago, a band of renegade war veterans under a man they called Hitler had yahooed through his town in a pickup. They had shot their totemic AK-47s at an invulnerable sun, cut a blue sky to ribbons with their panga blades. They had flipped the corpse of a woman from the flatbed of that pickup. Her head had jounced rubberly in the dust. A breast had been pangaed off.
That image spurs him to run harder.