Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller Page B

the vegetation with which it had once been swallowed before people. And before the trappings of people: crops and cattle and goats and houses and business.
    And then, through deep-quiet, long-stretching-road boredom and quite suddenly, and as surprising as the Prince battling madly through briars to reach a sleeping woman he has never met, two white figures appear on the road. They aren’t princes. Even from afar we can tell they aren’t princes. They look stained gray-brown in filthy travelers’ clothes with unruly hair sticking up with grease and dirt. They aren’t Rhodesians either, we can tell, because they are walking along the road and white Rhodesians don’t walk anywhere on a road because that’s what Africans do and it is therefore counted among the things white people do not do to distinguish themselves from black people (don’t pick your nose in public or listen to muntu music or cement-mix in your mouth or wear your shoes hanging off at the heel). One of the walking white men sticks out his thumb as we approach.
    Mum slumps forward damply as Dad slows down. Dad gives her an anxious look. Mum feels his glance and smiles crookedly. She says, “Why are you slowing down?”
    “Hitchhikers.”
    “Oh.”
    Dad says, “Well, I can’t bloody well leave them on the side of the road, can I?”
    “I don’t see why not. It’s where we found them.” Mum, who picks up every stray animal she ever sees.
    Dad says, “Stupid bloody buggers.”
    At this point in our journey, when we see the hitchhikers, Vanessa has built a barrier of sleeping bags and suitcases between us so that she doesn’t have to look at me because, she has told me, I am so disgusting that I make her feel carsick. We have run out of the toilet paper we had brought for the trip. It now lies strewn in our wake or clings, fluttering, to thorn trees by the sides of the road. We have played I Spy until we accused each other of cheating.
    “Mu-uuum, Bobo’s cheating.”
    “I’m not, Vanessa is.”
    “It’s Bobo.”
    I start crying.
    “See? She’s crying. That means she was cheating.”
    Mum turns around in her seat and swipes ineffectually at us, slow-motion drunk. Until now she has been spending an agreeable hour looking at herself in the rearview mirror and trying out various expressions to see which most suits her lips. Now she says, “Anything more from either of you and you can both getoutandwalk. ”
    Like a hitchhiker.
    And now this. The two mazungu figures looming out of the hot rush of road.
    “We don’t have room for hijackers,” says Vanessa, pointing at the pile between us and the back of the car, which is already stuffed to overflowing with suitcases and sleeping bags.
    “Hear that, Tim, ha ha. Vanessa calls them hijackers.”
    Dad stops and shouts out the window. “Where are you going?”
    “Wherever you’re going,” says the little blond one in an American accent.
    “We don’t have a plan,” says Dad, getting out and trying to make room for the two men among our luggage, among the sleeping bags, between Vanessa and me.
    “That’s fine with us,” says the little one.
    “Not us,” mutters Vanessa.
    The hitchhikers squeeze into their allotted spaces and Dad drives on through the empty land.
    The little one says, “I’m Scott.”
    “You’re a bloody idiot,” says Dad.
    Scott laughs. Dad lights a cigarette.
    The big, dark one says, “I’m Kiki.” He has a thick German accent.
    Mum turns around and smiles expansively to make up for Dad’s unfriendliness. “I’m Nicola,” she says, and then the effort of staring back at our new passengers obviously does not mix with coffee and brandy because she pales, hiccups, and turns abruptly to the front.
    “I’m Bobo,” I say. “I’m eight. Nearly nine.”
    Dad says, “Did you know there’s a war on?”
    “Oh, ja. Ve thought it vould be a good time to travel. Not too many other tourists.”
    Dad raises his eyebrows at our hitchhikers in the rearview mirror. He