Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller Page B

downstream from us. I smoked a cigarette, waving it around my head to get rid of the flies, and K stripped down to his underpants and waded into the river.
    “How do I start the boat when you get eaten by a croc?” I asked. The engine of Dad’s boat, in common with almost everything mechanical on the fish farm, had quirks of temperament that required an intimate knowledge of the psychology of machines to operate.
    K laughed (a smack of reflected sun caught his throat and face in profile and turned him black, like a cardboard cutout).
    I said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”
    “I do this all the time,” he said.
    “Why don’t you save it for rescue missions?”
    “Nah, I’ll be okay. I’m too tough for a flattie anyway.”
    “I’ll just write that on your tombstone, shall I?”
    K waited until he was chest-deep in the water and then went under. I waited several seconds and then I got to my feet, feeling stupid with a rising panic. This is exactly how people are said to be taken. In half a minute or so, K will resurface, he will shout once for help, a crocodile’s tail will arc out of the water sending silver droplets of water and red droplets of blood into the air, and that will be all I will ever hear from K again. I will yell, throw rocks, and call on God. But I will stop short of running into the river. Nevertheless, I will tell everyone at his funeral that I did my best to save him. Everyone will know that I am lying.
    And then he came up for air close to the boat, squirting a mouthful of Pepani water into the sky above his face, like a living fountain. He waded to shore and shook himself dry and came and sat next to me. “Ja, ja . Refreshing, hey.”
    “I was having croc visions.”
    K laughed. “When my time’s up, it’s up. I reckon my fate is all written in God’s Big Book and there’s not a whole lot I can do to change the time and place and nature of my death.” K bit the lid off a beer for me. “Here,” he said, “keep your hair on and drink this. I’m going fishing.”
    I lay back on the warm sand and put my hat over my eyes. I could hear K’s fishing line; a high whine as it buzzed over the water, a pause, and then— plop . I dozed off and when I woke up I found that K had made an umbrella for me out of a towel and four sticks. “The shade from the tree shifted,” he explained, “I didn’t want you getting sunburned.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I’ll get the boat,” said K, handing me the fishing rod and wading off into the river. I stared at him sleepily as he plowed through the water and returned towing the boat behind him. With his dark skin and tight metallic gray hair, he looked colossal and African, like Mwetsi, the first man in Shona mythology, who started life under the waters and ended murdered by his own sons when he grew ill from the poison of a snake bite.
    K lifted me into the boat and said, “Should we drift for a while?”
    “Why not?” I put my feet up on the cooler and lit a cigarette.
    The boat nosed silently into the current and we were tugged downstream. The sun was poised to sink behind the hills in Zimbabwe. A hatch of mosquitoes drifted out of the water and floated off in a tender swell of air, cool and slow, casually drifting to shore. A noisy clutch of ibises burst off an island. “Ha-de-da! Ha-de-da!” they mocked. Weaver bird nests hung over the water and their occupants swooped out of them and into riverside foliage. The world was held in a confusion of color; the sun, diffused through heat and haze, seemed to lick everything golden red and orange while darker blue shadows crouched under the fig trees and riverbanks.
    “I asked God if you were the one,” said K suddenly.
    “What?” I dropped my cigarette into the bottom of the boat.
    “I asked Him, ‘Why do you send her to me if she is not the one?’ ”
    I found the cigarette before it could roll into the greasy film of petrol, water, and oil in the back of the boat. “God, that was close,” I