The Story of Bones Read online

  The river was shallow during the dry season except for a dark channel that ran down the middle. Only four or five of us had learned to swim, so we mostly splashed and tumbled in the waist-deep water near the edge. On this day, I floated on my back, looking up at the sky and the fish eagle riding a thermal draft overhead. A gentle current stirred the water into whorls. Bugs danced on the surface. The sounds of laughter and splashing filled the air until the sun sat low in the sky and the temperature began to drop.

  We scrambled up the riverbank, shivering, and shrugged into our shirts, eager to reach home before dark. In twos and threes, heading in different directions, we called goodbye. It was then I realized only nine of us had emerged from the river.

  “Squeak!” I shouted, a sense of crisis already scything through me. Squeak was the strongest swimmer among us. I had last seen him doing a smooth crawl out in the main channel. Frantic, I scanned the water. The river slid languidly along its course, glassy and silver in the waning light. The only signs of my cousin were the T-shirt and flip-flops he had flung on the grass. Roop and a few other boys stood next to me, silent. Tears filled my eyes. I sank to my knees. Like every kid raised in the African bush, I recognized the work of a crocodile.

  Few creatures are as still and well camouflaged as a crocodile sunning itself in the mud. None of us had spotted the one that must have taken Squeak. We had gotten lazy about checking because we hadn’t seen a croc near our swimming spot for many months. Undetected, a crocodile simply waits for an opportunity, slips noiselessly into the water, clamps its jaws on its prey, and pulls it under. The capture happens quickly, almost silently, without a trace left behind. Any one of us could have been the victim.

  Uncle Stash and Aunt Letty kept to themselves for a while after that. Death was never far from our world—it snatched the unfit and the unlucky with grim regularity—but the loss of a child meant special grief. Squeak had been a late baby, arriving more than a decade after the youngest of his three sisters. My girl cousins were all grown and married, and for weeks after Squeak’s death, the house and workshop down the lane sat quiet and dark.

  Baba led a hunting party to track and shoot the crocodile. No person wading in the river, fetching water, or even fishing from the shore near our village would be safe with a crocodile in the vicinity that had tasted easy human prey. I wanted to help, but Baba made me stay inside with Mama and Zola. I heard him telling Uncle Stash to stay home too. “You don’t want to be there, Stash. You really don’t.”

  The crocodile was likely to remain out of sight, near its sunken, ripening prey for at least a day or two. The men organized shifts of armed lookouts to patrol the river’s edge until the killer reappeared. On the morning of the third day, Baba took first duty. Even before the sun had risen above the tall grass, he spotted the tracks—clawed footprints with a gutter down the middle carved by a heavily dragging tail. The prints were large and deep, indicating a weighty old male. They led from the water through the mud to a prime, north-faced sunning spot.

  The kill was quick—two shots to the head. Baba told me later that the crocodile was almost twelve feet long. When he and the other men slit open the stomach, they found enough to know they had slain the killer of my cousin Squeak.

  In time, I heard sounds coming from Uncle Stash’s carpentry shop again. It took a day or two for me to raise the courage to venture down the path. The last time I had seen Uncle Stash, his face was so contorted with anguish that I had run and hidden behind a tree. Now, standing outside the shop door, I waited for a break in the buzz of the saw before knocking twice. When the door finally opened, my uncle stood before me, grayed by grief and sawdust. For a moment he remained expressionless. I wondered if I should back away and go. But then the kindly expression I remembered returned—the warm smile, the crinkly eyes. He wrapped me in a hug that smelled of fresh wood. His voice was hoarse when he said, “I’ve missed you, Bonesy.”

  My visits became frequent again, then daily after school. Uncle Stash let me sit on a barrel and read or do homework. More often, I watched as he worked, as the sawdust flew from grinders, routers, and sanders—thrillingly powerful tools so loud he made me wear earplugs. From time to time, he asked me to hand an item to him, and in that way I came to know the names of chisels, planes, clamps, and rasps. When I was a year or two older, I helped add up the numbers in the accounts. He even let me use the electric drill and my favorite, the nail gun. Watching me fire nails into a pair of offcut boards, he clucked, “A nail is a temporary thing, Bonesy. Screws hold the world together.”

  By the time Mama died, I knew my way around the shop pretty well. In the fragile years after her death, Uncle Stash’s workroom became a refuge from both the bullies and the painful reminders of Mama at home. I learned to be alert for trouble on the way there in case I ran into Skinner and company. But I couldn’t always avoid them.

  One day as I was leaving the shop, they were right outside the door, making a game of tossing banana peels over the wire that powered the shop. Skinner had something new tucked under his belt—a switchblade. His cheek bulged with chewing tobacco.

  “Well, hello, Sawdust-for-Brains,” he said, spitting at my feet. “Did you have fun screwing today?” He closed in on me, pumping a banana against his crotch.

  The other boys bent over with laughter. Skinner had emerged as the undisputed alpha bully. He was tall and handsome in a rugged way, with formidable muscles he had developed along with his talent for cruelty. His nose had been broken in a fight. A jagged red scar trailed down to the bump an inch or two above his nostrils. These deformities only added to his dangerous, tough-guy image. Stories circulated about how he shot stray dogs for fun and how, when angered, his fury and the violence that came with it could last for days. Roop had seen him throw a kitten against the wall of the school, and once, he had kicked a chicken to death after it pecked at his ankle.

  “Which do you like better, screwing or nailing?” He reached out and pinched my cheek, hard. “I’d guess you’re a pretty good screwer, for a feeb.”

  Another kid the size of a refrigerator added, “Planning to fill all those cradles yourself, Sawdust-for-Brains?” Laughter erupted again.

  I broke from Skinner’s grasp and walked fast, pretending to ignore them while heat rushed to my face. The jeering voices stayed close behind. I was still small for my age, and the sheer size of my tormentors scared me almost as much as their taunts.

  “Is your uncle teaching you how to screw?”

  “Does your aunt come in to help? Show you those big tits?”

  They were howling now, circling around me. “How about the lovely Zola?” Skinner sneered. “Is she a good teacher too?”

  My hands formed fists at my sides. Anger almost trumped my fear. I was about to do something stupid when a group of girls rounded the corner ahead of us, coming our way. As if snapped to attention, the boys turned toward the girls.

  “Well, hello, lovelies,” Skinner said, slicking back his hair.

  The girls passed us, giggling. Fortunately for me, gnats had greater powers of focus and concentration than Skinner and his pals. The boy swarm turned as one to follow and tease the girls, forgetting all about me. I hurried the other way and was well out of sight before the lovelies lost their charm.

  Even with the risk of harassment on the walk there and back, Stash’s shop became a place of contentment. My uncle proved a thoughtful, curious man. He encouraged me in my studies, and he liked to pose questions that tested theories he had come across, as if he trusted me to know the answers.

  Gazing at my faded Manchester United T-shirt, he once asked, “Do all people see the same colors, Bonesy? Is my red the same as your red?” Sometimes he would state an unusual fact while looking at me hard, waiting for my reaction. “A watermelon is really a berry, you know.” “Some turtles breathe through their butts.”

  We could be quiet too, working silently side by side for hours
at a stretch. Once in a while, Baba or Zola poked in to summon me to a meal, but neither stayed long. More often, Aunt Letty stopped by carrying a tray of lemonade and cookies or a container of soup or stew for my family.

  Aunt Letty was a large, good-hearted woman who found solace in food. Since the day Squeak vanished, her ample body had inflated even more, and now, five years later, her bosom preceded her like the prow of a barge. She walked as if leaning into a gale. At thirteen, I was acutely aware of female anatomy, but I tried not to stare. I had recently glimpsed Zola in the shower (before she yelled and threw a bar of soap at me), yet I found it hard to imagine the enormous breasts that heaved and bobbed under Letty’s flowered dresses.

  One day, I was sitting on my barrel, sorting through a box of bolts, when I heard a perfunctory knock at the door and looked up, hoping to see my aunt. Instead, my school principal, Mr. Kitwick, ducked through the door, lustrous in his shiny gray suit. His hair was parted in the usual strict line. The dust raised by his stroll to the shop had only lightly dulled the gloss on his shoes.

  “Hello, Stash,” he said, greeting my uncle. Then he spotted me. “Well, hi, Bonesy.”

  Without even thinking, I stood, the way we did in school whenever Mr. Kitwick walked in. He looked too tall and polished for the cramped and grimy workshop. I was struck by the oddity of him looming above a thicket of dismembered chairs. His long, lean appendages suggested a kinship with the missing furniture parts, as if he had stopped by for a new arm or leg.

  “I didn’t know you worked here,” he said, using his pleasant voice instead of the stern one he saved for expulsions and intolerable violations of the dress code. “Are you your uncle’s apprentice?”

  I felt myself blush with pleasure at the notion that I actually worked. “Uncle Stash lets me use some of the tools. Mostly I just watch.” My teenage voice swooped up and down.

  “Nonsense.” Uncle Stash stuck a pencil behind his ear. “Bonesy’s a big help, and he’s better with numbers than me. But I never keep him from his schoolwork.” He shook his forefinger as if the very idea needed chiding. “He has to pass that exam, you know.”

  “He does.” Mr. Kitwick nodded in approval, looking at me. “Certification is the ticket to a bright future.” His big Adam’s apple leapt like a toad trapped in his throat. He stepped forward to hand Uncle Stash a pair of crisp bills, careful not to brush his coat or pants against a surface furred in wood dust. “I think we’re even now?”

  “Yes. Thanks.” Uncle Stash took the money and limped to the cash box that sat on a shelf above the workbench. His gimpy leg seemed worse, somehow, in the presence of my unfailingly upright principal.

  “The new chairs are very fine—almost too good for the rascals,” Mr. Kitwick said, winking at me. Then he pinched in his shoulders to avoid touching anything and made his way back through the maze of dusty furniture. As he stepped outside, he called over his shoulder, “See you in school, Bonesy.”

  Once he was gone, I turned to my uncle. “What’s an apprentice?”

  * * *

  I liked the suspense of not knowing what animal would appear next on my wall calendar from Ruby’s Amazing Safaris, so I never looked ahead. Zola called the big, glossy photos “Bonesy’s latest crush,” which was pretty close to the truth. I could stand and gaze at the creature of the month for minutes at a time, memorizing every wart and whisker. I could almost hear the relevant snorts and whinnies, and I had no trouble imagining my pinups in motion: the hippo’s jouncy trot or the lions, all muscle and glide. Every year the front of the calendar featured a dark green Range Rover and four new, smiling passengers—safari guests so wholesome and spotless in their earth-toned attire that I imagined they were royals flown in from a distant kingdom.

  Adding to my fascination was the mystery of who took the photographs. Ruby herself? I had never seen the titular head of Ruby’s Amazing Safaris, but in my feverish fantasies she embodied everything a boy could love and fear. As shapely as Aunt Letty but more rugged and brazen, Ruby was, in my mind, as enchanting and awesome as the word “safari” itself. Her calendars, stacked free every January on the stoop at Captain Biggie’s, had captured my imagination as long as I could remember. Though I admired every photograph, I felt something close to adulation for their semilegendary source—Ruby and her amazing safaris.

  Our village was far removed from the reserves and private concessions that hosted tourists. No one I knew claimed much knowledge of the safari business. But one day a Range Rover carrying four Europeans and a driver stopped at my school. The visitors, pale as codfish, wore khaki shirts and floppy hats. Mr. Kitwick introduced them. He told us they were en route to a photographic safari some distance away. They had taken a wide detour because they wanted an “authentic local experience.”

  The four travelers filed into our classroom, waving and smiling. Three of them gripped water bottles, as though crossing our schoolyard required lifesaving measures. They eyed the cracked blackboard, the wide-open windows, the corrugated roof, and the swallow’s nest plastered to the beam inside the door. It didn’t seem like much of an “experience” to me, but we were happy to learn they had brought us boxes of chalk, several cartons of number 2 pencils, and a brand-new soccer ball.

  The driver of the Range Rover was the true star of this unexpected visit. I got a good view of him through the open window near my desk—my first, riveting look at a real safari guide. Big-shouldered and unsmiling, he leaned his long body against the vehicle while his passengers dipped into the local scene. He appeared neat and professional in dark green shorts, a matching shirt with two breast pockets, and the finest pair of hiking boots I had ever seen. Dark, wire-rimmed glasses completed the ultra-cool masculine glamour. I was totally smitten.

  Of course, the other kids had spotted him too. Roop kicked me under the desk we shared and whispered, “Check out that mofo.” The contortions we all went through to remain technically in our places while we stretched and craned and raised our butts inches above our seats for a better look created a churning mass of child flesh that must have amused the visitors.

  As we watched, our man-crush reached into the front seat and retrieved a small object that turned out to be a two-way radio. He held it close to his lips while he spoke and then waited for a reply. His deep voice wafted through the open window. I could hear the hollowed basso of the person at the other end, but what that person said, I couldn’t tell. I imagined dramatic safari business involving rogue wildlife or misbehaving royalty.

  Mr. Kitwick clapped his hands to refocus our attention. “Class, please sing a song for our guests.”

  We sprang to our feet. Our teacher led us in a loud, if not particularly melodious tune:

  I flew to the animals’ dance

  A skinny giraffe made all the birds laugh

  By dancing in elephant pants …

  While we sang, I kept one eye fixed on the guide outside. Fortunately for me, he was forward of due left, so I had to turn my head only a little. He had lit a cigarette and was exhaling smoke in long, lazy streams. The way he held the cigarette, low, pinched between thumb and forefinger, struck me as dashing and manly. After seeing that vision of he-man sophistication, within a week I would take my first, wheezy puff behind the schoolhouse with Roop.

  When the song was over, the four visitors clapped, grinning and nodding so enthusiastically that I wondered whether singing children might be new to them. They clucked and bobbed as Mr. Kitwick led them out of the classroom. In a moment, I saw them file back into the Range Rover. The guide crushed his cigarette under his boot. Then he picked up the flattened butt and put it somewhere inside the vehicle, a gesture that sealed him in my mind as a great champion of nature. Before he stepped into the driver’s seat, he turned in my direction. The sun glinted off his dark glasses, but for one thrilling moment I was pretty sure he looked straight at me.

  * * *

  On the day before my fi
nal month in school, Baba stood next to me in front of my calendar from Ruby’s Amazing Safaris. A warthog whose month-long reign was over stared back with burnt-umber eyes. I was about to learn what new species would turn up to preside over the critical weeks ahead, when tenth grade ended and I would sit for the all-important JSC exam. “My ticket to a bright future,” I told anyone who cared to listen. If I passed, I would be the first in my family to do so—to be officially certified as a literate, numerate, educated tenth-grade graduate. For me, the end of free schooling meant the end of school, period. But I didn’t mind because now I had other, better plans.

  I bid a silent farewell to the month gone by and the impressively tusked warthog staring out above thirty-one squares marked off with neat red X’s. To prolong the unveiling of my newest creature crush, I took my time raising the page. Baba shifted his weight and exhaled with more force than necessary. Undeterred, I lifted the calendar slowly, making one week at a time disappear while the photo on the opposite side curled into view—a ribbon of clear blue sky, dark ears shaped like calla lilies, the sharp points of two medial horns.

  “A black rhino!” I raised the page all the way up and pegged the photo at the top. My new pinup peered into the distance with little piggy eyes. Its ponderous, square snout hung inches from the ground. Thick folds of body armor topped four stumpy legs. It was a fabulous, enormous black rhino.

  “It’s a white rhino, Bonesy.”

  I looked at Baba. “It’s not white.”

  “The name’s a mistranslation. Dutch settlers called it wijd, meaning ‘wide’—to describe the broad mouth.”

  I had glimpsed a real rhino only once, on an expedition with Squeak to collect grasshoppers. The great, gray hulk had raised its weighty head to gaze myopically in our direction and then returned to mowing grass with wide, square lips. A wijd rhino.