Down to Earth

4

The train rattled east over the dry South African plain. Rance Auerbach and Pe

“Looks like New Mexico, or maybe Arizona,” Rance said. “Same kind of high country, same kinds of scrubby plants. I went through there a couple of times before the fighting started.” He shifted in his seat, trying to find the least uncomfortable position for his bad leg and shoulder.

“New Mexico? Arizona?” Pe

“Egrets,” Auerbach supplied.

“Those are the ones,” Pe

“Sure,” he said, just to watch her eyes get big. “In a zoo.” He wheezed laughter. Pe

He might as well not have spoken. “Even the cows look fu

“They look like longhorns to me,” Auerbach said. That wasn’t quite right, but it was as close as he could come; he knew horses better than cattle. With a chuckle, he added, “They used to have longhorns in New Mexico. Maybe they still do, for all I know.”

“Hot damn,” Pe

“Here.” He took the pack out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. After she lit one, he found himself wanting one, too. He stuck one in his mouth and leaned toward her so she could give him a light. He sucked in smoke, coughed a couple of times-which hurt-and said, “Just like in the movies.”

“How come all the little stuff is like it is in the movies and all the big stuff really stinks?” Pe

“Damn good question,” Rance said. “Now all we need is a damn good answer for it.” He stared out the window at what looked like a big hawk on stilts walking across the landscape. The train swept past before he got as good a glimpse of it as he would have liked.

He and Pe

His sigh turned into another cough. Everybody rode together, too. It hadn’t been like that back in the United States. Despite everything he’d already seen in South Africa, he hadn’t expected it to be like that here, either. But the only ones who got special privileges on trains in this part of the world were the Lizards, and they didn’t ride trains very often.

The car might have been the Tower of Babel. African languages dominated-some with weird clicking noises that seemed more as if they belonged in the Lizards’ speech than in anything human, others without. But Auerbach also heard the clipped sounds of the British-style English some whites spoke here, the harsher gutturals of Afrikaans, and the purring noises the little brown men and women from India used.

Every so often, the train would stop at a tiny, sunbaked town not much different from the tiny, sunbaked towns of the American Southwest. And then, at last, the conductor shouted, “Beaufort West! All out for Beaufort West!” He repeated himself in several different languages.

In spite of all the repetition, Rance and Pe

“Drier than Kansas,” Pe

“Well, that’s what we came for, isn’t it?” Auerbach answered. “We can rent a car or get somebody to drive us around and look at lions or whatever the hell else lives around here.” He wondered if he’d see one of those tall, fu

“Okay.” Pe

It was only a block away: logically, on Donkin Street, which looked to be Beaufort West’s main drag, such as that was. It was hardly out of the motel class, which didn’t surprise Auerbach. He registered himself and Pe

Beef stew at a little cafe across the street from the Donkin House wasn’t anything like what Rance’s mother had made, but wasn’t bad. A bottle of Lion Lager improved his outlook on the world. “We’ll take it easy tonight,” he said, “and then tomorrow morning we’ll go out and see what there is to see.”

“Miles and miles of miles and miles,” Pe

“Miles and miles of miles and miles with lions and antelopes and maybe zebras, too.” Auerbach poked her in the ribs. “Hey, you’re not in Kansas any more.”

“I know.” Pe

As things turned out, nobody in Beaufort West had a car to rent. The locals, even the ones who spoke English, looked at Rance as if he were mad for suggesting such a thing. The only taxi in town was an elderly Volkswagen whose engine coughed worse and louder than Auerbach. The driver was a middle-aged black man named Joseph Moroka.

“You speak English fu

Auerbach thought the cabby was the one with the fu

“Oh.” Up there in the front seat, Moroka nodded. “Yes, that is what it is. You talk like films I have seen at the cinema.” He got friendlier after realizing they weren’t native South African whites. That no doubt said something about the way things had been here before the Lizards came.

He found his passengers lions. They were sleeping in the shade of a tree. He found plenty of gemsbok and kudu-he almost ran over a gemsbok that bounded across the road. He found a fox with ears much too big for its head. And Auerbach discovered that his hawk on stilts was called a secretary bird; it had a couple of plumes sticking up from its head that looked like pens put behind a man’s ear.

“It is a good bird,” Moroka said seriously. “It eats snakes.”

Here and there, cattle roamed the countryside, now and then pausing to graze. “Need a lot of land to support a herd here,” Auerbach said. That was true in the American Southwest, too. Joseph Moroka nodded again.

“Shall we head back toward town?” Pe

Rance gave her a dirty look. “If you just want to sit around in the room, we could have done that back in Cape Town,” he said.

“Well, we can go out again tomorrow, if there’s anything different to see than what we just looked at,” she answered. Had they been by themselves, she likely would have told him where to head in. But, like most people, she was less eager to quarrel where outsiders could listen.