Thursday, June 24, 2010

Zimbabwe Bird

The man and his son sped north through Kruger National Park toward the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. The man focused on the highway ahead, occasionally taking off his sunglasses to squint at the waves of summer heat that danced above the asphalt. The boy lay reclined in the passenger’s seat, his eyes closed, his bare feet resting on the dashboard of the rented Ford. The boy wore headphones and was oblivious to the noise of the wind that rushed through the open driver’s side window. The man pulled his sunburned left elbow in from where it lay on the sill, and he rolled up his window. Grabbing the steering wheel with his left hand, the man reached with his right hand over to his son’s thigh and began shaking it. “Hey, Dom…Dominic….”

The boy looked up at his father and took off his headphones slowly as if he’d been napping. “Huh, what?”

“What are you listening to?” the man asked.

“Nothing…the radio. What?” asked the boy, looking for the off switch on his new walkman.

“We’ll get to the border in a couple hours,” said the man. “After that, it’s about an hour and a half to the ruins.”

“Oh,” the boy replied absent-mindedly. They were on holiday, and the goal was to see as much of southern Africa as they could in the two weeks they had together.

Three days earlier, they had spent Christmas at the home of the man’s old college buddy who had settled in Capetown. Christmas had been pleasant enough. The father’s college friend and his family were gracious hosts, and they had a son about Dominic’s age. When not eating, the two boys had spent most of their time playing ping-pong while the adults discussed financial matters and played bridge. Capetown had been cool, fanned by ocean breezes, but Pretoria had been hot and now the heat seemed to be getting exponentially more oppressive with every inland mile.

They were scheduled to see Great Zimbabwe today and to stay in Harare tonight. Tomorrow they were due to reach Victoria Falls, one of the world’s seven natural wonders, and then it was on to a three-day guided tourists’ safari in Zambia. After that, the plan was to head back to Pretoria and Johannesburg and to see as many attractions as they could before the boy had to fly back to Sydney for school and his father had to return to his work in Riyadh.

Dominic adjusted his seat to its upright position and looked around at the vast plain through which they were driving. Summer was usually the rainy season, but the region was into its second year of draught and the grassland was parched, the grass more yellow than green. The highway was straight as a vector, and the savannah almost perfectly flat, punctuated only by the occasional shrub or dying tree. Kruger was famed for its wildlife, but they had seen none of it. They hadn’t even seen another car in more than an hour. The mid-morning sun burned in the cloudless sky, and the boy put on his sunglasses to better survey the scene. Still nothing, only now less bright.

“You hungry?” the boy asked.

“Not yet,” his father answered. “It’s not even eleven yet.”

Dominic re-reclined his seat, rolled over on his side, and stretched his hands back toward the cooler that sat on the backseat. After struggling a bit with the cooler’s latch, he fumbled inside for a Coke, found one, and managed to close the cooler lid again. As he turned back around with his soda and raised his seat back upright, he glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye.

“What was that?!” They had raced past what looked like a stone marker sitting about 25 feet off to the right hand side of the road.

“Yeah,” said the man. “I don’t know. It sort of looked like a tombstone.”

Dominic swerved around in his seat and looked back through the rear of the car, but the thing was gone and he could see nothing but dry grass.

“Let’s go back,” the boy suggested excitedly.

“It was nothing,” said the man, “just a milestone. It’s not worth stopping for.”

“Come on, Dad,” Dominic implored. “We’ve been driving all morning and there’s been nothing. Let’s check it out. It’ll be fun. We could stretch our legs.”

“It wasn’t anything, Dom. If it were important the guidebook would’ve mentioned it. Besides, we’re only supposed to get out of the car at designated stops, you know. Wild animals.”

“Oh, come on, Dad. You can see forever in every direction. There’s nothing dangerous out here.”

“Yeah, maybe that’s what whoever’s buried in that grave said.”

“Come on…it could be interesting.”

The man sighed in exasperation. He looked in his rear view mirror, took his foot off the accelerator, and brought the car to a halt. Making a three-point turn, he headed back south. “Let’s make this quick,” he said. After a minute, he slowed the car down to about fifteen miles per hour so that they could more easily find what they were looking for. The boy was delighted, practically bobbing in his seat as he looked out to the left, searching for the marker.

“There, there!” Dominic exclaimed. The man pulled to the shoulder and stopped the car, and Dominic slipped on his tennis shoes, leaving his unopened soda on the car floor. “Careful,” the man warned as Dominic threw open his door, but the boy was already jogging across the highway.

Once off the pavement, Dominic realized that what had seemed like an even coat of grass was actually a series of giant, intermittent tufts, spreading out each to each, creating the illusion of constancy. Crossing over the tufts of grass was clumsy business, and it was easier to walk around them than through them. The boy approached the stone marker in zigzag fashion, using the narrow dirt trails that occupied the interstices of the grass tufts. The marker’s inscription soon became legible: Tropic of Capricorn.

It took a moment for Dominic to process what he’d read. He’d fully been expecting to find a gravestone, a lonely memorial to some explorer of yore, gored on this spot by savage beasts…or maybe boiled alive in a huge pot, encircled by hungry natives undulating in wild, ecstatic thanks to their primal gods. But despite his teenaged predilection to bloody fantasy, he quickly decided that this stone, though somewhat staid and dryly academic, was nonetheless monumental enough to satisfy his thirst for adventure. “What’d you see on safari?” his mates would surely ask him. “I saw the Tropic of Capricorn,” he’d say. “Not much to it,” he’d tell them, “wouldn’t even know it was there if it weren’t for this stone marker,” he’d say.

Dominic’s father came up and stood beside the boy, arms akimbo, studying the inscription and nodding his head. “Hmm,” the man said, indicating that he too considered this discovery sufficiently interesting, that their back-tracking had indeed been worth their while. “Let’s have lunch here.”

They went back to the car to fetch their food and gear. The man threw a large picnic blanket over his shoulder and took a bag of utensils from the rear of the car. Then they grabbed the large cooler from the backseat, each of them holding one of its handles. The man kicked the backseat door closed, and together they carried the cooler over toward the marker. They spread the blanket out and laid it over the large tuft of grass closest to the stone. They set the cooler onto the blanket, knelt, and began to take out their lunch supplies. Bread, ham, cheese, mustard, a chocolate bar with almonds. The boy drank soda from a can, and the man drank iced tea from a thermos. They used paper towels for plates. They prepared their sandwiches in silence, on their knees. Once their food was ready to eat, they switched to their buttocks and sat facing the marker. “Here’s to the southern Tropic,” said the man, raising his thermos in salute, and the boy raised his Coke to complete the toast. They began to eat.

“How come there weren’t any blacks in Pretoria?” Dominic asked as he chewed.

“They were there,” his father answered. “They don’t mingle that much outside of Capetown.”

“Oh…you mean mingle with whites?” asked the boy, considering. “So what would I be here?”

“Well, you’re American and you’re a tourist, so you’re white,” said the man.

“But what if I lived here?”

“You’d still be white so long as you were a U.S. citizen. You might have some trouble, socially, ‘cause of how you look, but legally you’d be white. It’d be as though you were Portuguese, I guess.”

“What if I was all Vietnamese? I mean, a Vietnamese citizen.”

“American citizens are basically white unless they’re obviously black. If you were a Vietnamese citizen…well, I can’t imagine you’d live here. But if you did, I suppose you’d be colored. You’re either white here or you’re black or you’re Indian or you’re colored. If you’re not white or black or Indian, then you’re colored.”

“So Asians are coloreds?”

“Well, Indians are Asians, but other than that, yeah. Actually, the Japanese are sort of honorary whites here.”

“Why’s that?” asked the boy.

“I’m pretty sure it’s ‘cause everybody likes Toyotas,” the man answered with a laugh in his voice. “And Sony.”

Dominic put his sandwich down and started opening the Cadbury bar. “Finish your sandwich first,” his father told him.

“So there’s no apartheid in Zimbabwe?” the boy asked, knowing that there wasn’t but wanting to keep the conversation alive.

“Not officially,” the man said. “You know it used to be Rhodesia?”

The boy nodded as he chewed to show that he knew. “There was a revolution,” he said, swallowing. “Bob Marley played at the opening ceremony.”

“Yeah…I guess. About five years ago Rhodesia sort of broke with South Africa. It changed its name back to Zimbabwe and abolished apartheid. It wasn’t much of a revolution, though…hardly anybody died, property didn’t really change hands. White people still own everything. Blacks can vote now -- the President’s black, Mugabe -- but all the rich people are still white. Nothing really changed.”

The boy thought about this. “Are we rich?” he asked.

“Not yet,” his fathered answered, “I’m working on it.” Then, after some chewing, he wiped his mouth with a paper towel and added, “We’re affluent. I’m hoping to be rich by time I die. If we’re not rich by then, it’ll be up to you to finish the job.”

The boy wondered how his life might be different if they were rich, he and his father. Dominic’s mates at boarding school all assumed he was rich, largely because he was American and partly because he traveled so much between terms. He thought it was fine for people to assume he was rich, but he did not think it was actually the case (his father seemed too concerned about minor expenses to be a rich man). The boy knew that they weren’t poor, but he had no idea how close they were to being rich. In fact, the boy only vaguely understood what his father did for a living.

He told people that his dad was an engineer and sort of an architect but not really an architect. Dominic knew his father had studied engineering in college and that he had an MBA, but the boy wasn’t too clear about what an engineer was or what a businessman did. He knew that his father was a “contractor” and that a contractor, unlike an “employee,” was his own boss (he’d often heard his dad boast that he hadn’t been an employee since he’d been 22). He knew that his dad often contracted for oil companies, that he currently worked for ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, and that his father had met his mother while contracting for the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. And he knew that his father built things or designed things – platforms, bunkers, storage facilities. His father rarely talked about his work, but he had once said he was like an architect but that he never designed big things like office buildings or bridges or even proper houses but, rather, only smaller structures, things for temporary use. His father had once told him that he could design whatever was needed if the job paid enough.

They finished their sandwiches, and Dominic opened the chocolate bar and broke off a piece. As he ate the candy, he got a plastic bag out of the bag in which they kept their cutlery and began gathering up their trash. He put the plastic trash bag back into the utensils bag, broke off another piece of chocolate, and got up to walk over to the stone marker. His father remained seated and ate chocolate as he watched his son approach the marker.

The northern face of the stone was identical to its southern face, reading simply, “Tropic of Capricorn,” plain but weighty testament to the factitious line announced. The boy pressed down with both hands on the top of the marker, trying to lift his feet up off the ground, but the marker was not quite tall enough for him to get the right leverage. He looked at his hands, now filthy from the dust on the marker. How long had this stone been here, how many years of dirt had it accumulated? Dominic wiped his hands off on the legs of his trousers. He realized that, assuming that the marker was accurately positioned, he was straddling the Tropic perfectly. He began hopping, slowly and deliberately, from side to side. “I’m tropical…I’m subtropical…I’m tropical…I’m subtropical…” he began to sing out as he jumped.

The man put the remnants of the chocolate bar into the cooler, latched the lid, and stood up. “Dom, come on…let’s go.” The boy stopped his hopping. They gathered up the blanket and the rest of their supplies and carried the cooler back to the Ford.

The man turned the car back around, and they continued north. “Okay…heart of darkness,” the man said, “you and me against the world, kid.”

Dominic thought about putting his headphones back on, but he knew that his father was going to want to talk now that they had eaten. This was where and when they communicated best, it seemed, inside of cars while driving. For almost as long as he could remember, the boy had spent holidays on road trips with his dad – the American southwest, Mexico, the Pacific northwest up through Canada to Alaska, southeastern Australia, Iran, northern Africa – and the plurality if not the majority of their waking hours together were spent in the cab of rented vehicles.

Dominic felt a certain comfort – not exactly a sense of contentment, but one of normalcy – when sitting at his father’s side, heading for places his father expected to be somehow enriching, destinations of cultural interest or scenic beauty. They spent a couple of weeks together several times a year, and the man felt it was his obligation to do his best to spend this time broadening his son’s horizons through travels. Between stops, they shared what they could about themselves with each other. Indeed, if the boy were asked to draw a picture of his father from memory, the image he would surely conjure would be one of his father’s profile, his father’s hooked nose and grey temples, as he sat in a driver’s seat concentrating on a road ahead.

“Did you finish the reports?” the man asked.

“Yeah.” Three times a year Dominic’s masters sent his father the boy’s academic ranking in each subject along with narrative reports on his progress during that term. The man would read the reports and would then give them to his son to read also.

“Good job in English,” the man said.

“Thanks,” the boy answered. “Mr. Partiss always yells at everybody for letting a Yank beat them.”

“What’s going on in commerce? And in biology?”

“Falconer hates me,” the boy protested, referring to his commerce teacher. “The exam was mostly essay. I did alright on the multiple choice, but most of the points were on the essays, and he’s got it in for me. There’s no right answers. I don’t know what he wants.”

“Well, your job was to figure out what he wanted and give it to him. What about science? Has he got it in for you, too?”

“No,” said the boy.

“Biology’s pretty objective,” said the man. “Look…commerce is over. I guess biology is too, but chemistry and physics are coming up. You need to improve in science. English is great, and I’m happy with math, too, but you have to do better in science. Aren’t you embarrassed to be in the B class?”

“I’m dux in that class,” the boy said sullenly.

“It’s the B class, son! There’s no duxes in a B class! I want you to move up in science by the end of next term. You’re at the top of the B class, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Spend all your prep time on science if you need to. Don’t sacrifice math, but other than that science needs to be your top priority. You might think school doesn’t matter, but you’re 15 now. These grades are going to have a direct impact on your life, your college, career, everything. You can’t be playin’ around, Dominic. You should be top ten in everything. And you definitely need to be in all A classes, for Christ’s sake!”

Dominic nodded quietly. The man remained silent also so as to give his scolding some time to sink in.

“Hey, great job with the diving, by the way,” the man said after a few minutes. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“I’m just good at it,” replied Dominic, relieved that the discussion had turned from academics.

“You’ve never been a very strong swimmer, though,” the man observed.

“They’re different,” the boy said matter-of-factly, vaguely pleased that he could understand so plain a fact more clearly than did his father.

[to be continued]

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

The Grass Just Might Be Greener In Afghanistan

Someone famous once said that one can judge a civilization by the way it treats its criminals. I say that one can judge a civilization by its reality-TV game shows about the way it treats its criminals.

These days, what with the asymmetrical warfare, the Taliban probably has neither the time nor the energy to enforce its psychotic version of shariah law, but I’ve heard that they used to cut off a petty thief’s hand every now and again. I tend to believe these nasty rumors because the Taliban are obviously human rights abusers, brutal to the core, and I’m still pissed off about when they blew up those giant Buddha heads. I think it’s safe to assume that somewhere -- whether in Af/Pak-istan or somewhere else like, say, northern Nigeria or maybe Saudi Arabia -- this practice (the hand-chopping, that is) continues.

Meanwhile, in the state of California, a person can steal a few golf clubs or a handful of video cassettes and end up going to prison for, respectively, 25-years-to-life or 50-years-to-life. (I may have matched these prison terms up vice verse with the thefts, but whatever.) This draconian justice has been green-lighted by both the California and the federal Supreme Courts. This shit is real; it happens. I’m not a lawyer, but for $50 I could find the cases and cite them.

So...you get some poor, thieving sap from Waziristan or wherever who’s headed for the chopping block and you offer him a deal where he gets to keep his hand in exchange for his doing a lengthy stint in the Golden State’s slammer. Then you find some dude in California facing 25-to-life for petty theft who thinks that he’d rather lose a hand than lose that much time, and you offer to send him away to some crazy-ass place where they’ll set him free once they’ve lopped off a hand. It’s the old switcheroo. Mohammed is sitting around cracking his knuckles and bored out of his skull (except when he’s getting gang-raped), and Johnny’s always moping and whining about how freedom’s no fun when you’ve only got one hand. The audience votes for a winner (i.e., whichever contestant seems happiest with his choice, I guess), and the winner gets a million bucks. And the feel-good twist to the season finale: Mohammed gets an opportunity to be released from prison if he’ll agree to go and serve out his sentence as Johnny’s right-hand man.

Then, next year, we get to see their adventures together. (True, the competition aspect of the show will be lost, but this second season can focus in on character delineation and cross-cultural rapport.)

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