Harry Gombo was a book salesman. He wore a cowboy hat, which contrasted oddly with his buck teeth and his pin-striped suit. He liked the singer Jim Reeves. He wondered whether I had met the man. Harry sang “This World Is Not My Home (I’m Just A-Passing Through).” He wrote long abusive letters to his district manager in Salisbury.
“I have sent another fizzing rocket to the bwana.”
He wanted a company car.
He said he was glad to have an American for a neighbor. He admired me for romancing Abby, the track star. He worried about her and her two children. He said I could be their daddy. He sang the Jim Reeves song, “That Dear Old Daddy of Mine.”
Abby brought her two children over to my house when she worked late at the Rainbow. That did not help. It changed my mood when I came with her and had to step over their little sleeping forms — so still on the floor, like mealy-sacks — in order to get into bed with Abby. She roused them and sent them to sleep in the narrow hallway between the two rooms. They picked up their ragged blankets and tottered sleepily away, and they were soon asleep again. But that took away all my ardor.
One night I took Rosie home, and the next morning I saw that she had a bulging belly.
“Are you pregnant, sister?”
She said yes with that click of her teeth.
“Whose is it?”
She said, “Yours!” and laughed in a taunting way.
She kept it up and my blood ran cold. I was so worried that I started to do calculations. It was hopeless, because I could not remember when I had made love to her — all the times. But I said it was impossible and I tried to seem very certain.
“Get on me,” she said. She rolled onto her back and lifted her legs. Foreplay was unknown in that country.
I could not perform. The mention of her baby, the size of her belly, and the sun streaming through the window all killed my desire. I had been genuinely afraid by the easy mocking way she had said, “Yours!”
I suggested that instead of making love we have a cup of tea. She said okay and hopped out of bed. Captain made us breakfast and while he was out of the room I asked her how many months?
“Three or four,” she said.
I screamed, “I haven’t touched you for six months!”
“Don’t make noise,” she said and squinted at me.
“I am not the father.”
She said, “I was just joking.”
“Black humor.”
She said she had no idea who the father was, but when the baby was born she would go to the Chiperoni Blanket Factory and compare the child’s features with the men in the rag room, and then she would know.
Captain took her into town on the bike and that night I brought home a different girl. I always saw Abby on Sundays, because there was only one evening show. These days she never stayed late. Her coach had told her to drink a lot of milk and to sleep well. She was training for the race that would get her to Rhodesia.
I asked her why — though she was in training — she let me make love to her.
“Because I am so close to you,” she said.
This seemed very tender.
“My house is just this side. It’s easy.”
The township was a mess — it smelled, it was muddy, it was noisy, and at night it was so dark that if you weren’t careful you would fall into a ditch. All these were characteristics of the country. But there was no crime. The Africans in Kanjedza were too poor to get very drunk, and they worked too hard to stay up at night raising hell. There was cooperation — people helped each other, minded each other’s children, cooked for each other, did their washing together at the standpipe: clothes in the morning, dishes at night. They were village courtesies, and though it seemed an unlikely place to find them practiced, the Africans saw nothing unusual in it. The township was not a mess to them. They said they were proud of their cement huts and tin roofs. But they were city Africans and rather lonely.
In spite of the bleakness and the outward dirtiness of the huts, the broken and smeared windows, the ragged curtains and splintered doors and the way they put boulders on the roof to hold the tin down — in spite of this, when the African girls emerged from the huts they were fresh-faced and clean, in starched blouses and pleated skirts. All day they lurked looking frumpish in sarongs and old coats and rubber sandals; but when they went into town they were dressed up and unrecognizable. They wore pretty dresses and the men wore neckties and jackets.
Harry Gombo wore a three-piece suit and carried a carved walking stick. He usually wore a felt hat, too.
“Do you like my sombrero?” he said.
We were on our way to the Kanjedza shop everyone called the canteen.
“We call that a porkpie hat,” I said. “You’re a snappy dresser, Harry.”
He told me that he had grown up in the low-lying town of Port Herald and had never worn more than a pair of shorts until he was eighteen.
“And then I went about in a little singlet.”
“What’s a singlet?” I said, taking out my small notebook.
“A vest.”
He meant an undershirt.
He said, “But you Americans have everything.”
“There were a lot of things I didn’t have.”
He said he was surprised, but he believed me. And when I didn’t say anything more, he asked, “What things?”
I thought awhile. I wanted to be truthful.
He said, “A gun?”
“No, I had a gun.”
“What, then?”
“Sex, mainly.”
He said, “I poked my first girl when I was eight or nine.” He was smoothing his silk tie as we approached the canteen. Then he sat on the bench in front, but very carefully, to keep the creases in his trousers. “When did you start?”
“Too late — later than I wanted,” I said. “When you have to wait a long time for things you never get enough.”
“Sex is like eating.”
“America’s a very hungry country, Harry.”
“I had a white woman once. She was big and fat. I loved her. But she was transferred. Her husband was in the Forestry Commission.” He smiled gently and said, “Doris.”
“What are we doing here?”
He stood up and tapped his walking stick on the veranda of the canteen.
“Cuff links,” he said.
African girls were what I needed. Just after I left Harry I saw Abby hurrying to her house.
I said, “Want to visit me, sister?”
If they said yes it meant everything. I sometimes said, “Want to go upstairs?” This was regarded as a great joke, because the houses all had one story. But that upstairs business was also unambiguous.
Abby said, “Okay.”
As soon as we finished making love she said she had to go quickly — she was late for running practice.
“Why did you come with me then?”
“Because you wanted me.”
I walked with her to the track and on my way home a barefoot girl beckoned me from beside the Lalji Kurji Building. I was curious. She said, “Do it to me here,” and leaned backwards against the fence, bowlegged.
“I can’t.”
She laughed because I was ridiculous. Didn’t I see it was the only way? She said she lived in a small hut in Chiggamoola with her mother. She demanded that I begin. She said, “Put it in.”
“My feet hurt. I’ve got wicked arches. I have to wear cookies in my shoes.”
She was still laughing.
“That’s why I can’t do it standing up.”
One Friday, feeling eager, I asked a girl named Gloria to come home with me. She said she couldn’t leave without her friend, a skinny girl no more than fourteen. The girl was in conversation with a sinister-looking man in sunglasses — one of the black miners who worked in South Africa and who often showed up at the Bamboo.