Finished with his harangue, the boy — still wearing his black Dynamo baseball cap and sunglasses — started toward Hock’s hut. Some children followed close behind him, walking with unusual solemnity. Seeing them approach, Hock held his snake- enclosed arm behind his back.
“We are going,” the boy said.
“Where?”
“Never mind,” the boy said, and as he spoke, the children, sensing a confrontation, looked eagerly for Hock’s reaction.
Hock said, “Because my friend wants to know,” and he repeated it in a nastier tone in Sena, so that the children could hear.
Even in his sunglasses the boy showed that he was baffled, chewing his lips, flexing his fingers.
“What friend are you talking?”
When Hock swung his arm into view from behind his back, and lifted it, thickened with the snake, holding the snake’s head with his fingers so its pinkish-green tongue darted from between its fangs, the boy drew back and some of the children screamed — screams that silenced the rest of them. And then the snake’s pale throat swelled, because it was alarmed.
Hock held the snake like a ferocious glove, a gauntlet, that was both armor and a weapon. Though the children were terrified into silence, their cries had attracted the attention of the others who had gathered to hear the speech. Soon Hock faced forty or more children, and the bigger boys. But all of them kept their distance.
“Now we go,” the bigger boy said, controlling himself, backing up slightly.
“Tell me where,” Hock said, and held out the snake’s head. “Tell him. Tell my friend. Tell the njoka.”
“The football pitch.”
“Call me bambo.”
“Father,” the boy said, faltering with his tongue that was thickened from fear. He stepped aside, making room for Hock.
None of them — neither the children nor the three leaders— came near him then. And he, the helpless victim, despising himself for being dirty, having put himself in this position, in an underworld of cruelty, was strengthened by clutching the snake’s head, loving its frothy jaws and its curved fangs and its flicking tongue. When he swung it around and reached with his free hand to pick up his bag, the children screamed again and fell against each other.
They skipped past him, the jostling mob of them, and filtered through the thin bush of dusty yellowing acacia trees, the claws of their overhanging sticks and stems, all of the children barefoot. Ahead, the three leaders called out, “Msanga!”—Hurry! — so odd a command here in the stifling bush, under a hot sun. There was no clear path, but the thorn bushes and stunted mopane trees were sparse enough to allow them to pass through, creating a network of separate paths. And where the bush was dense the crowd of children narrowed into a single file, moving under the shallow canopy of brittle leaves, beating down a path in the whitened dust.
The snake contracted in coils around Hock’s arm, keeping its throat inflated, because of the confusion. Hock kept to the rear, where some children muttered anxiously, frightened by the sight of Hock holding the snake.
The land was so flat and obscured by the low bush it was impossible for Hock to see ahead. Because he was so much bigger than these children, who slipped under the stinging barbs on the skinny branches, he was forced to duck and sway and sidle along. His size, he now saw — his being an adult — was no help but only a great handicap among the children, who were numerous and ruthless, indifferent to his misery, and quick to take advantage of him.
His only asset was the snake, though his arm was heavy and hot with its weight, and slimy from its closely clinging body. His bag, swinging in his free hand, bumped against his leg. Yet he had no choice but to follow, and he suspected that they were nearing their goal, because he heard more shouts from up ahead.
Some children near him sang softly as they padded forward, and he thought of Zizi, how she sang in her throat when she was anxious. He grew sad and sentimental, hearing the humming, seeing the children’s dusty legs and torn shorts, and he reminded himself that these same children had wanted him drowned and dead.
Just before noon, after almost two hours of walking, they came to a grove of trees that tickled and scratched his head, and he stepped past them into the margin of an open field, where the children had begun to gather.
He saw that another group of children — from where? — had ranged themselves along the far side, in the ribbon of shade cast by protruding branches. These children crouched, they sat, they knelt; none was standing. The whole straight side of this extraordinary empty rectangle of parched grass in the bush, about the size of a football field, was dark with other waiting children.
Approaching the boy in the black baseball cap, Hock was surprised when the boy touched his sunglasses nervously and stepped away. Hock smiled, holding the snake’s head, and lifted his arm with the coils that had tightened into bulgy armlets.
“Where are we?”
The boy crept backward as he spoke. “We are being in the bush.” It seemed in his fear that the boy’s assured command of English was diminished, as he spoke haltingly, with a stronger accent. “At the football pitch.”
“What do you do here?”
“Sometimes we are challenging them.” He nodded at the children seated and kneeling at the far side of the field. “We play football. We dance. We fight.”
“Whose field is this?”
The boy hesitated until Hock raised the snake at him, and then the boy shrugged and said, “It depends.”
“On what?”
“On who wins.”
“So it’s a battlefield,” Hock said. “And you fight with fists?”
“With hands. With sticks of wood. With weapons.” He said steeks, he said wee-pons.
Hock said, “I really want to know where you learned English.” The boy was still stepping back, seemingly reluctant to answer. Hock said, “I used to teach English.”
“It is not hard to know English,” the boy said, almost with contempt.
“What’s hard, then?”
“To have food is hard. To have medicine. To have a mobile phone. To have good weapons.”
Saying this, he stared at the snake that Hock held before him, leveled at the boy’s face: the snake’s lipless mouth and dead unblinking eyes and flicking tongue.
“You will die if he bites you,” the boy said.
“Or you,” Hock said. He saw more children entering the field from one of the shorter sides. “Who are they?”
“From the big marsh,” the boy said.
And they too hugged the shade at the edge, for the sun was directly overhead and the flat dusty field of dry grass was so hot that the watery illusion of shimmering heat rose from the brownish bare patches at its center.
“What do we do now?”
“Just wait,” the boy said, almost meekly, backing up, and then he turned and walked quickly away.
Hock felt he had lost all contact with his other life, or any other place, and he was reminded of his feeling that he now existed in another age, on another planet, as a despised fugitive, and not on the surface of that planet but on a river in an eerily lit underworld.
And wait for what? Some sort of spectacle? A game, maybe, an event, because all the children had arrayed themselves like spectators — solemn, expectant, facing the open field. The field had no road leading into it, but merely lay, a great trampled expanse of sun-heated dust and tussocks of grass, a deliberately cleared acre that, in its symmetry and blight, was the work of human hands. He hoped they hadn’t come for a battle, yet their look of weariness and hunger made them seem desperate and unpredictable.