Memory Wall: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Not much more than a prison cell. Roger’s one window reveals the bottom corner of a billboard, perhaps twenty feet away. On the billboard a white woman in a whiter bikini reclines on a beach holding a bottle of Crown Beer. From where he lies Luvo can see the lower half of her legs, her ankles crossed, the pale bottoms of her bare feet flecked with sand.
    Through the walls and ceiling ride the racket of the Cape Flats, laughter, babies, squabbles, sex, the rumbles of engines and fans. Six or seven times, in the month or so Luvo can remember sleeping here, he has heard the drumbeat of gunfire. Women with glossy nails and chokers around their throats drift through the open hallways; every evening someone comes past the door whispering, “Mandrax, Mandrax.”
    Roger is out. Probably following around Alma. Luvo sits at the table and eats a stack of saltines and reads one of Roger’s books. It is an adventure novel about men in the Arctic. The adventurers are out of food and hunting seals and the ice is thin and it seems any moment someone will break through and fall into freezing water.
    After an hour or so Roger is still not back. Luvo takes two coins from a drawer and scrubs his face and hands in the sink and runs a wet paper towel over the toe of each sneaker. He fixes his watchcap over the ports in his head and rides a bus to the Company Gardens.
    He enters the South African Museum around 4 p.m. and steps past the distrustful looks of two warders and into the paleontology gallery. Hundreds of fossils are locked in glass cases, specimens from all over southern Africa: shells and worms and nautiluses and seed ferns and trilobites, and minerals, too; yellow-green crystals and gleaming clusters of quartz; mosquitoes in drops of amber; scheelite, wulfenite.
    In the reflections in the glass it is as if Luvo can see the papers and cartridges pinned to Alma’s wall floating in the dimness above the stones. Bones, teeth, footprints, fishes, the warped ribs of ancient reptiles—in Alma’s memories Luvo has watched Harold return from the Karoo boiling with ardor, enthusing about dolerite and siltstone, bonebeds and trackways. The big man would chisel away at rocks in the garage, show Alma whole amphibians, a footlong dragonfly embedded in limestone, little worm tracks in hardened mud. He’d come into the kitchen, flushed, animated, smelling of dust and heat and rocks, safety goggles pushed up over his forehead, waving a walking stick he’d picked up somewhere, nearly as tall as he was, made of ebony, wrapped with red beads on the handle and with an elephant carved on the top.
    The whole thing infuriated Alma: the safari-tourist’s walking stick, the goggles, Harold’s boyish avidity. Forty-five years of marriage, Alma would announce, and now he had decided to become a lunatic rockhound? What about their friends, what about going for walks together, what about joining the Mediterranean Cruise Club? Retirees, Alma would yell, were supposed to move
toward
comforts, not away from them.
    Here is what Luvo knows: Inside Roger’s frayed, beaten wallet is a four-year-old newspaper obituary. The headline reads
Real Estate Ace Turned Dinosaur Hunter.
Below it is a grainy black-and-white of Harold Konachek.
    Luvo has asked to see the obituary enough times that he has memorized it. A sixty-eight-year-old Cape Town retiree, driving with his wife on backveld roads in the Karoo, had stopped to look for fossils at a roadcut when he had a fatal heart attack. According to the man’s wife, just before he died he had made a significant find, a rare Permian fossil. Extensive searches in the area turned up nothing.
    Roger, with his straw hat and white beard and tombstone teeth, has told Luvo he went out to the desert with dozens of other fossil hunters, even with a group from the university. He says several paleontologists went to Alma’s house and asked her what she’d seen. “She said she couldn’t remember. Said the Karoo was huge and all