Flight of the Diamond Smugglers by Matthew Gavin Frank

Author:Matthew Gavin Frank [Frank, Matthew Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub

There are two more lines of text on the sign, which have been sun-bleached into illegibility.

Bartholomew Variation #4

WERE THIS NOT TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SOUTH AFRICA, BUT ancient Rome, the oracular priests known as the Augurs would be craning their necks, watching the sky for bird behavior. To them, the divining of the future depended on whether the pigeons were flocking together or flying alone, uttering their coos or keeping quiet. They would have seen Msizi’s bird, the sky otherwise as vacant as an urn awaiting its ashes, and they would have prophesied of doom.

But Bartholomew can’t take on the superstitions of others, especially those of the underlings of long-dead emperors. He has enough to carry. Many things are preparing to die in this desert, and he flies over them as if immune, but he is not immune. The air above the desert is still the desert.

Back at the mine, Msizi is covered in sludge up to his thighs, elbows. He feels mummified, plaster-cast. The earth burbles at his feet like farina. Men shout at other men, beat other men. Two diggers sing a song that begins with the words “Mayibute Afrika,” before they are silenced by the boot heels of mine security. Msizi imagines himself the only boy in a city of vampires, and indeed the mine resembles such an intricate city, webbed with aerial ropeways, stout ladders joining the stepped catacombs and blind alleys, pyramids, plateaus, arroyos of mud. He prays he will not be hurt today, will not slip and fall, be beaten back to his feet by some vampire whose eyes are hidden beneath the visor of a guard’s cap.

Msizi wonders where his bird is. He gives thanks for miracles already come to pass—that he and his lunchbox received only a dummy scan from the X-ray machine today; that no one noticed as Bartholomew wriggled fully loaded from his cupped hands. The sun is strong, and Msizi gives thanks for its brightness, for the way in which it blinds the guards who scan the sky.

Shirtless men pass by carrying blue stretchers. Sometimes, on these stretchers, mounds of diamondiferous gravel; sometimes a man’s broken body. One can only dig into the earth so deep before the earth decides to collapse.

The dust whirls red and white below the bird as he passes over the unearthly Klipbakke, the sun-bleached rock bowls, huge amphitheaters gouged into the scrub.

Some time ago, when Msizi first began to train him, Bartholomew injured his left leg. Msizi held him and sang to him; Bartholomew squirmed, then calmed, as Msizi wrapped his leg in newspaper, fashioned a cast from a lengthwise-cut drinking straw, and secured it with Scotch tape. The bird needed a lot of sleep to recover.

Bartholomew can’t endure these expeditions for much longer. Still, something in his genetic makeup compels him to keep flapping. He’s likely dizzy, and could go for sugar water and seed. Though he is losing his bearings, he still senses, via the world’s magnetic humming, that “home,” with its familiar light and smells, and sounds of scratchy jazz records, is still far away, likely, this time, beyond reach.

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