What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers Read Free Book Online Page B

nicknames in Ethiopia and Kakuma, so many names.
    I am frequently caught watching my mother, and am caught this time, too. She shoos me off to play with my friends, and so I run to the giant acacia to find William K and Moses. They are under the twisting acacia near the airstrip, where the ostriches scream and chase the dogs.
    Moses was strong, TV Boy, bigger than I was, bigger than you, with muscles carved like a man’s, and across his cheek a half-circle scar, a dull pink color, where he’d cut himself running through a thorn bush. William K was smaller, thinner, with a huge mouth that never stopped filling the air with whatever he could think of. He spent every day, from when he woke on, crowding the sky with his thoughts and opinions and, more than anything else, his lies, for William K liked to lie a great deal. He made up stories about people and the objects he possessed or wanted to possess, the things he had seen and heard and that his uncle, an MP, had heard while traveling. His uncle had seen people who had the legs of a crocodile, women who could leap over buildings. His favorite subject of fabrications was William A, the other William in our age-set and so forever the archenemy of William K. William K didn’t like having the same name as anyone else, and thought, I suppose, that if he harassed the other William enough, he might renounce his name or simply leave town.
    Today, in the day I conjure when I need to, William K is in the middle of a story when I arrive at the acacia.
    —He drinks his milk straight from the udder. Did you know that? You get diseases that way. That’s how you get ringworm. Speaking of ringworm, William A’s father is part dog. Did you know that?
    Moses and I don’t pay William K much attention, hoping he’ll tire himself out. This does not happen this day; it never happens. Silence only alerts William K that more words and sounds are needed from the dark, endless cavity of his mouth.
    —I guess having the same name should bother me but I don’t have to worry because he won’t be in my grade next year. Did you hear that he’s retarded? He is. He’s got the brain of a cat. He won’t be in our school next year. He’s got to stay home with his sisters. That’s what happens when you drink milk from the udder.
    In a few years, when they’re circumcised and ready, Moses and William K will be sent to the cattle camps with the other boys, to learn to care for the livestock, beginning with goats and graduating to cattle. My older brothers, Arou, Garang, and Adim, are at the cattle camp on this dream-day; it is a place with great appeal to boys: at cattle camp, the boys are unsupervised, and as long as they tend the cattle, they can sleep where they want and can do as they please. But I was being groomed as a businessman to learn my father’s trade and to eventually take over the operation of the shops in Marial Bai and Aweil.
    Moses is shaping a cow from clay while William K and I watch. Many boys and some young men took cow shaping as a hobby, but the practice does not intrigue me or William K. My interest in the activity is passive, but William K cannot ever see the point. He can’t see the pleasure in making the cows or in keeping them in the hollow of the willow, which is where Moses has stored dozens since he’d begun shaping them a few years earlier.
    —Why do you bother? William K asks. —They break so easily.
    —They don’t. Not always, Moses says quietly, still deeply immersed in the task of forming his cow’s horns, long and twisting. —I’ve had these for months. He nods his head to a small group of clay cattle a few feet away, standing crookedly in the dirt.
    —But they can break, William K says.
    —Not really, Moses says.
    —Sure they can. Watch.
    And with that, William K steps on one of the cows, crushing it into dust.
    —See?
    The word is barely out of his mouth when Moses is upon him, punching William K’s head, flailing at him with his thick arms.