Dust Devils

by Roger Smith

  As Sunday let her aunt lead her through the crowd that swarmed around the minibus, she heard fragments of sentences, words strung together like beads on a wire: Taxi war. Hit men from Durban.

  Her aunt limped toward a tree encircled by whitewashed rocks, where the African Zionist Church held its open-air services every Saturday. Ma Beauty sat down on a rock, dabbing at her forehead with a Kleenex. "Uh-uh, my nerves they are finished." She drew a banknote from her purse and handed it to Sunday. "You, go buy me a Coke and a Grandpa. Make quick now."

  Her aunt's recipe in any kind of crisis: a headache powder as bitter as bile, chased down with a Coca-Cola. Sunday took the money and crossed the street like she was sleepwalking, still carrying her bag. She skirted the ambushed taxi. Heard the moans and sobs of the wounded, the excited chatter of the crowd.

  As she headed toward the store she passed the bright red metal container stenciled with white silhouettes of people talking on telephones. Thought of the number in the burned book. Sunday looked back, saw her aunt talking to a woman who had come to sit on a rock beside her, hands flapping toward the taxi. Sunday ducked into the container.

  A man in his early twenties stood in the doorway, watching the activity in the street. He grunted at her as she passed. A woman thin as death was crying into one of the phones. Sunday stood looking at the telephones. Unlike any she had seen before. These were small, shiny, modern. Like cell phones. The man turned from the doorway. Sunday showed him the number on the burned card.

  He squinted at it. "Pretoria. Long distance. Ten rand."

  The value of the note Ma Mavis had given her. Sunday handed over the money and the man dialed for her. She had no idea what she was going to say to whoever answered in that city in another world.

  The man shook his head. "It is a fax number." Sunday stared at him. "A fax. You know, you can send a letter or a picture?" He pointed to a machine that sat on the counter, black and full of buttons.

  Sunday nodded. She had seen something like that in the office at the cultural village. But it was no help to her. Then she heard her mother's voice again and she scratched in her bag and found the wedding invite. She held it out. "Please, brother. Send this."

  He fed the invite into the machine. Sunday wondered whether it had been eaten, but after some clicking and whirring it slid out the other end and the man handed it back to her. He also gave her a slip of paper. "That tells you it was received," he said.

  Sunday thinking, received, yes. In Pretoria. But who received it?

  She left the container and threw the paper onto the mound of garbage that lay in the gutter. Sunday crossed the road toward her aunt, trying to decide on a lie to explain why she was returning with no Coke, no Grandpa and no money.

  Disaster Zondi sat at his desk, staring out across the empty expanse of soiled carpet, seeing a head on a stick. The head of one of his ancestors, a Zulu chief named Bhambatha who'd led an uprising against the British colonial powers a century before, protesting a poll tax his people were too poor to pay. The British had used machine guns and canon against the spears of Bhambatha's men. Cut off his head, impaled it, and toured it around Zululand as a warning.

  The British were long gone and so were their successors, the apartheid butchers. But in the last weeks Zondi had watched as another head, that of his boss and mentor, had been taken and paraded. Also as a warning. Don't fuck with the minister of justice, the man widely tipped to be the country's next president.

  The beheading had been virtual, of course. Done with smear campaigns and innuendo and commissions of inquiry held in camera. But Archibald Mathebula, once the fiercely principled chief of a special investigative unit tasked with combating corruption, had been left broken, banished from the ruling party he'd given his life to. Zondi had been one of the handful of mourners at Mathebula's funeral a week ago. Dead of a heart attack, the media said.

  Bullshit. He'd died of disgust. Plain and fucking simple.

  Mathebula's downfall was caused by his unit's probe into the crooked relationship between the minister of justice and Ben Baker, an entrepreneur who had thrived in post-apartheid South Africa. Fat but agile, Baker had quickly learned to dance to the new drum, enjoying endless photo ops with sleek black men in Italian suits. When Mathebula's crusade drew unwelcome media attention, the minister had the unit dismembered like a stolen car in a chop shop. And now Baker had danced his last dance and the minister was smiling his way toward the highest office in the land.

  Some of Zondi's colleagues had been absorbed by the police. Some by academia. Others were setting out their stalls as consultants on crime and corruption. Making a killing talking to businessmen over breakfast, giving them statistics and indigestion.

  Zondi had refused all offers. So here he was – a dark man, in a dark suit and a white shirt, no necktie – sitting at his desk on a Sunday afternoon in the vast, empty room that, until two days ago, had been a warren of partitioned cubicles.

  In the morning men in overalls would carry the desk down to another office in the gray building in downtown Pretoria – South Africa's administrative capital – joined by a sprawl of bedroom suburbs to Johannesburg, its greedy Siamese twin. If Jo'burg, built on a honeycomb of dead gold mines, was all about money, Pretoria was all about political power. It had once been the showcase of apartheid. Now the statues commemorating Boer generals had been felled and lay gathering dust in warehouses on streets named after Marxist heroes.

  Zondi sat with a small cardboard box on the desk in front of him. It contained a dictionary, a stapler, three pens and a dog-eared copy of Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. The book had lain forgotten in a drawer for years. He was tempted to open it and wallow in the irony. Instead he dropped the box into the trash basket beside his chair and stood, ready to start his last walk to the elevator, toward his uncertain future.

  When he heard a warbling from beneath his desk it took him a moment to realize it was his fax machine ringing. The machine – an ancient thing held together by duct tape – whirred and groaned as it expressed a page, millimeter by millimeter. A high-contrast black and white image emerged, like a Rorschach blot on paper discolored by age. The machine beeped and Zondi reached down and tore the page free.

  He saw a man and a girl, posing stiffly for the camera. At first Zondi was convinced that he was looking at a youthful photograph of a woman he had once loved, dead more than ten years. But the girl in the picture only resembled her. This photograph was recent. The man was familiar, too, and when Zondi placed him, he felt another part of his carefully managed life slip out of alignment. He was holding a wedding invite. But Zondi knew he wasn't being invited to a wedding. This was an invitation to something altogether different.

  He crumpled the page, still warm from its journey out of the belly of the machine, ready to toss it into the trash. But some impulse stayed his hand, and instead he put the fax in his pocket and left the room forever.

  Inja stood at the stainless-steel urinal, pissing down onto the little white balls that lay in the trough, smelling his urine mixing with the fake pine. He held his cell phone in his free hand, speaking Zulu, saying "Yes, yes. When? And who is dead?" Voice booming off the tiles, loud as if he was using a public address system.

  An old white man in short pants, knee-length socks and polished shoes, came into the men's room, took one look at Inja, and chose the privacy of a stall. Inja ended the call and pocketed his phone. Shook and zipped. Left the bathroom.

  One of his taxis had been hit in Bhambatha's Rock. Driver dead. Part of the ongoing war he and the other operators waged against one another for control of the rich taxi routes. There would have to be reprisals. Even more reason for him to get out of this place.

  Inja walked across the steakhouse in the town of Stellenbosch, forty minutes outside Cape Town. Dodging waiters in cowboy hats and white and half-breed children shouting, running wild. If a child of his behaved this way he would feel the whip till he bled.

  Theron sat eating in a booth in the smo
king section, behind airtight glass, a haze thick as a veld fire hanging over the tables. Inja sat down opposite the Boer. A steak and chips waited for him, the meat well cooked the way he liked it.

  "I want it cremated," he'd told the colored waitress with the tits Theron couldn't keep his eyes off.

  Breasts meant nothing to a Zulu man like Inja, growing up with girls walking around topless in the traditional way. But the flesh of a woman's calf – just below the hollow of the knee – now that aroused him. And that was the area the Zulu girls always kept covered, with skins and beads. The waitress wore a short skirt and when she'd walked away his eyes were drawn to that area just south of her knee. Inja had a flash of his fingers untying the beads around his new young wife's calf on the night of their coming nuptials. He had to send a hand down to adjust the fit of his pants.

  The Boer was speaking. "Okay, time to tell you what I want. For all the help I've given you." Theron gulped at his brandy and Coke.

  Inja sliced into his steak and took a mouthful, chewed, eyes fixed on this arrogant white pig. "There is still the bail hearing tomorrow."

  "Relax. Dell isn't going to get bail. I've got the prosecutor and the magistrate by the balls. They'll do as I say."

  "So," Inja said. "What do you want?"

  Theron laid his knife aside, lighting up a cigarette, blowing smoke into Inja's face. "There are only two things a man wants: sex or money. And since I don't want to fuck you, chief, it's gotta be money." Laughing.

  The Boer looked up as the waitress arrived with an Irish coffee. Theron flirted with her, winking. Watching her ass as she moved through the tables. "How much you wanna bet me she'll write her phone number down on the check?"

  Inja said nothing, chewed, working his way methodically through the steak. Covered in the sweet sauce the whites loved, hoping it didn't trigger the sickness that lurked out in the shadows.

  Theron switched off his smile. "I want half a million. Cash."

  Inja stared at him, speaking around his food. "You are mad. And where must I get such money?"

  "Come, Shaka. Don't play coy with me. Talk to the minister." Inja chewed, saying nothing. "I know you and him go way, way back. You guys were in exile together, running around in the bush with your AKs." Filled his mouth with steak, pointing his fork at Inja. "Down here in the Cape he can't throw his weight around like in the rest of the country. You fucken need me."

  Inja knew the white bastard was right. In this province run by whites and half-breeds, they scorned his chief. Mocked his many wives and Zulu customs. Thought of him as a savage. Inja's appetite was gone. He pushed his plate away.

  Theron puffed on his cigarette, leaking smoke through his nostrils like a donkey on a cold morning. "This is a nice meal and I don't want to ruin it with threats. But you know what I know. Tell your minister he's getting a bloody bargain." Washed the meat down with his Irish coffee.

  Inja watched as the dead man wiped cream from his lip.

  Dell lay on a bare mattress in the dark. The two drunk farm laborers who'd shared the holding cell with him had been kicked loose. One of them'd had diarrhea and the stench of the blocked toilet hung in the air, acrid and dense.

  A lawyer had come up from Cape Town a few hours back. The son of a friend of Dell's from the old days. The father, a political activist who'd morphed into senior partner at a massive legal firm, hadn't bothered to come himself. The boy – Jeremy? Jerome? – told Dell to "chill" until the bail hearing in the morning. Like he was talking about catching a wave at Clifton. Assured Dell he'd be kicked loose after the hearing.

  "A no-brainer," the kid had said.

  Dell was exhausted but when he closed his eyes he saw the black truck. Saw the Volvo tumbling into space. Heard the screams from inside. He sat up, holding his bandaged head.

  A car sped by outside, pumping Bob Marley's Redemption Song and Dell was back in 1994, at a party the night of the elections, South Africa caught up in the fever of freedom. Apartheid was officially dead. Nelson Mandela was in power. Dell was joyous and optimistic for his country, but felt sorry for himself.

  His marriage had ended. A love affair that had been fueled by student politics and rebellion had run out of gas in sight of the finishing line. So, standing among a crowd of revelers on the lawn of a house in a Cape Town suburb, he felt sour and a little old, at thirty-three, to be single again.

  Dell went into the house to help himself to a glass of nasty boxed wine from a table lit by melting kitchen candles. He found himself staring at a big oil painting. Presumed it was oil, the meaningless swirls applied to the canvas in thick gouts.

  "Like it?"

  He turned to see a girl of maybe twenty, breathtakingly beautiful, her skin the exact color of caramel, he remembered thinking. Wild hair halfway down her back in black curls.

  "No, I don't actually," he said. "I think it looks like fecal matter." Trying to impress her, knowing he sounded like a dickhead as he said it.

  "That means shit, right?" Rrrright. The accent neutral, except for the roll of the 'r' .

  "Yes. And you? Do you like it?"

  "Oh, I hate it." She sipped her wine. "But it paid my student loan for a couple of months."

  "Jesus. Sorry."

  Laughing, the candle flames repeated in miniature in her almond eyes. "Don't be." She was leaving him, and he didn't want her to go. She cast a last look over her shoulder. "I like your critique. I'll use it." Crrritique.

  He saw her at an exhibition the following summer. Took her for a drink. They moved in together three months later. Married the next year. Dell had thought of himself as a happy man. Had thought his wife was happy, too.

  He lay back on the mattress and felt the sheaf of e-mails still folded in his pocket. He stood and walked over to the filthy, lidless toilet, filled to overflowing. Fought back his nausea and tore up the pages, dropped them into the bowl. Was taken by a wave of dizziness and had to put a hand to the wall to steady himself. Saw the bodies of his family in the morgue. The memory of the charred flesh hit him and made the stink of the shit seem sweet.

  Disaster Zondi found himself in a community center in one of those suburbs in the north of Johannesburg that looked exactly like twenty others. Desperate people moping around a coffee urn on a Sunday night. He'd tracked down the address online. Googled sex addiction.

  The moderator called the meeting to order and the group scraped plastic chairs into a circle. Zondi's the only dark face in the room. People started talking. Stories of lost marriages and lost fortunes. Familiar stories.

  It had always been easy for Zondi, finding casual sex. It had a way of finding him, truth be told. He'd walk into one of those fancy Jo'burg bars – a place pretending that it was in New York or Berlin – not even thinking about a getting laid. Order a drink, ignoring the desperate men around him who tore off women's clothing with their eyes. Then Zondi would look up and there she'd be. The blonde. His female opposite. The yin to his yang. A smile. A few words, and then off to her place for the transaction. Zondi had two rules: no one came to his apartment, and he never stayed the night with his pick-ups.

  Lately, he'd leave the sleeping woman and get into his BMW. Still restless. Find himself driving through the night toward the inner city. A place that had imploded in on itself from poverty and crime and decay. He'd see the feral black whores who lurked outside buildings that looked as if they'd been shelled, the women locking onto his smart car like heat-seeking missiles.

  He'd call one over and sit staring out over the apocalypse while the woman went down on him. Hearing the smack of her mouth on the condom, catching the bushfire stink of meth or crack in her hair. When he didn't come, she'd bitch, want more money and he'd lay a banknote on her and let her go.

  Last week one of them had pulled a knife on him. A long blade with an ornate bone handle. The kind of thing white men had once used to carve Sunday roasts. The whore was so blown on crack she could hardly see and he could have taken the knife from her, but he gave her money and pushed her
out of the car. Drove away knowing that he had to stop this before it stopped him.

  Zondi came back to the room, unconsciously making eye contact with a wholesome looking blonde sitting opposite him. He'd never seen her before, but he'd met her a hundred times. Another one curious to merge her whiteness with his blackness. Doing a TopDeck, they called it in South Africa, after the white and dark chocolate combo sold in local stores. He looked away. She didn't. Zondi shifted in his chair, but still felt her eyes on him.

  The moderator got to a gaunt man, called him Horst, and asked him if he was ready to share. The man shook his head and the moderator moved on. Zondi had the feeling that this wasn't the first time it had happened.

  A desiccated woman in her forties spoke about how her serial adultery had caused her husband to commit suicide. She wept. The blonde kept on forcing eye contact. Zondi got up and walked outside. He stood out in the dark, breathing in bougainvillea and eucalyptus from the garden, wishing that he smoked. The man named Horst appeared at his side.

  "You would maybe like a drink?" he asked in a German accent.

  "Yes," Zondi said, suddenly realizing that he would like nothing more.

  He expected the German to suggest a bar in a nearby strip mall, but the man led him to an aging Mercedes parked not far from his own car. Horst slid in behind the wheel and Zondi took the passenger seat. The German produced a bottle of Scotch and a couple of foam cups from the glove box.

  He poured two drinks, handed one to Zondi. "Prost."

  "Cheers."

  Horst flattened his drink and poured another. Held the bottle up to Zondi who shook his head. "May I tell you something I have never before told anyone?" Horst asked, in his fussy, overprecise English.

  "Go ahead." Zondi knew how to listen. It was talking he had a problem with.