Dust Devils

by Roger Smith

  Heard footsteps on the gravel and then a fist hammering at the door, a voice saying in thick English: "Police. Open up."

  Goodbread stood holding the pistol. Ready. More knocking. Somebody tried the handle of the locked door. He heard the woman's voice coming from outside, speaking in Afrikaans. "That room is empty."

  A man's voice in reply, "Then unlock it and let us see, Mrs. Vorster."

  "I can't. My son has the keys. He's in town. At church."

  "Who lives in here?"

  "I told you. Nobody. A foreman used to but he's gone now, to Walvis Bay."

  Heard another voice, a man with a colored accent, "Lady, if you seen this Goodbread or his son, better you tell us now, otherwise you gonna be in big trouble."

  "I'm telling you, I haven't seen these people. Where do you come on this?"

  Goodbread was about to risk a glance out the gap in the drapes when a flashlight beam sliced through the darkness, the cop outside standing so close that Goodbread could hear him breathing as he peered into the room.

  Dell watched the disc of light skim across the wall and the floor and land on the back of the sofa. For a moment he nearly stood up with his hands in the air. Ready to surrender. Get them to call his lawyer – the senior one – and bring him up from Cape Town to straighten out this mess. Then he saw Theron in the courtroom, laughing with the black man who looked like a pimp. Saw the bodies of his family in the morgue.

  Dell stayed down.

  Goodbread felt the trigger of the 9mm beneath his fingertips, ready to bring the gun up in an arc and shoot the cop through the glass. Then the beam sucked itself back into blackness and was gone.

  The white cop spoke as he walked away from the window, "I'll leave my card with you, Mrs. Vorster. If you hear anything you call me. It would be better for you."

  Doors slapped closed and the vehicle reversed, headlamps raked the drapes again, floating a yellow rectangle of light across the room, then the driver shifted gear and the vehicle crunched across the gravel and the room went dark.

  Goodbread heard the truck bump down the track to the main house where it stopped. Heard a snatch of conversation in Afrikaans, Althea Vorster and the cops talking. A car door slammed and the cop truck took off, motor fading into the night.

  Goodbread stayed still, waiting. Listening. Till all he heard was the wheeze of his breath and the ticking of the tin roof as it cooled. He engaged the safety on the pistol and laid the gun on the counter beside the sink. Switched on the light bulb.

  "Okay, boy. You can stand."

  The man who looked like he once had came slowly to his feet, blinking. Gripping the bottle of Jack Daniel's by the neck, like it was a weapon.

  "What the hell were you gonna do, boy? Invite them in for cocktails?"

  Goodbread laughed and then coughed. A spasm that he couldn't control. He turned away from Dell, leaned against the wall and hacked like a sick dog, covering his mouth so that his son didn't see the blood that flowed up crimson from his lungs.

  Zondi sat on a bed that stank of sweat, listening to the window glass vibrate in time to music from the tavern next door. Zulu bubblegum. Music from his youth, when he had lived in this hellhole of a town. An unhappy time. All about waiting to escape.

  He'd checked himself into a room for the night. A cinderblock square, hidden behind the beauty salon in an alley off the main road of Bhambatha's Rock. A bed, a sink, a wooden chair, and a chipped closet with one door that hung off a broken hinge. Judging by the wrinkled pile of skin magazines that lay beside the bed, it was a room used by truckers and delivery men.

  Zondi could have stayed in one of the quaint bed and breakfasts – all fluffy comforters and brass beds – in the white town of Dundee, an hour away. A place that catered to tourists come to visit the battlefields that had absorbed plenty of blood during wars between Zulus and Boers. Zulus and British. British and Boers. This was an area famous for its bloodshed.

  But he wanted to be here, in Bhambatha's Rock. As much as he told himself he was here to find the girl, he knew that was only part of this journey. He needed to be back where it all started, where his source code was written. Where all those zeros and ones had combined to make him what he was. Whatever that might be.

  Zondi stood and put his duffel bag in the closet, his nostrils twitching at the smell of sweat and cockroach pellets and the ash of mosquito coils. He wouldn't unpack. Keep his clothes in the bag, protected from the stink.

  He opened his wallet and removed a few banknotes, put them into his pocket. Enough for tonight. Then he knelt and wedged the wallet and the keys to his BMW between the bedsprings and the reeking mattress. Not very secure but better than keeping them on his body, in this town of bandits. A frontier town ruled by Inja Mazibuko, the nearest cops fifty miles away.

  Each leg of the bed stood on a brick. An African superstition. To make the bed too high for a little demon known as a tokoloshe to climb up and take you during the night. He remembered being terrified of the tokoloshe as a child. Didn't fear that devil any longer.

  Zondi locked the room, catching the night soil stench of the communal shithouse. He walked up the alley to the main road, passing the entrance to the tavern. Fluorescent strips threw a sordid green light down on men sitting in plastic chairs arranged around steel tables, drinking beer from bottles, shouting at each other about girls and money and soccer. Black men of all ages, united in one common purpose: to drink themselves comatose. The few women in the room were wide hipped like skittles, ready to roll onto their backs for the price of a beer.

  Zondi heard a woman in the doorway shout a comment at him. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Reeboks, but he didn't look like he belonged here. He ignored her. Only rural Africans seemed to find her body type attractive these days: huge ass and thighs. The urban definition of African beauty had changed forever when Naomi Campbell pranced down the catwalk. These women were of no interest to Zondi. No blondes. No skeletal apocalyptic whores. He was safe.

  Zondi passed his car parked on the sandy sidewalk and crossed to the red phone container that squatted beneath one of the few streetlights. Zondi stepped into the container. A woman with a baby tied to her back was shouting into one of the phones, speaking to her husband in Durban. Asking him when he was going to send her money. The call ended with the woman cursing. She bumped past Zondi, the baby crying as if it had sucked sour milk from her tit.

  A chubby guy in his mid-twenties, wearing small town bling and designer knock-offs, sat on the stool beside the phones, clipping his toenails. Zondi watched as a crescent of nail spun through the air and landed in the dust on the metal floor. The man gave him a glance then went on to his next toe.

  "You Vusi?" Zondi asked.

  "Ja. And?" the man said.

  Zondi unfolded the fax of the wedding invite. "You remember sending this?"

  Vusi eyed it, shrugged. "Ja."

  "Who did you send it for?"

  "A girl."

  "What girl?"

  "Just a girl."

  Vusi attacked his big toenail with the clippers. It was a thick yellow nail and the small chrome clippers weren't up to the task. He grimaced as he squeezed and the clippers broke and one half flew away and clattered to the floor.

  "Fucken fong kong shit," Vusi said.

  Zondi held out a fifty-rand note. "You need to buy yourself a better pair of clippers."

  Vusi reached for the money. Zondi kept it just out of his grasp. He pointed to the photograph of the girl in tribal dress. "Was it her?"

  The man squinted, shrugged. "Could be. She wasn't dressed like that."

  "You know where I can find this girl?"

  "Looks like the Zulu Kingdom." Saw Zondi's blank look. "Where they do the tribal shit for the tourists. On the Greytown road."

  Zondi handed over the money and walked out. He'd drive up there in the morning, to see the girl who looked so much like her mother. Didn't know what he'd do when he found her.

  As he stepped off the sidewalk a whit
e minibus taxi, made yellow by the sodium light, slammed to a halt, blocking his path. He saw a man at the wheel and another man sliding the side door open, stepping out. Zondi moved to his left, to skirt the taxi. Heard the sound of a weapon being cocked, then felt something cool at the base of his skull.

  "Get in, Zondi." One of those voices that needs an elevator it comes from so deep. A voice he knew from somewhere long ago.

  He felt a knee catch him on the thigh and he sprawled forward, onto the floor of the minibus. The gunman was in with him, slamming the door against Zondi's legs until he pulled them in. The taxi took off at speed. He'd come looking for his past. Seemed it had found him.

  When Zondi tried to lift himself from the rattling floor, the man pushed him down. Frisked him. Zondi had no gun. He'd handed it in with his badge.

  "Want to tell me what the fuck's going on?" he asked in Zulu.

  A lighter flared in the man's left hand and he brought it to his face. Set fire to a fat spliff that dangled from his lips. "Don't you remember me, Zondi?"

  In the flickering light Zondi saw a bald man in his forties, with a skull so scarred and pitted it looked as if he was wearing his brain on the outside. Zondi matched the face to the voice. "Lucky," he said.

  The man smiled, exhaling a plume of bitter smoke. Clicked off the lighter. "You think you can just come back here? Like you owe no debt?"

  "Where are we going?" Zondi asked.

  "I'm taking you into the hills. I'm going to shoot your knees fucked up, so you can't walk. And your elbows, so you can't crawl. Then I'm going leave you there to feed the hyenas." Lucky laughed around the spliff.

  He was the brother of Jola, the boy Zondi and Inja and the others had killed as teenagers. A man who had sworn a blood oath of vengeance. When Zondi had returned to this town for his mother's funeral Lucky had been in prison in Durban, doing life for a taxi hit. And now he was out, ready to make good his promise.

  This was a land of Shakespearean feuds. Clans who lived facing each other across narrow valleys fought to the death, for reasons that time had obscured. Eighty years ago one man stole another's cow. Fifty years ago a man insulted another. Generations of men were drawn into the faction fights. Zondi and his friends had killed Jola twenty years ago. No time at all.

  Back in the eighties Zondi and Inja and a handful of other boys had called themselves comrades, teenage supporters of the long-jailed Nelson Mandela, invisible on distant Robben Island. They had sprouted Marxist slogans, willing to offer their blood to end apartheid.

  There were few of them, back then. This part of the country, kept in deliberate poverty by the white government, was the land of Zulu chieftains and tribal lore. Most of the chiefs had made deals with the whites in exchange for a pathetic stipend, a stinking hut, a thin cow or two, and dominion over people even worse off than themselves. Young men who stood up in defiance were whipped. If that didn't stop them, they were killed. Their bodies dumped in front of the huts of their weeping mothers.

  So Zondi and Inja and the rest had lived in fear and when Inja came to them one day and said they had been infiltrated by a government spy, they didn't ask for much in the way of proof. Jola, who ran with them, had been seen sitting in a car with a cop, smoking a cigarette. They caught Jola on a footpath down in the valley. He denied everything, his eyes white with terror.

  Inja struck the first blow with a cane cutter's machete that lifted a flap of flesh from the boy's arm, the air thick with the smell of blood and fear. After moment's hesitation, the others joined in with knives and sticks and axes. Zondi found a rock in his hands, brought it down on Jola's head. Saw the skull split beneath the tight black curls, showing white bone. Lifted the rock, a veil of blood and brain matter dangling from the dimpled underside. Brought it down again. And again.

  When they were done, Zondi stepped back, looked down at his red hands still gripping the rock. Dropped the stone, his breath coming in gasps. The dust hanging heavy in the air. The thing that lay in the sand no longer resembled a boy.

  The first and last time Zondi had killed.

  Now he felt the weight of inevitability. He was the outsider and he would pay the price for what had happened twenty years ago. Only three of the six youths who had killed Jola had survived: Zondi, Giraffe and Inja.

  Inja was Lucky's enemy. A powerful one. That defined him, gave him a role. Enemies were useful in this valley that had no need for peace, and Giraffe was a rich man by local standards, so accommodations would have been made. But Zondi had no place. He had surrendered that years ago.

  Zondi saw a flare of approaching headlamps in the rear window of the minibus. Heard the low growl of a powerful engine. The taxi driver said something over his shoulder and Lucky looked up as the lights swung by.

  An automatic rifle fired hard and loud and the side windows of the minibus shattered. Lucky aimed his pistol through the broken glass, muzzle flashes strobing his face. Then he made a sound like an old man gargling and folded forward, landing on top of Zondi, something wet smearing Zondi's face. The driver shouted. More gunfire. More glass.

  Zondi made a grab for Lucky's pistol. As his fingers found the grip, the taxi spun and somersaulted. Zondi flew around the rear of the minibus, in an embrace with the dead man. Smashed his head against something hard. Bit his tongue. Glass exploded over him, metal shearing and tearing, the seats breaking free of their bolts and gang-tackling him. The warm night air finding its way in through torn metal.

  The taxi sparked on the gravel as it slid to a stop. Zondi tasted dust, invisible in the blackness. Heard a wheel still spinning on blown bearings and something dripping onto the metal beside his head. Then nothing.

  Zondi opened his eyes, looking up at a million bright points of light, like pinpricks in a velvet curtain. Stars. Far brighter than he'd grown used to in the city. And the moon, a flaring disc. No, not the moon. A flashlight, shining down on him.

  He was on his back, under a crush of weight he realized were the uprooted seats of the taxi. The minibus lay on its side and Zondi was staring up through the rectangle that had housed the sliding door. Two figures dangled down through the doorway. He heard voices. Male. Teenagers. Too young to be the gunmen.

  "Yaw, yaw, yaw. They are meat, man."

  "Jump in and get their stuff. I see a gun."

  The light was blocked for a moment and the taxi shook as a figure dropped down and landed beside Zondi, heavy boots smacking the metal close to his head, crunching on broken glass.

  As the beam moved Zondi saw Lucky lying dead. The boy frisked Lucky and held up a skinny black arm, fist clenched around a wad of cash. "Look, my brother!"

  The other kid laughed and said, "Make fast before somebody comes on."

  The beam moved onto Zondi. He didn't shut his eyes fast enough.

  "Hey," the boy holding the flashlight said, "that one is still alive."

  The kid standing over Zondi swung a boot and kicked him back to black.

  The armored vehicle rattled through a village that looked like sticks and straw blown in on a desert wind. The villagers – women, children and shriveled old crones – watched from inside the huts, eyes white in the darkness.

  They saw the rotting bodies of their men tied to the sides of the armored car. Saw Goodbread and his crew standing up out of the vehicle, shouting, drunk on palm wine and blood. Heard screams as the guerrillas lying in ambush fired on them.

  Goodbread awoke wet with fever, scrambling himself upright, reaching for his AK-47. Fingers finding only the 9mm pistol beside him on the sofa. The shouts that woke him those of farm laborers on a tractor, not the enemy in a long-forgotten bush war.

  Goodbread looked across at the man lying on the bed, on his stomach, arms flung wide. Breathing deeply. Still dressed in the striped pajama top and the bloody jeans. Feet bare and soft looking. His son had wanted to talk the night before, demanding answers from Goodbread after the cops had left. Pouring the bottle of Jack Daniel's down his throat like it was some kind of balm for grief. Kn
ocked him down and knocked him out cold.

  Not before he'd cursed Goodbread as every kind of wrongheaded sonofabitch in God's creation. Goodbread had sat silent, impassive. Taking it. Reckoned he owed his boy that much.

  Goodbread smothered a cough, not wanting to wake Dell. Stood and walked across to the sink for a drink of water. He'd also slept in his clothes. Sat awake, truth be told, smoking in the dark. Gun at his side. He'd slipped into a fevered slumber for maybe a half-hour. Now the sun burned hot behind the yellow curtains above the sink.

  He shifted the drapes, looking out at the day. Saw the green fields and the milk cows. The propellers of the wind farm turning lazily in the distance. A breeze found its way through a crack in the glass, flapping the X-ray he'd taped there to keep the wind out.

  An X-ray of his chest, showing his bones and the white masses that bloomed in his lungs like desert flowers. Taped up there to keep the wind out, sure, but also as a kind of meditation. A reminder. So each morning when he opened the drapes he'd know he had one day less to live.

  Goodbread took the acetate film between his fingers and pulled it free of the glass. Opened a drawer beneath the sink and hid the X-ray. He didn't want his son to see it. Didn't want to get into that now. He heard a groan and saw that Dell was busy waking up to his own nightmare.

  Goodbread coughed, spat bright red blood onto the silver metal of the sink. Ran the faucet, watched the blood and mucus swirl away down the plughole. He had thought that his last battle was going to be against his own body. But here he was, locked and loaded. Ready to face the old enemy.

  Dell opened his eyes to the cramped room with the unplastered walls. Saw the gaunt old man silhouetted against the acid yellow drapes. Flashbacks finding Dell through the fog of a hangover.