Dust Devils

by Roger Smith

  He heard a man shouting commands in Afrikaans and the dogs retreated from the car, growling, Inja's scent in their snouts. He wound his window down an inch.

  "Ja?" the Boer asked, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, hands on hips. A big man, about thirty, but already a gut swelling over the belt of his khaki shorts.

  Inja flashed his badge. "Can I have a word with you, sir?" Speaking English.

  "There were already here last night. The cops," the man said in Afrikaans.

  Inja understood the ugly language – sounded like a throat disease to his ears – but he didn't speak it. "I'm Agent Mazibuko, sir. I'm here with the task force on farm murders." Fixed an ass licking smile to his face.

  The Boer looking surprised. "What task force?"

  "I'm here to liaise with the local farmers. To help stop this lawless element that is targeting you people."

  The man almost smiled. "Okay. Get out. Don't worry with them." Pointing at the dogs.

  Inja cracked the door and the dogs growled.

  The farmer said, "Quiet!"

  Inja stood up out of the car, ready to reach for his pistol. But the dogs stayed back, gargling low in their throats.

  "Come in," the Boer said.

  The man led him into the kitchen and shut the door on the dogs. Two women sat at the table, finishing breakfast. One was an old woman with yellow hair. The other was young, so white she looked like she had bled out. A dirty baby wobbled on her lap, and a small Boer boy child looked up at Inja from his place at the table.

  Inja smiled with a fine display of teeth. "Are there any other people in the house, who would like to join our discussion?"

  "What discussion?" the old yellow head asked. She was shrewd, Inja saw. He knew she would be the one to question.

  "Some farm murder task force," the Boer said. Then he stopped talking when Inja shot him in the dimpled pink knee that protruded from the bottom of his shorts, the silenced pistol coughing like a polite African of old. The man sagged, grabbing at his knee, cursing some white god.

  Inja had the pistol on the others. The young woman was about to scream. "If you make a noise I'll kill you." She shut her mouth. "Take the baby from her," he said to the old one.

  The one with yellow hair took the infant and held it on her lap. The baby was a giant, with a head the size of a football. With his free hand Inja dug into his jacket pocket and came out with a handful of black plastic cable ties. He threw them in front of the younger woman.

  "Now you are going to tie up this Boer bastard. His hands behind his back and his ankles together."

  The farmer gripped his leg. Cursing. The woman knelt beside him. Sobbed when she saw the blood pumping from her husband's shattered knee as he removed his hand. She took a moment to understand how to use the cable ties, then she secured his wrists. Stared at Inja, her hands shaking. He moved closer with the pistol. She tied the man's thick ankles. He leaned back against the wall, his face sallow.

  "Now you tie the child."

  She did as he said. The boy was crying like only a little white brat could. Inja tore strips off a roll of kitchen towel and filled the child's mouth with paper.

  "Put the baby on the table," he said to the old yellow head. She looked at him with hatred in her eyes and sat the infant among the plates. It wobbled on its disposable napkin, fat and pink. Stank like shit. Inja held the silencer close to its head.

  "Old woman, you listen to me or I'll shoot it," he said. "Tie up the young one."

  The yellow head hesitated, then she did as he ordered. The young woman sat at the table, weeping, snot running from her nose as she was secured.

  "Now sit down."

  The old one sat. The baby started to howl and Inja hit it on the head with the gun barrel and it toppled on its side among the dishes. Lay gasping. The old woman was out of her seat, coming at him with a bread knife. She had balls this one. Like one of those olden-time Boers who had dragged ox wagons over mountains and killed his ancestors with front-loader rifles.

  Inja rested the gun barrel on the baby's temple, blue veins like rivers under its white skin. "Drop the knife." She stared at him, then obeyed, the knife clattering against a plate of congealed egg. "Sit down." She sat. "Okay. Now. Robert Goodbread lives here? Yes or no?"

  "No," she said.

  Inja lifted the gun away from the baby's head and shot the Boer man in the face. The farmer slumped forward, dripping blood and brain. The young woman collapsed onto the table, sobbing. The old one stared up at Inja, her mouth a slit.

  "I ask again," Inja said.

  "Yes. He lived here."

  "And he brought his son here? Last night?"

  He saw the lie moving into her eyes. Shot the young woman in the arm. She screamed and sobbed and prayed. Looked up at the old one through tears and stringy hair. "Please, Ma. Tell him."

  "Yes. He was here. But they gone," the old one said.

  "Gone where?"

  "Namibia."

  She looked to be telling the truth. Inja needed to be sure, so he shot the young woman in the head. Blood sprayed crimson across the picture of a Massey Ferguson tractor on the wall calendar behind her.

  "I ask again."

  "They gone to Namibia. I swear to God."

  Namibia. Made sense. If this was true they would be across the border by now, the old white man and his son. Out of his jurisdiction. Inja found a new magazine in his pocket and slid it into the pistol. Cocked the gun. Pointed it at the boy child.

  "You're lying," Inja said.

  The woman stared at him. No tears in her eyes. Just hatred. "They. Gone. To. Namibia."

  Inja shot the child in the head.

  The old woman had her eyes closed, praying, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . ."

  "Shut up," he said.

  "… thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

  Inja took a step back and shot the baby. The force of the bullet knocked it off the table and it lay next to its dead father like something discarded.

  "Forgive us this day our trespasses, as we . . ." She stopped. And Inja had to laugh. No way was this Boer woman going to forgive him his trespasses.

  He held the gun on her. Her eyes opened and she stared straight at Inja. Spat at him, "Fuck you, kaffir. You'll rot in hell."

  He shot her in her yellow head. Emptied the pistol into the bodies of the three adults. The room stank of blood and shit and gunfire.

  It was time for Inja to go home. He reloaded, then checked his watch. Just gone 9:00 a.m. He could be on a plane to Durban by 12:30. Pick up his car from the airport and be on the road to Bhambatha's Rock by three. Home in time for his wives to cook him tripe for dinner.

  Inja opened the door and stepped out into the brightness. The dogs came at him and he killed them both. Then he walked across to the car, leaving as the flies arrived.

  Zondi surfaced from blackness, something dark and dense spiraling above him. He looked to his right, into the face of a skeletal corpse. The corpse lifted a clawed hand, sunken mouth chewing toothlessly. Moaning. Zondi raised himself onto his elbows, trying to work out where exactly he was in the afterlife, when a white face framed by long blonde hair entered his vision. Definitely hell.

  The white woman spoke a stuttering, pidgin Zulu, "You are okay?"

  Zondi answered in English, "Where am I?"

  "St. Mary's Mission Hospital. In Bhambatha's Rock."

  She spoke fluent English but with a strong accent. French. No, Belgian, he decided. The blonde, in a white coat, stethoscope dangling from her neck, squatted between Zondi and the moaning corpse. Zondi realized that he was in a ward so densely packed with suffering black humanity that he lay on a thin mattress on the stone floor beneath a bed, the springs coiled above him. Also realized he badly needed to take a piss. He started to pull himself out from under the rough blanket that covered his body.

  "So I'm not dead?" The blanket fell away and Zondi saw he was naked. And semi-tumescent from his full b
ladder.

  The blonde swallowed a laugh. "No, you are very much alive, I think."

  Zondi covered himself, lying back.

  "I'm sorry. Your clothes were torn and bloody. And we have run out of pajamas." Waving a delicate hand at the packed ward. People sardined into every available space, the stench of shit and suffering and death throttling Zondi.

  "Look, Doctor . . . ?"

  "Lambert."

  "I need to get out of here. Any chance somebody could go across to the rooming house and pick up some clothes for me?"

  Blue eyes fixed on him. He saw she had beautiful skin, like white Belgian chocolate. No, no, no, he told himself. Tried to focus on the crucifix that gleamed at her collar bone. An elegant neck, made for lovebites. Jesus.

  "You should not be leaving here. You have a concussion," she said.

  "I must leave."

  The doctor shrugged. The dark smears of exhaustion under her eyes told him she had more pressing matters to concern herself with. "Okay, I will send an orderly. Come and see me at my office before you go." She stood and walked away, maneuvering between the rows of black bodies.

  The AIDS victim at Zondi's side sat up and the shriveled dugs that dangled over the blanket, flat and leathery as saddlebags, told him she was a woman. She fixed her smeared eyes on him. "God is good," she said in Zulu.

  "Yes, sister, God is good," Zondi said. He lay back, thinking: No. Whatever he is, he isn't that.

  Dell drove into a landscape as flat and brown as cloth stretched out to the horizon. Rusting windmills stood motionless over dry dams and exhausted khaki sheep slumped in the dust. The empty blacktop unrolled long and straight beside an abandoned railroad line.

  Goodbread sat in silence at Dell's side. The only indication that he was awake, or alive, was his right arm rising like a metronome, bring the endless cigarettes to his lips. Over the drumming of the tires Dell heard smoke being sucked in and sighed out, and an occasional dry cough.

  This was a different Bobby Goodbread from the one he remembered, who was all bullshit and swagger, overheated by testosterone and bloodlust. Bragging about killing communists and capturing Nelson Mandela. This was a silent husk, dried out, like the tumbleweeds that gave way in the wind of the truck's approach.

  A faded road sign swam out of the heat haze, pointing to a small town a mile off the highway. Dell could see a church steeple rising amid low houses and the hard shine of the tin roofed boxes the coloreds lived in.

  "Turn in here," Goodbread said, voice thin and cracked.

  "Why?"

  "To get us some firepower, boy."

  "I'm forty-eight years old. Somehow boy doesn't do it for me any more."

  "That right? Then what would be your preference?"

  "Robert. Or Rob."

  "Not Bobby?" A soft, dry laugh, lost in the ticking of the turn signal as Dell swung onto a gravel road. "Head toward the gas station."

  "You know this place?"

  "I had occasion to visit twenty-some years ago."

  They were approaching a town that seemed to be dying by inches, as if the closing of the railroad had taken away its will to live. The truck bumped over the tracks, passing a derelict train station and a couple of dark brick houses that had been stripped and looted. The walls of one singed by fire.

  Dell pulled the truck into the Caltex gas station, the signage bleached by the sun. He stopped at the pumps and a colored man with a withered arm slunk over to them.

  "You get us gassed up," Goodbread said. "I'm going to talk to a fellow inside." Walked off toward the auto workshop.

  Dell sat in the truck, smelling the gasoline, the counter on the pump clicking. He heard the mosquito whine of a car speeding by on the highway, then nothing but the oppressive silence of the country.

  The cripple poured water from a plastic bucket onto the windshield and as he drew a rag across the glass he revealed Goodbread in conversation with a thickset middle-aged white man in a mechanic's overall. The man wiped his oil-stained hands on a dirty cloth, shooting glances over at the truck.

  Then he nodded and shouted something into the dark mouth of the workshop. A blond boy of eight or nine ran out. Barefoot. Skinny legs protruding from gray shorts. Wearing a T-shirt with the South African rugby emblem on the front.

  The mechanic pulled together the two iron doors of the workshop and padlocked them. Then he and the boy followed Goodbread to the truck. The man opened the rear door and sat, the boy sliding in after him, looking at Dell from under his pale fringe. Dell saw he had eyes as blue as robin's eggs.

  Dell paid the attendant. Heard the man in the back talking in Afrikaans, telling the pump attendant he'd be back in an hour. The mechanic leaned forward, speaking to Dell. "Go past the cop shop, then take a right."

  Dell drove by the police station, a dark cop with a paunch standing in the doorway, watching them with no expression. Dell turned into a road of brown houses with Dutch gables. Nobody on the street.

  The boy started humming the intro to a TV show the twins used to watch. The mechanic told him to shut up. He did. The houses dribbled away and the road continued out into the emptiness. Dust swirled up around them and Dell closed his window. Heard his father coughing, battling for air.

  After ten minutes the mechanic leaned over the back of Dell's seat and pointed a dirty finger toward a farm gate set into a barbed-wire fence. A FOR SALE sign hung on the fence, faded and rusted, with a bullet hole drilled through the middle. Dell stopped at the gate and the boy jumped down and opened it, the hinges tearing through rust.

  Dell bumped the truck over a cattle guard. No sign of cattle. Stopped and waited for the boy to close the gate and run back to the vehicle. Took off toward a house that sat near a gap-toothed windmill. As they neared the house Dell could see it was unoccupied, and had been for a long time. The roof sagged and the windows were boarded up.

  "Park by the back of the house," the mechanic said.

  Dell stopped the truck and the men stepped out. The boy moved to follow his father, but the man shook his head. "Wait here." The boy stayed in the vehicle.

  The mechanic led them across to the garage. A rusted metal door with a new padlock and silver chain. He unlocked the door and swung it open. The garage was empty but for a steel cabinet and a workbench standing against the far wall. The mechanic walked to the cabinet and opened it, speaking to Goodbread over his shoulder.

  "What does the Major need?" Another of the crew who had followed Goodbread through Namibia and Angola. Making the world safe from communism.

  "I want a pump-action, a rifle and two pistols."

  "Not a problem."

  The man took the selection of weapons from the cabinet and laid them on the work bench. Goodbread picked up the shotgun, inspecting it.

  "While the Major chooses, I just want to have a word with my boy."

  Goodbread nodded and the man walked out toward the truck, disappearing from view. Goodbread reached into the cabinet and found a box of red shells. Broke open the shotgun and loaded it. Then he hugged the wall and squinted through the gap between the garage door and the hinge.

  "Boy, follow me."

  Goodbread was walking, suddenly a younger man again. The way he'd been when the cops had arrived the night before. Energized. Dell followed his father toward the truck. The mechanic stood by the rear bumper, his back to them. Turning toward Goodbread, stowing something in his pocket.

  Goodbread said, "Who you phoning, Jan?"

  "No, nobody." Trying a smile.

  "Give your phone to my boy," Goodbread said.

  "Major, come on, you know me . . ."

  Goodbread pumped the shotgun. The man reached into his pocket and took out the phone. Hesitated, then handed it to Dell, who looked down at the glass face of an aging Samsung, smeared with oil from the mechanic's fingers. Hit the green redial button and put the phone to his ear. A static hiss and then ringing.

  A lazy voice said, "Police."

  Dell killed the call, wondering whether
this was the fat constable he had seen filling the doorway of the police station. "The cops," he said.

  "I didn't even get through," the mechanic said.

  Goodbread stared at him, shook his head. "You sorry son of a bitch. How much are they offering for us?"

  The man shrugged. "TV said fifty thousand." Scratched at his stubble. "My wife's gone. I got debt."

  "Real touching. If I had me a guitar I'd sing along and that's the God's honest truth." He coughed. "You and me need to take a walk, Jan."

  "Major. Please."

  The boy was alert now, sensing danger. Half sliding from the truck. "Pa?" Voice as high as a girl's.

  "Stay there, Deon."

  The child obeyed.

  "You come with me and nothing will happen to your boy," Goodbread said. "Understand?"

  The mechanic nodded. Looked at his son. Lifted a hand. Dropped it. Seemed about to say something, then he swallowed his words and turned and walked around the house, Goodbread a step behind him. Dell and the boy watched them disappear.

  "Where they going, uncle?"

  Dell couldn't find words. Saw those blue eyes staring up at him. Saw his dead children. The boy blinked at the blast from the shotgun. Dusty birds exploded from the roof of the house, black as shrapnel against the sky. Another bang. Then Goodbread walked back toward them, smoking pump-action dangling from his hand. Dell saw the boy was crying. Silently.

  "Get in front, Deon," Goodbread said in Afrikaans. The boy did as he was told, obedient as a gundog. Goodbread leaned the shotgun against the front seat. "You wait here with the boy," he said to Dell and disappeared into the garage.

  Dell slid in behind the wheel. The boy was shaking and tears tracked the dust on his face. Dell marveled at the layers of hell that were being revealed to him, day by day.

  Goodbread returned carrying two more handguns and a rifle, his pockets bulging with ammunition. He got into the truck, the boy sitting between him and Dell. "Okay, let's go."

  "Where?"

  "Back to the highway."

  "What about him?" Dell gestured with his head toward the child, who stared out the windshield, crying silently.