by Roger Smith
"Just drive."
"I won't let you hurt him."
"What the hell do you think I am?'
Dell could offer no answer. He started the truck. When they came to the gate Goodbread stepped down and opened it and closed it after them. Got back in and they bumped toward town. Dell found a backstreet that skirted the cop station and then they were past the town and back on the blacktop.
They drove for almost an hour in silence. The child shivered like he was freezing. In the distance Dell saw a car pulled up under the shade of a thorn tree. As they drew closer he could make out a man, a woman and three children sitting at a stone table, eating.
"Drive on until they can't read our license plate," Goodbread said, looking back over his shoulder.
Dell watched the picnickers recede to small dots in his rearview.
"This will work," Goodbread said.
Dell pulled over onto the shoulder and Goodbread cracked his door and stepped down. Motioned for the child to follow him. "You go down to that auntie and uncle. You hear me, boy?" The child nodded, looked at them both, then started walking, feet bare on the hot gravel.
Goodbread was back in the vehicle, door slapping shut. "Drive."
Dell drove.
Zondi, dressed in jeans and a clean shirt, a fresh pair of Reeboks on his feet, felt dizzy. He shut his eyes for a moment, blocking out the sunlight that blasted in at him though the windows of the hospital corridor. Had to steady himself against the wall. Took a breath and got a lungful of disinfectant and the bitter smell of death and disease.
All around him were wasted men and women in candy-striped pajamas. Shuffling along the corridor with thousand-yard stares. Slumped on benches. On the floor. In wheel chairs. Gaunt, hollow-cheeked. Skins patterned with lesions. Coughing through lips gummed by yeast infections thick as churned butter.
South Africa has the highest rate of HIV in the world and Bhambatha's Rock was at the epicenter, smack in middle of the worst-infected area. One in three people carried the virus. Years of ignorance, superstition, government apathy and misinformation had erased a generation, leaving babies to be raised by grandparents. A plague almost biblical in its ferocity.
Zondi's head throbbed and his body ached, but he was walking out of here. The people around him were not. He came to an unvarnished wooden door with a card pinned to it: DR. M. LAMBERT.
Marie? Martine? He knocked.
"Yes. Come in, please." That accented voice.
He opened the door and found the blonde doctor sitting behind a metal desk, writing a report in a brown file. More files stacked beside her. A plastic bottle of mineral water and two glasses stood beside the files.
"Have a seat, Mr. – ?"
"Zondi. Disaster Zondi."
She looked up at him, frowning. "Disaster? Like something terrible?"
He sat. "Yes. It's a long story."
She allowed a distracted smile and rubbed at blue eyes smudged with fatigue. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm okay."
"Then you are lucky. The men you were with in the taxi are dead."
"I know."
"A trucker found you this morning and brought you here. Maybe you must talk with the police. Over in Dundee."
"Of course," he said. No way in hell.
The doctor was toying with a piece of paper. He saw it was the fax of the wedding invite. Torn and bloody. She held it up. "This was in your pocket, when you were admitted." A pause. "You are here to attend this wedding?"
"Maybe."
"From whose side of the family are you?"
"The girl's."
"Okay. And she is how old?"
"Sixteen, I think. Why?"
She tapped the invite. Hesitating before she spoke. "This man, the groom, he was a patient here, not so long ago."
The doctor stopped talking. Zondi waited for her to continue but she didn't. She rummaged in the desk drawer and found a container of pills and put them in front of him.
"For your headache." She poured some of her bottled water into a glass and pushed it across to Zondi. "Take two pills now." Standing. "If you show symptoms like nausea and dizziness, please to return here immediately. Understand?"
"Yes."
"Good."
She gathered the stacked files and dropped them into a steel cabinet. Slammed the door shut. One file remained on the scuffed surface of the desk. "I must go now, to ward rounds." The doctor switched a smile on and off and left the room, closing the door after her.
Zondi sipped at the water. Didn't touch the pills. Looked at the buff colored folder, reading upside down: MAZIBUKO M. He slid the file across the desk and turned it to face him. Scanned it. Inja Mazibuko had been admitted to the hospital three months before with a bullet in his leg. Zondi turned a page. Came across the result of blood work. Didn't need a medical degree to see that not only was Inja HIV positive but his T-cell count was shot to hell. He had full-blown AIDS.
Zondi understood now why Inja was marrying the girl who looked so much like her mother.
Sunday felt as if she was in one of those dreams where time moved as slowly as a stream of dark mud. She sat on a blanket in the dust, weaving at the wooden loom, the betrothal beads whispering to her every time she moved.
Richard droned away in English, telling the small crowd of sweating white people that they should follow him to the beer ceremony that would conclude the tour. After she served the beer Sunday would hurry to where her bag waited in the hut. She would change her clothes and walk out to Sipho's car and freedom.
Sunday looked up from her weaving, staring past the pink faces with their sharp noses and pale eyes. Seeing something unusual. A black tourist. A tall man in expensive jeans and shoes. Standing at the edge of the group. She heard Richard speak to him and he answered in Zulu. But he was from the city, for sure, in those clothes.
As she left the loom and walked toward the ceremonial hut, she felt the man's eyes on her. But when she turned he looked away, the sun dancing like fire on the frame of his sunglasses.
Zondi looked at the girl serving beer to the tourists and saw her mother. After killing Jola and fleeing to Johannesburg, Zondi had purged himself of his longing for Thandi, his first and only love. A kind of emotional cold turkey. Stumbling through drunken nights with fast Soweto girls in backrooms stinking of unwashed bodies and Vaseline and beer. There were times where he'd nearly weakened, jumped on a bus back to this valley where he would have been put to death.
Four years later, when he took his life in his hands and came home to bury his mother, he had seen Thandi. She lived in a hut on a hill, married to a man who spent most of the year in Durban, polishing white women's stone floors to a mirror. She told Zondi she was childless. A barren woman, she said. A disappointment to her husband.
Of course Zondi slept with her. In her mud hut, on a blanket on the dung floor. Thandi passive and silent after the Jo'burg girls, who had shouted their lust at the ceilings. The deeper Zondi pushed himself into her, the farther away he slid. He had won a bursary to study politics in Johannesburg. Ran with a crowd of intellectuals and radicals, many of them blonde and hungry. Thandi had stayed marooned in a valley unchanged in hundreds of years. Jets rumbled overhead but the people in their shadows lived the same way their great-grandparents had lived.
Zondi went back to Johannesburg without saying goodbye to her and never returned. He'd heard, five or six years later, that she and her husband had been murdered, part of one of the ongoing clan feuds in the area. Heard that Thandi hadn't been barren, after all.
Her daughter came to him and knelt, extended a clay gourd for him to drink from. He almost spoke to her. Stopped himself. This wasn't the time. He took a sip of the sour sorghum beer. A taste that reminded him of the poverty of his childhood, his tongue attuned to single malt now.
He handed the gourd back and she looked up at him from under her eyebrows, muttered thank you in Zulu and darted away. Zondi's head throbbed. He felt breathless. Claustrophobic. Crouched and duc
ked through the low doorway of the hut, standing up into the dry heat that slapped him dizzy.
"Why did you have to kill him?"
His son's voice woke Goodbread and when he coughed his eyes open, he was back in the distant dust of his childhood, in the high desert of West Texas, the land burned bare by the drought that had come in the wake of World War II. Took a moment to understand this was a different dry landscape blurring by through the windshield of the truck.
"What you say, boy?"
"You heard me," Dell said.
Goodbread cleared his throat, battled to give voice to the dusty words. "Reckon he left me no choice. He could identify us."
"The kid will tell them, anyway."
"Tell them what? He was maybe eight years old, what's he going to say more than we're two men in a white pickup truck?"
"And that cop in the town saw us."
"I'll wager he was dreaming of his girl's lunch meat. Couldn't give a description worth a sack of shit." Goodbread hadn't spoken in hours and the talking pained his throat. He drank some water and fired up a cigarette. Sucked smoke.
"Has it always come so fucking easy to you?" His son again.
"What in the hell are you talking about now, boy?"
"Killing."
Goodbread didn't reply. Smoked and stared out at the road that stretched straight as a wire to the horizon.
Dell said, "Ah, fuck it," and fiddled with the car radio, searching for a newscast. He'd been listening obsessively for reports of their whereabouts. A voice cut through the static, speaking in that grating, guttural Cape accent. The newsreader talking about yet another farm murder. North of Cape Town.
When Goodbread caught the name Althea Vorster he turned up the volume. The woman, her son, his wife and two children. All dead. And he knew to a bone certainty whose handiwork this was.
A coughing spasm seized Goodbread and he felt blood wet and warm in his mouth and on the palm of the hand he lifted to his face. He turned his head away, stared out over the sand and scrub as he brought his breathing under control. Wiped himself clean on a handkerchief.
Dell stilled the radio, looked at him. "The woman who cut my hair?"
Goodbread nodded. Gasped for air. "Now that shitwad has got me angry."
"You weren't angry before?" his son asked.
The old man shook his head. "No. Before he killed your kin. Now he's killed mine."
Zondi sat in his Beemer in the car park of the Zulu Kingdom, engine running, A/C cranked high, windows shut against the heat and the dust. Sipping water from a plastic bottle. His head hurt like hell, as if his brain itself ached and he felt a weird dissociation, like he was lagging half a step behind himself.
The term contrecoup injury came unbidden. Caused, he remembered, by the brain smashing into the bones of the skull. He flashed on images from a crash-test movie he'd caught early one morning on the Discovery Channel, sitting drinking single malt, numb after a night of dislocated sex. Watching cadavers strapped behind the wheels of speeding cars sent into high-speed collisions. Heads exploding through windshields in sprays of glass, hoods of cars crumpling like foil, lovingly rendered in balletic slow-motion. Saw himself flying around in the taxi, his skull connecting with the hard metal surfaces.
He was sleepy, his chin sagging to his chest. He sat up and poured water into the palm of his hand and wiped his face. Felt the A/C chilling his wet skin. Through drops of water he saw the girl walking across the sand toward him, carrying a paper shopping bag with string handles. She was dressed in those shapeless jeans poor people wore, her T-shirt threadbare but desperately clean, with ironed creases so sharp you could cut your hand on them. Zondi opened the door and stepped out into the wall of heat.
When she was almost abreast of Zondi the girl smiled the same smile her mother had used on him twenty years ago. He turned and saw a young guy, maybe eighteen or nineteen, leaning against a small, dented Nissan, smiling back at her. He wore one of those I'M POSITIVE T-shirts AIDS activists sported to proclaim their status. The boy took the bag from the girl and opened the trunk and stowed it. Slammed the lid and the two of them got into the car.
She looked too happy, Zondi decided, for him to intrude now. He slumped down behind the wheel of the Beemer. He'd come back tomorrow. When he was rested. When he felt more in control.
Truth was, he was shit scared. Terrified to open a door he'd bolted when he'd fled this valley long ago. He shut his eyes, sucking up a lung full of refrigerant from the BMW's A/C. Heard the Nissan splutter into life. The old car bumped out of the parking lot, throwing up red sand at the late afternoon sun.
The tour guide watched the car drive away. This was wrong, he knew, the betrothed of Induna Mazibuko alone with that little troublemaker from Durban. Richard had chased him away from the cultural village many times before, when he had come with his condoms and his pamphlets and his lies about disease.
Richard had changed out of his skins, wore a pair of sweat pants and a check shirt. Sandals made from old whitewall tires. He reached into the pocket of his sweats and found his cell phone. He had no way of reaching Induna Mazibuko directly but he had the number of somebody close to him.
Richard prodded at the keypad with a thick finger as he watched the car disappear through the gates and turn toward the main road. Heard the voice of the Induna's sister shout a greeting at a volume that pained his eardrum.
Dell sat alone at a table in the diner, watching the sky darken to the color of congealed blood. His father was in the truck parked across the road. He didn't want food. Said that Dell would be less conspicuous alone. Dell was amazed that he could eat. He'd only picked at the breakfast that morning, the one served to them by the blonde woman, but in the hours that had passed he'd found himself starved.
The colored waitress brought him a greasy steak sandwich and fries and each mouthful seemed to make him hungrier until his plate was empty. He was the only customer in this little Formica time machine that seemed to have survived intact from the early sixties. And the small town outside the window hadn't changed much, either. Across from where he sat Dell could see a dusty park and a public swimming pool, run down and deserted.
Dell called for the check and the waitress went to the cash register to prepare it. Goodbread came in. Didn't look at him as he headed across to the men's room. The woman took Dell's money and went to make change, moving at small-town pace. By the time she returned and Dell pocketed the money, his father hadn't emerged from the bathroom.
Dell needed to take a piss, so he pushed through the swinging door. A porcelain urinal and a stall. The door to the stall was half open. His father lay on the floor. Dell shoved the door and stepped in, saw blood on Goodbread's face and on his shirt. The old man was sucking air, the skin across his sunken cheeks a bruised blue. Dell grabbed him under the arms and lifted him, amazed at how light he was. Sat him on the seat of the toilet. Bent him forward. Heard his breathing ease a little.
Dell grabbed a wad of toilet paper and crossed to the basin. Wet the paper and went back into the stall and wiped his father's mouth. There was nothing to be done about the blood on the shirt. Goodbread's breathing was more regular and some color had seeped back into his face.
"You okay?" Dell asked.
"Yes."
Dell tried to get an arm under him. "Let me help you back to the truck."
The old man shrugged him off. "I'll make my own way. You go." His voice a whisper.
Dell walked out. Crossed the road and stood looking into the ruined swimming pool. It was filled with rotting garbage. He could see the frame of an old bicycle and the stiff carcass of a dog in the bed of waste.
He remembered reading about this place, around the time apartheid ended. The Afrikaners who ran the town had emptied the pool and smashed its tiled walls and floor with sledgehammers to make sure it would never hold water again. Refusing to share the rectangle of blue chlorine with the dark people from across the railroad tracks.
Dell turned and watched his father cro
ss the road. The old man looked like a ghost. Goodbread climbed up into the truck, shut the door and beckoned him. Dell made his way back to the pickup, cranked the engine, and drove down the main street. Goodbread fought for breath, gulping air through his mouth.
"Lung cancer?" Dell asked
"Yes."
"How long have you got?"
"A month. Maybe two." Words coming with difficulty.
"That why they let you out?"
"Uh huh. Compassionate parole." Laughed. The laugh triggered a coughing spasm.
Dell had nothing to say. He turned the truck toward the highway.
The little car struggled up the last of the inclines that would take them out of the valley and onto the Durban road. Sunday sneaked glances at Sipho as he drove, the low sun silhouetting his fine features, almost girlish beneath his short-cropped hair. He felt her eyes on him and turned to her.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"Yes. Thank you." Looking away quickly. Her cheeks burning.
"You're really sure you want to do this, Sunday? Induna Mazibuko is not a man you want to anger."
"Of course I'm sure."
As she spoke she took the betrothal beads from around her neck and snapped the string of cotton and dried grass. The plastic beads pooled in her hands. Sunday wound down her side window and threw the beads out, saw them bouncing on the sand road, black as rabbit turds. There was a taxi a little way behind them and it amused her that its wheels would crush them. She laughed and felt lighter. She closed the window and saw Sipho glancing at his rearview mirror.
"Do you have any family, in Durban? Who you can stay with?" he asked.
"No." Sunday felt a sudden panic. She had an image of Sipho abandoning her in the middle of the giant city she had seen only on the pages of magazines.
He worked the gearstick with his long-fingered hand and the engine whined, the car hugging the hairpin bends. They seemed to be moving no faster than the goats ambling along at the roadside, with their bearded old men's faces.