Man Down

by Roger Smith

  As he passed the closed door to Tanya’s office their infant took a breath to recharge her cries and he heard the rodent-like scuff of his wife’s fingers on her computer keyboard.

  When the wails started again Tanya shouted, “Will you for fuck sake shut her up?”

  Turner entered Lucy’s room, tracking through a tumble of toys and lifted his nine-month-old daughter from her crib, her tiny face crimson with fury. He rocked her but she continued to yell.

  Cradling Lucy he took her through to the kitchen and made a bottle of formula, one-handed.

  As soon as the suckling’s lips found the teat her cries stopped as she gulped and slurped, as rapacious as he had once been at the bottle and the pipe.

  Turner opened the refrigerator, his nose curling as he caught a whiff of spoiled food, and lifted out a can of Coke.

  Still holding Lucy he cracked the tab and heard a whisper of fizz.

  Drinking from the can, the syrupy metallic taste on his tongue, he looked out the kitchen window at the garden of the Parkview house, bare trees black against the cold blue of a Jo’burg August sky, the grass burned yellow by sun and frost.

  Dry.

  Dry like him these past sixteen months and twenty-two days.

  Turner carried Lucy back to her bedroom and laid her in her crib, standing over her as she fell asleep.

  He returned to the living room and took his seat before the TV, the monotony of the game, which was lurching toward a draw, lulling him almost to sleep again.

  Rain started to fall in London and the match was abandoned amidst a sudden flurry of men dragging covers over the pitch.

  Turner grabbed the remote and surfed until he found live coverage of the provincial premier, a small man as sleek and sportive as a seal, stepping from a limousine outside the Sandton hotel that was hosting some political shindig into a barrage of camera flashes, his stocky, overdressed wife stumbling after him on stilt-like heels.

  In claustrophobic close-up the premier smiled a smile so wide that his eyes disappeared into knife-slits in his dark face.

  The face of a man who had sold his soul in a Faustian pact.

  The face of the Lawn Jockey.

  The kidnapping and presumed murder of his step-daughter had been his finest hour. He’d stood firm, any initial suspicion of his complicity washed away by the TV-ready combination of strength and tragic vulnerability.

  When his father-in-law had crumbled, taken low by the fate of his beloved granddaughter, it was the Lawn Jockey who’d shone in the media, calling for justice, begging the kidnappers to release his daughter (claiming her as his child for the first time) and—as the days became weeks—begging them to return her body for burial and the groundswell of support was such that, as was the way of these things, he became a spokesman for violence against women and children and this morphed into political clout and when the incumbent premier was ousted for turpitude and malfeasance the Lawn Jockey was thrust into power by the ruling party, shining and clean and wearing the irresistible mantle of mourning, and now it was said that his political sights were set on the highest office.

  And Chris Bekker, or so Turner had heard on the withered grape vine, had prospered along with the Lawn Jockey, the two men joined at the hip by the secrets they shared, the Afrikaner cop wielding a hidden power way beyond his pay grade.

  Turner hadn’t seen Bekker since the night of the carnage and had spoken to him only once, nine months ago, on the night Lucy was born.

  The night Turner had watched his child fight her way out of Tanya who had dug her nails into his palm until it bled and screamed and rained down on him a stream of glottal filth, calling him everything that was low and base.

  When the newborn was finally whisked off to an incubator he’d been ordered out of the room where Tanya lay torn and bleeding. She would be stapled and stitched but would never regain her enthusiasm for sex.

  Or perhaps it was Turner she had lost all enthusiasm for.

  Feeling as if he were watching himself from afar he took an elevator to the lobby of the hospital and walked out into the night, smelling gasoline and the blossoms of spring.

  When his cell phone rang (a new number, he’d trashed the one from his drug dealer days) and he saw “Caller Unknown” on the display Turner hesitated, but, expecting it to be one of Tanya’s colleagues asking for a status update, he answered.

  “Yes?”

  “Englishman.”

  Turner watched an empty bus drive by, the hunched driver looking like a refugee from a Hopper painting.

  “What do you want?”

  “Just to congratulate you.”

  Turner said nothing, hearing the wail of an approaching ambulance.

  “You take care now,” Bekker said. “Now that you’ve got something to lose.”

  The call had ended and Turner had walked back into the hospital.

  Turner, his mood disrupted by these memories, killed the TV and a sudden craving for a drink and something narcotic drove him from his chair to the French windows, where he looked out at the small pool, its surface made choppy and agitated by the PoolShark cleaner, the gizmo that Tanya had persuaded him to sink his blood money into marketing—she had successfully represented the impoverished inventor in a patent suit—and by God if it wasn’t starting to pay off, Turner better at selling pool cleaners than drugs.

  He opened the doors onto the cold, feeling the sting of the chill on his face, and walked to the water, staring down.

  How long he stood there he didn’t know but by the time he heard the doors open behind him his nose and ears were stinging.

  “Johnny?” Tanya said from the doorway.

  She was wearing jeans, a white shirt and charcoal sweater. Dressy for her.

  “Fuck, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “The drinks thing?”

  He remembered.

  A social engagement with her cronies from some desperately worthy legal aid group.

  Which meant standing drinking Coke while her unappealing colleagues drank boxed wine and traded human rights abuses in their smug, self-satisfied voices.

  “Why don’t you go?” he said. “I’ll stay with Lucy.”

  “Fuck that,” she said. “You’re coming. I’m tired of flying solo at these things. I’ll get her.”

  He locked up the house, gathering together formula bottles and diapers and stowing them in a bag.

  Tanya emerged with Lucy swaddled like an Inuit and Turner activated the complex alarm system and they went out to the new Nissan parked in the driveway of the walled, fenced fortress.

  He put the bag in the rear and strapped Lucy into her car seat.

  As he reversed and activated the remote on the keychain, the gate rattling open, a familiar sharp smell filled his nostrils.

  “She’s crapped,” he said and stopped outside the gate, which started to judder closed.

  “Jesus,” Tanya said, stepping out of the car, opening the rear door and grabbing Lucy roughly enough for the child to start to wail. “Open the gate, I’ll change her inside. Keep the car running and get the heater going for fuck’s sake.”

  As Turner, watching his wife hurry back toward the house, switched on the car heater, his side window disintegrated in an explosion of glass, a fall of shards landing in his lap.

  A gun was at his temple and a voice shouted, “Out. Now.”

  Turner fell out of the open door, landing on his knees, his hands raised, the gun still at his head.

  Two young men.

  Black.

  One gunpointing him, the other diving behind the wheel.

  Turner saw Tanya turning toward him, her sharp nose hamster pink from the cold, opening her mouth to shout as the man’s pistol swung onto her and their baby.

  Turner felt the chill wind of karma and knew this was it.

  This is when he would pay for what he had done.

  But Tanya swallowed her scream and the gun was gone from Turner’s hea
d and the men were in the car, speeding away down the street.

  Tanya stood over him.

  “Fuck this country.”

  She stalked back to the house and Turner got to his feet, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone, dialing 911.

  10

  Turner and Lucy, as bloody as extras in a splatter movie, sat on a rock down where the driveway met the road, staring out across the sand and the scrub to where the sun leaked into the sky over the distant mountains, listening to an invisible coyote in a call and response with the wailing siren that closed in on them.

  The girl shook and he held her, the blackened stub of his ring finger resting on her arm above the small gash from the saw. The blood had already congealed and the wound would need no sutures. The scars she’d carry from the night would not be on her flesh.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  She fell silent and in her silence he felt the press of all the unanswerable questions about what had befallen them.

  After a long time she said, “Why? Why did this happen to us, Daddy?”

  “It just happened.”

  “But why?”

  “Sometimes things are beyond reason. They just happen.”

  “They just happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it could happen again?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I believe everybody has their ration of luck, good and bad. I think we’ve about used up our bad luck.”

  “And our good luck?”

  “We’re sitting here, aren’t we?”

  The siren had become a chorus now and light bars strobed through the brush and the saguaro.

  “Did God save us?” Lucy asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you believe in God?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t believe in God.” Turner paused, blinking, as if seeing something he didn’t want to see. “But I do believe in the Devil.”

  11

  Turner, communing with the massacred Afrikaner family who remained imprinted as a memory trace on the atmosphere of the death house, slid down the wall and sat on the stained carpet, staring at the bullet holes in the plaster, waiting for the gunshot from the bedroom as Bekker finished the girl.

  After a minute the cop stepped out and Turner decided that his addled, overloaded mind, unable to process what was happening, had edited out the sound of the shot.

  Bekker stood above him and shook his head as he lifted his mask.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “Jesus fuckin Christ. I can’t shoot her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s just a fuckin kid. I can’t do it.” He raised the weapon and placed it against Turner’s temple. “But you I can do.”

  And again, Turner waited to die.

  “Unless . . . ,” Bekker said.

  “Unless what?” The words, abrasive as sandpaper, scratched at Turner’s throat.

  “Unless you do her.”

  Bekker lowered the gun and squatted before Turner.

  “You understand one of you has to die?”

  “I understand.”

  Bekker shrugged. “Okay, so are you up for it?”

  Turner closed his eyes, something screaming inside his skull.

  The pistol jogged his head and he looked at Bekker.

  “No,” Turner said.

  Bekker shrugged. “Okay.”

  Turner saw Bekker’s gloved finger tightening on the trigger.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Bekker stilled his finger.

  “Give me the gun,” Turner said.

  Bekker laughed. “You think I’m fuckin crazy, Englishmen?”

  Turner squinted, baffled.

  “I give you the gun so you can shoot me with it?”

  Turner hadn’t considered that option but now that it was presented to him he saw its value.

  “Uh, uh,” Bekker said. “I keep this, you go over to my bag and you get my throwdown.”

  Of course, Chris Bekker would always keep some outlaw, untraceable firearm nearby.

  Turner, using the wall, raised himself to his feet and crossed the room. He knelt by Bekker’s bag, light refracting from the oily black fabric, and reached for the pull-tab of the zipper, fingering the icy little teardrop, drawing it toward him with a wasp’s nest buzz of unmeshing teeth, his nostrils filled with the unmistakable scent of cotton paper and engraver’s ink.

  What was revealed to him was worthy of the cover of one of the endless stream of pulp paperbacks he’d consumed over the decades: a pistol lying atop a stack of money.

  Turner lifted the pistol.

  He’d never held one before and was surprised at its heft.

  He looked across at Bekker who stood with his automatic pointed at Turner’s heart.

  “What do I do?” Turner asked.

  “Release the safety.”

  “How?”

  “On the left side of the weapon, just above your thumb, you’ll find a switch.”

  Standing, tilting the pistol toward the lamp, Turner saw the safety catch and moved it down with his thumb.

  There was a little click, like a pen smacked against a tooth.

  “Now cock it,” Bekker said.

  Turner stared at him.

  “Jesus, Englishman. Take the rear of the weapon in your left hand like you’re gonna jerk it off. Pull it back.”

  Turner did as he said and heard it rasp as it was cocked.

  “You’re good to go,” Bekker said, his own weapon unwavering.

  A bead of sweat broke free of Turner’s hair and landed on the black metal of the gun.

  “Do it,” Bekker said.

  Turner didn’t move.

  “Fuckin do it, Englishman.”

  Turner, moving through air as thick and viscous as oil, floated toward the bedroom, light lagging and streaking, his racing heart trying to beat its way through his sternum, the room suddenly brighter as his pupils dilated, the sound of his shoes on the carpet loud to his ears.

  The girl sat on the bed, her hands in her lap, the yellow light from the lamp catching the planes of her cheeks. She looked up at him.

  “I’m sorry,” Turner said.

  The girl stared at the mouth of the gun and then she stared into his eyes for a very long time. Whatever she saw in his eyes caused her to close hers and it was that movement, her falling lids mimicking the action of a camera shutter—capturing not only Turner’s image but also his dark and corrupt essence—that made him pull the trigger.

  THE END