If I had a phone I could call for help. I could lean on the hooter. Will anyone come? Those lights there through the trees, that’s a house on the other side of the old road. They probably won’t hear. And even if they do, they probably won’t come. These days it’s every man for himself.
There was something written across the rear window of the bus, one of those blinds printed with a platitude. Something he should memorize. But he couldn’t make it out in the gloom.
If I run towards the highway there’s just the one fence, three strands of barbed wire, I could vault it or go underneath, leopard crawling.
He got out of the cab again. Surrender the vehicle. After Manny Pinheiro got shot, Sylvia had done one of those courses where they taught you how to behave in a hijacking, had done it in his place, because really he was the one who needed it. She was always quoting phrases from the manual. Move slowly. Don’t look them in the eye. It is not worth dying to save your car. He pushed down the lock on the door panel, lifted the handle and shut the door. Do not be a hero.
The four men were standing behind the bus. At the sound of his door closing, one of them looked across, and then away again. They were in no hurry. They were also moving slowly, not looking him in the eye. For some reason their slowness, their ease, kept him rooted. If they had rushed at him, he might have fled. Instead they were talking casually, barely acknowledging him, deliberately ignoring him, as if they were giving him time to run away. This understanding of their attitude rooted him more firmly. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, testing the mechanics of escape like someone in a dream, trying to run away but making no progress. Running in molasses.
His movement caught their attention. Two of the men looked at him directly for the first time. A third opened the back of the bus and reached for something. The fourth walked a few paces away, unzipped his fly and began to piss. The third man shut the door of the bus with a bang. He had something in his hand, a pipe perhaps. The fourth man rezipped his pants. Now all four of them came towards him over the flattened veld grass, and then stopped again and looked around.
Where are the guns?
The cars swept past half a kilometre away.
They should have guns.
They were all the same height, all wearing the same outfit. Dark jackets, leather jackets he thought, light pants. They looked like a musical group, a quartet. Even their faces were rough equivalents of one another. Perhaps they were brothers? The members of a gang or a club? What should he memorize?
One of them was carrying the pipe he’d taken from the back of the bus. It might be a spanner for the jack. He was not pointing it or flourishing it, it was simply there, an incidental object, dangling from his fingers. He moved ahead of the others.
Walk. His knees buckled as he walked into the clearing in front of the bakkie, as if he was going to meet them, and then stopped with the headlights behind him. His body felt disjointed. He swayed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Molasses. Why do they always say ‘molasses’?
They were wearing jackets despite the heat. The one in front, the one with the pipe, had a puffy coat, something stuffed with down. His head was round and smooth, there was a clenched look about his face, about his whole body, the hard body you had to imagine beneath the soft coat. He stopped while the others hung back and held out his hand, the hand that was not holding the pipe.
‘Come. We do not want trouble.’ His voice was reasonable and soft. He wanted the keys.
I should throw them into the dark like a character in a film, a small man full of bravado, standing up for himself. Let them look, let them discover how hard it is to find anything in this mess. One flick of the wrist will do it.
But instead he closed his fist, felt the key ring pressing into his palm. He was here for a reason, he saw that now, he had been given the chance to demonstrate something to these men, to himself. But what? Which qualities was he called upon to show?
His knees folded a little more, his shoulders hunched up around his ears as if his body could no longer support the weight of his head.
The man with the pipe looked curious. He said something to the others without looking back and they moved closer. What is this drunken fool up to?
They are going to beat me. He could feel their fists striking him already, knocking his face into a blur, into a buckled concertina of features, cartoonishly stupefied. I am in the light.
He saw his shadow, an enormous projection of himself, on the billboard. He was crouched over, butting the air with his fists. He was bobbing and weaving. Making patterns in the air with his head, tracing figure eights and zeds, practising a sort of calligraphy, an American art. A boxing machine. A boxing machine in molasses. A primitive thing, clankier than Gutenberg’s press, driven by belts and flywheels, speaking an ancient, oily language of cranks and cams, sprockets and valves. He would resist. He would absorb the punishment and stay on his feet, a man who did not know when he was beaten. Bobbing. Weaving. Dancing.
Their disbelieving faces came closer. The one in front was holding the pipe diagonally across his body, gripping it in two places like an axe, cancelling himself out.
He saw exactly what would happen. They would beat him and hammer him and drill him. He bobbed, and ducked, and refused to fall. They struck out, as if they were driving nails into him, and with every blow he felt more like himself.
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