by Roger Smith
She ignored the stares and whispers of the other passengers. She knew how it looked, a beat-up colored chickie, blood on her T-shirt, with a white kid.
Fuck them.
She stroked the boy’s hair, and he lifted his face, trying to focus on her. Then his eyes closed again. Sheldon’s T-shirt was too small for him, and it was unwashed, but at least it was better than the pj top with Uncle Fatty’s brains all over it.
She knew she had killed the old man, had felt his head all spongy and soft under the Virgin Mary. Served the bastard right. While she was beating him she had flashed back to memories of her own childhood, and there were moments when, what with the tik and all her rage, she wasn’t sure if she was hammering Uncle Fatty or her own sick fuck of a father.
The taxi slammed to a stop, and passengers fought their way off, while others clambered in. She grabbed the boy and pushed her way out, past the leering sliding-door operator.
“I see where he got his blue eyes,” he said, laughing at her bruises.
She didn’t waste her breath on him, just slung Matt over her shoulder and crossed to the community center. The kid weighed her down. He had big bones, the little bugger.
She pushed through the smear of depressed humanity patiently waiting for nursing sisters and social workers and government grants, until she came to the door of Belinda Titus’s office.
She banged once on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. Belinda Titus sat at her desk, fastidiously applying lipstick while she admired herself in a compact mirror. Her freshly painted lips parted like a hooker’s thighs when she saw Carmen.
“I beg your pardon, but you can’t just march in here!” Belinda Titus, indignant, twisted the lipstick back into itself like she was twisting Carmen’s neck.
“I just did,” Carmen said, dumping the boy on the chair facing the social worker.
“What is this?” Belinda Titus demanded. “Who is this chil?”
“His name is Matt. He’s American. I think he was kidnapped.” Carmen was on her way out. She stopped as she opened the door. “By the way,” she said, rubbing a finger across her mouth, “you got lipstick on your teeth.”
She had slammed the door and walked back through the downtrodden and the oppressed, and she had felt better than she had in a long time. She knew it wouldn’t last, but what the fuck, she’d enjoy it while it did.
Then, as she came into Tulip Street, she heard the crowd before she saw them. A low animal roar of bloodlust. Carmen pushed her way through the mob and saw a bloody shape lying in the dust. It took her a few moments to recognize Gatsby. Donovan September was hitting him with a hammer, and some of the other boys and men were putting the boot in. The crowd was roaring its approval, calling for revenge.
Carmen, not able to drag her eyes away, was having serious reality issues. At last she convinced herself that what she was seeing was real, not some tik hallucination, and she heard her voice joining in, calling for the blood of the fat boer.
Burn sprinted up the street in time to see the mob form around Barnard and envelop him. Burn dived in, shoved bodies aside, his white skin and American voice surprising people out of his way.
“Stop! Don’t kill him!”
The boy with the hammer looked up for a moment, paused. Then he went back to his work, smashing Barnard’s head open like a Halloween pumpkin.
Burn tried to level the Mossberg at the boy, but hands in the crowd, like tendrils, took the gun from him. He was jostled, sworn at, and he felt a fist connect with his jaw. Then a rock hit him above the left ear and he dropped to the ground. The crowd became a single organism that lifted him off his feet and moved him to its perimeter, where it dumped him onto the sand.
Berenice September, carrying shopping bags on her way home from work, arrived at the moment when the mob parted and allowed the child to roll his tire to the center.
She saw the unmistakable form of Gatsby lying on the sand. And she saw her son, the serious one she loved so much, crouched over the cop, a bloody hammer in his hand.
“Donovan! No, Donovan!”
Her son looked up at her, and she saw his face as she had never seen it before.
Then the crowd closed again.
Donovan September took the tire that was offered by the solemn child, and he lifted Gatsby’s head and slung the tire around his fat neck like a necklace. Then a jerrican of fuel was passed through the crowd, and Donovan doused the fat man’s body.
Gatsby was still alive, his ribs pumping, his hands reaching up to the heavens. The mob moved back a few paces, and Donovan September lit a cloth and threw it at the fat man.
Gatsby exploded into flame.
Benny Mongrel stood at the very edge of the crowd and watched as they fell upon the fat cop. Every blow that rained down on that fat body smashed the desire for revenge out of his own.
It was right that this was happening.
It was good.
It was why he had been led here.
Benny Mongrel watched as the flames consumed the man who had killed his dog.
Rudi Barnard was in the lake of fire that his preacher had prophesied. His body was spiderwebbed with black char lines as the flames burned through the layers of his skin. He lifted his arms and welcomed the flames, even though they consumed his flesh with a most terrible agony. This was when he would be granted salvation, the gift of voices, when he would emerge from the fire cleansed of mortal sin and find his reward.
He looked around him in the lake of fire and saw the sinners, the lost souls, damned to burn in this hell for eternity. He tried to lift himself, to take a step forward, toward the light that he knew was ahead of him.
But he could not.
The burning water held him back. The limbs of the damned enfolded him and pulled him deeper and deeper into the inferno. He tried one last time, to drag himself toward the light that grew fainter and fainter as it retreated from him. Then, when the light at last was dimmed forever, Rudi Barnard finally had his answer.
His god was dead.
CHAPTER 31
Susan Burn lay in the operating theater, bisected by the sterile drapes that screened her lower body from her view.
She felt dislocated, detached, a numbness beyond that caused by the epidural anesthetic. She felt alone. Unlike when Matt was born, she had no hand to hold, no familiar presence to give her strength through the pain. No Jack to share the joy when the moment came. The drapes added to the sense of dislocation and alienation. Her doctor and his team were busy beyond the curtain, and Susan was reminded of a puppet show she had seen as a child.
She heard a whirring noise, like a food processor, and the acrid smell of her own body burning reached her nostrils. He’s cauterizing your blood vessels, she told herself, trying to pretend that she was narrating something on the Discovery Channel. After the whirring ended, she heard nothing but the muted clink of surgical equipment and the whispers of the doctor and his nurse.
“We have her head here, Susan,” she heard the doctor say. “I’m suctioning fluids out of her nose and mouth.”
Thank God, she’s breathing. That dread, that terrible superstitious premonition, had hung over her the whole day. That some price would have to be paid for the wrong that she and Jack had done. And that price would be the life of her baby.
“Okay, now I’m going in for the rest of her, Susan. I need you to help me, okay?”
She heard herself reply. “Okay. What do I do?”
“Just press your hands into the upper part of your abdomen and push down.”
She felt the nurse guide her hands to the spot, and she started pressing. It was nothing like the protracted ordeal of giving birth to Matt, when she had felt as if a part of her body was being torn from her, but at least she was a participant in this drama, no longer a member of the audience. She pushed.
“Okay, we have her,” the doctor said.
Then, exactly like in one of those puppet shows, her red and yellow baby, face squashed and furious, was hel
d up above the curtain for her to view. Instinctively, she reached out her hands, but the nurse shook her head.
“She has to go into the warmer. We’ll give her to you in a minute.”
Susan lay staring up at the lights, listening as another suction did its work. Then the nurse returned with the infant and handed her to Susan. She lay her baby daughter, Lucy, against her breast and felt those tiny lips already sucking at her nipple.
And Susan felt herself crying, really letting go, for the first time since that day in Florida when Jack had told her what he had done to their lives.
Burn wandered, dazed, at the periphery of the mob. His head throbbed, and he could feel sticky blood behind his ear, from where the rock had struck him. The sickly sweet smell of burning human flesh came to his nostrils, and through the shifting mass he saw Barnard’s body ablaze.
The crowd, after its initial violent rage, was strangely quiet, as if now that the thing was done, it had to absorb the impact of its actions. People on the outside of the pack started to break away and drift up the street.
Burn moved through the thinning mob until he came to its center. He stood over the charred form of Barnard, the face unrecognizable, the teeth visible in a grimace, the arms stretched upward, blackened claws grasping. Whether this was Barnard’s last action or an involuntary muscle contraction caused by the heat, Burn would never know.
But what he did know, with absolute certainty, was that the only man who could take him to his son was dead.
People were dispersing with more urgency. Even those closest to Barnard, the ones who had initiated this act, freed themselves from the mob’s grasp. The young man, no more than a teenager, who had beaten Barnard and set him alight, took a last look and turned and wandered into a house nearby. A middle-aged woman stood in the front doorway watching him. They said nothing to each other as the boy went into the house.
Burn realized that he had been listening to the clamor of sirens for at least a minute, and they were getting closer.
He turned and ran back up the road toward the Ford.
He had no idea what he would do next.
Benny Mongrel walked away. It was done. There was nothing more for him here.
On the corner, near the taxi stand, he saw a man around his own age propping up the gate of a cramped yard, smoking, watching the goings-on but keeping his distance. His tattoos and his demeanor were those of a man who knew enough about trouble to give it a wide berth.
“They saying that’s Gatsby they got there,” he said to Benny Mongrel.
“Ja, it’s him.”
“He was a fucken bastard.”
“Last of his kind.” Benny Mongrel saw an opportunity and took it. “You got a smoke for me, brother?”
The man removed a crumpled pack of Luckies from his trouser pocket and held it out. Benny Mongrel took one, slipped it between his lips.
“You know, Gatsby, he shot me once,” the man said as he lit Benny Mongrel’s cigarette.
“Then how come you still here?”
“He must of been in a good mood.” The man laughed sourly and turned and made his way toward the shabby house, dragging one leg as he walked.
Benny Mongrel headed away from the sirens, puffing on the cigarette behind his cupped hand. The wind had died, and the air hung as heavy as a blanket on the Flats.
Carmen Fortune left the mob behind and walked back toward her apartment block. She was relieved that she wouldn’t have to deal with Gatsby finding out what she had done with the boy. At least there was that.
She passed a white man getting into a dented brown Ford. Most of the white men you saw on the Flats were cops, but he didn’t look like one. He was bleeding from his head, and he looked confused. Lost. When he pulled away, he grated the gears of the car.
She climbed the stairs, and as she got up to the landing she saw her neighbor Whitey Brand come walking out of her apartment with her TV, casual as you please.
“Hey, what the fuck!” Carmen ran up the last few stairs.
Whitey just looked at her and walked on, taking the TV into his place.
When Carmen got to her apartment, she saw the door was standing open. It was splintered like it had been kicked in. Then she saw Whitey’s brother Shane bending over some dead guys in her living room-guys she didn’t know-ripping off their money and cell phones.
Carmen decided she was experiencing a particularly bad tik crash, that she honest-to-god was starting to lose her mind. She shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw Shane pushing past her, his hands full. The dead men were still there, bleeding on her floor. And the sirens were slicing through her head like a butcher’s saw through bone.
She turned and walked away. There was nothing in that place that she needed anymore.
Disaster Zondi stood and looked down at the charred remains of Rudi Barnard. The smell of burned human flesh reached his nose, a smell both awful and haunting. The clothes had burned into the skin. The hair was gone. The shoes had melted onto the feet. The tire had burned away completely; all that eft were the three steel rings from its inner core circling what had been Barnard’s neck and chest.
It had been years, decades, since Zondi had seen a necklacing. The first time had been at the funeral of a youth activist in Soweto in the mideighties when he’d been sixteen or seventeen. The comrades had attacked a young woman accused of being a police informer. Zondi remembered being drawn into the fervor, chanting freedom songs and dancing the toyi-toyi as the woman was stoned and hacked. A boy younger than Zondi had shoved a broken bottle up the woman’s vagina. Then she was encircled by a tire and burned to death.
The necklacing, far from being gruesome and terrifying, had been heady, exciting. Had left him filled with an enormous sense of power, his own and that of the untold number of kids who were going to bring the enemy down.
Zondi, a youth of his time, had swapped the Book of Common Prayer of his mission school childhood for the altogether more appealing manifesto of Leon Trotsky. Who was he to experience pangs of distaste, never mind guilt, if they executed their enemies in this way? After all, the mother of the nation, Winnie Mandela-Nelson’s very own wife-had stood before them and applauded their actions, saying they would liberate the country with their boxes of matches and tires.
Zondi had participated, at a distance, in a number of other necklacings. He had long since closed the book on those memories and the thorny questions they sometimes begged. Now, like a lot of men washed up in the twenty-first century without an easy moral compass, he was defined more by what he didn’t believe in than what he did.
But this, he had to concede, had a certain poetry to it.
He overheard two young colored uniforms talking on the other side of the crime scene tape.
“Shit way to die.”
“Ja. I won’t be able to eat Kentucky for a week.”
They laughed and started talking about South Africa playing Australia in a rugby test match that weekend.
Zondi took a last look at Barnard, successfully fought the urge to toyi-toyi in his Roberto Cavalli suit and Brunori loafers, and walked over to the cops.
“He was running away from something, apparently?”
The cops gave him the usual once-over, just a degree away from insolence, before the taller man answered. “Ja, he was in those flats up there. People say he jumped out the window.”
“Drive me up there, please, Constable.”
Zondi was already walking across to the cop van, getting into the passenger seat. The tall cop exchanged a glance with his colleague, then got in beside Zondi and started the van. They bumped down the sand road, coming to a stop outside the ghetto block branded by the thug life graffiti.
Zondi climbed out, looked up at the shattered window. A bloody blanket lay in the dirt directly below. Zondi saw a lace curtain twitch in the apartment above the one with the broken window, and he glimpsed a leathery old face before it disappeared.
Zondi followed the cop up the narrow stairs. His nose wri
nkled at the smell of piss. The door to the apartment withthe broken window stood ajar. Zondi gave it a push with the toe of his loafer, and it swung open until it stopped against the body of a man. The constable had his service pistol in his hand and followed Zondi into the apartment.
Three dead men. All with that unmistakable look of gangsters. Two of them shot, one probably by a shotgun. The third man, who had at some point in his career had his fingers amputated, lay with his throat cut. Zondi could see bone.
Zondi and the cop walked through to the bedroom. He looked down at the fourth body, an emaciated man in his sixties, wearing only briefs. The dead man’s brains were all over the statuette of the Virgin Mary that lay on the floor beside the bed. Zondi saw a child’s pajama top, covered in blood and brain matter, lying beside the dead man. He noticed the American label: Big Kmart.
Zondi turned to the cop. “Constable, there’s an old woman in the flat above. One of those types who spends her whole day watching at the window. Ask her who lives here and who she saw coming in and out of here today. And ask her about a kid. A boy. A white boy. You got that?”
The cop nodded. “Yes, sir.”
He left Zondi to wander around the apartment. Zondi opened a chipped closet in the bedroom and saw a few items of women’s clothing. A brush, clogged with dark hair, lay on a dresser beneath a broken mirror. The stinking bathroom didn’t tell him much. A few cheap cosmetics and a box of sanitary pads.
Zondi went back into the living room. From the way the bodies lay, the gunshot victims had been met with fire as they entered the apartment. And then the amputee’s throat had been slit.
At some point during all the action, Barnard had thrown himself out the window.
The constable was back. “She say a woman lives here. Early twenties, maybe. Carmen something, doesn’t know her last name. The old guy is her uncle. An alkie, she say. She saw three guys come in here; one was white. Then another three. Coloreds. Gangsters, she say.”