“Probably a baboon, or even a monkey,” he says quickly. “Leave them. We cannot stop here.”
I don’t believe him. I notice the glance shared between the two men. We all know what these bones are, and they did not belong to a baboon or a monkey.
We run now with new energy.
Even Patson’s father picks up his pace, and soon we leave the river behind with its grim reminder of where we are and where we might end up.
The sun moves steadily across the sky; the morning becomes hotter, giving way to midday. It feels like we have been running for hours; like the crossing of the Limpopo was a week ago. Soon the water I drank at the river starts speaking to me. The pain in my side almost makes me fall down. I notice the men behind me are moving slower. Both of them are in great pain. One of them cries out for Lennox to stop. They drank too much at the river, and now they suffer for it.
Lennox picks up a tiny pebble. “Put this under your tongue, suck on it. It will help.”
I suck on a pebble as well, and it brings some relief, but nothing can stop the pains shooting up my leg. We are getting tired. Even Lennox is jogging slowly now. Patson has climbed off his father’s back and is hopping and being dragged between his father and Innocent.
Lennox is worried. He keeps looking back at us, encouraging us, shouting for us to keep running. The two men run alongside him.
“We should leave them here,” says one of them. “They are slowing us down. Why should we be in danger because of them?”
“We stay together,” replies Lennox. “Would you want me to leave you alone in the park?”
And the conversation is over.
We run on.
Stumble on, more like it.
I can’t feel anything anymore, only the sound of my heart thudding in my ears. I ignore the pain in my side, the cuts on my feet, the sweat dripping down my face. All I do is breathe in and breathe out. Put one foot in front of the other, keep a steady rhythm. My feet and legs are screaming at my brain, my lungs are begging for more air, my heart is beating double-quick time, but my brain ignores it all.
Keep running, it says. Running will bring you to safety. Keep running.
Patson is once again on his father’s back. Innocent and I run on either side of him, trying to bear some of his weight. Patson’s father will not give up. I see it in his eyes. They have glazed over; they see nothing. Patson weeps in frustration. He knows we are moving slowly because of him.
“Leave me, Daddy, leave me,” he whispers, but Patson’s father ignores his son. He runs on, gripping his son’s leg more tightly around his body.
We reach the top of a rise and look down over yet another grass plain. In the distance, I see the thin line of a fence.
“The end of the park,” says Lennox.
We are almost there. Then I see something lying on the ground that makes me stop.
“Lennox! Look!” I shout, pointing at what I have spotted but not wanting to believe what I have seen.
“Don’t look!” shouts Lennox. He has seen it too. “Do not look. Run.”
But I have looked. My brain takes a while before it understands what I have seen. I have seen the legs of a person but not the body.
But before my brain can fully understand this, I hear a sound that stops my heart, a sound that stops my breathing, a sound that crawls into my stomach and makes all the pain of running disappear. It is the most terrifying sound I have ever heard.
How can the sound be so close when we cannot see the animal that makes the terrible noise?
The sound splits me in half—I want to scream, but I am too scared to open my mouth.
“Lion!” says Lennox, looking wildly about him.
Now I know what it is to be terrified.
Innocent’s trousers darken; the smell of piss. The two men behind me moan. The roar of the lion has turned us into statues. We see nothing; we hear only lion.
“Listen. Listen carefully.” This is Lennox whispering. He is looking all around, trying to find where the sound is coming from. “Nobody must run. If you run away, it is over.”
His voice is low but firm, something to hold on to.
“Listen to Lennox,” I manage to whisper to Innocent, who looks all around him, confused by the size of the sound that has covered us all.
“We must hold hands. Walk slowly away. Toward the fence.” Lennox is very afraid, but he is concentrating.
I understand what he wants. If one of us runs away, the lion has something to spring upon. If we stay together we might have a chance. The others seem to understand. Out here we stand no chance alone. We once again grab one another’s hands. We form a line. We move slowly away from the sound. There might be more than one lion.
Lennox leads us down the rise, away from the sound of lions feeding. Now my legs want to fly, now my heart is pumping, now everything is screaming to my brain, Run for your life.
But we walk.
Now we walk faster. Now we jog. Now Lennox allows us to run. He sweeps Patson off his father’s back, throws me his bag, and hoists Patson over his shoulder and runs.
The fence gets nearer, the sound of the lions fading behind us. Patson’s father, free from the burden of his son, runs. Innocent holds on to my hand and we run together, as fast as the wind, our legs pumping, our bodies flying through the grass.
The two men run ahead, faster than us. They are the first to reach the fence. They start climbing.
“No!” shouts Lennox.
Too late. The wire fizzes, crackles, and the men shriek and fall to the ground as the electricity burns them.
“Not there—I’ll show you,” says Lennox, helping up the dazed men and leading us along the length of the fence until we get to a section that’s been cut open, the wire carefully handwoven together to look as if it is whole. In a few minutes Lennox has opened the hole and we are through, out of the park.
We walk slowly, exhausted, relieved not to be running. We come to a dusty road beside the fence.
“You can wait here,” says Lennox. “It is safe here. Someone will come and pick you up. You just have to wait.”
The two men glance at each other. They will not wait here in the middle of nowhere. They begin jogging along the road. Patson and his father are too exhausted to go anywhere. So is Innocent. We have no choice but to wait.
“And you?” I ask Lennox.
He points back to the park. “I go back.”
“Thank you. Thank you for getting us to South Africa,” I say.
He nods, smiles at Innocent, and says to him, “Thank you for chasing the hyena away.” Then he trots back the way we came.
We collapse at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I am so thirsty, my throat aches for a drink.
Sleep.
I wake to the sound of an engine.
Through the glare, I see a truck driving toward us, billowing dust behind it. Brakes squeak. The truck stops next to us.
The smell of tomatoes.
A white man leans out of his window. “You want work?”
Patson’s father gets to his feet. Innocent looks up at the man, shields his eyes from the sun.
“You want to work, you get in the back of the truck, otherwise I leave you here,” he says, revving the engine.
We climb in, helping Patson’s father hoist Patson up. Innocent sits down on one of the boxes, and the wood cracks.
“Don’t sit on the bloody boxes!” shouts the truck driver.
On the side of each box is a label—FLYING TOMATO FARM.
PART 2
HOW WE CAME TO A PLACE CALLED JOZI
(EIGHT MONTHS LATER)
14
FLYING TOMATO FARM
I kick an empty tin can on the road, and it sails through the air, landing with a clunk. Sunday soccer at Khomele village is over, and I cannot go back there, not after what happened. I will miss the soccer but not the angry stares of the adults.
I walk through the large gate of the Flying Tomato Farm and look up at th
e sign of the red tomato with angel wings that hangs over the gate. The farm is not the heaven I thought it was eight months ago when we arrived in the back of the truck.
This new thought pops and crackles in my head as I walk back to my room behind the packing shed. The words of the men at Khomele village buzz around in my mind. I didn’t understand everything they said, but what I saw in their faces was clear enough. We are not wanted here.
“Deo? Why did those men shout at us?” Innocent’s question comes from a long way off. I am not really listening to him. He walks beside me, dragging his feet in the dust and shaking his head from side to side. “I didn’t do anything. Not to them. They shouldn’t shout at me. I don’t like that. You scored a goal, and I was happy. It’s always like that. I fly when you score. Always.”
I have no answer for him. What happened at Khomele today has started me thinking again.
When we first arrived at the Flying Tomato Farm, I had to pinch myself every morning to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming. Innocent and I had beds to sleep in, with our own blankets and pillows. We had a roof over our heads, and we weren’t running. We ate two meals a day, and at the end of the month we got fifty South African rands—almost seven billion Zim dollars each, just for picking tomatoes!
I had never seen such a beautiful farm in all my life. Benjamin, the twice-removed second cousin of the nephew of the Modjadji Rain Queen, laughed at how often my mouth dropped open at what I saw on the farm. He is what they call the madala on the farm, and he has worked here all his life. His nephew, Philani, always teased Innocent and me. He called us the “how-whe” birds because we were always gaping at everything.
The many fields of tomato bushes stretching out in straight lines toward the foot of the faraway Soutpansberg Mountains; the rows of white plastic tents covering the young bushes, protecting them from the hot Limpopo sun; the gleaming tractors and cultivating machines driving up and down the road from the packing shed to the fields; the bright fluorescent lights in the packing house and the moving conveyor belt filled with red, tumbling tomatoes, picked and packed by twenty fast-moving hands into boxes; the white men in their short pants, always busy, jumping in and out of their cars or trucks, shouting instructions in a language that sounded like they were clearing their throats all the time, always watching, always talking into their cell phones.
At first I thought we had landed in heaven and that life could never get better than this. Each morning Innocent and I got up at six o’clock to wait for the truck to take us to the tomato fields. There we would work until midmorning, preparing the soil, spraying the leaves, picking the tomatoes, and loading them into crates to be packed into the back of the truck. After eating breakfast we would work again until three o’ clock and then come back to the farm to wash and sort the tomatoes. At five o’clock the bell would ring, and then we’d eat again.
I didn’t pay careful enough attention to what happened to Patson and his father. I didn’t want to see how the foreman would not allow Patson to work, and that meant his father couldn’t stay on the farm, so they were handed over to the police. I was sorry I didn’t say good-bye to Patson and his father. They were here only two days, and on the third morning I woke up and saw their beds were empty. Philani told me later that the police were waiting for them at the gate and took them away.
“And my uncle works for these men,” said Philani bitterly a few days after. “He knows what is happening here, but he will not leave.”
“But why would he want to leave if he has been here all his life?” I asked.
“You wait,” he said. “The water from the Limpopo is still wet behind your ears. You’re still fresh meat that made it out of the park. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
Philani is the joker on the farm—but you never know whether he is laughing at you or with you. I think there is some trouble between him and his uncle. Benjamin is very strict with Philani and says that being eighteen doesn’t make him an adult. They argue a lot. Philani doesn’t want to be here; he is always talking about leaving.
My life on the Flying Tomato Farm was too busy to worry about what had happened to Patson and his father or why it was that not all the workers were happy. I didn’t pay much attention to why they and Philani whispered angrily to one another late at night outside my window or why they looked at Foreman Gerber with hatred in their eyes.
In the beginning I was only too happy not to think too much. We were strangers here, and that was enough to worry about. I also had to keep an eye on Innocent and make sure that when the boss was around, he played the adult game we had worked out.
“Now it is time for Operation Innocent and Deo Are Adults,” I told him on the third night on the farm, after I noticed the foreman looking at him closely as we signed our contracts.
“I can do that,” said Innocent.
And he could. None of the white foremen noticed that Innocent was different, because whenever they came near he was busy with our “operation.” Except the first time we were paid and Innocent grinned at Gerber when the foreman handed him one fifty-rand note.
“Where is the rest of the money?” asked Innocent loudly. “One piece of paper isn’t enough to buy my batteries.”
I quickly took his money and moved him away, explaining to him that here the money was different. That was when Philani stepped in and made a joke about how we still expected to be paid in wheelbarrows of money. Everyone laughed, and the attention was drawn away from Innocent. Later, Benjamin came over to us while we were eating. For a while he didn’t speak; he leaned against the wall of the packing shed, regarding my brother.
“Who’s looking after whom?” he asked at last.
Innocent looked up at him, shrugged, and cleaned up the gravy on his plate with a piece of bread. Could this white-haired old man be trusted?
“We look after each other,” I said carefully.
“Of course you do. Are we not all our brothers’ keepers?” he said with a twinkle in his eye. I stared at him without answering, not knowing if this was some sort of trap.
“How old are you, Deo?”
“I’m seventeen,” I said quickly, lying by two years.
“No, you’re not,” chirped in Innocent. “There are ten years between us. And I’m twenty-five. So that makes Deo fifteen, and not a day older.”
I could’ve kicked Innocent then, but the old man laughed at my brother’s face.
“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Deo,” he said to me. “I will tell no one about your brother. You are safe here now, but keep him out of trouble, and listen to Foreman Gerber and the others. There are a lot of places worse than the Flying Tomato Farm. If you work hard, you will do well here.”
And he was right. We worked hard and stayed out of trouble, and we did well.
At first I was happy to listen to old Benjamin and stay on the farm and not go anywhere else. After all we had been through, I wanted to be in one place only. I liked getting up every morning and not worrying about where we were going or when we would next be eating or sleeping. I liked doing the same thing every day.
I suppose I was like a ghost hovering above the shell of me, watching myself spraying tomatoes, picking tomatoes, packing tomatoes, and even eating tomatoes. It was so easy not to think about what happened to Amai and Grandpa Longdrop. If I worked hard, they stayed away and I didn’t have time to invite them into my mind. I didn’t have to push down the lump in my throat. By nighttime, I was too tired to lie awake and think about them and what had happened to us back in Gutu. And, come Sundays, I had something else to keep me from thinking.
On Sundays I played soccer with the boys from Khomele village, right next door to the Flying Tomato Farm.
I can smell out a soccer pitch anywhere, anytime, and by the second weekend at the Flying Tomato Farm I had found out where the local boys played. One Sunday I walked across the road to Khomele village to watch. The next Sunday I returned, and the boys invited me to join them. At first I played cautiously, stay
ing on the fringes of the game, checking out the skills of the other players.
I was always chosen last, which I didn’t mind. At least I got a game. I learned quickly that these boys played very differently from what I was used to. The ball they played with allowed for a much faster game. It had more spring it its bounce than my billion-dollar ball (which didn’t hold a billion dollars anymore, but sixteen pink fifty-rand notes), and I had to adjust to it bouncing quickly off my foot, making it harder to control. I learned, too, that doing tricks with the ball counted for a lot in their eyes.
And so we played each Sunday, and I became bolder, scoring a couple of goals, making some good passes, learning a few fancy tricks, and soon I was always one of the first to be chosen.
What more could I ask for? Soccer on Sundays, free food, a place to sleep, a beautiful farm, money each month, a fading memory of Gutu, and a happy Innocent. Can you blame me if I thought I was in heaven?
But what happened at Khomele village today has started me thinking again.
I was playing soccer, and Innocent was listening to his radio on the sidelines—until I scored a goal. It had been a particularly great goal, the result of a four-pass move ending with my sizzling left foot curling the ball out of reach of the goalie. The boys on my team were congratulating me, and we were running around lifting our shirts up and shouting like they do on television. Innocent was running up the sideline, his arms outstretched, shouting “Goooaaal!” when he bumped into some of the adult men who had come over to watch the game. One of them grabbed him by the arm and pushed him hard.
“Get out of here, Zimbo! What are you doing in Khomele?”
I ran over and faced the group of men.
“We play here every Sunday,” I said. “Why did you push my brother?”
“Because he’s a lion from Zimbabwe and he comes here to eat our food,” said a young man, pointing at Innocent.
“And he takes our work,” said another man. He had the bloodshot eyes of someone who likes the taste of liquor.
Now Is the Time for Running Page 8