Cruel Crazy Beautiful World

by Troy Blacklaws

  Kaaaak kaaaak is all they reply.

  A few moth-eaten, sun-seeking dassies blink sorrowful eyes at me from the red zinc roof of the old whaling warehouse.

  The professor, shadowed by Moonfleet, drifts down to the slanting slipway where whalers once landed harpooned whales.

  Moonfleet skips and barks at my music. Seagulls fly from the salting poles. Dassies shy from the hot tin roof.

  The professor rolls up his pants and wades barefoot in the shallows. His hands t’ai chi at the sky.

  Moonfleet, all skipped out, licks the salt off the soles of my feet.

  I play my guitar till my fingers bleed and the sun sinks west of the new harbour. And then I play on into the dusk, a fish bone for a fat pick.

  16

  A FARM SOMEWHERE SOUTH of the Limpopo. After midnight.

  Jonas picks Jabulani. There are muted murmurs of an injustice, for Jabulani has not had to endure this hell for long.

  – Jabulani is the one who can run like a wild dog. Our forefathers were warriors and knew how to throw a spear, but that skill too is lost. Jabulani is the one who learnt at his university how to throw a javelin far. And if he survives, the police may listen to him, for he is a teacher.

  They cast a rope over a beam, then tie it around Jabulani’s hips. They hoist him up to the beam.

  He signals for them to let go. He winds up the rope, looping it between thumb and elbow. He slings it over his collarbone.

  Now they chuck the long, glowing-tipped stick up to him.

  He catches it. Holding the stick ahead of him like a tightrope walker, he foot-foots along the beam, heel to toe, heel to toe.

  They gasp and hiss each time he teeters. At the end of the beam he tilts a vent and hauls himself out onto the roof. Through the vent he hears a hum of hope from the condemned men.

  He geckos up the roof slope to the zenith. The stars look like holes punched in Jonas’s fire drum. Down below he sees the dogs lying flat, feet flirting with the glowing coals of a dying fire.

  He stands and feels the heft of the stick in his hand. His target is over forty yards away. If the stick falls short, they will all suffer. Ghost Cowboy will kill him.

  He hurls the stick at the thatched roof of the poolside gazebo. A dog barks at the whistle of this one-eyed sky snake spearing through the dark.

  Soon the thatch begins to glow. A flame peels away. Then another. Then the gazebo roof is ablaze.

  Now all the dogs go ape.

  Jabulani drops flat to the roof.

  The gunmen bound out of the farmhouse all bootless and cussing and eyes agog at the sparks shooting high.

  A peacock flaps up towards the stars, tail feathers on fire.

  The gunmen let the Zimbabweans out of the tobacco barn and yell at them to form a line from the pool to the farmhouse. No chance of saving the gazebo. They focus on dousing the farmhouse thatch before the flying sparks can catch.

  Jabulani sees slopping buckets jig from hand to hand. He sees the flaming peacock fall out of the sky: a phoenix scattering firework feathers.

  He slides down the far slope of the roof and jumps.

  Then he runs hard along the rutted dirt road.

  A porcupine darts across his path, rattling his quills like a shaman shaking bones and shells.

  After maybe two miles, he comes out onto the tarred road, where he finds south by the stars and runs again.

  Lost in this bushman rhythm, he hears the screams of the flaming peacock looping again and again through his head.

  He hears the sound of a motor and turns to peer into blinding headlights. He fears it may be from the farm but it is not the low throb of a Landy. Gambling on it being a stranger, he holds out his thumb.

  The headlights polaroid the skull of an ox spiked on a pole. He saves this image in his mind.

  A woman alone in a Pajero. She winds down the window. Nina Simone’s voice floats out, mingling with smoke from a jay held in peace-sign fingers.

  – Where you heading?

  – Cape Town.

  – You dig Nina?

  – Huh?

  – Do you love Nina Simone?

  – I love her.

  – Well, hop in then.

  She hands the glowing joint to him.

  He sucks deep and long.

  – There’s an icebox at your feet.

  He cracks a can of Windhoek Lager.

  They ride the wake of flaring headlights through an indigo universe. For a long time no words mar the giddy high of escape.

  The grass and beer put him in a forward, flirty frame of mind.

  – I thought lone white women never pick up black men.

  – It’s crazy. I ought to be manhandled.

  She laughs, winds down the window to fillip out the butt of the jay.

  He sees deep down her zaftig bosom.

  – But this Marley magic fucks with your head, hey? she shouts over the whine of the wind.

  – It does rather.

  She winds up the window.

  – You from Zim?

  – I am.

  – I thought so. You looked shit scared. The proverbial rabbit in the headlights.

  Now he laughs at this pigeonholing of Zimbabweans. It feels good to laugh. He has not laughed freely since his life began to unravel half a year ago.

  Nina’s voice is a viscous, velvety red wine.

  – Mates of yours?

  Headlights fare in the rearview. He swivels his head and squints into the glare. The safari Land Rover bullets into focus. Ghost Cowboy rides shotgun. His long white hair flames in the wind as he draws a bead on the Pajero with his long gun.

  – If we survive, I want you to fuck me. Deal?

  A shot zings over the roof of the Pajero.

  Jabulani instinctively ducks. He senses this isn’t the moment to tell her he hasn’t yet been unfaithful to Thokozile.

  – Tell me your name.

  – Call me Nina, for now. Yours?

  – Freedom.

  He always tells white folk his white name. They want a pithy Western handle to call you by, rather than your African name.

  – Freedom? Cool! So you and me, Freedom, we find a motel, yeah?

  In the rearview Jabulani sees the gun spark just before the rear window implodes.

  – Yeah?

  – Yeah.

  She foots the gas hard and the Pajero shoots ahead. Zoned on marijuana and the thrill of outfooting the hunter, she yips at the gecko moon.

  The beams of the Pajero fall south like dying shooting stars.

  At dawn they are far south of Johannesburg, that hard, hazardous city of gold-seekers that they’d skirted in the dark. And now the N1 cuts an unflinching blue line down to Cape Town.

  A lone woman carting boxes and a pot on top of her turban surfaces out of the dancing haze on the tar. She dangles a live chicken swinging beak-down from her hand.

  And further on a cart made from the plundered corpse of an old pickup follows on the heels of a sagging, dusty donkey.

  And yet further still an old rag-and-bone woman hawks sunflowers from under a faded beach umbrella.

  A boy flutters his hands as if swimming in the liquid mirage. His hands draw their eyes to his windmills crafted from wire, cans and dead time.

  Jabulani recalls his boyhood of fishing in the river and killing birds and lizards and sucking udder-hot milk out of his hands and learning the art of stick fighting. He recalls walking for miles down a dust track to a tar road where he hawked giraffes he’d carved from mukwa to tourists from South Africa. South African money put him through high school in the town at the end of the tar road. And when the manila envelope came from the university, his father went out and killed that lazy, lagging old ox. And then there was whistling teeth and the music of the mbira and ululating tongues and jouncing bones and sour beer.

  Now Nina halts to buy a pineapple from an old woman who knifes off the spiky skin for them.

  They ride on again, sucking at the yellow pulp and tunin
g into the wry, haunting twanging of Ry Cooder’s guitar.

  – It’s a mystery. This isn’t pineapple country. Only thing yellow you tend to find here is sunflowers, or the yellow sign of a Shell garage. Just the other day I heard a hadeda ibis calling in my yard in Cape Town. It’s as if the compass in their head’s fucked. There didn’t used to be hadedas so far south.

  She lifts the hem of her shirt to mop juice from her chin. Her low-slung jeans let out a rumour of hair.

  His cock unfurls as he gazes out the window at the flat, stark land where opal-toned bones blink in the sun and lone birds ride the wires.

  His forehead drums against the window as she swings the Pajero off the tar.

  He winds down the window to gasp for air.

  She kills Cooder.

  For a moment the world’s violently still. Then he hears the wind hum along the telegraph wires. And then he hears her husky breath in his ear.

  She slides his pineapple-sticky hand under her panties. She’s humid after the coolness of the pineapple.

  He’s perky as a meerkat now.

  She unzips him and slides her lips over him. A bus blares its horn at them. The Pajero shudders in the gusty wake of the bus.

  She licks her lips and pops another half-moon of pineapple into her mouth.

  Then the Pajero’s gunning south again.

  He smells her on his fingers.

  She’s humming along to an Eels song.

  He flicks through the sun-warped novel by Coetzee she has bird-winged on the dash. Yet Thokozile’s eyes come between him and the out-of-focus words on the paper. He flicks to the cover and studies the image of a raw-boned fugitive dog on a dirt road. I am that lost dog, he thinks.

  17

  HERMANUS. NOON.

  I stand before the house of the glass-eyed priest Zero said would hand his Vespa over to me. The sign on the gate tells me to BEWARE OF THE DOG. I can hear Chopin played poorly on the piano. I call hello. A butcherbird flies from the gutter.

  No hiatus in the playing. And no sign of the dog. A rusty hand mower is islanded in long grass. An old black bicycle with a basket up front leans against the wall.

  The gate whines like an old man’s bones. I go along crazy paving through the high grass to the door. There’s a pane of opaque glass in the door. I ring the doorbell. The piano fades out. A warped shadow ghosts towards me.

  The priest in a frayed dog collar and long, colonial khaki shorts. I can’t tell which eye is glass.

  – I’m Jerusalem. I’ve come for the Vespa. My old man called you up from Cape Town.

  – Aha. Cupido? The Vespa’s in the garage.

  – Where’s your dog?

  – Out in the backyard. He’s old and stone deaf. He used to love Chopin. Now he can’t tell Mozart from Masekela.

  We go round to the back of the house. The priest has a faintly fascist way of throwing his feet out ahead of him.

  On seeing a stranger, the dog jerks to his feet and barks a frenzied, gut-swinging, ball-jiggling volley. The priest puts out his hand to calm his old yellow lab.

  – Don’t mind him. It’s just an act.

  The dog follows us to the garage, snuffing at my heels.

  A butcherbird is a peg on the clothes line.

  A rat runs along the rim of the zinc backyard fence.

  The dog goes after the rat and clangs his feet against the zinc. The butcherbird flies away.

  – I hate that bird, says the priest. He dives and pecks at all the other birds.

  In the garage there’s an old MG and the Vespa. The Vespa is a perky red.

  – She’s beautiful, isn’t she? I take her out for a run every now and then, but I’m losing feeling under my feet. It’s a mystery ... and they haven’t found a cure. The doctor forbade me to ride.

  He runs his fingers around the chrome rim of the headlight.

  – I had hoped my son would want her, but he’s not coming home.

  – Where’s he?

  – London. He’s a money man. Thinks this country has gone to the dogs.

  Then, sensing how racist this sounds:

  – Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not how I see things. Yet I do fear for the future. So far the Xhosas have outwitted the Zulus. Mandela and Mbeki were wily. But I prophesy the Zulus won’t bow to the Xhosas forever. Historically they are the warrior tribe. And now Zuma is jousting the Zulu spear at the sky.

  – He’s a clown.

  – But he can dance a Zulu war dance and sing a song calling for his gun. And he has a grassroots following. And Africa has a habit of shooting herself in the foot. My son begs me to go to London. He’d put me up in his attic in Camden. I’d have no dog, no yard, no freedom to follow a road along the lagoon on a whim or walk along the beach for miles. London’s no life for me. All the wan faces on the tube, sandwiched like grey ham between pages of the newspaper.

  – I spent my young boyhood in Amsterdam. I remember the cold gnawing at my ears and toes. I remember the empty playgrounds in winter. I remember the steep stairs and how my socks never dried.

  And I remember how folk never smiled in the winter. I remember a Moroccan whore in a pink-lit fish tank whom Zero paid to show me her buoyant tits. I was just eleven. He was worried I’d turn out gay.

  – That’s the other thing. Stairs. I have not told my son I have to focus just to walk along a flat path.

  I hand over Zero’s wad of rubber-banded rands to him. He pockets the money without thumbing through it.

  – If you’re ever lonely, come over for tea. I vow not to lure you into my church.

  I hop onto the Vespa.

  – She’s been a good girl. You keep an eye on her. The roads are hazardous with all the jaywalking dogs and the crazy taxivans.

  His eyes glisten as he bids his Vespa farewell. His dog, sensing his master’s maudlin mood, licks his scabby shins.

  18

  SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF BLOEMFONTEIN.

  The Pajero sharks on along the N1 through the Karoo. An arid land of lone windmills flashing steel petals to draw sheep to water tapped from dark, unseen rivers.

  Now and then a deserted road dusts away from the highway.

  The tarmac ahead is quicksilvery under the sun. That’s perhaps why Nina doesn’t see the karakul sheep in time to dodge it. Or perhaps it’s the marijuana in her blood that blurs her senses. Either way, the Pajero’s front fender flips the sheep high into the sky.

  Jabulani and Nina tilt their heads in sync to follow the fight of the sheep till it vanishes overhead. Then they swivel their heads to see it land on the tarmac behind them.

  Nina swings the Pajero hard off the tar. It spurts up dust. The motor stalls.

  – Fuck, tunes Nina. I never saw it.

  All you hear is the silver-winged tones of R.E.M. gliding out over bleak veld, over distant, earthed sheep.

  They climb out and walk up to the sheep. It is still breathing, in jerky gasps. Its feet are folded up neatly under it. Its wool has no hint of blood in it. The only sign that it has just flown over a Pajero is a stoned look in eyes curiously free of accusation.

  Nina tips up her shades to stare deep into its glassy eyeballs.

  – We can’t just ride on. It’s got to be bleeding inside.

  – You think so? It looks unscratched.

  – It’s in pain. I can tell from the eyes. We have to put it down.

  – Kill it?

  – A mercy killing.

  – How do you intend to kill it?

  – I’ve never killed a thing in my life. Other than ants and mosquitoes. You’ll have to kill it.

  – Me?

  – Ja. You’re from Zim.

  – So?

  – You had to fight for freedom. And now Mugabe’s gone apeshit. You’re used to violence.

  – But I’m a teacher. I’m against violence.

  Jabulani thinks: Well, I have killed half-dead rats that the cat left bleeding in the yard. And I have twisted the head off a bird or two that few into the windscreen of my ol
d Datsun. But this is killing on another scale. Just look at the size of its head.

  – This animal’s in pain, man.

  – Why me?

  – I beg you to. Kill it for me.

  Jabulani thinks: If not for her I’d be dead.

  – Okay. I’ll do it. For you.

  Jabulani walks along the roadside till he finds a big stone. He lugs it over to the sheep. The stone has the heft of a medicine ball.

  He stands over the sheep, focusing on his target: that flat hard plane between its eyes. He wonders how thick the skull is, and if it will crack in one go.

  He thinks to himself: Just half a year ago I stood in front of a class with a book in hand, teaching poetry. I taught my students how a line can see-saw on a comma and how words at the end of a line want to fall. I told them words have memory, music ... and weight.

  The sheep’s eyes glaze over now with a saintly pity for the lot of a teacher who must put poetry into the heads of schoolboys. It is a harder task, perhaps, than caving in a skull bone with a stone.

  He lifts the stone.

  Nina plugs her ears with her fingers and squinches her eyes shut.

  After a time, she squints to see if the sheep’s dead yet.

  Jabulani’s still holding the stone in his hands. And the sheep’s not dead.

  – I’m sorry. Its eyes spook me out.

  – Don’t be a pussy.

  – Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll run it over. Then I don’t have to look it in the eyes as it dies.

  – That’s genius.

  – But you have to direct me. I want to hit its head just one time.

  – Got it.

  Jabulani gets in behind the wheel. He mutes R.E.M. Another volatile silence.

  Overhead a vulture loops lazily.

  The Pajero catches. He turns his head to get his bearings. Nina’s a few yards beyond the sheep, hands poised in the air. He shifts the Pajero into reverse and its tyres kick up dust till they find tar. Now he’s barrelling along. He focuses on Nina’s waving hands rather than on the sheep. He flinches, gearing himself for the jolt of rubber against head, for a bang against the axle if his aim is marginally off.

  Nina hops clear as he shoots by. She’s yelling her head off.

  He feels no jarring.

  And yet the sheep’s gone.