Cruel Crazy Beautiful World

by Troy Blacklaws

  Beyond the door they hear men laughing and joking in a sing-songy foreign lingo.

  Over the lintel a gecko eyes a moth’s frenzied orbiting of a light bulb.

  Zero nods at Canada Dry and Canada Dry back-pedals a few steps. Zero and Dove Bait draw their pistols from their pockets. Phoenix levels his Uzi.

  The gecko zips after the moth. Moth wings flicker from his gob.

  Canada hurls himself at the door like a rugby forward bent on barging his way over the try line. The door cracks and Canada Dry falls into the next filmic shot.

  – This jig is up, yells Zero.

  He swings his Colt as if he’s a marine on camera.

  Eyes gape, gobs call out to pagan gods, hands flutter haphazardly as bullets sing over the round table with that gory thing at the hub.

  A monkey-gobbler draws a Black Star pistol and aims at Jabulani.

  Jabulani puts up his hands.

  Zero shoots that monkey-gobbler in the collarbone. The Black Star spins out of his hands and blood spits like gust-flung dandelion darts.

  Canada Dry, still down on the floor, stalks after the fallen Black Star.

  The shot monkey-gobbler sinks to his knees.

  Canada Dry’s stoked with gun: Waha! Chinese pistol!

  Another monkey-gobbler slides a tinted glass door ajar and hops onto the balcony wall.

  There’s a hiatus as all characters freeze (Jabulani’s hands still up in the air). The soundtrack goes dead. There’s an unscripted camaraderie to their staring at that comical figure see-sawing on the wall.

  Then he’s gone and they all flinch for the clichéd silver-screen yowl:

  Yet the man falls soundlessly.

  The most curious thing about this silence is that the scalped monkey (surrounded by half a dozen monkey-gobblers) is still thinking with the brain they were about to spoon out of his skull and he sends an unworldly whine into it.

  And Jabulani’s hands fall and his spine folds as his mind fades to black.

  33

  HERMANUS OLD HARBOUR. JUST after dusk.

  The professor is dozing on a deckchair under a sun-faded beach umbrella on the wall of the old harbour. He has guyed the umbrella down to stones with fraying string. The dog-eared paperback in his hands has lost its cover: either a short book or a torn-out sliver of a longer book.

  Moonfleet’s barks wake him.

  He scowls at me.

  – You.

  – Yes. That a novella you reading?

  – Honed and bare-boned.

  – Hemingway?

  – Camus. The Outsider.

  – I thought he wrote The Stranger.

  – Same book.

  – That’s a loophole in my reading.

  – Gist is: white guy shoots an Arab.

  I recall being sent to a fancy white school in Cape Town when we came from Amsterdam. On paper apartheid had been dead for two years (since Mandela was freed in 1990), but the other boys gawped at me. To them I was an alien. My name did not conform. They had no pigeonhole in their head for a half Jew, half Muslim. In the schoolyard they called me dirty Arab. On the athletics track I lapped them. I licked them hollow and mute. But in the schoolyard the baiting went on for another two years, until Mandela was voted in.

  – So why’d he shoot that Arab. Revenge?

  – Not revenge. Nor any other kind of rancour. He hated no one. And he loved no one. That Arab just happened to be on the beach at the same time.

  – That’s hardly a crime.

  – Was for dark folk in South Africa, not long ago.

  – So he just shot him in cold blood?

  – No. The sun fucked with his head.

  – You can’t blame the sun.

  He stares out beyond me and I realise he’s remembering again the way the sea ravaged his wife.

  I think I’ve lost him, but then he says:

  – Was it not the sun that illuminated that girl for you?

  I am stumped by this. He saw me see her. How does he travel unseen along the path? Swing through the milkwood bundu like some kind of spider monkey?

  – I’d have fallen for her anyway.

  – She’s just a girl. The sun tricked you.

  – She’s beautiful. Not in the fake way of flick girls, but somehow innately beautiful.

  – You love that word. Beautiful. A beautiful dog. A beautiful girl. What is beautiful? What are your yardsticks? Is all life not beautiful? Was that Zimbabwean they killed not beautiful? Is my sun-wizened face not beautiful? Why do you need to label things? This is good. This is evil. This is beautiful. This is not.

  – But you must see that she’s an angel. Her skin’s flawless.

  I just so happen to have the milky, unsunned skin of her breasts in mind.

  He laughs.

  – And her eyes are magic. They’re this sublime, lagoony blue-green. I think you’d call it viridian.

  – Viridian’s more green than blue. You more Arab than Jew?

  – My father’s half Malay, half Cuban. My mother’s a Jew.

  I drift in reverie. Recall the day Miriam fired Zero’s Colt to scare baboons from a picnic we had on Noordhoek beach. The shot spooked a horse that threw its rider. And I thought: This could never happen in Amsterdam.

  – All I see is a girl. All I see is a man dead. Why call her an angel? Why call him a refugee?

  This old professor must have left his students reeling. I want to tell him you have to label things to get by ... but I’d sound like my old man, wouldn’t I? Yet it’s hard to deny labels are handy. My father’s coloured. So am I. Just less so, if such a thing can be measured.

  I recall learning in school that a crude yardstick in the old Cape for finding out if a man was coloured was to put a pencil in his hair. If he shook his head and it fell out, he wasn’t.

  – So they condemned him, then? The guy who shot the Arab?

  – They condemned him, in the end, for not crying when his mother died. And for putting milk in his coffee. That’s the fucked-up thing about this world. They damn you for random, irrelevant things. For the tint of your skin. For being gay. For being Zimbabwean.

  I just stand there wondering if I will cry at my mother’s funeral.

  34

  CAPE TOWN. NIGHT.

  Jabulani studies the things in Jerusalem’s room. A pansy-shell fossil. A cricket bat. An old guitar, the rim sheen worn away by years of strumming. A row of books: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Camus’s The Stranger (no sign of him having read it), Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (a first printing from 1954 with a guineafowl feather tucked in it), Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (an old copy pinched from a school library), Mda’s Ways of Dying (pages warped from falling into liquid ... perhaps the pool, or the sea) and (inevitably) Coetzee’s Disgrace (subtle cracks of the spine).

  No books by South Americans or Indians. Maybe he took them along to that town by the sea. He finds it curious that the books are free of annotations ... just yellowed by time and perfumed with dust.

  Zero, Canada Dry, Dove Bait and Jabulani study a map on the kitchen table. An array of glasses tells the story of a long night.

  Phoenix gazes out the window at Miriam dancing a t’ai chi waltz in the moonlight. She weaves among her colony of gnomes with an unseen wind-lover. The gnomes smile at his fiddling with her skirt. They smile at the smile he conjures from her lips. They smile at the yellow ghost snake (the memory of a hosepipe) winding through the yard to the empty pool.

  – The girls get caught by the gumagumas on the border.

  Zero’s finger travels south from Limpopo province to Bloemfontein in the old Orange Free State.

  – Then they end up in a brothel, or get sold as maids. There’s no register of such a girl. She can vanish without the world blinking an eyelid.

  He blows through his lips. Poof.

  – My man in Polokwane took these shots.

  He scatters photos of a girl bundled into a Cherokee.

  – Just yesterday afternoon.
Fake licence. But check this out.

  Zero holds up a blurred shot he’d radically zoomed into. Part of a blurred garage logo: TOLK-.

  – Folk? Jabulani wonders.

  – No. Tolk.

  – Turns out there’s just one garage beginning with Tolk – in this country. Tolkien Jeeps in Bloemfontein. And there’s just two Jeep Cherokees on their books. One belongs to a butcher. The other to a farmer. One of them’s going down. I figure it’s the farmer. The butcher shop’s in downtown Bloem. Too tricky to hide a girl. Besides, the butcher’s never the evil guy in a crime novel. Too tacky.

  They all laugh, other than Jabulani and Phoenix.

  – So this too is your war? Jabulani taunts.

  – You’re learning, teacher, Zero laughs.

  He focuses on the map again.

  – I have to figure out how to find this farm.

  Jabulani studies the lurid pink scar in the V of his hand.

  – What about the story I told you guys? What about Ghost Cowboy and Jonas and that girl on the marijuana farm?

  – I have to get this girl out. We go tonight. Then we’ll figure out how to catch your cowboy ghost. And we’ll find that ox-head on a post.

  – What post? Dove Bait wonders.

  – You tell, Zero nods to Jabulani.

  – You see, the skull of an ox impaled on a pole marks the dirt road to the marijuana farm where they held me captive. There’s no other sign.

  Jabulani wonders if she’s surviving, the girl he howled at. He wonders if another Zimbabwean has had his corpse flipped from the flatbed of the truck into the croc pond. He wonders if they still play football at dusk and if old Jonas still pangas a watermelon to sweeten their bitter lot. And if he thinks Jabulani forgot.

  He walks out into the moon-silvered yard. Miriam’s cat zeroes in on him. She rubs her leopardy fur against his shins, as his cat did. He gathers this cat in his hands and combs his fingers through her hair. She stares turquoise eyes at him.

  Miriam abandons her dance. Now she sees this hitherto unseen stranger through the eyes of her cat.

  – You love cats, she murmurs.

  – Never seen this kind.

  – A Bengal. Foreign.

  – Like me, Jabulani smiles.

  – Where are you from?

  – Zimbabwe.

  – I am not scared of you.

  – That’s good. All I want is to earn money to send to my wife and children.

  – You have children?

  – A son and a daughter. Still at school. I gather you have a son.

  – I had a daughter.

  Jabulani feels as if he’s walking along that high beam again.

  – I am sorry for your loss ... What happened to her?

  She back-pedals, gathering her dress in a fist until it hardly covers her hips.

  – Why?

  – Sorry.

  She spits out a rueful laugh and rocks on her heels. She winds her hair up with her free hand.

  He lets the cat slide to the grass and enfolds her in his arms.

  She flinches. After a time she lets her hair fall.

  From the window Phoenix sees a dispersed Zimbabwean holding a pining Jew: two lonely, diasporic souls clutching at each other in a hard, spurning world.

  35

  HERMANUS. AFTER MIDNIGHT.

  Buyu and I walk along the cliff path to her house.

  The sea is curiously calm.

  There’s a hint of indigo in the gull-less sky. And the moon hangs like a pearl from Scorpio’s hooked tail.

  That raw frangipani stump in her front yard is empirical evidence I did not dream her.

  There’s a risk folk will report seeing two dodgy characters loitering on a wall, but we sit on it anyway, all foot-swinging and tomcat-cocky.

  I pluck my guitar. I see her shadow glide behind filmy white curtains. Then, for a long time, there’s no hint of her.

  Buyu lies down flat on the wall and stares up at the stars.

  I play on till I conjure her shadow again. Now it stays and sinuously lilts. Lotte subtly swaying her hips to my music? Or just a slight breeze drifting along the curtains?

  Buyu dozes off, his eyes white under slit lids, his feet jigging like a dreaming dog’s.

  Between tunes I hear an owl calling hoo hoo, the zither of mosquitoes and the snarl of Buyu’s breath over the listless sighing of a low tide.

  Now lights in the house go out. For a long time it’s dark behind the curtains. I am about to abandon this futile serenading and to joggle Buyu awake when the curtains slide apart, just a few inches, maybe a foot.

  Caught naked in the moonlight, she’s an angel between two vast white wings.

  Forgive me if this riles you, O Professor, but this is how I define beautiful.

  36

  BLOEMFONTEIN. AFTERNOON.

  A mystic-green Benz coasts through the town.

  Zero’s drumming his palms on the rim of the wheel to the beat of a Midnight Oil song.

  Phoenix rides shotgun, his face a stoic mask.

  Canada Dry and Jabulani sit in the back of the Benz. Canada Dry spins a revolver on his finger. Now and then he aims at a random dog or a bird on a wire and goes pow-pow, pow-pow!

  Dove Bait they left in Cape Town to keep an eye on Miriam and her rat-taunting cat and the happy-go-lucky gnomes. Besides, he’d lose his head around young girls.

  Zero halts a block beyond the Cherokee butcher’s shop. He goes in for boerewors.

  The butcher is paring a sheep down to flat chops with a bandsaw that now whines as it cuts through bone, now hums as it glides through flesh, now whines, now hums. He abandons his sawing, wipes blood off his hands.

  – Middag.

  – Afternoon. That’s a cool jeep you got out front.

  – Ja. There’s few in these parts.

  – Aha.

  – You have a wish?

  – Boerewors. Two coils.

  – You want spicy?

  – Spicy’s good.

  The butcher parcels the boerewors in Manila paper. He tallies up the cost with a pencil on the paper.

  Zero hands over a few notes. The tinging of the till is a sound from Zero’s youth. This place is a time warp. Yellow flypaper spiralling down from the roof. A standing steel fan swivelling and rattling. A Scope pin-up of a skinny white girl in a bikini flaunting fat tits. Johnny Cash singing on the radio.

  There’s no sign that this is post-apartheid South Africa, apart from a fading shot of a jubilant Mandela in a Springbok rugby shirt (rather uncoolly buttoned all the way up) after the Boks beat the All Blacks back in 1995 ... just a year after freedom. And then the fact that he, a coloured, is being served without the butcher batting an eyelid.

  – That game came down to the wire, hey? Zero remarks, nodding at the photo of Mandela

  – Ja. You saw it?

  – I was overseas. Saw it in an Irish pub in Amsterdam full of bloody rooineks. They all yelled for the All Blacks. No one was for us then, hey?

  – Ja. The world was against us.

  – When that ball flew through the posts, I tipped the rest of my beer over my head and went out onto the banks of the Amstel and danced a jig.

  The butcher laughs.

  – You wouldn’t want to sell me that jeep of yours?

  – No. But there’s a farmer out at a farm called Jakkalspan. His jeep’s all scarred and dented. I wonder where the hell he goes with that thing. Maybe he would sell.

  – How can I find this farmer?

  – Here. I’ll draw the way out for you.

  – You can’t call him?

  – He has no telephone. He’s like one of those Indian kermits hiding away in a cave.

  Zero smiles at his fumbling of hermit. He’ll have to tell Jero. It’ll kill him.

  At a 7-Eleven they pick up buns and tomatoes.

  Just beyond town they ride along a rutted road. They go past a fat-hipped woman with a baby cocooned against her spine and a plastic keg of water on her head.


  Further on they go past a few zinc shanties huddling in the sketchy shade of a stand of bluegums. Colourful washing hangs out on barbed wire and smoke unspools from a fire. Boys play football barefoot with a tennis ball. Girls play a game akin to hopscotch, where they hop on one foot and hold their other foot by the heel. There’s a paradoxical holiday mood, as if they are camping by the sea instead of along a dirt road.

  One girl shoots through a hole in the wire at the sight of the Benz and runs in their dust wake. She has no hope of catching them, yet she runs as if a mad dog’s on her heels.

  Jabulani thinks: Just a few days ago I was running hard and headlong as that girl.

  After half a mile Zero halts the Benz and winds down his window.

  The girl now catches up, halts a few yards short, stares warily at them. There’s no telling if folk will toss pennies or stones.

  – You are fast, young girl, Zero tells her. You go on running like this you’ll become a Zola Budd.

  For her a Zola Budd’s a taxi. She’s never heard of the barefoot runner. But a taxi’s a zoom-along thing, so she flashes dazzling teeth at Zero.

  He holds out a note. She skips up to him and curtsies for the money.

  – Stay well, girl.

  – Go well, sir.

  They go on, slowing at the sign of the farm they are looking for: Jakkalspan. Then they go on another mile or so until they find a bridge over a river. Zero parks the Benz under a bluegum.

  They make a fire out of newspaper and driftwood down on the river sand. They cook the boerewors and put it on the buns with slices of tomato. They down Black Label beer from an icebox.

  Jabulani and Canada Dry strip down to their jockeys and swim in the river.

  Zero lies on his shirt and sings along to a song by Masekela about a woman floating through the marketplace like a butterfly. He thinks about Jero in the market in Hermanus. Phoenix told him Jero’s cool. But he wonders how his life will pan out. He hopes having to hustle to survive will kill that fool dream of his of becoming a poet. He hopes he’ll find a good girl who never goes cold on him. And he hopes, above all, Jero will never have to scatter the ashes of his child, the way he had to.