– You want to go down? she says without looking up from her magazine.
I imagine she has cage-diving in mind.
– I’m scared.
She laughs and now checks me out from foot to head, eyes lingering midway.
– You’re in the cage. They can’t bite you. And if they did the men got guns.
Cool. And no doubt they’d be happy to shoot a random, cocky coloured out to sabo their gig.
– I’m glad you told me that.
– Ja.
She hands me a flyer full of shots of gaping-jawed sharks. Their eyes are glazed with that distant, ashamed look dogs get when you catch them peeing.
– That’s a lot of money. Is it cheaper for locals?
– How local?
I’m on the verge of telling her Hermanus but am keen to keep gun-toting men off my ass.
– Cape Town.
– Maybe I can let you go for this.
She pencils a figure on paper.
– That’s still I lot. I’m a student.
I fiddle out my UCT student card from among the notes earned from hawking geckos. Still valid till the end of 2004.
– It’s not cheap but you’d never forget it, hey? And in case you did, we shoot a video.
– You going out again today?
– We go out just once a day. Unless the sea’s too wild.
– And you always see sharks?
– Ja. But if you don’t, you can catch a free ride the day after.
– Aha.
– Sting did it.
– He went out on your boat?
– No. Another boat. But I saw him.
For a moment she looks downcast. Perhaps at the thought she had not hooked a film star and might forever be stranded in this end-of-the-line place.
– And if Sting goes out to sea you just got to pull a shark out of the hat, hey?
I nod. If ever there was a given, this is it.
– Catch is, sharks get lazy being chucked sardine chum all the time. It’s like they’re dazed.
– But don’t they hunt seals for blubber?
– Ja. But something funny’s happening. They look bored. Like lions in a circus, maybe. And tourists want to see them crazy for the chum.
– So how do you remedy that? Not go out as often?
– You change the chum. You see, it’s not just the smell of blood the shark goes for, it’s the signals from all the flapping.
– Flapping? You using live bait?
She leans over the counter, offering a tantalising view of yet another kind of bait.
– Don’t tell anyone. But we just came up with a foolproof chum. It makes the sharks all perky.
I imagine she makes tourists rather perky as they order from the bar.
So this is the macabre fate of caught stray dogs. I wonder how they chuck them to the sharks so tourists don’t see. Maybe Zodiac out to sea beforehand?
Now she goes all stiff and formal.
– So, mister, you keen?
– I’ll think about it.
– You do that. But you must be here by six if you want to go out. We have to teach you a few things about cage-diving. Not that there’s a risk. But just in case, hey?
I order an aptly named Honey Blonde Ale from her. As she bends to fetch it out of an icebox, a sparrow flies into the bar and weaves through the hanging bicycle frames.
I recall one time at school in Cape Town when a bird got trapped in the canteen. It flapped against the glass out of fear of the ungodly din. Boys tossed things at it. I took off my school shirt and flung it over the bird to catch it. I felt the sting of peach pips and bottle tops and pencils on my skin as I took the bird out. I felt shivers of the bird’s fear through the cloth. I got a kind of revenge a few days afterwards by blowing into an empty soda bottle to mimic the tone of the school bell. Like dogs in an experiment, all boys within hearing radius stood up and without glancing at the clock headed out. Others followed till the canteen was empty. They discovered they’d been tricked when they got to class and found no teacher in sight.
The beer froths up as she jams a sliver of lemon into the mouth of the bottle, Mexican style. She catches the overflow with her tongue.
– Sorry, hey.
I just smile a half smile.
The sparrow flies out into the glare of the backyard. I follow it, squinting into the white light. At the end of the yard is a wavy zinc wall painted pink with a few sickly palms dangling yellow fans over it. I can’t see over the wall.
I jump out of my skin as a baboon hisses at me from one end of the yard.
Beer froths out of the bottle again and the girl laughs before she goes back to flipping through her magazine.
Now I see he’s on a wire running up to a kind of washing line that lets him shuttle back and forth. The grass under the line is worn to dust. His ass is an obscene shark-gum pink.
– Good baboon, I tell him.
He goes berserk, tugging on his wire and flashing his fangs. Hard to tell if he’s flirting or in ninja mode.
The girl glances up and flicks me a smile. I lift the beer bottle as if to say cheers before thumbing the lemon down into the beer. It floats like some frilly, yellow-spined foetus in the liquid. I swig the beer: lemon and malt. A hint of honey in the smell.
Then I see a half-flat football on the grass. I put the beer down in the grass and juggle the dud ball from foot to foot. It’s tricky, as there’s no life in it.
The baboon hops up and down, reels off a volley of barks.
I flick the ball over the zinc.
I skirt round the baboon and jump to catch the rim of the zinc wall. I toe up and peer over. I see a row of cages. Just one of them has a dog in it. Deaf dog didn’t hear the baboon barking or my feet clanging against the zinc. No sign of that mussel-licking Rhodesian dog.
I can’t hold on long as the zinc rim cuts into my palms. I am about to let go when I hear the girl yell and before I can spin my head I’m yanked off the zinc. I fall hard to the grass.
The guy who tugged me down looms over me, burly as a rugby hooker.
– What the hell you after?
Winded, I gasp for air and hold up a hand for mercy.
– You spying on us, hey?
– No. No. I’m sorry. I just kicked a football over.
– Forget the ball and piss off, you hear.
– But I haven’t finished my beer.
The guy kicks the bottle. It cracks against the pink zinc.
The old Xhosa man somehow slides through a gap in the zinc. I hear a listless bark. The ball flies over to us.
The hooker picks it up and cuts a slit in it with one swing of his pocketknife. The ball farts a gasp of sour air. You don’t need a master’s degree to decipher the symbolism.
40
TABLE MOUNTAIN, CAPE TOWN.
Under the pines at Kloof Nek, Zero lets the farmer out of the boot. He bolts, but Canada Dry dives him down.
Now Zero holds his Colt to his head.
– You walk along the jeep track ahead of us. If you sidestep, I shoot you.
The white stones of the track glow in the moonlight.
The smell of pines floats on the cool air.
The farmer walks ahead up along the looping track, spitting out gobbledygook. Perhaps a prayer, or a curse.
Zero hobbles after him, followed by Canada Dry. Whenever the farmer falters, Zero spurs the barrel of his Colt into his spine.
He must wonder, Zero thinks, how you can be guffawing with your mates one moment, slinging down sherry, your cock jutting at the girl you ripped bare ... and then be reduced to a stooped, jibbering thing the next.
They are too high to hear the sounds of the shipyards and Canada Dry cuts his chirps. Apart from the farmer’s blurred words and the chocking of boots the night is silent.
Zero had thought of letting Phoenix toss him into the sea in Shark Alley. He remembers the rush of cold fear he had felt when the shark hit him and the unbearable lacuna as it loope
d before taking a half-moon out of him. Condemning him to hobble for life. And to long flannels down to his snakeskins.
But Jerusalem would freak out. Even if you told him this bastard raped girls and this was his just comeuppance, Jero would go all John Lennon on you. Ironic that he, a would-be poet, is blind to the beauty of poetic justice. Yet it’s not just about hiding gore from Jerusalem. If the sharks jawed this fucker dead they’d never find a hint of him again. He’d be gone one time, like that old lady a great white took in Fish Hoek just the other day. In that case folk saw it happen, so there was no need to find a corpse to put it on the front page of all the papers.
In this case, as in all his other vigilante acts to date, they’ll need to find a cadaver if Zero is to get his curiously warped thrill from reading about it in the paper.
He recalls the headlines so far:
CORPSE OF RED MAFIA MAN FOUND DOWN OLD TIN MINE
That man would never again put a Jiffy over the head of a go-go girl.
And just yesterday: ASIAN MAN FALLS TO HIS DEATH IN SEA POINT
It is indeed a time for falling, reflects Zero.
– I need to piss, Canada Dry whines.
– Halt, Zero commands the farmer.
Out of years of reservist habit the farmer halts in two steps. You can’t take the army out of the Boer, thinks Zero. You always see on the newsreels that right-wing farmer riding his horse and his cult following of diehard Boers saluting their swastika-type flag and calling for a white republic. His name’s White Earth. No joke. He just got out of jail for beating a petrol jockey half dead. He spends a few years in jail and the jockey’s fucked up for life. That’s justice for you. And old White Earth is a poet to boot. He comes out of jail mouthing pussy lines about dancing daffodils.
– Funny they never need to piss in cowboy flicks, hey?
Canada Dry tee-hees at Zero’s wit.
Below them the lights of Cape Town flicker like a zillion fireflies. You can see strings of fairy lights on cargo ships moored in the bay. You can see out to the dark arc of False Bay down to the left, and out over the Cape Flats to the jagged black spine of the Hottentots Holland range on the horizon.
They come to the Woodhead Reservoir. From here there’s a long drop down to a ravine. Zero spits into the void. It would do the trick but there’s a chance he’d snag on the way down. That would slow his fall and he might just survive.
The farmer falls silent, sensing his words are wasted.
They go on and now the track becomes a path cutting through thick fynbos and over boulders. The farmer falters, gasping for air.
The moon films the fynbos in quicksilver. Zero picks a feather of fynbos and rubs it between his fingers for the lemony scent. How beautiful it is, thinks Zero. Like being on another planet. It begs you to come up with a poem.
They go on till the world falls away below them to the lights of Camps Bay and the slopes of the Twelve Apostles beyond. You can just see the white hem of the sea. A flat rock juts out over the void. It defies the laws of physics, this rock. Like the Finger of God. The drop’s twice as long as from the reservoir. And no risk of snagging.
– You stand on that rock.
Zero recalls the time they picnicked on this rock. He and Miriam, before Jero was born and before they went into exile. They’d filled their mouths with champagne and French-kissed while it fizzed on their tongues. The champagne had gone to his head and he’d danced a risky jig on the edge till Miriam had peeled her shirt off to lure him to her. They’d felt the heat of the day’s sun seep up from the rock into their naked skin, as if by osmosis. They’d felt as if their love would last forever. Zero laughs a short, dry laugh. Perhaps Jero began his life on this very rock. Now how’s that for poetry?
– Now you jump.
The farmer’s face is chalky white against the slate sky.
– All this flying reminds me of apartheid, Canada Dry remarks. Folk falling out of high windows, falling down stairwells, falling from a scaffold ... falling, falling, falling.
He laughs a wry laugh for times gone by. Perhaps he feels a wistful pang for a time when it was clear who was being fucked over by whom.
– I beg you guys. You can have my Cherokee. You can have my farm. And all my sheep. Hey?
– And how do you want to heal the girls you raped?
– It was a sin, man. I was mad. I had scorpions in my skull.
– Scorpions? You telling me it wasn’t your fault? You sound like that Greek madman whose tapeworm told him to stab Verwoerd. Thing is, he was a hero in my eyes for killing a racist bastard. You, on the other hand, are one sorry specimen.
– It was a sin. I prayed to Jesus in your car boot. And he pardoned me. It was as if I came out that boot reborn.
– Booted up from scratch, Canada Dry quips.
– Unlucky for you I don’t hang out with Jesus. And if I did, I’d tell him how uncool I find it of him to let you off the hook. It was a sin. And now you suffer for it. Not for long. Not as long as the girls have to carry images of you in their head. So, you see, in that sense you are lucky. Now jump, man. Otherwise I shoot you in the gut ... and you fall anyway.
– You’re fucking crazy.
– Amen.
The farmer casts his eyes out over the Atlantic. Dawn lends the sea a gunmetal patina. Perhaps he thinks it ironic for a farmer who has spent a lifetime with his feet firm on the earth to die in the sky by the sea. Shadows shift like rippling black cloth over the Twelve Apostles: grimly silent jurors all. He finds no hint of mercy.
He teeters on the rim of the rock till Canada Dry’s foot sends him over.
41
HERMANUS. DAWN.
Phoenix revs up a Cherokee with a Zodiac in tow. And Dove Bait riding shotgun.
I hop into the seat behind.
You can tell by the way he swings the wheel with one flat palm that the sass of Bahaya the taximan still lurks in his blood.
– Hey Phoenix. Hey Dove Bait. Cool you found a rubber duck.
– Borrowed from the Hawston boys.
A typical, laconic Phoenix one-liner. You’d think Clint Eastwood rather than Freud was his mentor.
– And the jeep?
– That’s a longer story.
Dove Bait caws as if this is a good joke.
Phoenix swivels his head to scowl at him. At that moment something goes pop under a tyre. Phoenix squints into the rearview.
– You asshole! You made me kill a tortoise.
I have never seen Phoenix rattled before. When he ran down old Black Mamba, it was in cold blood. He is forever cool and lucid.
– All the years I rode a taxi I never ran down a dog.
– Sorry, tunes Dove Bait.
Fortunately Dove Bait senses it’s not the time to remind him of Black Mamba.
– But a tortoise can’t feel like a dog.
– You ever got into the head of a tortoise, hey? He’s not a fucking flower. He feels pain. He falls in love. Maybe he dreams. Who can tell all he can remember? Or if he can foresee his own death?
Dove Bait just gapes out at the world. This topic has got too loaded for him.
– Poor tiddly tortoise, tuts Phoenix.
Somehow Phoenix’s hard, bald head reminds me of a tortoise shell and I feel faint after the sound of that shell imploding. I wind down the window for air.
There’s a pepperminty smell to the blur of fynbos. I hear the defiant call of a bird from the lagoon. I think of boys dozing in a London bus. I feel a yearning for my mother’s coffee and her way of haunting that limbo between dream and waking.
– That boy going to man your stall again?
– He is. He’s keen to earn money for medicine for his mother. AIDS is killing her.
I picture Buyu lugging a box the size of an Indian tea box from my flat to the market. Then I picture Buyu’s father staring at the sun peeling off the surface of Lake Victoria and of his mother lying in the lee of a dhow, pining for a distant son.
– Hey Phoenix, you t
old my old man about the priest’s dog?
– Did. But he had something to get rid of. Sent him along for the ride instead.
He disdainfully flicks his head at Dove Bait, who has gone all mute and meek.
I hear Zero’s voice in my head: I leave no spoor. No proof.
– How we going to follow them out to sea without spooking them? There’s no way they’ll chuck a dog to the sharks in front of us.
– I got a plan. We don’t follow them. We go out to Shark Alley before they do. We hover behind Geyser Rock in this Zodiac and hope they swing in. Tourists want to see seals and sharks. A double bill. They hope to see a shark kill a seal. But the sharks will zero in on the dog instead if he’s bleeding. I’m hoping they’ll spill fish blood rather than cut him.
– That’s the plan? To hide behind a rock until they drop him overboard ... and just hope they don’t cut him up beforehand?
– And we let him doggy-paddle till we catch a fin on film.
– But that’s a fucked-up plan. He’s old, that dog. He’ll sink. Or the sharks’ll kill him before we can fish him out.
– A dog in water’s a demon. He’s not just going to go down like some Chinaman caught in a rip tide.
– Can’t we just fetch him out of his cage now? Go in with guns blazing and ...
– We have to catch them red-handed ... otherwise this will just go on. I want to film it.
– But I know this dog.
– You told me he’s old and deaf. Maybe it’d be a mercy. On the other hand, he may just get lucky. Depends on how we time it. I want to shut down this gig today. I got another job up north to handle. Me, Zero, Canada Dry, this palooka lover-boy here ... and that Zimbo I told you of. We’ll be gone over Christmas. Hope you’ll be cool.
– Christmas was never a focus for us.
– Still. Call your old lady up. Somehow she’s less dazed. It’s as if this Zimbo has cast some kind of voodoo to lure her out of her sorrow.
I wonder if his voodoo can cure her. I would kill to see my mother laugh again the way she did that time when Zero’s foot went through the floor in Amsterdam. She’ll smile in that distant, dreamy way of hers when she’s hanging out with her gnomes, but she no longer laughs.
Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Page 14