Cruel Crazy Beautiful World

by Troy Blacklaws

  I see the quizzical slant of her brow as she spits me out.

  – No good?

  The rat’s gone galley west and I wonder if she’ll think I dreamed it.

  – It was magic ... but there was a rat. I’m sorry.

  – That was to be your Christmas gift. From your white angel.

  She tames her dress and combs her fingers through her hair.

  – I love you, I tell her.

  She just kisses me on the forehead. I shut my eyes to imbibe her scent. When I look again she’s gone, leaving me to free my hands with my teeth.

  I feel deserted, robbed, gutted. At the thought of him lying over her on white linen in a ratless space, I want to choke myself with the fishing line.

  44

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 2004. N1 highway, heading north through the Karoo.

  Jabulani rides shotgun beside old Zero in his mystic-green Benz through a land of yellow and ochre and olive tones. Behind them Canada Dry’s shooting play-play shots at lone birds on telegraph poles.

  Phoenix and Dove Bait follow in the Jeep Cherokee.

  They go through lonely dorps each with their high church, butchery, dim hotel, glass-finned jail, take-away café. In the windows of shut shops they see tacky tinsel and fake snow. The streets are deserted. All the folk are in church in this good, god-fearing land.

  Jabulani has a feeling of unreality. As if he’s in a dream. Not too long ago he was in a school where there was a low risk of being killed. A boy might snap his collarbone in rugby or twist his foot in the long jump. A teacher might trip over a school bag left in the hallway or fall off his bicycle. None had ever died. This is kamikaze crazy: heading for a shoot-out with the devil. He wants to beg Zero to spin the Benz around ... but if he does he’ll be forever haunted by the caught Zimbabweans: zombie-eyed, stoop-spined, lost to the world. Jabulani imagines them imagining him in Cape Town: a mouth full of fish and wine, their hard lot on that death farm the furthest thing from his mind.

  Jabulani calls up an image of Miriam alone with her gnomes and cat. Zero had found a waterfront bar that would hire the two Zimbabwean girls over Christmas and New Year. They just wanted pretty girls; otherwise Jabulani would have jumped at the job. He’d far rather carry beers over his head to tourists than tote a gun for handouts from Zero. Then again, if he’s to be frank, handouts is perhaps too cynical a word for the good money he’d earned so far on jobs where he’d been just a fumbling, unneeded tagger-on.

  Miriam. He finds her sallow skin and far-gazing eyes beautiful. He is puzzled by Zero’s curt, offhand way with her. No doubt it has to do with the girl they lost. Perhaps Miriam had not let him into her sorrow then. And that had sapped their love dry. He flinches at the thought of Zero making love to her. Him, bulky as a rugby hooker, seesawing over the fulcrum of her fragile hips.

  He has fallen in his own eyes. He’s always thought of himself as a good father and a faithful lover, yet now he’s curious – no, keen – to feel his dark skin yin-yang with hers, subtly opaque and silky, to hold her opaline tits in his palms.

  As if reading his thoughts, Zero swings the Benz hard off the road, shooting up smoky dust.

  They picnic on Kentucky and ice-cold Black Label beer under bluegums.

  The sun burns down on the tar. A curious buzzard eyes them from a telegraph pole. A few white woolly dots at the foot of a distant windmill. Otherwise no hint of life.

  But now a hazy scarecrow figure drifts into focus. A bony old music-maker in a dusty top hat and a floppy suit plucking a tune from his guitar and singing along: a freewheeling, flirty yet lackadaisical tune riddled with recurring cow-cajoling whistles. He reconfigures time to his whim, this black Dylan, and so walks the long miles without the measure of distance sapping his vigour. He’s so lost in his mesmeric groove that he would have gone by without blinking an eyelid had the dog on his heels not barked.

  They all stare at this phantom, this relic of a vanishing Africa. Jabulani has heard of Zulu maskandi minstrels, just as he has heard of Indian holy men who can float in the air. Such a man is not just nomadic busker, but poet, prophet, storyteller and walking history book. But why on earth is he on a road so far from KwaZulu-Natal? The world is standing on its head.

  Zero offers him a Kentucky drumstick and a tall boy of beer. Tells him: Happy Christmas.

  The man tips his hat for this Christmas box and walks on. He hands the drumstick to the dog. Jabulani wonders if he survives on liquid alone, like an air plant or the myth of a Masai surviving on blood and milk. He walks on along the mustard dust between the jagged rim of the tar and the riot of cosmos.

  Jabulani feels a sudden pang for the red dust of Zimbabwe and wonders if he will ever see her again.

  45

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 2004. HERMANUS. Before dawn.

  Buyu and I pick cannas and hibiscus along the cliff path. We fill a wine box with the petals.

  We scatter the petals on the grass on front of her house, then hide.

  The seagulls and sparrows call her out.

  She wanders barefoot out over the mosaic of petals, yellow, orange and red. She flings bread to the gulls and sparrows and dassies.

  Al comes out onto the veranda, a mug of smoking coffee in hand.

  – Magic, hey? says Lotte.

  – Looks like an Indian funeral, says Al.

  Buyu and I ride the Vespa out past Fisherhaven to Kleinmond for Christmas lunch.

  Flamingos fly like a school of pink fish through the blue of the sky.

  The water level has sunk low in the Fisherhaven lagoon. Wild horses drift through a sea of red amphibian flowers.

  How weird, to spend half the year underwater dreaming of the sun.

  We picnic down on the Kleinmond slipway. I have takeaway tuna sushi with flamingo-pink ginger and a beer. Buyu (who laughs at my forking out good money for uncooked fish) has fish and chips and Sprite.

  Seagulls hustle Buyu for the chips. They too scorn my sushi.

  The sea is alluringly blue, yet kelp sways darkly below her skin.

  One lone penguin weaves through the kelp.

  Buyu wanders down to the water. He pinches a crab between my chopsticks and holds it up for me to see.

  – Free sushi, he jokes.

  I laugh, though in my gut I feel robbed of Lotte.

  Buyu lets the crab go.

  He skips crab-flat stones over the surface of the water. I imagine he’s remembering a lakeshore in Tanzania. I wonder if his mother’s hanging on.

  And I think of my mother. How she, so adored by her tacky dwarves, may feel less lonely than me.

  I shut my eyes against the falling sun. In the psychedelic red sea behind my eyelids, I see a kind of dancing, four-handed Kali: nude, fanged and red-eyed. Her skin changes colour, now blue, now black. In one hand she holds a gun, in another a panga, in another diamonds, in yet another gold. She has a string of skulls hanging from her head. The dusty skulls of Biko and other folk killed by apartheid. The shiny skulls of folk who thought freedom would kill all the old demons. And one skull of a girl whose fingers wizardly turned string into diamonds or a cat’s eye or a star.

  46

  BOXING DAY, 26 DECEMBER 2004. Somewhere south of the Limpopo. Before sunrise.

  For miles now they have been cruising. Jabulani’s head juts out the wound-down window, his eyes peeled for the sun-bleached ox skull on a pole. He fears they may have gone too far. That it somehow eluded him. Perhaps it hangs at such an angle that it does not reflect light if you travel from the south. Nina had been heading south then. Or perhaps Ghost Cowboy got rid of the thing in the veld, for it was Jabulani’s sole signpost to the farm. He curses himself for not having put down another marker ... a pyramid of stones, or a snatch of cloth tied to the barbed wire.

  He thinks of Nina and how cool and crazy she’d been. If he survives this, he’ll go and see her in hospital.

  On the horizon he sees a luminous hint of dawn. If the skull did not pop up out of the dark soon, they’d have to abandon th
eir plan. It all hung on timing. Zulus always raided at dawn, Zero had said, to catch their foe out in that murky, eye-tricking time when it is no longer night and not yet day. And on this dawn of the day after Christmas, the gunmen would be doubly muddy-headed from boozing hard. That’s what Zero’s gambling on. For a few miles now there’d been a loaded stillness in the Benz. Zero had switched off the radio and Canada Dry had run out of jokes.

  If he fails to find the skull, not only will he have put Zero and his crew out, but there was a good chance old Jonas would die on that damned farm.

  And then the Benz’s headlights illuminate the skull: sinister and grinning.

  – Whoa! The skull! Jabulani cries.

  – Cool, says Zero.

  – Bang, bang, goes Canada Dry.

  Jabulani is amazed Ghost Cowboy left the ox skull hanging. Perhaps he wanted to lure Jabulani to a showdown.

  Zero blinks to signal to the Cherokee. They halt maybe half a mile beyond the skull. They kill the lights and go by foot along the tar and then along the dirt road to the farm. After a mile or so the road becomes an avenue through high, raggedy bluegums. At the end of the tunnel of trees is the farmhouse, ghostly in this looming dawn. To Jabulani this is a rerun of Bloemfontein.

  Zero goes over the plan: Phoenix is to go ahead to defuse the dogs with his darts. Zero is to swing round to the east through the veld so he’ll be silhouetted by the rising sun. Canada Dry and Dove Bait are to stay put on this road, hidden behind the bluegums, to cut off this escape route. Jabulani’s job is to swing west through the veld and somehow warn the Zimbabweans trapped in the barn ... before the bullets begin to fly.

  Jabulani tiptoes gingerly through the veld, scared of cracking a stick or snagging on a tripwire. He hears a two-toned iambic grunt and halts dead in his tracks. Another porcupine? A warthog? Then he figures it was the choked-off bark of one of the Dobermann dogs. Then he hears a curt bark, followed by a yelp fading to a whine. The other dog down, darted. A deep voice – from the farmhouse? – tells the dogs to voetsek. Jabulani sucks in a draft of air, holds it.

  Now he runs flat out over the bare veld behind the barn, his borrowed boots chocking against stones, chipping the hard husk off anthills.

  As he runs, he recalls how a steenbok had somehow got into a tennis court at the school in Bulawayo and how the schoolboys had taunted it: gaping-eyed, bat-eared, jittery-footed and absurdly out of context. It was the most vulnerable thing he’d ever seen until now. He feels as if he’s haring across a firing range. He steels himself for the bite of a bullet. But no bullet is shot and now he’s up against the far wall of the barn, gasping for air.

  – Hey, Jonas! he calls through the wood joints of the barn. Jonas!

  – Yo! Jonas cries.

  You can tell he thinks it’s a ghost or a hobgoblin come for him.

  – Happy Christmas, Jonas. This is Jabulani.

  – Hey, teacher! You survived! You fetched the police?

  – No police. Just a few men.

  How is he to describe them? Layabout vigilantes? Laid-back desperados? Tarantino types?

  Jabulani hears sighs of disillusionment from the captives.

  – But they are hard-core heroes.

  There’s a rippling murmur of hope from the Zimbabweans.

  – When you hear shots I want you to hack your way out this side of the barn. You still got that watermelon panga?

  – I got it.

  – Where will you go?

  – I go home to my wife in Zimbabwe. I go home empty-handed but I am too old for this. I will bake bread again if there is any flour to be found.

  – I will see you, Jonas.

  Now the sun’s surfacing and Jabulani will be lit up the moment he juts his head round the corner. He puts his gun in his pocket and inches along on all fours to peek around. A bullet whizzes just over his head. Jabulani plucks his head back into the shaded lee of the barn. His heart beats frenziedly. Now he hears a volley of bemused shouts from the farmhouse and the muted murmurs of the Zimbabweans in the barn.

  What happened to Phoenix? He took out the dogs, but how can a gunman be free to take a potshot at him? Perhaps Phoenix hadn’t seen him and the guy was zoned out on a deckchair by the pool or the tennis court until the dog barked.

  He wonders if Zero has got to the farmhouse yet.

  Now Jabulani hears another shot. He figures Phoenix got the sniper. And then follows another volley of shots. Perhaps one of the other gunmen has gone down. There’s a fermata of surreal silence, before the world explodes with gunfire.

  Now he hears the roar of a motor. The army troop truck. The sound of the motor fades slightly. Then he hears shots and the motor cutting out. That’d be Canada Dry and Dove Bait waylaying the truck.

  He takes another look round the corner. No one shoots at him. As he edges along the wall of the barn he hears the staccato sound of Jonas’s panga blade biting into the wood of the barn and the muddled voices of the Zimbabweans.

  At the far end of the barn he looks out onto the farmyard. Phoenix is hiding behind a tipped wheelbarrow, drawing all the flak from the farmhouse. Two dogs and a fallen gunman lie bleeding in the dust. Another gunman is in the swimming pool, tinting the water red.

  Jabulani draws his gun. He sees Zero walking along the roof of the farmhouse.

  Ghost Cowboy comes out of the house, holding a knife to the throat of the young black girl Jabulani howled for. Ghost Cowboy has a handgun in his free hand. They head towards the zebra-striped Land Rover.

  Shots from Ghost Cowboy’s gun spark off the barrow.

  They dance a weird, spinning waltz, Ghost Cowboy and the girl, over the yard. She’s got this white Rolling Stones T-shirt on with the image of that long, red, lolling tongue. The knife cuts a gill slit in her skin and blood filters out till the outlines of the tongue blur.

  Jabulani draws a bead on Ghost Cowboy but dares not fire.

  The hinges of the Land Rover door whine a high note. Ghost Cowboy flashes a defiant smile at his foes. At that instant of fuck-you cockiness Jonas jumps out from behind him like some mad samurai Puck. He swings his panga down through the albino’s head to his eyes. There’s a hiatus of horror before blood flows profusely and the girl’s cry skirls to the sky.

  Then the girl falls and a gut shot from Zero or Phoenix fells the cowboy. He kneels in the dust, the panga blade jutting out from his forehead, blood masking his face. He lets the knife go, turns the gun on himself, but his hand quivers too violently and he just shoots off an ear.

  He’s still alive when half a dozen Zimbabweans who did not skedaddle into the veld converge on him. They snatch the gun out of his hand, draw the panga blade out of his head and toss him over the wire to the crocodiles. Somehow he finds his feet again. Blood-blinded, he capers haphazardly till he falls into the pond. No killing frenzy follows, no deadly, scaly torpedoes zoom in on him through the water. The crocodiles have learnt long ago that there’s nowhere for their prey to go.

  Jonas hovers over the girl, dabbing up the blood with a hanky, soothing her with motherly clickings of his tongue.

  Canada Dry and Dove Bait rumble up in the troop truck in time to see a giant crocodile dawdle-hobble along the rim of the pond. To see it catch Ghost Cowboy’s flapping forearm in its jaw, toss its head up and tug off the arm as you might pluck a drumstick from a chicken, or pull a Christmas cracker apart. Another flick of its head and the arm’s gone.

  – Far out, chirps Canada Dry.

  Jabulani fires two shots into Ghost Cowboy to end his pain. Each of the shots jigs his torso to and fro in the shallows.

  The Zimbabweans stand hat in hand. Despite all he did to them, they bow to a man who died so macabre a death without crying out.

  Jabulani’s eyes pan the farmyard. The carnage reminds him of the ending of Hamlet.

  The girl revives.

  Dove Bait stares longingly at her. You can tell he wishes to have her as a memento.

  – Pity about the guy in the pool. It’s a beautiful
day for a swim, chirps Canada Dry.

  – You and Dove Bait fish him out, Zero commands. Chuck all the corpses over the wire to the crocs.

  – And the dogs?

  – Shoot them, Canada. Then they too go over.

  – But ... but they’re innocent.

  – How so?

  – They’re just dogs.

  – You have a gift, jokes Zero. If I’m ever in the dock I’ll call you to get me off the hook. Fact is, they’ll starve otherwise. This way they won’t feel a thing.

  – Not my old dog, begs Jonas. Let him go with me to Zimbabwe.

  – Just the darted dogs, says Zero.

  The Zimbabweans don their hats again.

  – Phoenix. Get these Zimbos to give you a hand loading this truck to the hilt with marijuana.

  – That’s a lot of dope, chirps Canada Dry.

  – Leave space behind the cab for whoever wants to catch a ride down to Cape Town.

  And to Jonas:

  – You get to ride in that funky, zebra Land Rover. You and your dog. Just ditch it before the border.

  – Daughter, you come home with me, Jonas says to the girl.

  Dove Bait looks gutted.

  Jabulani, aside, to Zero:

  – You want to ferry a cargo of dope down the highway?

  – I feel lucky, tunes Zero.

  A crow flies up from roadkill: a fluffy, flat scab that was a jackal or a dog.

  Jabulani interprets this as an ominous sign.

  The news at noon:

  RADIO: An earthquake off the island of Sumatra in Indonesia was felt as far as India and Myanmar. The force of the earthquake registered as high as nine on the Richter scale. A tsunami triggered by the earthquake has devastated the coastlines of Sri Lanka and India. The Thai islands of Koh Phi Phi and Phuket have been hit hard and the lives of scores of locals and holidaymakers have been lost. A run-up of fourteen metres was reported in Cape Coral, Thailand.