Sam's Best Shot

by James Best

  Ed turned to Sam. ‘Where would you go back in time to, Sam?’

  ‘1992, in California,’ he promptly replied.

  Ed was taken aback. ‘Why?’

  ‘To see Bill Gates releasing Windows 3.1,’ Sam replied, with a grin.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tension in the Transkei

  After crossing the Kei River at the Great Kei Cutting—a deep gorge that plunges down to the stony river bed below—the bus climbed on to the two-thousand-metre-high Transkei plateau. A mesa rose above sheer cliffs hundreds of metres tall. Previously, tribal justice had been meted out by throwing poor souls off these cliffs, prompting another conversation with Sam about capital punishment.

  Pale emerald hills undulated in almost perfect sinusoidal waves. Sharply edged creek beds occasionally cracked the surface like a cake that was about to fall apart. Rondavels sprinkled the hills, spaced out rather than clustered together. Each had a small animal pen with walls of long sticks thatched tightly together, a vegetable garden, and a field of corn or tilled earth. There were glimpses of yellow pumpkins and brown chickens. Pigs, dogs, goats, horses and long-horned cattle wandered between the huts and across the road, causing some sharp swerving and braking from our imperturbable driver.

  Anka was getting tense and teary as we approached Coffee Bay. I turned to her. ‘Okay. It is 2065. You are eighty-five years old, sitting on a verandah in a nursing home, and I happen to end up in the same nursing home, and I get wheeled out by the nurse onto the verandah next to you. We recognise each other and I say to you, “Hey, Anka, back when you met that guy in South Africa, how did it work out?” At that point, you will have an answer. And really, that is what you are here for: an answer. It may not be the one you want, but at least you will have an answer.’

  Anka nodded, smiled and thanked me. She thought for a while. In her Dutch accent and in typically direct Dutch style she replied, ‘Yes, James, I will have an answer. But on that verandah you will be ninety-eight.’

  The sun was getting low as we neared our destination. Low clouds scurried across the plateau causing shadows to dance over the hills. The rondavels seemed to have a set colour scheme, painted one of only four colours: white, aqua green, apricot or pink. They dotted the fields like blobs of paint on a Monet painting. Anka wondered aloud whether there was a cultural significance to the limited colour choice. Perhaps a colour meant a family name or ethnic sub-group?

  Anka yelled to the front of the bus. ‘Driver, does the choice of house colour mean something?’

  ‘Yes,’ he yelled back without looking.

  ‘What?’

  He half turned and smiled. ‘It means you like that colour.’

  The bus burst into laughter as we came off the plateau and bumped our way back down to the Wild Coast at Coffee Bay. The bay had been named for a shipload of coffee that was supposedly spilled in a shipwreck in the early days of European settlement. Upon arriving at Coffee Shack Backpackers hostel, Anka departed to discover her destiny further up the coast. Meanwhile, the hostel manager greeted Sam and me warmly, having heard about our arrival in advance. Apparently, word was getting out about us on the hostel grapevine, and both staff members and guests were reading the blog before they met us, which was kind of weird, but made for an excellent ice-breaker. It also saved me having to explain our situation over and over again.

  That evening we suffered yet another compulsory two-hour blackout—called ‘load sharing’ for South Africa’s overloaded electricity grid. This had been the fourth evening in a row where candles were lit, restaurants couldn’t cook food and bills and receipts were written by hand.

  There was a lot of disgust at the government, and suspicion of corruption. Power rates had risen twenty per cent that year, but nobody thought things would improve any time soon. One South African backpacker was studying economics and told me the power crisis would slash a full one per cent off South Africa’s GDP that year, which I well believed. Another commented that this had only become an issue since 1994—the year the African National Congress, under Nelson Mandela, first formed government—and I sensed a hint of racial tension.

  Sam was principally annoyed that he couldn’t charge his Nintendo DS. After dinner we set out for our cottage, torches in hand. We had to cross a small creek to get to our room and navigating the rocks by torchlight was a little hazardous. As we took off our wet shoes on the verandah, we were struck by the view of the moonlit surf under the bright Milky Way. The sound of drums drifted across the village. It seemed that South Africa took away, but then gave back twofold.

  The next day we travelled to a nearby beach with spectacular cliffs and a large rock island, towering vertically up out of the surf, guarding the mouth of a river. Over millennia the relentless pounding of the surf had carved a hole right through the centre of the island, leaving a short tunnel through which wild waves smashed. Other backpackers had walked three hours to get there, but Sam and I had gone in the retrieval truck with the picnic lunch for the group. Sam was disengaged, sitting apart from the others and stimming on small sticks among the rocks lining the beach, flicking them between his fingers and repeatedly dropping and picking them up. It was disappointing, but we couldn’t be kicking goals all the time, I reasoned.

  On the trip back, Sam suddenly snapped out of his daze and started entertaining the troops. While the truck dodged geese, cattle and pigs on the road, Sam and I took turns making animal noises, doing funny head dances and imitating voices from The Simpsons, The Incredibles, and of course, Harry Potter. The German and Dutch twenty-somethings looked on with wry amusement and a hint of bewilderment.

  In the afternoon we headed back to our hut. Once again we needed to negotiate the creek on the way to our hut. The tide was up but it looked only knee deep so I decided to give it a go rather than go around, a ten-minute walk through the village and over the bridge upstream. But when I was halfway across, already up to my thighs in water, a tidal surge brought the depth up to my waist. Scrambling to keep my phone, money belt and wallet above the water and not fall over in the process, I struggled to the other side.

  Sam clearly couldn’t follow me across. I shouted to him above the rumble of the nearby surf to stay still while I walked around to get him. A staff member from the hostel saw our predicament and hurried down to Sam’s side. She shouted that she’d drive him around to me. That is, I think that’s what she shouted. I waited at the road above our hut for ten minutes but no staff member, no Sam. I started to worry. Maybe he’d refused to go with her. Did I hear her correctly? I didn’t like him being away from me, even in a backpacker hostel.

  I jogged over the bridge and back to the hostel, scanning the grounds for him. When I couldn’t find him or the staff member, I panicked and ran to the office. People were mobilised and a search began. The two were quickly found down near the creek in the camping area. Sam had refused to accept her lift and tried to find another way across. The staff member had sensibly just stayed with him to keep an eye.

  When he saw me, Sam called out ‘Dad!’ and ran to my side before jumping up and down, flapping his hands by his side. It seemed he’d sensed danger while separated from me, which was a good thing. I also didn’t mind he’d refused to go with a stranger in a car, even though the consequences had freaked me out. The staff member drove us both back around to the hut and I changed my wet shorts and underwear. I hadn’t quite wet myself, but the creek certainly had.

  That night Sam went to sleep early. There was to be a drumming performance at the next hostel over and I allowed myself to go. There was another blackout as the performance began. Four young African men with drums were silhouetted on stage in front of a row of lamps and candles, the rest of the room dimly lit. A weird-looking long-haired white dude with a flute stood behind the drummers. The crowd waited expectantly in the eerie atmosphere.

  The drumming began. Powerful rhythms rocked the room. These guys could play. The flute dude actually worked in well, providing a dancing, high-pitched melodic contra
st to the thumping low beats of the drums. The drummers beat the tightened skins and worked themselves into a lather, and the crowd, black and white, jumped off their cushions and began to dance. The hands of one of the drummers moved so fast you couldn’t see them. Compelling, hypnotic, exhilarating.

  The last song was, of course, ‘Shosholoza’, a traditional Ndebele song brought into South Africa from Zimbabwe by mine workers, and wildly popular in South Africa. It’s a call and response song: the singer calls to the crowd and the crowd sings the same line back. Mandela said the song helped him get through eighteen years of breaking rocks in the quarry. To South Africans, it’s more than a song.

  The white South Africans I had spoken to the night before were also there and quite drunk. They had started drinking shots in the hostel that afternoon while watching rugby. They knew all the words and were as enthusiastic as anyone there in singing the black folk song. Maybe I had misread them. I was still struggling to get my head around the complicated relationship between black and white in modern South Africa, but that night ‘Shosholoza’ helped bring black and white together.

  The next day I decided Sam and I would just chill. We crossed the rising creek to the hostel to check emails and, if possible, Skype home on the wobbly wi-fi. In the office, Sam once again tried to update his Nintendo DS on the web. I didn’t realise it at the time, but he had been attempting to do this for nearly a week and it was the main thing on his mind. I was distracted, doing what I wanted to do, as he started to stress out, rocking back and forth on the lounge and whacking his hands on the cushions. I started to pay more attention to him and attempted to calm him down, but to no avail.

  I didn’t really understand what he was doing with the DS and why the update wasn’t working. Soon he really lost it, shouting and jumping up and down in front of the lounge. I tried to soothe him again, but I realised I needed to get him out of there. Staff were hovering nearby with concerned and confused looks. One, a kind African lady who had taken an interest in Sam, came into the room. ‘Sam, Sam, you calm down. You be nice to your dad.’

  He thumped his fists into the lounge. ‘No, no, no! It will upload. NO to the no access to internet. I FORBID this!’ He grabbed me hard by the arm, then squeezed my head in frustration.

  I needed to get that DS off him, so I grabbed it quickly and stood up. ‘We need to get out of here. Come with me now.’

  He jumped up, raised his fist and shouted at me, ‘No! You give it to ME now. The internet only works here. It doesn’t work in the ROOM!’ He tried to stop me leaving by bear-hugging me, the ever-increasing strength of his teenage body taking me by surprise, and then, his forehead buttressed to mine, he squeezed my head again between his hands and grunted and growled. He was now yelling at the top of his voice and I prepared myself for a bite or headbutt, two techniques he hadn’t employed to date. The squeezing and grabbing continued but I managed to stay calm. It was so embarrassing but I also felt sorry for Sam. I willed myself to maintain control.

  Palms downwards, I patted the air in a calming motion. ‘You can’t do this, Sam. We are in Africa. You cannot use violence; it will just make things worse. They might take your DS away or you might get arrested by the police if you get violent.’

  He shook his fist and jerked his head, shouting, ‘I can use violence. I will use violence. I will kill them. If they take my DS away I will shoot them.’

  I tensed. Quietly, I said, ‘If you shoot someone you will go to prison.’

  ‘I will put them in prison,’ he shrieked. ‘I will kill them all!’

  This raised the bar. He was making threats that might be misunderstood. I desperately wanted to get him out of that environment and away somewhere private. Eventually I coaxed him out of the hostel and up the road. The creek was so high it wasn’t fordable so we had to walk through the village to reach our cottage.

  Sam continued to shout and grab at me as we walked along the road. There was now a crowd of thirty or so watching us. He threatened anybody and everybody who could take away his DS. My attempts to talk him through it were getting nowhere. ‘I will swim to Australia and get back my videos,’ he bellowed. ‘If they take my internet away I will make them get hanged!’

  Finally we reached our cottage. But as we rounded the side of the building I was stunned to see a herd of twenty long-horned cattle surrounding the front door. Bloody hell! That was the last thing I needed at this moment! To a casual observer it probably looked quite comical as I ineptly and unsuccessfully tried to shoo the large beasts away. Fortunately, a shepherd boy soon appeared and quickly moved them along.

  Inside the cottage, Sam and I collapsed onto the beds, a pair of sweaty messes. Over the next twenty minutes, I was able to move Sam from his agitated state to a place of relative calmness, where he could reflect more logically on what happened. I knew I hadn’t played my own hand very well either. I shouldn’t have mentioned arrests or taking away the DS, but at least I had managed to stay calm.

  Sam eventually conceded that violence had not helped, and had worsened the situation. I made him take a solemn oath to not do that again. After a few minutes I turned to him. ‘Sam, your DS still works. Even without the update it still works.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sighed.

  The tension was breaking. I continued, ‘So when we go back at dinner time, we’ll try again but if it doesn’t work you’re going to stay calm, yes?’

  ‘Okay,’ he mumbled into the bedclothes.

  I gently lifted his chin and looked him in the eye. ‘You’re sure?’

  He nodded firmly. ‘Yes.’

  And he did. Back in the office later on, I completely focused on his needs and we got the bloody upload sorted out. Four staff members immediately came into the office and congratulated him. Unbeknownst to me, they had all been listening around the corner.

  The next day on the news we saw reports of a different sort of violence. There had been unrest on the streets in Durban, where we were due to visit shortly. Great. The source of tension was apparently between local South Africans and black and Indian workers from neighbouring countries who were supposedly guilty of taking jobs. I didn’t want us to get caught in any crossfire. Fortunately, we still had a few days before we were scheduled to arrive in Durbs. I had planned a visit to the mountain kingdom of Lesotho first.

  Over the next few days in Coffee Bay the African staff repeatedly engaged with Sam. One woman, Susule, took a particular shine to him. She smiled as we watched Sam carry his lunch from the counter to the table. ‘He is a beautiful boy.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, he is. He looks like his mother.’

  She turned to me. ‘Yes, but he also has a beautiful heart.’

  I grinned. ‘Yes, he does. Sam tries very hard.’

  After a pause, she hesitantly asked, ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was born that way. His condition is called autism,’ I said.

  She had no idea what I was talking about. ‘Oh, he was born that way. Where’s his mother?’ she asked in her thick musical accent.

  ‘She’s back in Sydney with my other two boys. She sent me here so I could help Sam learn.’

  She nodded and seemed happy with that. ‘Oh, that is very good. It is nice to see a father and son together. He’s a nice boy.’

  As we left Coffee Bay on the bus, a white American woman talked to a black African man across the aisle from Sam. The American woman put forward her point, expression earnest. ‘All the colonial powers drew the country borders on the map. Local tribes and cultures had nothing to do with it. That was one of the worst things they did. The borders were drawn by the Europeans.’

  ‘Yes, you are right,’ the man replied. ‘And after the Europeans stuffed us up with their borders, they are now getting rid of their own.’

  We had three bus trips that day to get to Sani Lodge in the Drakensburg Mountains. Between the first and second buses Sam and I sat in an orange and purple vinyl booth in a Shell Ultra City roadside centre and had the first science lesson of th
e trip. Sam’s school back in Sydney had started the new term that day and I figured the best way to maintain the discipline to keep up Sam’s schooling was to exactly follow the timetable of his classmates. Today’s classes would have been science, religion, English, maths and geography. I had some electronic resources on my computer, which had been supplied by his school. These were better for some subjects than others; I hadn’t been able to fit all his textbooks on my laptop. If there were gaps in the teaching materials, I’d just have to improvise.

  Sam kicked up a bit of a stink about going to school when he was not going to school, which had been one of the consolations of the trip, but grew more accepting when I let him practice writing a narrative using Harry Potter characters. Yes, I improvised. I calculated that about half an hour of one-on-one time with me would easily be equivalent to an hour-long lesson at his school.

  On the second bus trip that day we saw a spectacular sunset over the increasingly mountainous landscape. Seven shades of blue steel grey, fading to pale as they approached the horizon, defined the ridgelines. We reached our next transfer at Kokstadt after dark, and we could sense the chill of the higher atmosphere. Our next transport should have been there to meet the bus. It wasn’t.

  The Baz Bus driver rang to check. There had apparently been a mix-up. He told me the hostel was arranging a driver who should be there in ten minutes. We grabbed some sausage rolls and lukewarm samosas from a nearby dodgy takeaway and watched the bus pull away. I felt suddenly apprehensive. I was alone with Sam, standing outside a rundown roadside cafe complex, at night. I strategically positioned us so our backs were to a wall, with Sam and the bags behind me.

  Sure enough, a questionable character soon appeared. He was emaciated, wearing ragged clothes, and stooping with his hands in his pockets. He shuffled towards us slowly, with an occasional glance in our direction out of the side of his eyes. When he got within a metre or two of us he started to mumble, ‘Hey, how you doin’?’