Karoo Boy

by Troy Blacklaws

  – He’s dead.

  – I heard it on the radio.

  – I saw him die.

  – Au au, Douglas.

  – I’m glad he’s dead.

  – That is a hard thing to say.

  – But how can you forgive a man who taught his daughter to hate blacks?

  Moses stands there, wiping sump oil from his hands with a shammy.

  – Maybe because he was a poor teacher, he smiles.

  darting lizard

  NO BARKS TO WARN me. Marika’s head is a silent half-moon floating at the window. My heart drums. I dare not move. Maybe it is just a phantom floating on the dark of my guilt. The one lit eye stares out of unbatting lids. There is no sign of feeling in it. She has come to cast a curse on me.

  – Hey, Douglas, she whispers.

  – I see you.

  – My mother is sending me away, to boarding school in Pretoria.

  – I’m sorry.

  – Come out to the reservoir with me. To say totsiens.

  – I thought you blamed me?

  – Still, I want you to come.

  I climb out of the window. Chaka, seagull-chaser, guineafowl-hunter, licks her legs for salt.

  The town is sad and mute under a full moon. I chuck stones at Chaka to keep him from following us. A stone kicks up from the tar to nip his ribs. He yelps and slinks homewards in the tail-tucked way of tailed dogs.

  – Let him be, Marika says.

  But I don’t want to share her, not even with a dog. When Chaka glances round to see if I feel sorry, I mimic another throw.

  The Shell garage is deserted. I imagine Moses snoring on his bed, dreaming of the tokoloshe while the few surviving cats cruise the junkyard dark for rats.

  The bell of the Dutch church chimes midnight.

  It is a long walk to the reservoir but the night is magic: the stars blink like cats’ eyes, and the crickets chorus. A bat swoops low, loops around us, and flits away. A porcupine rattles its quills at us.

  We lie under the mimosa, where memory of the day’s blazing sun lingers in the sand.

  – I’m sorry you have to go.

  – I will miss the horses, and the veld, and the reservoir.

  My lip quivers as I squeeze back tears.

  She sheds her dress.

  – And I will never forget you.

  She lies naked on the sand and tugs my head to her full, welling fruit and I suck it.

  – It feels so beautiful, she purrs.

  Under the mimosa under the moon I suck Marika’s nipples raw.

  She wriggles out from under me until my head lies between her thighs and her lovehair tickles my nose. My tongue is the unbottled lizard on Muizenberg beach, darting into fissured rock. Then it is just me, burrowing wordlessly into Marika as she sighs and rocks her hips on the warm sand.

  I spurt into the sand. Damp for the downunder frogs.

  jacaranda juju

  IN THE CONVENT IN Pretoria, the nuns forbid Marika to wear short skirts. They have burnt her snakeskin. They have blacked out words from her letter to me.

  I zippo a sandalwood joss, and finger the seeds of the coral as if they are rosary beads, in the hope of conjuring up images of Marika in exile. The sandalwood smoke drifts out into the dark, where crickets chirp and distant dogs bark in fits and starts. I wonder if you could write out such music of chance. How would random chirps and yips and yaps look in tadpole notes?

  I armadillo into a ball on the orange sofa.

  I see her in the place where long skirts hide her knees, scratched and scarred like the knees of a boy. She bends her head under a crucifix. Then she hikes her skirt up, and tucks it in so she can ladder down from a high window. I see her legs long and luminous in the moonshine. When her feet touch the grass, she peels her skirt away and weaves naked through the jacarandas. Jacaranda flowers pop under her feet and stain them indigo.

  cowrie

  WHILE MISTER MCEWAN READS Blake, I doodle a pencil house for Marika.

  This is our house and this is Chaka. And this is the garden where Byron makes the flowers flower. Magnoliawisteriaoleander etcetera. And these are the kitchen steps where Hope peels potatoes in the sun. Come in.

  This is the curtain I hid behind, the time my father wanted to beat me for calling Byron a nigger. Look at the motif of Chinese monks crossing arced bridges to an island of willows. Behind the willows fish heads and dead flowers kiss in a dustbin. See, up on the spice rack is a china dog. The dog eats milk chits. Each night Marsden and I fight over who is to put the chits out for the milkman. I call Marsden aasvoël to rile him and he calls me koggelmander. But you can tell he is sourpussed because I bagsed aasvoël first. After all, wouldn’t you rather be a lizardy koggelmander than a bald bird with stinkbreath?

  Through this door is where my mother and father sleep under a fanblade. See, above my mother’s pillow a crucifix hovers on the wall like a dark, mothy insect.

  And this is Marsden’s room. See his seagull sketches tacked to the wall, and this one of my mother’s toes painted red. On the sill, beside Tennessee the tortoise and jars full of porcupine quills and paintbrushes, is something I forgot: a grass straw the Masai punch through cow skin to suck hot blood. Beautiful, isn’t it? And, under the sill, a basket of tennis balls, and cricket balls with unravelling seams, and a frisbee punctured by Chaka’s teeth, and juggling balls. Marsden, you see, is a juggler, and an artist. My father says to Marsden: my boy, if you ever backpack through the world you can survive by juggling on street corners. What would I do to survive? Marsden reckons: Koggelmander, I juggle and you gigolo.

  Sometimes I slip into his bed at night, spines and footsoles touching, turned away yet tuned in.

  The hallway is rather bare, just a zebra skin on the wall. It grazed yellow speargrass in Kenya, until my Grandpa’s bullet bit behind the ear. You can see where it is patched. I had never thought of it, but you are right, it is undignified the way his legs fan out flat, as if in flight. When I was a child I was so scared of the buffalo head there, over the toilet door, that I rather peed out of my bedroom window at night. Can you see the holes in his horns? Like the holes woodworm bore into yellowwood kists.

  Back in the classroom, so far from Cape Town where the sea lilts to the mood of the moon, I wonder what happened to the crucifix. Maybe it is buried in newspaper in an unpacked teabox. Buried deep like the French book of black-and-white photographs Marsden and I found on the promenade, in one of the blue bins. Photographs of women with bare cowrieshell slits, or otherwise hidden under fuzz, and nippleskin rippled like apples that begin to dry out. We hid the book in Marsden’s sketch box. Then, fearing my mother would find it, we buried it under the pyramid of compost in the far corner of the backyard. Under weeds and orange rinds and potato peels and egg shells.

  white doll

  – HAND ME THE MONKEY, comes Moses’s voice from under the Volvo.

  I scratch in the toolbox for the monkey wrench. I love the long Sunday afternoons at the Shell with Moses. It is hard to believe it is four years since I pedalled by for Coca-Cola.

  The Volvo glints yellow, no longer a hobo, but a funky convertible. Just her square eyes betray another life.

  – Here is the monkey, Moses.

  – Ndiyabonga, says Moses.

  I know it makes Moses feel good when I call him Moses after another week of being Jimmed. Fill up with 97, Jim. Yes, baas. Oh, and do check the oil and water, Jim. Yes, Madam. They do not know he has a brother dead down the mine and a brother gone north to Mozambique. They do not know he felt the sun on his face just one day a week for thirty years. For Moses South Africa was not braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet, but pap and sour beer and football, and an endless maze of tunnels under the earth.

  Moses comes up from under the Volvo.

  – There, I fixed the diff. I just wish I could fix up the sadness in you. You cry for the girl gone to Pretoria.

  He spits into his hands and rubs them.

  – Pretoria. Sounds
so pretty.

  He gives a bitter laugh.

  – Pretoria says you can work in Johannesburg. Pretoria says you must go back to the Transkei. Without the paper from Pretoria you are nothing. I have no hope now for a letter to come from Pretoria. Pretoria has no time for an old man who no longer goes down the mine. And now Pretoria wants your girl.

  East of Klipdorp the sky colours red. A faraway rooster calls yenkuku yenkuku and Hope’s chickens cluck restlessly.

  I cycle through the dorp, heading for the Shell. As I turn into Delarey I hear the deep rrum rrum of the Volvo motor.

  At the Shell, Moses says molo to me and shifts over to the other side. He is wary of driving without his papers. I get in behind the wheel. As we go, Chaka barks at the Volvo’s tyres, until he drops away.

  – One day we fuduka for good out of this Karoo, goes Moses.

  – Fuduka, I echo. All the way to Cape Town.

  I have one hand on the wheel, the other searches for a radio station. Radio 5 comes through clear as a record. Lou Reed walks on the wild side.

  – And your cats, if we go?

  – Ou Piet from the hotel will put out milk for them.

  I tilt my head to suck in the cold wind that rapids over the windshield. On the dashboard Saint Christopher wades the monkey Jesus through the river.

  Ahead a shepherd stands watching sheep graze the tall grass between the tar and the fenced grazing lands. From a distance he looks like a Masai with a long spear. Turns out it is just a long bamboo with a red handkerchief to flag cars. As we go by, he smiles pink gums at us.

  Ahead a man waves in the street. Another shepherd? O Jesus, a roadblock. A policeman signals us to the side, where two other policemen gut the boot of a dented Datsun, while the coloured family cluster on the kerb. A little girl darts out from under her father’s hand to pick up a kewpie doll from among the things on the kerb. The doll has a twist of plastic hair. The father tugs the girl back out of the way of the law.

  We are close enough to hear the policemen, to see the doll’s blue eyes.

  – Kyk daar, jong, they so want to be white their kids play with white dolls, jokes the policeman with yellow arrows of rank on his greyblue uniform.

  – Ja-nee, the unranked policeman shakes his head.

  You would think the shadowless figures clustered under the zenith sun did not exist.

  Through the murk of fear in my head, it dawns on me that I have never seen a black doll in a shop. Not in OK Bazaars or Spar, or any shop.

  – No contraband goods. Jy kan ry, the father is told.

  – Dankie, my baas, says the father, dipping his head.

  He and his wife bend down to regather their scattered things.

  Then the ranked policeman turns to me.

  – Good day, sir. Your licence, please.

  My heart drums a tattoo as I hand him my licence.

  – Your licence is in order. Does the man beside you have a licence?

  Moses keeps his eyes averted.

  – A licence?

  – A pass. A licence to be out of his homeland.

  – All his papers were stolen, sir.

  – Do you mean to say you have no pass for the Bantu?

  Moses bows his head under the inevitable.

  – His pass was among his papers.

  – Okay. Out you get.

  Me, I stand by the car, fear lapping at my brain. Moses, they handcuff.

  – You follow in the car, boy.

  I see Moses, head bent, as they steer him towards the back of the yellow van. His hands bound behind his back. His fingers clasped like fingers of an old man on a windy beach, eyes trawling the sand for flotsam or cowries. Let him go, I want to cry out. He is a beautiful man. But I am scared of the lancing blue eyes of the sarge and of the baying, caged dog. And of the rumour: they sjambok boys under 18 instead of jailing them like men. They tie you down. They gag your teeth before the sjambok flies. The sjambok, the flying boomslang that drops from overhead and fangs through your skin. And the sting is beyond the sting of clay flung from a kleilat. Or the sting of a cane. I pinch my fly to plug a spit of pee.

  I follow behind the police van. The gears catch because I am so scared. We pull up outside a typical police station under a red zinc roof and a listless flag. I park next to the van. They leave Moses hunched in the back.

  – Come inside, boy, the sarge says to me.

  – Can I call my mother? I beg.

  – If you are big enough to ferry illegal blacks around, you are big enough for a night in jail without holding your mama’s hand.

  – Jail?

  – Just joking. We will get you back to your mama and you can suck her breast all you want. But we have to figure out what to do with the Bantu.

  The typewriter zings as it reaches the end of a line.

  – So, tell me your name.

  – Douglas. Douglas Thomas.

  Chaka barks. My mother comes running out onto the stoep. – Douglas, are you hurt? What happened? she cries.

  – They have Moses in the back because he has no pass.

  – How could you lock an old man in the back of a van? she confronts the police.

  The sarge shuffles his feet awkwardly.

  – I am sorry, ma’am, we are just doing our duty. Illegal blacks are always hitching down to Cape Town, and there they squat in Crossroads.

  – What do you intend to do with him?

  – Well, ma’am. He has no pass. Under the law, we have no choice but to send him back to the Transkei. He is a Xhosa, is he not?

  – He’s a man, and you’ve caged him like an animal. His name is Moses and he’s spent his life working down your goddamn mines. Now he’s old and you want to exile him. No doubt you’d like to shoot him, like you would an old horse.

  – Ma’am, we have a job to do.

  – Look, I’ve seen his papers. They were in order.

  My mother frowns at me because my gob is hanging open.

  – It’s not his fault his papers were stolen. And Pretoria has been slow to send him new papers. He’s been a good gardenboy, captain.

  – Sergeant, ma’am.

  He glances at the other policeman. I have a feeling he would have been happy to be called captain had he been alone.

  – Alright, ma’am, if you vouch for him, I’ll let him go. But this is unusual procedure and could land me in trouble if it gets out.

  – It won’t get out. You have my word.

  – Laat hom gaan, he mumbles.

  The other policeman goes round to the back of the van. I hear the bolt slide, and then Moses comes out.

  He bows his head to my mother.

  – I’m sorry for the trouble, madam.

  – Never mind. You go and lie down now.

  He walks along the side of the house, past the kitchen steps, to the backyard khaya. The eyes of the policemen follow him, to make sure he does belong and is not going to scarper over the fence. He stops at the door. My heart beats. He reaches for the handle, as you do not knock at your own door. The door opens, though Hope remains unseen in the shadows. Moses goes inside.

  – Perhaps your boy should stay put until his papers come, calls the sarge from the Land Rover window.

  My mother waves and the Land Rover rumbles away.

  Moses and Hope come out of Hope’s khaya.

  – Aai aai aai, goes Hope. I told you something bad would happen, madam. I told you.

  – Hush now, Hope. How are you, Moses?

  – I was a fool. Why would they let an old kaffir go down to Cape Town? Such a dream is just to dream.

  – But Moses, we can go another way. Down the coast, past Port Elizabeth. Or through Montagu.

  – Master Douglas, they are everywhere. If they do not catch me on the road, they will catch me in Cape Town. No, you go alone. I will stay here in this stone town.

  – Moses, says my mother, if you want to, you can stay here and look after us, Hope and me. Hope, you can move inside.

  – But, M
adam, the law forbids it.

  – To hell with the law. Hope, you sleep in the spare room tonight.

  go well

  THERE IS A GAPING yearning in me to hold Moses, to nook my forehead in the hollow of his neck, to breathe him in. White yinyanged on black. Instead, we clasp hands.

  – Go well, says Moses. You are a man.

  – Stay well, Moses, I mouth.

  Hope flaps about, full of foreboding that I will wind up dead if I go back to Muizenberg:

  – The Langa skollies will kill you dead. Or the baboons.

  My mother hugs me.

  – You call me from Bessie’s, or from a callbox, you hear.

  As I climb into the Volvo, my mother has to prop Hope up, to keep her from flopping down to the grass. Chaka pees against the Volvo’s tyres.

  I reverse out of the yard.

  – Don’t forget to look up Johan Myburgh at the Cape Times, my mother calls after me. He’ll give you a foot in the door.

  Chaka chases the Volvo, biting at the tyres. My mother and Hope and Moses dwindle in the rearview mirror.

  Chaka abandons the chase, his lolling pink tongue hangs out.

  I turn into the Shell to fill up.

  There is a new Jim, wearing the overall with Jim sewn on the back. He is a wiry man and the overall looks flappy on him.

  – Kunjani. Fill her up with 97.

  While the pump runs up rands, Ou Piet Olifant lopes over from the Rhodes Hotel.

  – Cape Town, hey my boy?

  I nod.

  – I thought so. Can I catch a ride?

  I don’t know what to say. This was the dream I shared with Moses.

  – Just a joke, my boy. But I tell you, if District Six was still jiving, I would go for the show. Totsiens, my boy. Say howzit to Cape Town for me.

  – Totsiens.

  Clapton surfs a solo guitar riff on Radio 5 as I drive south out of Klipdorp, coral seeds in one pocket, Dodi’s blood money in the other, Moses’s dream in my head.