by Roger Smith
Angel is already half way out the car when he sees that Boston has dug in the glove box and produced a bottleneck, sucking on it as he holds it over a lighter flame. Angel catches the sweet-sour whiff of Mandrax mixed with weed. A white pipe. This muscle relaxant is the downer of choice, out here on the Flats.
Boston sucks for a long while, eyes closed, before he leans back and lets go of a cloud of smoke, holding the pipe out to Angel who is ready to refuse, then he thinks what the fuck, maybe he needs to chill him out a bit, and he sits back down and takes a hit.
He doesn’t do much of this shit, Mandrax, and feels it smack him between the eyes like a cattle hammer, and then it’s like his body is deboned, his flesh melting back into the car seat. He sits there, mind blank, staring out at the hot sky. Boston takes another hit and passes the pipe back to Angel who, as he grips it, has a sudden crazy flash that it’s a relay baton and that he’s in a race. And that if he doesn’t win the race he’s dead meat.
He escapes the hot, airless Civic, drinking air, watching another crowd of men stopping cars, staring through the windows at the passengers inside.
Boston, lanky as an NBA player, comes and stands beside Angel and kicks at a beer can with his giant Reebok. “So, what the fuck we do now?”
“Jesus Christ, my brother, just think of all that fucken money,” Angel says. “All we gotta do is find us that kid.”
“Ja, and how the fuck we gonna do that?”
Before Angel can reply the white police chopper comes clattering low over Tin Town, sending people running from the blades. Boston turns his back and covers his head with his hoodie but Angel just stands there with his eyes shut, in the middle of the sandstorm, and lets the wind and the dust and the Mandrax suck him up high till he has a helicopter view across the rotten shacks and fucked-up houses and acres of garbage.
Puts himself in the head of that little fucker who took the kid. Where would he go, the little jockey? Where would he hide? For sure nowhere in Tin Town or Paradise Park, not with these money hungry bastards running the streets. And not on the dump that’s crawling with cops and the greedy homeless.
Then Angel has a vision, honest to Christ, clear as if he’s watching TV, and he starts to laugh as he opens his eyes and takes off down the road, Boston falling in beside him.
“Where we going?” asks Boston.
“Only place nobody bothering with that little jockey and the white girly.”
“Ja? Where’s that?”
“The graveyard, my brother. The fucken graveyard.”
27
Ishmael takes a leak. Out of respect he’s careful to keep the stream of piss off the graves, aiming at a skinny tree with no leaves. He’s walked a bit away from the sleeping kid, not wanting her to see him.
He watches the helicopter moving slow and low over Tin Town, the blades chopping up the air. The Red Ants are still busy tearing apart the shacks at the far end of the graveyard, and he hears their darky shouts mixed with the angry colored voices of the squatters.
Then, as he shakes him off and tucks him away, Ishmael catches a movement over the crosses and he ducks down behind a tombstone. Two men coming on. Youngsters. Fucken gangsters. Knows the walk, knows the attitude. Can’t swear to it, but reckons they’re the same ones that chased him last night.
They haven’t seen Ishmael and he leopard crawls back toward the kid, not feeling the gravel tearing his elbows and knees. He comes round a headstone and sees her ankles pale against the earth, and knows that he’s going to have to get his hand over her mouth when he wakes her to keep her quiet.
Too late.
She sits up and looks around, wiping at her eyes. He drags himself on, hoping she’ll see him, willing her to shut up.
But she opens her mouth and shouts out in that little whitey voice: “Ishmael! Ishmael!”
●
Cindy hears a noise and here comes Ishmael, running at her very fast, his eyes white and wide and his tongue pink through his lips. There’s a loud noise, like a door slamming shut in the wind, and he looks like he’s run into something and his shirtfront is bright red. He keeps on running to her, but slower, and before he can get there she feels hands on her as a big, tall man lifts her up far off the ground.
She’s looking down at Ishmael, who walks now like her daddy when he’s drunk and another man is pointing something at Ishmael and there’s a bang and the little man wobbles but on he comes and he’s got a rock in his hand and he falls forward, hitting the tall man who lets his hands go and Cindy drops hard onto the ground and she can’t breathe.
Her face is close to Ishmael, lying on the sand, his hands grabbing the ground with crab fingers.
“Run, Cindy,” he says. “Run, now.”
His eyes go far away like her mommy’s did, lying dead in the red bathtub, and Cindy runs like she ran then, never ever telling anybody that she saw her mommy dead.
●
The jockey hammers Boston with a rock, the tall man falling like a tower of bricks. But the jockey is down, too, bleeding and Angel fires again but misses. The kid takes off, moving like a rabbit through the graves, toward the Red Ants and the squatters who have stopped their battle and stare at the little whitey coming on.
“Little Cindy! Little Cindy” they shout, and the Ants and the squatters join forces now, running through the graveyard trying to catch the kid, who weaves off toward the dump.
Angel puts in a spurt, hurdles the graves, flying along, and he runs the kid down and grabs it by its shirt and lifts it, not breaking his stride.
Three Red Ants come at him with nightsticks and he shoots one of them in the face and sees him drop. Angel keeps on running toward the dump, the kid twisting in his arms like a crazy thing.
He risks a look over his shoulder and sees the squatters and the Red Ants streaming after him, shouting, “Little Cindy! Little Cindy!”
As he takes to the slope of the landfill he slings the kid over his shoulder and knows he’s running it, that race, and that if he doesn’t win he’s for sure a fucken dead man.
Angel curses himself for hitting on the white pipe. Feels that shit in his muscles, slowing him down. Fucking with his head, too.
He’s up on the dump, dodging piles of trash, a pain like a knife in his ribs, his breath coming in rasps, and he thinks of Boston lying back there, maybe dead, and knows he’s alone now, with all these useless people wanting what he’s got.
He slows, but thoughts of the half-mil send a burst of energy into his legs.
The child smacks her fists against his back and kicks her feet into his ribs, screaming like a little pink pig. He gets behind a pile of garbage, out of the mob’s sight for a second, stops and throws her off him onto the ground. She hits and shuts up and he drops onto her and punches her in the gut—punches hard enough to wind a grown man. She lies still and for a moment he thinks he’s killed the fucken thing, then sees her lights are out but she’s still alive, her chest pumping, fighting for air.
He hears shouting and a posse of homeless men are upon him, the leader nearly getting him with a plank thick with rusted nails. Angel rolls and the nails smack into the dirt next to his head. He comes out of the roll shooting, drops two of the men, and the others back off. Angel’s finger clicks on the empty chamber and he knows now how close he is to losing this race.
A last burst of adrenaline drives him up and he lifts the kid and plunges on, sees cops and ragged people streaming up over the lip of the dump like the plague. Hears the chopper before he sees it and drops to the ground as it clatters overhead. Then he’s up and running again, battling through the soft, wet, sucking garbage, the child a dead weight on his shoulders.
The mob spots him again and he dodges between two mountains of trash and loses sight of them but he knows he has to ditch the kid. Hide it. Get his ass away and return for it later.
He sees an old fridge lying on its back, white metal shining out from the garbage and he opens the door and releases a smell so foul that it overwhelms the
stench all around him. The inside of the fridge is hairy with green mold and cockroaches swarm away from the open door.
He drops the kid inside, folding her up like a puppet, and she fits perfect. He slams the door closed, hears the kiss of its rubber seal, and sees it’s got an old padlock hasp on it, lock long gone, though.
A gleam of metal winks at him from inside the trash pile and he pulls free a screwdriver with a broken handle. Angel jams the hasp closed with the screwdriver and throws a few piles of junk over the fridge to camouflage it.
Then he’s running again.
●
Cindy wakes up and thinks, but how can you be awake, if everything is black, black, black?
So she squeezes her eyes shut tight and then opens them again and sees nothing but that same darkness the color of ink. She tries to move her body and can’t, not even one little wormy inch, just feels something hard all around her, holding her tight, her knees squashed up to her face and her arms held fast against her sides. Feels scratchy, squirmy things running across her skin.
She screams and she cries and she prays to gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild, but her voice is small and squashed, like she’s hiding in a closet full of clothes—the way she did after she found her mommy lying in the red water.
The shouting and the panic gets her fighting for air that isn’t there, just something hot and stinky that gets sucked into her when she gasps for breath, closing her throat like a hand.
And then the darkness presses in on her and fills her up and she’s slipping away and knows she will never come back, and as it takes her she thinks: this is what happens to bad girls, Cindy Goddard.
28
Her name is Katryn. Her left eye was taken by a whore with a sharp stick and her reason by years of rotgut wine. She goes up the side of the dump on all fours, like an animal, grunting and wheezing through her toothless mouth. He follows her, like he always does, Long Jan. Least that’s what she calls him.
He had a name, she’s sure. Everybody got a name. But his went away when they cut out his tongue long ago in Pollsmoor Prison. So because he’s nice and tall she calls him Long Jan.
Katryn’s right eye isn’t so good, and the world, anyways, is always blurred by the cheap booze she sucks from the silver bags, but she can see all the people up there on the dump, looking for that girly. She’s sure she spotted it, the child, this morning—or was it yesterday? Her memory isn’t so nice and bits of life fall together in a pile like the trash at her feet.
But she seen that girly, clear as day, while she was getting her jollies with Long Jan, him lying under her, pointing at the child. And she knows some white man is offering a fortune of money, which is why these people have got themselves all worked up.
Money.
She doesn’t worry with it no more, not like them all around her. Asks herself: Katryn what would you do with big money like that? And she can’t for the life of her find an answer.
So, while the others are looking for the kid, she knows it’s a good time for her and Long Jan to search the rubbish for empty bottles and old boxes and bits of wire and metal. All of this they drag down off the dump to their supermarket cart and take it to a house in Paradise Park where a man gives them coins, enough to buy them wine and maybe a half loaf. All the money they need.
Katryn stumbles forward across the landfill. Hard sometimes to get the legs to do what she tells them. She knows every inch of this place like it’s her own yard, and she sees something white and shiny sticking up out the trash. Something new, brought in overnight. She scuttles across and bends down and shoves away some rubbish and sees it’s a fridge, still with its door on. Ja, now that door, when Long Jan breaks it off, will keep them drunk and happy for a day or two.
Katryn waves him over and she tries to open the fridge door, then sees it’s held closed by a screwdriver. She grabs at the broken handle, but it slips from her shaking fingers and she falls to the ground, coughing. Lang Jan pulls out the screwdriver and opens the door and jumps back, making those funny little budgie noises.
Katryn gets herself to her feet and stares into the fridge. She shuts her eye and opens it and wipes at it with her hand. Still sees the white child, folded up like a little dolly inside. She jabs a filthy finger into the child, but it don’t move. Just lies there, dead still.
Katryn backs away now, instinct telling her this is trouble, this. Trouble they want no part of. But Long Jan kneels down and lifts the child out, very gentle, and it hangs limp from his big bucket hands, all dangly pink arms and legs like raw sausage.
And then there’s a terrible noise and a wind that tugs Katryn’s rags away from her body and Long Jan lifts the white child high to the helicopter that swoops down like a bird, as if he wants to feed the child to it.
29
Ishmael knows he’s dying. Feels the blood pumping out his belly, where the gangster’s bullet took him low. Watched enough gut-shot men to know that it’s a slow and painful business. Maybe the dead lying under these tombstones are having their say, after all.
He stumbles his way out the graveyard, hiding inside the jacket with the hoodie he took from the gangster he smacked with the rock. Stumbles up toward the dump, hears the low roar of the crowd and flat smacking gunshots as the cops fire tear gas. People on the edges of the landfill run blindly, some of them sliding and falling down the side, a white haze hanging low over the trash.
Ishmael, the edges of the world soft and blurred, somehow gets himself up the slope. The wind blows from behind him but his eyes still tear up from the gas. When he reaches the top of the rise he sees maybe two hundred people running in panic. Rows of cops in gas masks and riot gear advance across the trash trying to drive the mob back, away from the helicopter that has landed its skids on the garbage.
Ishmael’s close enough to see a medic carrying the blonde child, running hunched down to avoid the whipping blades. The man hands Cindy’s lifeless body into the chopper and pulls himself inside, and the helicopter lifts off and banks over the landfill, clattering off.
Ishmael stands and watches the chopper disappear, dust and shredded paper and fragments of plastic settling down on him in a soft, stinking rain. He wonders if the girly is dead and decides that it may be a blessing if she is.
Then the cops advance and he is caught in a swirl of bodies, and Ishmael lets them take him like the tide and before he knows it he’s off the dump, down at the bus station and he’s tired now, has to sit, his vision going dark, so he drags himself up onto a bus and falls into a seat, resting his face against the window glass as the bus rattles off out of Paradise Park, and when the blackness comes for him he doesn’t fight it.
Wakes up with a man shaking him. The driver.
“Hey, boozer. Get out, man.”
It’s dark outside now and the bus is parked somewhere on Voortrekker Road. Empty.
When Ishmael stands he can’t feel his legs and just kind of floats out the bus onto the sidewalk and he has to grab hold of the barred window of a furniture store so he doesn’t fall. He puts a hand under the jacket and feels the blood dripping out—and something else, something soft and sticky pushing through the wound.
Why are you still alive, Ishmael?
He’s staring at a stack of TVs, screens big as billboards, glaring at him from inside the empty store. Each screen is filled with the front door of that house in Constantia and as Ishmael watches the white man steps out the door and the camera surges forward, the TV image shaking then settling.
And when it settles, Ishmael sees the white man holds Cindy in his arms. The girly, wearing pajamas, is dazed, blinking at the lights, a halo of fuzzy blonde hair sticking up from her skull like cotton candy.
The white man puts her down beside him on a low wall and holds her close, the very image of a loving father. She stands stiff as he talks. Like a little soldier. Ishmael can’t hear the white man, just sees his lips moving, as he lifts Cindy into his arms again, poses in the exploding camera flashes, then turns away and walks into t
he house.
Cindy looks back, her face white and haunted, and she stares right into the camera lens, almost as if she’s looking into Ishmael’s eyes, then the door closes on her and she’s gone.
Ishmael pushes away from the bars and staggers on down the sidewalk, knows where he is going now and what he has to do. Prays he lasts long enough to get it done.
He comes to another store and presses the buzzer on the safety gate. It clucks like an old lady as the lock releases and he enters. A fat Boer stands behind the counter, gut swelling over his khaki shorts, gun holstered at his hip.
“Ja?” the Boer says, staring at Ishmael.
“Gimme one of them,” Ishmael says, pointing at the Okapi knife beneath the glass in the display cabinet.
The Boer gives him a look, but he reaches in for the knife and puts it down in front of Ishmael, who lifts it and checks the blade. Makes sure the little animal—looks like some kind of a buck—is stamped in the metal. Doesn’t want no Fong Kong shit that breaks in his hand when he needs it.
Ishmael folds back the blade into the handle and pays for the Okapi, digging the lady’s stolen money from inside his jeans. The banknote is bloody when he hands it to the Boer, but the fat man takes it without comment.
Ishmael doesn’t wait for change, just gets himself out onto the sidewalk, the knife in his pocket familiar as a wife as he lurches his way down to the minibuses.
30
The taxi driver, a little bastard in his twenties, just sits in his car smoking, even though Florence battles with the heavy suitcase, dragging it from her room to where the car is parked outside the front of the house. The driver must have some lever in the car, because the trunk clicks open.