by Roger Smith
She said, “The guys who did that shit . . .”
“Ja?”
“What happened to them?”
“It’s a long time ago.”
“You killed them, didn’t you? Like fuckin Charles Bronson you went after them and killed them?”
He laughed. “You watch too many crap old movies.”
She said nothing until they arrived back at her corner. As she stepped down from the car she said, “Will I see you again?”
He shrugged his wrestler’s shoulders. “Dunno.”
“But I was right, wasn’t I? You wasted those fuckers?”
He put the car in gear and drove away and watched her watching him in his rearview until he couldn’t see her anymore.
Yes, she was right.
There’d been five bastards who had tortured him and killed his wife. And he’d hunted the men down and put them in the ground.
All but one of them.
The revenge he’d chosen for him had been longer.
And sweeter.
FIVE
“Those kaffirs have got nothing on me. Fokall,” Magnus Kruger said as he led Leon Louw, who was twitchy, jonesing for a meth pipe, through what the general grandly called the Garden of Remembrance.
It was no fuckin garden, just a patch of red sand, the fierce drought and Witsand’s fast-depleting groundwater (the town of Nêrens limited the amount of water it piped into the Boer stronghold, adding fuel to Kruger’s racist paranoia) making the cultivation of vegetation impossible, with a few old statues standing in the dust.
Kruger paused at the half of Strijdom’s head, one stern eye fixed on bygone Boer glory, that had been propped up on a poorly made cement plinth. Leon wasn’t much for poetry, but he remembered a thing from high school, Ozymandias, about the crumbled statue of a pharaoh in the desert, its broken head lying in the sand, and the English teacher—some faggy fuckhead in an honest-to-god bowtie—telling them it was all about pretentions to greatness coming to nothing.
Kruger, although it was barely eight in the morning, sent a shaking paw into the pocket of his khaki shorts and withdrew his flask and took a hefty swig, his front dentures tapping at the pewter like a woodpecker, so bad were his tremors.
He closed his eyes and the booze did its work, and he sighed and the second swig was accomplished more easily.
This spectacle had Leon hanging for a pipe even more desperately.
He’d been dragged from an uneasy sleep, a painful hard-on—inspired by a sweaty dream about Sue Kruger—slapping at his belly as he’d reached for the walkie-talkie that spluttered and squawked at his bedside.
The Witsand high command—of which he was one—were allowed cell phones, but the general liked to communicate by walkie-talkie, it made him feel all military and macho.
Without saying what he wanted he’d demanded that Leon meet him in the garden, immediately, and there had been no time for the fixing of his breakfast pipe.
Kruger walked on, pondering a statue of Apartheid’s primary architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, which had been rescued from outside a hall in a hick town when it had been removed prior to the erection of the likeness of Mandela or some other darkie. The statue always amused Leon: it was bizarrely tiny, the great man no larger than a child, wearing his silly little bronze suit while he pointed at fuck knew what in the sky.
The general seemed his usual self after his collapse the day before and he made no mention of it, and Leon knew better than to bring it up. He guessed it was a huge fuckin embarrassment for Kruger and—like the time he fell off his horse at some right-wing parade in Pretoria years ago, in full view of the guffawing media—it would not be spoken of again.
Kruger walked on and paused by what looked like an oversized cement dildo, part of (or so one of the general’s flunkies had told Leon) a monument commemorating the Irish who had fought with the Boers against the hated British in the Boer War. The monument had been uprooted in Johannesburg—where it had become a shelter for homeless darkies, stinking of shit and piss, the rancid street people fucking against its hallowed curves—in the dead of night, the derelicts sent packing with boots, clubs and guns, and loaded into a truck and transported here.
The twelve hour drive back to the volkstaat had turned into a drunken fiasco and after the truck had collided with a car near Warrenton only one of the four dildos had arrived at Witsand.
Kruger gazed over the red sand and the scrub and the thorn trees and said, “The world is watching.”
Leon, sweating and jumpy as a froghopper, had lost the thread of the conversation and blinked at the beefy old Boer.
“Watching this case,” Kruger said. “Watching Third World kaffir street justice at work. And their eyes are on me and my people and I will not let my people down. I will use this as a platform to take our cause to the world.”
He drank, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and chuckled.
“I mean, what do they think with this fuckin gun? Who would keep a gun after he uses it to kill a kaffir?”
Kruger detected a flicker on Leon’s face and frowned, rearranging his coarse features into a scowl that was Shar-Pei-like in its magnificent fissuring and furrowing.
“You didn’t, did you?” Kruger said.
“Didn’t what, General?”
“Keep that fokken firearm?”
Leon hacked up a dry laugh. “No, no. It’s lying down a hole halfway to Klipfontein.”
“Good, good. I knew I could trust you.”
Leon had to turn away lest his face betray something that even this drunken idiot would detect. He stared out across the barren flatness that still gave him the creeps.
But he wasn’t seeing the hell that was the Kalahari, he was seeing that terrifying fuckin darkie, built like a brick shithouse, coming at him that night a month ago when he’d gone to Rosetown, the black shack settlement outside Nêrens, to score tik.
The man grabbing Leon as he stepped down from his truck and punching him in the gut with the force of a pile driver, the night spinning into a nightmare as this darkie—the Bushman cop, Assegaai, lurking like a twist of smoke in the shadows—dragged him into a shack and made him sell his soul.
The squat man—Leon never got to know his name—his shaven head dented and pitted like the surface of the moon, had forced him to hand over the weapon he’d used to kill Tshepang Moshweng.
Yes, Leon’d kept it, fuckin stupid cunt that he was.
Kept it in his truck.
Kept as a memento. A power object, like something he’d read about in Carlos Castaneda back when he first started using drugs—some crazy shit about things that took on a supernatural energy, that made you even stronger if you kept them with you.
And the pistol, an unregistered thing he’d picked up in the ghetto, was his power object.
Once he’d wasted the darkie he just couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it, and he’d bragged about it, waved it around when he was out of his head on tik and booze.
The chunky black man had beaten a confession out of him in the shack, Leon spilling everything to him and Assegaai.
Told them how, the night he’d done it, he’d sat at the roadside in his Ford in the dark, engine off. The cab of the truck thick with meth smoke, the electric charge of the crystal in his veins heightening all his senses, the air hot on his bare arm that dangled out the open window of the pickup.
He’d drummed his fingers silently on the door of the truck, listening to the night sounds. The scratch of a cricket. A dog barking far away. The moan of a rig changing down on the Kimberley road. A braying laugh drifting from the shacks of Rosetown, across the sand from where he’d waited.
His phone rang twice then died.
The signal.
Leon started the pickup and rolled slowly forward along the footpath that led from the main road to the shackland; a track that had been grooved into the sand and scrub by the feet of the workers going back and forth to town.
His headlights found a figure walking in the
dark. A skinny teenager in shiny sweats and a Kangol hat, the cheap silver chain around his neck flaring in the beams.
The kid lifted an arm to cut the glare of the headlights as Leon rolled up beside him, the boy squinting, blinded.
“Hey, Tshepang,” Leon said, speaking through the open driver’s window.
The darkie blinked, then smiled.
“Hey, Leon.”
Leon had the .38 in his lap and he wrapped his fingers around the grip, feeling the heft, the metal cool to his palm. His finger rested lightly on the little comma of the trigger.
Could he do this?
Fuck yeah.
He raised the weapon and extended his arm through the open window, a sudden hot breath of a breeze teasing the hairs on his forearm.
Tshepang stared into the barrel of the gun and laughed, lips falling open on big white teeth, sure that this was just Leon being Leon, always fucking around.
In his eagerness Leon snatched at the trigger and the gun bucked as he fired and the shot went wide of Tshepang.
The boy turned and ran, going at a good clip, his Nikes kicking up puffs of dust, but he sprinted away in the beams of the headlights, the dumb fuckin darkie, and all Leon had to do was lean out the open window, nice and steady this time, and pop him once, in the leg, and Tshepang staggered and slowed and fell.
Leon cracked the truck door and stepped down, feeling like he was in a movie. Feeling more fuckin alive then he could ever remember feeling.
Tshepang was on his knees and then he was up again, dragging his wounded right leg, looking back over his shoulder as Leon advanced.
Leon sighted down the barrel and shot the boy in the left leg and he fell on his face.
Tshepang tried to get up. Couldn’t. Started leopard crawling, dragging his useless legs, saying “Huh, huh, huh.”
Leon walked after him, the weapon leveled.
Tshepang, still dragging himself along, looked over his shoulder at Leon, mouth open, knowing his shit was fucked up in the very worst way.
Leon shot Tshepang twice in the back and when the darkie slumped to the ground he leaned in and put the barrel to the boy’s head and pulled the trigger again.
Bam!
Good night.
Wow, fuck, what a motherfucker of a rush.
Leon stood for a while, holding the pistol, feeling like this was the moment he’d been born for, looking down at Tshepang who had one dead eye open, staring into the night, blood trickling away from him in little rivers that soaked into the sand.
Leon had turned and climbed back into the pickup, reversed, his headlights sweeping the body of the boy lying in the dirt, and he’d taken off toward town, Eminem pumping, Leon chanting along.
Leon, after he spilled all this, left lying sniveling and snotty on the floor of the shack, as the black man, groaning and creaking like an old ship in the wind, had crouched beside him, and looked at him for a while, then he’d shoved the barrel of a Glock into Leon’s mouth.
“No, please,” Leon had pleaded around the gun, weeping.
The darkie held his phone out to Assegaai and told him to take a picture.
The flash exploded and blinded Leon and when he was done blinking he found that his mouth was empty of the automatic and he wiped spittle and snot on his sleeve and gasped for breath.
“You’re a cop’s son?” the black man said.
“Ja.”
“Your father has put a fuckload of men behind bars? Black and brown men?”
“Ja.”
“If you don’t do exactly what I tell you I’ll make fuckin sure you end up in Pollsmoor Prison with those fuckers. You heard of Pollsmoor?”
“Ja.”
“Hundred guys in one cell with one shit pot. Gangs and killings and rape.” He grabbed Leon by the throat and shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. “You heard of the rapes?”
“Ja, I heard.”
“You heard of the Slow Puncture?”
Leon said, “No, what’s that?”
“It’s a gang punishment. They get a guy and cut his asshole open until it bleeds and then have him raped by a prisoner with full-blown AIDS. No shortage of those sorry fucks in Pollsmoor. I’ll make sure it’s done to you.” He slapped Leon. “You getting the fuckin picture here?”
“Ja, I’m getting the picture,” Leon said, sniveling.
The darkie chucked the murder weapon to the Bushman.
“Detective Assegaai will hang on to that for now. He’ll be in touch with you. Meanwhile you say fuck all to nobody, understand?”
“Ja.”
“I was never here. Fuckin understand?”
“Ja.”
A mighty slap had Leon hitting the steel wall, the rickety construction shaking like a can of coins.
“Say it like you fuckin mean it!”
“I understand. I swear, I understand,” Leon said, snot dangling from his nostrils.
A few weeks had passed and he’d heard nothing and thought that it would all go away, the way things did when people found new shit to be interested in.
Then the Bushman had caught up with him in the shack where he went sometimes to fuck a Griqua whore with an ass that the Kardashians would pay big money to have—Leon’d once balanced a full long tom can of Black Label on that ass while she’d ridden him and not a drop of beer had spilled, no word of a fuckin lie—and told him that the murder weapon had to find its way into the glove box of Magnus Kruger’s truck the next time he went out boozing in Nêrens. The plan was to stop and breathalyize him on his way home, search the truck, find the gun and the Boer’s ass would be good and nailed.
So the next night, drinking and talking shit with Kruger and his pack—well, listening really, to the old Boer’s addled ramble that swept from the genocide of white farmers to ancient Greek philosophy, to the mess in the Middle-East (he loathed Jew and Arab with equal vehemence but found grudging admiration for Israel’s Apartheid-style oppression of the Palestinians) without any apparent logic or reason—Leon had headed for the piss house and then ducked out into the street where the general’s Toyota Hilux rested in the hot night, opened the unlocked door (nobody would be fool enough to fuck with this maniac’s wheels) and wiped the gun free of his prints before he stashed it in the glove box along with furled copies of Farmer’s Weekly, dog-eared issues of Loslyf, the Afrikaans porno mag, an empty bottle of Klipdrift and a bag of Boxer pipe tobacco.
Then he’d gone back in and carried on drinking, making sure he was still there, propped up at the bar in plain sight, when Kruger staggered out to his truck, fired it up with a mighty roar of its shot mufflers, and rocketed off out of Nêrens.
A mile short of the road block Kruger had lost control of the truck and rolled it. Unharmed, he’d staggered off into the night, blundering his way across the desert in the direction of nearby Witsand.
The cops had found the truck and the gun and the Bushman and the terrifying darkie must have been in a hurry because they’d pushed on with their plan, in the belief that the gun would be enough to convict Kruger.
“Hey, Leon! Hey!”
Leon was brought back from his flashback by the sound of Kruger’s voice.
The general was on the move again, passing the stone relief of Voortrekker wagons that had been rescued from the side of a building in Bloemfontien that now housed a witchdoctor’s consulting rooms.
“You sleeping or what?” Kruger said, scowling.
“No, General,” Leon said, scampering to his side.
“I’m not worried about this murder bullshit. My fuckin lawyer will eat those kaffirs for breakfast. Hannes De Kock is a good Boer like you and me, but he’s got it up here.” He jabbed a blunt finger at his skull. “He knows those Jew Boy advocates and those kaffir judges and prosecutors. He knows how to fight those bastards. They think they can just plant some gun on me and expect to make it stick? No, no, no. It’ll be laughed out of court.”
Leon said nothing, feeling queasy.
What if that wild darkie force
d him to testify against Kruger?
“Now, Leon, you know that I trust you.”
“Yes, General.”
“And I know what you did the other day, mounting that commando to free me from arrest, was a brave and noble thing to do.”
“Thank you, General.”
“But it could have backfired badly, and I can’t give the kaffirs anything to use against me. Not now. You understand?”
“Ja, I do.”
“So I need you to keep a cool head on your shoulders.”
“Like ice, General. Like ice, man.”
“Okay, now there’s something I want you to do for me.”
“Anything, General.”
The big man looked out at the nothingness. “You know my daughter is in Nêrens?”
Like, duh, the whole fuckin world knew that.
“Yes, General.”
“She’s a source of pain to me, the godless thing she has become.”
“I understand, General.”
“I tried my best with her. But she is a bad seed, like her mother, weak and wanton.” He shook away a memory and fixed his pale eyes on Leon. “I want you to get rid of her.” He saw Leon’s face. “No, no, man. Not like that for fuck sake. Jesus Christ, not kill her. What the fuck have I just said about keeping a cool head? Just get her out of town. However you do it, do it quietly. Can I trust you with that?”
“Ja, General. Leave it to me.”
The craggy man nodded and swigged from his flask and then started a conversation with the relics around him and Leon knew the audience was at an end, so he gave a half-hearted stiff armed salute and turned on his heel, hurrying home to hit the shit out of a tik pipe and calm his nerves that were twanging like an out of tune banjo.
SIX
Joe Louw was woken by knocking at his hotel room door.
After spending the night watching mindless shit on the tube that’d allowed him to shut down all capacity for thought, he’d fallen asleep fully dressed in the chair by the TV around the time the muezzins in the Bo-Kaap had started their wailing.
He checked his watch. 8:44 AM.
The knocking came again, too insistent for the cleaning staff.