by Roger Smith
Louw used the remote to shut down the TV—a beach volleyball game, two hefty women in bikinis grunting like aardvarks as they smacked the ball over the net. He rose from the chair, his limbs stiff, and saw himself in the mirror. He looked like he’d been dragged through a bush backwards. His hair stood away from his head and his clothes were creased.
He tucked in his shirt as he crossed to the door and opened it, revealing Steve Bungu.
“What do you want?” Louw said.
Bungu held up a grease-stained brown paper bag.
“I brought you breakfast.”
“I don’t want bloody breakfast,” Louw said, but he stepped aside and let the thickset man enter the room.
“Koeksusters,” Bungu said, wagging the bag.
Sickly-sweet, syrup-coated plaited doughnuts dear to the hearts of Afrikaners.
“I’m not hungry,” Louw said.
Bungu set the bag down on the table beside the TV and settled himself in the chair by the window, lacing his fingers over his hard paunch.
“What are you doing here?” Louw said, still standing.
“Think of it as a house call. Just to check up on how you are.”
“How do you think I am?”
Bungu stared at him and sucked his teeth. “Okay, Joe, what options did we have?”
“We? You did this taxi shit. There’s no we.”
Bungu chuckled. “Ja, I did the dirty work. Our fuckin dirty work. Don’t get all sentimental on me now, Joe. It had to be done.”
“Jesus Christ, seven people?”
“Eight.” Bungu shrugged. “Another one died in the hospital this morning.”
Louw closed his eyes. “Fuck.”
He went into the bathroom and shut the door, feeling nauseous, but there was nothing left in his gut to puke up. He splashed his face with water and dried himself on a towel, running his fingers through his damp hair.
When he returned to the room Bungu sat Buddha-like, staring at him.
“You okay, Joe?”
“No, Jesus, I’m not okay.”
“What I mean is, are we okay? Are we still on track here?”
Louw sat on the bed and nodded. “Ja. We’re still on track.”
“Good. Or what do you guys say: bakgat?” Bungu laughed.
Louw gazed down at the carpet and saw a dead fly lying on its back, legs sticking up in the air.
“Joe, if you feel tempted to let any fuckin cats out of any bags, just think of your son, okay?” Bungu said.
Louw looked up at him.
“Think of him in prison.” Bungu shook his head. “Not a pretty picture.”
“Get out.”
Bungu levered himself to his feet and rubbed his lower back and grimaced.
“You just take it easy, Joe. Keep your eye on the ball and in no time you’ll be back up on your beach and all this will just be a memory. Ja?”
“Ja.”
Bungu left and Louw locked the door and wandered across to the greasy paper bag.
No, Jesus, Joe, he said to himself.
But he opened the bag and looked inside and saw the syrupy orange doughnuts and before he could stop himself he shoved two into his mouth, wiping his sticky hands on his pants as he stood at the window staring down at the sluggish traffic, his mouth thick with bile and honey.
SEVEN
The brown tow truck driver with the faded gang tattoos stared at the violated Nissan and when he turned his light eyes—like shards of broken glass—onto Sue Kruger she thought for a moment that he was going to offer words of sympathy but he only shrugged almost imperceptibly and went about the business of winching her car onto the flatbed of his truck.
He was very beautiful in a brutal way and she wanted to take his picture but was afraid to ask his permission, so she just stood in the shade on the sidewalk and waited until he was done.
Two young white men in an old Ford Cortina drove past slowly, laughing, and the asshole at the wheel honked his horn and whistled. Sue ignored them and so did the tow truck driver. He looked to be a man with an almost Zen-like capacity to ignore what did not concern him.
“When will my car be ready?” Sue asked.
“Dunno, lady, I just drive the truck. Maybe check with the workshop round five and see if it’s sorted.”
“Sorry, one more thing . . .” Sue said and the man paused with one hand on the door of the truck.
“Ja?”
“Where can I rent a car?”
“In Nêrens?” He shook his shaved head. “Nearest car rental is down in Kimberley.”
“Is there really nothing here?”
He shrugged. “Look, you can try Doep du Plessis a couple blocks that way.” He pointed an oil-blackened finger past the Dutch Reformed Church. “He sells old cars. Maybe he’ll rent you one.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Dunno if you should thank me. His cars is shit. Only people who buys them is darkies who is too stupid to know better,” he said, flashing her a wink so rapid it could have been a nervous tic.
Some knee-jerk white liberal thing had her wanting to call him on his casual brown on black racism, but she just nodded and he hauled himself up into the cab, slammed the door, fired the big engine and drove away with her car.
Sue turned and walked toward the ugly old brownstone church, sunblasted and godless, locked and empty of worshipers. It was a dead ringer for the one in the town she’d grown up in and as she stared at the spire thrusting up into the white-hot sky, she was six years old, coming out of a Sunday morning service, walking with her mother while her father bulled ahead, Magnus Kruger in his prime, the community in awe of him, the men fawning over him as he pumped hands and slapped backs and feasted his slitty eyes on their sweating wives and fecund teenage daughters in their clumsy church frocks, the females giggling and simpering and speaking to him from behind their hands.
He’d fucked those women and girls with an almost religious fervor—their fearful husbands and fathers looking the other way—as if this bounty of female flesh were only his god-given right.
Later, on the way home, she’d sat jammed between her mother and her father in the front of the pickup truck, her father’s heavy hand swatting her whenever he’d shifted gear, her mother wordless, watching the passing beige farmland through her dark glasses.
On the road to their farm they’d come across a gaggle of little black kids dressed in their Sunday best, holding prayer books, following a woman back from the church service that had been held under a tree in the veld.
Her father had blocked the road with his truck and jumped down, yelling, grabbing the books from the children and tearing them up, the terrified kids scattering in his wake, and when the woman had tried to stop him he’d slapped her and she’d fallen to the dirt, her cheap blue nylon dress riding up her chunky thighs.
He’d returned to the truck stinking of rage and sweat and stale alcohol, saying, “Why educate those little kaffirs? Why let them read? It’ll only make them dangerous,” as he roared off, Sue bouncing on the front seat and her mother saying nothing, crying silently behind her sunglasses.
Sue stopped for a moment of the sidewalk, breathing away a sudden dizziness.
Why did she want to see her father?
Being close to him yesterday for the first time in nearly ten years had been a shock. The hair and beard that had once been black were now white and there were brown age spots on his forehead. When he’d tumbled to the ground, a stain of urine spreading at his khaki crotch, he’d no longer been a colossus, just an old and feeble man.
Still, she wanted to be face-to-face with him, wanted to see how time was weakening and reducing him. She wanted to tell him that he was going to die and that his venom would die with him. Tell him that he had no male issue to carry on his sickness and that a series of backyard abortions had left her barren.
That would be enough for her, to sit him down and tell him these things.
She left the church behind, walking down a narrow street
of ’30s and ’40s bungalows converted for business use. Electricians. Plumbing contractors. Even an escort agency—deserted this time of day—its muted neon as sad as last night’s make-up.
Sue came to a row of old rust bucket cars leaking oil onto the brick forecourt of a house with barred windows. A faded sign—EXECUTIVE CAR SALES—hung from the roof, rattling and groaning in a hot breeze that flung dust and grit into her eyes.
She blinked and rubbed her closed eyes and when she opened them a man had appeared before her. A small white man who looked shrunken in his sweat-patterned short-sleeve blue shirt and no-name-brand jeans and scuffed Hush Puppy shoes.
He smelled of tobacco and some kind of noxious deodorant, smiling at her with stained teeth.
Knowing Doep du Plessis was about to launch into a spiel, she said, “I’m not here to buy a car.”
“Oh. Now that is a pity,” he said.
“But I want to rent one.”
Du Plessis jabbed a yellowish thumb at the sign. “Says sales not rentals.”
“Please,” she said, brushing tendrils of blonde hair from her face, “just for a few hours.”
He looked at her, squinting “You’re Kruger’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Sue sighed knowing this would be the deal breaker.
Shrugging, she said, “Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Hell, I laughed myself stupid at what you did yesterday.”
She regarded him anew. “You did?”
“Ja, man, that took balls of bloody steel. Putting on that dress and singing like that in front of all those assholes.”
“You’re not a fan then?”
“Of your dad and his lot? No bloody ways. They’re an embarrassment, man, with their stupid old ideas. I’m a businessman, got no time for that crap. I get on with everybody in this town, no matter the color of their skin.” He leered at her. “All I care about is the color of their money.”
“So will you rent me a car?”
Du Plessis clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth before nodding.
“Ah, why not? I’ll give you a good price ’cause you gave me such a good laugh.”
He went on to name an extortionate sum but she paid up and found herself at the wheel of a hunchbacked little Mazda with torn seats and faded green paintwork, shaking and jerking her way back to the hotel, where she checked out and dumped her backpack in the trunk of the car.
She drove out of Nêrens and turned onto the national road toward Witsand.
As the town disappeared in her rearview, Sue was left breathless by the endless expanse of red sand. That her father and his little tribe had journeyed here, to the desert, was almost laughably Old Testament, and had she scripted it she doubted she could have conjured a more fitting end for Magnus Kruger: forgotten and turning to dust in this arid wasteland.
Well, not quite forgotten.
This murder business had dragged him from mothballs back into the headlines. But the attention would soon fade. He was as useless and meaningless as the Apartheid relics he collected.
She turned off at the Witsand sign and the car convulsed and seemed in danger of disassembling as she clattered along the gravel road to the boom.
A big blond boy, his hairless legs swelling like pink sausages from the tight hems of his khaki shorts, emerged, stooping, from a sentry box and shambled over to her, a rifle slung from his shoulder.
When he recognized her he gaped and shook his head.
“Maak dat jy weg kom, Satan se hoer,” he said.
Get away, Satan’s whore.
He unslung the rifle and brandished it wildly and Sue feared he would accidentally discharge it.
She fought the Mazda into reverse, turned the car and headed back toward town.
The direct approach would not work.
She would have to ambush her father again.
Where, she did not know.
EIGHT
After a childhood of rural poverty, deprivation and bloodshed Disaster Zondi had fled to the city as a teenager and he had come to loathe the boondocks. He was an urban man. Give him concrete and glass and neon. He drank in the polluted air of the city like it was nectar, and enjoyed nothing more than getting into his car late at night and aimlessly driving the freeways that encircled Johannesburg like tentacles, listening to Coltrane or Satie or John Cage, observing the hard-edged cityscapes through his windshield at a comfortable, climate controlled remove.
Nêrens was his idea of hell, and it was only the understanding that he would spend another useless day drifting between the grim hotel and the flyblown police station that compelled him to commandeer a white police truck and drive off toward Soetwater, the farm where George Maritz had been murdered.
As the endless, blank landscape unspooled before him, Zondi seemed not to be moving at all. A perfect metaphor, he realized for his present position. He was becalmed in the desert.
Of use to no one.
Captain Mmutle, the station commander, ignored him, resenting his presence. Detective Jan Assegaai was more friendly, but largely unavailable: he spent his time ranging around the five hundred or so square miles that were his purview, the only cop—it seemed—who did any work, the rest lolling around the police station in their blue uniforms, as inert and useless as jellyfish washed up on a beach.
Zondi had met briefly with the prosecutor from Kimberley and she’d been professionally cordial but had made it clear that she neither understood his presence here nor required his assistance.
If there was nothing for him to do, then what was he doing here?
Zondi felt like an actor in a play he hadn’t read.
He’d tried to call his boss that morning but Mrs. Marsh had told him the director was “incommunicado.” Since it was only days before the unit shut its doors, Zondi assumed the man was already testing the comforts of his feathered nest.
Mrs. Marsh had promised to keep trying to rouse the director on the “tellyphone” and suggested that Zondi relax and enjoy his time in the countryside, as if he were in some bucolic Constable painting, not the stark Kalahari.
The farm was easy to find. It bordered Witsand on its north side and when Zondi spotted the rusted sign pointing to Soetwater he turned off the asphalt, bumped over a cattle guard and drove for half a mile along gravel until he came to a gate.
He stepped down from the idling truck and approached the gate. It was unlocked and he pushed it open, the rusted hinges screaming at him. He drove through and closed the gate after him, although he saw no sign of the livestock that had once been farmed here.
A stand of trees surrounded the homestead and as he drove closer he was surprised to see green grass and a garden overgrown with flowers.
Soetwater—Sweetwater—lived up to its name, and seemed to have ample groundwater.
Zondi stopped near the house, an ugly, artlessly-renovated brick affair, with a satellite dish on its tin roof. He sat a while, listening to the engine ping, leery of killer dogs.
None appeared. Instead a black man in torn coveralls and muddy gumboots emerged from the nearby outbuildings, regarding him warily.
Zondi stepped down from the pickup, greeted the man in his imperfect Tswana, and showed his ID.
“You live here?” Zondi asked.
“Yes. Me only. All the others are gone since Boss George is dead.”
“What was he like? Boss George?” Zondi asked, falling into the old Apartheid vernacular to set the man at ease.
“He was a good man. He paid us well. He built a school for our children. We are suffering now that he is dead.”
“Where is his wife?”
The laborer’s grooved face betrayed a moment’s disapproval, then he shook his head. “She is gone.”
“Gone where?”
The man waved a calloused hand. “Away.”
“Can I look inside?”
The farm worker shrugged and led Zondi toward the rear of the house and unlocked the kitchen door. Panes of broken glass in the door had been board
ed up.
They stepped into the kitchen and the laborer said, “This is where they kill Boss George.”
A broken table was pushed to one corner and a dark swathe of what could only be dried blood on the linoleum floor spoke of the farmer’s grim end.
Zondi walked through to the living room. It was empty of furniture and the wooden floor was dusty. Marks on the walls showed where pictures had once hung. One framed photograph had been overlooked. Zondi stepped closer and saw a snapshot of a smiling, middle-aged man in shorts standing with a small blonde girl who hugged his thick legs.
“That Boss George?”
“Ja.”
Zondi went into the main bedroom. Empty. Closets open on wire hangers, the smell of mold and stale air.
Something crunched under his feet and he saw another photograph, the glass broken. He stooped and lifted it. George Maritz and his much younger wife—a bouncy blonde with a red gash for a mouth—on their wedding day.
Was it Zondi’s imagination, or did the bride’s face wear a look of resignation in contrast to her husband’s one of joy?
Zondi rested the photograph on a windowsill and checked the remaining two rooms. Empty. Dusty. A molting teddy bear lay forlornly on the floor of the smallest room.
Zondi walked back out through the kitchen and the laborer trudged after him and locked the door.
“Do you know what’s happening to the farm?” Zondi asked.
“Ja. They sell it.”
“You know who they’re selling it to?”
“Ja, them.” The man nodded in the direction of Witsand and then he spat a gout of phlegm onto the grass and walked away.
Zondi returned to the truck and sped back toward Nêrens, blind to the wasteland around him.
NINE
Sue Kruger drove beside an endless freight train, and when, at last, it snaked past her she saw the tumble of shacks of the black ghetto on the red sand, the relentless sun torching the silver metal.
No vegetation, no shade.
She thought about life and fate and wondered how people could end up in this place, living like this, and she could find no answer.