Bumi

  “Hey, Angela?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Mind you don’t cut your palms on this grass. It’s very slippery from the rain.”

  “I won’t,” Angela responded.

  Devin scrubbed her hands in the loose sandy soil, then dipped them into a shallow bowl of rainwater glimmering in a nearby pitted boulder. Angela, watching her, followed suit. “You’re right about the jerky,” she remarked. “Did a number on my stomach.”

  “Ja, that’s all we need,” Devin sighed. “We’ll see if we can find something fresh to eat and it would be a good idea to find a spring or something where we can get clean, fresh water as well. Meanwhile, though, I want to see this pig that those two maaties tossed off the hill last night.”

  “Me too,” Angela told her, following closely on her heels as Devin gingerly made her way toward the rubble of boulders and thorn brush below the cave.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Devin gasped, putting her hand over her mouth in a vain effort to hold back her gorge. It all came up anyway and she leaned over a boulder and vomited the meager contents of her stomach. Still retching she rose and saw that Angela’s face had turned that yellowish grey she had observed not so many hours ago at the toilet rock when the guerilla had grabbed her. Angela sat down suddenly, landing hard on her backside, and fainted. The upper part of her body was held in place by a gore-splattered, jagged rock where the ‘pig’ had obviously bounced on its way down.

  And there was said ‘pig’. As Devin had guessed: a young black woman, naked but for the blood and brain stained doek[20], all black and yellow in the moonlight. She sprawled spread-eagled against a massive boulder, arms above and over her head which was lolling over the west side of the rock. A huge black hole seemed to gape between her legs. She had been partially disemboweled and her intestines spilled sickly white against the ebony of her breasts. Devin slowly opened her eyes wider from the defensive slits they had assumed upon first glimpse of the scene and took in the irony of the tableau before her. When she and Angela had rolled Jan off the edge of the parapet, he had obviously followed the same course as the ‘pig’ he had tossed over, landing face first in the mess he had obviously had a hand in creating. If he had not been dead when he landed, burying his mouth and eyes and nose in the still-warm belly of his victim, he was now.

  Maybe that’s when she screamed like that? Devin shuddered at the thought of the pain this woman had endured. And for what? Rock spider fun and games? Arsehole! I hope he drowned in stomach acid. She stepped carefully over a rubble of rocks to get closer to the scene and saw then that what she had thought to be a big hole between the woman’s legs was in fact the crowning head of an infant. “Oh, Jesus Christ, I don’t believe this shit!” she cried out. She leaned over and touched the top of the head, feeling the blood-sticky, little black curls and the soft fontanel. They were warm. Still? How long has it been - 20 minutes, half an hour? Seems like a bloody lifetime. She held her middle and forefinger on the fontanel and halted her own breathing for 15 seconds, feeling for a pulse, no matter how faint, and found none. At first. After several deep breaths, she placed her forefinger again upon the fontanel and a murmurous pulse raised into her finger. She snatched her hand away, gasping in horror. Now what!

  The infant appeared to be facing the woman’s backside. Would it not have suffocated? “What the hell happened over there?” she hissed at the back of Jan’s head. “What the fuck is the matter with you? Jesus!” She kicked at his body and a swarm of midgies rose briefly in a blue haze above his head before settling in again.

  Devin wiped her fingers in the dirt. She turned from the scene and hurried back to check on Angela who was slowly coming out of the faint. “Don’t look back over there,” she told her as the woman’s eyes opened. She stood between her and the bodies. “It’s worse than what you saw back at the plane crash.”

  “I won’t,” Angela mumbled. “I already saw enough.” She rose to her knees, turned her back on the bodies and closed her eyes. She began to pray, silently. Devin watched her for a moment. “Wait here,” she instructed Angela, before heading back up the kopje to retrieve the hapless guerilla’s knife. She sat briefly on the parapet, gathering her thoughts and courage, legs dangling and swaying in the cool breeze. She picked up the guerilla’s knife (he had probably been consumed by now), and stared off across the bush, waiting for Angela to find her relative level of sanity. She made her way back down and touched Angela on the shoulder.

  Devin said, “We have to go back over there.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The woman they tossed over the edge is dead, but her baby was on its way out and we’re going to have to get it out. I think it’s still alive.”

  “What?” Angela stared glassily at her. “That cannot be. Wouldn’t the baby have died being stuck in the birth canal? How long has it been anyway?”

  “I have no idea. I would think so, but I felt a pulse. I think.” Devin stared at the knife blade, catching a glimpse of her crazed, filthy face in the moonlit glint of the blade.

  “OK, let’s go!” Angela was up and stumbling back across the kopje, back to the slick rocks where the bodies lay in grotesque tableau. Devin stared after her, before rising slowly and following her. “I’m not sure how I am supposed to do this!” she hissed.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Angela assured her.

  Gingerly, they pulled Jan out of the mess that had been the woman’s stomach and tossed his body aside. Angela placed her fingers on the small bloody head and held them there for what seemed a full minute. “I feel it too,” she said. “Look, you can see most of his nose emerged.” Devin stared and wondered how she had missed that. The infant was not facing the spine, he was sideways, facing away from her when she had first touched him.

  “Give me the knife.”

  Devin handed it to her. Angela cut up the belly line from the pubis to where Jan’s blade had prematurely ended in an amateurish attempt at full disembowelment. She pulled the flesh and tissue and muscle away, then cut carefully through the thick lining of the uterus. The woman lay splayed open from pelvic bone to heart. Angela reached in and gently pulled the baby from the birth canal, one hand in the cavity gentling the final passage of the infant, then raised it, a gory trophy, out of the gross wound that had been the mother’s belly and womb. “Help me,” she begged. “Dear God, help me!” Devin held out her hands to prevent it from dropping back into the blood and guts and other unspeakable mess seeping into the ground.

  Angela held the baby head down and cleared what appeared to be meconium from its throat. It had made no sound. She cradled the infant and began resuscitation, blowing gently into his nostrils, then placing her mouth over the baby’s mouth and nose, blowing gently, massaging its chest intermittently with light tapping of her fingers near its heart. “Rub his back,” she instructed Devin who had been doing her best not to faint. “That will warm him up a bit.”

  Devin complied and then noted a small kick of the baby’s right leg. “I think he’s coming round,” she whispered. “Look.”

  Angela gently turned the baby over and patted its bottom, whispering, “Come on now, honey, you can do it, you can do it,” and the child opened its mouth and howled.

  “Shit! You did it!” Devin gasped. “He,” and he was in fact a he, “is alive! Goddamn, you a midwife or something?” She grinned at Angela and reached over and hugged her. “You’re a total star! OK, let’s cut that cord and bhopa[21] it with something.” She glanced about as if expecting a piece of string to magically appear. “Do we have to cauterize it?”

  “I guess we can,” Angela said, “and you’ll have to use that lighter.” She pointed to the umbilical cord where it was about an inch above the baby’s belly and Devin quickly sliced through it, tossed the remainder onto Jan’s corpse and applied the flame to the stump. Devin removed Jan’s shirt, with some difficulty due to rigor mortis beginning to set in, and cut from it a strip long and wide enough to wrap the baby and keep it warm, and one
that could be used as a nappy. She tied the sleeves together and produced a sling that would allow Angela to carry the baby against her chest.

  “What we gonna feed it?” Devin mused. “Now we really have to be quick and bloody careful so we can get this kid to safety too.” She swiped the knife against the rock where the mother’s splayed body had come to rest. Would her milk still flow even though she’s dead? Angela saw her eyeing the woman’s full breasts and shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “And don’t look at me! It’s going to have to be water until we can get him to a wet nurse or find some formula. And how likely is that?” She burst into tears. They poured down her cheeks and splattered on the baby’s face. He stared up at her, eyes luminous and black and wide, and placed a fat thumb in his mouth.

  Exhausted, the two women made their way carefully back up to their cave and crawled back inside. Despite the previous pre-dawn cautions about falling asleep, both women, sitting close together in the relative warmth of the cave nodded off several times before the freshly cleansed earth saw the first real light of the dawn. It roused them, along with the roar of the helicopter’s engines as the aircraft passed back over the kopje, directly above them. Sand sifted down from the roof of the cave and they both looked up nervously expecting a cave-in, but that was the extent of the noisy assault upon their ears and their refuge. Not so the small herd of impala down on the plain – the startled animals bound and leapt as one before scattering in panic, running headlong back the way the women had traveled the day before.

  They watched the helicopter until it was well out of sight, heading due west. What’s on there and where are they going? Devin wondered. That chopper’s not big enough to carry whatever is down there on the other side. Her stomach growled and cursed at her, demanding sustenance, and Angela’s complained along in concert. The baby slept. They drank some of the water in the kerosene can and, reluctantly, shared the last of the guerilla’s rancid biltong. Devin smoked half a cigarette. They were waiting until the Land Rover left before they would chance venturing outside; and memories of the puff adder and the bone-chilling scream and the tortured corpse they had both heard and so clearly seen, dampened any impatience to leave the cave.

  Finally, the rumble and creak of the vehicle coming back around the line of kopjes was audible and they both crept to the lintel of rock and lay down, watching. The creaking and squeaking of the body parts seemed muted, more of a rumble, and the engine much, much louder. As the jeep pulled into view, both women could see it was loaded down, the rear tail gate sagging almost below the mud flaps on the back wheels. The cargo was invisible, covered with a brown tarpaulin. The jeep held only one party – must be Karel – and it gave the area where Jan and the ‘pig’ had tumbled down the kopje a wide berth before moving across the plain in the same direction as the helicopter pilot had taken.

  Devin and Angela rose as one, gathered their meagre belongings and the infant and clambered up to the top of the kopje, only to hear yet another engine. Diesel? Warming up. Devin shoved Angela to the ground before rising cautiously to peer over boulders littering the top of the kopje. It was a Bedford lorry whose sides, roof and bonnet had been camouflaged in olive green, khaki and grey paint. It looks like the army trucks we used to see on the road running past the biology classroom. The cargo was under an olive green tarp over which was stretched a brown mesh holding all secure, and invisible. The rising sun painted the back window of the cab red and briefly illuminated the interior. A large white man came into sight around the back of the truck, cinching down some of the ropes and ties. He was wearing what appeared to be a khaki bush hat, khaki shorts and a faded blue shirt, veldskoens, He had a cigarette clenched between his teeth. He appeared to be alone.

  “Wait here!” Devin hissed. She slithered, oblivious to the scrapes and pain, over the top of the boulders and slid down the side of the kopje, catching at a small mopani on the way down, straightened up, swung the rifle off her shoulder and, at a dead run, sped toward the man. He stood still with his back to her. He appeared to be relieving himself against the back driver-side tyre. Devin gave him no warning. She aimed at the back of his legs and pulled the trigger.

  33.

  Angela rose, shock nearly knocking her right back down, and the infant began to howl. “What? What! Oh, my Lord! Devin!”

  “It’s OK!” Devin yelled, beckoning her down to truck.

  As Angela made her way up and over the top of the kopje, the vultures descended on the corpses on the other side. She did not look back, concentrating now on what lay before them. She clambered down over the rocky, thorny slope toward the narrow, shallow valley they had seen the day before.

  Devin stared down at the man who, eyes wide at this hideous image looming over him, was whimpering on the ground, legs and backside spurting blood. “Help me,” he begged. “What the fok you do that for, hey?”

  “What the fok you kill a pregnant woman for, you savage?”

  “Hey now, it wasn’t me, hey!”

  “Ja, it was your china Jannie, and you stood by and let it happen. Probably watched. You’re a twat!” She smiled suddenly. “And now you can tell us what happened here last night.” She kicked at him. “Sit up.” Using her knife, she cut the ties on the tarp over the back of the truck, and bound his hands behind his back.

  “Shit, man, I’m gonna bleed to death, you stupid bitch!”

  “Izzit now? Agh, shame, man. Hou jou bek[22].” She turned to Angela whose eyes glittered with shock and fear. “Hold your gun against this fool’s head,” she commanded. “I will bind your wounds,” she told him, “so you can stay alive long enough to tell me what the hell is happening here, ou, and the minute you start with your shit, I will put another hole in you. Verstaan[23]?”

  He nodded, tears pouring down his wrinkled, sunburned cheeks. Angela stuck the barrel of the rifle into his right ear while Devin searched the cab of the truck, whose idling engine was still warming, for something to bind the gunshot wounds and (somewhat) staunch the flow of blood. The cubbyhole held a small first-aid box and that produced a couple of filthy compression bandages, along with Tampax. She stuffed one into a larger hole in the man’s calf, lifted his shorts and stuffed one into the hole in his butt cheek, and handed the rest to Angela. “Presents.” She grinned. “And it is hairy!” She laughed as she strapped the calf and thigh wounds, then cut a piece off the remaining bandage to use as compression for the seeping wound in his backside.

  “OK. Talk.”

  “Are you a fokking terr?” he asked.

  Devin ignored him. She had given Angela her shirt back on the other side of the hill. She stood before the man, her bark hat tied around her throat, pending the rising sun and heat of the mid morning. She was filthy, bloody, scraped and barefoot, wearing only filthy bra and panties. The breeze was still cool, raising goose pimples on her arms and legs. The stench of death that had assailed them the afternoon before was virtually gone, perhaps softened by the thorough dousing of the storm. And the looming shadow, which had lurked on the west side of the msasa, had disappeared. Devin wondered if her eyes had been playing tricks on her, then remembered that Angela had seen it first and pointed it out to her.

  “Do you think that shadow under the tree was this truck?” she asked Angela quietly. There was a tightness around her eyes that had not been there the day before.

  “Yes, I do now,” Angela responded, squinting toward the east and noting the tracks of the vehicles through and over the long grass. Devin turned back to the man whimpering and cursing behind her. “What’s in the lorry? What you doing here? And don’t give me shit or I’ll put another bloody hole in you - this time between your eyes.”

  He spat at her. “I don’t see how it’s any of your fokkin' business!” he snapped, in Afrikaans.

  “I warned you about bullshit answers,” she responded quietly, in English, raising her rifle to point at his large, melon-like head. “Bugger this.” She stalked to the back of the lorry and raised the tarp where she h
ad cut the ties. The stench flooded out, crawled into her nose and throat, and she gagged, taking a step backwards, but not before she saw what the lorry held.

  “Ivory.” She stalked back around to face the man. “What’s your name?”

  “Kobus.”

  “OK, Kobus,” she grinned, “what was in the Landie?”

  He stared at her, sighed, and flopped his chin down to his chest. “Horn. Rhino horn. Other stuff.”

  “Who was in the chopper?”

  “A buyer....a... like..a go-between for the buyer.”

  “Name of the buyer?”

  “I dunno. That’s why they have a go-between. I think he’s a chink. Some kind of slant.”

  “Lovely.”

  She turned her back on him and opened the truck door, searching for anything edible. “You got any powder milk?” she yelled back to him. He nodded. “Where?”