by Linda Ihle
“Grub box on the floor there.”
She opened it and found a virtual treasure trove of food. She tossed out the dregs of beer in a Castle dumpy bottle and used some of the water she and Angela had been drinking to clean it before adding some milk powder, a little water and shaking it up. She opened a condom packet, ensured it hadn’t been laced with spermicide, stuck it over the top of the bottle, cut a little slit in the reservoir, and, “Here,” she handed it to Angela. “I just hope he doesn’t get the runs.”
Angela smiled for the first time that day. “Thanks.” With a little effort, she managed to get the baby to start suckling, giving him only a thimbleful at first.
A slight breeze from the south, by the large msasa, carried the stench of carrion. Devin, ever mindful of her bare feet, walked to the tree, where she found that the grass to the west side of the tree was flattened in four spots where the truck’s tyres had stood. The ground immediately south of that spot was whitish-tan, and oily. It appeared to be new or excavated dirt, covering an area of nearly 200 square feet.
“What the hell?” Devin muttered. “Looks like they buried something here.” She shook her head. “Bloody big grave though.” She was loath to walk onto the dirt because of the substances which seemed to have been scattered there. One of them gave off a faint chemical smell, nothing like motor oil and not the same colour. Smells like cement.
She turned and yelled back toward the truck. “Is this lime?” He winced and nodded, grateful only now that the black woman no longer had the barrel of an AK in his ear and was intent, apparently on feeding a newborn, bloody, filthy, naked, black baby. “Why?” She walked back to him so she could better hear him.
“It covers the blood and skin and stuff so we don’t get a whole hobbo of vultures and hyena for Africa over here.”
“Where are the carcasses?”
“There’s some here that we brung in and there’s more where we killed them just scattered…..,” he muttered waving a vague hand toward the west.
“How the hell did you get a whole rhino in the back of this lorry?”
“We cut their heads off or just their horns where we killed them. Gave some of the meat to the kaffirs and had them carve them up and scatter the leftovers.”
Angela sat back on her haunches and turned her head to exhale and then gather a fresh breath. Devin stared in silence at Kobus and imagined a hundred lifeless eyes staring upward at the perfect blue bowl of sky; elephant with ears and trunks and tails and ivory and feet hacked off, rhinos with horns slashed off. And the stench of rotting meat and corruption was now almost palpable, reaching into mouth and throat and nostril, choking, cloying and clogging every pore.
“How the hell have you you been able to do this and get away with it?” Devin muttered. “How?”
“It’s disgusting,” Angela whispered. “Absolutely disgusting.”
Kobus pointed to the west. Devin walked gingerly in that direction. “Keep your bloody eyes on him!” she yelled. Two hundred or so feet from the msasa, the ground dipped rockily into a deep gomo. The stench of death and rotted and burned meat rose up and clawed its way in. She stopped, before cautiously approaching the edge of the hole. The carcasses of the animals, some intact, some burned beyond recognition, others partly eaten, had been tossed as if by some sadistic giant child, higgledy piggledy into the gomo. Some half-hearted effort had been made to cover them with branches from nearby trees, but insufficient to completely hide the crime.
She walked back. “We need to mark this spot somehow,” Devin said, “so we can bring the security forces back here. But, what if they’re involved? There’s so much shit that goes down in this horrible war that we will NEVER know about.” She had begun to raise her voice and the baby whimpered. Angela brought a finger to her lips and Devin quieted. She drank a gulp of water and handed a cup to Angela who swallowed it quickly. She hauled the grub box out of the lorry and handed a packet of Marie biscuits to Angela who almost sobbed when she saw it. The two women sat and ate quietly, ignoring Kobus and his blubbering, begging for a ciggie, some water, anything.
“I know how!” Devin whispered. She reached into the grub box area, grabbed the toilet roll there and flung it over a nearby wag’n’bietjie tree. In seconds the thornbush was festooned in white, standing out like a sore thumb in all the pale green and khaki of the bush. Devin tore off the sheets and placed the remaining roll in the lorry. “Let’s go, there’s nothing we can do here. I don’t want to be caught here by those other bastards. We’ll take the lorry.”
“What are you going to to do with him?” Angela nodded toward Kobus. “I don’t want him in the cab with me.”
“Well, I can’t lift his fat arse into the back and I don’t want him up front with us either.” Devin tapped her bottom lip with a grimy forefinger. “We’ll tie him to the tree and leave him with some water and....maybe....a ciggie.” She grinned at him.
“Fokkin' cunt, kaffir lover!” he swore at her.
“If you not more polite, Kobus,” she teased, “I will shoot you in the balls and then tie you to the tree and leave you with niks[24].”
He made as if to speak again, thought better of it and snapped his lips closed. Devin cut a length of rope from the tarp ties and gestured for him to stand up. He whimpered and moaned. “I can’t!” he blubbered. “Alright then, I will tie you to the bloody bumper and drag your fat, stinking, hairy arse to the tree.” He rose stiffly on one leg, where a round had torn through his buttocks, and hopped slowly to the msasa. “Follow me, Angela,” Devin called, “and put the baby down. I need you to keep a bead on this bobbo’s face.”
“Stop there,” Devin commanded. Angela moved around to face Kobus and brought the barrel to within an inch of his forehead. He began to pray in Afrikaans. “Shut up, fool,” Devin muttered as she untied the rope around his wrists. She brought one ham of a hand, bristling with black knuckle hair around to his front before following suit with the other, requiring her to reach around him with her cheek against his chest. His heart was hammering and his sweat was sour, putrid. She retied his hands so that he would be able to reach any water she would allow him, and even light the one cigarette she planned to leave him, with one match in a battered old Lion matchbox.
“Sit.”
He complied and she proceeded to bind him to the base of the tree, tying intricate knots on the opposite side, well out of his reach. “OK, good,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “I’m sure your murdering boeties will miss you, and they’ll be back to find you jus’ now. If not,” she shrugged, “tough titties, hey.”
“Listen,” he whined, “we didn’t kill all of them, hey! There are poachers, mostly gooks who work for the chinks. and they do a lot. Then there are also the landmines.”
“Ah, how fortunate for you! Not just surrogates, but collateral damage, hey? Reaping the fruits of war. Lovely!” Devin snarled at him. He shut his mouth again and shrank back away from her. She dug a Castle beer dumpy out of the bottom of the grub box, took one of his cigarettes out of the 50-pack box of Winston, emptied all but one of the matches from the Lion matchbox, and placed the items on the ground in front of him. “Fab view you have here,” she remarked, “of the hyenas and vultures and jackals coming in to check out the carcasses.” He paled and she grinned. “Watch him for a seccie,” she asked Angela.
She turned and walked back up past the idling lorry and up the kopje she had descended barely a half hour before. Climbing to its highest point, she scanned the horizon, seeking any familiar landmarks, tracks, trails, anything that would lead her home. She discerned a vague footpath, a smudge on the earth, that appeared to head more southwestward. That’s good. I’m just gonna carry on the same way we were going. I think it’s the right way. Plus, I don’t want to run into any of those twats coming back to look for Kobus.
34.
The women climbed into the cabin of the lorry, and rolled down the windows. Devin removed her bark hat and placed it on the wide dashboard behind the steering w
heel. Within minutes, the old Bedford jerked haltingly across the veldt, as Devin acquainted herself with the clutch and gears. They headed more southeastward again, avoiding the tall brown grass hiding boulders and the wag’n’bietjie thorn trees, staying to the right of but following the narrow, barely discernible footpath that would, I hope, lead them to the Tribal Trust Lands in the Gokwe vicinity.
“Why don’t you stay on the track?” Angela asked as she bounced in the seat.
“Landmines.”
Angela stared at her. “Are you serious?” Devin nodded and said nothing more.
She had been gingerly maneuvering the truck over the rocky veldt for more than two hours when the radio suddenly crackled to life.
“Hey! Kobus! Come in. Where are you? Jislaaik, we fokkin’ late now, boet. We don’t want to run into that stick (army group) we saw yesterday, man. Over.....”
Devin pushed the black button on the radio mike. “Kobus is tied to a msasa tree where you left the carcasses, Karel.” She giggled. “Over!”
Shocked silence drowned in crackling static from the radio.
“Wat se jy?[25] Who is this? Kobus, are you tricking me, ek se? Ek sal jy klap[26].” He laughed, nervously.
“This is probably your worst nightmare, Karel,” Devin advised him. “I shot his arse and tied him to the msasa by the gomo where you chucked all the carcasses.”
“FOK! Who is this?”
“I just told you, Karel....”
“How the hell you know my name?”
“Your china Jan called you that last night after he threw that woman off the kopje. Oh, and he is also dead. Good thing too. And, Karel, once we get this truck to where we’re going, a helluva lot more people will also know your name.”
A sound like a strangled sob, distorted and cracked, broke the following silence, then, “We?” he asked.
“Ja, we, Karel. Agh, cowboys don’t cry, Karel. Get some balls and get your Land Rover over to the closest kraal. Then run like hell, hey. Chikurubi Prison is no playground. Ciao.”
Devin pushed the button to end the conversation and grinned at Angela. “They’ll get what’s coming to them.” She pointed at the baby. “He’s starting to stink. Maybe we can wash his bum with the old water and try to devise a new nappy for him?”
“Nappy?”
“Um, yes, um….diaper?” She gestured toward the back of the lorry where three hessian water sacks hung. “We have plenty of water to drink now, plus beer.” She grinned and Angela grinned right back at her.
Devin stopped the old truck at the top of a slight slope while they searched the cab for a suitable diaper. The child was quite small and didn’t appear to weigh more than six or seven pounds. Probably due to kwashiorkor? He had been very quiet for the most part and she wondered about the potential for some brain injury inflicted in the horrific murder of his mother. But his black eyes were bright, he appeared not to have an elevated temperature, and he had not regurgitated any of the milk Angela had fed him in tiny doses. Angela climbed out of the truck with the child and removed his temporary diaper that had been cut from Jan’s shirt. She had found beneath the seat a white cotton vest similar to one Kobus had been wearing beneath his shirt. It had apparently been used to clear the inner windscreen of the lorry and was, reasonably, clean. It would fit the tiny bottom that she now sluiced with water from the trusty kerosene can Devin and she had carried for miles.
She turned the child to face her and he immediately urinated into her hair. Devin giggled. “My little brother did that too.” Angela turned and smiled. “Yup, mine too.”.
With the child cleaned up and bladder emptied, she climbed back in, placed him gently on the seat of the lorry and diapered him with the vest, tying it at his hips. Within minutes they restarted their journey, the noise of the engine seeming to soothe the baby. It also obliterated the roar of a helicopter approaching the killing fields they had left behind.
35.
As noon approached, the heat intensified. Watching closely that she maintained a parallel course with the footpath while not venturing onto it, Devin wiped at sweat dripping off her brows. “I wish we could drive faster,” she told Angela, who was fanning the baby with a battered old copy of Look. He appeared absolutely unfazed, staring up at her. She smiled at him. “Um, I hate to say it, but try not to get too attached to this little bloke,” Devin warned gently. “Once we find a copshop or DC or, hell, even a friendly chief, we’re going to have to turn him over.”
“I know,” Angela sighed. “He’s just so gorgeous though! What’s a DC?”
“District Commissioner. Ja, he’s a handsome little bugger alright. How sad he had to come into the world that way. I hope no-one ever tells him the circumstances of his birth. Shame, poor little sausage.”
Ahead, the path entered a mature mopane forest. “Let’s stop in the shade for a bit,” Devin said. “I need to wee and to cool off. Plus, I don’t know how I am going to maintain the track and avoid it at the same time what with all the trees.” She pulled across the path, eastward, holding her breath and gritting her teeth, but no explosion came, and pulled safely into the shade of a giant mopane. The temperature in the cabin seemed to drop instantaneously by at least 10 degrees.
“See anything out there?” she asked Angela.
“No, nothing,” she responded after gazing into the forest and along its peripheries, blurred by shimmering mirages of thwarted heat.
As Devin opened the driver’s side door, though,a furtive flicker of movement deep in the forest caught her eye. She stared at the area for a full minute and saw it again; just an indistinct suggestion of motion. Maybe a bird? she wondered. Looking first for paper thorns, she stepped out onto reddish, compact soil and walked to the back of the lorry, where she squatted and urinated before grabbing one of the water sacks off the back. She pulled the cork out of the dripping sack and drank lustily. “Ah! So GOOD!” She exclaimed. As she made her way back to the cabin, she glanced back into the cool, deep forest and what she had thought might have been just a bird revealed itself. A magnificent male lion stared back at her, within fifty feet of the truck.
“Agh, shit!” she screamed and leaped back into the lorry, slamming the door behind her. “Roll up your window, roll up your window!” she yelled at Angela who had been sitting, eyes closed, in the relative cool of the mottled shade. She complied without question before looking to see what had caused this reaction.
“Oh, my gosh! Look at the size of him!” Angela exclaimed.
The approach of the truck had disturbed the midday slumber of a pride of lion sprawled at the base of a conical termite mound beneath the shade of adjacent mopanes. The large, golden-maned male had come to investigate, possibly also drawn by the stench of the lorry’s cargo.
“He’s a beaut, hey!” Devin whispered. “Here, have some water. I am going to drive around and away from him. Then you can get out and wee, OK?”
Angela nodded. “I am sorry I didn’t see him,” she said. “I guess I am totally pooped.”
“Ja, it’s OK.” Devin grinned at her. “I just love seeing these buggers in the bush. So many of them have been killed for who knows what stupid reason.” She depressed the clutch and thrust the gear lever into first and they lurched forward, now eastward of the path. She maneuvered the heavy old vehicle east and through an opening in the older trees, running over some smaller saplings in the process. “Sorry, sorry,” she muttered.
“You are talking to the trees now?” Angela asked with a nervous grin.
“Ja, I hate doing that…I mean running them over. These are mopanes and they are among my most favourite trees. We had a rope swing in a big old mopane in our yard in Ukunkwe. We played in that tree for hours, sometimes climbing all the way to the top so we could look out over the bush.” She grinned. “My other favourites are exotics though, jacarandas, and when they’re in bloom they’re just glorious, but I get pink-eye just looking at them. That’s one thing about ellies that really makes me cross,” she added. “They a
re so destructive with trees, even pushing some over so they can get at the tender roots. So, today, perforce, I was acting like an ellie! Do you like trees?”
“Yes, in fact I do,” Angela said with a smile. “My favourite, though, is what they call a live oak in Florida. They grow to be enormous. And we had one on our lot too. I think that one would have stopped this truck, though. It was huge!” She raised her arms to the roof of the cabin, spreading her hands. “Ukunkwe. That’s a strange name, Devin. I guess it must be a native word?”
“Ja, it is. It’s a Sindebele word for the tok-tokkie beetle. They are strange little buggers - they tap their backsides on the ground - I think it’s when they’re mating or hunting or something. Anyway, there’s a plethora of them where I live….where I lived, past tense.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Salisbury. Mostly.”
As they pulled away, the lion stood watching, then trotted leisurely behind them for a short distance. To her right, Devin could see the rest of the pride draped across the base of the anthill, in the shadows of the deeper forest. The younger members raised their heads and watched the lorry’s jolting path, while three lionesses, glanced up briefly before lowering their heads again, peaceful and sated in the shade. The male finally veered off and rejoined the pride, sitting vigil, aloof and confident. Devin kept an eye on him until he was just a dot in the rearview mirror, then veered slightly westward, as the forest would allow, in search of the track she had been following and a safer spot to let Angela out.