Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (10 page)

– You are not a stereotypical policeman.

De la Rey laughs.

– I got one of my men posted by your door. His job is to prevent you from running away while I verify your story. And to fend off
ghost cowboys
.

Again he forms an imaginary gun and goes
bang bang
.

– If I find this Shell story happened the way you tell it, I’ll look into this marijuana farm shit. Either way I may have to handcuff you. You catch my drift?

He walks up to the window.

– I reckon a man’d survive falling out this window. With a bit of luck.

It’s not hard for Jabulani to get the hint.

H
ERMANUS.

Buyu’s story:

– My father, he was a fisherman.

– Lake Victoria?

– Yes. Him and his father before him.

– My forefathers were fishermen too. They fished for
snoek
in the Atlantic.

Buyu smiles at this twinning of our roots.

– My father, he fished for tilapia from his dhow. One day the white man, he came along and tipped a bucket of river fish into the lake and the river fish killed all the lake fish.

–
River
fish?

– They call him Nile perch.

– I heard perch can become as long as a man.

– Longer still. So now my father, he caught too few fish for my mother to sell in the market. Outsiders came to catch the giant river fish from trawlers. If a tilapia fisherman wanted to catch a river fish, the trawler men shot at him. My father’s dhow stayed on the beach. For money for my school uniform and schoolbooks he dived into the lake to herd the river fish into the nets of the trawlers. For this the trawler men handed him a few pennies. With this money you could not buy a bottle of milk or a bag of
sadza
, never mind books. Still, he hoped to survive this way ... until a crocodile took his foot off.

– No way!

So Zero was lucky just to have lost half his calf to a shark.

– Now we had no money. My mother, she went to the fish factories that gut the river fish to send overseas. She begged for a job but they said there was no job for her. Like a begging dog she went barefoot over pyramids of stinking throwaway fish to pick the bones.

He draws in air and blinks his eyes rapidly.

– Then one day the factory men, they came to our hut in a pickup. They dragged my mother howling out. They shot guns at the sky. My father, he hopped after them on his good foot, shaking his stick at them. One of the factory men then shot at the sand by his feet and my father, he did this jerky dance. The factory men, they laughed like hyenas.

– That’s fucked up.

– When they had gone my father, he fell over and rubbed sand on his head.

– Was there nothing your father could do?

– He went to the police. They told him they would put him in jail if he made mischief. He went to the factory and the guards beat him with sticks. After that he just sat on the sand by his dhow and looked out over the lake. If the sky above was pink with flamingos, if a neighbour put a bowl of sour beer down for him, if young girls skipped over a rope tied to the mast of his dhow, he would just go on looking ahead of him. In the end my hope for him was torn as the sail of his dhow.

I picture a worn-out sail flapping on a loose boom.

– And your mother?

– After half a year the factory men, they offloaded her. Her hair was gone and her dress hung loose. My father, he would not let her into his hut. He said he was no longer a man and so he had no wife. She camped in the dhow on the sand. I lay with her. She begged me to go south. In South Africa, she said, there is gold under the sand. And diamonds. And when the wind blows, oranges and avocados fall and rot in the sun. In South Africa the seas are full of fish. They chuck the fish heads along with the guts to the birds. In South Africa the white men throw out the feet of a chicken. In South Africa men may not shoot their guns at the sky and snatch girls who catch their eye. The law forbids it. And if you have this thing I have, she said, they give you medicine so you can survive to see your son finish school. So I told her I will go to this land of gold and oranges and find medicine for her.

– How’d you survive the long trek?

– I hid in holes, cracks and empty shacks. I ate insects, worms and rats. Whatever I could catch. In Zambia one time a stray dog followed me for two days. In the end I picked up a stone and put it in my bag. I climbed a tree and waited. In the end that dog, he got too curious and came to sniff the air and looked up at me. I let the stone go. He fell over. I came down and hit him on the head with that stone until his feet no longer kicked. I was hungry and wanted to cut him up, but I was scared of the evil in him. And in Zimbabwe on the border crazy guys called
gumagumas
hunted me. I hid in an empty warthog hole and prayed to Jesus, for he too came out of the hole they put him in.

A
HOSPITAL SOMEWHERE SOUTH
of Bloemfontein.

The nurse had put a tray down, across Jabulani’s lap. Under the teacup he finds a wisp of paper torn from the margin of a newspaper.

Hey Dude. I begged a nurse to hand this to you. I’m @ motel as you head out of town. Room 9. Kombi’s out back. If you want a ride, catch me by sundown. Jake

Jabulani hops out of bed and lets his hospital frock fall. He tugs on his jeans and shirt. He snatches frog-green rubber hospital clogs.

From the window he lets the clogs fall two floors. They skip off the hard tarmac of the parking lot, then land toe to toe. Jabulani interprets this as a good omen. He slides out over the sill. He holds onto the window frame with his good hand till he hears a shot from somewhere in the hospital. He falls.

Pain knifes up through his shins and he flips over on the tar like that
pangaed
woman tossed from a pickup by Mugabe’s monkeys. Blood filters through the white cloth on his hand.

He hears another shot. The black policeman at the door will have gone down.

He picks up the clogs and darts barefoot across the lot. At the far end he hides behind a parked taxivan, gulping air and feeling the clogs on to his feet while he scans the hospital through the tinted glass of the taxivan. Amazingly a taximan is dozing at the wheel while Lucky Dube howls from the radio. Jabulani sees Ghost Cowboy at the window of his hospital room, panning his hawk eyes across the lot.

Then the barrel of a gun is at Ghost Cowboy’s eye and a bullet skips off the roof of the van.

The taximan shoots out of the van like a fat seed popped from a pod and, lying as flat as his beer gut will let him, calls out to God:
Tixo! Tixo!

The sight is so comical Jabulani laughs a knee-jerk laugh.

The next shot scatters glass.

A siren joins Lucky Dube in a jarring duet. Ghost Cowboy vanishes from the window.

Jabulani dances over glass diamonds in his hospital clogs. A shard of glass spikes through the rubber into his sole-skin. Pain flares through his jinxed left foot. He gimps along on the other foot as he plucks out the glass.

Then he’s out of the lot and hop-jogging down the road, past a hotel where a dun man studies a fly drowning in his beer, sidestepping an old grandpa who is spitting blood into his hanky, hurdling the cardboard box of a pink-turbanned fruit seller who sells avocados, dodging a dog that clacks his teeth at his heels and an old woman who jousts her walking stick at him and yells:
Bliksem! Hoodlum! Catch him!

Now he’s running full speed on a volatile high of pain and fear. He topples a cart, sending oranges rolling across the tarmac. He outruns a black priest in black garb on a bicycle who calmly doffs his hat to him as if this is a common sight: a man hurtling by at full tilt, casting haunted eyes behind him.

At the motel he raps on the door to room No. 9. A maid eyes him skewly.

He gasps wordlessly.

She snatches up her mop in case he goes for her.

Jake swings the door open. There’s a fake tiger skin on the wall and a porn video on the TV. A girl’s riding a white horse bareback on the beach. She has zilch on. Just tits bobbing to a
Bonanza
kind of rhythm and red hair flowing like a river.

Jake hands Jabulani a half-jack of cheap whisky.

Jabulani shakes a dose of whisky over his bleeding foot. It stings like blazes. Then he swigs a shot to dull the throbbing in his hand and slow the spinning of his head.

– That Cowboy’s after me again.

– Let’s go, Freedom, my man.

They don’t even wave goodbye to the naked rider.

Outside the door the maid swings her mop up again. They go through a gap to the back where the VW hobnobs with a rusting, bleeding Dodge up on bricks. A cat jumps out of the Dodge, spooking Jabulani and Jake.

– You take the Dodge, Jake jokes.

Jabulani is gobsmacked by Jake’s cool. But then he did not see that Zimbabwean shotgunned down in cold blood. Nor Nina rag-dolling.

H
ERMANUS MARKET.

Buyu’s all natty in his plaid Oakley shorts and Quiksilver T-shirt.

I teach him how to hang up the seahorses and whales and how to lay out the animals (geckos in front and giraffes behind). I put them in rows: birds of a feather.

He jumbles them up, subverting all sense of scale.

I teach him how much each goes for and how much leeway he has for haggling.

He tells me if I just sit and hope folk will walk up to the stall, I will die a poor man. He heads off with a penguin in one hand and a gecko in the other.

There’s a pungent tang of sea in the wind. Pink-footed pigeons bob and coo on the zinc roof of the Fisherman’s Cottage.

And the same unflinching sun fades the tarps and umbrellas cast over the stalls and peels the paint off bone-toned walls. And the same fruit seller calls his unvarying shrill litany.

The dreadlock dude sways listlessly as a jaded go-go girl as he juggles his devil sticks.

And Hunter whistles tunelessly as she shines her tiger’s eyes, moonstones, ambers and fossils with the same dazed look in her eyes.

Beyond her the man from Senegal barters with a tourist who hovers over him as he paints his cast of two-foot-high characters.

I love this raw, haphazard poetry of the market. Each stall a stanza: measured out and lone-standing yet somehow overlapping and running on. I wonder how I spent years in the muted, stale time-warp of a library while all along life ...

A whistled chirp from Hunter cuts this thought short. I focus to see the glass-eyed priest slope up to my stall.

I am scared he’ll wonder how I got scratched up and so discover I dinged his Vespa.

But he just dandles a gecko unhandily, as if in a daze.

– My dog’s gone. Something’s happened to him.

Hunter abandons her stone-rubbing to tune in.

– He wanders down the road, but he’s never strayed for long. If he’d got run over, I’d have found him. It’s a mystery.

– Maybe he smelt a bitch and lost his head, chirps Hunter.

The priest coughs a curt laugh.

– He’s seventy-seven in dog years. For him and his master, the days of courting girls are long gone.

Hunter sighs. She shuffles over, holding out a quartz to him.

– Ever seen a wisp of smoke forever captured in hard water?

He peers into the quartz as if looking for evidence of God.

– You may think I’m mad ... but I think they thought he was a stray. And I think someone’s hunting the street dogs in this town.

I want to laugh, but I see he’s not joking.

– They all used to beg for fish guts at the new harbour... but now you hardly ever see them.

I realise that I’ve not seen the pariah market dogs since the afternoon Zero dropped me off.

– They took him. That’s my theory.

In a bid to be breezy, I joke:

– Why would they? This isn’t Vietnam. Or China.

But Hunter
sabos
my shot at breeziness:

– Maybe they inject them with heroin in the townships to see how pure it is before shooting up.

The priest sways as if he’s on the verge of keeling over.

– Or that Chinaman Foo Buck Koon turns them into soy-doused take-away?

I glare at her for being too glib. Yet the priest hardly hears her.

– I heard there’s a demand for killer dogs in Johannesburg, he says in a wavering voice. He’s got guts. I’ve seen him kill a porcupine.

I dare not tell him his deaf, spent dog would be hopeless as a guard dog.

– Maybe witch doctors want him for their voodoo
muti
, Hunter pipes up again.

God
fops out of the priest’s mouth like a spat-out fish.

Hunter’s in a groove:

– They turn their bones into a kind of snuff. Or scientists caught him. They don’t just shoot dogs into space, they use them as guinea pigs to find a cure for malaria and yellow fever.

Again the priest says
God
.

Instead of soothing him Hunter reels off her cryptic mantra:

– Things can get hazardous.

I turn to the priest.

– Hey, I’ll keep an eye out for him.

At that moment the harbour hobo heads for his fig tree, cup in hand. He slides his spine down the bark. Moonfleet folds at his feet.

The priest gazes glumly at the dog.

– Dogs all over this country. Why’d they snatch mine?

Tears bead down his cheek till his stubble pops them. He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand.

– Let me make you a sweet cup of tea, coos Hunter.

She taps hot water from a flask into a cup and drops a used tea bag into it.

– He loved haring after seagulls on the beach. He’d skip through the waves after a tennis ball. He was plucky. Now I have no one to play my piano for.

An old, one-eyed priest playing the piano for a deaf dog. A woman murmuring to dumb garden gnomes. Another lamenting a lost beauty to dead stones. A
muezzin
’s cry falling on deaf ears. Rocking men reeling off prayers to a god who turned a blind eye last time.

Hunter teaspoons Peel’s honey into his tea, stirs it, then hands it to him. As he slips a finger through the ear of the teacup, she runs her fingers along his hand.