Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (19 page)

I hear Zero’s voice in my head:
I leave no spoor. No proof.

– How we going to follow them out to sea without spooking them? There’s no way they’ll chuck a dog to the sharks in front of us.

– I got a plan. We don’t follow them. We go out to Shark Alley before they do. We hover behind Geyser Rock in this Zodiac and hope they swing in. Tourists want to see seals
and
sharks. A double bill. They hope to see a shark kill a seal. But the sharks will zero in on the dog instead if he’s bleeding. I’m hoping they’ll spill fish blood rather than cut him.

– That’s the plan? To hide behind a rock until they drop him overboard ... and just hope they don’t cut him up beforehand?

– And we let him doggy-paddle till we catch a fin on film.

– But that’s a fucked-up plan. He’s old, that dog. He’ll sink. Or the sharks’ll kill him before we can fish him out.

– A dog in water’s a demon. He’s not just going to go down like some Chinaman caught in a rip tide.

– Can’t we just fetch him out of his cage now? Go in with guns blazing and ...

– We have to catch them red-handed ... otherwise this will just go on. I want to film it.

– But I
know
this dog.

– You told me he’s old and deaf. Maybe it’d be a mercy. On the other hand, he may just get lucky. Depends on how we time it. I want to shut down this gig today. I got another job up north to handle. Me, Zero, Canada Dry, this palooka lover-boy here ... and that Zimbo I told you of. We’ll be gone over Christmas. Hope you’ll be cool.

– Christmas was never a focus for us.

– Still. Call your old lady up. Somehow she’s less dazed. It’s as if this Zimbo has cast some kind of voodoo to lure her out of her sorrow.

I wonder if his voodoo can cure her. I would kill to see my mother laugh again the way she did that time when Zero’s foot went through the floor in Amsterdam. She’ll smile in that distant, dreamy way of hers when she’s hanging out with her gnomes, but she no longer laughs.

And I wonder about this yellow lab. I wonder why they sacrificed that young harbour dog, the Rhodesian, and left this dud old dog on death row. Perhaps that dog was friskier bait and they had to lure a shark for Leonardo DiCaprio. Maybe they fear sharks would spit him out as he’s all hide and sinew. Or perhaps the priest can work some kind of voodoo too. I hope his prayers keep the lab afloat in a fourteen-degree sea so cold it knifes to the bone.

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub. And who do you think they be?
The
zen
-darter, the floozy-killer and me, all floating in a Zodiac.

Curious seals glide under the Zodiac or bark at us from their island.

Through binoculars I see their Zodiac come into focus. Two men and the dog. The dog puts his head into the wind and his ears flap flippantly as if he’s just going for a ride. He can’t bite at the wind as dogs do, for they have bound a bandana around his snout to muzzle him.

They cut the motor. I fear they’ll see us peering over rocks painted white by seagull guano, but they are too focused on fiddling with the dog. They tie a ball of sardine chum to a float and then tie the float to the end of his tail. They undo the bandana just as they sling him overboard. The dog goes under, then bobs up: chin jutting out, front feet all a-frenzy, eyes glassy with fear. He paws at the Zodiac but they jab at him with an oar as if dipping a sheep. Each jab draws a yelp before he goes under. Each time I hold my breath until his head buoys up again.

Now he doggy-paddles in circles, his feet sending telltale volts through the sea. He trolls the bobbing chum from his tail, and the chum unspools a thread of blood that a shark can smell a quarter of a mile away.

– Lucky they didn’t cut him, chirps Dove Bait.

Somehow
lucky
is hardly the word to describe a dog about to be gobbled up by a shark.

Again the dog swims for the Zodiac. They listlessly row away from him, hands shading their eyes from the low sun.

Phoenix is panning his camera to and fro.

Now I see him through my binoculars: his fin slitting seamlessly through the blue.

–
Shaaark!
I cry.

Phoenix focuses his lens.

The sea’s so limpid you can see his outline: a long, lucid, silver-skinned torpedo.

I shiver in horror.

– Let’s go, I beg.

– Not yet.

He has to catch fin and dog in the same frame.

– Forget proof. This is crazy!

Another few toe-pinching seconds go by.

Now Phoenix signals a thumbs up and Dove Bait fires up the Yamaha. We gun in from due east, the bow of the Zodiac jousting high over the sea. The shark’s due west.

The guys on the other Zodiac head out, spooked by this unforeseen twist. In the distance we see the tourist speedboat on the horizon. Today the Great White, tomorrow the Big Five. Or a tour of Soweto.

We converge from polar points. The distance between dog and shark is now maybe a javelin throw. This shark’s a demon. He does not circle as they do in films. He zeroes in on the chum and the furry of the flapping-footed dog. Phoenix judges we won’t get to the dog in time. He fires a shot at the fin, hardly the measure of a matchbox from this angle.

The guys in the fleeing Zodiac duck as the shot rings out.

The bullet’s nicked a chink out of his fin, yet the shark’s unfazed. Its conical head shoots out of the water. His jaws flash a riot of jagged, jumbled teeth. He snatches the chum and shakes his head, flicking the dog to and fro as frivolously as a high sea plays with a surfboard on a leash. Another shot puts a hole through the fin. Now the shark keels to flash his white belly at the sky. Now he dives, yanking the dog down after him.

We fly over the blood-tinted wake of the chum. I see the shark spearing down deep under us. Phoenix fires yet another shot.

Dove Bait spins the Zodiac on the blood-tinted surface.

Phoenix’s bald head looks sallow as a ghoul. He pockets his gun.

– He was a good nineteen foot, Dove Bait tunes. A fucking Zeppelin!

The float surfaces.

I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes. I feel Phoenix mussing my hair. Then I hear Dove Bait whoop.

The dog’s come up! His tail’s bleeding an absurdly vivid magenta. The shark’s teeth cut it down to a stump. I gaff him by his collar and yank him on board. He stands on shaky feet, then shudders the sea from his sorry hide. I go down on my knees to hug him: deaf, docked, old dog. He sneezes in my face and wags his raw stump.

There’s no sign of the tourist boat or the Zodiac.

In the distance, another shark hits a rogue seal. He shoots all the way out of the sea. In the sky he twists his head to gulp the squalling seal.

I recall fishing from the harbour wall in Kalk Bay at sundown with old Zero. It was 1994. I was fourteen. We’d been in the Cape again for two years. The mood was festive. Mandela was out. Hope was kiting high. I hand-lined into the harbour and Zero cast a line out to sea. The fish I’d hooked floated among beers in the cooler box. Zero was shooting the breeze with the other coloured fisherman. Then my line sung out. The gut cut into my palm. I let go and sucked at my hand. The shark surfaced, flipped, and then he was gone. I yelled
Shaaark
at all the fisherman gazing out to sea. They dropped their rods to come and stare into the flat, oily green water. I measured it out in footsteps to prove it to them. Eleven feet. Heel to toe. They shook their heads and giggled toothlessly as they drifted away. Zero mussed my hair and said it was a seal that took my line. Or it got hooked in the propeller of that trawler just heading out into open sea. Afterwards my mother and sister joined us for lemon tart at the Olympia Café. My mother winked at me as if to say
my wistful dreamer, my floating poet
. I so wished I’d had it on film. Just the rubbing of the sole of my sister’s foot against the arc of mine saved me from crying at the injustice of it. I smiled at her and that was the last time I can recall looking into her eyes.

Now I see another two fins gliding towards us. The clan has arrived.

I remember Zero telling us then in that café the story of a shark landing in a boat called
Lucky Jim
and his flipping one of the crew into the sea.

Suddenly the Zodiac feels far too flimsy under us.

A
FARM AN HOUR
out of Cape Town. Afternoon.

Phoenix and Jabulani look down from the slopes of the Simonsberg on the mosaic of vineyards and dams below. This is the valley Cecil John Rhodes called his. He spent money he made from diamonds dug out of the hole in Kimberley on Dutch farms until all you see below you was in his hands. From here he would gaze out over Africa and remember the dry stone towers of a medieval city far to the north called Great Zimbabwe. He’d think of the birds carved out of stone that he filched from the ruins and wonder at the mystery of how empires always fall. It would have been hard for him, then, to imagine the fall of yet another empire so vast the sun never set on it ... the empire he was a lord of.

Jabulani thinks of how he spent his youth in a country called Rhodesia, named after this same Rhodes. And how some of the whites who ruled it then had scorned the theory that Great Zimbabwe was the handiwork of native Zimbabweans. So deep did their racism go. He recalls a journey to the ruins and squinting through the glare of the sun to make out in a boulder the form of the Zimbabwean bird. This was (he had told Panganai and Tendai) the distant land of Ophir that Solomon got his cargo gold from. This was the El Dorado of Africa. He’d had a way then of spinning out a yarn:
And not just gold ... but ivory and gems and monkeys and peacocks. So great was Zimbabwe.
And now his country had become the joke of the world.

And Ophir was perhaps never in Africa after all, but in India or beyond.

Phoenix puts up a row of empty beer cans on the banks of the Good Hope dam.

He measures out a distance along the dam wall akin to the gap between wickets in cricket. He hands Jabulani a .38 revolver.

– I told you, I am not a cowboy. I am a teacher.

– This is not about splitting infinitives, teacherman. If your bullet doesn’t split this Ghost Cowboy’s skull one time, you are smoked.
Capito
? History.

Jabulani squints at the beer cans. They warp in the mirage shimmering up from the sand. The gun feels cool against his scar. He fires. Sand spurts up between the cans. He glances timidly at Phoenix.

But Phoenix just stares at the cans.

Jabulani fires another shot. This time a can tilts as dirt flicks up. Yet the can doesn’t fall.

Phoenix nods.

– That girl at the Shell. Focus on her.

Jabulani sees Ghost Cowboy’s shotgun twirl her so flippantly. The film in his head spools out at just a few frames per second. He sees how her bare feet dance a spinning tarantella. He sees the blood seep through her shirt like a blooming of red flowers. Her one hand flings out so flamboyantly you’d be forgiven for thinking Ghost Cowboy just let her go at the end of a tango. That he’ll maybe catch her flying hand and pluck her towards him again. The other hand goes to her gut as if to pick her red flowers.

This time a can skips into the sky. Then another. And Phoenix is smiling.

– So you can teach an old dog new tricks. You have a good eye. All you needed was to focus.

Jabulani smiles like a schoolboy who scored well on a paper.

Phoenix picks a peach and skins it in one skilled spiral.

– This is the valley where I spent my boyhood. My pa picked this kind of peach. Yellow cling, they call it. So sugar-sweet and sappy, man.

His lips slit into a rueful smile.

– I thought this was a
Cape
thing: this peach. As Cape as Cape gooseberry and
hanepoot
. Now books tell me peaches come all the way from China and gooseberry’s South American as tango. And that the Egyptians made wine from this same
hanepoot
grape. Fucking Cleopatra had
hanepoot
. I tell you, everything you’d put your head on the block for as hard-core fact, every benchmark you think is fixed, turns out to be an illusion. Take light. You’d think it’s just waves, hey?

Jabulani nods.

– Whereas, in fact ...

Phoenix lets this thought drift out of focus.

– One
fact
I was taught as a schoolboy on this farm was that all the beautiful things in this world belonged to the white man: the peaches, the wine, the gold, the diamonds, the beaches. And even as a boy I thought: No. My pa planted the trees, my pa slaves on this farm under a bastard sun. I’ll pick the fruit if I want to. And then one day the white farmer zoomed up in his Isuzu pickup. I had no hope of outrunning his pickup, so I flung the yellow clings away. I hoped he’d just zoom by, but he halted. He found the peaches in the sand. They might have been windfall peaches if not for telltale tooth marks.

Phoenix laughs a curbed, bitter laugh at his folly.

He yelled at me to jump onto his pickup. I howled and begged but he felt no pity. I saw his son in the front of the pickup. A boy who went to a fancy school for white boys in town where they had an athletics track and a swimming pool. A boy heading for university. A boy who had his fruit cut and peeled for him by a coloured maid.

Phoenix spits out the pip of his peach.

– The police took me into the courtyard and gave me a hiding with a cane and then let me go. Two cuts. That was it. They said they had no time to go to court with me. They said I was lucky I’d got off lightly. The thing that stung for years was not the caning ... but that the white boy, a boy just like me who dreamed girls and blew Chappies bubbles and played football barefoot, did not glance at me on that trip to the police station. He held his stare ahead. All the way I thought: If he just looks into my eyes, just once, he’ll see himself in me and beg his father to let me go.

Phoenix shakes his head and whistles through his teeth.

– My father was gutted. After all the years of picking peaches, he felt he could never look the farmer in his eyes again. It was beyond him to doubt the white man’s wisdom. He said I had dirtied his name. Not long afterwards I dropped out of school and went to Cape Town. I hid in the hulls of boats in the dry docks and dreamed of sweet, forbidden peaches while hunger taunted me.